The Song Is You (22 page)

Marv said, You don’t mind if Gene stays. He’s just going to sit over there. He won’t bother us. Come on, baby, do it like I like it.

She didn’t really want to. She didn’t much like this Gene, who, so amiable in the movies, so boyish and cheery, the Technicolor Troubadour with the baby face, now seemed …. off. LA funny, far-off look in his eyes. She wondered what he was seeing. And then … and then he started singing. Softlike. “Annie Laurie,” I’d lay me doon and dee, the rolling lilt. Like in the movies but not. Broken or something. Something had turned. The voice, his voice, it echoed, fell in with the creaking sound of water pressing on old wood, lapping on rusty hulls. An old mattress with no spring left, hard thrusts straight through to gasping floors. And that voice, his voice, distorted, as if from an old phonograph, cracked, shuddering, still warbling ancient sea shanties. A siren song. The lost boys.

Marv was whispering, “He takes the pipe because he thinks he’s going to die. Thinks he’s got the syph, but no doc has agreed with him yet. It’s in his head. His head’s not right.”

She wasn’t sure how long it had been—not long—when she looked over, woozily, shakily, barely aware of what Marv was doing, which was as rough and unfriendly as ever, and saw that Gene was crying. Weeping with a strange moaning, wringing his hands. He’s not right, she remembered thinking through the haze. Something’s not right in his head. Then she remembered thinking, What’s right with mine?

And next thing, he was there, with his hands on her neck. Marv made a halfhearted attempt to shove him aside (”Gene, Gene, why you gotta do that stuff?”) but was so loaded himself that he couldn’t seem to make it stop. Gene’s hands were so tight and the smell of burning leaves was everywhere and her own head so swollen with the junk they’d given her.

He was whispering in her ear and there was no other sound, no other feeling, and his breath like something dying inside him, and there he was whispering and saying over and over, “I’m saving you, Jane. I’m saving you. You’ll thank me when it’s over.”

She was thinking, I’m going to die and it’s all over. I’m going to die and he doesn’t even know my name.

Then she saw the knife drop out of his pocket and onto the floor. And he turned, like a dog with his ears pricked up, and he saw his knife and she knew what he was thinking. And he took one hand off her throat to pick up the knife and she drew a quick breath before he could put it back.

And she could feel it dragging. Oh God, she could feel it.

The last thing she remembered saying was, in that breath, “Stop,

stop, I’m already dead.”

And she was out. Thankfully, mercifully out.

She didn’t think she was unconscious for long. When she drifted back, her whole body felt disconnected from her, like a terrible weight from which she could now rise, still tingling from the junk. That was when she heard the voices in the hallway talking about dumping her body. Just outside the door, Marv was frantically pleading (”I’m friends with your boss, the big boss you send the money bags to—they know me and they would want you to help me”), and his words and his promise of money seemed to be enough. And she knew she had no time. And the little girl appeared and she took her chance. The girl found her a raincoat and took her out the back way. Hid her in the cellar until it was safe. Gave her bus fare because she couldn’t find her purse.

On the bus, she opened the coat and looked at herself for the first time. That was when she saw the blood, only blood. It was running along her body. It was forming dark spiderwebs on her legs. It was warm and it wasn’t until then she knew she was alive. She took the bus to Iolene’s, but Iolene wasn’t there, had been staying with her new boyfriend, Jimmy. Iolene’s place was where she’d stashed their pictures, the files she’d cadged from the doctor’s office. All their sins wedged into a file cabinet. The thought of it now made her sick. She opened a drawer and took out half the files. Pulling a suitcase out from underneath the bed, she dumped them in. After an aching, burning shower, she began changing into one of Iolene’s dresses and that was when she looked at the words across her belly. She raised her hand above them, almost as if to touch them. She thought she would faint or become sick. She willed herself to do neither. She wondered now how she did it. But she knew in a flash where she was going. She took five dollars from Iolene’s cookie jar and left.

“So I went to see Davy Ogul. He got one of their doctors to come over and clean me up, sew me back together,” Jean said, as Hop listened, rapt. “Then I showed Davy a few files I thought might be worth something. I said for a hundred dollars, he could have them.”

