The Secret Life of Anna Blanc (33 page)

Because time was of the essence, she couldn't wait for Joe to decide. She kissed him. She kissed him again with her whole, open mouth, the way he had taught her to do. Her kiss burned with all the intensity of their situation and all the passion required to overcome it—her imminent marriage, his duet with the piano girl, the fact that she would never see him again, his certain death if Edgar were to find out, and a bearded lady just outside the dressing room.

Joe pulled back. The old, familiar hostility clouded his eyes. “Are you sure you want to associate with a lowly policeman?”

Anna would have blushed, but she was pink already. “Yes,” she said. “I do. I really do.” And she did. She slipped her soft, bare arms around his neck and kissed him again. He reached down and ran his hand along her silky, stockinged calf. It set off fireworks in her nether parts like it was Independence Day.

It occurred to her, as she slipped her petticoats higher, that her tactic might have backfired. Joe showed no interest in the crime scene whatsoever. Instead, he unhitched her garter, stripped off her stocking, and began kissing his way from her bare toes up her softly downed leg. She had lost interest in the crime scene herself and was making little whimpering sounds.

But this was her last chance to help solve a murder before disappearing
into a world of too-tight corsets and knitting circles. He left a cool trail on her skin and she shivered. “You'll go to the crime scene?”

“Um hum.” He kissed a little bit higher.

Her breath caught and she wrapped her fingers in his silky hair. “You promise?”

“Um hum.”

By his own testimony, Joe always did what he said he would do. If this were true, regrettably, her mission was accomplished. She allowed him one final kiss, and one more to be sure she had secured his cooperation, and one for good measure…

She lost count.

She was drowning in him, being swept away in his manly deliciousness. “Stop.” She whispered without conviction.

Joe stopped.

She felt a sinking disappointment. He was holding her leg in midair, his lips pressed to the inside of her knee, just below the embroidered ruffle of her French drawers. He calmly set her leg down and smoothed her three petticoats over it. He smiled his crooked, dimpled “Anna's lover” smile and it turned her insides to liquid.

Anna squeaked. “Oh, don't stop.”

In a flash, he was kissing her mouth and her neck with his warm, talented lips, kissing every inch of her skin not swathed in whalebone or lace, down to the very edge of her corset. He made her skin cool and electric and her nether parts sizzle. He made the mirror steam up.

Even as she felt for his Arrow shirt suit, Anna tried a silent prayer to Mary Magdalene, patron saint of tempted women. “Holy smoke” was the best prayer she could muster as she felt his hand caress her bottom through three petticoats and a pair of two-piece drawers.

Unlike God, who was currently
not
on her side, the Magdalene could relate to Anna's situation and heard her feeble prayer. Anna felt a temporary surge of virtue, as if born up on the wings of angels. She murmured into his sweet, open mouth, “Stop.”

He stopped.

Joe slowly extricated himself from her lips and the tangle of her
rosy limbs. He was flushed, his hair mussed, his eyes heavy. Her breath was ragged, her lips bee-stung, and her loosened corset had started to rotate sideways.

He sat against the far wall of the dressing room, breathing. “I love you.”

Anna's heart fell, spooking the angels. They flew off and her virtue evaporated. She lunged for him.

He gathered her against him and kissed her like he meant it, like he loved her, like there was no piano girl. She arched up against him like a love-crazed nymph. “Stop…don't stop,” she said, and he didn't.

He made her more breathless than the corset. Her head was spinning. The clock was ticking. Soon the body would be gone, the evidence with it, and the murders would never be solved. But she could not stick to her resolution for more than a second. Not with his body sliding on her body, and his voltaic skin only three and a half blessed layers of fabric away from her own. Not when he was chewing through her corset, and her heart was falling, falling, falling.

She needed more than a moment of self-control. She needed reinforcements. She needed them now. And so, Anna did what any girl would do if they found themselves in a similar situation, needing to tear herself from the arms of a delicious policeman so that he could solve a crime.

She screamed. “Miss Baumgartner!”

