“No remarks,” I said.
As she had been the other day, she was dressed neatly and primly in good-quality clothes that were a little dressy for the middle of a weekday. This time it was a dark oatmeal dress, high-necked, with tiny brass buttons shaped like knots down the front and one on the cuff of each short sleeve. She took a powder-blue engagement book from her bedside table, the kind that closes with a zipper, and unzipped it. I saw she’d been using it as a notebook. What looked like a draft of a letter or an essay ran straight down the page, the words sidling around the numbers of the days like surf rolling around rocks. She opened it to a fresh page, took a pen from the little loop inside the cover, and uncapped it. Then she was ready for business. She patted the bed beside her and I sat down in Shade’s place.
“I knew you’d come,” she said, her eyes shining. “You have every cent I own in the world, and you could have just taken off and no one the wiser. Or you could have just laughed at me and said what money, because what proof would I have? But Mattie told me you were honest.”
“Old Mattie,” I said.
“I knew I picked the right man. And now I guess you deserve a little information.”
“I do,” I said. “First off, are we talking about Lance Halliday?”
She went completely still. She looked almost resentful. Then she leaned forward and gave me a sharp little punch in the leg. It hurt. “You’ve been busy,” she said, beaming. “I knew I picked the right man.”
“All I did was what you did,” I said. “Talk to Mattie. What’s Halliday been doing?”
“He’s going to burn my face with lye,” she said.
“Seems a perfectly nice face. What for?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“It’s too early for believe and don’t believe. Why’s Halliday want to hurt you?”
“He’s in love with me,” she said, eyes downcast. “No, I won’t use that word. He’s obsessed with me. I’m, I suppose it sounds arrogant to say it, but I’m someone men get obsessed over, sometimes. Many times. I met him when I was a hat check girl at Ciro’s. He’s a very good-looking man, tall and very good-looking, I guess Mattie told you he was supposed to be a leading man. But I guess he was like me. He couldn’t act. And he strikes everyone who meets him as awfully nice, and he was nice to me. I told him I’d have dinner with him, and then we had another dinner after that, but by then I’d found out a few things about him. He’s a gangster,” she said.
She said gangster as if it were her vocabulary word for the week.
“He makes pornographic movies,” she said, “and sells them, or charges money to show them, I guess is the way it works.”
“He the one you made the movies for?”
“No. Not him. And I told you, I don’t ever want any more of that. Not ever. That’s why it was so horrible when I found out. I didn’t know if he liked me or if he was just trying to get me into one of his movies. I didn’t care. I told him I didn’t want to see him again. And he, he just went crazy. He just, do I have to tell you the sorts of things he said?”
“I don’t know yet. You’d had two dinners?”
“I didn’t sleep with him, if that’s what you mean. I’m no virgin, Mr. Corson. I suppose anyone who wanted to has a right to call me a whore. And that’s why I want to get out of all this, and start over, and have a life where no one has any right to call me that.”
“So he went crazy. What did you do?”
“I ran out of the place. I didn’t know what to do. He’d made all sorts of threats, and I knew he was someone who could have people hurt, have anybody hurt he wanted. So I went back in, and I told him I was sorry I’d hurt him, and that I never meant to. I told him I’d stay with him all weekend and do anything he wanted, and that way he could see I was no one to be obsessed over and get me out of his system, and afterward he’d let me go. Everyone always thinks I’m going to be so wonderful, and then they find out I’m not at all. I don’t ever, well, I’m just not very good. You can see I’m telling you everything, Mr. Corson.”
“What did he think of your offer?”
“Oh, it was awful. It was worse than before. For a minute I almost thought he’d started beating me, hitting with his fists, but he was just talking, saying things to me I didn’t think anyone could ever say to anyone. Wild things. And that’s when he said about the lye. He said if I didn’t want him, he’d make it so no one ever wanted me. Oh, it was horrible.”
“How’d you get free?”
“I just walked out. He didn’t try to stop me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt he’d already thrown acid in my face, that he’d burned me all away. I was shaking, and on the way home I almost had a wreck.”
“When did you sell him your car?”
She blinked. “That was on our first date. I told him I was worried about money, and he said I shouldn’t ever have to worry about anything, and he gave me a check right then and there, and by the next time I saw him he’d talked to one of his lawyers and fixed the whole thing up. That’s why I didn’t go to bed with him, the first night. Because he’d just given me money.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Nine days ago. I spent the rest of the night just shaking, with a chair jammed under the doorknob, and the next morning I packed a bag and left. I was way up in Pasadena, in a much nicer house than this, but I thought I’d better go way across town and find someplace really cheap, because I wasn’t going to go back to work either. I just never went back to Ciro’s.”
“What name do you use here?”
“Rebecca Stevens. Do you think that’s too close?”
“No, I think that’s all right. He’s not going to go house to house looking for Rebeccas.”
“Do you believe me a little now?”
“That about describes it. What were you thinking I could do about it?”
“Well,” she said, looking happier, and set her pen to the paper. “First of all, he owns a nightclub.”
“Part of one. The Centaur.”
“That’s right. What if you told him he’d better leave me alone, because otherwise you were going to do something to his nightclub?” As she spoke, she wrote Threaten Nightclub very neatly at the top of the page.
“That puts me against all his partners, too,” I said. “Rebecca, unless you’ve got an organization, you don’t threaten gangsters. That’s like biting a shark. What else?”
She neatly crossed out Threaten Nightclub. “Well. You know the big boss of all the gangsters around there is a man named Fausto Burri. And he’s supposed to be a very old-fashioned old man. What if you told Halliday that if he didn’t leave me alone, you’d tell Burri that he was making pornographic movies?” She’d written: Smut.
“You’re not serious.”
She flushed. “I know my ideas probably aren’t very good. I don’t actually do this kind of thing, the way you probably do.”
“If Halliday’s making blue movies, Burri has a cut. His business is Burri’s business too.”
“All right, all right. But listen, what if you told Burri Halliday was going to burn me with lye? Because that’s not making Burri any money. That’s just a big stink for everybody, and probably bad for business, and so I suppose he wouldn’t like that.” She crossed out Smut and wrote Bad Business.