Death Was in the Picture (29 page)

“Well just…” Rhoda hesitated. Tried again. “Well, just… it don’t look good, maybe. But it ain’t what it seems.”

I kept my yap shut and he paid me no mind. He’d seen Rhoda sitting behind the desk, and just now he didn’t want to see anything else. How quickly it all can unravel, that’s what I figure he must have been thinking as he crossed the room, tucking his gun into his holster once he’d seen it was just us girls and we were unarmed. How quickly it all can come apart, as he snaked out one long, thick arm and grabbed a big mittful of Rhoda Darrow’s hair.

She yelled then, I can’t put it any other way. She did not scream, which is what I would have done. Screamed out of surprise and maybe fear. Rhoda Darrow yelled, as though with all that had happened, this single thing—a hand wrapped painfully in her hair—had pushed her past her breaking point. Angry. That’s how she sounded. So angry that when she tilted her head up and sank her teeth deeply into Xander’s wrist, I was barely surprised to see the blood begin to squirt between her lips.

It was his turn to yell then—a low, animal sound. While he yelled, he wound up and hit her so hard with his left, uninjured hand that she was jolted out of Dex’s chair. I heard a crack as her head hit the bookshelf behind the desk. Then there was nothing. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead while she lay there still and pale and Xander Dean bled all over Dex’s office floor.

Your thoughts surprise you at a time like that. You’d think that all you’d be able to keep in your head are pure animal responses—fight or flight. But that’s not strictly true. Or it is on a certain level, but that level is pretty near the surface.

As Xander stood bleeding and Rhoda lay either dead or dying on the scuffed hardwood floor, I found myself calculating the space between the door and the place where I stood. At the same time I wondered if Dex had remembered to take his piece—I tried to picture him with or without it—or, as he occasionally did, if he’d left it hanging in its holster behind the door
on the coat tree against my advice. Would this be the one time he listened to me? Or would I make a grab for the gun only to find it was not there?

At the same time my mind cast about for another type of weapon. What could I hit him with? The wastepaper basket? A chair? Dex’s ashtray, dirty but made of stone. And, were I able to grab one of those things for such a purpose, would I have what it took to get the job done? There was nothing in my background that let me think this might be the case.

As I stood there I realized—weirdly, oddly, unexpectedly—that this was a version of the thing you hear:
her life flashed before her eyes.
In a sense, all these things flashed in front of my eyes. Or, maybe behind them. Not my life, though, but ways I might prolong it. The whole of it took just a few seconds, and all of the options looked grim.

How long did we stand there like that? I don’t know. Time slowed down. Stopped.

Xander Dean stood looking toward Rhoda’s still form, his blood running down his arm, pooling oddly by his feet.

So much blood. How was that even possible?

Me, still in the chair opposite the desk, crouching now, as though I might bolt or attack. Take your pick because it didn’t matter; fear stayed my hand.

We stood there for an hour or a moment, I’m not sure. We stood there and time did not matter.

For a while, time stood still.

IT WAS THE tick, tick, tick of the clock on the bookshelf that made me focus on reality; on the situation at hand. The same bookshelf, I thought almost idly, that had caused that awful crack to Rhoda’s noggin.

I could hear the rising sound of an ambulance. Increasing in volume, coming closer. I remember thinking—ridiculously—that it must be coming for Rhoda. But of course it was not. No one had called for an ambulance. No one even knew we were there.

Before long the sound of the ambulance began to recede, just as it had grown. My heart turned over. I felt it. My heart turned over with a sigh.

I knew I had to do something, but I seemed unable to formulate even a single cohesive thought, let alone anything so well considered that it could be called
apian.
From the looks of him, Xander was facing the same challenge. Lucky for me, in his case there was all that loss of blood to deal with and lightheadedness to blame. I’d take it any way I could get it.

Left to our own devices, I wonder how long we might have stood there like that, Xander and me. A half hour? A day? Eternity, though on the way there we’d be turned to stone. It was like we were caught in a spell, only partly of our own design.

