Walter Finch was light when he picked me up from the hospital ten days after the shooting: gentle, cheerful, undemanding. He wasn’t the sort of man to wear his violence on the outside, not like Victor. Another of our quiet affinities. I, too, could bide my time with what I had to tell him. Tamara waited against the door of his silver Packard, a paisley scarf wrapped around her hair. The solvent heat and noon sun had shrunk her, or perhaps just the space she occupied; she smiled to see me, but her eyes looked upside-down with pain.
“What happened?” I asked after I had settled myself, awkwardly, into the back seat.
“Don’t you dare! You can’t get shot before my eyes, Phyllis, and then go asking how I’m doing! Here, you want a pillow? I made Walter bring pillows.”
I bore her ministrations with detached patience; my parting drink of morphine still murmured dulcet comfort, and if I kept very still, that song could drown out the world.
“I’m so glad to see you, Pea,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “I tried and tried to read your numbers, but I guess you’re special, sugar, ’cause they want you to be here before they tell me anything.”
She held up her familiar card deck, the faded backs, soft as old leather, with an open palm and a closed fist trapped in violet bramble.
“You want to read them now?”
She sucked her teeth. “The luck you been having, I don’t think they can wait.”
“Well,” I said, and wondered why the sight of those cards was pricking me, uneasy, in the ribs. She spread a blanket between us and started to shuffle, the cards flying faster than a hummingbird’s wings.
“But what’s happened with you, baby?” I asked. “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”
Tamara just shook her head and shuffled even faster. She had that chipped porcelain smile she got whenever Victor spent too long backstage. I put my left arm around her shoulders. The cards spilled, the jokers and jacks and spades face up and staring.
“It’s Clyde,” Tamara said, “it’s that fool!” She smacked the back of Walter’s seat with an open palm, and let out a cry like an animal in a trap.
Walter’s driving was funereal and he kept his eyes on the road, but I caught his grimace in the rearview mirror.
“Her soldier boy shipped off,” he said.
Tamara moaned. “Clyde wouldn’t stay, no matter what I said, just like last time. He says he loves me and the next breath he’s promising to write. Like he ever does! So I don’t care what Hitler does to him—”
She seemed ready to blow her nose on my sling, so I asked Walter for a hankie. “Tamara,” I said, almost laughing and so sad I could cry with her. “Tammy, honey, what did you want him to do, dodge the draft? Get arrested? He still wouldn’t be with you in jail.”
“He always finds a way to leave. He’s that boy, the one I fell for back in Lawrenceville. I told you.”
“The actor?”
She sighed against me. “He’s just so goddamn beautiful, Pea.”
“I know. But he was drafted. Doesn’t mean he don’t love you.”
“Victor could have—”
Walter must have flinched; the car jolted at the same time I interrupted her: “Don’t. You might be young, but you ain’t stupid. You’ve seen enough to know how it is. You want that for him? Someone you love?”
She bit her lip. “What about Dev?”
“What about him?”
“He runs for Victor. And I bet you he won’t be getting himself killed halfway around the world in some white man’s war, either. Why’s it good enough for him and not Clyde?”
I closed my eyes, afraid that Tamara or Walter might read the fear there, my new and terrible knowledge of Dev’s double life. He could have died anytime in the last decade, and I hadn’t even known.
“Tamara, leave her be.”
“It’s not good enough for either of them. But at least your Clyde has the sense to know it.”
This pricked her upright; she glared at me and swelled. “Won’t you ever forgive him?”
I started laughing.
“What?” Tamara said. “Damn it, Pea, don’t make fun—”
“That’s what you think? Honey, if there’s any forgiveness going around, I’m the one who needs it.”
“Tamara,” Walter said, heavily. “Leave this. Please. Let’s get upstairs.”
Tamara bit her lip and bent to retrieve her cards. She froze when she saw how they had fallen, all those spades face-up, pointing at me like a devil’s garden, and a family of royals pulling the weeds.
“Walter, tell me you’ve got someone watching Pea’s back.”
He looked thoughtful, then nodded. “I’ll put someone on the building tonight.”
Tammy gave him a sour look from behind puffy eyes. “If something happens to her again—”
Walter raised one hand—a benign enough gesture—and Tammy’s words turned back hard enough to bruise. “Our angel has been at this since you were a girl, Tamara. If something gets her, I promise you, she knew it was coming.”
“We haven’t found Maryann West yet,” Walter said, just before leaving me. Tamara had gone back to the car. “But I’m hunting, and so we will. Victor wanted you to know.”
I stared at him for a good while, long enough that anyone else would have blinked or shuffled or asked me what I wanted. Walter just waited like the Buddha.
I bore it almost as well, though my arm had started to hurt more than the morphine could suppress.
“What I really need to know,” I said at last, “is why you’re lying about this. Maryann West didn’t kill those people. Neither did Trent Sullivan. Victor did. Victor is, I suppose, and there you are, shoveling shit for him like it’s your job.”
“It is. I don’t know why you ever thought it wasn’t. Vic never kept me around for my good looks.”
I
