“Go away, Nash.” She wouldn’t look at me. Her eyes stayed focused on the street. It was the seasoned look of the hunted, like a rabbit just out of the woods surveying an open field.
“You remembered my name.” I tried to make it sound like a good thing.
“It’s not hard.” She gave me an up-from-under look. “Every time I see you I GNASH my teeth.”
I answered her with a verbal rimshot. She softened with a reluctant smile.
The silent lightning I’d seen from the alley as I’d waited for Parrish to leave the Palms had found its voice. The thunder came and went at varying decibels, as if someone was fiddling with the volume control. The wind had picked up and carried with it the cool, metallic omen of rain. Flashes lit up the surrounding buildings and pavement of skid row. I thought of God trying to get a picture for his own Lost Wall, not of vagrants but of whole streets. Whole neighborhoods. Lana glanced up at the looming clouds with the same wariness she showed for the street.
“How was the third show?”
She flicked the back of her hand toward the Palms. “They’re just a bunch of animals.” She gave me a sideways glance. Like all her gestures and glances, it was straight out of a Lana Turner picture. “What do you want, Nash?”
“I talked to Parrish.”
Her eyebrows arched. “And you’re still alive? You must be a real sweet-talker.”
“No.” I thought about saying more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Anything she’d really understand.
“So what do you want from me?”
“His address.”
“You were talking to him. Why didn’t you ask him yourself?”
“I didn’t get the chance.”
She propped her hands on her hips and eyed me like I was a sidewalk preacher hawking redemption. “Why should I trust you?”
I nodded toward the Palms. “Because I’m not like those other animals.”
She thought about that for a moment. I felt a small ripple of pride that she didn’t laugh in my face.
“The Minnesotan.” She used a quick tilt of her head to indicate a brown brick hotel looming over the far corner across the street. It fronted on Washington Avenue with twin five-story wings in the shape of a U and columns of windows bracketed by beige pilasters. An enormous neon sign stood high above the roof blazing out in red letters: THE MINNESOTAN HOTEL. And below that, glowing in cool green, maybe its biggest — and least verifiable — selling point: FIREPROOF. A marquee sign over the single-floor lobby that linked the two wings advertised the “Panther Room” in red. Among the dozens of wooden, three-story firetraps masquerading as flophouses, The Minnesotan was a step up, but I wasn’t sure by how much.
“Room three-sixteen,” she said as she fiddled with an earring. “It ain’t no secret.”
Something clamped itself onto my heart and squeezed. I guess I hadn’t wanted her to know where Parrish lived, at least not down to the room number. The fact that she did made me picture something I didn’t want to see.
“You keep extra clothes there?” My teeth had stayed stuck together as I’d said it.
Her eyes turned to flint. “None of your damn business.”
I eased off my teeth. “You’re right. Thanks for the news.” I turned toward The Minnesotan and waited for a streetcar to pass before crossing the road to get to the other side.
“We live in the same building, that’s all,” she said, raising her voice so I’d hear her over the rattling roar of the trolley.
I turned toward her. The streetcar rumbled away.
She was twirling a lock of her platinum-blond hair. “I live in 401.” Then she smiled a murderous smile. “I like it that you care.”
I glanced up and down the street. The only people in sight were a couple of drunks trying to navigate the rough seas of the sidewalk. I tried to keep my wits about me, but Reason was already drifting down the block. He gave me a knowing smile and a tip of the hat before he turned and walked away, whistling a happy tune, content to meet up again later.
I gave her the toughest look I had. “It’s a dangerous night,” I said. “You should have an escort.”
She walked toward me, one high-heeled stiletto placed directly in front of the other, her eyes taking on the sharp, seasoned focus of the hunter. I never asked her for her real name and she never offered it. All she had to do was what she did: look at me like the Santa Anas had returned.
Her voice turned breathy. “You never know where you might find trouble.”
She offered me her arm and I took it. I knew I was making the wrong choice, but like following prey into an unfamiliar building through an unmarked door, sometimes you can’t help but go where you shouldn’t. That’s not just a sin that P.I.s commit.
I knocked on the peeling varnish of the door to Room 316, but I had the growing sense I’d get no answer.
I’d left Lana sleeping soundly in her bed in 401. Doing three shows a night must have exhausted her, because she’d been out the minute she’d climbed off. The whole thing had taken less than ten minutes — she had the kind of body that kills self-control — but I was beginning to feel I’d been distracted too long. The storm had pounded on her window as if raging against what was going on inside. As if it could scour away with its fury the permanent stains — the permanent sins — of skid row. Ten minutes later, it still hadn’t given up on its hopeless mission.
I tried the knob. The door wasn’t locked.
A single lamp on the table in front of the window lit a small part of the room, leaving the rest in shadows that rose and fell with the flashes of lightning that flickered through the drawn shade. There wasn’t much to light up, just a single bed, a dresser, and a padded vinyl chair that was losing its stuffing. A cigarette languished in an ashtray.
Tommy lay on his side on the floor, his front bathed in light, his blood making a black pool in front of him on the low-pile maroon rug. A pearl handle stuck out of his chest. It moved in irregular fits with Tommy’s shallow breaths.
I kneeled at his side. “Just hold on. I’ll get help.”
“No need.” He pushed out the words without any air to carry them.
“Baird?”
His head moved. It was as close to a nod as he could get. “He knocked. I thought it was you.”
He coughed up blood that oozed out of the side of his mouth. His skin was gray and seemed to be hardening. He pushed more blood from his mouth with his tongue and choked on words that wouldn’t come out. He swallowed hard, then forced out his last words on his last breath.
“I’ll wait.”
But he didn’t.
As I turned to leave to go call for the police, something over his bed caught my eye.
Taped to the thick steel crossbar of his headboard frame was a picture. It was almost identical to the one Dan had left for me at the Minneapolis post office. It was of Tommy and his parents, taken a moment before or a moment after the one I had. Everything looked the same. His parents were smiling. Tommy was in his uniform. But one important detail was different. The one that proved why you take more than one picture. At first I didn’t understand why this one was the one he’d kept for himself. But then it made perfect sense.
In this one, Tommy’s eyes were closed.
Outside, the storm raged on, still battling the sins that can’t be washed away.
Dan Parrish took the news like it wasn’t news. There was only one part that surprised him.
“ ‘I’ll wait.’ What do you think he meant by that?”
I sat forward in the battered desk chair in the back room of the Sourdough. The Pope had let me use his phone. He’d found me at eight a.m. waiting in the sun with a handful of other desperate men on the rain-scoured sidewalk in front of the bar. I took a long breath and ran a hand through my hair as I gazed at the hundreds of faces staring at me from across the room on the Lost Wall.