Dead to Me (21 page)

“Oh, shit,” he said, and this time he didn’t correct himself. “Alice, I’m so sorry, but I have to go to work.”

“You just came from work.”

“I know, and now I have to go to my other job.”

“I’m sorry I kept you up all night,” I said. “How many jobs do you have, anyway?”

Cy thought about this for a minute.

“Is that a hard question?” I asked.

“No, I just realized that I must be an extremely lazy person, because I work one less job than your sister does,” he said. “There’s Marty’s, where I’m going
now to clean bathrooms and take out the trash, and Musso and Frank. I work for Jerry when he needs me. And when time allows, I pursue my love of the stage and screen. Not that I ever get paid for
that.”

“What about Annie?” I asked, realizing Cy knew things about her life I couldn’t, things I wanted to know.

“Let’s see,” Cy said, counting off the jobs on his fingers. “She works for Jerry, too, but you already knew that. She waits tables at a diner near Olvera Street. She
makes deliveries for a bookie, reads movie scripts for an agent. And she works at Marty’s.”

“She’s one of the girls who drinks ginger ale and pretends it’s champagne?” I asked, taken aback.

“She’s pretty dazzling at it,” Cy said. “No businessman’s wallet is safe when she is near.”

“Oh.”

Maybe I was a sheltered little priss after all, but I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to hear about it. Something in my face must have given away my thoughts, because Cy’s smile
stiffened, and I could tell he wanted to take back what he’d said.

That was when the telephone started to ring. I froze in place at the kitchen table, staring down the hall toward it.

After four rings, Cy asked, “Are you going to answer it?”

I let it ring twice more. If it was my mother, I didn’t want to talk to her, not in the shape she’d be in.

The phone rang again.

If it was Conrad Donahue or Rex or the man with the blue polka-dot suspenders, I didn’t want them to know I was here.

If it was my father or Jerry Shaffer, I didn’t know what I’d say to them. And if it was the hospital calling with bad news, I didn’t want to know.

“They’ll hang up,” I said.

Twelve rings. Then fifteen.

“Listen, my car is parked outside,” Cy said. “If it’s Conrad or Rex, we’ll go out the back door, and I’ll have you out of here in less than a
minute.”

I shook my head. There wasn’t anybody I wanted to talk to badly enough to take the risk. Or at least that was what I’d thought until Cy asked, “What if it’s
Gabrielle?”

I scrambled for the phone, picked up the receiver, and held it to my ear.

“Hello?” I whispered.

In the background, I heard shouting, then a siren.

“Who is this?” I asked.

As soon as she opened her mouth and drew a breath, I knew who was calling. Cassie sounded tired, scared, and at least as shaky as I did, and the first thing she said to me was, “You were
telling the truth.”

I
breathed a sigh of relief.

“Cassie, what’s going on?”

“I’m at the hospital with Annie and your mother.”

I sat down on the floor in the hallway, my back up against the wall, my legs stretched out in front of me.

“With my
mother
? What are you doing there? How did she—”

“I stayed up to make sure you came back,” Cassie said. “But I fell asleep, so I didn’t know if you’d made it home or not, and I was worried, so I realized that the
only way to find out was to break into your house and see if you were there.”

“You did what?”

“I climbed the palm tree and went in through your bedroom window, but I tripped, and the noise woke up your mom, and she came running in, and I was there and you weren’t, and it was
one in the morning.”

“So you told her,” I said.

Cy met my eyes and mouthed, “Who is it?” I motioned for him to wait, then grabbed a pen and paper from the hall table and started to write while Cassie explained.

“I’m sorry, Alice. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“It’s okay, Cassie. It doesn’t matter.”

I held up what I’d written and showed it to Cy:

“How is she?”

“Not so good, Alice. I think she’s about to snap.”

I was confused until I realized she wasn’t talking about Annie, and that my sheltered friend with her teetotaling Midwestern parents was in no way prepared to deal with my mother.

“Keep her calm. Go through her purse and hide her pills, her flask, whatever she brought with her. Get her some coffee. See if you can get her to eat something, and I’ll be there as
soon as I can. What about Annie? How is she?”

“That’s the other thing,” Cassie said. “Your mom had Annie transferred out of County Hospital. We’re at Cedars of Lebanon now. It’s fancier or something? I
don’t know.”

Ordinarily, I would have rolled my eyes at my mother’s snobbishness—god forbid her daughter should lie in a coma at County Hospital alongside the riffraff—but when I heard the
news, I felt like cheering. Conrad thought he knew where Annie was, but thanks to my mother, we were still one step ahead of him.

“What happened to you, Alice?” Cassie asked. “Why didn’t you come back?”

“Conrad Donahue kidnapped me at the pay phone, and he and some of his goons took my father and me up to Griffith Park to…”

I trailed off, worried that Cassie would hang up on me if I started talking about movie stars again.

“It’s okay, Alice,” Cassie said. “I believe you.”

I wondered if it was wise to tell Cassie anything else. I didn’t want to worry her or put her in any more danger than I already had, but it wasn’t fair to keep the truth from her,
either. Whether she’d meant to be or not, she was in the middle of things now.

“Cassie, it
was
Conrad. He’s the one who tried to kill Annie. He had my father tied up in the trunk of his car. I thought he was going to kill us.”

I heard a hitch in Cassie’s breath.

“How’d you get away?”

“I ran,” I said. “I think my father got away, too, but I don’t know where he is now.”

“What should I tell your mother?”

“Tell her I’m on my way,” I said. “And Cassie…”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

After I hung up with Cassie, Cy said, “Let me give you a ride to the hospital.”

