Reno, 1946

Three weeks to the day they met, Hop was driving Midge Maberley to Reno, head pounding already with the hangover that was still six hours away. Driving through the desert relentlessly to get there before he could come to his senses.

They couldn’t get married until the last twenty-seven days of her residency were complete. She had to wait out her divorce, a seven-month marriage to a touring bandleader who hadn’t made it back to the West Coast since the honeymoon.

In Reno, Hop filed phantom stories at the local UPI office and drank and played cards all night, every night. He kept playing until he lost everything, lost the thousand dollars he came with, and then lost it again. That thousand had been all he had in the world, most of it from a big win at Santa Rosa, the win that started the binge during which he met Midge to begin with. When there was nothing left, Hop, alone and running out of distractions, had the sudden realization that he’d played so that he would lose everything, had dedicated himself to losing. He didn’t want to marry this girl, Midge, with one slim dime in his pocket, nor one faint thread of decency or expectation. Each night he clamped his hand on one of her white dimpled knees and pushed it down flat on the rough hotel sheets and tried to fuck all their shared ugliness away. And all her beauty, too. By the time the divorce came through and he propped himself up at city hall, there was nothing left of either of them. Not one bright shock of sentiment or hard-won illusion.

Sitting in his car, Hop stared at the photo of his wife and tried to think, tried to focus. When he’d met Midge she was working at Earl Carroll’s. She’d talked about having half a dozen jobs since she’d moved to Los Angeles, from shampoo girl to cigarette girl to thirdrow-back chorus girl and back again. But she’d never said anything about having worked in a place like this. Maybe it just never came up. Maybe.

He looked at the dates of employment: MAY 1944—FEBRUARY 1945. Not such a short employment that it wouldn’t merit mention. And he’d met her in late fall 1945.

Was it all happenstance that Iolene had files from a place his wife once worked? Hell, maybe this doctor was the one to go to for all the girls who ran through the nightclubs. He knew a few doctors frequented by all the actresses at the studio, like their favorite hairdresser or tailor.

Try to talk yourself out of it, Hop, but…

Midge at the Earl Carroll Theatre on Sunset. The famous sign out front read, THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRLS IN THE WORLD. He remembered it well. Sitting

there, he found himself even saying it aloud:

“Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.”

A chill raced up his back.

Iolene. The last time he saw her, at the bar.

I’ve known that girl forever, she’d said about Jean. One of the most

beautiful girls in the world. They should have written that for her.

What? he’d asked.

She’d shaken her head. Never mind. You never got it.

Had Jean Spangler worked at Earl Carroll’s? Vaguely, he

remembered something from the papers. How had he forgotten? Both Jean and Midge. Did Midge know Jean?

Of course.

Before he knew it, he was back in his car, folders strewn across the backseat.

Midge. Fucking Midge. Is there any corner of my life you’ve left untouched, uninfected?

What could you possibly…

At first, his head was too flooded with facts and revelations to form an idea, a theory. Then, as he began driving, scenarios thrummed to life. Almost no food for two days, a few hours’ sleep, sure, but he could still put two and two together. The coincidence was too great: she worked at Dr. Stillman’s office and files from his office show up at Iolene’s. Jean worked at Earl Carroll’s and Midge worked at Earl Carroll’s. Midge playing so dumb, coming to his apartment, pretending she didn’t know what Frannie Adair was digging for (”She asked if I remembered about a girl who disappeared … I told her I didn’t remember anything like that …”). Stringing him along, watching him twist, when all along she knew Jean Spangler. God, did Midge work with them? It was a stretch, but not impossible. Why else would she never mention working for a doctor before? He imagined, veins throbbing in his temple, a setup: Jean, Iolene, and Midge all doing the same dance for that hood Davy Ogul back in ‘44, ‘45. Jean meets Midge at the doc’s office, or Midge takes the job there just to have access to the files. Or Davy Ogul puts her in that job to get access to the files. Had Midge still been in touch with Iolene? Was that why Iolene came to him? Had the two been pulling something on him now, ready to blackmail him as Midge’s last revenge? He knew he was reaching, but the way his head was jammed, the ugly possibilities seemed infinite. Jean, Iolene, Midge— he wondered, crazily, if they were somehow the same woman with three slippery tentacles reaching out to grab him by the neck.

Well, he was no fucking patsy.

