Dead to Me (12 page)

But then the breath I’d taken registered in my brain, and I knew something wasn’t right. The clothes all smelled of mothballs. My eyes fell on a peach-colored sweater—Annie
loathed the color and never would have worn it. As I burrowed through the clothes, I saw that the nicest pieces were stacked on top. Beneath them were cotton shifts in indiscriminate sizes and
styles, stained slips, blouses with torn sleeves. Clothes that could have been bought cheaply and by the sackful for a quarter or two.

I got on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. There, I saw a hot plate with a frayed cord, and a stack of paperback novels with the same mothball smell as the clothing in the dressers. I
paged through some of them, but found nothing except mildew in the bindings.

Jerry was right. There was nothing here, and certainly nothing that had ever belonged to my sister.

“Annie never lived here,” I said.

“You’re a quicker study than me,” he said. “But this is the only address she ever gave me. Like I said, she moved around a lot. As far as I can figure, this was the
address she used when she had to give one out. She and Otto had some kind of arrangement—she paid rent on time, and he didn’t ask any questions, like why she never seemed to be
here.”

“So, there’s just enough here to make someone who didn’t know Annie very well think that they’d found her place.”

“Bingo.” Jerry nodded. “She even planted a couple of false leads here and there, just so a nosy snoop didn’t have to walk away empty-handed. I spent an hour or so running
down a fake locker combination she’d written inside one of those books before I realized what she was up to.”

“Really?” My eyes lit up. “Can I see it?”

He handed me a particularly unloved and waterlogged-looking dime novel, and indicated the address and numbers penciled in the margin. It read:

“I had to get a lady friend of mine to test out the combination on every lock on every locker at the YWCA on Figueroa, and believe me, she wasn’t happy about
it.”

For a moment, her handwriting had the same magical quality as the clothing in her dresser when I’d first opened it. But again, I knew immediately that something was off. Unlike my father,
Annie would never in a million years write a combination where it could be found by any snoop. I studied the page for a moment longer, then erupted in a giggle that almost made Jerry swallow his
toothpick.

“That’s not a locker combination,” I said, digging in my purse for a paper and pen. “It’s a word.”

If you ever want them to be read, ciphers need keys. The problem with keys and code words is that they can be intercepted, guessed, and found out. People are rather predictable about things like
that. They pick their dog’s name, their birthday, their phone number. But if your key is too obscure, the person you want to decrypt it can’t—unless you find another way to give
them the key.

The beauty of Annie’s key was that it hid in plain sight. Jerry saw a locker room at the Young Women’s Christian Association on Figueroa Street. I saw everything I needed to crack
the code.

The most basic, simple way of making a cipher that turns letters into numbers is to start with a Polybius square:

This creates a chart that gives every letter of the alphabet a two-digit number to stand in for it. A is 11; Z is 55. ALICE becomes 11 31 24 13 15.

The problem with a Polybius square by itself is that it’s too easy to figure out. A is
always
11; Z is
always
55. You don’t have to see many of these before
you’re fluent in them. So you have to make things a little bit more interesting.

The first part of the key was the FIGUEROA. Annie used that to throw off the predictable A-to-Z progression of the Polybius square.

Now A wasn’t 11 anymore; F was.

But there was another step, too. I knew because there were numbers in Annie’s cipher bigger than fifty-five.

YWCA was the key; YWCA, otherwise known as 54 52 25 23.

So, to decode the cipher, I needed to subtract the numbers in the key from the numbers Annie had written down:

Jerry looked over my shoulder while I worked, his eyebrows scrunched together.

“Now I see why she never showed me anything more complicated than the trick with the pencil,” he said.

“This is a Nihilist cipher,” I explained. “Russian revolutionaries used them to pass messages to one another. They’re one of Annie’s favorites.”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “Well, whatever it is, don’t let HUAC get wind of it, my little Bolshevik. You and your whole family will be blacklisted before you can say ‘Joe
Stalin.’”

Once I’d used the key, the only thing left to do was to plug the sum back into the Polybius square.

Or at least that should have done it. Instead, when I’d finished, I was left with a row of letters that didn’t mean anything. I wondered if I’d made a mistake
somewhere along the way or if Annie had invented an extra layer of encryption.

Even though she’d never lived here, it was impossible not to see Annie’s hand in the cleverly disguised front, to feel her presence here. It had been a long time since we played our
games, and yet here she was playing them with me, still a cryptographer spy and crusading angel of the Allied forces. Still glamorous, elusive, and uncrackable. I loved her for it.

While I was puzzling over the code, Jerry shook his head and laughed in disbelief.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Only that you’ve been working on that thing for half an hour,” he said.

“I have remarkable powers of concentration when I want to.”

