Dead to Me (9 page)

I wasn’t sure what these women had to do with each other, what their pictures were doing in an envelope in my father’s office. When I saw the next one, I wasn’t sure I wanted
to know.

As I pulled it out of the envelope, a wave of nausea passed through my body. How old was the girl in this picture? I wondered. Thirteen? Fourteen? She had been made up to look like Jean Harlow,
reclining on a chaise longue in a platinum-blond wig and frilly underwear, but all the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the features she hadn’t grown into yet, the smile that was a
little too eager to please. Worst of all, her eyes looked glassy and unfocused, and I wondered if she’d been drunk or drugged when the photograph was taken.

What if the pictures aren’t his? I thought. What if he’s holding on to them for someone at the studio?

It didn’t help. This girl was younger than me, and her picture was in my father’s safe. He hadn’t turned it over to the police or ripped it into a hundred pieces. He’d
kept it.

I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer—I couldn’t stand to touch it. But even after I’d stuffed it back in the envelope, I couldn’t get the image of the girl out
of my head. It made me sick, knowing that a picture like that was lodged in my head, and that I’d have to carry it around with me.

And then there was the girl. I wondered where she was now, if someone was looking out for her, and then a chilling thought crossed my mind. It was bad enough that my father had her picture. What
if he knew her? What if he’d stood by and let this happen to her?

I shuddered, and pulled the last photograph out of the envelope, half afraid to look.

In for a penny, in for a pound. What else are you capable of, you rotten-hearted, sorry excuse for a father?

When I saw it, I began to get some ideas.

Because the woman in the picture was Ruth.

T
he photograph fell from my hands and drifted to the floor.

In place of the tasteful plum lipstick and plain gray shirtwaist, Ruth wore false eyelashes and black garters, but there was no denying she was the woman I’d met that afternoon.

The woman who’d tried to hand me over to Rex.

Rex, who was apparently on friendly terms with my father.

I curled up on the floor next to Annie’s bed, gripping the sheets in my fists. I buried my face in them, shutting out the light and noise of the hospital until it was just me alone with
the things I knew. Detail by detail, I forced myself through them.

My father had a picture of Ruth in his safe. Ruth knows Rex. Rex set Annie up at the Stratford Arms, but Annie found out Rex knew our father. She ran away, but it didn’t matter. Someone
tried to kill her. My father had the pictures. My father had the pictures.

The pieces didn’t fit, and they didn’t make sense.

Who took the pictures, then? Rex? My father? Was that what made Annie run away from home? Was it the reason why she got away from Rex?

I needed a decent night’s sleep, a bath, a meal, someone I could trust, a new set of parents, and cab fare. But right at that moment, what I needed most were answers.

That was what finally got me up off the floor sometime around dawn. I let go of the bedclothes, picked up the picture of Ruth, and laid it at the foot of the bed with the others. They
weren’t pleasant pictures to look at, even for a short time, though I doubted that I was their intended audience. No one who was looking even a little bit closely would have mistaken any of
them for professional jobs, much less publicity photos. The costumes and poses were lazy, the lighting was bad, the sets and backgrounds nonexistent. My brain worked to piece together what these
people had to do with one another, what their pictures were doing in my father’s safe: the woman who looked like Snow White, Camille Grabo, Ruth, and the girl.

Then I noticed something sloppy in the background of Ruth’s picture, something any photographer with half a brain would have tried to hide, and suddenly, it didn’t matter that I was
supposed to be here when Jerry arrived, or that he’d be here at any moment.

I knew exactly where I had to go next.

The receptionist at Fleming’s Fine Family Photography told me that Milton Fleming was not in. However, Milton Fleming made an annual appearance at the high schools near
Hollywood, hawking his unique photo packages—“perfect for yearbook pictures or head shots”—and while his pitch failed to invigorate my school spirit, his voice, raspy and
harsh from a lifetime of cigarette smoking, certainly left an impression. Not even the wad of phlegm lodged in his throat could keep that voice from penetrating the glass door of the back
office.

I looked over the receptionist’s shoulder, glared in the direction of the door, then back at her.

“He’s not here?”

“No, dear, I’m sorry.” She gave me a thin smile. “Perhaps I could take a message for him?”

“Yes, please,” I said, smiling back at her.

“And what would that message be, dear?”

I cleared my throat and delivered my message loudly enough that it would require no intermediary to reach Mr. Fleming.

“I WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS A SITUATION INVOLVING PHOTOGRAPHS OF A PORNOGRAPHIC NATURE TAKEN IN THIS STUDIO.”

The customers browsing in the showroom froze and turned to stare at me. One woman grabbed her child by the elbow and dragged him out of the shop. The bell hanging above the door trilled on their
way out.

“PERHAPS YOU’D LIKE TO SEE SOME OF THEM.” I started to reach into my purse, and the receptionist’s hands flew to her face.

Before she could speak, though, the office door swung open and Mr. Milton Fleming appeared, in the flesh.

“What the hell is going on out here?” he wheezed.

I nodded politely and extended my hand. “Mr. Fleming. If you have a moment, I’d like a word in your office.”

“And who the hell are you?”

“A concerned party.”

He snorted. “Concerned party, my foot. Who put you up to this?” He stepped forward and stuck a finger in my face. I held my ground and pulled the picture of the underage girl in the
pinup lingerie out of my purse.