He suddenly realized that he was driving to Jerry’s, and he hoped Midge was there alone. He didn’t want any interruptions. To stop him. She was going to explain herself. They all were.

Blood pulsing in his head, he was at the front door of Jerry’s apartment without any memory of parking his car or entering the building or walking up the four flights. And now there was a man in his shirtsleeves and bedroom slippers standing in the hallway,

pointing his finger at him.

“What? What?” Hop said.

“You hammer that goddamned door any longer, I’m calling the

cops,” the man shouted.

Hop looked down at his fist on the door, at his own red knuckles. For the first time, he heard the sound he was making. Dropping his hand to his side, he turned back to face the man.

“Who the hell do you think you are, buddy?” the man continued. “People are trying to eat their Sunday dinner and they gotta hear you yelling and pounding.”

“Take it easy, pal,” Hop said. “This isn’t the public library.” He rubbed his reddened fist with his other hand.

The man, a good six inches shorter and twenty years older than Hop, wouldn’t relent. Folding his arms across his chest, he groused, “I should call the cops on you.”

Hop felt something rising within him, something popping in his head. Something that made him start walking toward the man, still

rubbing his fist in his hand. Walking purposefully.

The man saw something in Hop’s eyes and backed up in a dart.

“Where you going, pal?” Hop said, finding himself wanting the man

to take him up on his threat. Wanting anyone to. The man, eyes like saucers, tripped back into his apartment and

shut the door.

Hop, two feet away, stopped.

He wanted the popping feeling, that strange flitting in his brain,

pressing down and up at the same time in hard bursts—he wanted it to stop.

So, he said to himself, letting his arms fall to his sides, she’s not here. No one’s home. That’s okay. That’s okay.

He walked slowly down the stairs, out the front door, and to his car.

You should go home, Hop.

Go home. Clean your head out. You can telephone later. Your head’s not right now. Everything’s at funny angles. You need to rest.

But instead he ended up driving to yet another drugstore and calling Jerry’s apartment. No answer. Of course. Sweet Mary, Hop. Then he called Frannie Adair at the newspaper.

She’s out on assignment.

Where?

The Little New Yorker.

Hop called the Little New Yorker.

He could hear the bartender calling out Frannie’s name. A few minutes later, he heard her voice on the phone. Direct and lively, like always, but a little breathier. A shade more drawn out.

“You keep close tabs. I’m beginning to feel like my old man’s in town,” she said, then paused, as if waiting for Hop’s rejoinder. He knew he couldn’t possibly offer one, and she went on without him. “Well, my boy, as it happens, I’ve been trying to reach you. This fella I talked to at the studio, turns out he remembered something. Remembered hearing Jean Spangler had gotten lured into some mob-run, picture-peddling racket. And that she had a girlfriend working with her, a colored girl, a torcher.”

“Hmm. How Christian of Jean.” He cursed himself for letting this Alan Winsted thing get away from him. It was his own fault. Who knew that little studio runt would know so much or be so hungry? I should have, of all people, Hop thought.

“This colored girl, she’s the one who came to see you, isn’t she? Came for help because she was getting pressure? Someone—maybe some heavies, maybe studio people, maybe both—thought she had something, something she could use to blackmail them or Sutton and Merrel, or both. Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t, but they weren’t taking any chances.”

She paused. He didn’t bite. He felt the space between his temple and the earpiece get damper and damper.

“Listen, Hop, Iolene might be as gone as Jean Spangler by now. That’s what I’m getting at.”

“My, my,” Hop said. He was surprised at the sudden coolness in his own voice. To him, it sounded as forced as B-movie tough, but maybe not to Frannie. ‘You’ve made a lot of progress, gumshoe. So the cops weren’t so far off. Just another girl for hire hustling for Cohen’s boys and then trying to work it solo for more dough, right?”

“How do you figure?” she said, her voice bristling.

“Hey, I believed the damsel story as long as I could—the wrong-place, wrong-time girl. Savaged and abandoned for the bad luck of having long legs. But let’s face it. She was just another badger girl making bucks on her back. She got greedy and paid the price,” Hop said, fast and cold.

Frannie didn’t say anything. The phone booth felt 120 degrees. He could almost hear the wood planks spreading.

“Jesus, Frannie, I can practically see your Little Orphan Annie eyes now,” he said. “Come on. You’ve been around long enough to write the end to this sob story.”

