I was not smiling, not at either of them. I was wondering exactly how much Ellen had overheard and why she looked like such a flight risk.
I studied them as Lou chattered away at Ellen, tossing compliments her way, reaching out once to tuck some of Ellen’s frizz back against her head. Something Lou taught me years ago, good advice to live by: never trust women who don’t like other women. At the rate Lou was working Ellen, the three of us would be tangling together friendship bracelets by happy hour.
Finally, Lou pushed away from the desk and tossed a half-penitent shrug at me, as though she truly regretted leaving. “I’ll get out of your hair now,” Lou said, smiling over dazzled Ellen’s head at me, widening her eyes so I knew she, too, was wondering how much Ellen had heard, and shut the door behind her. Ellen stared after her, ignoring me. She didn’t want to meet my eyes, I realized.
Later, I thought about how it might have gone if I’d been wise enough to play nice, be the smart older sister with a plan. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Lady with her blue nail polish and her easy disposal of the girls she’d once worked with, and the envelope in my desk I hadn’t quite managed to mention to Lou, and speaking of Lou, where the hell had she gone last night after the bar, and then there was that hangover to consider, no small thing, the mezcal that was refusing to play nice with the gin. Maybe if any one of those things had been different, everything would have been.
There’s excuses, and then there’s excuses.
Instead, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t get up from my desk. Ellen was frozen, half turned to the door. I kept my eyebrows raised, waiting for her to make the first move. Finally, she took a step toward the chair, moving tentatively. She searched my face for an invite to sit and, when it wasn’t forthcoming, bypassed it and circled the room.
She paused in front of the drink cart. She turned the bottles this way and that, no doubt looking for something to do with her hands. Coming across like she’d never seen liquor before.
Maybe with Klein’s money in her pocket, the knowledge of what she could do to a powerful man, she wouldn’t always wait for other people to tell her what to do. I hoped so. I wasn’t convinced.
“Is this a good time?” Ellen asked finally, turning to me and rubbing her pale lips together. Her fingers drummed against the cart. Nervous. She’d been thinking since last night. I didn’t like it.
“As good a time as any. Pour me a drink and let’s get down to business.”
Ellen’s mouth dropped open, a who, me? thing that made me want to slap her.
“A . . . drink?”
“Gin. Straight.”
Ellen reached down on autopilot, hand hovering over the black glass bottle, and I felt a little smile in my chest, aha. I still had her. But then she pulled her fingers back like she’d been burned and said, “You want me to pour you a glass of gin?”
“Not all the way full. A few fingers, not the whole hand. It’s still early.”
She didn’t like it, but because I’d done my job well and picked a girl who could take a few slaps but couldn’t figure out if she minded, she yanked the top off the bottle like it had done something ugly and personal to her and dunked a few splashes into two separate tumblers.
She slammed the glass down on the desk, a few drops of gin splashing up onto my neck, and sat down in the chair across from me with even more force, crossing her legs and bouncing her foot up and down. It was a practiced move, not comfortable, like she’d seen someone do it in a movie once. She swirled her glass of gin and bent her face to it, sniffing. She took one big slug and her nostrils flared. But to her credit, she choked it down. I almost laughed.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Do you have any ice, at least?”
“No,” I lied.
She nodded, up and down, up and down, a little sad about the state of the world she’d found herself in. But I still had her. And even better, she was so distracted, she didn’t seem to have picked up on anything she might’ve overheard between me and Lou. Good.
I kept it brisk and all business. “Klein’s free Thursday afternoon. I’ve booked the St. Leo already so all that’s left is for you to call him—”
Ellen was turning red, and she started to shake her head. She mouthed something, but no sound came out, and I watched her face as I talked until the words exploded out of her: “No! No, no, Thursday isn’t going to work. No!”
The hangover was making it hard for me to focus on anything other than the blotchy red spots spreading across her cheeks.
“What, you have other plans? Okay, if Thursday’s no good, we could—”
“Thursday isn’t going to work because I’m not doing this anymore,” Ellen said. “Any of it. I mean it. I’m out. Finish the job without me because I’m done.”
Chapter 4
It was lucky for me that Ellen was not a good negotiator. After her outburst, she couldn’t stop talking—she didn’t uncork so much as explode.
“You can keep the money, that’s fine, that is fine with me,” she said. The more she repeated the word, the less I believed her, and I was right: “Although technically I’ve been working for weeks, so maybe we could come up with some sort of pro-rated— But all I’m saying is that I’m not doing it anymore. And that’s final. Nothing you can say would convince me. Nothing. Zilch. That is all I’m saying. I mean it.”
Mistake one: never speak first.
I folded my hands at my desk and watched her. She was breathing hard—emotional—no doubt scared of what I would say. Which meant I still had some power over her. That was good to know. The threat of the Lady’s forced retirement beat in my head like a second heart, but I kept my face as blank as I could.
“You know, you said to me, two, three weeks tops. You made it sound like it was going to be a lot of fun, like I’d be getting to play dress-up and having great sex and eating fancy dinners and . . .”
My patience was a very dry well. What was dinner and dress-up compared with bringing Hollywood’s richest scumbag to his knees? “He hasn’t been feeding you? He hasn’t made you feel real pretty?” Easy, Jo. You need her more than she realizes.
“Do you know what it’s like, having to fuck that old man? And then he hits me,” she said, as if I didn’t know. “I’m not doing it again. The way he looks at me. God.” She raised a hand to her cheek—the outline from the afternoon before had faded, but I was willing to bet it was still tender. She bit her lip and sucked on her teeth. I remembered she was trying to make it as an actress in this town. Well, who wasn’t.
“Okay,” I said.
Ellen was working up a good cry, her dark eyes glistening and slick. She was so shocked, she choked mid-sniffle and gaped at me. Now she didn’t know what to do with all that effort.