The Song Is You (21 page)

“I don’t… I don’t want to remember anything.” She shook her head. “I’m done with that.”

Hop felt his temper rise again. “Maybe you’re done with it, but it’s not done with you. It’s not done with the rest of us.”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at him. Her eyes were pleading.

“Look, we have to go somewhere. We have to talk,” Hop said pulling her closer, pulling her right up against him, his mouth on her ear. Digging his fingers deep into her arms, he could tell he was hurting her and he couldn’t stop and didn’t want to stop.

“Not now,” she pleaded, eyes darting from side to side. “Later.”

“So you can take it on the heel and toe again?” His fingers tightened on her arms, pressing her into him.

“No, no. You can wait here. I’ll finish the shift. An hour. Just an hour.”

“No hour. Now.” He didn’t want to tell her that he couldn’t last an hour sitting there, watching, not knowing. He had no hours left.

She saw something in his face. And she said, “Let me talk to the other girl.”

She brought him to an apartment on the second floor of a timber frame house. The stairs ran along the outside of the building, which smelled like tar and mildew.

When they entered, she turned, shook off her coat, and walked across the room to turn on a small floor lamp. The space was furnished sparely with a rattan frame settee, a card table with a fringed tablecloth. A dying jade plant.

“Come here,” she said, beckoning him from across the room.

“Why…” He trailed off, walking toward her.

As he reached where she stood, leaning over the lamp, he realized she was trying to get a better look, to place him. He moved very close, directly above the lamp with its blonde glow. She looked at him closely and then, suddenly, grinned, the teasing dimples emerging.

“The reporter. The reporter. You’re still good-looking but not as pretty.”

Hop relaxed a little. “You got me on a bad day.”

She smiled again, but then it flitted away. She was remembering things. All kinds of things. He wouldn’t want to be in her head. Or maybe he already was. Had been for days.

“Sit down,” she said. ‘You want something to drink?”

“No. No.” He sat in a straight-backed chair facing her.

She struck a match on the rattan armrest and lit a cigarette,

swatting the edge of her scarf from the red ember. Her hands were shaking. But then again so were his.

“I don’t have any money. You can see I don’t,” she said.

“I don’t care about that.”

“So what’s the game, newsboy?”

The abrupt, hard tone, its similarity to Peggy Spangler’s, bristled against Hop. Her face under the light looked beautiful, yes, but like wax. He found his anger rising again.

“How does it feel to leave your family behind?” he said. “They all think you’re dead or worse.”

She didn’t flinch. She was ready for this. “They’re so much better off. They’re safe. I was nothing but a jinx.”

“What kind of mother abandons her daughter?” he said, as if he knew anything about mothers. As if he’d even given one stray, flickering thought to … to … was her name Christina?

“The kind of mother who knows she’s nothing but bad news for her little girl. And I don’t mean because I was a lousy mother.” She straightened her back, wrapping the edge of her long gold scarf around her fingers. But her voice remained flat. Plain. Toneless. “I was a fine mother, Mr. Hopkins—sure, I remember your name. I was a fine mother who got pulled into something rotten and didn’t want to put my little girl in danger for it.”

“Pulled in, eh? Is that how you frame it? You know, when you fall into the blackmail racket, you’re not falling. You’re jumping. Those

were some rough boys you were mixed up with. But I didn’t see you kicking and screaming.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You knew what you were doing, didn’t you, doll?” Since when did he call women “doll”? He didn’t like the sound of his voice, wasn’t even sure what it was, but he couldn’t stop. It flew out at sharp angles, shards whizzing through the air. “The biggest stars in town. And ready for a dance with you. You were seeing dollar signs all the way to the back room of the Red Lily.”

“That’s what you think,” she said, with nary a flinch.

“Yes,” he replied, watching her, looking.

‘You know all about it, huh?”

“I know enough.”

‘You don’t know anything,” she said quietly. Then she paused a long ten seconds, face frozen, before raising a hand to her neck and placing it around the scarf tied around it. It loosened; then she gave a hard tug and it slid down quickly to her lap.

Across her neck was a dashed line, pale pink, almost like serration marks, like a girl’s paper doll with different heads you could affix, the mark showing where to cut to replace the golden blonde head with the deep brunette one.

