“Hmm.” He smiles dubiously. “I guess I can see you on-screen—that face, those pins.” He reaches for her and she lets him. “I’ll get my assistant to put in a call.” He runs his fingers around her ankle, traces the contour of her calf muscle. “But, Margot?”
She quirks an eyebrow.
“Be careful, okay?”
“Don’t you worry, Mr. Arnold.” She strokes his hand away, stands. She needs to get back out onto the shop floor. “I can take care of myself.”
“Don’t doubt it for a minute.” He raises his glass.
Eighteen
Beverley had plannedto meet her friends in the bar of the Monument Hotel at two p.m. sharp. But it’s two twenty-two p.m. and she’s hovering across the street from the lobby doors, her collar damp with perspiration, her path blocked not by tardiness or reluctance, but by hundreds of marching protestors.
As bodies surge past, she watches, taking in their signs, their shouts, their passionate songs. The news has been filled with protests like this for as long as she can remember. A handful of her Berryview neighbors keep posters in their windows to show support. She’s surprised Elsie is not out here, too, taking notes, asking questions, grabbing a placard for herself.
End Police Brutality!one large sign reads, held by several people. Someone holds a bullhorn aloft and cries, “Stop the violence! Equal rights for all. End. Police. Brutality. Now.”
A cheer goes up from the crowd and Beverley feels her face flushing hot. Can they see it on her? she wonders. Can they see the traces of her relationship with Roger?
She cannot shake the image of pink animal flesh from her mind. She thinks of the warning, the taunt. It can only have been meant for her, but she still does not know who left it, and she cannot tell Elsie and Margot about it. They have no idea about Roger. They’d never understand.
Beverley had never much considered the role of the police until the police had slammed into her life like an avalanche. When she was younger, she placed cops in the same benign category as teachers or doctors—people who operated on a benevolent plane, a force for good, the sort of people who lived according to a strict moral code—but that has changed of late. She has never known Roger, or the other officers at his precinct, to be racist or cruel, but there are so many things about his job that she will never be privy to. She is not his wife or his colleague. Roger doesn’t speak in depth about the civil rights movement. They don’t discuss the newspaper headlines about police corruption, about prejudice, about violence against minorities. He won’t be drawn in when she asks him about yet another activist being killed, or clashes between protestors and police, heavy-handed arrests, rumors of corruption, supremacism, violence.
Her mind is tugged suddenly back to the street by something familiar in the crowd. It’s a face she recognizes, one that sparks something strange inside of her. He is in front of her for only a few seconds, carrying his own placard but staying silent, gaze fixed firmly ahead. It’s Christopher Appleton, the new neighbor from across the street—number forty-four. She’s sure of it. She stares at the back of his head as he departs, swept up in the crowd. She would never have expected someone like him to be part of a protest like this. Her stomach twists. What else does she not know about her new neighbor?
The protest eventually thins, and she makes her way across the street to the hotel.
Inside, the air-conditioning has been cranked up to full blast, ajarring contrast to the August mugginess outside. The restaurant is decked out like some sort of space station. Sputnik lights hang from the ceiling; silver paper with a geometric pattern lines the walls. The seats and tables are sleek stainless steel. It makes her think of the NASA astronauts she saw on the news—shot up into the star-flecked unknown in little more than a fiery tin can. What must they see from up there, looking down on the swirling green-blue marbled earth; their days marked by the fluid, repeated rising and setting of the sun; the watchful moon, cratered and surreal, filling the windows, waiting for human footsteps? For a short moment, she is envious. Perhaps life would be easy up there, above the earth’s gravitational pull, her weightless body reduced to its base functions: sleeping, eating, excreting. No Henry. No nightmares. Away from the burden of what has happened to her in this life.
“Hey, aren’t you the girl from the half-and-half commercial?” Margot calls playfully, and Bev’s attention snaps back down to terra firma. “Don’t worry. We haven’t started yet.”
As she takes a seat, the metal unnervingly cold against her thighs, she sees that Margot and Elsie have brought notes along with them. She feels immediately redundant. They have both been off chasing leads in the murder cases. What has she contributed, beyond a few nervous questions tossed Roger’s way? She cannot tell them about her visit to San Quentin. They’d be furious if they knew she’d been in contact with Henry. She cannot tell them about the carcass on her lawn. She looks like she’s shown up empty-handed.
“Bloody Mary,” Margot calls, and a few moments later the drink appears on the table. She leans toward Beverley, grabs her wrist and shoves the glass into her hand. “Drink.” Margot has always seemed so certain of her own movements, possessed of a confidence that eludes most other women. When they first met, Beverley was shocked at how tactile Margot was, not thinking twice about grasping Beverley’s kneeor allowing their shoulders to brush together. Beverley’s mother rarely touched her, even when Beverley was a child. She never braided her hair or held a sponge to her skin in the bath. Margot’s obviously did. Others might look at her friend and see a party girl, someone flippant, shallow, but Beverley has always been in awe of her ability to make a connection, and quickly, with any sort of person, from any walk of life. Her smile wins people over, and that easy wink. People lean in for it, grasp, like iron filings rushing to a magnet.
The drink has barely touched Beverley’s lips before Margot starts talking about Diane Howard Murray. Beverley struggles to imagine her glamorous friend traipsing around a trailer park in her sunglasses and her chisel-toe heels. The image almost amuses her, but as Margot continues to tell them about Diane’s grandmother Pearl, what she’s learned about Diane’s life, Beverley cannot help but be impressed. Margot is sharp, smart, braver than Beverley could ever imagine herself to be. She takes them through the specifics of the crime scene, the way that Diane was dressed in a coat, how the killer took great care to stage the body, putting her in black suspenders and placing her on display.
Elsie tells them that Hunter has agreed to run one small story about Cheryl Herrera’s missing bracelet. Patti had to take the lead to him, told him she’d had the tip-off from one of her old colleagues, Dom Roachford.
“So, then,” Elsie continues, opening her notebook, “let’s try to think differently. What sort of guy would commit these crimes?”
Margot swivels in her seat and begins to list as if she is answering a question on a game show. “Boyfriends. Fathers. Close male relatives. Male friends who want to be more than that—always the first port of call.”
“Well, you say that, but our husbands all murdered people they didn’t know,” Beverley counters. “And these killings—they’re not likethe sort of murders you see committed by family members.” She thinks of Roger, how he was convinced these weren’t domestic disputes.
Margot frowns in defeat.
“Emily Roswell didn’t even have a boyfriend,” adds Elsie. “We know that. She wasn’t seeing anyone, or at least as far as the parents knew. And the father has an alibi, confirmed by his work. Same with Cheryl’s father, and her family maintains she wasn’t seeing anyone, either. No recent breakups. Do we know whether Diane had a boyfriend?”
Margot shakes her head. “Okay, maybe a stranger,” she concedes. “But why? And should we, for a second, consider that it might be a woman? It doesn’t have to be a man.”
“It does have to be a man,” says Elsie plainly. “It’s a man.”
“No, but what about that torture-mother woman?” asks Margot. “Ugh. What’s her name…?”
“Gertrude Baniszewski,” Beverley says quietly.
“That’s the one. She tortured that girl, that teenager. Killed her. It could be a woman.”
