“I’m sorry,” she said. “I truly am. But I can’t do anything without your help, and you can’t do anything without mine. Please trust me, for Eva’s sake? Please?”
His eyes darted across her face as if searching for chinks of treachery. At last he turned and shuffled into a tiny side chamber created by a thin wall of rough boards. This hiding place had been partitioned off from the laundry, sharing its heat and moisture but not the basins. A grimy window, covered with an iron grille, was pushed up as far as it would go. But it admitted only the stench of stewing garbage from the alley. Beneath it was a cot with a bedsheet tucked neatly into place. A single metal chair, its white paint chipped and scratched, held a folded shirt. Was this tidiness the last vestige of his pride? He moved the shirt to the bed and sat beside it, slapping the chair for Julia.
A distant roar reached them from the stage. The show must be coming to its headline acts. Jerome slumped, elbows on his knees, forehead in his palms. Perspiration beaded and trickled on his skin. She tried to ignore her own.
“She wouldn’t shoot him,” he said wearily, as if for the thousandth time. “No matter how vile he was. She hates guns. She’s terrified of them.”
“Did she go back up after her last show?”
Jerome raked fingers over his spongy mat of hair. “She wanted to get that damn manuscript. I thought it was a terrible idea. But she wouldn’t give it up.”
Julia considered. “She went back?”
His head sagged into his hands. “I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
Jerome sank as he spoke, until his chest lay on the planks of his thighs. “I went home. Next thing I knew, some white men were hauling me out of bed and saying Timson had been shot. That was all. They gave me about two minutes to get some things together, then dumped me here and said I’m a dead man if I try to leave. As if I killed him!”
“Have you talked with her?”
“Once, that night. They took me into Wallace’s office. I guess he owns this place. I got on the line, and her voice was shaking so bad she couldn’t put more than three or four words together. I’ve never heard her like that.”
“What did she say?”
“That Timson was dead and we both had to hide. She was crying about how we were in terrible trouble. She fussed about losing that damn manuscript. Like I care two beans for that now.”
“Do you know where she was?”
“One of Wallace’s buildings, I don’t know which. She said he told her he’d help if she went to the cops, so she was going to do it in the morning. I think maybe he was there.”
Jerome looked straight at Julia. “She never said she killed him, and she never said she didn’t. She knew it was hopeless either way.”
“She went to Wallace for help?”
“Yes.” The word gushed out in a sluice of pained disbelief. “Why him? Why not me?”
Julia understood why. Eva had gone to someone with the power to help her. She swallowed and asked her next difficult question, praying he wouldn’t get angry. “When I saw her on Monday, she had some nasty bruises. Do you know how she got them?”
He coughed. “You mean, Did I beat her? Just say it. Yes, we argued. I told her it was crazy to go back upstairs. You saw what that man was like. But I would never, ever lay a hand on her.”
He exhaled another foul breath. “It was probably the cops. They like to remind us who’s in charge.”
“They said she’d been beaten before she came into the precinct.”
“Timson then. Bastard.”
“Except,” Julia said slowly, thinking, “those bruises could prove Timson attacked her. She could say she acted in self-defense.”
Jerome snorted. “Says a white lady in a ten-dollar hat. There’s no such thing as self-defense if you’re colored and a white man’s dead.”
Julia felt something slip inside her, her moral logic wobble and crack. He was right. How could she keep forgetting? Her map of the world was the wrong map. Here she was a ridiculous stranger. How absurd was she at that moment, formulating a logical defense in her smart Agnès hat and Callot frock, now sodden with the perspiration of a backstage laundress?
She found her small handkerchief and lifted off her hat. She ran the cloth around her hairline, pushing back the curls stuck to her face. “Eva loved your plans for Paris.”
His eyes sparked. “She told you about that? Seems like a million years ago. We’re not going anywhere now. Not to Paris, not to the toilet, nowhere, without checking six times that no one sees us.”
Julia refolded the cloth and wiped the hollows of her throat. She hunched her shoulders and jiggled her dress before daubing the trickles between her breasts. Sweat is a great equalizer, she thought as she sacrificed dignity for relief. “Why was she so keen on Paris? Wouldn’t it be simpler to stay closer to home?”
A wry smile crossed his face. “She was keen, wasn’t she? It made no sense. But when I told her about the time I was there on a fellowship, she decided it was the perfect city, perfect for us. With a little money, the world was going to be at our feet.”
The smile faded, but his eyes kindled with a new warmth. “She started scheming how to get us there. That’s why she decided to write her book, to give Pablo Duveen what he’d been babbling for, the whole gaudy, glittering rara avis of Evangeline Pruitt, in prose just purple enough to make him pry open Goldsmith’s wallet and dig deep.”
“She wrote it for the money?”
Jerome smiled again, and Julia saw a tenderness so acute she dropped her eyes. “Hopeless
