Dead to Me (23 page)

Conrad’s man whistled loudly, and I heard footsteps slapping down the steps. Rex emerged into the sunlight, pushing Ruth along in front of him.

“Search her, boss,” Rex said to the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders. “She’s got the goods.”

Each of the officers drew their weapons and dropped to one knee, shoulders squared to line up their shots.

“Let go of the girl,” said the bigger one with the sandy hair.

I burrowed in as best I could behind the row of stones. On my belly, I crawled through the bushes, hoping I could make it to the relative safety of the overgrown backyards where I could at least
stand up and run if bullets started flying.

They exchanged a short glance, then Rex pushed Ruth to the side and gave the officers what might have once been a charming smile without putting down his gun. The man with the polka-dot
suspenders smiled, too, and released his grip on the gun, letting it dangle off his thumb. With his free hand, he slowly reached into his pocket, pulled something from it, and tossed it so it
landed in front of the two officers.

The older cop burst out laughing. The younger, redheaded cop looked confused until his partner picked it up and shoved it in front of his face. The man in the blue polka-dot suspenders had
thrown down an LAPD badge, just like the ones they wore. The younger man’s eyes grew wide, and he opened his mouth to stammer out an apology.

Rex shot him in the chest before he could get it out.

Before the other officer could register what had happened, the man in the polka-dot suspenders drew up his gun and fired a shot into his head.

For a moment, everything seemed to happen in slow motion—the bullets whizzing through the air, the men falling to the ground. But the blood pooled on the sidewalk so fast, more blood than
I’d ever seen at once, more than I’d known could come out of a person. Just as fast, Rex grabbed Ruth and all three of them piled into a black car parked in front of the building and
peeled off down the street.

I looked up at the fire escape, but there was no sign of Gabrielle.

I ran from my hiding place. One officer was already dead, his gray eyes motionless and wide open. His partner was still alive, though. He lay on his back, clutching at his chest and sucking for
breath. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it to the wound.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

My sweater was already soaked through and hadn’t even slowed the bleeding, so when he lifted a hand from his side, I took it. It seemed to calm him somewhat, and the wet, heaving breaths
grew easier and farther apart. I sat with him until his eyelids fluttered for the last time before falling shut for good.

My hands began to shake, and I couldn’t make them stop. The shaking spread up my arms, into my shoulders, and down my legs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”
I said over and over as I rocked back and forth.

How long Jerry had been standing there, how much he had seen, I didn’t know, but suddenly he was kneeling beside me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders so tightly that when I shook
against them, it was like waves breaking on a rock. Gently, he unwrapped my fingers from around the dead man’s hand.

“You’re here,” I said.

“Of course I’m here,” he said, staring at the cuts and bruises on my face.

Jerry pulled me to my feet, but when he started to run toward the bushes, I froze in place.

“Come on, Alice,” he said, tugging on my arm. “We have to go.”

He was right. I knew that, but all I could do was look back over my shoulder at the bodies on the sidewalk and think about how the police officer’s last breaths had sounded, the way his
hand loosened its grip on mine as he died.

“Alice.” Jerry’s voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of a dream. “There’ll be more police here any minute.”

“Gabrielle,” I said, looking up to the fire escape she’d climbed down just a minute before. “She was here, Jerry.”

Tears filled my eyes, and I fought the urge to sit down on the pavement and sob. Gabrielle had come so close to falling into Conrad’s hands, and I hadn’t been able to help her. She
was still out there on her own, and it wouldn’t be long before they were on her trail again.

From the things Rex had been shouting, it sounded like Ruth had managed to collect whatever piece of evidence Millie had hidden in the lockbox under Irma’s bed, but she was in a car with
Conrad’s cronies. It wouldn’t be long before they forced it out of her hands.

And worst of all, two men were dead.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think straight. My head felt like it was full of tangled string, and every thread I picked up led to a giant knot in the space where my brain should be.
There was one thread, though, that spooled out yard after yard after yard—
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

They were both the right age to have been soldiers not so long ago. It seemed cruel to think that they’d escaped German and Japanese and Italian bullets, only to be brought down by
American ones. And I’d as good as killed both of them.

“It’s my fault the police were there,” I said, my breath coming in gasps as I tried to hold back the scream I could feel rising in my throat. “I called them. I told them
to come.”

Jerry dragged me through the shrubs and around to the back of the apartment building so at least we were out of view.

“Alice, tell me about Gabrielle,” he said patiently. “Is that the girl Annie was protecting? She was
here
?”

I stammered out what I’d seen. I told him about the fire escape, about Rex shouting for the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders to search Ruth before shoving her into their getaway
car.

“It’s not too late,” Jerry said when I’d finished talking. “We can still find her, but we need to move fast. Can you do that, Alice?”

He looked at me with concern, and I nodded. Then he reached inside his coat pocket and drew out a Kodak Brownie camera.

“I found this under Irma’s bed,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “Conrad doesn’t have it, he doesn’t have Gabrielle, and he’s not going to.
Now, let’s go.”

I stared at him, stunned by what he’d just shown me. I’d doubted Jerry, believed the things that Millie had told me, and yet, when I needed him most, there he was.

“How did you find me?” I asked. “How did you know I was here?”

“Not now,” he said. “We don’t have much time to look for her.”

Together, we set off through a row of hedges. We cut through the backyards at breakneck speed, searching every garden, shrub, alley, and derelict shed on the block without success. As we neared
the street Jerry slowed to a walk and peered up and down the sidewalk, looking for any signs of danger before we stepped out into the open. A few yards away, I saw his beat-up Plymouth.

“Act natural,” he said.

