The Ledger Page 5

  With just a trace of pride, Elena said, “The price is very high.”

  “But enough men have the price, don’t they?” Christie felt the contempt in her voice, made no effort to conceal her feelings. She was aware of what she was doing, that it was wrong, unprofessional, and for some reason, personal. Yet, strangely, for some vague, indefinable reason, Elena seemed completely at ease. Her eyes, glittering and proud, her voice, low and strong, showed no disadvantage.

  “I give nothing that is not fully paid for. And once given and paid for, I have no debt, I owe nothing of myself to anyone. Not to any man. There is no man, not one anywhere, who can make me suffer for one little minute of my life.” Elena smiled, stretched, leaned forward. “That Casey Reardon, he is a very attractive man. A very exciting man.” Her voice was brittle and mocking. “Is he your man?”

  “That’s just about what you’d think, isn’t it?” It came out like an insult and they held it between them for a brief moment so that it could be felt full measure for what it was, so that the lines could be firmly drawn and established. Yet, the silence turned back into Christie and she felt accused.

  Elena smiled. “Why not? He’s very strong and dominant. He has what you would call ... charisma?” She leaned back and regarded Christie with amusement. “Tell me, aren’t you aware that it shows?”

  “What shows?”

  Elena’s small hand sketched a vague form before her. “When there is something between a man and a woman, it shows. It fills up the spaces between them. It reaches from one to the other. Haven’t you even been to bed with him?”

  “Casey Reardon is a married man.” Her answer seemed shallow and schoolgirlish, even to Christie. She spoke rapidly, to change the direction of the conversation. Elena had touched an area she didn’t want to think about. Reardon. Damn Reardon. “How about you, Elena? With how many men does it ... does it show? Or can’t you keep count?”

  “None. With none. That is a very different thing. The sex act, performed out of lust”—she dismissed it with a wave of her small brown hand—“that is nothing. A commodity, bought and delivered. There are no lasting connections.”

  “What about with Giardino?” It was asked out of curiosity; Christie was genuinely curious now about this girl, who viewed life so differently than she did.

  “A habit with him. For which he provides me with many things.”

  “Like customers?”

  Elena shook her head. “No, Enzo is not a pimp. He does not send me men. But on the other hand, he does not mind if I care to turn a dollar for myself. There are men. There are always men, and as you said before, many men with the price. So?”

  “Just like that?” Christie turned her hand up, imitating Elena’s casual gesture.

  Elena Vargas moved her hands and body gracefully as she spoke. “Oh, just like that, or just like this, or just like whatever a particular man wants it to be just like.” She leaned back, her dark eyes on Christie. “Have you seen my apartment? It is very elegant. It is what they expect, luxurious surroundings. It is part of what they pay for: the illusion of luxury. Lavender, everything in the bedroom is lavender,” she said quietly, her eyes half closed as though she were visualizing the scene she described. “The carpets, the sheets, the blankets, the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapes. All lavender. All very expensive.” Her hand moved quickly and dismissed her room. She studied Christie for a moment, a small frown between her dark brows. “You seemed surprised when I said something showed, between you and Reardon. Weren’t you aware of it? Didn’t you know it was obvious?”

  Christie felt herself tense up again. “You’re the one who’s obvious,” she said shortly.

  For the first time, Elena sounded defensive. “I am what I am. I owe no excuses. Not to anyone.”

  There was a touch of passion in her tone; Christie felt aware of a small vulnerable glimpse into Elena and with that awareness, a better sense of control over her own words.

  “Don’t you owe anything even to Elena? Not even to the face that looks back at you from the mirror?”

  Elena drew back, pulled her feet under her. She dropped her head for a moment, but when she looked up, her expression was serene. “I will tell you something which I don’t think you’ll understand. But I will tell you anyway.” She lit a cigarette, reached for a small ashtray which she held in the palm of her hand. She blew the first lungful of smoke straight at the ceiling, then lowered her head. “When I am in bed with a man—any man—and I am required to do whatever it is he has paid for—one part of me is there. Just one part. This part.” The hand holding the cigarette skimmed the contours of her body. Smoke trailed upward in spirals as her hand moved slowly. “That’s all. Just this.” Her shoulder moved in a slight, derisive shrug. “The rest of me, the part of me that is Elena, is never present. I am not present. I am far away, removed. There is no real part of me present. My voice says words, my lips react, my body moves, my arms, my legs, but Elena is not there.”

