Dead to Me (20 page)

Of course, I had no reason to expect better from a man who’d wrapped his older daughter in low-cut evening dresses and sent her out to sing at wild parties when she was fifteen.

Careful—he’s the only father you have, I thought. And now, he might be dead.

I wondered if it had crossed his mind, as he lay tied up in the trunk of Conrad’s Rolls-Royce, that his predicament might have been avoided if he’d only had the decency to walk the
underage girl out of the party. I hoped it had.

It wasn’t his fault, not all of it, I thought.

He didn’t kill Irma. He didn’t take the disgusting pictures of Gabrielle. And I couldn’t believe he would ever hurt Annie. Maybe he was being set up. Maybe he hadn’t
known about any of it until it was already too late.

He was my father. He was a monster. He made unforgivable choices, but he didn’t deserve to be murdered and framed for things he hadn’t done.

Whatever it was I felt for him at that moment, I hoped the driver had been right.

“Please don’t be dead,” I whispered.

Two fat teardrops landed on my knee, stinging the cut under my eye as they fell, and I wiped my face with the back of my hand. At the front of the car, I caught a middle-aged woman in heavy
makeup staring at me. I shot her a dirty look, and she went back to looking out the window.

I took the paper, got off the Red Car at Fairfax, and crossed the street. With every block, the light grew dimmer, the sounds of traffic fainter, until I came to my street. It seemed wrong
somehow that it was just the way I’d left it.

I stayed off the sidewalks and kept to the shadows as I walked down my street, stopping occasionally to duck behind a hedge and scan the cars parked along the curb. There was no sign of the
Rolls-Royce, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be coming. I wasn’t sure what I’d tell my mother when I saw her, but I knew I needed to warn her, needed to get her out of
there before the sun came up.

Carefully, I picked my way down the street, through the front yards of my neighbors: the banker whose forehead always seemed to be sweating; the widow who used to pay Annie and me a dime each to
pull weeds out of her flower bed; the magazine editor whose wife brought everybody on the block a basket of oranges at Christmas.

And then I was in front of my house, the least-welcoming home on the block.

It looked half lived-in, like my family spent part of the year on long vacations and never really settled in when we came back. All the lights in the house were off, and the porch was dark.

But it wasn’t empty. Sitting on the front steps, his busboy apron folded across his knees, was Cyrus. It was lucky for him it was so late at night. Even though he wasn’t doing
anything but sitting, he looked so out of place I was sure my neighbors would have called the police if they’d spotted him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

At the sound of my voice, he looked up. When he saw my face, he leaped to his feet and ran down the sidewalk toward me.

“Oh my god, Alice, what happened to you?”

My jaw throbbed. I didn’t want Cyrus—or anyone else—to see me like this. I remembered what he’d said to me at the restaurant, that I didn’t have to get myself
killed trying to prove I loved Annie. I didn’t need his worry or sympathy, and I didn’t want him thinking he’d been right about me. All I wanted was to go inside and put a bag of
ice on my face.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, walking past him toward the front steps.

With a few strides of his long legs he beat me to the door. “Alice, please. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”

I tried to go around him, but he sidestepped between me and the door.

“Excuse me,” I said, glaring at him.

“Let me help you bandage that cut,” he said, pleading. “At least let me stay with you for a while.”

“You can’t come in,” I said, fishing my house key out of my skirt pocket. “My mother would kill me.”

“Your mother isn’t here,” Cyrus said, pointing to the driveway.

Sure enough, her car was gone. I curled my fingers into a fist around the house key and swore under my breath.

Couldn’t you drink at home, Mom? I thought.

“Fine. Have it your way,” I said, too tired to argue. Cyrus stepped aside, and I unlocked the front door.

He could come in long enough to say whatever it was he’d come to tell me and long enough to make sure Conrad and Rex weren’t hiding in the linen closet, but that was it.

Cyrus followed me inside, and I locked the door behind us.

“Alice, the reason I came over is because I didn’t tell you everything before.”

I snorted. “Obviously.”

As I led Cyrus through the foyer, I saw him craning his neck to look up at the crystal chandelier, the gold gilt mirror, the Persian carpets that lined the hardwood floors.

