People Like Us (56 page)

“Gus,” called Peach after him, but he did not hear. In a louder voice, she called for her housekeeper. “Immaculata! Immaculata!” Next to her bed, on the overcrowded table, she found her bell and rang it and rang it again.

“
Si, señora?
” said the older woman, shuffling into Peach’s room in bedroom slippers.

“Stop him,” cried Peach. “Outside. Mr. Bailey. Stop him.”

Immaculata shuffled out of the room, unhurried, as always, down the hall to the front door, just as Gus’s car was pulling out of the driveway. Alerted now to the emergency of the moment, she ran down the steps of the house, waving her dish towel in the air, but Gus did not see her.

His German Luger, cleaned and loaded, was in the glove compartment of his rented car. At eleven o’clock he drove to Studio City, being very careful to adhere to the posted speed limit, allowing other cars, going beyond the limit, to pass him. A car coming toward him in the opposite lane had on its bright lights, and he was momentarily blinded. He put his hand up to shield his eyes. As the two cars passed, he turned to curse the occupant, and his eyes locked for an instant with the driver’s. He felt troubled, but he did not understand why.

He parked his car on a side street a block away from Marguerite’s bar. He remained in the car until a quartet of noisy bar hoppers had turned the corner, and then he opened the glove compartment and took out
the German Luger. He walked to the alley and took his place behind the wall. It was several moments before he realized that Marguerite’s car was not parked in its usual place. An image of the car with bright lights flashed through his mind, and he wondered if he was now imagining that it had been Nile green. He walked out the alley to the street and turned the corner to where the entrance of the bar was. He had not been inside the bar since his brief encounter with Marguerite some months before. Entering, he turned away from the bar itself as if he were going to the men’s room. Losing himself behind some patrons, he looked over at the bar. Lefty Flint was not tending bar.

“Help you?” asked a waiter with a tray of beer bottles.

“No, no, thanks,” said Gus, making his way to the door.

Outside he ran the several blocks to his car. He drove to 1342¼ South Reeves. He parked his car on the street and walked down the driveway at the side of the complex, staying as close to the shrubbery as possible. Behind, the Nile-green Toyota was not in the parking place below the garage apartment. Upstairs, the venetian blinds were closed, but Gus could see light coming through the slats.

Frightened now, his heart beating fast, Gus mounted the rickety wooden stairway that led to the front door of the apartment. He looked but could not find a bell. He took the gun from his pocket and held it in one hand. With the other, he knocked on the door. There was no reply. He knocked again.

From within, he heard sounds. A shade covered the glass part of the door. He saw someone pull back the shade a crack and look out.

“Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.

“I’m looking for Lefty,” said Gus.

“You’re too late,” said the voice he recognized as Marguerite’s. “Lefty’s gone.”

“It’s Gus Bailey, Marguerite. We met once before,” said Gus through the door.

She opened the door but left the chain on. “What do you want, Mr. Bailey?” she asked.

“Where’s Lefty?”

“Gone. I should have listened to you, Mr. Bailey,” she replied. “I guess you were trying to help me, but I didn’t want to hear back then.”

“Open the door, Marguerite. Let me in.”

She took off the chain and opened the door. When Gus walked into the kitchen of her small apartment, he saw that her eye was closed, and her face had been beaten.

“Jesus,” he said. “Come on with me. I’ll take you to the emergency room at Cedars.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I got off easy. It’s not bad. I feel like such a goddamn fool. He just used me. I arranged for him to have a job when he got out, and a place to live, and he was all full of good intentions, and the parole officer thought he was all rehabilitated and on the straight and narrow, but working behind a bar was not exactly what he had in mind for himself. I thought the guy was in love with me, when I used to visit him in Vacaville, but the pickins are slim for guys in prison. They’re not in great demand, if you know what I mean, and it’s only some asshole like me, with my misguided sense of social consciousness, who would have thought that a man who strangled a woman and beat up other women was rehabilitated in three years.”

“Where did he go, Marguerite?”

“You’re just as big a fool as he is to go searching for him with a gun, Mr. Bailey,” she answered.

“Tell me where he went,” repeated Gus, insistently.

“Put your gun away, Mr. Bailey. He’s gone. He’s on a plane somewhere.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t confide in me. He just knocked me around a bit.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“You weren’t at the parole hearing, were you?”

“No. There was no point.”

“There was some rich lady there who asked the parole board not to release him. He had a real grudge against that lady.”

Gus stared at Marguerite. “What rich lady?”

“She’s always in the magazines.”

“You’re not talking about Ruby Renthal, are you?”

“Ruby, that’s right. Very high society.”

Gus, listening, was stunned at what she said. “Ruby Renthal was at the parole hearing?”

“She asked the board not to release him.”

“My God,” said Gus.

49

On the day before she left New York for good, to take up permanent residence at Merry Hill, Ruby Renthal, in a nostalgic mood, paid a last visit to her apartment, which was shortly to be divided up into three smaller apartments. Wandering through the large empty rooms, she wondered if people would continue to refer to it as the Elias Renthal apartment, even after they were gone, in the way that people had continued to refer to it as the Sweetzer Clarke apartment for many months after she and Elias had purchased it, before it had become inalterably their own through its magnificent transformation by Cora Mandell, with the help of Maisie Verdurin and Jamesey Crocus. Only that day Ruby had seen a layout in the
Times Magazine
section showing Yvonne Bulbenkian lighting tapers for one of her parties in a pair of silver candlesticks that had only recently been her own, on a Chippendale dining table that had also been hers, beneath a portrait of King Boris of Bulgaria in hunting attire that had until their scandal
hung in her own dining room. She felt no craving to own them again.