In the end what got us moving was the slam of a distant door. I recognized it as the door at the top of the stairwell, though I figured Xander probably would not. I also knew what it meant. In our building, the elevator stopped running when the operator went home. Our elevator was as old as the building: the elevator operator wasn’t just there for his good looks and
witty banter. The sound of the door closing could have meant Hartounian had come in to repackage olives or one of the accountants had come in to do some late night figuring or perhaps the dentist had come in to contemplate the meaning of payne. But I hoped it didn’t mean any of those things and that Dex was on his way back to his office at that exact moment. I hoped some more that Mustard would still be with him.

The door at the top of the stairs slammed. A hollow, echoey sound.

Xander and I looked at each other. Our eyes locked over Rhoda Darrow’s pale, still form.

I’ll remember that moment always. Xander’s eyes seemed impossibly blue and I could see the pulse jump at the base of his throat, the shadow late afternoon can leave on a man’s chin, the way his mid-section strained against his good suit.

I was not aware of gathering myself up, of collecting myself like a racehorse at the gate, but I must have done—and Xander? He saw it too because both of us sprang into motion in the space of a single beat of our hearts. He came toward me but I—lither, younger, faster, lighter and fueled by the possibility of death—I sprinted toward the open office door, praying that the door to the hallway had been left open as well.

It had. I scrabbled through it without hesitation while Xander thundered along behind me. I imagined him losing ground, perhaps regretting that extra cheesecake or six, while I sprinted down the hallway, around the corner, and straight into Dex and Mustard.

“Kitty. What the hell?”

I didn’t explain. Didn’t need to. My eyes would have been wide with fear, my breathing ragged. Later I’d realize that the front of my dress was ruined with a splash of blood. Xander’s or Rhoda’s? I’d never know. It didn’t matter anyway. Not in the end. Except it alerted my boss and his friend that something
serious was afoot. Xander, for his part, pulled up when he saw them, shifting from pursuit to retreat.

Dex and Mustard catching Xander Dean? It was no contest; none at all. They cornered him in the office, like some wild animal. He tried to use Rhoda’s still form as a hostage, a shield, but it didn’t do much good.

“I’ll kill her,” he said, his gun to her head. “I swear I will.”

I saw Mustard cock his head this way, then that.

“Ain’t she already dead? She looks dead,” Mustard said.

“She’s
not
dead,” Dean said through gritted teeth.

“Whaddaya think, Dex? Dead?” said Mustard.

“As a doornail, looks like,” Dex replied.

“She’s
not
dead,” Dean said again.

“And we’re gonna take your word for it?” I was standing behind Dex and Mustard in the hallway and, at this point, I saw both men raise their guns, level them at Dean’s chest.

“It’s over, Dean.” This was Dex. “You’d best put the gun down. The girl’s body, too. It wouldn’t take much for me to make a few alterations to that nice suit of yours.” He waggled his gun at him. “Alterations even the best tailor couldn’t fix.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. A moment when it seemed as though Dean might take his chances with getting to the gates of hell before his time. In the end, though, he threw down his gun with the sort of casual familiarity with which I might discard a chicken bone or yesterday’s newspaper. Without being asked, he raised his arms and linked his hands behind his head. Later Dex would say it was because of something in Mustard’s eyes. It wouldn’t have cost Mustard much to kill Dean right there. I think Mustard was disappointed he wouldn’t get the chance.

As soon as Dean was neutralized, I pushed past the boys to Rhoda’s side. At first I couldn’t feel the beat of her heart and I figured she was dead. The copious amount of blood bore this out. But then I felt it: a reedy pulse, barely there. But still.

We called an ambulance. We called the cops. While we settled in to wait for both, Mustard and I did what we could to staunch Rhoda’s bleeding, while Dex watched over Dean and drank from the bottle of scotch he and Mustard had been bringing back to the office.

We took a breather then. That is, we caught our breath. We took a breather because we thought that, with Xander Dean in custody and Rhoda Darrow damaged but safe and in our hands, something was finished. Complete.

We were wrong.

“I DIDN’T KILL her, don’t you idiots understand that?” Dean had been pushed into a chair in Dex’s office. The cops would show up, probably sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, we had to listen to him mewl.

