Love Comes Calling (20 page)

O
h, I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.” I did a quick dance around the Phillipses' parlor as I hummed the song later that evening. I'd come over to make sure Griff didn't go out anywhere. “She shimmies like a jelly on a plate . . .” I'd decided to do a dance for my auditions in Hollywood, as well as a reading. I hadn't decided on a scene yet, though. In fact, I was thinking I might write a scene for myself. I wanted something that would let me use my talent for crying real tears.

I backed up to the divan in order to try the dance again.

But then I paused. The divan. A divan might be just the thing. . . . I slipped out of my shoes, stepped over the arm, and arranged myself on top of the cushions in a languid pose. Or maybe . . . I put my wrist up to my forehead. That was better. I would look ever so much more pitiful that way. Maybe I could pretend to be an invalid. I almost started crying at the thought of it: my whole life ahead of me and nowhere to go. How terrible! I nearly started crying real tears for real. But maybe I shouldn't be quite so pitiful after all. Maybe . . .
maybe I could just
pretend
to be pretending to be an invalid. I could vamp it up a bit in that case. I turned onto my side and put my palm beneath my chin. Tried fluttering my eyelashes. That was better. I could be helpless
and
seductive that way.

“Would you please stop, Ellis?”

I looked up to find Griff watching me. But instead of the frown I expected, he was looking at me rather . . . strangely.

“Sorry.”

“It's just . . . I would much rather take you out somewhere than be stuck in here going through these numbers.”

“Can I do something?” Besides trying to keep him from being murdered?

“No. Yes . . . maybe.”

Which was it? I got to my feet and did another shimmy while I waited for him to decide.

He slammed the book shut and threw down his pencil. It hit the tabletop, then vaulted through the air, landing tip first on the carpet.

I did the Charleston over to the pencil and picked it up. Then I did a foxtrot over to the table and set it down in front of him.

He sighed as he picked it up. “I just wonder if this is really worth it.”

I dropped into a chair beside him.

“One of the fellows on the commission presented his evidence yesterday to try to get an arrest warrant for one of the mayor's assistants. We had everything we needed—more than we needed—and the judge wouldn't even read it. Refused to look at it. So does it really matter if I can prove what the
mayor's done? The police and the judges and the councilmen are all on his side.”

I thought about all those people I'd seen at the speakeasy drinking liquor, breaking the law, and loving every minute of it. “Maybe people are tired of being told what to do and what to think all the time. Maybe the laws don't make any sense.”

“But how can it make sense to appoint liars to the government and cheats to the state bench? It's as if . . . right has become wrong and wrong has become right.”

“It can't be that bad.”

“It
is
that bad. It's worse. Why bother to have laws at all?”

“If that's the way you feel, then of course your work is worth it.” I pulled the book from his hand, opened it back up, and shoved it under his long face. “If people keep electing the crooks, then you have to tell them why they ought to stop. If you think it makes a difference, then show people why.”

“
You
agree with me, don't you?”

“I think I do.” I did, didn't I? “It's just that . . . you can't really force people to do what you want them to, can you? Even if it is for their own good.” The talk of laws and morality was just plain dull, and it looked as if it was depressing as well. At least to Griff. “So . . . what are your plans for the summer? Other than working with all these numbers?”

“I don't really have any.”

“None?” But those men had been clear about doing whatever it was they had planned out in the open in order to send a message. What had they said? . . .
“In plain sight of everybody so there's
no mistake about it
.
”
So they weren't just going to drive up here to Beacon Hill and kidnap him. They were going to do something in front of a bunch of people. That
meant they had to know something about Griff's plans, which I didn't. “What about . . . the Fourth of July?”

He shrugged.

“You're not doing
anything
this summer?”

He tapped his pencil against the table. “I get to cut the ribbon at the hospital opening next week.”

That didn't sound very exciting. “Why?”

He shrugged. “It's a memorial for Mother.”

That wasn't any grand thing that would have lots of people attending. “What else are you doing?”

“Working. And sleeping. And pretty soon I'll start football practice.”

Football practice and cutting hospital ribbons? “There has to be something else.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Because? “Because . . . you're Prince Phillips for goodness' sake! And the captain of the football team ought to be out more.” Or
not
! I wasn't supposed to be encouraging his going out. That would only make it easier for him to be murdered. Normally I'd be pleased he was so boring, except that he had to be doing
something
out where everyone could see him, because apparently that was the plan. Otherwise, I'd been mistaken about everything.

