“Yes, Elsie?” Hunter says briskly, shuffling a thick stack of papers. She could read them, sure, offer her opinion, correct his grammar. She feels her fingers start to twitch but resists reaching out for the documents.
He glances up. “I’m meeting Halliday later. My cabinet’s looking dry. I need scotch. Fetch, please.” He waves her off.
Her shoulders sink.
“Elsie?” Hunter seems annoyed that she is still standing in the doorway.
“Right away, Mr. Hunter.” She pulls the door closed behind her, shutting out the rising laughter from inside.
—
Later, when theafternoon lull is seeping in, Elsie returns with the liquor.
She knocks for Hunter and, finding his office empty, crosses to his desk and places the brown paper package in the middle of it. As she turns to leave, the telephone rings. She pauses. The call must have come directly to him rather than to the general number, which Elsie usually answers before patching the caller through. Still, she should answer the call. It could be important, and she doesn’t want to be yelled at for missing a message.
“Paul Hunter’s office.”
The man at the other end of the line is abrupt, says he’s from the county sheriff’s department.
“It’s about the Jane Doe from the gala,” he says. “Blondie. Get him to call me. I’m around until six.”
Elsie scratches down the details, tucks the message underneath the bottle of scotch and tries to ignore the prickle in her fingers. This must be the same body that Bev told them about last night. She pictures the story moving through the newsroom—silt along the channels of a river. Hunter will return from his meeting and find the message; he will call the sheriff’s department, then open his door wide to call in the reporters for an urgent meeting. Patricia Fowler might even be admitted. Elsie will be forced to sit outside while everything happens behind that closed door.
She’ll get lost outside it all.
A Jane Doe. She knows what the term means: an unidentified female body. Elsie pauses at the threshold of Hunter’s office, her fingers flexing almost imperceptibly at her side. She could change all this; for once, she could be the one in the office who is first on the story.
She turns, strides back to the desk, picks up the note and places it firmly in her pocket.
Five
“Pass me mysmokes, will you, Bev?”
Beverley lifts her head from Roger’s chest and reaches across to the nightstand, hands the box over, resists the urge to take one for herself. Being in this bed with Roger Greaves always sets her slightly on edge. It’s the same bed she shared with her husband, with the same faded floral sheets, the indentation of Henry’s limbs still deep in the old mattress. Sometimes, at night, when Roger’s gone and she’s alone, she eyeballs the shape as if it’s the chalk outline of a body at a crime scene. She supposes it is, really—the lingering aftermath of a death.
After everything happened, she hadn’t wanted to leave her home, as Margot had, across the country, from New York to LA, or as Elsie had, from a shitty house in the Haight to an even shittier apartment in Burbank. The catch is that she still feels Henry in the walls, in the fabric of the couch, in the old, clouded tumblers at the back of the cupboard.
She returns to Roger’s warmth, bringing her ear to his heartbeat, drowning out “Strangers in the Night” on the bedside radio. Thesheets are mussed at their ankles, her knee hooked over his thigh. Clothes lie discarded on the floor. Roger’s police badge, always removed with the greatest care, sits next to a blister pack of Valium Beverley snuck from her mother’s bathroom cabinet. The room is heavy with humidity, but she won’t have the window open, and by now Roger knows better than to ask. Her skin tingles with the rock-pool damp of cooling sweat. The smell of the act hangs low in the air.
Beverley uses the opportunity to ask about the body found on the night of the gala. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but there’s something about the timing, the fact that Beverley was there when Cornwell found out, that makes her feel connected to it in a way. Roger usually has no qualms about sharing the details of cases with Beverley. She chooses to believe that’s because he trusts her, and not because she is so inconsequential that he knows she would have nothing to do with the information anyway.
“Oh, that.” The words are squashed in his throat as he swallows smoke. “Cornwell’s got his eyes on the Kings for it.” He exhales.
“Who?”
“You must have heard of the Kings.” He leans on an elbow, fixes his flinty eyes on her. “What with all that digging you do, the newspapers.”
She can’t help but feel that he’s mocking her.
“They’re a gang,” he explains. “Slick. Dangerous. This is just the sort of thing they’d do.”
“But who was it?”
“The Kings, Bev.”
“No, who was it that was murdered?”
“Oh.” Roger draws on his cigarette again; it makes the dimples in his cheeks sink deeper. He holds two fingers of his left hand in the air. “A—quote, unquote—good-time girl.”