She sighed. “Just because they may have gotten recruited into some blackmail scheme doesn’t mean Sutton and Merrel didn’t hurt her, or worse. The one doesn’t cancel out the other.”

“Well, there’s evidence for one and not the other, so you run the odds.” Even as he said it, he pictured the stained blanket, its heavy rings of rusted blood, its meaty odor. Had he really seen it? Or was it one of his frenzied dreams, nights shot through with booze, sleeping sitting up in his car, Iolene becoming Jean becoming, somehow, Midge again. The Red Lily itself seemed more and more a fever dream with blurred edges, fun-house grit and pop-up horrors.

“There’s evidence for everything,” Frannie sighed. “Too much evidence and not enough proof. My editor won’t let me run anything until I can get a PD go-ahead. And I could show Jean Spangler and Judge Crater are living in tract housing in Mountain View and the boys in blue would still not raise a paunchy finger. They’re bored with my face.”

With that face, impossible, he almost said, would surely have said forty-eight hours ago or less. Now he couldn’t say a word.

But her face could never be boring. It had too many bright things in it, too many promises of warm hands, knowing smiles, morning coffees on kitchen tables with red-checkered cloths, long car rides in sunny glades, Saturday-night shows with hands touching light and eyes flickering at the screen. Real things with heft behind them, brimming with their own dark wonder. A relentless wonder that stirred him whenever he looked at her.

But something suddenly hit Hop. “Wait a minute. You said Iolene.”

“What?” she said quizzically.

“A few minutes ago, you said Iolene might be as gone as Jean

Spangler by now. Where’d you get that name?” She paused. A split second—maybe less—but it was there. Then

she said, “I told you. The fellow at the studio. He gave me her name.”

“Bless you, Frannie Adair, you’re a horrible liar.”

“I’m not bad on occasion. But listen, you don’t tell me everything. Why should I tell you?”

“You shouldn’t,” Hop said. ‘You shouldn’t.” His head throbbed at the thought of how much else she might know by now. The memory of Midge’s employee photograph flirted through his brain and suddenly his blood was beating against his skin again. He had no choice. He had to find out. “Listen,” he continued, trying to keep his voice from trembling, “can I see you?”

“Okay,” she agreed, voice slipping back into a breathier tone. “Meet me at Don’s Bar and Grill in a half hour. Hey, Peggy Spangler called. She wanted your phone number. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

“Did you give it to her?”

“No. She said she called every sheet in town and you didn’t work for any of them,” Frannie said, and Hop could almost see her grin. “I told her you were freelance, which is true, after a fashion.”

“I’ll be there in thirty,” Hop said, hanging up. He wasn’t worried about Peggy Spangler. She was a detour. Another girl with something hard and metal knocking around in her chest, a can of thumbtacks, a rusty alarm clock. Another blank face with dollar signs for eyes.

Fuck, Hop, can the purple prose. And don’t worry about Frannie Adair. Never waste your time worrying about someone who can’t

even lie over the phone.

He tried Jerry’s apartment again. No answer.

He grabbed the phone book and tore out the back page. Grabbing

a pen from his pocket, he wrote:

Midge— Meet me at Don’s Bar and Grill, Pico and Main,

tonight. I have important news and things I want to say. —

Gil

What if Jerry got the note and read it first? Hop couldn’t stop his thoughts from racing long enough to care. Instead, he folded the paper, wrote Midge’s name on it, and drove back to Jerry’s.

He tried knocking one more time on the door, loudly, half hoping the blowhard down the hall would come out again. He didn’t.

When no one answered, he slid the note under the door.

It wasn’t until he was nearly downtown that he began thinking about what Frannie might have been doing at the Little New Yorker. The place was a watering hole for mob crews.

When was the last time he’d seen her? A day? An hour? Five minutes? A week ago, he’d never met her, and now she had slipped through the center of every knot, that russet strand curling around every corner, braided in tight.

“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.

“What’s wrong with you, pal?”

“Did you see that guy? I thought he was going to kill the broad dead.”

He’d lost Frannie in the melee. Or maybe she’d left. Either way, he allowed himself to be roughly escorted out of the bar and down the street by a bartender and one of the ham-fisted patrons, who socked him once in the jaw, then a blistering crack in the ear to show him “what happens to fellas who roughhouse ladies.”

