Out at Night (23 page)

She joined in singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Guns popped; fake snow fell; the show was over. She stepped into the lobby and waited.

The Follies women made walking look easy.

Patrons tottered up the aisles. The clang of walkers mixed with the scraping of wheelchairs. The aisles jammed.

A Follies man with thick yellow-white sideburns bounced into the lobby from a side door, took one look at Grace and grinned.

“So what do you think?”

“I think you’re amazing,” she said honestly.

“Oh, you can come home with me.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that. Where does Jewel usually stand?”

He pointed to a door closest to the plaza and turned to greet the first woman out the door.

Grace positioned herself and waited. Jewel glided across the floor, six inches taller than the stooped audience members thronging around her. She shook hands with a row of elderly women and one older man whose wife finally nudged him along. Jewel turned to Grace. Her eyes were hazel brown and up this close, her cleavage was wrinkled and deep. She extended her hand.

Grace shook it. “Stunning. A two-and-a-half-hour show, too, and eight times a week.”

“Thank you.” Jewel said it with warmth, already turning to the next person in line.

Grace tightened her grip. “Actually, I’m with the FBI. I need to talk to you about Professor Bartholomew.”

Jewel’s hand flexed convulsively but her smile was glossy, intact. “You’re holding up the line.”

“I’ll be here as long as it takes.”

Jewel glanced at the next person in line, a stout short woman wearing good walking shoes and sparkly glasses. “Be right there.”

She turned back to Grace.

“Give me five minutes.”

__

Grace followed Jewel down a lit staircase directly under the stage, past men in hard hats shifting a set of metal ladders against a tangle of pipes. A woman in sweats sailed by with a rack of sequined purple jackets. They squeezed by a teenager in black carrying a laundry basket piled with dirty leotards.

The door to the men’s dressing room stood ajar and Grace stole a glance. A dancer had stripped out of his satin shirt, his chest hair a curly mat of white.

Jewel kept walking, shoes rapping smartly on the low-impact carpet. From the rear, her sequined blue skirt swished, revealing panels of red and white glitter, the skirt barely covering her rump.

She opened a door. A mirror stretched the length of the room. Opened vats of makeup and foundation and tubes of lipstick spilled across the counter. Eyes stared vacantly down at Grace. She jumped back, startled, her heart banging.

They were Styrofoam heads, eerie silhouettes of smiling, invisible women wearing wigs: silvery bouffant, shoulder-length Cleopatra black, shiny pink. Jewel took off her blue military hat and put it on the shelf above her work space and peeled off the blue wig and put it on a wig frame.

Her natural hair was a soft brown, pressed into flat curls by the wig. Jewel sat in a chair and crossed her legs, facing Grace.

“Talk. You have three minutes, tops, before everybody comes piling in.” She bent her head and coughed into a hand. “Sorry. My chest.”

“You were dating Bartholomew before he died.”

Jewel sighed. She turned the chair and faced the mirror. A vat of cold cream stood open next to a box of tissues and she scooped some cold cream onto a tissue and carefully took off her lipstick.

Grace watched her in the mirror. There was nothing calculated about her delay in answering, only weariness. She tossed the tissue in a trash can and turned again.

“You saw the end of the show, right?”

Grace nodded.

“That’s a big deal. For all of us. We honor these incredibly—beautiful—old men—most of them men, sometimes a woman, who stand and accept our thanks for having served in the military, some back as far as World War Two.”

Her hazel eyes filled with tears.

“Let me take off my eyelashes before I screw them up.”

She bent and carefully peeled off the first one and put it in a box. It looked like a feathery spider. Something nice and big. A tarantula, maybe. She peeled off the second one. Her eyes were suddenly smaller.

“I first noticed him in the audience opening night, a couple of weeks ago. And then I realized, he was showing up at least three or four times a week. He always tried to sit close enough so we’d make eye contact. He never seemed to take his eyes off of me.”

“Creepy?”

“Not—particularly. I’m a performer. I wouldn’t be onstage if I wasn’t okay with that. But there was an intensity about it that at times was unsettling. Especially because, well, this is going to sound odd—but every time when he met me later, it was as if he was introducing himself for the first time.”