Joe winced as her banshee cry tore through his eardrum. He stared at her for a second, incredulous and betrayed, then narrowed his eyes and dashed out of the dressing room. Anna peeked after him. He streaked past the bearded lady, using clothing racks for cover, his shirt entirely untucked, the front of his trousers popped out like an army tent. He dodged round the other mannish chaperone and left ladies' furnishings being chased by a security guard. It was to be, so she thought with a pang in her heart, her last glimpse of him—Officer Joe Singer, the man she liked even more intensely than before, and whom, if she were a more foolish girl, one tossed about by passion, she might think she loved.

Anna looked into the mirror. She was rosy everywhere. Her hair was unkempt, her corset ruined, and she had bruises on her neck that she didn't recall getting. She leaned up against the dressing room wall and burped. She giggled at the burp, and burped again. She giggled uncontrollably. Her waves of giggles swelled into unrestrained belly laughs, her belly laughs into a tidal wave of whoops and snorts. Her whole body shook. She slid down onto the floor, her bare legs splayed out into the show room, shaking, shaking. She had been pushed to her limit. She was finally there. Joe Singer had made her hysterical.

Miss Baumgartner called a doctor. When Anna had been treated and lay glowing on a fainting couch in a private room at Hamburger's, Officer Wolf came in to take her statement. Given the sensitive nature of the interview, Anna had said she would speak with no one else.

“We found her hysterical on the floor of the dressing room, ready for the giggle-giggle ward,” Miss Baumgartner said. “There were bruises. Her clothing was ripped. She wasn't…She…she was in her underwear.”

Anna leaned forward, her expression intense. “He was a little man.” She held her palm high in the air. “In a sombrero. A hunchback. With wild red hair, a long beard and…a monocle.”

Miss Baumgartner's square jaw tensed. “She may have hallucinated, Officer.”

Another chaperone stepped up to help. “He looked to me like that man from the music store.”

Anna shook her head so hard her cheeks wobbled and her comb slipped sideways. “Impossible! That man was the police chief's son. He's so handsome. I would have noticed if he were in my dressing room.”

Wolf had his pen poised to take notes, but at this he set it down and smiled.

While Anna was being treated for hysteria, Hamburger's security guard hunted Joe like a beagle on a fox. Joe jumped fences, hid in smelly privies, raced through yards with hostile dogs nipping at his heels. The whole time, he wondered how he would explain this to his father, should he be caught, and how much time he'd be spending with Ernest, the jailer.

When Joe lost the guard on Second Street he had sweat stains under his arms and shit on his boots. He felt humiliated. His hat was smashed, and he had the worst case of sore balls in the history of love.

He boarded a tram and eased himself onto the seat. He was finished, done with Anna Blanc's doe-eyed love-in-the-name-of-the-law. He wouldn't kiss her again for love or the law, not to catch Jack the Ripper.

At New High Street he yanked the bell cord, pulled the rim of his smashed hat down over his eyes, and flipped up his Arrow shirt collar. He stepped off the trolley and kept his head down. His tongue was dry. His temples ran with sweat. He longed for some liquid comfort, but he couldn't stop to buy a drink. If a cop saw Joe anywhere near the brothels, he would arrest him on the order of the police chief, even though Joe only went to play piano. He'd been caught twice playing Madam Lulu's baby grand—the best in the city apart from Anna's. As much as he liked the jailer, he didn't relish the idea of spending another two weeks in a cell.

Joe skulked up New High Street and down Marchessault, past Canary Cottage and the Octoroon, where the mulatto girls plied their trade. He doubled back to Commercial, sneaking past the Poodle Dog, the Municipal, and the other parlor houses. He wandered the Plaza, near where the Chinese and Italians lived, Alameda, Arcadia, and Ferguson Alley,
past doped up whores in brick boxes with their vacuous, staring eyes, and the young Chinese girls in brothels with barred windows. He found no sign of any suicide or murder. Anna had sent him on a potentially disastrous wild-goose chase.