“Won’t you be late for work?” I asked.

“I don’t care.”

We cleaned up the kitchen first, put away the frozen peas, and gathered up the iodine-soaked cotton and the bloody hand towel to throw out.

“Why were you carrying this around?” Cy asked, holding up the old copy of the
Los Angeles Times
I’d picked up at the Red Car stop. It was spotted with blood, too.

I took the newspaper from him and folded it under my arm.

“I like to stay informed about the news of the world,” I said with a shrug.

“Even when you’re getting punched in the face?”

“Especially then.”

I followed Cy out the back door, locking up behind us, and we cut through the neighbors’ backyards until we came to the street where his car was parked. As we stepped out onto the
sidewalk, I looked up and down the block for the Rolls-Royce, but there was only one car in sight. With its battered fender and flaking paint, I knew there wasn’t a chance it belonged to
Conrad Donahue.

As we walked toward it, I thought about my father and wondered where he was right now. Was he still making his way through the brush, down the steep gravel paths to safety—or had Conrad
caught up with him?

It was a huge park, I told myself, and my father would be able to go places a car wouldn’t. But it was so dark. Even if he got away, if he got lost or hurt, he’d be all alone out
there. There was nothing I could do for him, I told myself, so it was better not to think about it. Only it wasn’t that easy.

Cy held the car door open for me, but when I started to get in, he put a hand on my shoulder.

“Wait,” he said.

I felt my body tense up. My thoughts had drifted a long way off from his kindness, off to a place where a hand on your shoulder meant you were about to get tossed into the backseat of a car.

“What?” I asked, jerking away from his touch.

His hand slipped from my shoulder, and he backed away, a hurt look on his face.

“You’re one of those nice girls, Alice. Nice house, nice things,” he said with a sad smile. “Only you’re not nice.”

When I pulled away from him, I hadn’t meant anything by it, and he hadn’t done anything wrong. But then he opened his mouth, and it was just like back at the restaurant. Once again,
he stepped just a little too close, assumed just a little more than I liked.

“How would you know?” I asked, getting into the car and slamming the door behind me.

I sat there by myself for quite a while. Cy took his time walking around to the other side of the car, and when he finally got in, he stared straight ahead without saying a word.

I was about to get out of the car and find my own way to the hospital when he turned to me.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He put the car in gear, and we pulled out into the street. He didn’t turn on the headlights until we’d pulled onto Fairfax.

“I didn’t have any business talking to you like that.”

I waited for the explanation, the “but” that would wipe out all the words before it. It never came.

“It’s okay,” I said. I thought about saying more, but decided to follow Cy’s lead and leave it at that.

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” I asked a moment later. “Before we got in the car.”

When we stopped at a red light, he turned to face me and said, “I wanted to tell you that your sister has friends. She borrows cars and goes on road trips. She throws herself birthday
parties. She still sings when she feels like it.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

“Because I don’t want you to think her life is ugly,” Cy said. “I saw your face when I told you she worked at Marty’s. I just didn’t want you to think that
was all there was to it.”

“I don’t think that,” I said, even though I knew he was right. I’d been horrified at the idea of my sister sitting in a bar and flirting with men for money. It
had
seemed ugly to me.

But it wasn’t the whole story, and I’d missed the last four years of it. Besides, nothing about Annie could ever be ugly.

But that wasn’t the only thing Cy was right about.

He barely knew me, we weren’t friends, and it was none of his business, but he’d still landed on the truth of it: I wasn’t nice. I never was. I’d pushed away the last
friend I had, hidden the truth about Annie from my mother, even though I could see she was suffering. And when a boy who’d been nothing but kind to me touched my shoulder, I flinched away
from him.

I decided to pack the last few minutes away, to move someplace a little brighter.

“Might I read to you a passage from scripture?” I asked, unfolding the newspaper and snapping the pages open. “Something from the gospel of Hedda Hopper?”

“Oh yes, please,” Cy said.

The tension that had settled in between us melted as I read him stories from the gossip column about whether Elizabeth Taylor would have to dye her hair for her upcoming role in
Little
Women
, whether a certain MGM leading lady was pregnant, and whether Mickey Rooney was ruining his career. Next, I put on a high, breathy voice and fluttered my eyelashes as I read aloud to Cy
about the many challenges facing a particularly vapid newlywed starlet.

“‘I just want to be a good wife to Bobby. I never have been the kind of girl who made many pot roasts, but, boy, I sure hope I can learn!’”

“Read another one,” Cy said, laughing as we crossed Western.

But I didn’t have it in me. My eyes had drifted back down the page to the picture of Conrad and my father and Gabrielle and the dress that Gabrielle was wearing.

“Cy, please stop the car,” I said, grabbing the dashboard as I turned to him. “I need to get out here.”

I’d seen that dress before, somewhere a party dress definitely didn’t belong.

“Are you nuts? I’m not doing that.”

“Please, Cy, it can’t wait.”

“I thought you needed to go to the hospital.”

“The hospital’s not far from here. I can walk.”

“Alice, you’re being very strange.”

“Please trust me,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it after you get off work. You can meet me at Cedars.”

“And you’ll be there?”

“I promise. Just please let me out of the car.”

Cy pulled over on Sunset Boulevard, a puzzled look on his face.

“Are you sure about this, Alice?”

I nodded, practically leaping out of the car.

“Be careful,” he called after me as I slammed the door shut.

“I will be,” I said. “I’ll see you soon, Cy.”

As soon as he pulled away from the curb, I dashed across Sunset Boulevard, thinking about a yellow chiffon dress I’d seen dancing on a clothesline.

That was why Ruth didn’t make sense.