“My God,” Tansi said, edgy. “I’ve never seen him like this.” She turned. “I need to get inside. I have to powwow with Warner and Jake.” She hurried away.
Mercy’s eyes followed Tansi. “Edna, I’m worried about Jimmy.” I shook my head. I was thinking about Confidential, and the vague, amorphous accusations. What was I missing here? “I don’t want to go back in there,” Mercy added. “Not now. Jimmy took the party with him. What do you say you and I grab a bite at Jack’s Drive-in on the Strip? The food is wonderful and we’re way overdressed, although on occasion I’ve seen some Beverly Hills matrons there in mink coats ordering hot dogs with chili sauce.” She hesitated. “Unless you have obligations in there.”
“No, I’m ready. But I sense you have an agenda, Mercy.”
“Of course. You and I, I’ve decided, need to plan our visit to Carisa. That new letter is too scary.”
I returned to the party to say my goodbyes, but I couldn’t locate Stevens or Warner. Even Henry Ginsburg, I discovered, had left. Tansi was walking in circles. When I saw Jake approaching me, I fled, but I realized he was also sneaking out, maneuvering himself toward a side door. That made me smile. Mercy waited in the lobby, and then, with me as a passenger, we drove to the eatery to plan our assault on the hapless Carisa Krausse. “Our commando raid,” Mercy termed it.
“More like,” I countered, wryly, “the charge of the frightened brigade.”
I savored a massive hamburger slathered in avocado and mayonnaise; the bun crisp and chewy; and fried potatoes cut so slender I thought them wood shavings, with a trace of sea salt, perhaps; and a dish of peach ice cream, speckled with huge chunks of red-gold fruit the color of a good sunset. Good food at last, I told Mercy. “In California most food, I’ve found, is filtered through sunshine and dabbled with greasepaint.”
Mercy laughed. “Edna, you have to come to my home for a home-cooked meal.”
“Well, this is a good start.” I bit into the hamburger.
“So,” Mercy began, “let’s talk about Carisa.”
Suddenly, I blanched. I’d just been thinking how restful I felt, tucked into the booth, when the image of Jimmy and his mountainous rage flooded me. “Oh, Mercy,” I cried out.
“What?” Alarmed.
“I just had a horrible thought. You don’t think Jimmy would go there now-to Carisa’s. He’s in such a foul mood. You don’t think…”
Mercy covered her mouth for a second, looked scared.
“We’re going there.” I stood up.
“It’s a dreadful neighborhood,” Mercy said, hesitating. “Skid Row. And it’s late.”
“It’s barely,” I glanced at my wristwatch, “eight o’clock. Civilized people are just sitting down to dinner.”
But Carisa’s neighborhood silenced me-blocks of sad, dilapidated buildings, seedy, ill kept. I’d glimpsed New York’s Bowery over the years, shook my head over the vacant-eyed winos bundled in mission-house overcoats. But this Skid Row was numbing, block after block of what looked like sagging flophouses, shanty hotels, pawnshops with weathered signs. As Mercy’s car cruised into the area, I observed panhandlers, hookers, lost souls leaning against walls, or hunched over. “It’s really called Skid Row, this area,” Mercy told me. “Or the Nickel, because much of it centers on Fifth Street. Los Angelinos avoid the area-notorious for crime, drugs. Look.” She pointed to a man staggering off a sidewalk. “It’s like a big stereotype,” she said. “A Warner backlot for a James Cagney movie. Angels with dirty faces.”
I frowned. “A stereotype is sometimes nothing more than the redundancy of truth.” Mercy looked at me. Third Street. Fourth Street. Street after street, fading daylight, shadows settling in.
Flickering neon sign on a corner bar: H RRYs, the A missing. That alarmed me. A cardboard sidewalk shelter, a man’s feet visible. Eight-thirty at night, the streets eerily still, souls shuffling along, trancelike; yet the night seemed noisy, violent. The echoey tintinnabulation of jukebox music from deep inside a tavern. Then, as we idled at a light, snatches of a fierce husband-wife spat filtered through thin walls. The sobbing of a child-or maybe it was an alley cat in heat, hidden behind a shabby fence. The clamoring of a distant late-night freight train; a truck bumping over a broken street, headed to the warehouse district. Mercy parked her car in front of a three-story building, and we sat there. An old man staggered by, bumped into her fender, and I started. Not the brightest of ideas, this.
Gathering my voice, “You’ve been here before, right?”
“In daylight,” Mercy said, faltering. “High noon.”
“It must look better then.”
“Well, it looked safer, shops open, traffic, you know, cops.”
“This is what Tansi warned me about?”
Mercy frowned. “Tansi wasn’t built for this patch of God’s earth.”
“And we are?”
I surveyed the adjacent buildings. A pawnshop with oversized signs: CALL ME LARRY! RADIOS amp; TOOLS HIGH PRICES PAID! BUY amp; SELL. PH. MI 2021. A storefront window cluttered with motley goods. LUCKY BOY HAMBURGERS. RUTH’S GRILL COCKTAILS.
“Well, what should we do?” Mercy asked.
I caught my breath. “Which apartment?”
Mercy pointed up. “In front. The second floor. The one with the lights on. She’s home.”
“How do we know she’s alone?”
“God, I never thought about that. I just hope Jimmy’s not there.” Mercy looked at me. “You want to leave?”
I shook my head, resolute. “I’m never coming back to this neighborhood after tonight.”
Mercy smiled. “It’s not, I suppose, dangerous. It’s just…poor.”
“Not much consolation, I fear. And we’re really not dressed for this.” We looked at our fancy dresses, the jewelry. “We look all wrong.”
“Maybe they’ll think we’re working girls.”
“We are working girls.” I grinned. “I look like an aged madam out on the town.” A pause. “Let’s go.”
“You want to stay in the car?”
“No, I wouldn’t miss this conversation. Carisa Krausse has loomed a little too large in my imagination these past couple days. I need to place a face to-to the madness.”
The building was quiet. On the first floor, a radio blared from a back apartment. A Spanish station, a soap opera perhaps, with slammed doors and breaking glass. Then a male voice, a tenant’s gruff baritone. But I was confused by the interior: the hardswept foyer, the polished but discolored old ceramic tile, with long-abused art-nouveau designs; the nicely lighted hallway, old wallpaper but clean, stairs swept and scrubbed; railings worn but glistening. The stink of old varnish and countless tenants, but also the astringent odor of lye soap, diligent cleaning, a battle against grime and decay and mites and spilled lives. I walked slowly up the stairs, holding onto Mercy’s arm.
There was music coming from Carisa’s apartment, not loud but wafting gently into the hallway. Lavish violin strings, the thump of piano keys, the light air of a girl singer. Rosemary Clooney? The Boswell Sisters? I had no idea. Music from radios, especially the plaintive crooning of adenoidal female singers, always irritates me. I consider the sentimental slurring of the Andrews Sisters tantamount to treason during the last world war. But I keep such sentiments to myself. Jerome Kern, yes; Cole Porter, certainly. Witty men, clever lyricists, jaunty confections, the Broadway ditties. Yes, I thought, Rosemary Clooney. Or maybe Kate Smith?
I didn’t like the fact that Mercy, unconsciously, was humming the tune.
When Mercy gently rapped on the door-a little too softly, I thought-the door flew open because it had not been latched, and we stood there, staring at the body of a young girl, sprawled indecorously on the floor, her head resting in a pool of blood, her body twisted.
I looked at Mercy, Mercy at me.
“Is it…?” I gasped.
Mercy nodded.
I stepped into the room. “This is not going to make anyone happy.”