Still Lives(66)

For several minutes I stare at the clothes, puzzling. I let my hand drag down the waist of the dress, squeezing its cool threads. Then I shut the wardrobe.

Greg’s mother continues to watch me from across the room. The day she died, Theresa told Greg that although I was “thoroughly nice,” I wasn’t “worthy” of him. But it doesn’t hurt anymore, her rejection of me. What hurts now is that there’s a clue to Kim’s death here, and I can’t find it.

I yank open the wardrobe again and start with the Ann-Margaret dress, pulling it over my head, yanking when it strains. The black wig next, and then jeans barely reaching my thighs. None of this fits me. All of it constricts, even the wig, which pins my ears. Kim Lord was almost two sizes smaller than I am, and the woman in the mirror looks like an ogre who stumbled into the closet of a princess. I put on gloves from the bottom of the closet, slip my toes into her tiny shoes, then throw my purse over my shoulder and pirouette back and forth.

Who killed you? I ask my reflection. Why did you die? I say, pursing my lips, cocking my dark head. I run my hand over my flat, empty stomach, and sicken myself by imagining it full.

Finally I turn away and look back to see my own shoulder blades poking from the unzipped spine of the pale-pink dress. It’s too tight to close. My skin and bones look smooth and winglike, but mostly they look exposed.

A narrator inside me begins to murmur: See now? Feast your eyes. You’re alive. You get to live. Leave this place. Leave L.A.

I take everything off, get dressed in my own clothes, and put Kim Lord’s neatly back except for the black wig, which I keep on my head. Then I take Theresa’s knife from my purse. The blade’s still sharp, though duller than it once was. The silver reflects pieces of the room around me, faintly and without depth or proportion. In Theresa’s last months, when she was dying, she sometimes called our landline. Her voice would gravel and grind so deep, it sounded like a man was speaking through her. A collector of debts. Why, she said to me once. Why am I still here.

I slide her knife in the rack with Greg’s other blades, and I leave.

Outside, the deadbolt locked again, I throw the key into the dumpster behind the next building.

Then, wearing my dark, limp crown, I drive around Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Mid-Wilshire, until I find a parking garage I have never seen before. The city night dissolves behind me as I take the ticket and ease the car through the rising gate. I’m not tired, but I need to be safe. Anonymous. Anyone. Dark hair frames my face. I find the ramp, find a random spot on a random floor, cut the lights, lean my seat back, and stare up at my ceiling for a long time, listening to others arrive and depart. Listening to their door slams, their engines, and the silence. And the silence.





WEDNESDAY





23

Early today!” Fritz beams. It’s 6:00 a.m., but he’s crisp and exuberant in his navy security suit, his hair still showing the furrows of a comb. His tinted lenses are clear for once, and I can see him studying me.

“Yeah,” I say sheepishly, not breaking stride. “I’m probably the first one here.” I clutch my purse, hoping he won’t notice I’m wearing the same clothes as yesterday, that I look like I spent much of the night cramped up in my locked car, sleepless, afraid to get out.

“Nope,” says Fritz, and counts off on his fingers. “Fourth.”

I pause, hoping one of them is not Jayme. I want to make a call first, and I want to take my Rocque work with me, to get it done while I’m away.

“Lynne Feldman was first.” For a security guard, Fritz is a bit of a gossip. He and his wife are empty nesters now, and he gets lonely. “Then Juanita Filippa. Then Brent Patrick. But Brent is gone again already. Vacation, he says.” He shakes his head. “Took a heap of stuff with him. Left his puppy in there for Dee.” He gestures to the carpentry room. “Wonder about his wife.”

I wonder, too. I wonder what Brent was drawing in his office yesterday, if his inevitable resignation is coming. I wonder what happened at Bootleg last night. It sure didn’t look like Yegina was preparing to go on a date with Hiro or to meet up with her brother. Every time I think of the expression on her face when she spotted me outside her door, my stomach turns. So I’m not. Thinking, I mean. I’m just grabbing my work and calling Hendricks and telling him I’m leaving the city, but could he please case my apartment for me.

“You need some gigantic coffee,” Fritz says, and thumps my shoulder.

I thank him and scurry away, past the various crates arriving and departing. I wonder if Evie’s Rothkos are in the air somewhere over America now.

I stop by the mailroom, grab the stack of paper in my box, and rush for the door. Kevin’s name jumps out from a typed manuscript with a yellow sticky on top: Sorry, Maggie! Snaked this from your box by accident.—Dee. Since her last name is Rager she gets her mail right above me. Dee, whose behavior keeps sticking out like a thorn on a branch. Home “sick” last Wednesday and Thursday. And now this. What is she up to? I can’t puzzle it out.

Instead, I start to read Kevin’s article, and almost finish by the time I reach my office. It covers the night of the Gala, and the party’s slow realization of Kim Lord’s absence. The writing is precise and stark, the atmosphere noirish. Shadows flicker, men scowl, and women glitter. If someone pulled out a pearl-handled pistol, I would not be surprised. Kevin introduces me as his PR rep, “a languid, saucy blonde” named Richter. Good ole Richter seems to perceive the dark undercurrent of the evening before everyone else. “Richter won’t even accompany me into the final gallery. She hovers on the threshold, a fairgoer reluctant to enter a haunted house. When I look back, she is shading her eyes.”