The Song Is You (18 page)

“Frannie. Frannie.” Was all he said. The only woman in his life not out to ensnare him, he thought, before remembering she’d dedicated the last few days to trying to dig his grave.

She was alone at a large table filled with wet rings from glasses recently removed. Her cheeks very pink, like a doll’s. Nearly finished with the highball glass in her hand, she was smiling and frowning at the same time. The shiny blue comb in her hair was just a quarter inch askew.

“What’s it been? Hours?” she said, gesturing toward the seat beside her.

“Dear heart,” Hop said, draping his arm across his chest. Who’d’ve thought he could still put on a show? Not him. Inside, he felt charmless and mercenary. A sharpshooter with a target in his sights.

He slid down next to her in the booth. Smelling her light perfume, he moved closer without even thinking. And then he was surprised how near she allowed him to come. One whisper of breath from her, heavy with juniper, gave him his final confirmation.

“Frannie Adair’s been hitting the nozzle hard.”

“I’m okay. Don’t you worry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve just

been working.”

“Sounds a lot like my work.”

“Hopefully not that much.”

“So you get your headline yet?”

She shook her head. “But an endless number of unprintable yet completely believable rumors. That tip about Iolene Harper—I’ve been working that angle with some fellas at the Little New Yorker. That’s how I found out her name.”

“The New Yorker would be the place for it. Not too many square joes and upright citizens there.”

“So,” she said, ignoring him. “I guess I don’t get a word from you about what this Iolene might have said to you. Now that I know who she is.”

“Iolene who?” Hop said, hoisting a smile. He waved the waitress over and ordered a double scotch. If he was going to keep going, he was going to have to forget about everything else, especially the fear he was fighting. The fear was this: nothing, really, matters. These girls, they bloom into these pillowy flowers, inviting him in, then they turn into tinsel, all glittery and rough edges, and then, still later, they turn into something else … what was it… what was it?

“ — Hop? Your drink.” Frannie thanked the waitress and slid the glass toward him.

Hop remembered what Jerry said—was it just a few hours ago?— about Frannie Adair: She got a reputation early on for being willing to roll with some hard boys for a story. Hasn’t been able to shake it since. Maybe you can use that. If you need to.

“Let’s get back to the Little New Yorker for a minute. You’ve been talking to Cohen’s crew,” he said, letting her have it. “Drinking with them. Consorting just a touch?”

Frannie’s eyes widened slightly and crimson fluttered across her face.

“It’s okay,” Hop said. “Christ. What I do in one day—”

“I know it’s okay,” she said briskly. “It’s my job. I couldn’t do my job without it. To get them talking you have to be willing to do one of two things. And this one’s easier for me than the other. I spent twelve years at St. Cecilia’s with starched shirts and thick stockings and a healthy dose of ‘Oh no you don’t.’”

“That’s charming,” Hop said coolly, “and a little worn. I guess that’s what you tell those boys as you order up the rye.”

She winced slightly. He hadn’t meant to sound so hard. Or had he? He took a fast nip of his drink.

“Well, it’s true I no longer qualify for St. Cecilia’s Purest Flowers Prize,” Frannie said, sloshing the stirrer in her drink tiredly. “But girls who jump in with those fellas have too bumpy a road ahead of them for the likes of a slim-hipped gal like me. I stay off the road and watch from the shoulder.”

“Okay by me,” Hop said, backing off. Who was he to doubt her, the straightest stocking seam he’d come upon in five years? “And what is the word on the shoulder?”

Frannie sighed and took a long sip of her drink, bringing water faintly to her eyes. “I hate it when the whole picture turns out simpler and uglier than the parts. You can forget Sutton and Merrel. They’re just cads—maybe very bad cads but not murderers. Forget your big studio draw-up. They’re not so interested.”

“No?”

“You were right. Word is that Jean and Iolene were working the old badger game for Davy Ogul. Looks like they got greedy. I don’t know the details, but one of Cohen’s apaches had been casing Jean for two days. Word is they buried her in Griffith Park. Must have missed the

handbag.”

It was so simple. Was it so simple?

“And Iolene?” Hop asked throatily.

