Tana flicked a hand in front of her face, as if waving away a gnat. “That was all Mitch’s decision. I would say to those unnamed sources, you don’t know my husband. No one can make my Mitch do anything he doesn’t want to do.” There was only a touch of murder in her voice.
The interview switched to a family picture of the wife, the candidate, and a towheaded cherub who was pink all over, like a half-cooked ham. It was unfortunate, the way attractive people never seem to breed well. I studied Carrigan on the screen. Those shoulders had my vote, and probably that was true for a lot of other women in this city.
So he’d taken his wife’s last name. I kicked that one around in my brain for a bit but couldn’t decide what to make of it. It could mean he didn’t have access to the family money. But it could also make him more desperate to protect his reputation. He had a lot more than most men to lose in a divorce.
I stopped the video after a plug for an upcoming campaign fund-raiser, to be held at Olvera Street in a few weeks. “Join us in the heart of Old Los Angeles,” Tana had said, her sunny blonde beauty at odds with her trilling pronunciation of El Pueblo de Los Angeles. I had a hard time believing the Carrigans had any real Californio roots, but if she said it enough times, people wouldn’t care. That was the magic of Los Angeles: over time, the artificial became as historic as the true.
Somewhere near the bottom of my ginned-up coffee, the booze too warm, the coffee only lukely so, I had to get a little honest with myself and admit I was avoiding looking at Klein’s file, avoiding thinking about Ellen and the money I owed to both the Lady and the police now. I wasn’t sure which was worse. The glands in my mouth started to sweat, and soon I had a mouthful of saliva that gin wouldn’t wash down. I leaned over and spat into my trash can.
I couldn’t let my guard down until it was over. Ellen would try to get the drop on me again. She had the cash in her grubby little fists—she’d won this round—but she’d tipped her hand, too. That was a bigger mistake than she knew. I couldn’t afford to underestimate her again.
When Lou popped her head into my doorway to tell me she was leaving, my office was dark, the sun long since gone and only the glow of my computer illuminating my face, the bottle of juniper snugged between a coffeepot and a succulent on my desk.
“How’d it go with your girl?” Lou asked, fingers dancing along my door frame.
“She meets with him Thursday,” I said, which wasn’t really an answer.
Lou’s face relaxed. I wondered what she had to promise our boss to get my extension. “Money to the Lady before you know it,” she said, reassuring me. I let us both pretend it worked. She promised to pick me up the next morning at my apartment, and we’d start scouting Carrigan together. She glanced at the gin bottle on my desk and added, “I’ll bring coffee.”
The bottle was drying up by the time I powered the computer down. Damn thing must’ve been leaking. I put my head on my desk to rest my eyes and didn’t open them again until I heard the faint tinkle of chimes on the front door. I sat up, wondering if the Lady had brought that sharpened shiv of a diamond ring back for the envelope. Or for me. But when I poked my head out into the hallway, no one was there. I shook my head. Just the gin making me jumpy. Time for me to be going.
On my way out, I paused at Jackal’s door. I hadn’t seen him since that morning, but I hadn’t expected to. For the better part of the day, he’d kept his door locked and wouldn’t even answer for Lou, because professionalism was a thing he’d left behind the day he bent me over the front desk to welcome me to the job, way back when. But he’d come around. Eventually.
His door was barely open, light slivering between the jamb and the knob, thin as the line dividing flesh from garter. From inside, a strangled bark of laughter—Jackal’s. A different sound from when I made him laugh. I leaned my head closer and heard the crash of something falling from his desk to the ground and then the erotic hoot of a woman trying too hard. The sound made me tired. It was a nice thing to believe about myself after Ellen, that my instinct for sisterhood wasn’t quite dead.
I listened, wondering what else I was going to hear—when you go to the trouble of listening at mostly closed doors, you do have certain expectations—wondering, too, what I would feel when I heard it. The fresh zhish of a zipper, the giggles swallowed between two mouths.
Jackal groaned, and I bit my lip, tasted blood. A feeling like a cold cloud of stars exploding in my stomach. I pressed a hand against the door and rested my cheek on it.
I let the fleshy sounds go on for a few minutes before I tipped the door farther open. Jackal had kept only one light on, a desk lamp, and it looked like his paramour had attempted to fling a scarf over it to create a mood. She’d misjudged, and the scarf piled on Jackal’s carpet. The girl was propped on his desk, her feet pushing against the desk chair’s arms for leverage. Jackal’s fist formed a ponytail in her long dark hair, his own body jammed between her and the chair. His pants were still creased in the back, and every time she tried to catch hold of his shirt, Jackal jerked away, not willing to grub up his starch. Fastidious, even in his one-night stands.
He moaned a name, too low for me to catch, and tugged the ponytail to one side so I had a clear view. Young, fox-pretty face, thick brows like slashes across her forehead. Lots of dark hair. Looked like me back when I’d started working in the office. I pictured sticky vinyl lips and realized she looked a bit, too, like the woman who had been retired. Jackal’s ex. I shuddered. He had a type.
From her position on the desk, Jackal’s new girl had a straight shot at my face, if she wanted it. But Jackal was good at this, I knew firsthand. She didn’t look up until the whole thing came to the rather expected end. Jackal finally stepped back, tucking himself back into his pants, and she caught sight of me. The brunette shrieked and covered her unbuttoned chest with her hands, glaring at me.
“Feel better now?” I asked him.
“Robert, what is she doing here? Was she watching us?”
Jackal was still breathing heavy, but his eyes met mine, ember-hot. “Babe, I didn’t know you were there.”
I laughed, saluting him, trying to ignore the tightness in my chest. “Oh, I’m sure.”
The brunette was looking back and forth between us, a growing horror in her eyes. “Babe?”
“I know,” I said, sparing her a glance. A fine sheen of sweat glazed her brow, and a blush was vivid but fading across her chest. “I didn’t much care for that term, either.”
Jackal smoothed his mussed hair back. It wasn’t that I was angry—though I was, but not because he’d brought another woman into the office. Or, rather, exactly because he’d brought another woman into the office and into our games—civilian casualties weren’t my style.
“You proved your point,” I said.