When they felt confident he wasn’t going to come charging back, they left and Hop slumped against a shop window, touching his throbbing jaw gently with his fingertips. He was half drunk and all worn out. Had he really grabbed her by the neck? What was wrong with him? That wasn’t the kind of guy he was. The kind of guy he was. He was the guy who held men back, talked them down, soothed them back to humanity while slipping crisp bills to all the glaring witnesses who saw the Big Star throw a punch at his worn-out wife.

He looked down the street for Frannie, thinking she might try to find him, but instead it was Midge who was walking, in trifling little steps, down the sidewalk toward him. Lit under each streetlight in that dress, she was Lana Turner on her best day.

“Why the hell does she have to be so damn beautiful?” he murmured to himself.

“Come on. Come on, you son of a bitch,” she said as she approached him. “Let’s go.”

They sat in the coffee shop around the corner. She with ice on her neck, smeared with blooming bruises, he with ice on his jaw, swelling by the minute.

“Thanks again for the signature Gil Hopkins necklace,” she said.

“Hey, who deserves it more?” Hop said, then felt queasy at having said it. His shame alternated, second by second, with rage at the memory of her photo in Dr. Stillman’s office, like catching her in bed with another man. He couldn’t seem to stop himself. “Decked out like that”—he gestured to her lamé, hanging from her like Christmas ornaments—”you must be costing Jerry more than his dignity.”

“Awfully snide for someone who was seconds away from a night in

L.A. County.” “But for the grace of you, right?” he said, then shook his head, telling himself to pull it together, hold on until he could get to the bottom of it. But what could be more bottom than this? “Listen,” she said, fur stole ruffling up like an animal about to charge. “What’s the new sin you’d like to hang me for? I’m no angel, but, far as I see it, everywhere I turn these days, you’re coming at me like a battering ram. When are you going to find a new girl to batter around? Or have you?” Hop looked at her, his eyes sore, heavy. He could feel their

redness, feel the blood shooting through them.

He let her have it. “When did you work for Dr. Stillman?”

“Oh,” she said, twitching visibly. “How did you find out?” She

shook a packet of sugar into her coffee, then a second one.

“I better get a drink,” Hop decided.

“They only serve beer.”

“I’ll order a baker’s dozen,” he said, gesturing to the waitress.

“How’d you find out about Dr. Stillman?” Midge said after the

waitress left.

“Maybe you better start talking first.”

“I worked there. Before I met you. Before I got the job at Earl

Carroll’s. I had a lot of jobs back then. What’s the big idea?”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t just any doctor, was he?”

“You know even better than I do, Gil, that those kinds of doctors

keep this town going.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I probably did. When we started up, if you remember, you weren’t

paying much attention to my sparkling conversational talents.”

“If I’d paid more attention to what you were saying, we’d probably never’ve gotten married in the first place,” he said, then added, without thinking, “But there was the way you walked into a room …” He could see her eyes lift in surprise. He’d surprised himself.

The waitress set his beer down. Half of it lapped over the rim and onto his folded hands.

“Gil,” she said, “what does Dr. Stillman have to do with anything? Does this have something to do with the reporter? With all that?”

Hop nodded.

“I see. So did you take her to bed, too?” she asked, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was thinking hard, staring at her coffee like a fortune-teller.

He didn’t respond. He knew something was happening. She was just barely holding on to the coldness, the hardness.

“Look, Midge,” he finally said, “maybe I don’t deserve the straight story. Maybe I’ve told too many tall tales myself to earn it. But I’m at the end of something here. Can’t you see? I’ve got one inch of rope left to hang myself with.”

“Yes, I can see that,” she said. “Oh hell, you’re such an awful SOB, but I’m a sucker and always was. A sucker for that ugly face of yours. And no, you don’t deserve it, but God, I can’t bear it all. I can’t bear it.”

Hop didn’t say a word, didn’t dare risk saying something to change her mind.

Squaring her shoulders, she began. “Listen, when that reporter called the other night, I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until Jerry told me that a girl came to see you about… about Jean Spangler that I started piecing things together. I started thinking. Maybe you had a hand in keeping things quiet—that’s what you do, after all— and now you had to watch your back. The other night, when I came to see you, I realized you were circling awfully close. I was trying to see if I could get up the nerve to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Hop slumped in his chair, put one hot hand under his chin. “That you were kissing cousins to Jean Spangler? How well exactly did you know her, Midge, to give her access to a pirate’s cache of blackmail goodies?”