As I left Central the next evening, Jack was waiting on the sidewalk, which was perfect because I was hoping maybe I could slip the name James McDonnell of Tremont-4577 into our conversation. That was the man who belonged to the telephone number, and he lived just a couple blocks up on Milford Street.

“I thought we could go back to the North End this evening.” He started off down the sidewalk in the direction of the elevated railway station.

The North End? I caught up with him. “I thought you didn't want to be seen with me.”

He glanced over at me. “I changed my mind.”

“What if I have other plans?” Plans that didn't include falling-down drunks and billowing clouds of cigarette smoke?

“Do you?”

“No, but—”

“Then let's go.”

“How come we always do what you want to do?”

“Because I'm paying, and I'm supposed to keep an eye on you. And besides, a fellow deserves to have a drink now and then. And . . . I'm a little bit worried about things.”

I stopped walking.

It took him a few steps to realize I wasn't beside him. Once he did, he turned around. “You're not coming?”

“I can't stay past eight.”

“But the party doesn't even start till ten, baby!”

“The last time, I had to sneak back into the house. And . . . I don't want my mother to worry.” Because she
would
worry if she ever found out.

He raised his hands. “Fine.”

Forty minutes later, I was regretting my decision. It had taken some quick thinking to send the car back home without Jack realizing what I was doing, and now that we were at the speakeasy, there hadn't been even one minute when I didn't
have to yell to be heard. It was no good trying to carry on a conversation with him. “Tell me again why we're here.”

“To have a good time.” He yelled the words at me.

A waiter brought Jack a coffee cup, and he downed whatever was in it. Then he leaned back against his chair and loosened his necktie. What was it about liquor that made everyone want to part with their clothing? It didn't seem decent.

“Ellis!”

I moved my chair closer to Jack's and tried to hide behind those big, broad shoulders of his.

“Yoo-hoo! Ellis Eton!”

Jack poked my arm with his elbow. “Looks like your friend's here again.”

Sounded like it too.

“Ellis!” Irene lunged forward and tried to kiss my cheek. She missed. But she did manage to splash whatever she was drinking all over the front of my dress. And of course it had to be a deep golden amber color.

“Sorry.” She pulled a napkin from the table and tried to blot it up, but only succeeded in stumbling against the table, sending Jack's cup skidding to the floor. “Sorry.” Bending to reach for it, she over-stretched and then collapsed, giggling, onto the floor.

I got up and reached down to lend her a hand.

She grasped it and then pulled me right down on top of her.

“Irene!”

“Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She snickered as she tried to push me away.

I rolled off her and pushed to my feet, giving her my hand.

She reached right past it, then tried again. “Stop moving, Ellis.”

“I'm not!”

Ignoring my offer of help, she got on all fours and then grasped at the back of my chair and pulled herself up. She started to leave, but couldn't seem to make her feet go in the right direction.

“Honestly, you shouldn't drink so much! Do you want some help?”

She tried to brush my hand from her arm, but she missed again and ended up pawing at the air beside it. “Don't need any help, thank you.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Fine as a—fit as a—” Some hairs had gotten caught in her lipstick, and she tried to blow them away. It didn't work. She finally took an angry swipe at them. “I'm fine.”

She didn't seem to be, but she'd brushed off all my offers of help and I didn't want to risk her convincing Jack I really was Ellis Eton. I watched her lurch from table to table until she disappeared into the crowd.

L
ater, as I was headed toward the entrance, I ran into Irene again. She was standing by the door, her face an alarming shade of gray.

“Irene? Are you okay?”

“Ellis?” Her eyes nearly rolled back into her head as she looked at me.

I put an arm around her shoulders as she swayed.

“I don't—don't feel—Ellis? My head's not right.” Her knees buckled as I tried to keep her on her feet.

“Jack!”

I wasn't strong enough to hold her up on my own. I tried to shake some sense into her, but she began to slip from my grasp. “Help me—somebody!”

There was no pause in the drinking or the laughter or the music.

“Jack!”

Nobody came. Nobody even noticed.

I pulled her to my chest, wrapped my arms around her, and just tried to hang on.

“Ellis?”

“It's all right, Irene. Everything's going to be fine.”

“Always wished—always wished I were you.”

At the moment I would have collapsed from her weight, Jack appeared and lifted her from my arms. I followed him out through the door and up the stairs.

“We have to do something!”

He set her down on the curb. “She probably drank some bad gin. Best thing to do is let her sleep it off.”

“Irene?” I squatted next to her. As Jack let go of her, she slumped forward toward the street.

