All for a Story (39 page)

“Some girls just aren’t made out for friends.” This from the woman sitting next to her, whose face was familiar from other nights on the town. She was doughy-soft and pale, and she sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, the way ladies were supposed to.

“I’m thinking I might be one of them,” Monica said. “I can’t seem to keep anybody in my life.”

“Looks like you had a fellow at the place back there.”

“Him I don’t want to keep.”

“You ever been arrested before?” She spoke with surprising nonchalance.

“No. Have you?”

She held up three fingers. “Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and here. This is the nicest by far.”

“Glad we could accommodate you.”

“It’s not so bad, you know. Few hours here, pay a fine, and then it’s back in the saddle. Me, I figure you’ll never get warm if you spend your life afraid of getting burned.”

“Well, aren’t you the philosopher? What’s your name?”

“Samantha.” She reached a hand over to shake. “Nice to finally meet you.”

“I apologize for the circumstances.”

The two leaned back against the wall. Samantha offered up a cigarette, which Monica refused, and another attempt at conversation, which she also refused.

One by one the men and women were led out, escorted to the front desk to make their phone call, then back again. The cells were side by side, and from her recessed seat, she couldn’t tell when Charlie was taken. Not that she cared. Tonight should end it all for sure. Perhaps she’d been foolish to think she could stay with a guy as long as she did with Charlie and expect everything to end all cut and clean. Most guys were more than happy to go away, move on.

Max certainly was.

A girl takes five seconds to clear her head and decide if she’s in love or not and he’s ready to write the whole thing off. Had her pegged for being fast, and maybe she was, but fast girls fell in love too, didn’t they? It just maybe wasn’t so obvious when it happened. Sometimes a girl needed to think. For a few minutes, maybe longer. What could that hurt?

“Samantha Pedronski?” Officer Meeks studied his clipboard and repeated the name, louder.

Monica nudged. “Is that you?”

“Yeah.” She took a final drag on her cigarette and crushed it out on the floor.

“Then why don’t you go?” Monica spoke quietly, out of the side of her mouth, not wanting to be the one to turn the spotlight on this girl who seemed determined to hide.

“I got no one to call. At least not that can come get me tonight.”

“No friends even?”

Samantha gave a quaking smile. “All my friends are right here. We might have to find a way to bail each other out.”

“Samantha Pedronski!” Officer Meeks’s voice was hoarse from shouting.

“Hold your garters!” Monica yelled back. “Her lawyer’s office doesn’t open ’til nine.”

“Well, why didn’t ya say so in the first place?” he said before moving on to the next name on his list.

“You’re a quick wit,” Samantha said, watching the one with lipstick on her teeth exit.

“I spend a lot of time making up stories. In fact, most of my life is a lie.”

“You’re kidding. So a few months ago, when you went to Romo’s and pocketed the coffee cup? That didn’t happen?”

Monica winced with the memory, having given it very little thought since the incident occurred.

“It was an espresso cup.” Tiny little thing, almost doll-sized. “Yeah, I took it.”

“And when you went up to Atlantic City and saw the guy getting his face kicked in on the beach? Was that true?”

Monica nodded, recalling in the pit of her stomach the sickening sound of that face-crushing encounter. Two men in expensive suits, blood staining the white foam of the surf.

“Everything I write about is true. I think the lie comes from
making everybody think it’s a swell way to live. Because lately it doesn’t seem so wonderful. Look where it got me.”

Samantha shrugged. “There’s worse places, I guess.”

“Maybe,” Monica conceded, “but there’s better, too.”

Officer Meeks was back with the girl who, after thanking him with exaggerated charm for his escort, revealed that she had taken the time to wipe the lipstick off her teeth at some point. He slid the door shut and locked it before looking off to the side and saying, “Five minutes, buddy. Not a minute more. I don’t know if the big boys want any of this in the press at all.”

“That’s all I need, Officer. Thanks.”

The familiar voice brought Monica flying from the bench to grasp the cold iron bars, pressing her face between them. “Tony!”

He turned to look at her, unbelieving at first, then put a finger to his lips and scurried over until he was nose-to-nose with her, speaking quick and quiet like a rat. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as everybody,” she whispered. “Family reunion.”

“Not so funny, sister. You know whose place this was?”

She shook her head as much as the bars would allow, and he dropped his voice even softer.

“King’s.”

“As in, Jim King? The guy who —?”

“Pffft.”
Tony cut her off, but they were both thinking of the man who had come into the office a month ago. Obviously Hoofers had not been his only establishment.

Monica gripped the bars tighter, her hands now equally cold. “He’s going to think I tipped somebody off.”

“He’s not here,” Tony said. “You can bet if the Feds ever got ahold of him, they’d have someplace better to take him than a local lockup. Besides, you never wrote about the place, did you?”

“Not with any details.”

“And nobody knows you, so —”

“Hey, cop!” The girl with the newly clean smile was now standing right next to Monica, her face pressed through the bars. “How come the monkey girl gets a visitor? Maybe I wanna visitor too!”

“He’s not a visitor,” Monica hissed, hoping her hint would stave off further shouting. “He’s with the press. Same as me.”

“Oh, of course,” she said in a quieter, if still nasty, tone. “Journalism at its finest.”

It was all Monica could do to stop from kicking her and thereby giving Tony a new story to report. But there were more pressing questions.

“Does Max know?”

“That I’m here?”

“That
I’m
here,” Monica said, not at all certain of what she wanted the answer to that question to be.

“I don’t check with Max for all my stories. I figure I can sell this two ways. For the
Chatter
, it’s a cautionary tale of the evils of drink. For some bigger fish, it’s the story of the takedown of a gangster. Either way, I get a picture.”