“And he gave it to you?” Hop managed to ask, his head jammed to numbness with the horrors, with this awful monster movie unfurling before his eyes.

“Sure he gave it to me. He’s no fool.”

Hop almost corrected her (”He was no fool”) but then realized she might not know Ogul vanished soon after she did. Then he realized

there was a lot Jean might not know.

“Did you … did you maybe tell him there were more files?”

“He asked. I said I was leaving town for good, but if he was in the market, he should go to Iolene. I knew he’d do right by her.”

Hop felt something drop in his chest. He did the math in his head. Davy Ogul tries to parlay the files to the wrong guy, or his boss Mickey Cohen finds out about Ogul’s extracurricular blackmailing. Next thing, Ogul goes poof. The hard boys eventually connect the dots and Iolene has a big bull’s-eye on her forehead. Or maybe Iolene, frantic, tries to hustle a little on her own—maybe even hustle those pictures of Jean. Or, most likely of all, Iolene talks up the pictures in a panic, like she did to Peggy Spangler. Iolene, she said she couldn’t get them out of her head. She wanted to get rid of them. They were starting to get to her. She said she kept seeing them in her sleep. She said they were in all her dreams. If she told Peggy Spangler about them, who else might she have told? For that matter, who else might Peggy Spangler have told? How long does it take for something that hot to get back to the wrong people? And God knows there were plenty of eyes and ears at the Red Lily to set things in motion. Fuck, Jean, you triggered a hundred ways for Iolene to die. And it only took one. Like Frannie Adair said, Some goon with a half a C-note in his pocket tailed her and got her in the head.

“But Jean…,” he began, but so many questions swarmed his head, he couldn’t pick one. Finally, he blurted, “The note. To Kirk.” He wanted to be sure Midge had been right.

She looked at him vacantly for a moment, then a flash of recognition drifted across her face. “I forgot that was in my purse. I didn’t write that. It’s a souvenir.”

Hop scrambled for another question. “Your cousin said you were pregnant.”

Jean allowed herself a whisper of a smile. “Poor Peg. Did she get her picture in the paper?”

“No. Just you.”

She shook her head, still faintly smiling. “I found that note—just some girl’s note, tossed in the trash. I kept it. It made me think of things I might have forgotten.”

“The girl coming off the Greyhound bus,” Hop murmured. Hell, he’d gotten off that bus.

“What?”

“Skip it,” Hop said. A hundred more questions danced around in his head, but one didn’t come fast enough and he feared she was about to take his pause as her chance to end things.

As if one cue, she smoothed her skirt and adjusted her scarf, and it was like a curtain closing. He could feel his dismissal in the air. He knew he had to hurry.

“So, you can see I’ve left all that behind,” she said.

“Have you?” Hop murmured, distracted by the thoughts racing through his head.

“Listen,” she said, leaning forward, winding that scarf back around

her pearly skin. “I want you to understand.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. You’re one of those who like to stay in the muck,” she said, shaking her head. He wondered how she might know that. And then he realized anyone would.

She went on. “What I figured out, from all that, it’s … it’s like this: Sometimes you have to do bad things to get pure again,” she said. “Like burning something to make it clean.”

He paused, thinking. The moment suddenly seemed heavy with meaning, but he wasn’t sure what the meaning was. Then he looked at her and said, “Do you really think you can do that? Make yourself over new? Don’t you carry it with you? Doesn’t it stick with you, like a scar?”

She looked at him, her eyes hooded.

“I didn’t mean—”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, her voice turning cool, distant. “Wait here a minute,” she said, rising to her feet. She walked into the adjoining bedroom. When she reemerged, moments later, she was carrying a brown, creased accordion file. “I wonder if you can do me a favor,” she said, holding the file to her chest.

“What’s that?”

“My family, they’re better off, you know. Christine is, that’s for sure. But Iolene … I want Iolene to know I’m okay.” As she spoke, her voice changed again. From remote to nearly broken. Her eyes, for the first time, filled with tears. “If you can tell her that I’m sorry for skipping on her and that… I wish only the best for her.”

Hop looked at her and said nothing. He knew at that moment that he wouldn’t tell her what had happened to Iolene. And, looking in her face, he hoped she’d never know.

