“Roger.”
“Not my quote!” He laughs.
“Roger.”
“I’m sorry, Bev, but these women put themselves in vulnerable positions. What do they expect?”
She grows hot. “I think it’s fair to expect not to be killed, Roger.”
He pauses, then laughs regretfully, shakes his head. “Point taken.” He reaches over, trails his fingers across the tops of her arms.
They’re quiet for a while.
“You’re a remarkable woman, Bev. You know that,” he says eventually as he leans back on the pillow. “To have the strength to talk about this stuff…”
She didn’t feel remarkable. She felt exhausted and cheap. She hated being the other woman. She knew what they were doing was wrong, but it had been five years now since she’d first seen Roger and Tom Cornwell, with her husband in handcuffs, helicopters circling overhead. She had not known then, of course, that they would become entangled in one another’s lives, that Cornwell would remain a looming presence, that Roger would become a familiar routine for her—as a consequence not of any intense passion or attraction but of physics, two points drawn to each other in a steady, unswerving way. And so it went: Roger stopping by after work, once the kids were in bed, when Enid thought he was working late. They’d make love; they’d talk; they’d drink. Beverley would talk about the children—how the other mothers waiting for the school bus would shame her; how her own mother, so adroit at criticism, liked to tell her that her children would be ruined by what their father had done. Henry was the reason Beverley’s son never slept at night, Alice said. Henry was the reason he wet the bed, lashed out. Roger liked to take the chance to reminisce, to tell stories. He’d speak about his time in the military, about the travels he’d made as a young man, about his childhood in Chicago. She’ddrift off, soothed by the low timbre of his voice, the comforting presence of someone there in the room.
Once Roger has gone, she locks the door behind him, then clicks into the monotony of her nighttime routine. First, she checks all the windows and grabs the flashlight from beside the radio. She opens the back door but does not step out into the yard. The moon has retreated; the night is clear, crammed with stars, the twitch of heat still alive in the air. She flicks on the flashlight and roams the shadows with the beam, focusing on corners and any shrubs she hasn’t cut back quite far enough. When she’s satisfied, she turns it off and shuts the door, locking it, then trying the handle. She makes her way to the entrance hall and stands at one end of the sideboard there. Leaning her whole body weight against it, she pushes it along the wall until its edge is at the front exterior wall. Then she swivels it, as best she can, ninety degrees, so it is flush against the front door, sealing everything off from the outside world. After that, she goes to the living room, grabs a glass vase and three heavy books. She returns to the sideboard, places the books on top of one another and then finishes with the vase. If anyone even tries to open the door in the middle of the night, the glass will smash and Beverley will be alerted.
Then she pours herself a drink and retrieves the box from the pantry.
Inside the box is a scrapbook, the size of a large photo album, ring bound and well-worn. She opens it and flips through the pages. Newspaper clippings are stuck neatly throughout. She runs her fingers over the first and hovers them over the picture: Henry working a grill at a backyard party, tongs in hand, hamburger meat sizzling away. The editors had clearly chosen a picture intended to make him look like your average Joe, but Henry was never average, at least not physically—that thick, black hair; those eyes that looked as if they had beenwhittled from stone simply to gaze at her, eyes that would bore in so that she felt forever pinned by him. She remembers the picture being taken. It was the Fourth of July and they’d invited Beverley’s mother and a few of Henry’s coworkers from the air-conditioning company over for a barbecue. The yard was strung with stars and stripes and the weather was fine, bees idling around the jasmine. She’d worn a sleeveless blouse with heart-shaped buttons. She remembers fiddling with them while the wives tried to engage her in conversation about potato salad. She’d been distracted. She and Henry had argued just before he struck the pose for the camera. She had bought the wrong frankfurters from the grocery store, and Henry had called her out in front of everybody. When they’d turned away, he had administered his punishment. She flexes her wrist now, as if she can still feel the sting of the tongs, still hear the hissing of her own flesh. She trails her fingertips over her skin. There is a patch where it has lightened, been toughened by scar tissue, grown harder over the years.
She smooths the edges of the clipping. The headline—The Heatwave Killer Unmasked—still leaves her numb. She flips quickly through the rest of the book, each article detailing a different crime, a different murderer, cases from the Bay Area to San Diego. Elsie’s ex-husband is in there: Albert Moss, the community college teacher who trailed women home after his classes. There are all sorts of men trapped between the pages—men who bludgeoned women to death with hammers, loners who stalked girls from their cars late at night. Beverley never liked to overlook anything. If a woman went missing in Sacramento, she’d add a clipping to the book. If a husband shot his former lover in Santa Maria, she’d neatly score the story out from the newspaper, find a fresh new space, fix it to the page.