“The pictures they thought Jean had, well, they were suddenly recirculating. Or they thought they were. They could only guess Iolene had taken custody. The call went out on her last week. And these things don’t usually take much time. Some goon with a half a C-note in his pocket tailed her and, from what I heard, she got it in the head.”

Hop could picture the glitter of the silver bobby pin in Iolene’s hair, her heel turned on the floor. The smell, of bruised things, soft things turned steel or plastic or chrome and then soft again, a rotting flower, left to rot.

“I’m sorry,” Frannie said, seeing something in his eyes. “I guess you liked her.”

Hop looked at her. “I didn’t really know her,” he said, his voice jagged. He finished off his drink. “Let’s get the whole goddamned bottle.”

Frannie took a deep breath and twisted a little under her dress. “What the hell.”

They talked haphazardly for a while. Once, Hop excused himself and telephoned Jerry’s apartment again. Still no answer. As he walked back to the table, he watched Frannie, watched her with those big eyes, her ankles crossed neatly beneath the table, tucking a wisp of ginger hair back into her upsweep. Was she doing it for him? He was pretty sure she was.

He sat down.

“So why did you marry her?” she asked him abruptly.

“Pardon?” He slid closer. He wanted to smell that smell of, somehow, fresh ironed pillowcases, cut flowers, wind through hanging laundry. Something. But it was hard to reach behind the smell of gin and smoke and sawdust and smashed cherries and orange rinds ground under feet.

“I’ve been thinking about how careful you are. How cautious. And then I think you must have been really unhinged to tell me what you told me that night—when this all started,” she said, resting her face on her upturned palm, looking up at him. “Your wife. She must be some number. Why’d you marry her?”

He thought for a second. And at the same time, he considered why Frannie might be asking him. Something told him it was purely personal.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Someone’s always trying to get something from you and every so often you just give it to them.”

“So it could have been any girl. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“For both of us.” Hop smirked. “But sure, there were other things, too.” He was trying to answer without thinking about what he had just found at Dr. Stillman’s office. That was still too much to pull together. Instead, he went with the alcohol, followed it. Made it his own. “I had something for her when we started. It made me a little crazy. But it went away.”

Frannie looked at him and in her eyes was the thing, the thing he always tried to conjure in women. A kind of suffuse sympathy and warmth that flooded them but checked itself before extending outward and demanding something, or overwhelming everything. It just seemed to spread throughout her body, behind her face, and slip down her throat, along her arms, tingling at her fingertips—almost visibly—but asking for nothing in return.

But was he so broken? Was he so broken as to deserve this from a girl like Frannie Adair? A girl who’d never worn sparkling netted stockings or held a round card or shaken her ass for coins? A girl who’d not once painted her nails hot magenta and danced them along a sugar daddy’s knee for a job or a mink? A girl who’d never stood in a line of other girls and turned her bare leg from side to side for a leering casting director, promising with a wink that she could turn her legs all night?

Those were the girls you could get that look from. Because they were so glad for you. So glad for something fun and carefree and no rough stuff and no grim surprises. But not girls like Frannie Adair.

She said, as if reading his mind, “Maybe it’s the hooch, Gil Hopkins. But if I didn’t know any better, I’d think I’d gone soft on you.”

“Well, I have been turning on the charm pretty strong these last few days,” he said.

“Actually I like you better like this. All ragged and desperate.”

“Like a cowboy. Or a hobo.”

She grinned in spite of herself. “Or a used-car salesman.”

“I’d sell a lot of cars.”

“The farther you fall, the more I like it. You’ve lost the … the metallic sheen that made you rat-a-tat-tat when you walked in a room. Now you’re …” She reached out with a slightly quavery hand and poked his wrist with one dainty finger.

“Dented,” he suggested. “Broken.”

“No,” she said. And she smiled and he smiled in that strange sharing of smiles that happens when there is a heavy alcoholic musk in the air and the lights are low and glowing and the chairs are close together and the music is trembling beneath each table in smooth, artful throbs.

That was when he began to think about bringing Frannie Adair home to bed.

She could heal all this, couldn’t she? If she, who knew at least half of the sordidness he’d rutted through in recent days and felt only more seduced …

And she, with all her slippery Catholicism, was as unsullied a woman as he had known in close to a decade, with a Midwestern sense of right and wrong and crime and punishment and bringing

darknesses to light and …

Could she fuck him out of his own self-disgust?

