Dead to Me (25 page)

T
alking with Cy made me feel like I had some kind of electric current buzzing through my veins. It kept me alert, kept me upright. By the time his
taillights disappeared around the corner, though, I could feel all of it drain away. I walked toward Cedars of Lebanon in a daze, the task before me suddenly too large to manage on my own. I
couldn’t search an entire hospital for Gabrielle. All I wanted was to pull a cot up next to Annie’s bed and snuggle in next to her. I’d close my eyes and drift off and think about
a future where all the things I wanted came true—everyone safe and well and happy and together. Everyone who deserved it, anyway.

But as soon as I opened the door and stepped into the hospital lobby, I knew I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep.

A crowd of reporters and photographers huddled around the pay phones and paced cagily around the lobby, snapping photographs and shouting punchy, over-caffeinated questions at a stocky nurse,
who shouted back and shooed them away from the desk. I waded into the crowd and tugged at the sleeve of the least agitated-looking of the reporters.

“What’s going on?”

He was no taller than I was, but twice as wide, and his knees seemed to bend inward under his bulk. A light brown fringe of hair ringed his head, and he had craggy red skin, heavily veined. He
wore an
LA EVENING HERALD & EXPRESS
press pass in his breast pocket.

“Conrad Donahue was admitted this morning. Statement says he ‘shot himself’ in the leg ‘while he was cleaning his gun,’” he said, rolling his eyes. “I
thought I might actually get to write a real story today.”

“Conrad Donahue is
here
?” I asked. “What room is he in?”

Last night in Griffith Park, I’d seen my father go for Rex’s gun, and as I ran away with my hands tied behind my back, I’d heard a gunshot. I’d been worried about whether
my father was dead or alive—it had never occurred to me that the bullet might have struck someone else, that the fine spray of blood across the front of Hanrahan’s shirt might belong to
Conrad Donahue.

And now Donahue was here, in the same building as Annie and Cassie and my mother. My blood ran cold.

The reporter took my gape-mouthed surprise for that of a star-struck girl and chuckled. “Don’t get any wild ideas. They’re not letting anyone near him.”

The nurse muscled the crush of reporters back, wielding her clipboard like a shield. It was a madhouse. What they needed right about now was for someone at Insignia Pictures to issue a press
release. Give the reporters a nibble—a decent, if watery, quote—and they’d go away happy. Too bad Conrad hadn’t thought of that before he locked up the head of publicity at
Insignia Pictures in the trunk of his car.

“I’m not going to
do
anything,” I said. “I’m here to see my sister.”

“Well, then he’s somewhere on the fourth floor, I think. That’s where all the private rooms are.”

I thanked the reporter and shoved my way through the sea of notepads and patched tweed sleeves until I reached the front desk.

“What room is Annie Gates in?” I asked the nurse at reception. “She would have come in last night with my mother and another girl.”

The nurse studied her clipboard and gave me a room number on the third floor. Then I saw her expression turn skeptical as she asked, “Who’s your friend?”

When I looked over my shoulder, I saw the
Herald
reporter standing two steps behind me, his press badge and notepad hidden away in a pocket, and the grave look of a hospital visitor
dashed across his face.

“He’s nobody,” I said, then backtracked as the nurse’s lips pursed in mistrust. “I mean, he’s my uncle. We’re here to see Annie.”

Why not, I thought as she waved us through the door. Most of the reporters in that waiting room would have told me to get lost. Besides, I wasn’t feeling particularly respectful of
Conrad’s privacy, and it couldn’t hurt to have a reporter who owed me a favor.

“That was swell of you,” he said, huffing a little as we wound our way up the stairwell. “You like movie stars?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Me neither.”

He paused on the landing, and I waited with him as he struggled to catch his breath. Then I had an idea.

“Did you hear about the police officers who got shot this morning?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“If you want to write a real news story, see if you can get someone to compare the slug in Conrad Donahue’s leg to the ones they pulled out of those officers this morning. I bet
anything you’ll get a match.”

He knitted his brow as my words sank in, then grinned nervously.

“Do you know what you’re saying, kid? How can you know something like that?”

“Just do it,” I said, ignoring his indulgent smirk. “You won’t be sorry.”

The smile faded as he pulled the notepad out of his jacket pocket.

“It’s not every day I see a schoolgirl with a shiner like that,” he said. “I’m going to guess you didn’t get it in a car accident.”

“Not even close,” I said.

We parted ways at the top of the stairs, the reporter looking back over his shoulder at me, wary and puzzled. My fingers twitched with adrenaline at having told a stranger so much, so
carelessly. They shook as I opened the door to Annie’s floor and started down the hall.

It was too quiet, too dim. At the County Hospital the floor had buzzed with activity, so even in the middle of the night you never felt totally alone, but here, something felt wrong.

Cedars of Lebanon was shaped like a V, with rooms extending down each wing. I stood at the center of the V, snaking my neck around the corner to examine the area near Annie’s room. The
stairwell door glided shut, its latch catching on the jamb before closing with a soft click.

A second later, there were two men coming down the hall, one of them wearing a police uniform, the other in blue polka-dot suspenders. I gasped and turned down the other wing, not quite walking,
not quite running. I skated along the floor, moving so that the hard soles of my shoes did not clatter against the tile, and tried the first door I came to.

It opened into a dark room with the sharp chemical whiff of a hospital supply closet. I closed the door behind me and dropped to the floor. It was too dark to see, but sitting in what I judged
to be the middle of the closet, I could feel a concrete floor that stretched about three feet in any direction before giving way to flimsy metal shelves lined with bottles, bedpans, gauze, and
rags. I crawled toward the darkest, farthest corner of the closet, careful not to send anything crashing to the floor. My hand grazed a bottle, a metal grate, a pile of rags.