Joe returned to the safe side of town, feeling relieved. He didn't think he'd been spotted. He made a wide circle around Hamburger's and bumped into Wolf, who was sauntering down First Street.

Wolf hailed him with enthusiasm. “Hey Officer Singer, keep an eye out for a bearded, red-haired, hump-backed, monocled midget who crawled into Miss Blanc's dressing room at Hamburger's today wearing a sombrero.”

Joe spit out the words. “Why would I care?”

Wolf put his arm around Joe. “Because she was very clear that it was
not
you.”

Half of Joe's face contracted. “Do I look like a bearded, red-haired, hump-back…whatever? I don't even own a sombrero.”

“You know, that's what she said. Said you're too handsome to be her assailant.”

Joe raised his hands. “So?”

“She wouldn't say what he did, but he left her in absolute hysterics. Had to call the doctor. If I ever find that midget, I'm gonna shake his hand.” Wolf was so pleased, Joe thought he might salute.

Joe sighed. “I'll let you know if I see him.” He crossed the street, heading for a soda fountain and a cold drink.

“That's good. That's very good.” Wolf called after him. “You owe me. I'm the one that's going to have to tell Edgar Wright when we can't find the bearded, red-haired, hump-back, monocled midget!”

Wolf jogged up the steps of Central Station and held the door for a young woman with fresh, pink cheeks and wet lashes. She'd come to
the station to report her bicycle stolen. The little peach looked ripe for comforting but, as it was Snow's case, Wolf went to find him.

Mr. Melvin ate supper behind the counter, peeling an orange he had picked from a tree behind the station and watching little spurts of juice fly into the air. Wolf sauntered over. “Where's Snow?”

Mr. Melvin chewed and didn't look up. “He's in the morgue with the coroner. They just brought in a body.”

Wolf strode down the hallway. He smelled the morgue before he reached it—a sewage smell that persisted even when unoccupied. He pushed open the door. The curtain was pulled back. Snow and the coroner maneuvered a stretcher, sliding a body onto the concrete slab. It was covered in a sheet.

Wolf grinned. “Officer Snow, there's a little lady who's come to report a stolen bicycle. But I see that you're busy, so why don't I help you out and handle it myself.”

Snow wrinkled his scarred face, trying to squeeze out a thought. “You're trying to take her because she's pretty.”

“No. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, so to you she'd be ugly.” While Snow decided whether this was an insult, Wolf's face turned serious for a moment. “Who you got there?”

The coroner took a pair of scissors out of a drawer. His voice was medical. “Just a lady of the night.”

“We pulled her out of the lake at Echo Park.” Snow looked smug, like a child flaunting a secret. “You knew her.”

The coroner closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

Wolf frowned. “
I
knew her?”

The coroner's Adam's apple bobbed up and down. “Snow, you don't mind if he helps the lady with her bicycle.”

Wolf's smile had flattened into a thin line. “Are you trying to get rid of me, doc?” He took a deep, dreadful breath and reached for the sheet.

The coroner stopped his hand. “Why don't you wait until I clean her up?”

Wolf pushed the coroner's wrist aside and peeled back the sheet, revealing an oval face. “Oh, God!” He laid a hand over his eyes.

Eve's coiled hair was wet, streaked with dark pond muck and silt, and pinned to a crushed, veiled hat that must have once been white. She smelled of the lake. Her eyes were wide open, her pupils dark olives. She looked surprised. Her cheeks, which had always been suntanned, were colorless, as if she hadn't seen the sun in weeks.

Snow grinned proudly, like a child who had guessed the punch line of a clever joke. Wolf turned on the coroner and glared. “Why are you calling her a lady of the night? You know that girl's not a prostitute.”

Snow nodded knowingly. “That's Eve McBride, our former matron. I seen her in the doorway of the Poodle Dog. So I knocked and asked. She uses a different name now. Lucinda or something. That confused me at first. But it was her. She told me to keep it quiet. She didn't want Joe to know. I said I would if I could screw her. So she let me screw her. Isn't that a gas? I screwed Matron McBride and the bitch cried…” Snow's dull eyes looked regretful. “I would have screwed her again, too, but now she's dead.”