Why not try? Why not let her try?

That is, if he didn’t mind the risk of infecting her, infecting her maybe in a way even uglier than Merrel’s scourge spreading, real or imagined, or both …

Before he let himself tunnel into that thought, he took another long drink and then placed his hand, under the table, lightly on Frannie Adair’s leg, which was covered loosely in nubby shantung.

“You’re so beautiful, Frannie Adair, you make me want to never see you again.”

“Now,” she said, calm and controlled, but there was no hiding the pinkness spreading at her temples. “Now, I’m just a shade into pretty, far from beautiful. So you can see me all you want.”

“I couldn’t bear it, Frannie Adair,” he said, fingers of one hand on her leg, the other inches from her face. “All I’d think about was putting that sheet crease back on your cheek.”

“Is that supposed to be nice?” She tsk-tsked.

“That’s what I’m warning you off of,” he said, fingers spread, touching, just barely, her jaw, her cheekbone. “That’s why I can’t possibly see you anymore. And you’re stripping all the get-up-and-go out of me. The jackrabbit energy that gets me up the ladder. With you, Frannie Adair, I’d never want to leave you, your twin bed and your bottle of mid-shelf bourbon.”

“Quite a picture you paint,” she said, trying for sarcasm, but her knees, they were throbbing. He could feel it.

“Frannie,” he said. “Couldn’t I just lock myself up in there with you for forty-eight hours and then light a match to it so I couldn’t ever go

back? Your house on fire, I’d have to go back to work.”

‘You have an awfully funny way of flirting.”

“Flirting’s for chumps, Frannie Adair. I’m deadly serious. When are

you going to slap my hand away?”

“Hand? What hand?”

He smiled at her lightly, resting his chin on the heel of his hand, while the other hand skated along her skirt, dotting the edge with his fingertips, feeling an unbearably tempting warmth. A promise of forgiveness, absolution.

“I get everything I want,” he said. “I can’t help it.”

It was at that moment, out of the corner of his eye, that he saw it. The streak of silvery white.

Midge, head to toe in lamé her pearly-white skin sweeping out the top, long tinselly earrings swinging, the head of the white fox fur around her neck seeming to be on the hunt, teeth bared.

“I got your note, Gil. What the hell do you want now?” she was saying as she approached their table, her own teeth bared.

In his head, the white turned to its negative and he saw the dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-lipped Jean flicker before him for a split second, then back again. The image, too, of Midge’s employee photograph, as glamorous as the most glamorous of mug shots, in Dr. Stillman’s files.

She’d played him. She’d played him. He just knew it. She’d held her cards so close, feigning the innocent victim. Somewhere inside him, he’d been hating himself for what he’d done to her, while all along she’d been playing him. He just wasn’t sure why.

He was on his feet, his heart galloping ahead of himself, his blood surging hot and frantic through every vessel in his head.

“And that fucking cunt finally shows her face,” he said, without even knowing he was saying it, the words singeing his tongue, and suddenly his hand was around her powder-white neck and he’d pushed her against a wall post, her head snapping with a sickly sound. He couldn’t stop himself.

There was a lot of noise behind him, chairs sliding away from tables, voices calling out, Frannie. But his focus was on Midge’s eyes as his hand clenched tighter on her throat, his arm outstretched—he wouldn’t get too close. Her eyes were only vaguely alarmed. Mostly they were flat, glassy, unblinking. It seemed he really had long ago lost the ability to shock her, even if he was always shocking himself.

He thought, even as he felt his arms being pulled, his body being pulled, that he could hold on to her neck forever and he still couldn’t stop her. Her ability to twist his life into knots was boundless. She had seeped into every corner, every tiny space.

“You’re killing me,” he was saying, his voice broken, lost. “How did you do it? How long did you know? Did you know all along?”

He felt his body finally wrested so far from her that his hand popped off her neck like a bottle top. Thrown back onto his chair by two fellow patrons, he caught his breath as a manager and two women surrounded Midge, shielding that blinding whiteness from Hop’s eyes.