“You don’t have to take your shoes off,” I said. He wedged his heel back into his loafer and followed me down the hallway to the kitchen.

I remembered what Jerry had told me about how Cyrus worked two jobs to support himself. I always thought of my house as normal, but compared with Irma’s apartment and Annie’s
flophouse on Main Street, it must have looked like a mansion to Cyrus.

“Iodine?”

He said it like it was a question, and I realized he was asking me where it was, and that he intended to bandage that cut after all. I wasn’t sure I wanted a boy I’d known less than
a day dabbing iodine under my eye, but I pointed him in the direction of the powder room anyway.

“Go sit down,” Cyrus said. “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

It was half that long before he came into the kitchen holding a bottle of iodine, a wad of cotton gauze, tape, and a towel ratty enough that it wouldn’t be missed. He opened the freezer
and fished around until he found a bag of frozen peas.

“Put that on your jaw,” he said, handing it to me.

Cyrus ran the towel under the faucet and wrung it out. Then he sat down next to me and began to blot away the blood on my cheek. The water was just the right temperature, warm and heavenly.

“How’d you know where everything was?” I asked.

He shrugged. “That’s my job. Knowing what people need. Getting it for them. Usually it’s booze and saltshakers, so this is a nice change of pace.”

I couldn’t help smiling, though with my sore jaw it came out more like a wince. “How’d you know that’s what I was going to ask for next?”

He smiled back at me and poured iodine onto a square of the cotton gauze.

“Crack wise while you can,” he said, “but this next part is going to sting.”

Once he’d finished cleaning up my bloody face, Cyrus dabbed the gauze under my eye. I flinched, and he quickly pulled his hand away.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little,” I said.

He blew a cool, gentle breath over the cut. Without meaning to, I shivered.

“Sorry,” I said, looking down at the tabletop. “It tickled.”

I could feel my cheeks flush with embarrassment, but if Cyrus noticed, he was polite enough to act like he hadn’t. He applied salve to the raw skin on my wrists and knees and cleaned the
cuts I’d gotten in Griffith Park. While I switched the frozen peas from my jaw to my blackening eye, he got me a cup of water and shook two aspirin tablets out of a bottle for me.

As I swallowed them down, I realized how normal it felt to be sitting in my kitchen, drinking out of a juice glass, despite everything that had happened that evening. For the first time since my
bacon sandwich in the bathtub, I felt safe.

“Thank you, Cyrus,” I said when he’d finished.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “And please, call me Cy.”

He leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath.

“Alice, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything sooner.”

We’d passed the first aid and small talk portion of the evening. He’d come here to tell me something, and I could see him working up the nerve to do it.

“Was it because Jerry was there?”

He shook his head.

“It didn’t have anything to do with that. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t see what good it would do. I can’t prove anything. I can’t do anything about
it.”

In the kitchen at Musso & Frank, I’d known Cy was holding something back. When Jerry asked him if he knew where Gabrielle was, he said he didn’t know. But he also said that he
didn’t know who tried to kill my sister, and that was a question Jerry hadn’t asked.

It had to be more than that, though. Back at the restaurant, Cy had told Jerry he was trying to stay out of sight, that he was afraid of ending up like Annie and Irma. He’d acted like he
was being hunted.

“You know something about the night Annie was attacked, don’t you?” I asked.

“How much do you already know?” he asked, looking at me warily.

I didn’t have evidence, and like Cy, I couldn’t prove anything, but there was only one direction everything I knew pointed.

“Was it Conrad?”

Cy nodded. “I was working at Marty’s that night. Conrad and a guy named Rex came in, and they offered me some extra money to give them a table in the back and make sure no one
bothered them. Nobody would have anyway—all the men who go to Marty’s are sailors and traveling businessmen trying to get laid.”

Cy turned a deep shade of scarlet when he said this.

“I’m sorry. That’s just the most polite term I can think of to describe their intentions.”

“It’s fine, Cy. Go on.”