No, I thought. It was too solid and too warm to be a pile of rags. I squinted into the darkness, and the outlines of things slipped into focus. A mop of hair, sharp features, and big, round
eyes, just like I’d seen in the picture in my father’s safe, the picture from the
Los Angeles Times
.

“You,” I said.

I didn’t flinch away from the rag she waved in front of my face. It was a supply closet, after all, and it was just a rag.

As the rough fibers brushed against my lips and nose, though, I caught a whiff of something acrid and sweet. I knew something was wrong, but by then, it was already too late. My body slumped to
the floor.

W
hen I opened my eyes, I heard a small raspy voice whispering in my ear, “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

“Gabrielle,” I mumbled, still woozy from whatever she had doused on that rag.

I heard a rustle of skirts as she crawled around to the side of my body before taking my hand and helping me sit up.

“Thank god you’re all right,” she said. “I’m sorry I knocked you out. I didn’t know it was you.”

Rubbing at my aching temples, I accepted her apology.

“What happened to your face?” she asked, tossing a head full of ratty black curls so they fell in front of her eyes.

The only light in the room fell across the floor in three thin strips through vents near the bottom of the door, but it was enough to get a good look at her, now that I knew who I was looking
at.

She had the same small face, the same pointed chin, the same dark eyes I’d seen in the pictures, now alert and staring with undisguised curiosity. She looked more like a bratty kid than a
pinup girl, and I couldn’t imagine how she’d come this far, gotten this lost, without someone taking her by the elbow and marching her straight home, possibly stopping to feed her a
sandwich on the way.

I wanted to keep my face neutral—she must have been looking for a reason to run, a reason to decide I wasn’t worth trusting. Unfortunately, my insides were feeling anything but
neutral. Had she intended for me to find her here? Had she been followed? Now that I’d finally found her, what was I supposed to do next?

The cut under my eye had opened again, and the skin around it was raised and sticky. The other side of my face was less damaged, but lopsided from the swelling in my jaw. Even the lightest touch
made me wince in pain.

“Conrad?” she asked.

“How did you guess?”

“Rex would have hit you somewhere it didn’t show.”

It sounded so wrong to hear those words coming out of her mouth. Maybe we were only two or three years apart, but it felt like more.

“Did you know he was here?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Annie told me, ‘If something goes wrong, find me and I’ll take care of you.’ I got so lost. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So
that’s what I did.”

“How long have you been hiding here?”

“Not long,” she said. “I went to County Hospital first, but they wouldn’t tell me where she was. I pretended to leave, then I hid around the corner from the nurses’
station until I heard someone tell an orderly to clean the room where the girl who got moved to Cedars had been so they could put someone else in it.

“I wasn’t sure it was her at first, but they kept talking. They were arguing about how she got all beat up like that, and why the girl and the detective who’d been visiting her
didn’t bother calling her mother. It was pretty clear who they were talking about then.”

“So you came here,” I said.

Gabrielle nodded. “I can’t get close to her room, though. There’s police everywhere.”

“Conrad’s looking for you. They all are,” I said. “And Annie still hasn’t woken up.”

Gabrielle said, “But you’re here now.”

I rubbed my temples, wincing in pain.

“I don’t see how that does us any good. I’m stuck in here just like you are.”

Gabrielle was insistent. “Annie told me about you. She said you were smart, that if I didn’t have anywhere else to go, I could go to you.”

Really? I thought. Why would Annie tell Gabrielle a thing like that, steering her away from older, smarter people who might have helped her?

“Me?” I asked.

“I didn’t know where else to turn,” Gabrielle said, hugging her knees to her chest.

Well, that made two of us.

While I nursed my ether hangover, Gabrielle told me everything that had happened. Everything.

She’d only had a few seconds to hide before she heard the door open. It had been Ruth, and she’d run straight for the bedroom. A minute later, Rex came running after her. She knew
they’d be looking for whatever Millie had hidden in the lockbox under Irma’s bed, saw her chance, and bolted out the door and down the hall to the fire escape.

Millie had shown her the spot where the boards came up the first night Gabrielle stayed there. It was two nights after she met Irma, one month after the day she met Rex, and sixty-four days
after the afternoon her mother threw all her clothes onto the front lawn and told her not to bother bringing them back inside.

“I lived at the YWCA until I ran out of money. After that, I stayed at a hotel and got a job doing dishes, but the whole place was infested with rats and cockroaches. I used to sleep with
my shoe in my hand so I could whack them with it if they got too close.”

When she saw the ad for the modeling agency, she’d answered it, and when the man on the phone asked when she could come in, she’d said now. The man on the phone met her at the
agency, told her his name was Rex. He offered her a seat and a glass of lemonade with vodka in it, and told her she was cute enough to eat. Gabrielle let him take her picture.

“He was creepy, but he wasn’t the worst one. He looked me in the eye when he talked and he didn’t touch me except to shake my hand,” she said.

The third night, Rex said she was pretty enough to be in the movies. Gabrielle had her doubts. She was gawky and skinny-legged, with unruly hair and feet so big she had to have her shoes
specially made. But then he showed her the pictures he’d taken the day before, and they almost took her breath away. Rex had somehow caught all the flaws in her face and turned them into her
best points. Her pointy chin looked striking, her too-big eyes were hypnotizing, even her messy hair fell around her face like one of the maidens in a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

“I showed some of these around,” he’d said. “People liked your face, but they said you looked too young.”

Since Gabrielle had been out on her own, she’d noticed that there was always a moment in conversations with people who wanted something from you. And up to that moment, you could walk away
whenever you wanted without feeling as though you’d been rude or stuck-up or led someone on. And after that moment, it became almost impossible to walk away at all, no matter how badly you
wanted to. After that moment, it was too late.