Heat shot up Grace’s spine. Her face felt warm. “He didn’t recognize you.”

Jewel shook her head. “Finally I asked Nate about him. Nate’s always followed his own drummer. I never understood his fascination with—”

It came late. A delayed shock, a second one. Grace lived in San Diego, she was used to aftershocks. These were coming fast, rolling breakthroughs, small moments where the pieces fit.

“Wait a minute. Did you say Nate?”

Jewel nodded, puzzled.

“Nate who?”

A cautiousness crept into Jewel’s eyes. “Is he under investigation?”

“What’s his last name?”

“He hasn’t done anything, has he?” She gripped her fingers together so hard that Grace saw the knuckles turn white.

“You tell me.”

Jewel twisted her hands in her lap. “Oh, God. His last name’s Malosky. I went back to using my maiden name after the divorce.” She took deep breaths, wincing, as if inhaling ground glass.

A clatter of footsteps pounded down the metal staircase.

“I don’t want to have to do this someplace else,” Grace said gently. “Let’s push through it and get it done. Am I the first person to talk to you about Bartholomew’s murder?”

Jewel nodded. The door next to the women’s dressing room opened and the booming voices of the men carried through the wall. Somebody guffawed. Jewel glanced in the direction of the voices. She shifted in her chair.

“Nate Malosky. Your son. Bartholomew’s assistant. You were saying you never understood his fascination with. . .”

Jewel raked a hand through her hair and absently fluffed it.

“His fascination with alternate history—that whole, ‘everything that’s ever gone wrong in history you can blame on old white guys’. To me, it seems just as racist a belief as the other kind, but not to Nate. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s all they teach at university now. It would just be great if there was a balance.”

They heard female voices and a clatter of heels crossing the stage above them and Jewel talked faster. “Then Nate fell in love with Andrea and she seemed to politicize him even more.”

“Did he help her with her business? Square Pegs?”

“Nate? Sure. I even help them with the business. It’s like working at Nordies. I don’t think I could work at that department store and ever bring a paycheck home. I saw something this last week at Square Pegs, loved it, would have bought two or three, but Nate jumped all over me and yelled, just for unwrapping it.”

“What was that?”

“
What
isn’t important. Okay, they were drums. Goat-hide African drums. Very cool. He was trying to save me money.” Her voice was protective, the mother and her cub. “I love this job, but I can’t do it forever. I need to be saving for my old age.” She half smiled and then she took a shallow breath again and winced.

“You okay?”

Jewel glanced back at the door. People were in the hallway now, talking, coming closer.

“Getting back to his not recognizing you. He’d come, watch the show, meet you, and it always felt like he was meeting you for the first time.”

“When I realized who he was, I thought it was my chance at understanding my son, but Bartholomew’s politics made me angry and sad. Everything about the military he hated—everything those guys did to serve, and all I could see in front of me were those men, standing at the end, small and frail and proud. I went for coffee a couple of times with him, that’s about it. Some people give off this—odd energy—and Ted Bartholomew was one of them.”

“Odd. How so?”

Jewel glanced at the door again, leaned in, her voice almost a whisper. “He thought of himself as this mild-mannered professor, intellectual, but not an activist. In his self-talk, I think that’s what he was saying.”

“Self-talk.”

“Yeah, you know how we have this constant stream of stuff inside, this emotional ticker tape telling us who we are. Whether or not it’s true. I think he saw himself as this thoughtful, articulate—”

“I’m sorry to push but—” They were seconds away from being interrupted.

Jewel nodded. “I Googled him and all this stuff came up. Protests, arrests. And then there was that other part. Finally I asked Nate and he told me what the deal was.”

Laughter erupted right outside the door; a man’s voice and a woman answering. Grace could picture a hand on the knob, a body turned, finishing up a sentence in the hallway and then twisting the knob, plowing in.

“The deal.”

“Professor Bartholomew had a face recognition problem. He was good with people he’d known a long time, but even with Nate, he’d sometimes forget. Who he was. Nate said he had a cheat sheet in his desk. Green dots next to faces of friendly people; red slashes on people he had to be careful around; everybody named. He’d taken a picture of me first thing, but I didn’t think anything about it; everybody takes pictures.”

