Mistake number two: tears worked on men; they were wasted on me.
“What? What did you say?”
“I said okay. It’s been a tough case. We fucked up. We promised you a schedule, and you’ve kept up your side of the bargain. We didn’t. Tough shit for me, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.” I even worked up a smile for her, gnashing my teeth together.
“Really?” Ellen exhaled, and her shoulders dropped about a foot from her ears to her knees. She beamed a beatific smile of relief in my direction, like the Virgin Mary successfully pleading a headache to the Holy Spirit.
“Sure, no hard feelings. I get it. He’s a tough man to get it slick for. We’ll grab Lou and cash you out. But let’s celebrate all your hard work first. To your perseverance,” I said, raising my glass. Ellen raised hers in return, but she set it back down without taking a sip. The juniper quieted my headache a little but not nearly enough. “You’ve been lovely, Ellen. Truly. Thank you for your service.”
I paused the tumbler of gin halfway to my lips before I set it back down on the desk, as though I’d just remembered something. Ka-thunk. A solid weight to these tumblers Lou had bought, I mused. In a pinch, you could use ’em to murder a pesky blonde.
“It’s too bad you won’t get a chance to say goodbye,” I said. “To Hy.”
Ellen flinched at the sound of his name—aha. “That’s—that’s fine . . . What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I said, trying not to enjoy it yet—there were so many ways it could still go wrong, “we’ll have to terminate your work on set. It’s in your contract, a small clause—we rarely have to use it, but it seems these are exceptional circumstances.”
“All right,” Ellen warbled. “That’s . . . all right.”
“And you understand the precautions we’ll have to take, of course. Calling the wife is never fun, but we have to be sure you don’t see him again. You get it.” I plucked my phone from the desk and held it out to her. Conspiratorial. Like we were girlfriends crank-calling local dreamboats at a sleepover.
Ellen blanched. “What? I’m not doing that!”
There was a near-dead part of me that admired her, clinging to the memory of her life before me, the time when I didn’t call the shots. I’d seen Klein up close. He was doughy without being fat, which was, somehow, worse, an inch of pale flab separating him from the younger version of himself, with the skin of an unpaved street. I had the image of her cradled between his splayed legs, and it made me shudder.
But had my first mark been any different, or worse? You didn’t do it to fuck men you liked.
“Lou’s policy,” I said, faux apologetic. “To make sure none of the girls run jobs with our marks on their own.” I shrugged. “What can I say, it works.”
“You want me to . . . to call her? You want me to tell his wife that we’re—that we’ve been—”
“I promise you, he’ll never bother you again after that,” I said. “Plus, I thought you were so eager to know what she’d say yesterday at the hotel, about the two of you together. I thought you’d enjoy the opportunity.” I held my breath, wondering if I’d tipped it too far.
Ellen’s big brown eyes got watery, and she cocked her head, a kicked puppy. No, I thought. She can take a bit more. “Why are you so mean?”
“Here, I’ll dial.” I started to punch the numbers in, and Ellen practically vaulted over the desk to knock the phone out of my hand. She glared at me, more fire in her face than I expected.
“Stop it! Stop. I’m not doing it anymore, I told you,” Ellen said, her voice squeaky but harsh. “I’m not calling anyone and I’m not seeing him again. That’s final.”
“Come on, Ellen, if you want out, you’ve gotta—”
“I can make calls, too, you know.” Now she was standing straight, towering over me still seated at my desk. “What if I make a call to Mitch Carrigan’s office and warn him about this, this, this honeypot brothel you’re running here, huh? Tell him he better watch his back because I have it on very good authority he’s the next target. What if I do that, huh?”
Her threat bounced around my office, getting bigger with each passing second. In the vacuum, just the sound of both of us breathing—Ellen, hard; me, barely at all. No air at all while I thought of what Lou would say, what the Lady would think, not only that I’d screwed the Klein job to bits—all those weeks of preparation and we’d end up with nothing—but that I’d managed to scuttle our newest job, too. “Mitch Carrigan, our biggest score ever,” Lou had said, practically bouncing on her toes. There’d be no salvaging that fuckup, no matter how much Lou begged. And it was Lou she’d overheard. Lou would be on the line then, too. The thought struck me cold.
I stood up. Even in flats, I was taller than Ellen by more than an inch or two, and she stumbled back and almost tripped ass-first into the chair. But I bypassed her and walked to the liquor cart, grabbing the gin myself. My hand drifted over the bottles as I thought of what to say. No answers in any of them, but it didn’t stop me looking. I topped off my own glass and then waved the bottle under Ellen’s nose, but she twisted away like I’d raised a hand to slap her. I took a long deep drink, and when I came out of the glass, I knew what I was going to do.
I pulled the Lady’s fleur-de-lis envelope from the drawer and held it out to Ellen. “For Thursday. On top of your cut.”
“What?”
Ellen snatched the envelope from me so quick it sliced a finger. I popped it in my mouth and sucked on the welling blood as I watched her open it. Her eyes went wide. Inside: a folded piece of paper, the same weight as the envelope, the same embossed blue fleur-de-lis in the corner. Of course the Lady had a stationery set. When you rubbed the two halves of the paper together, they made a lovely shish-shish sound, like silk on skin. In thick marker strokes on the page: A monthly courtesy for our brave blues. Ellen tossed the paper and the envelope onto the desk without sparing either a glance.
Beneath the folded piece of paper, bundled together with a rubber band, a thick wedge of crisp green. The money, I’d realized when I’d peeked inside the envelope, must be the monthly bribe the Lady paid the cops. To ensure they looked the other way in case one of our marks decided it was worth the public humiliation to complain about what we did.
“There must be thousands of dollars here!”
“Eight large,” I said, half wishing I could grab it back out of her hands.
“This on top of what I already get?”
“That’s right.”
It was more money than she’d make in at least three months anywhere else and I knew it. More importantly, she knew it. I regretted offering it even as she shoved the money into her purse. I thought of her threat to tell Carrigan. I hadn’t expected that.