As she pushed her hair back, he could see the line ran from behind one earlobe all the way across her delicate neck to the other ear. For a second, he was frightened that her head would simply fall forward, leaving a red-tipped stump.

“There’s more, Mr. Hopkins,” she said, almost smiling. She turned away from him and placed her fingers on the edge of her skirt, which she began slowly peeling upward. Then she turned back toward him slowly, like some kind of unnatural striptease.

Her full skirt was now gathered at her hips and there were those long, fulsome legs, which Hop took in, from the straps on her sandals and up, up as she turned to face him. She was pulling the skirt all the way to her waist, and Hop found his eyes lifting slowly from her ankles to her knees to the tops of her stockings, to the tight garters clutching her slender thighs.

She looked at him. “Come closer,” she said in that drowsy voice, lulling and hypnotic.

Disturbed and excited and ashamed of his excitement, he leaned forward. What was she going to show him? Did he want to see? How horrible could it be, or was this a come-on? Or both?

His chair skidded loudly as he moved closer. The folds of her skirt grazed his arms as he placed them, tentatively, on either side of her, resting on the seat.

The lighting was low and it was hard to see. There was something pink, folded, tender through the netting of the skirt, above the garters. Something on her skin. At first he thought it was a caesarean scar, but it was too low, too disperse. Then he thought it looked like burns—even branded skin, like a steer’s. Soon he was so close that his face was brushing against her skirts, so close he could smell her: not bergamot, no … honeysuckle. You’re so much sweeter, goodness knows. Honeysuckle rose…

He heard a scrape and realized he had dragged the whole settee on which she sat closer toward him. He still couldn’t quite see and she wasn’t going to lift her skirts any higher, wasn’t going to stand up to give him a better view. She was only going to let him see this way, her way.

Inches from her torso, he realized what he was looking at. A series of rippling scars abraded on the tops of her thighs, across her hip bones, disappearing behind her cream-colored panties, which she had folded down slightly so he could see.

Letters. Words.

They’d been carved into her and remained in raised scars pink as

rose petals, across her hips.

What did they …

What else could they say?

D-E-A-D-W-H-O-R-E.

He kept looking. He was afraid to sit back and meet her eyes. His breath ran hard against her skin. He looked at the words and remembered the blanket at the Red Lily and yes, it was all true. Or true enough. Somehow it was much simpler and much, much more complicated than he’d ever guessed.

His fingers, as if moving of their own accord, were touching the letters gently. He felt her shift ever so slightly, but nary a quiver.

Then, his fingers lightly pressed against her, he heard her voice, slow and strangely sexy.

“He got it half wrong at least. After, I heard both of them tell some fellas who worked there to get rid of my body and they’d get a quick five hundred dollars. This young girl came in while they were deal making. She saw my eyes. She knew. She helped me out the back way. She gave me an old raincoat to cover everything and a few bucks. She said she’d fix it. Later, I figured the men took the five hundred and pretended they’d dumped me in Griffith Park. All they dumped was my purse.”

Hop slowly sat up, his fingers burning, tingling.

“Why not go to the cops?”

She looked at him, not even bothering to pull her dress down. The look said everything. But she told him her story nonetheless. She’d never had a chance to tell anyone before. She was dying to tell.

Marv Sutton, double-breasted and pomaded, all a girl on the hunt could want. He met Jean at the studio commissary, took her to dinner at Chasen’s, for a few long ocean drives to far-flung hotels where he’d thrown her down on the softest sheets she’d ever been thrown down on before. He’d whispered the usual promises, and in spite of herself, she’d almost started to believe him. She let him do things to her, things she didn’t normally do, not even when she was married. He gave her a three-ounce bottle of Chanel No. 5 and lace-topped stockings from Paris. He bought her pearl-drop earrings that hung so heavy on her ear-lobes she could barely lift her head. And, not three weeks after the affair began, she felt it starting to turn. She saw a script girl, flush-faced, come out of his dressing room, adjusting the back seam on her skirt. A girlfriend told her she’d seen him taking a tumble with a Tropics showgirl in the club’s back parking lot. So when she saw him at the Eight Ball, she wasn’t sure how she felt about him anymore. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to bother anymore. But maybe she did. He looked handsome and he was with his partner, Gene Merrel, whom she’d never met. The fact that the pair was there together lent a lot of excitement to the place, and everyone seemed to be talking about their table. Her sad-sack cousin, what a drag that she’d shown up uninvited. She’d had to do some pretty fast talking to get Peggy to play along. But luckily the fast-talking reporter with the pretty face looked ready for anything and ol’ Peg sure was game. Marv paid her a lot of attention and didn’t even blink at the luscious Iolene, so things were looking up.