“And there’s something I want you to give her for me,” she went on, composing herself. “The files I took from the house—I didn’t sell all the ones I took to Davy. I kept a few. The most valuable ones.” She shifted the file forward onto her knees. “I wanted them in case I was in a real bind. I didn’t know if anyone was going to be coming after me. I didn’t know if I could make a clean break. I needed something to bargain with. Anyway, it’s been a while now and I’m moving again. Farther this time. And I don’t think I need them. Not as much as Iolene might.” She looked off to some invisible space over Hop’s shoulder. “You see, I left her holding the bag and she … she was as close to me as anyone ever was. Closer.”

So close you took her name, Hop thought. Before he could stop himself, he said, “You love her.” He didn’t know where it came from or what he meant by it.

She shook her head vaguely and didn’t say anything and it was all right there in front of him. As many questions as he had left, he knew enough to stop asking.

“I’ll give them to her,” he said, rising. She didn’t move. He began walking toward the door. His hand on the knob, he looked back at her sitting there, her forearms posed tensely on either arm of the chair, her fingers wrapped hard around the wood. Her head tilted down, dark hair lit through by the lamp, as if on fire, brilliantly.

He wanted suddenly to give her something, but he couldn’t think of what.

“Midge—you know my wife, Midge? She said you were so lovely, that you had something bright and shiny about you. Something special, she meant.”

Her head lifting slowly, she looked over at him. Abruptly, he had the feeling you get the split second before the blow comes. Midge taught him that feeling.

“Why’d you do it?” she said, eyes suddenly narrow, like slits.

“Do what?” he asked.

“To Midge.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Hop said, hands

turning around the knob damply.

“I ran into her at Good Samaritan back in, oh, ‘48. Before all this. I was in the emergency room—a boyfriend broke my arm— and I saw her for the first time in two years. She spotted me right off.”

He remembered as if it were happening again right before his eyes: Jean and Iolene in his living room that night, October 49. Jean

looking over at a set of framed photos. “This is your wife?”

‘You saw Midge?” he said.

Jean nodded. “So why’d you do it?”

“Do what?” he repeated.

“She was glad to see me, to see someone,” she said coolly. “She

looked like she’d been crying for days. Her face was raw. And then she told me how she’d gotten married. To a reporter.

And then she told me how he’d pushed her over a chair and she fell and lost the baby.”

“She fell,” Hop said mechanically, turning the doorknob right and then left. “That much is true.”

“Are you saying you didn’t push her or she didn’t lose the baby?”

“I’m saying she was never pregnant,” he replied, shaking his head. “She just hoped she was. And she fell because she was trying to throw a marble ashtray at me.”

She nodded. “That’s a big difference. Between your stories.”

“Isn’t there always?”

On the long drive back, he thought about a lot of things. About Iolene and her last desperate hours. Her unblurred beauty and her tenderness. Her only mistake was judgment. In coming to him, she picked the wrong guy to step up for rescue. For anything. And he thought about fresh-faced, clear-voiced Frannie Adair, so majestic, cool, striding above it all like some goddess, soles of her feet just grazing the ugliness the rest of her kind had sunk into up to the chin or more. And there was Midge. Midge and the half-truth that always lingered, twisting and turning in the hollow between them. And Midge and her stubborn, battered heart because she might love Jerry forever, but she’d never let him touch her where Gil Hopkins had. It was a horrible lesson to learn. He taught it to her a thousand times.

These were the most sentimental thoughts Hop had allowed himself in years and they felt awkward and ill-fitting and he fumbled with them and then let them go. Poof.

He was halfway home when he looked over at the accordion file on the seat next to him. The string had snapped and on his last sharp turn, something had slid out from one of the folders. He reached over and saw it was a piece of paper. He placed it in front of him and pressed it against the steering wheel so he could get a look.

It was a postcard. A lake lined with fir trees and a fawn at the shore, just about to set a hoof in. In script at the top were the words “Merry Lake Is Waiting for You.”

He turned it over and sure enough, behind yellowing tape, was a four-leaf clover.

She must have thought Iolene needed it. She was right. Late, but right.