“She’s kind of in a panic, actually. Needs reassurance. This is the first time she ever lets Jim sleep with her. He told me about it, said she was having her period and everything, but he didn’t care, even had oral sex with her, told her he wanted their blood to ‘commingle.’ Of course, he had to explain to her what ‘commingle’ meant but that was all right because she said it was ‘beautiful.’ She went back to the clubs. Of course, by this time, there’s a whole new raft of beauties younger than she is. She’s still got men lined up along the bar but the lines aren’t quite as long as they once were. She’s thirty-one now. And there’s one thing she can never be again — and that’s new. And that’s what clubs like these always want. The new band. The new girl. The new drink. You know what I’m saying?
“Then she does the dumbest thing she’s ever done in her life, she falls in love with this bartender whose putting it to every babe in the place. He’s got lines of women around the block, including all the newest and the hottest. And she falls in love with him. He goes out with her a few times — hammers her like she’s never been hammered in her life — but then he dumps her; She’s not used to being treated like this. In her life, it’s supposed to be the other way around. She panics. Getting dumped undermines her whole life. She has money, a nice house, she can have all the plastic surgery she wants— but she knows that her time has passed as babe-of-the-moment.
“She starts stalking the bartender. She calls him night and day, she e-mails him, sends him flowers and candy, even gives him a car — a frigging Firebird, if you can believe it — and two or three times, she breaks into his apartment while he’s hammering some other babe in his bedroom. One night, he’s so frustrated, he punches her, gives her a black eye. Another night, she literally attacks his date in this restaurant. Throws her down on the floor and starts kicking her like some home boy would. And the coup de grace. She hides in his car, the car she bought him and he was asshole enough to accept, and at gunpoint forces him to take her for a long drive. She is very, very drunk. They drive around and around and she tells him all these plans she’s got for when they get married. The first thing she wants with him, she says, is children. One boy, one girl. She’s got access to enough cash to set him up in his own bar. An upscale one. No more club bullshit working for bosses who deal coke out their back door. And all of a sudden, he starts laughing at her. Which is not a good idea, somebody has a gun on you the way she does. By this time, they’re up in the red clay cliffs. And she grabs the wheel from him and stomps her foot on his on the gas pedal and they go shooting right off the cliff. And we’re talking a forty foot fall to the road below. He dies, her face is totally destroyed.
“Six, seven plastic surgeries in three years and there’s not much improvement. The last one, though, she kind of convinces herself that she’s looking better. And that’s when she starts going back to the club scene. And it’s a catastrophe. I only saw her once but she looked like a monster in a bad sci-fi flick. I mean, a $1.98 monster. But this monster is for real. People are so repelled by her, they don’t even laugh at first (she tells Jim all this later on), they just shy back from her like she’s got something contagious. Or she’s like an omen that’s going to bring them bad luck or something. Anyway, every place she goes, they just stare at her. The waitresses come over and they kind of smirk at her. And then people start getting mean. All the hotshots start asking her to dance. And some chick comes up and asks her what kind of makeup she’s wearing. Not even the people she used to think of as friends want anything to do with her. She was a pretty ruthless little bitch when she was young and beautiful, and they’re not all that sad to see her cut up this way. And every night, she goes up to her nice fancy lonely house and tells all this to Jim, who is by this time sort of her live-in shrink. And Jim is so pissed by what she’s telling him — how she was treated in these clubs — that he starts setting the places on fire, the clubs I mean. For her, that’s why he’s doing it. For her. Because he wants her to know how much he loves her, how much he’s willing to protect her. Because he knows that she’ll marry him now. Ever since he was a kid, that was all he wanted. For her to marry him. And now it’s finally going to happen.”
6
Wind rattled the warped wood-framed windows. The linoleum was so old it was worn to floor in several places. The one big room smelled of cigarettes and Aqua Velva and whiskey, and a bathroom smelled of hair tonic and toilet bowl cleaner. There were doilies on the ragged armchair and the wobbly end tables and even on top of the bulky table model TV that dated from the sixties. The windows were so dirty you could barely see outside. If you listened carefully, you could hear the spectral echoes of all the lonely radio music that had been played in this shabby for-rent room down the decades, Bing Crosby in the Thirties and Frank Sinatra in the Forties and Elvis in The Fifties, and God only knew what else since then. A lot of animals crawl away to die in hidden shadowy places; this was a hidden shadowy place for humans.
“It’s only $150 a month is why he lives here,” Matt Shea said.
“They should pay him,” I said.
“Yeah, it is pretty grim.”
We’d spent three hours trying to find he and Ella. No luck. The times we’d called the landlady, she’d said he wasn’t home. I finally said we should check out his apartment anyway. Shea agreed and here we were.
“We need to go to the police,” I said.
“I know.” He made a sour face. “This gets out, I’m going to have a hell of a time holding on to some of my clients. You don’t want your lawyer having a god damned whacko for a brother.”
He didn’t seem unduly concerned about the people who’d died, or what fate awaited his brother.
He said, as if reading my mind, “I know I sound pretty selfish. But I came from the west side. I just don’t want to see it all go to hell.”
I started looking through the faded bureau. The mirror atop it was yellow. There were ghosts trapped in the mirror. You could sense them, dozens, maybe scores, of working men and women who died out their time in this room, staring at their fading lives in this mirror.