She steps back to the carcass. She has to move it. She cannot let the neighbors see. She quickly considers what she will need—a tarpaulin, some gloves, a large spade. As she runs through the list, she can’t help but think of the animal’s significance.Pigs. A derogatory word for cops. Her mind goes to the posters she’s seen in some of her neighbors’ windows, the newspaper articles she’s seen about marches against the police. Has someone seen Roger coming to the house? Does someone know she’s sleeping with the very man who arrested her own husband? She considers, briefly, that it might even be a threat to Roger himself.
Whatever it is, she thinks as she eyes the carcass, its slit throat, she knows it’s a warning.
Seventeen
The girls atthe department store are rattled. They tear around the shop floor, straightening Biba jackets on their mannequins, fastening metallic buttons, smoothing their own set hair in front of their window reflections. September is only a few weeks away, and they’ve just learned that Broderick Arnold,theBroderick Arnold of Arnold’s Department Stores, is on his way for his preseason inspection, and the man is more than particular when it comes to the appearance of his shop floors.
Margot stands behind the till, thumbing her way through an oldVogue. She glances up at the other girls, flapping like hummingbirds, and takes a breath. She’d woken soaked in sweat this morning, the embers of a nightmare she hadn’t had for a long time smoldering in the muggy air of the room. Stephen had been in her dream, reaching out for her, clawing desperately at her face, screaming her name. She’d watched him fall backward, away from her, plummeting downward into spiraling darkness. It was a nightmare she’d had for months after Stephen was arrested, and after he did what he did to himself while injail, awaiting trial. She’d never told anyone about that nightmare—just as she’d never told anyone how she’d holed up in her mother’s old apartment when it had all happened, numbing herself with alcohol and pain pills. She couldn’t say his name for two whole years. Whenever she tried, her throat would spasm and swallow the letters down. But no one knows that.
She straightens her shoulders. The nightmare might have returned, but she cannot allow herself to go back there. She will not allow herself to be that weak again.
She watches as a pretty sales assistant uses two hands to tug the straps of her bra upward, lifting her breasts into bullet positions. Margot could use her chest, too, she supposes, but she knows all she has to do to impress Arnold, to impress any powerful man, is to breathe and hold his eye contact. Women in subservient positions, women working in department stores owned by wealthy entrepreneurs, do not usually meet the eyes of powerful men. Margot likes to launch that challenge, to disarm, see what comes back. When she does it, she can almost see the whirring of the men’s brains inside their heads.Who is this woman? she can see them thinking.Who the hell does she think she is? And what does she know that I don’t know?
Twenty minutes later, Broderick Arnold steps through the revolving doors and the hummingbirds scatter. He smiles and does the rounds, greets them all—a businessman’s routine—and when he passes by Margot, she fixes his eye, keeps her expression plain.
It brings him to a stop in front of her counter.
He tilts his head, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. She notices the cut of his suit—tailor-made. Broderick Arnold would never wear anything sold in his stores.
He raises a finger. “Remind me of your name,” he orders.
She smiles, happy to play along for watching eyes. “Margot Green.”
He slaps a palm on the counter. “Have a beautiful day, Ms. Green.”
Minutes later, she’s in a familiar position on the desk in his office, his head between her thighs.
It’s not sex per se that Margot gets a kick out of. It’s the tipping scales of power that sex facilitates. Broderick Arnold is one of the wealthiest men in California, with multiple businesses under his belt, including this department store, yet she can manipulate him with her body, with just thesuggestionof her body, and she has done so on many occasions. She wonders, from time to time, when they meet like this, whether Broderick knows who she was before this life. Perhaps he does—Margot has never hidden from the press. Perhaps he even finds it titillating. The papers always made her out as some femme fatale, a seductress who used her wiles to catch her husband in the act of killing—entirely inaccurately, of course. But she didn’t hate it.
She was drinking grasshoppers at home when the cops finally came to tell her that Stephen had been arrested. She wasn’t surprised, but it annoyed her that the news channels had got hold of the information before she did; Stephen’s face was already being plastered across TV screens statewide. As the detectives sat her down on Stephen’s expensive couch to tell her that he had been arrested for the murders of eight people, the phone began to ring. It didn’t stop for the next two hours, until one of the detectives convinced Margot to unplug it from the wall. Soon enough, the press arrived, cameras pushed up against the window, the door knocker rattling. Margot stood up. “I really wouldn’t do that, Mrs. Green,” a detective called after her. But Margot knew the only way she would survive this scrutiny was to face it head-on, so she opened the door, tucked her hair behind her ear and stood before them.
When Arnold is finished and Margot is sated, she lights a cigarette and accepts a whiskey poured from a crystal decanter.
“Do you know Mason Clarke?” she asks him as she puffs out a plume of smoke.
Arnold laughs. “Never one for the small talk, were you, Margot?”
“Do you?” She tilts her head, smiles.
Arnold takes a gulp from his glass. “Sure. I’ve never met him, but we helped fund some of his pictures. Why do you ask?”
“Think you could get me an intro?”
“Should I be jealous?” he teases, crushing ice between his teeth.
“You know I’ve only got eyes for you, Mr. Arnold.”
He places the glass on the desktop, turns to her with a serious expression. “What’s this about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Clarke. I’ve heard some stuff about him. Not pretty.” He sips again.
“And?”
“You sure you want a part of that?”
“I just want to sound him out about something.”