  Her voice had become as intimate and as revealing as her words. Christie sat, longing for a cigarette but unwilling to ask for one. She ran her thumb across her lower lip and considered the girl. If Elena had built a fiction around herself, then there had to be something at the center which needed protection.

  “I thought you and I had agreed to be honest with each other.” Christie noted the rapid blinking of the thick black lashes. “That little story, is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you make everything okay? You’re not twins, Elena. You’ve got one mind in one body, like everyone else, and the mind is with the body no matter how many little stories you choose to tell yourself.”

  “Not the mind” Elena said, as though this was the point she must clarify, this is what she must explain. “Not the mind—” her hand waved the cigarette impatiently. “That is blank, empty. But another part, something else.” She bit her lip quickly, stopped speaking abruptly.

  Christie felt the cold clarity of pursuit. She could feel the edge to her words and see the impact on Elena. “What part, then, Elena? Oh, wait a minute. Are we talking about the ‘soul’? Your immortal soul?”

  Elena stood up, looked around the room, crushed the cigarette into the ashtray. “Soul? I have no soul. I am talking about the ...” She hesitated, seemed to need to answer Christie’s quietly mocking questions. “I am talking about the essence of Elena.” It was as though she spoke of a third person, not present in the room. Somehow, as she spoke, she managed to confront Christie, not with an explanation but with a boast. “The part of Elena that will never be revealed to any man in the way that the essence of Christie Opara is apparent when that Mr. Casey Reardon is in the same room with you!”

  Christie felt a sudden wave of panic and confusion. The incredible conversation had turned back into her and she felt accused again. Along with the accusation, she felt an equally incredible need to deny what Elena had said and to justify herself. That there was no feeling between Reardon and her. Their relationship had been strictly professional; some slight flirtation at times, playful bantering, certain set reactions between them. But not deep enough for anything to show. Not really. Christie closed her eyes for a moment, closed out Elena and the room. She studied the soft grayness behind her eyelids, slowed herself down. When she spoke, her eyes steady, her voice careful and deliberate, she regretted every word, yet felt compelled to make a statement. And to whom? To this girl, this, this prostitute who had no right to say that something showed between Reardon and her.

  “Casey Reardon is the Supervising Assistant District Attorney and the commanding officer of my squad. I work on his staff. Period. Anything else you seem to have ‘sensed’ or think you know, is wrong. You’re not quite as smart as you seem to think you are, Elena.”

  “Oh, I am very smart,” Elena said quietly. “A very smart girl.”

  “Sure. That’s why you’re here. Because you’re such a very smart girl.”

  Elena would take no offense. She had started this game and set the rules and found the a
dvantage; it helped pass the time and was amusing and she wasn’t willing for it to end. She moved about the room casually. She was relaxed and felt a pleasant sense of power. The young detective was quite pale, her eyes seemed lighter than they had before. Elena dropped into a chair, her small legs dangled over the arm. “What does your husband do when you work nights, Detective Opara?” Elena noted with satisfaction that Christie’s whole body had stiffened. She smiled. If they were going to keep her cooped up in a hotel room, they would do better to send men in to talk with her. This girl that Reardon seemed to have such confidence in was a fool after all.

  “Does he stay at home with his mother and your little boy? Or maybe,” she said softly, “maybe he gets lonesome. I know so many men who get lonesome. Maybe he is with some girl, eh?” Elena’s pattern of speech changed: she had fallen into a cadence, not quite an accent, but there was something unmistakably Latin not only in her speech but in the small, meaningful, easy gestures. “Maybe he’s with some girl like me who understands that a man gets lonesome.” She paused, then relentlessly pursued, noting the effect on Christie. “Or isn’t your husband like that? Isn’t he that kind of man?” Her lips pulled into a mocking smile. Only, you know what, baby? Outside of queers, there is only one kind of man: that kind of man.”