“Who put
her
up to this?” I said, holding it up to make sure he got a good look at it.

The few remaining customers did not even attempt to conceal their eavesdropping.

“I’ve never seen that girl before in my life, and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, get the hell out of my shop before I call the cops.”

Then I took out the picture of Ruth.

“I’ve never seen her, either,” said Milton Fleming.

“Look behind her,” I said. “What do you see there? How do you explain that?”

Poring over the photographs in the hospital room, I’d been focused on the girls, looking for the clues in their faces and body language. But that’s not where the clues were. The
photographs were poorly lit and sloppily composed—the photographers had barely bothered to conceal where they were taken. In Ruth’s photograph, they hadn’t bothered at all. The
stencil on the door was nearly washed out by the spotlight that shone up from below, bathing her face in a sickly light, but I could still make out the letters, reversed in the frosted glass:

It took a moment for Mr. Fleming to see what I was pointing at, caught up as he was in the sight of a winking and scarcely clad Ruth. He gaped for a moment before suddenly remembering that he
was a respectable citizen and family man looking at dirty pictures in the presence of a minor. The moment his eyes lit on the stenciled letters, I saw his lips begin to form a protest that died in
his throat. All that came out was a long, high-pitched wheeze.

“Girly, I don’t know anything about this.” His panicked eyes met mine and begged me to believe him. I almost did.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me in close enough to whisper in my ear, “Please.”

Please?
I scowled at him.

“Please, not in front of these people, not now,” he said. “I could lose my contract with the schools, and I swear I didn’t have anything to do with this. There’s a
back door to the shop off the alley. Come back in an hour, and I promise, I’ll give you anything you want.”

“One hour,” I whispered back. The people in the store froze in place, hanging on the sight of Mr. Fleming, muttering in my ear. He nodded, gave my shoulders a shake, and gave me a
shove that looked rougher than it really was.

“Get out of here now, girly,” he bellowed, chasing me toward the door. “Next time you play a prank like that, I call the police.”

We put on a good show for them. At the last minute, I spun around and stuck out my tongue at him, then slammed the door hard behind me.

Since I had an hour to kill in the neighborhood, I found a diner around the corner from Fleming’s and helped myself to the first meal I’d had since yesterday’s breakfast. I
shouldn’t have bothered. My toast was cold and the coffee tasted vaguely of dish soap, which at least served to reassure me that the cup had been washed. I was still hungry when I finished,
but I needed to save my last few dimes for bus fare.

By the time I finished my meal, it had been close enough to an hour. As I walked down the alley behind Fleming’s Fine Family Photography, it occurred to me that Mr. Fleming might be
planning an ambush. The alley was empty, no cars or people in sight. Just to be safe, I pressed my back flat against the wall and inched along until I was standing just outside of Fleming’s.
When I peeked through the glass door, I saw Mr. Fleming sitting in a leather swivel chair, smoking, and staring daggers at a boy who sat across from him. Mr. Fleming looked too angry to speak, and
the boy looked too scared. It didn’t look like an ambush in any case, so I knocked on the back door. Mr. Fleming let me in, locked the door behind us, and closed the blinds.

“Meet my son, Alex,” he said, offering me a seat. “I believe he’s the person you want to talk to.”

Up close, I could see that Alex wasn’t much older than me. He wore his fine blond hair like a kid’s, slicked back with too much pomade, and his stark-white eyebrows made him look
perpetually surprised. He had the pale, rheumy eyes of a kitten you didn’t expect to live long—not the sort of person I imagined would do well in a criminal underworld. I took the
picture of Ruth out of my bag and put it down on the table in front of him.

“Did you take this?” I asked.

He nodded.

“For someone named Rex?” I ventured.

Again, he nodded. He picked it up, and I noticed that his hands shook. “I don’t take pictures for Rex anymore.”

Mr. Fleming sighed and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “That’s what happens, Alex. You fool with those people, and you pay the piper. You pay and you pay and you keep
paying.”

With this last sentiment, Mr. Fleming picked up his ashtray and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall near Alex’s head and shattered.

“Idiot child,” he said more quietly, and went back to his smoking, flicking the ash into a coffee cup.

Alex’s hands shook harder as he swallowed and gave me what I’m sure was the steeliest look he could manage at the moment. “What do you want?” he asked. “How
much?”

“How much
more
, you mean,” Mr. Fleming roared.

For a moment, I was tempted to play along, to continue being whoever it was that Alex and Mr. Fleming seemed to think I was. Because it was someone who terrified them, someone to whom they would
have given up anything, information or cash. Maybe they deserved it, but I didn’t think there was any joy to be had in terrorizing the school photographer and his son.

“I’m not after your money,” I said.

“Then who sent you?” Mr. Fleming asked.

“Nobody sent me,” I said, taking the picture back from Alex. “But I need information. I need to know where these came from.”

Mr. Fleming looked skeptical, but Alex swallowed and nodded.

He explained that he’d been taking pictures of sunbathers and bodybuilders at Venice Beach for his portfolio when Rex approached him and asked if he’d like to make a little extra
money. Rex asked if Alex had his own studio, and being eighteen and proud, Alex passed off his father’s business card as his own. Soon they had an arrangement, and Rex started bringing girls
by after the studio had closed.