Wouldn’t Davy Ogul love me to get some shots of this, she thought. He’d been a lousy boyfriend—dim, short-tempered, and perennially unfaithful. But she liked the sheaves of long-stemmed roses, the bunny rabbit he brought her daughter on Easter, the emerald tennis bracelet he gave her (and then took back to pay off his gambling vig). When she was dating him, he’d sweet-talked her and Iolene into doing a few jobs. The usual thing: They went to parties where certain men would be and all they had to do, really, was get those men to go into the bedroom or to another hotel room or even, once, to the balcony of a Hollywood apartment, and get things just wild enough to make the photo pay off. If Jean was the one wriggling against the studio exec or the nightclub owner or the big-shot producer, Iolene was the shutterbug, and vice versa. She’d never had to follow through. She’d never done that, not even when it would have rung up gold. When, if it came to that, she’d cut.

Neither she nor Iolene liked the badger stuff, either, truth told. Even if it paid a few bills and once even got her an audition. Davy really brought them in the deal as a love-ya-kid just for her. So when the romance with Davy ended, so did those jobs. And she for one was glad. Not that she and Iolene were stupid. They made copies of every photo they took before passing over the negatives to Davy. They kept them at Iolene’s and had no reason to believe Davy would ever know. They called it their insurance files. Insurance in case. Once Jean even jacked up the stash by taking some files from her doctor’s office. She was friends with a girl who worked there and once, when the girl left her in the office alone, she’d taken a few fat handfuls and added those to her cache.

But that was all over. Things were easier now, anyway. The child support came more regular. Jobs came. She let it go. Until now, until this opportunity presented itself.

So, when the boys asked her, she said yes to the Red Lily. Why not? She’d heard about it. Who hadn’t? She would have been wary, maybe, but Iolene was coming. Still, she knew she didn’t want Peggy tagging along, ready to use whatever she saw against her, or, worse still, trying to cut in on the action. So she told her cousin that the reporter was worth her time, knew all the players, and besides, wasn’t he darling? Didn’t he look like a movie star? Didn’t she deserve some hay?

At the Red Lily, Marv and Gene had a favorite room. Marv, he said the junk would really get things crazy. It would be great. She wasn’t for junk, but there didn’t seem to be a way to decline and keep the game going.

Iolene brought out her camera and said, “Come on, boys. Let’s get some shots.” And the studio guy, Bix, kept saying, “No pictures. No pictures.” But Marv and Gene were so loaded and they didn’t care and they started posing. Kid stuff. Marv grabbed her and threw her over his knees and pretended to spank her. He lifted her skirt up. But Gene, he got agitated by the bulb. He kept jumping around and pretending to chew and tear at her clothes like some wild animal. It was strange and she didn’t know if it was a joke, but she tried to laugh. Finally, he tore the arm off her dress, trying to pull her toward him on the couch. The more she wriggled, uncomfortable, the more agitated he became. But everyone was laughing and they continued to laugh and that really got him going. In a sweeping motion, he took off his belt and grabbed her and wrapped it tight around her face, her head, wedged it in her mouth. Marv made jokes about steers and cattle. They were laughing and Iolene was not. And Iolene’s camera took one last shot before she stopped. And Jean saw that she was frightened. And Jean thought, I know I should be frightened, too, but I feel nothing.

Jean no longer knew what her plan was. But she found herself telling Iolene that it was okay for her to leave. She told Iolene that she had to do it, had to keep going. She held Iolene’s wrist so tight, like it would break, and told Iolene that she had to do it. It was the only way to end it all. To finally end it.

And then things got kind of hazy, colors swelling, her body stretching like warm taffy, and Iolene was no longer there, and the studio guy wasn’t in the room anymore, either.