  Christie felt hatred pound through her: hard, complete, total, for this taunting dark girl with her sharp, bright intelligent face and her insistent words and smug certainty. Deep, deep, it gathered inside of Christie and worked along her chest and throat and she hunched forward. Her voice was low and fierce, a terrible whisper that unexpectedly engaged Elena Vargas totally.

  “Listen, you. Listen. You want to know about my husband? I’ll tell you about him. He’s dead. He—is—dead. And do you want to know how he died? Would it amuse you to know how Mike Opara died?”

  A tremor, cold and shuddering, ran down Elena’s back, between her shoulder blades. She pulled her arms across her small soft body. The game had gone too far but she could not stop it. It was out of her control.

  “He was a detective. And he was on a roof. And there were some boys. Just kids. Boys, sixteen years old. And they were shooting it up. You know what that is, don’t you Elena?”

  Christie jabbed her index finger into the vein of her own arm, her eyes burning at Elena. “Sure, you know what that is. Well, there were these three little boys, only they were junkies and junkies don’t have any age, they are just junkies. But Mike, my husband, he saw three skinny kids running and leaping from one roof to another. Across a space of five feet. His partner was on the other roof, waiting, because they knew this was what those boys would do. Two of them leaped and landed right in the arms of Mike’s partner. The third boy,” the words stopped for a moment and Christie, unable to destroy that third boy, moved her face slightly and the words, relentless, continued, “the third boy leaped but he didn’t quite make it. He jumped short and caught on to the railing of a fire escape across the alley. Mike saw him hanging there, screaming. Pleading to be saved.” Christie’s voice went soft as a chant; word followed on word, as though she was powerless to stop speaking. “It was five stories down; sixty feet straight down into an alley of garbage and rats. Mike jumped and landed on the fire escape and he reached down and pulled that boy up and got him on the fire escape and tried to open a window into the apartment. The boy whirled around and caught Mike off balance and shoved him through the stairway opening.” Christie’s face was expressionless, a blank mask. “And my husband fell, sixty feet, straight down, crashing into the sides of fire escapes and into the garbage. And the boy, he wasn’t quite sixteen. Just a poor deprived boy with no home and no one to look after him.” Christie blinked rapidly, her eyes came back into the room, saw the dark-eyed girl watching her intently. Her voice became a sharp, deliberate parody of Elena’s. “He was just a sonofabitch of a Puerto Rican kid who didn’t mean any harm. He got scared of the big man on the roof, he thought the big man wanted to throw him off the fire escape. He didn’t know the big man was a cop. He thought maybe he was a bad man who wanted to hurt him or something.” Christie shrugged, her voice became vicious, strange to her own ears. “He didn’t mean to push da beeg man down into the alley, see, he just so scare, he didn’t mean to harm no policía.”

  Christie caught her breath, then added softly, the voice her own now, “But he did push the big man off the fire escape. And my husband died in that garbage.” She reached for the package of cigarettes on the table, felt her hand tremble as she held a match and inhaled. The artificial coldness of menthol hit the back of her throat and she exhaled slowly and raised her face. “So you see, I know where my husband is when I work nights. He’s where he’s been for the last six years. He is in his grave.”

  Elena’s face changed; the color went from a rich, warm brown to a sickening yellow haze; it started around her mouth and worked upward along her cheeks and forehead. Beneath the smooth, perfectly applied makeup, the terrible color showed. Her mouth opened slightly and she moved her jaw, but no sound came.

  Christie stood up abruptly. She ground the cigarette into the nearest ashtray, looked around, spotted her boots, damp and bent against a chair. Without thought, she reached for them, sat on the edge of the chair, bent over, jammed her feet into the boots. She stood up again and her voice was a harsh, controlled whisper.