“You’re such a fool, Gil,” she said, shaking her head. “To you, it’s always simple. People want, they take, they make themselves sick about it. Then they do it all over again.”

‘You talking about me or yourself?”

“Yeah, well I don’t do that anymore,” she said. “The point is, things are messier. Do you want to know how messy or do you just want to cut me up?”

Hop looked at her, exhausted. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

Midge met his eyes, then sat back in her chair, gazing off into some dark space in the corner of the room.

“She was so lovely,” her voice tugged out plaintively. “And when she first came to Dr. Stillman’s office, she was so calm, so cool. I was more nervous than she was. I’d only been working there a week or two. She’d had a miscarriage and my, was she relieved.”

Hop avoided Midge’s eyes, even though he could feel her still.

“She told me how she lost it before she even knew it was there— inside her. It happened in the powder room of the Florentine Gardens. She slid on the blood on the floor and cracked her head on the stall door. She had a little white bandage by the corner of her eye. Those dark, sparkly movie-star eyes.”

Midge paused a second. “She came again a month later and we talked for a long time and she ended up asking me to lunch. We were just casual friends for a short while a long time ago. She was just another girl on the make. I knew hundreds of them. Yeah, I was one of them, in my own way.”

She reached across the table and took Hop’s beer in her hands, leaning over it like a cup of steaming hot chocolate.

“When I read in the papers that she was missing, I figured she’d finally gotten too smart for her own good. And I felt sorry for her. And her family, her child.” Abruptly, Midge showed a whisper of a smile. “When I read about the note, though, I had to laugh. How they

were trying to find a Kirk and a Dr. Scott.”

“Why?”

“That wasn’t Jean’s note,” she said, then took a quick sip of Hop’s

beer and licked the foam off her lips. “I mean it wasn’t something she wrote.”

“Is this some kind of riddle?”

“One of the times Jean was there, a young girl was waiting. This girl was there for a … you know, a termination. She was so nervous and she had this little notebook in her hand and she kept starting to write on it and stopping. Finally, Jean put her hand on the girl’s arm and said, ‘Honey, unless that’s a Latin test, nothing should be so hard to write.’ The girl smiled, couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, with freckles and a shiny forehead and knobby knees. She said she’d been trying all day to write her beau—she called him her beau—and I remember she said, ‘His name is Aloysius Kirkland, but I call him Kirk, like the movie star.’ Anyway, she said she couldn’t get through with the letter. She rolled back the pages on the pad and showed us all these false starts. ‘Dear Kirk: I’m doing what’s best for us both. This cannot be.’ ‘My darling: I’m sorry for the burden I’ve placed on you …’ ‘Kirk: It is not in the stars, not for us.’ All straight out of a Saturday-matinee sudster. Then, the last one—what was it?”

“Kirk, can’t wait any longer, going to see Doctor Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away. Ending with a comma,” Hop recited. He knew it better than the Lord’s Prayer—much better—by now.

“My, my. That’s right. Anyway, the girl stopped at that point and laughed. Said she just realized she’d written the wrong doc name. Scott instead of Stillman. Scott was the name of her family doctor she saw back in Louisville or wherever.”

“Fuck me,” Hop said. Those are the kinds of things you can never think your way into or guess. The puzzle piece you’d never find on your own.

“Anyway, Jean and I tried to calm her down. She never did get the note finished before they took her in. I didn’t even realize Jean had taken the note until I read the newspapers.”

“But why…” But he’d figured it out, too, if slowly. The note reminded Jean of something. Reminded her of the Jean Spangler who stepped off the bus at the Greyhound City station downtown with all the other Jeans, Iolenes, Midges. Hell, he’d gotten off that bus, tipped his hat at the station agent, and dragged his hide-bound suitcase up Sixth Street. He knew what the note reminded her of. He knew those kinds of notes. Dear Gil, I look forward to the day you can wire me a ticket West. I miss you terribly. Love, Bemice.

Midge looked at Hop and her eyes seemed a thousand years old. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Unsnapping her purse, she pulled out a silvery tube of lipstick. After running magenta across her mouth, she said, “That young girl—she got through the operation. But she was back six months later. This time, no note. The shine on her forehead gone, matted to perfection. No knocking knees. And no mention of a beau, Kirk or any other. I saw later that on the place on the intake form where they ask for an emergency contact, she’d written, ‘Sodom.’” Midge smiled faintly. “I wasn’t worried about her anymore. She’d figured it all out.”