“Apparently,” Jerry said. “Also, I’d like you to know that while I may not be able to crack a Nihilist cipher, I have not utterly wasted my time here.”

“You were just sitting there,” I said.

“I was
thinking
,” Jerry said. “And I was wondering whether the people who got here before us allowed themselves to get quite so engrossed in your sister’s secret
codes. I suspect they may have lacked your powers of concentration.”

I sat up straight and set down the book.

“Someone besides us has already been here?”

“They were careful to cover their tracks, but yes. This room’s already been searched.”

“How can you tell?” I scanned the room, admiring Jerry’s eagle eyes. There was hardly a thing here to be out of place, and nothing was.

“Well, it might have been that piece of cigarette ash in the corner, or that the mirror above the sink is just slightly crooked.”

I gasped. “Really?”

“No. Otto saw them sneak up here two nights ago.” Jerry slapped his knee and gave a little bark of laughter. “And they neglected to slip him a fin or two when they did
it.”

“Who was it?”

Jerry’s face turned serious now. “It was dark. He didn’t get a good look at them, but it might have been Conrad Donahue’s people. Or Rex’s. Or your
father’s.”

Jerry walked over to the window and peeked out at the street below. He had to stand on his tiptoes to do it.

“Aren’t those all the same people?” I asked.

Jerry came away from the window and removed the toothpick he’d been gnawing on from the corner of his mouth.

“It’s beginning to look that way,” he said.

“Then what do we do next?”

Jerry sank down onto the cot again. It creaked under his weight.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

“Beg your pardon?”

He cleared his throat. “I said I don’t know. I’ve checked out all our old meeting spots, a few old apartments, friends she’s mentioned, enemies too. Nothing’s
shaken loose, and I don’t know where to look next.”

He stared at his hands, folded uselessly in his lap, his face as bleak as the room itself. “I’m letting her down,” he said.

“You’re not letting her down.”

I sat down next to him on the cot and put my hand on his shoulder.

“Was there anyone Annie really trusted?” I asked. “You said you talked to her friends. If anyone knows where that girl is, wouldn’t it be one of them?”

Jerry let out another laugh that wasn’t really a laugh.

“If they knew anything, they weren’t saying a word about it to me.”

I thought about that for a minute, then asked, “Do you think any of them would talk to me?”

“Why? You’re a kid.”

Jerry scratched at the stubble on his cheeks, and little bits of dead skin snowed down onto his pant leg.

“I’m Annie’s sister,” I said, wrinkling my nose in mild disgust. “And a girl. And not a detective.”

“You might have a point there.” A pink flush spread up Jerry’s neck as he brushed the flakes onto the floor. “There is one friend of Annie’s who might be worth
talking to again. Maybe he’ll have more to say to you than he did to me.”

“He?” I asked.

I tried to imagine Annie with friends. Friends she could go out with at any hour of the night, friends who didn’t have to drop her off a block away from her parents’ house.
Boy
friends.

“His name’s Cyrus. Annie and her friends found him and more or less adopted him. He was like a little brother to them. Or a pet. I never could tell which.”

“What’s he like?”

“He wants to be an actor,” Jerry said, his voice dripping with scorn, “though not a bad kid despite that. He works hard, that’s for sure. Last I heard, he was holding
down two jobs, and that’s not counting the work he does for me.”

“What kind of work?” I asked, hungry for details. This was Annie’s inner circle, the people she’d chosen over my parents and me. I wanted to know what she saw in
them.

“He works at a bar not too far from here. It’s the kind of place where a person overhears interesting things from time to time.”

“Marty’s?”

“You catch on quick, kid,” Jerry said. “He buses tables at the Musso and Frank Grill, too. It doesn’t pay as much as the bartending job, but you get a lot of producers
and directors and writers in a place like that. Not a bad place to be if you’re an actor trying to get discovered. He’s good with a camera, too. I’ve taken him along with me on
stakeouts before.”

Up until now, my sister’s closest known associates included a thuggish pornographer and a dope peddler who posed for scandalous pictures. Compared with them, Cyrus sounded downright
wholesome.

“I’d love to meet him,” I said.

W
hen Jerry pulled his car into the parking lot behind Musso & Frank, the smell of steak filled the car before we even opened the doors.
In the seat next to me, Jerry’s stomach gurgled, and I realized I hadn’t actually seen him eat since I met him. I wondered
how
he ate if he was spending all his time working a
case where there wasn’t a paying client, especially since he’d shelled out more than a week’s worth of grocery money to Otto. If I’d had more than a dime in my purse, I
would have gotten him a sandwich, but a dime wouldn’t even get you a cup of coffee in that place. As for myself, I wasn’t hungry. I’d been to Musso & Frank exactly once in my
life and that had been enough.