He stepped back and began rummaging through the worn leather bag slung over his shoulder. “The light in here is lousy,” he said, producing a camera, “but sometimes ya gotta make do.”

“There’s a third story.” The words seemed to tumble through her lips no sooner than entering her head.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Monkey Business goes to jail?”

“Oh yeah?” He looked up from fiddling with the camera. “I can see that. Kinda cute, you standin’ there behind the bars. Then we’ll do one of them treatments —cut your face out of the picture and put a monkey’s there instead. Protect your anonymity, as it was. Might be a nice feature to add all around, the pictures. You
could have Monkey at the park, Monkey at the White House. Even Monkey at the zoo. Feedin’ an elephant, maybe.”

She could picture it too. Her body, her clothes —finally getting the attention they deserved —posed all over the city. And just above her shoulders, maybe even under her hat, that doodled little monkey face that ran in place of a byline. What a fine joke. What a clever idea that would have been all along, but she hadn’t thought of it then, and such a monstrosity wasn’t her idea now.

“No, Tony.” She interrupted him in the middle of a delightful Monkey in a bathing suit. “My picture, my face. My name.”

“You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me, kid.”

She looked over her shoulder at Samantha, pale and puffy, sharing a smoke with another woman. What kind of girl had she been three arrests ago? Monica didn’t want to find out. Now she pulled her coat close around her, closing the collar up around her nose. The dying taste of her last drink lingered, a constant reminder of what brought her here. Not just that one drink tonight, but all the ones before. All the nights before. Maybe she’d just been lucky, beating the odds, keeping herself at the right places. Never going to the same place too often, never staying too long.
Slippery
 —that’s what Edward Moore had called her.
“Like the law don’t stick to you.”

“Nope,” she said, turning back to Tony. “I’m coming clean. Max can run it as a straight story, ‘Monkey Out of Business’ or something like that. I just think it’s time for me to move on to something more . . . I don’t know . . . responsible.”

Tony gave her an inscrutable look, but before he could say anything more, the police warden hollered again. “Hey, Mr. Reporter. You got one more minute.”

“I’m workin’ on it,” Tony replied, exhibiting the same impatience.

Monica was grateful for the interruption, thinking Tony might not be the best person to handle such a half-baked idea. Max deserved to be the first to know, both as her boss and . . . whatever else he’d become. If she was going to hand Monkey over to anybody, it should be him.

“Hold this, will ya?” Tony handed the camera to Monica while he rummaged in his bag for a new flash. It was heavy, boxy, and bulky. She’d never understand how Tony could handle it with such ease, let alone carry it around all day.

“Now,” he said with a glance up, “step back a little, and to the left.” He directed with one hand while looking down through the viewer. “Maybe one more step? I wanna get as much of you as I can in the shot. The way the light’s makin’ these shadows, it’s a beautiful thing, kid. Beautiful. You ready to hold nice and still for me?”

Behind her, her fellow prisoners caught on to what was happening, and whether it was to be included or excluded from the photograph, a mad scramble of women erupted.

Monica stood in perfect motionlessness. The flash exploded in a burst of cleansing light, taking with it her secrets. In just a few days, everyone would see her face, know her name. Well,
everyone
might be an exaggeration. Only those who’d been blindly following her all this time. She felt the weight of their adoration heavy on her shoulders for one burning moment, and then it drifted off with the light. For a full minute after, she stood, blinded, but as she blinked, the world came back into focus, and she stepped forward to grab the bars for balance, freer than she’d ever been.

There was a spot, dead center above her tailbone, like a button of pain holding together a body’s worth of dull aches. The room
was cold with the same unchanging dull light. No windows, no clock, no reliable way to mark the passage of time other than asking, and nobody wanted to talk to her. Even Samantha had abandoned their budding friendship, having enticed all the girls to fill the bench, leaving Monica to sit on the cold slab of floor. Officer Meeks hadn’t made an appearance in ages, not since issuing the final “Pipe down!” after Tony left, taking his camera and notepad with him. A few of the men had been willing to talk —as unnamed sources, of course —and a few of the women thought it would be a gas to have their picture taken, but Officer Meeks had pulled him out before anybody got their full say. They’d been left with no recourse other than to voice their renewed frustrations.

Monica had jumped on the tail end of the shouts, hollering a plea for Tony to please not tell the boss, when she heard the sound of a key at the top of the passageway followed by the familiar squeaking step of Officer Meeks. He appeared at the door of the women’s cell, looking none the worse for wear for his shift, and read the name off a card in his hand.

“Elsa DiMonaco!”

A doe-eyed, round-hipped girl hopped up like she’d just won a prize and sashayed to the open door, blowing kisses as she left. A few of the men were called out too, chuckling profanities as they left.

“Now, see?” Samantha spoke from her perch in the center of the bench, the agreed-upon queen of the cell. “That’s nice. In Atlantic City they make you stay all night, no matter what. No one gets out until 7 a.m., when the shift changes. Keeps ’em from sending all us drunks straight out into the street.”

Monica wanted to say that she wasn’t a drunk, but the coating on her tongue wouldn’t let her speak such a thing. Besides, her throat clamped shut with the thought of staying for an entire
night. Did Mrs. Kinship know she could come right away? Tonight? She’d seemed so calm on the telephone. Calm, and something else. Resigned? Unsurprised? She’d never been a fan of Monica and her late nights, her dates, her poorly concealed attempts at covering her boyfriends’ tracks. All this time, Monica had been dreading that moment when she would have to face her dour-mouthed neighbor with scraped-together humility and gratitude. Now she welcomed that moment. She practiced her smile into the darkness of her coat.

Again the squeak of Officer Meeks’s shoes.
Meeks squeaks.
She crossed her fingers and repeated it three times before realizing she had no reason to remember such a clever phrase. There wouldn’t be another column.