“You know, Midge,” Hop said wearily. “Contrary to what you might read in True Confessions, this town isn’t just some platinum-studded meat grinder with fresh-faced virgins going in one end and coming out hard-bitten whores.”

She raised one perfect eyebrow. “It’s not?”

“Hey, honey, just because it happened that way to me.”

And she laughed and it was the first time he’d heard her laugh in a century or more and it was so fizzy and delicious, a hot toddy. It was hard to conceal his pleasure. And hard to feel anything in that moment but the memory of her small bewitching body under his hand, under warm sheets, her laugh in his ear, her mouth tickling his ear and laughing.

“The things you don’t know, Gil,” Midge said, leaning forward and curling her chin in her hand. “You think Jean was just another starlet gritting her way down. But she had whole other stories to tell. They all do.”

“Even you.” “You know my stories.” “I thought I did. Sugar daddies slipping you occasional twists of

cash for a slap and tickle. A night on the town. Was there more?”

“Only what you taught me,” she said with a blast of coldness. Then: “I wasn’t hungry enough to slide into what Jean slid into. But I also

wasn’t that… glorious.”

“Glorious?”

“You missed everything,” Midge sighed. “She may have been a tramp when she needed to be. Who isn’t? But she had something bright and shiny about her. You wanted to rub against it. Feel the shock.”

“So did you? Rub up against her?” Hop said, trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the nasty edge from his voice.

Midge shook her head. “I wish everything was as easy as you make it.”

“Me too. Why don’t you tell me just how hard it was? For Jean. For both of you,” Hop said, almost meaning it, although he wasn’t sure why. “She got you the job at Earl Carroll’s, huh?”

‘Yes,” Midge said. “She did.”

And then she told Hop. She reminded him that she herself had come a long way from the apple-cheeked, starry-eyed girl who traveled from Ada, Ohio, to Los Angeles, California, as Miss Jiffy Muffin 1942. There was a way that she wanted to live. She saw it in the movies, in the movie magazines. No more Saturday nights at the soda shop, killing time—months, years even— sipping on lime rickeys, reading Look magazine, rolling her eyes at the local boys with the slack jaws and bumpy skin. Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, Hedy Lamarr—they didn’t have to live this way. Their evenings were spent shimmering through nightclubs with Cary Grant on their arm, corks popping, band swaying— this is the way one lives.

Just shy of eighteen, she’d packed her bags with the same steely determination with which she’d spent the previous three years shaping her plain face and unremarkable body into a sweet-smelling package of dimples and flutters and perky curves. The stick-straight dishwater-brown hair became long honey locks that, after a few months in Hollywood, became a brilliant blonde to go with her puffy rosebud of a mouth. She knew when she left, even if her warm-faced, openhearted mother didn’t, that she wouldn’t be returning after the publicity events, the print and radio ads, and the three-week tour of the West Coast (Once here, I dug my heels in, Hop remembered her once saying to him, years before, centuries before).

Not that Midge wanted to be an actress. She’d always been much too much of a realist for that. She knew the odds and she also knew the limits of her own talents. Nah, she just wanted to live the good life out here, use her pretty face to get some things, enjoy herself, forever wash the dust of Ada off her.

She knocked around from job to job, and a girlfriend in a rooming house told her about Dr. Stillman. He needed a girl, a nice, smiling Midwesterny girl, to answer phones with kindness and keep the nervous patients in his waiting room calm and comfortable. And Midge thought okay. Shoveling popcorn at the West Hollywood Bijou wasn’t paying enough to keep her in stockings. And the other girls she knew, things sometimes got bad for them. One girl sold her hair. Another used candle wax to fill in the cavities in her mouth. Others, you know. That’s what they did.

And Dr. Stillman was nice and Midge had never been squeamish, nor had she carried with her from Ohio any judgments.

But one day the doc asked her into his office and his face was sterner than she’d ever seen it. He’d noticed files missing from his cabinet on two occasions, both times after her shift had ended. Was there something she wanted to tell him? She said no, and that she’d never taken any files ever. Why would she? He looked at her for a long minute and said okay. He believed her. But he would be watching.