I tried to push her back and prop her up, but she kept falling over. I looked up at Jack. “Do something!”

“What do you want me to do?” Jack was backing away toward the speakeasy steps.

“Call the police. Get an ambulance—” Something!

“First of all, I am the police. Second, we can't ask the ambulance to come here.”

Irene's eyes weren't opening, she wasn't talking. In fact, she hadn't moved at all. “Jack, she's not waking up!”

“Oh, come on—” He took her by the shoulders, lifted her up, and shook her. The toe of one of her shoes got caught in a crack on the sidewalk and came off. “Hey—!” He gave her another shake. “What's her name again?”

“Irene.”

“Hey—Irene! You got to wake up now.”

Her head lolled to her chest.

Jack bent and set her on the ground, letting her fall onto her side. Then he grabbed me by the arm and tried to haul
me off down the street, but I wasn't going anywhere. “We can't just leave her here!”

He kept walking, although he did slow down long enough to turn and talk to me. “If she's really dead, she won't care.”

“Dead! What are you saying?”

“She's not breathing, baby.”

“She's just—she's—she's sleeping! She's going to wake up; she just needs more time. And we can't leave her, because when she wakes up, she's bound to wonder how she got to the sidewalk, and if we aren't here to explain, then—”

“Trust me, eventually someone will call an ambulance, and you don't want to be here when it comes. They'll ask a whole bunch of questions you really won't want to answer. And then the newspapers will catch wind of it, and then the reporters will come. . . .”

“So you just—you're just going to leave her here?”

“Best thing to do.
Only
thing to do.”

“Well, I'm not going. I'm staying right here!”

“You can't.”

I sat down beside her. “Just watch me.”

He swore and walked back to us. “Fine. But I'm warning you: If she's found in front of the club, they'll shut it down for sure.”

“I don't care what they do. I'm not leaving.”

“I can't stay.”

“Then go.”

As he walked off down the street, I sat next to Irene and cradled her head in my lap. She couldn't be dead. She wasn't. Any minute she was going to wake up and ask me where the party was. And then I'd tell her what I thought about places
like that speakeasy, and she'd sigh with a frown and probably ask me to find her a cigarette. And sooner than you knew, next autumn we'd be back at the dormitory together, laughing about all of this, because she wasn't going to be mean next year. We were going to be friends again. I smoothed the skirt of her dress down over her knees.

That's where the ambulance found us: sitting on a curb.

Two men got out and took her from me, placing her on a stretcher.

“Is she . . . ?” I couldn't finish the sentence.

“She's dead.”

They pulled a blanket up over her face. Once they drove off, Jack came back and sat down beside me. He took my hand into his.

Twisting away from him, I pulled it from his grasp.

“I called the ambulance from a shop down the street.” He put a hand to my cheek. “Listen, baby, something I learned in the war: When someone throws a grenade into your trench, the best thing is not to be there when it explodes.”

“I don't think she was breathing.”

“It happens sometimes. You drink too much. You get a bad batch. Something goes wrong.”

“You don't think she . . . she's not
really
dead, is she? I don't think she is . . . I'm pretty certain . . . I mean . . .”

He sighed, took my hand, and pulled me to standing. “Let's get you home.”

I pushed at him. “I don't want to go home with you.” When he wouldn't leave, I beat at him with my fists. “Go away!”

He didn't budge. “Someone's got to take you home.”

When I turned and started walking away down the street, I could hear him following me.

Irene was dead. She really, truly was. She'd been alive just two hours ago and then she'd—she'd died. She'd practically died in my arms. No . . . not practically. That's what she'd actually done. She'd died as I was holding on to her. I was the last person she'd ever talked to, the last person she'd ever seen. I was the person she'd wanted to be. She'd wanted to be
me
. But—but—why?
I
didn't even want to be me. Especially not now. Not anymore.

Jack slipped his suit jacket over my shoulders.

In spite of the fact I didn't want him anywhere near me, I nestled into the warmth of his jacket, drawing the sleeves up around me.

“You're shivering.”

I was? But it was summer. I opened my mouth to try to deny it, but my teeth wouldn't stop clattering together.

“Here.” He came forward, wrapped one of his big, strong arms around my shoulders, and pulled me to his side. “Poor little bunny.”

“She-she-she . . .” Why couldn't I talk? Why was I crying? What was the matter with me?

“She's dead. She died, all right?”

It wasn't all right. It would never be all right. People didn't just—just—
die
!

“Sometimes things happen, and you can't help it. You can't do anything about it, and you can't stop it. Sometimes people just die.”

