The Other Typist (28 page)

I continued to look around. Without realizing it, I was searching the room for Gib. I had heard them arguing almost every day that week. Even in my state of displeasure with Odalie, I was nonetheless eager to see her cut him out of the picture at long last. I roamed the room. He was not in the cluster of men puffing away at their cigars. He was not hovering over the roulette table, watching for men purposely leaning against the rim of the wheel to slow it. He was not in the crowd of nervous bodies shimmying the Charleston (though to be honest, he rarely was). When I finally found him, it appeared Odalie had, too. They were seated upon a red velvet settee in a far corner by the bar, and together they were discussing something with great animation. Neither was smiling, and after several minutes it became clear their discussion was taking the form of yet another argument. Curiosity soon got the better of me. I set the cocktail that was already in my hand down on a nearby table and approached the bar, where I feigned thirst to the bartender and ordered a fresh drink. The entire speakeasy had grown impossibly boisterous by that hour, but I was nonetheless hoping to hear a fragment or two of Odalie and Gib’s conversation.

But no sooner had I edged my way within earshot than a tipsy young girl tried to perch on the arm of their settee, and finding Gib’s hand under her derriere, jumped up with a yelp. As she sprang from where she had accidentally sat upon his hand, she upset the contents of her martini glass over his head and proceeded now to flutter anxiously about the settee, squawking with apology. With an intermingling of bathtub gin and hair oil dripping into his eyes, Gib did not appear amused by this new development. Odalie, for her part, deftly extracted Gib’s pocket square from the breast of his jacket and began blotting the offending gin from his face. In seconds she had sent the girl away and was soothingly urging Gib into a back room with her, where it seemed they intended to adjourn indefinitely.

With my reconnaissance mission thwarted and my curiosity unquenched, I let out a sigh and turned to regard the wild revelry transpiring in the center of the room. Someone had rolled a cart into the middle of the dance floor and stacked it high with a pyramid of champagne glasses. Meanwhile, a pretty little slip of a girl in a bright yellow dress stood atop a step-stool and poured a golden stream of champagne from a very cumbersome and heavy-looking magnum. The champagne frothed and bubbled over the glass at the very top until it cascaded down the small mountain of glasses, filling each along the way. People all around me, drunk and sober alike, applauded the girl’s coordination.

For the briefest of seconds, I caught a flash of suspenders and spats and thought I’d glimpsed the Lieutenant Detective, standing just behind the makeshift champagne fountain. It wasn’t him. Even so, the tremor of recognition had jolted me into a state of nervous alert, and I found myself suddenly restless. Perhaps even a greater shock to my system was the half-formed realization that I might indeed welcome his company. I was unsettled and couldn’t remain leaning at the bar for long. Before I knew it, I had dumped down the glass of gin and vermouth in my hand and proceeded to do something I rarely did while still sober enough to remember the experience—that is, I ventured out to the dance floor and threw myself into the jittery crowd of Charleston dancers. I don’t know how much time passed during my exertions on the dance floor, but it was likely a full thirty minutes later when I pulled off to the side to catch my breath. By then I had begun to sweat so much, my pinned bob had plastered itself to my cheeks and I tasted salt whenever I licked my upper lip. Red-faced, I stood to the side and watched as others carried on.

I had lost track of Odalie completely when all of a sudden her luminous oval of a face buoyed up at me, thrust forward into the candlelight from the dark. A bit startled, I staggered backward.

“Oh!”

“Rose, dear—there you are!” Her voice sounded funny; there was a brittle, accusatory quality to it. Something was wrong. Perhaps it was a trick played by the flicker of the candlelight, but it looked like Odalie’s mouth was twitching. I slowly became aware of another shape standing nearby, just over her shoulder. It was the shape of a man. The shoulders were reasonably broad, but the hips were narrow and the head was disproportionately small. I blinked and looked more closely.

“Oh!” I said, startled all over again. Although to be fair, upon seeing his face I shouldn’t have been startled at all. I had given him the address myself, not to mention a description of how to enter through the wig shop.

“You remember Teddy, don’t you, Rose? From the Brinkleys’?” I believe she knew it was an unnecessary question. Of course I remembered. The overly polite tone of her voice was laced with a bitter anger. I had been planning all along on telling her I had been the one to invite Teddy, but now that the fateful moment of confrontation had arrived, I found myself swallowing nervously and extending a hand in Teddy’s direction.