It made Midge feel lousy. What did he think she would want with a bunch of medical files? Sure, some of the patients were actresses and a few were pretty big. Many more, however, were girls sent by actors, directors, producers, studio honchos, politicians—the list went on and on. Sure, there were secrets. But where would that get Midge Maberley from Ada, Ohio? And yet she felt the doctor’s eyes on her all the time now, determined to catch her. Who wanted to spend each day like that, amid that dreadful, awful smell of Mercurochrome?

So when her new pal Jean Spangler said, Honey, your figure is too fetching for these corridors. Come meet the manager at Earl Carroll’s, he owes me more favors than I can count, she gave her notice.

A week before her last day, Jean took her to meet a photographer she knew who could help Midge learn to use a camera. Then she took Midge shopping. As a shutter girl, she’d wear a uniform of emerald satin with gold flocking and shiny gold stockings. Jean helped her pick out flashing necklaces, earrings, evening gloves, even garter belts to catch the eye.

Then they went to the Roosevelt Hotel for drinks. And Midge was so grateful to Jean and asked if there was anything she could do for her. And Jean dismissed her with a wave of the hand.

Three Gibsons later, however, Jean whispered, “Midgie, you have to take your shot while you still can.”

“What shot is that?”

“The doc’s office is a treasure trove, honey.”

“He doesn’t keep any money—” “You know what I mean.” And then Midge remembered Jean sitting in the waiting room one

day, a week or two before, chattering away. Watching as Midge pulled patient folders and refiled them in quick order. “What secrets they could tell,” she’d said with a wink.

“That’s not for me, Jean,” she said now, with an Ohioan’s firmness still girded to her somewhere deep inside. And she knew then that it was Jean who had taken those files. She knew it, but hell, why should she care? She had a new job at Earl Carroll’s. She was going to take pictures of Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper. And she did. And Jean began getting more movie jobs, was around less and less. They rarely saw each other. And then Midge met a handsome young reporter without two nickels but with a head full of gleaming hair and eyes full of trouble.

“But Hop,” she said to him now, her voice turning low, forlorn. “They killed her, didn’t they? They killed Jean.”

“They?”

“I don’t know. The big ‘they.’”

“Yeah, I know about the big ‘they,’” Hop said, thinking of Iolene. Of Iolene hiding. Knowing her time was marked.

“Funny. Jean was always superstitious about all that,” Midge said, stirring her still-untouched coffee. “She said she’d never make old bones.”

Hop looked at Midge’s eyes and found something in there. Something he remembered, or thought he did. Something old and pure.

“That’s why she kept that doctor’s note. I’m sure. Some kind of lucky piece, reminding her of things she’d gotten through. She never stepped on sidewalk cracks or opened fortune cookies,” she went on. “She had a four-leaf clover she kept in her purse. She’d sent away for it, mail-order, from the back of a magazine. She showed it to me a couple times. She kept it taped to the back of a postcard. I remember it was a picture postcard of a lake she’d visited once as a girl. It was way up in the San Bernardino Mountains. Fresh air, pine needles under her feet, the whole bit. What did the postcard say? Something like ‘Come back to Merry Lake’ or ‘Memories from Merry Lake.’ That lake, she said it was her idea of heaven.”

Merry Lake, Hop thought to himself. Something was shuttling around in his head. Merry Lake. “So she ever go back?” he finally said.

Midge shrugged. “It was just one of those plans you mean with all your heart when you’re on your third sidecar.”

“I might know about those plans.”

“Me too. Isn’t that how we …” “Yeah.” “Gil, one last thing,” she said, sensing he was about to go, which

he was. Which he knew he had to.

“Yeah?”

“As bad as we were together,” she said, her voice delicate. “Why …” Her eyelashes lifted and she let those eyes quake through him. She was brutal.

“Because I knew he’d take care of you,” he said quickly, glad to have the chance to say it. He’d never said it before, even to himself. “I guess I knew that somehow. And I knew it would be right for both of you. It would be something for both of you.”

“How gracious,” she said tonelessly.

“I didn’t say it was gracious. I just wanted to make things better

for all of us.”

“The fixer. Always the fixer.”

“But I did, didn’t I, Midge? Didn’t I fix things?” he said, and,

mortified that his voice was almost turning into a sob, rose to his feet.

“I missed you my whole life,” she said, looking up at him helplessly.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, because he knew it did.