In her persimmon-lacquered drawing room, nineteen coats, or was it twenty, she wondered, the windows were bare, stripped of their elaborate hangings with the fringe from France that had taken weeks to come. She looked at the spot on the wall where her Monet of the water lilies, that she and Elias had purchased from Maisie Verdurin’s wall on the night of her first party in New York, had hung, and the places on each side of the marble fireplace where her console tables with the inlaid rams’ heads, from the Orromeo auction in London, had stood until she discovered they were fakes and donated them to the White House, which had returned them at the time of the auction, for reasons unknown.

In her ballroom, which she had not entered since the night of her ball, she stood at the top of the stairs, where she had received on that night, and remembered how it was in the magnificent hours before her world had begun to topple. She walked down the stairway and heard the music, the waltzes, and stood in the middle of the dance floor and closed her eyes as she remembered waltzing with Elias, with Mickie Minardos, with Gus Bailey, and her royal princes, from countries that no longer wanted them, who used to impress her so much. She looked up and could see the ten thousand butterflies, in the thirty seconds of their beauty, and hear the exclamations of joy from the mouths of her four hundred guests.

“Well, Ruby Nolte, as I live and breathe,” came the voice that interrupted her reverie. She opened her eyes with a start.

Standing at the top of the short stairway leading to her ballroom was Lefty Flint. She watched him walk down the steps and across the dance floor to her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.

“Paying a call,” he replied. “You got yourself a gentleman caller, Ruby.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I told them you were expecting me.”

“But I don’t live here anymore. How did you know I was here?”

“I got my ways.” He looked around him, at the gold-and-white paneling of the room. “What do you call this room, Ruby? The ballroom? I didn’t know people still had ballrooms. My, my. Imagine, having your own ballroom. You did good, didn’t you, Ruby, for a stewardess? Look at you. Anyone who didn’t know what I know about you would think you were one of the swells.”

“Get out of here, Lefty, right now,” she said.

“We’ve got a few things to go over, Ruby.”

“No, we don’t. We have nothing to go over.”

“Oh, yes, we do. How fucking dare you come to my parole hearing and try to keep me in that place?”

“Obviously, it didn’t have any effect.”

“How could you do that to me?”

“I’d do it again.”

“Listen, rich lady. I went to prison. I did my time. I have atoned.”

“Only in your kind of circles, Lefty.” Calm now, sure of herself, she met his eyes.

He looked at her. “You’ve changed,” he said.

“You don’t know how much,” she answered. “If you have in mind to punch me out, I’d think again if I were you.” She opened her bag and looked in it as if she were searching for her lipstick or compact. She lifted out her pistol and pointed it at him. “When my husband bought me this pistol, I thought it was the laugh of the year. He would say to me over and over, ‘There are mad people out there, out to get people like us.’ I never took him seriously about that, but now I see how right he was. I told you once. Now I’m telling you again. Get out, just the way you came in.”

“Your husband in the slammer, that guy?” sneered Lefty.

“That guy,” she answered, holding the pistol on him.

“Who stole all the money?”

“Who stole all the money,” she replied.

“You’re holding him up to me?”

“There’s one big difference between you and my husband, Lefty. He didn’t beat women or kill them. He can pay back the money. You can’t give back the life you took. Wherever you go, people will say, ‘He’s the guy who strangled Becky Bailey.’ You’re a murderer.”

Lefty said nothing. He moved toward Ruby.

“Get out of here, you son of a bitch,” she screamed.

“Hold it, Lefty,” came a voice from behind. Lefty turned quickly and faced Gus Bailey, standing on the stairs, his Luger drawn. During the split second before he fired, Gus remembered saying to Bernie Slatkin, “I want him to be looking at me at the moment. I want him to know it was me who did it.”

Gus fired.

50

Dear Peach:

My duties here, all manual so far (although there is hope that a position in the library will open up soon, when Boyd Lonergan, who shot the jewelry salesman by mistake in the Tiffany’s robbery, is released next month), have kept me so busy of late that exhaustion has kept me from writing sooner. Isn’t it extraordinary that they should have sent me to the same place that they sent Lefty? Several of the inmates here remember him, and all of the guards. I’m pleased to say they
remember him without affection. He told Boyd, with whom he shared a cell briefly, that he had beaten several women before he killed Becky.

For the first time in years, I feel calm. When I am washing clothes in the laundry, where I am currently assigned, or peeling potatoes in the kitchen, where I was assigned before, there is no longer a subtext of Lefty in my thoughts, as there has been for so many years. I keep thinking of all those nights in New York when I was talking about one thing and thinking about another.

How strange life is. If what happened had happened in the alley behind the bar in Studio City, the way I planned it, I would probably be here for twenty years. First degree, they would have called it. What ever possessed him to go to Ruby Renthal’s house that day? How extraordinary that she was even there.