“Of course,” I said. “Teddy. So good to see you again.” He smiled and accepted my outstretched hand as if he had not just seen me mere hours earlier at the precinct. Once he’d released my hand, the three of us were left standing around awkwardly. No one made conversation for several minutes; meanwhile the party roared on all around us. I slowly became conscious of the fact we had come to constitute a static point amid a sea of vibration. Finally, Odalie spoke.

“As I’m sure you can imagine, Teddy and I need to have a little chat, Rose,” she said. I nodded awkwardly, suddenly uncomfortable in my body. I knew my discomfort had to do with the guilt I now felt; I could see in Odalie’s eyes she knew I’d brought them to this moment of final confrontation by giving Teddy the address of where we’d be that night.

“And we can’t very well chat here,” Odalie added. “Would you mind, Rose, taking him back to the apartment? I’ve got some things I need to finish up here, and then I’ll be right over so we can all sit down good and proper.”

I agreed to Odalie’s request that I temporarily play host for her, but I didn’t feel confident about any of it anymore. No sooner had my betrayal been revealed than I had immediately begun to regret it. I’m not sure what I thought would happen by giving Teddy the address to the speakeasy that night. But whatever it was, I still hadn’t acquired the stomach for it.

Odalie flipped open a silver case and extracted a cigarette. Teddy fished around for a lighter and found one swimming in the depths of his jacket pocket.

“So, Rose’ll show me to your apartment, and then we can talk more about . . . about Newport,” Teddy said, holding up the flame. The tone of it rendered it half-question, half-statement.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about,” Odalie said. “Go on, now. I’ll be right behind you two.” She patted his hand and winked, then disappeared back into the crowd of dancers, which greedily swallowed her up.

Content to wait for Odalie at the apartment as instructed, Teddy held out a genteel arm to me. Together we headed for the back door.

Our journey over to the apartment was uneventful, despite the obvious tension. Silence prevailed between us throughout the trip. Twice—once in the taxi-cab and once as the elevator cage ticked off the floors, making its ascent—Teddy drew a sharp breath as if he was about to speak, but then seemed to think better of it. It wasn’t until we were in the apartment and had been sitting there for some minutes that I broke the silence by asking him whether he’d like a drink. It was not something I historically had a habit of doing—offering people drinks, that is—but it was something Odalie would’ve done, and besides, I had begun to develop new habits during my tenure with her. I did not think Teddy, undoubtedly a charter member of the Boy Scouts during his youth, would accept the drink. But to my surprise, he did. Under ordinary circumstances I think he might’ve refused the drink; he seemed like the type to preach on about the virtues of “keeping a clear head.” But I believe he found himself in extenuating circumstances that night; it was clear Odalie made him nervous. I found myself flipping through a little recipe book Odalie kept near the bar titled
Harry’s ABCs of Mixing Cocktails,
attempting to build some sort of drink called a sidecar.

I felt Teddy watching me, looking on with sincere interest as I lifted a bottle of Cointreau from a shelf and measured out an amateurishly precise jigger. Whether the drink I built turned out to be a proper sidecar or not I don’t know, but I shook the concoction over ice and poured it into two martini glasses. Less than twenty minutes later, I found myself repeating the process. The effort made my forehead bead up with perspiration, and stray hairs stuck to the sweaty skin, making it itch.

“It’s a nice night. She may be a while. Why don’t we take the air on the terrace while we wait?” I suggested. Teddy’s eyes widened, and he shot me a sudden fearful look. It dawned on me this was an odd request—something usually recommended by a seducing lover—and I blushed. But Teddy coughed and shrugged, and after I’d mixed us a third drink, we adjourned to the terrace, where only hours earlier I’d stood watching the moon sail into the sky with its blood-tinged warning.

The muggy warmth of early autumn had left no trace of its oppressiveness behind on the night breeze. It had turned into the kind of evening I can only describe as delicious. The air was lukewarm and carried just the tiniest hint of a chill in it when the wind lifted. The crisp scent of wet leaves wafted over from the park, and the silvery light of the moon was so bright, our shadows stood behind us in sharp outlines, giving us the indirect impression we had invited a third and fourth guest to join us. We stood in silence for several minutes, resting our elbows on the terrace ledge and peering out over the city below. Somewhere several floors down and what seemed like a whole universe away there was a very low, faraway din of bustling traffic, of horns honking. I watched Teddy as he took a long pull at his drink.