Not from drinking! “You're a policeman. And you were
there too, right along with them, breaking the law the whole time.” There ought to be something wrong with that.

“It's a law I don't believe in.”

“It shouldn't matter! Because that's your job: to make people obey the law.”

“And how am I going to do that, baby? There's one of me and there's . . .” He craned his neck as he looked up and down the street. “There must have been a hundred people in the club. At least.”

“You just . . .” I moved away from his embrace and looked down at his waist. “You take that gun and . . .”

He put a hand on it as if fearing I might do that very thing. “No one but a gangster pulls a gun on anyone. Even in the war there were things you just didn't do.”

“There. See? Rules. And you obeyed them, right?”

“Well . . . no. Not all of them. Because there were a lot of stupid generals in Washington and a brand-new Joe College in charge who didn't know hooch from a haircut trying to tell us what to do. So we saluted, stepped lively, and did what we had to.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it with a trembling hand. “But you didn't live very long if you didn't look out for yourself.” He took a long draw on the cigarette and exhaled. “Who's got the right to tell me what to do anyway? And what's the harm in a drink or two? Why should I stop anyone from having a good time?”

“A good time?”

He took another draw as he looked around. “What would you have wanted me to say to all those people in there anyway? ‘Shame on you. You shouldn't be drinking that stuff'?”

I wasn't quite sure what I would have wanted him to say.
Or what I would have wanted him to have done. I'd never really thought about laws before. Not until Griff had started talking about his numbers. I'd always just . . . obeyed them.

“Baby, they'd laugh right in my face. Half of them are older than I am. Besides, who am I to tell anyone else what to do?”

“You're the policeman!” And if
he
didn't, then who would? “What about—what about all those people who get shot by gangsters? Like in—like in Chicago?”

“What about them? Gotta hope they died happy, doing exactly what they wanted to do.”

“Irene wasn't.” She might have been doing what she'd wanted to do, but she hadn't been happy.

“You didn't kill her.”

“But I was there.”

“And thank goodness. Did you ever think of that? Maybe that's the best thing that could have happened. If you weren't there, who would've been?”

I thought about that for a minute, but then realized he was just trying to be nice. “She wanted to be me. Did you know that? That's what she said.”

“People say lots of things when they're dying and—”

“Don't you dare say they don't mean them! If you only had a few words left to say, why wouldn't you want them to be the truth?” Why wouldn't you? “But . . . why would she want to be me?”

“Living up there on Beacon Hill with all those rich people? Who wouldn't want to be you?”

Me, that's who!

“People always want what they don't have.”

Irene had wanted to be me, and I wanted to be a Hollywood movie star.

“Listen, baby, it's tough luck—but if people make choices, then they have to live with the consequences.” He flicked the cigarette away and then held out his hand toward me.

“But what about me?” I couldn't stop my chin from trembling. “How do
I
live with the consequences?” I didn't drink and I obeyed the law, but it hadn't stopped Irene from dying in my arms.

He took me by the hand, but I pulled it from his grasp. “Don't touch me.”

He held up his hands. “Fine. I won't touch you. But you can't blame me for any of this. She knew what she was doing.”

Had she, though? Had she really known it would end like this? “You didn't even know her.”

He shrugged, then stuffed his hands into his pockets. “If a bullet's got your name on it, no use trying to dodge it.”

“This is not the war! She didn't have to die.” There were no bullets and no trenches and no stupid generals. There was just . . . jazz music and cigarette smoke and crowds of laughing people. And none of those were supposed to get you killed.

“Listen. You're in a war, you survive, you come back, and you figure you got to take whatever you can get, whatever way you can get it. Life's a gamble. One day you're here and the next? . . . you're gone.”

“That's it? That's all you're going to say?”

“Come on. Let's go home.”

“This is not about you or your wars or your—your dumb luck! It's about Irene and how she still ought to be alive.”

“I'm not saying—”

“Or maybe it
is
about you and how you're supposed to be this great cop, this hero, and you know what? You're not! You're just a—just a man who doesn't have the courage to do what's right. So I don't want you, Jack Feeney. I don't want to speak to you, I don't want to see you, I don't want you to take me anywhere ever again.”

“All right. Fine. Just keep your nose out of my business, and it's been good talking to you.”

I tossed his jacket back at him.

He caught it. “Just—take care of yourself.”

Take care of myself. I guess I'd have to if the police department was filled with cops like him. It was every man—and woman and child—for himself. Or herself. I was on my own.