  “Oh, I know you, Elena. You’re a part of it. The mistress of one of the men who make narcotics available to the little boys on the roofs all over this city. You’re not a junkie, you’re worse, much worse. They are what they are. I’ve accepted that a long time ago. They can’t help themselves, they’re sick. But you,” Christie was filled with contempt and loathing, “you live on the money and the filth and the death. You sleep with whoever has the price and the price, from the kind of scum who pay you, almost inevitably comes from narcotics. And you think it doesn’t matter where the money comes from, it’s just money and it puts the clothes on your fancy little back and it pays the rent on your luxury apartment. But the money you find on your dresser—or whatever the procedure is—comes from the pockets of the little boys on the roofs.” She exhaled sharply, tried to clear her lungs of the mentholated nausea. “You’d like to think you’re free of all that filth, that you’ve built a nice little protective screen around yourself. The ‘essence of Elena’ is not involved.” Christie’s mouth twisted into an unpleasant smile and she saw the small, quick, gasping intake of breath, the uncontrolled twitching of Elena’s mouth. “Well let me tell you this: the essence of Elena is a whore!”

  The girl shook her head from side to side, denied the words. Her voice was a long, drawn-out moan. “No. No, listen to me, Christie Opara, listen to me ...”

  Christie reached for her pocketbook, her back to Elena. “No, I don’t want to listen to you.” She turned suddenly. The face watching her was strangely contorted. “You know what, Elena? I don’t want to be in the same room with you, the same city with you, the same world with you. I don’t want to listen to you and do you know why?” Her eyes were level with Elena’s; her voice was as clear and as inflexible as steel. “Because there is nothing—nothing—you can tell me about yourself. I know you, Elena. I know you.”

  Christie crossed the room toward the door but Elena darted ahead of her and blocked her way. She held Christie with a terrible, painful, naked burning of her eyes. Her mouth, which had been so strong, so smug, so certain, trembled visibly. Her hands, moving restlessly, tried to hold on to something, reached compulsively for Christie’s arm, but Christie wrenched free of the touch with loathing, as though the girl’s hand contaminated her.

  “Don’t you judge me,” Elena said. “No one can judge me.”

  Christie started to turn away, but the voice, ragged and insistent as death, seemed to have paralyzed her. Elena leaned forward, her eyes burnt out and empty, her face the color of dust. “You don’t know me. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”

  For the first time that night, Christie looked at, saw Elena
Vargas; saw through the mask of expensive makeup and languid certainty and mocking superiority. The terrible, exposed nakedness of Elena’s face made her turn and run from the room because she had seen too much, did not want to know.

  3

  THE TWELVE-HOUR COLD CAPSULE had only been working for an hour. Christie felt clearheaded but slightly glassy eyed. She held the oblong brass doorknob leading to the District Attorney’s Special Investigations Squad for a moment, took a deep breath, then opened the door. If she had expected any particular reaction to her arrival, the men present were all too involved in their work to notice her.

  Marty Ginsburg was hunched over the old Underwood, pounding his index fingers over the keyboard. The speed of his typing was remarkable, and he kept pace with the words dictated by a tired Bill Ferranti.

  Detective Pat O’Hanlon, tall, pale, soft-voiced, was whispering into the telephone, one hand cupped over the receiver, the other hand sketching furious scrawls on the green desk blotter. His head bobbed up and down. “Yeah, good, I got it, I got it. I’ll be down there in about an hour.” Then, his voice went slightly higher, in an attempt at charm. “Listen, pal, old buddy, it would save me an awful lot of time and leg work if you’d get me a photostat.” His mouth turned down. “Ah, come on, your boss doesn’t have to know, what the hell.”

  Stoner Martin sat bolt upright in his chair, his eyes half closed in concentration as he rapidly touch-typed at the Royal. His partner, Detective Arthur Treadwell, absently rubbed at the collection of dark brown freckles which stood out against the tanness of his face. He shifted uncomfortably in the small chair and tried to adjust his ample body. Treadwell nodded at Christie, then told Stoner Martin, “Christie’s here. Want to tell Mr. Reardon?”