That was how Dex put it:

“Quit your mewling, Dean. Save it for the jury. You’re gonna need all the help you can get.” Then he pushed his face up close to Dean’s and said in a deadly stage whisper. “You’re gonna need it, else you’ll be doing a little jig at the end of a rope.”

“Gee-zuz, what does it take?” There was desperation in the big man’s voice now. As though we held a key to the rest of his life. Maybe, in a way, we did.

“Are we idiots?” Dex looked from me to Mustard, then back again, as though asking our opinion on an important question. I didn’t say anything. Mustard kept his own counsel, too. “When we first saw you today, you were holding a woman in front of you—a woman you probably thought you had killed, by the way. You held a gun to her head. Told us you were going to shoot her. To
shoot
her, Dean. And we’re supposed to believe you’re innocent?”

“He ain’t innocent,” Mustard said with distaste. “This mook was born not being innocent.”

Mustard hated Dean now. I could see that, plain as anything. From Mustard’s perspective, Dean had abused some sort of network of trust. It was an abuse that Mustard could never forgive.

“What do you take us for?” Dex wanted to know. “You set me up. You hired the girl,” he indicated the place where we’d
made Rhoda as comfortable as possible on the floor. “You made sure I saw Wyndham go in with the other girl you hired. Now stop me, please, when I get to the innocent part.”

“But you’re already there, don’t you see? We didn’t want the girl
dead.
That wasn’t the plan. Think about who I was working for. You’ve been detecting. You’ve figured it out, right? She wasn’t supposed to
die.”

“No?” Dex said, skeptical, but listening. “What then?”

“It was supposed to be scandal. That’s all.” He looked from me to Mustard, then his eyes went back to Dex, so obviously in control. “That’s
all.
I mean, hell: why would we have wanted the girl dead? We didn’t need her dead. Dead was worse. Look what it did: with the girl dead, of course you’re going to think I did it. Everyone is. And everyone’s going to look at the whole thing real hard, too. Much harder than for scandal. Geez,” and here his voice rose and I was surprised to hear it touched by anger, “we didn’t want
any
of this. Think about it: the girl can’t testify if she’s dead. She’d be more useful to us alive, all around.”

“You’re saying
we.”
My voice sounded overbright and over-loud in the electric atmosphere of the room. The others must have thought so, too, because three heads turned to look at me. “Who is we?”

“But you know.”

“Tell us anyway,” Mustard said, shaking Dean up a bit by the lapels for good measure.

“I don’t know much,” Dean said and Mustard gave him another shake. “I
don’t.
The guy what hired me is called Joe Breen.”

“From the old neighborhood,” Mustard said with distaste.

“Sure, sure. I knew him from Chicago. That ain’t against the law.”

“You said Breen was from Pittsburgh,” I said to Mustard.

“But he came here by way of Chicago,” Mustard shook Dean up a bit more for good measure. “These mooks all did.”

“Who was he working for?” Dex asked.

“That I don’t know,” another shake.
“I don’t,”
he insisted. “But I got some ideas.”

Quickly then, before the cops came, he sketched out what he knew. In some ways, Mustard hadn’t been far from the truth. In others, he’d been whole planets away.

Joe Breen had been hired by the Hays Office some months before. Breen’s job was to get the movie studios to self-police the administration of the Production Code that had been written a year or more before.

“They weren’t playing ball, see? That’s why the Hays Office hired Joe: to make the studios play ball. Least, that’s what he said.”

Breen decided that what was needed was a big stick. He had many to offer. He hired Dean to be one of them. Dean’s job was to highlight—at a grassroots level—what was wrong with the movie industry. Not the technical details, of course, but the rotting core at its moral center. Dean’s job was to bring that to light. It was understood, though never outlined, that he could use any tools available to make this happen provided no one could ever connect him with the Hays Office or anyone
connected
with the Hays office.

“It was a conspiracy?” I said, shocked.

“Well. That word …” Dean said. I didn’t know if I should be amused or annoyed at the look of distaste that he wore.

“You were part of a conspiracy to make the movie industry look bad—corrupt. But to what end?”

“Better movies,” Dex said. “Jesus, that’s it, ain’t it? All of this … conspiracy … was so the studios would start producing better—cleaner—movies.”