“So, the usual customers buy a lot of drinks, flirt, try to look like big spenders. But the thing is, all the women in Marty’s work for Marty. I pour them ginger ale all night, they
pretend it’s champagne, and they just keep ordering more. Before the guys know it, their wallets are empty and they’re too drunk to argue when we toss them out. That’s
Marty’s business model, anyway. No one in that room gives two shits about Conrad Donahue—sorry, Alice. No one cares about—”

“Just say what you want to,” I said.

I couldn’t stand to hear him be careful around me, like I was some sheltered little priss who would pass out cold if I heard bad language.

“I just didn’t want to offend—”

I cut him off before he could finish.

“Like the patrons of Marty’s, I also do not give two shits.”

“So I took the money and let them sit wherever they wanted,” Cy said.

He seemed a little bit more at ease with me now, but I could tell he was still trying to figure me out. I wondered if he’d watched his language around Annie.

“They left Marty’s around midnight, and an hour later they were back. Conrad’s not much of a drinker, but he put away three whiskeys in a row. I heard him say to Rex,
‘The girl wasn’t with her,’ and he was pretty upset about it, but Rex told him not to worry because she wouldn’t get far without her friend.

“I didn’t put together what they were talking about until the next morning, when Jerry came around looking for Annie. Conrad didn’t pay much attention to me when he came to
Marty’s, but I don’t think he knows Annie’s my friend, either. That’s why I’ve been lying low.”

Cy sank back in his chair, exhausted.

“So, that’s what happened. That’s what I didn’t tell you before.”

And now I knew.

It wasn’t exactly a shock, but knowing for sure that they’d done it made everything seem more real. I could see what had happened that night in the park like it was a movie playing
in my head. Cy told me what he knew, Jerry told me what he knew, and the rest I could fill in for myself.

Annie went to the park that night to meet a police officer, only instead, it was Conrad and Rex waiting for her. They got a surprise, too, because Gabrielle was supposed to be there with her and
she wasn’t. They didn’t care about my sister. It was Gabrielle they were after, and when Annie wouldn’t tell them where she was, they tried to beat the answer out of her.

There was still something I didn’t understand, though.

“How did Conrad know she was going to be there?” I asked.

Cy put his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hand as he thought.

“Annie was nervous about the plan from the beginning—too many people knew about it. That’s probably why she didn’t bring Gabrielle with her,” he said. “My
guess is Jerry’s contact at the LAPD let the word slip. Maybe on purpose, maybe not.”

I thought about how brave Annie was to walk into the park that night knowing the whole thing might be a setup. She’d done it anyway, and she’d done everything in her power to make
sure that Gabrielle was safe. I wondered what she thought when she found Conrad and Rex waiting for her there, knowing that the people she’d trusted to help had failed her.

“Are you okay?” Cy asked, and I realized that I wasn’t sure how long I’d been staring at the same spot on the kitchen table and that my hands were shaking.

“I’m—I’m not,” I said. I didn’t recognize my own voice, it sounded so cracked and wrung out.

When I lifted my head, Cy was craning his neck, trying to get a better look at my face. He looked unsure of himself, and a little like he’d rather be somewhere else. Maybe he could patch
up a scrape, I thought, but a girl who turned strange, dead-eyed, and quiet for minutes at a time was beyond his skill or patience.

Or maybe I was wrong.

“Come here,” he said, and held out his arms to me.

I’d never liked being touched—it came with too many strings attached. If one of the boys I’d dated had opened his arms to me like that, a minute later, he’d be trying to
snake a hand up my shirt. My mother only fussed over me when she was putting on a show for her friends, or when she was feeling drunk and maudlin. And the last time Annie had given me a hug, she
left.

But Cy didn’t know me. He didn’t owe me anything, and I didn’t have anything he wanted. Maybe that was why I leaned into his arms.

I rested my head on his shoulder and let him pull me close to his chest and stroke my hair. Every time I thought he was about to let go, he held me tighter, and every time, I felt relieved
because I wasn’t ready to let go yet.

No one had ever held me like that before, hard and close and as long as I needed.

I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but when I finally let go, I felt like I could breathe again. I looked at him. He looked at me, and neither one of us said anything until I saw
Cy’s eyes flicker up to the clock that hung over the sink. It was four in the morning.