Wolf's lip curled in disgust, then he proffered a mean smile. “I had the same tender feelings about your mother.”

Snow cocked his scarred head, as if wondering how Wolf knew his mother. Wolf looked weary. He rubbed his brow. “Do a kindness and keep your word. Don't tell Joe Singer. He doesn't need to know. You too, doctor. Let him think she's happily settled in Denver.”

Snow waggled his head, smiling. “I bet Joe screwed her for free the whole time she was working here. She liked him.”

Wolf's mouth hardened, and he cracked his knuckles.

The coroner stepped between them. His voice sounded sharp. “The body's on the slab now, Snow. Go help the lady find her bicycle.”

Snow's eyes lit at the prospect of a pretty girl. He strode purposely toward the door.

Wolf bent over Eve, brushed a lock of hair from her once-beautiful face, and gently closed her eyes. “How did she die?”

The coroner scratched on a clipboard. “She drowned in the Lake at Echo Park. Apparently, she'd been out in a swan boat alone. They found it floating empty.”

Wolf stared intently at the coroner's face. “Doctor, what do you think she was doing alone on a pleasure boat if she worked at the Poodle Dog? Those girls stay in.”

“I'm just a physician,” the coroner said with clinical detachment. “You'll need to ask someone more familiar with the recreational habits of whores.”

Wolf grabbed the sheet and rolled it all the way back. Eve's legs splayed beneath an elegant white gown of soggy tulle and lace, molded to her body. The muddy veil, wadded at one side, would have reached the floor had she been standing. One wrinkled foot lay bare. Another swelled from a shoe that was much too tight. Wolf glared at the coroner. “Even you should know that a girl doesn't go boating in a wedding dress.”

A voice came from the doorway, tentative and low. “Is she a brothel girl? A suicide?”

“No.” Wolf yanked the curtain closed to hide the body. The curtain rattled on its metal hooks.

Joe eyes flashed disbelief and then peered at Wolf with suspicion. He growled, “Get out of my way.” Joe tried to squeeze past Wolf.

Wolf blocked him and steered him by the arm back toward the door. “It stinks, Joe. I know. But why don't you let me handle this?”

Joe sidestepped Wolf and lunged for the curtain, giving it a firm yank. It rattled to one side, revealing the dead girl. Joe stared at Eve's body, expressionless. He turned to Wolf, opened his mouth, and shut it again. He scrunched up his face as the awful truth burrowed its way, violently, into his understanding.

With one strangled sob, Joe turned to the coroner and swung.

Anna lit a fire in her bedroom hearth, though it was one of the hottest days on record. She wore nothing at all. A smoky, wintery smell cut the air. The hummingbird buzzed at the feeder again. When the smoke streamed outside the window, the bird flew in circles and smacked into the glass, leaving an oily mark in the shape of its tiny body and falling
to the ground. It added to her grief. She would find the little bird later and bury it in the wisteria.

She stoked the fire and tossed her books onto the blaze, one by one. She burned detective novels hidden under covers of acceptable books.
A System of Legal Medicine
went up in flames, along with
The History of Forensic Psychology
and the police procedural that she had stolen from the Venice police station the night she and Eve had been arrested. She said goodbye to Theo's medical books, because there was no way she could return them now, since she had ripped off their covers. They took a long time to burn.

She felt tragic, like a Cinderella without a fairy godmother. But she also felt relief. She was no longer carrying a dark, heavy secret—a rock in her stomach because she might be discovered. She could never, ever stop liking Joe Singer intensely, but Edgar had forgiven her and she could love him for that alone. She also had forgiven him. Though he had betrayed her, it had been driven by love. He loved her completely, even if her passion for him was only a bud. Now all she had to do was to keep her head down. If she could behave until Saturday, she would be Edgar Wright's chatelaine. She would have love, spending money, more freedom, and the chaperones would be out of a job.