“She’s something of a sphinx, isn’t she,” he commented rhetorically when he finally came up for air and tipped his face away from his martini glass.

“What exactly do you hope to get out of her, Teddy?”

He looked around the terrace uncomfortably and shrugged. “The truth, I suppose.”

“And what if the truth is bad?”

He regarded me for a very long minute. “How bad?”

I shrugged. “The worst you can imagine.”

His eyes widened. “Do you know something?” he asked. There was a shade of eagerness in it, but there was a shade of terror, too. I shook my head quickly.

“No, no. I don’t know anything,” I said. “But don’t you sometimes think . . . there are things you would rather not know?”

“No,” he answered. “I don’t.” I searched the glowing white shapes of his face under the moonlight and realized he would not stop until he knew all of it—whether the girl he’d known as Ginevra was in fact Odalie, and whether she’d once upon a time been capable of retaliating in some tragic, irreversible way. I saw now his blue eyes were full of steel; he was going to know it all.

“What would you do,” I began to ask, my heartbeat speeding up at the mere thought of his likely answer, “if Odalie admitted to . . . to doing something terrible, even if . . . even if it was only a fleeting impulse—and a bad one, true enough—but that she hadn’t meant any of it?”

“I think you know, Rose, what I’d do.”

I did. He would bring her to justice. Not the way I’d done with Edgar Vitalli. No, Teddy was not yet ready to strike that bargain and cross that threshold. In some ways he was an earlier version of me: one who desperately wanted to see justice done but who still (naively, I could argue) believed there were strict rules by which to achieve this. He would report her, and if one police district refused to entertain his claims he would go to another, and doggedly to another and another, until he finally found one bold enough to cinch a pair of handcuffs around Odalie’s wrists. It would be the right thing to do. The very definition of justice, in fact. Nonetheless, my hands grew clammy as I realized I was having pangs of regret. I had betrayed the one bosom friend who had ever really stood by me.

Just then, a shape stepped onto the terrace with a sleek, feline grace. I wondered, for the briefest of seconds, how long Odalie had stood by the terrace door, and how much she might have heard.

“What a glorious night,” she said. Her voice had that husky rattle in it, and she carried a small mirrored tray upon which three martini glasses balanced. As she distributed them into our hands, I wondered how she’d known to make sidecars. Then I remembered I’d left the open recipe book out on the bar. Suddenly Teddy’s hand jerked, and he pointed at something. Following the arrow of his finger, I realized he was pointing at our wrists—first Odalie’s and then mine. With a shock, I realized I had forgotten about the bracelets, which twinkled brilliantly now under the bright moonlight.

“Oh!” was all he could muster. “Oh . . . Oh!”

I felt my stomach turn, and I realized I was wild with a fresh terror. I understood what was at stake now, and I knew my fear was the dread of losing Odalie. Odalie, for her part, was unfazed. She ignored Teddy’s distress and stretched languidly in the tepid evening air, finishing with a small, ladylike yawn.

“You know what I’d love? I’d love to stand out here and smoke a cigarette.” Her teeth glowed eerie and phosphorescent in the silvery moonlight as she flashed a cool smile at us. She opened the clasp of her purse and pretended to look inside. “Oh! But I’m all out. Rose, darling. Would you mind terribly running to the newsstand and getting some?”

I nodded but was hesitant to go, unsure as to whether I should leave her alone. The instinct to protect her was surging strongly in me now. Whereas before I had wanted to see Odalie confronted, now I only wanted Teddy to go away, and as quickly as possible. I considered that perhaps if I dashed out for the cigarettes, it might give Odalie a chance to set him straight and send him on his way. As an afterthought I considered the walk might do me good anyhow; I was slightly fevered with drink by that time, and it felt as though hot embers were smoldering steadily under the apples of my cheeks. Odalie put some change in my hand, and I hardly remember riding the elevator—although I must have done so—for the next thing I knew I was walking in an awkward, aggressive stride along the city sidewalk.