She scans more articles, murderers allotted paragraph upon paragraph while their victims are sidelined to passing whispers of acknowledgment. When the womenaregiven space, it is to make clear thatthey had brought their own murders upon themselves. By making themselves known. By staying out late. By kissing the guy. By wearing the short dress. By not taking self-defense classes. By being pretty. By not being pretty enough. By being fat. By being short. By being striking and loud and ambitious. Women brought death upon themselves simply by being women, it seemed. Avoiding death was just an expected part of life for them—the constant mental calculations, the weighing up of choices, of risk.
She turns to a clean page and pulls scissors and a tube of Elmer’s Glue-All from the box. Then she goes to the pile of papers on the countertop and picks up the copy of theLA Timesthat Margot had left behind on the patio.
She is flipping quickly past stories of space missions and civil rights marches when a small photograph toward the back of the paper makes her pause. She smooths out the page so she can examine the article more carefully. She wasn’t sure if the story would have been picked up yet, but here it is: a grainy crime-scene shot—a gurney with a body bag laid out on top; police tape; the glow of lights on the sidewalk.
POLICE WORKING TO IDENTIFY MYSTERY VICTIM
The article beneath the photograph is perfunctory, scant on details, but Beverley immediately knows this is the victim from the night of the gala, the woman Roger had referred to as a good-time girl. A woman working as a prostitute, Beverley supposes, but nevertheless a woman just like she was, whose identity has now been lost, plastered over, replaced with the stark image of a body bag and the rear wheels of waiting police cars.
The moment jolts back into Beverley’s mind—the coarse blare of the spotlights, Tom Cornwell’s eyes widening, the officer at the bottom of the stairs.
She runs her fingers over the photograph, picturing uniformed men in muttered discussion, tense looks; a woman’s fragile body left on the sidewalk, abandoned, life snuffed out. Having been in the area, so close, on the night the woman was killed, Bev can’t help but feel like part of her story.
It’s unusual.That’s what Cornwell’s officer had said.You’re not going to want to miss this one.She clearly remembers that now. But Roger didn’t mention anything unusual about it tonight. Nothing unusual is mentioned in the article, either.
She lifts the paper, holds it a little closer, studies the photograph again.
What are they hiding?
Six
Elsie had receivedan agitated call from Beverley, who’d remembered what the police had said about the body of the Jane Doe. She’d then asked Elsie if she knew anything about a gang known as the Kings, if she might be able to find out more about them at work.
She had been surprised that Beverley was taking such an interest in the case, but then she’d remembered the scrapbook, Beverley’s need to collect and categorize bad news—as if keeping on top of awful things was a way to stay in control, to stop more awful things from happening. There was clearly something up with this murder, more to the story, something the police were concealing. So Elsie was interested, too. And wasn’t it her job as a journalist—well, okay, a journalist’s assistant—to find out what was being hidden?
She already knows the cops have given the woman a nickname, “Blondie”—that’s what the county sheriff had said on the phone—but she knows she’ll get no further information by asking them anything directly. She’s already tried, of course—called the number from thenote that she’d stashed in her pocket, received nothing in return but a slammed-down phone and a dial tone.
She takes a sip from her third stale coffee of the morning and ignores her pounding caffeine headache. She scours the office floor for Robert Heston, theSignal’s chief crime reporter. She needs more information about this Jane Doe, and she knows Heston could be a way to get it—if she asks delicately enough.
But Robert Heston is not an early-morning sort of guy. Robert Heston chain-smokes Chesterfields and smells as if he has been out drinking all night, every night—because that is exactly what he has been doing. His skin is pale, and there are large bags under his eyes. She has never once seen the man look rested. His hair is dull. His expression is often vacant, uninterested. Elsie thinks he is the most inspirational man in this office.
An hour or so—and two more coffees—later, the reporter finally lopes in. Elsie waits for him to take a seat, her teeth buzzing from the caffeine. She watches as, instead of reaching for his notebook or his typewriter, he leans his forearms on his desk, collapses his head into them and groans. He must be hungover again. Elsie cuts a glance over her shoulder, but she knows Hunter’s not in yet—not that he’d punish Heston for arriving at work in this state. Heston is the best crime reporter in California; Elsie knows he’s at theSignalonly because he got fired from theTimesfor getting wasted at the Christmas party and urinating on the editor’s desk. Before that, he broke the story of the Elmwood Avenue Killer. He got the only interview with Jack Ruby’s attorney. He scooped everyone else in the city when he exposed police wrongdoing in the Toogood case—an officer had ignored vital evidence in the Klan’s murder of a civil rights activist. His editor would have been pissed about that—Heston could have jeopardized the paper’s relationship with the police with that exposé—but Heston won a Pulitzer, so who was anyone to argue?