“Did anybody else know?”

“I don’t think so. He would have died if he’d thought I knew.”

She realized what she’d said and blinked.

“It’s okay. I know what you meant.”

“Nate says Professor Bartholomew—Ted—was embarrassed about it. Nate found out by accident. The sheet was on his desk at work; little photos all in a row, like a high school yearbook or something, and Ted studying it like it was an exam.”

“What happened to it?”

“The cheat sheet? When Bartholomew died, the first thing Nate did, when he heard about it, was go and find that piece of paper. He told me it was the last act of kindness he could do for his friend. Protecting him.”

“Where will Nate be?”

“Why?”

“Not now, in a couple of hours.”

Jewel looked at her steadily. “You won’t hurt him.”

“I might be the only chance your son has of getting out of this alive.”

Chapter 28

Grace drove to Indio as fast as she dared, her anxiety translating into anger that could have easily spilled into road rage, except that nobody challenged her. The sky had started to turn. It was after four and a faint wash of color stained the San Gorgonio Mountains. It would be dark soon.

She felt diminished and small. She didn’t like feeling responsibility for her cousin, and yet she did. Her cousin’s happy ending—her husband by her side as she delivered her perfect little boy—seemed to rest on Grace’s shoulders and it was a burden she didn’t ask for and didn’t want.

She wasn’t good at happy endings. Not for herself, not for anybody else. That made her think about Jewel. Everybody was connected to somebody they loved. Even Grace. And loving somebody carried profound risk for damage.

She pulled into the parking lot at Windlift and darted through the building. It was emptier than it had been the night before, less noise, less activity, but it didn’t make it any easier to find Stuart. Some counters on the second level had been swept clean. The egg pods were gone, as if overnight, they’d hatched into exotic creatures and flown away.

A grinding noise spilled out of the hangar and she followed it. A crate twisted on a crane next to a boxcar. Grace circled the room, staying clear as two crewmen wrestled the crate into the open side of the boxcar. Stuart wasn’t in the hangar.

She walked out past the boxcar on the siding and spotted the owner of Windlift gesturing to a group of three men, their heads down, hangdog and respectful. She looked as angry as she had the night Grace had stood on the hill with Stuart, watching her and Johnstone secure a boxcar.

One of the men was Stuart. The closer Grace walked, the more she saw it wasn’t a hangdog expression on his face, but exhaustion. He stood the way she’d seen some livestock stand, dozing upright, jerking awake in a trembling instant.

“L.A. to Buckeye, that’s an extra hundred seventy miles.” Judith Woodruff’s voice was raspy and raw. “You promised the uplink with the Kansas route at the Forty. I have a schedule to maintain. This is unacceptable.”

Stuart blinked his eyes and opened them wide, as if he could will himself to stay awake. Judith hadn’t seen that, but she would soon. Right then she was busy tearing into a man sweating in a suit. He looked as if he’d spent his life indoors and wished he could get back to what he was most comfortable with, a good drink in the afternoon, a secretary fielding interruptions, a schedule that worked.

“We had rail fatigue up by Windy Point,” the man said. “The angle bar gave way. We’re working on it.” He glanced up and locked eyes with Grace and she saw a spark of hope flare, as if he were praying for imminent rescue. Either that, or death.

Judith narrowed her eyes and shot Grace a look. “What?” she barked.

Grace touched Stuart’s arm and he flinched awake, focused on her face. “Grace.”

“Great news, Stu. You’re going to be a daddy.”

His eyes snapped wide. He was suddenly, buoyantly awake. “She’s in labor?”

“Sarah and Andrea know about it.” There was warning in her voice. “They might try to get into the birthing room.”

“Good to know.”

“Indian Canyon’s jammed. Overshoot it on Palm Canyon Drive and double back.”

He nodded. “Oh, my God. I’m going to have a son.”

“Wait.” Judith spun out of the group and yanked on his arm.

“She’s in labor, Jude. That was the deal.” Stuart shook her off and loped toward the Windlift parking lot. He called back over his shoulder. “I’ll write you, where to send the last check.”

Judith Woodruff whirled on Grace. “Great. Thanks. Another thing gone to hell.”