We walked down the sidewalk at a leisurely pace, like we were two ordinary people out for an early morning stroll. However, our talk was anything but small.

“We should check bus stops,” I said, thinking back to my escape from Griffith Park the night before. “Streetcar stations.”

“Good idea,” Jerry said.

We got in the Plymouth and drove, zigzagging through the streets of Hollywood, as far as Gabrielle could have run in the ten minutes or so since she’d climbed down the fire escape. First,
we checked the main streets: Sunset, Vine, Santa Monica Boulevard. When we didn’t find her waiting for a bus or a streetcar, we took to the less-trafficked streets.

“I called Cy at Marty’s an hour or so ago,” Jerry said, steering the Plymouth down a sleepy residential street. “That’s how I found you. He told me you jumped out
of his car at the corner of Sunset and Western at four thirty in the morning for no reason. I could only think of two places you’d be going from there.”

“Ruth’s place or Millie and Irma’s,” I said.

“I went to both.”

“So did I.”

We could drive more slowly on these streets without attracting attention. I peered out the passenger-side window, under cars, behind fences, between houses, but there was no sign of Gabrielle
anywhere. It was like she’d just disappeared.

After a few more minutes, Jerry turned to me and said, “We can’t keep doing this much longer, Alice.”

I wanted to argue with him. It felt wrong to give up the search when we were this close, but this time, I knew he was right. If Gabrielle had managed to catch a streetcar, she could have been
two miles away. She could have been hiding in a backyard we’d missed. She could have been anywhere, and we were out of time.

Someone would have found the two bodies on the sidewalk. The police would be on their way. They’d find my sweater at the crime scene. They’d start combing the neighborhood for
suspicious cars.

And if they found us, there would be no hiding my hands, the front of my shirt, the tips of my shoes, all smeared with a dead police officer’s blood.

“W
here are we going?” I asked. We were heading south now, away from Hollywood.

“My office,” Jerry said. “I’ll feel better once we get you cleaned up and I have the film in this camera developed.”

As we neared downtown, Jerry swerved into a narrow alley, dinging a trash can with his fender. Instead of slowing down, he pushed the gas pedal to the floor. Finally, we stopped near the back
entrance of a seedy brownstone that might have once been someplace comparatively nice, maybe a state mental hospital or a women’s prison. Jerry parked the car in the alley, and I followed him
inside.

We took the stairs to the fourth floor. Jerry unlocked the door to an office at the top of the stairs, then handed me the keys to the washroom at the end of the hall.

“Come back to my office when you’re finished,” he said. “I’ll be in the darkroom.”

After locking myself in the washroom, I peeled off my shirt and ran it under the faucet, scrubbing soap into the fabric until the bloodstains faded to pink. Then I scrubbed my shoes, my hands,
and my arms before getting dressed again.

As I studied my face and my sodden clothes in the washroom mirror, I thought about my father and wondered what kind of shape he was in at that moment. It was morning, seven or eight hours since
he’d made his escape from the trunk of Conrad’s car. Where had he run from there? Conrad’s cronies had made their way out of the park in that time and gone over to Irma’s
apartment. Did that mean they’d found my father, or that they’d given up looking?

I closed my eyes and pictured him running out of the park toward Hollywood Boulevard, just like I had. I hoped that was how it’d happened. Even if I couldn’t imagine what might have
happened to him after that.

When I went back to Jerry’s office, there was percolator coffee brewing on a hot plate, a clean mug drying on the edge of the sink for me.

And Cy, staring out the window that looked onto a fire escape and another seedy brownstone.

When I opened the office door, he jumped and nearly knocked over the percolator. Jerry’s office was about the same size as one of my mother’s closets, and Cy crossed it in two steps.
For a moment, I thought he was going to hug me, but he seemed to think better of it when he saw my soaking-wet shirt. Instead, he took my hand and squeezed it.

“I was so worried, Alice.”

“I’m here now.” I squeezed his hand back. “And I’m fine.”

“Why didn’t you go to the hospital? After Jerry called me, I tried to get ahold of your friend Cassie there, and she said you never showed up. Then I went by your house, and after
that, I just drove up and down Sunset Boulevard looking for you.”

Behind what looked like a closet door, I heard a thump and a clatter, followed by swearing.

“Everything’s okay. Don’t come in,” Jerry shouted once he’d recovered himself. “Light will ruin the film.”

Cy continued. “When I couldn’t think of anyplace else you might be, I came here. I thought maybe Jerry had found you.”

I took the mug from the sink and poured myself coffee from the percolator. I needed it badly.

“How’d you get in?” I asked, taking a sip.

“Let myself in,” Cy said, pulling a huge ring of keys from his pocket. There was probably one for every job he had, or had ever had.

“You’re supposed to be at work right now, aren’t you?”

“I went to Marty’s for an hour or so before Jerry called, but I wasn’t exactly in a toilet-scrubbing state of mind. Mostly I just paced around the bar worrying about
you,” he said. “Alice, I’m so sorry. I never should have let you get out of the car like that. I should have gone with you.”

Looking at Cy’s tired face and bloodshot eyes, I remembered I wasn’t the only one who had been up all night. I handed him my mug of coffee.

“No, you shouldn’t have,” I said. I wouldn’t have wished the things I’d seen that morning on anyone. “I’m glad you’re here now, though.”

Too tired to stand another minute, I took a seat on the window-sill. Cy sat down next to me, and we passed the mug of coffee back and forth, sipping quietly, until Jerry emerged from the
darkroom. A heady brew of developing solutions wafted out.

Jerry unclipped the freshly developed negatives from the wire where they’d been drying, and brought them over to the window.