Chapter Five
Five
“Pass me my smokes, will you, Bev?”
Beverley lifts her head from Roger’s chest and reaches across to the nightstand, hands the box over, resists the urge to take one for herself.
Being in this bed with Roger Greaves always sets her slightly on edge.
It’s the same bed she shared with her husband, with the same faded floral sheets, the indentation of Henry’s limbs still deep in the old mattress.
Sometimes, at night, when Roger’s gone and she’s alone, she eyeballs the shape as if it’s the chalk outline of a body at a crime scene.
She supposes it is, really—the lingering aftermath of a death.
After everything happened, she hadn’t wanted to leave her home, as Margot had, across the country, from New York to LA, or as Elsie had, from a shitty house in the Haight to an even shittier apartment in Burbank.
The catch is that she still feels Henry in the walls, in the fabric of the couch, in the old, clouded tumblers at the back of the cupboard.
She returns to Roger’s warmth, bringing her ear to his heartbeat, drowning out “Strangers in the Night” on the bedside radio.
The sheets are mussed at their ankles, her knee hooked over his thigh.
Clothes lie discarded on the floor. Roger’s police badge, always removed with the greatest care, sits next to a blister pack of Valium Beverley snuck from her mother’s bathroom cabinet.
The room is heavy with humidity, but she won’t have the window open, and by now Roger knows better than to ask.
Her skin tingles with the rock-pool damp of cooling sweat.
The smell of the act hangs low in the air.
Beverley uses the opportunity to ask about the body found on the night of the gala.
She can’t quite put her finger on it, but there’s something about the timing, the fact that Beverley was there when Cornwell found out, that makes her feel connected to it in a way.
Roger usually has no qualms about sharing the details of cases with Beverley.
She chooses to believe that’s because he trusts her, and not because she is so inconsequential that he knows she would have nothing to do with the information anyway.
“Oh, that.” The words are squashed in his throat as he swallows smoke. “Cornwell’s got his eyes on the Kings for it.” He exhales.
“Who?”
“You must have heard of the Kings.” He leans on an elbow, fixes his flinty eyes on her. “What with all that digging you do, the newspapers.”
She can’t help but feel that he’s mocking her.
“They’re a gang,” he explains. “Slick. Dangerous. This is just the sort of thing they’d do.”
“But who was it?”
“The Kings, Bev.”
“No, who was it that was murdered?”
“Oh.” Roger draws on his cigarette again; it makes the dimples in his cheeks sink deeper. He holds two fingers of his left hand in the air. “A—quote, unquote—good-time girl.”
“Roger.”
“Not my quote!” He laughs.
“Roger.”
“I’m sorry, Bev, but these women put themselves in vulnerable positions. What do they expect?”
She grows hot. “I think it’s fair to expect not to be killed, Roger.”
He pauses, then laughs regretfully, shakes his head. “Point taken.” He reaches over, trails his fingers across the tops of her arms.
They’re quiet for a while.
“You’re a remarkable woman, Bev. You know that,” he says eventually as he leans back on the pillow. “To have the strength to talk about this stuff…”
She didn’t feel remarkable. She felt exhausted and cheap.
She hated being the other woman. She knew what they were doing was wrong, but it had been five years now since she’d first seen Roger and Tom Cornwell, with her husband in handcuffs, helicopters circling overhead.
She had not known then, of course, that they would become entangled in one another’s lives, that Cornwell would remain a looming presence, that Roger would become a familiar routine for her—as a consequence not of any intense passion or attraction but of physics, two points drawn to each other in a steady, unswerving way.
And so it went: Roger stopping by after work, once the kids were in bed, when Enid thought he was working late.
They’d make love; they’d talk; they’d drink.
Beverley would talk about the children—how the other mothers waiting for the school bus would shame her; how her own mother, so adroit at criticism, liked to tell her that her children would be ruined by what their father had done.
Henry was the reason Beverley’s son never slept at night, Alice said.
Henry was the reason he wet the bed, lashed out.
Roger liked to take the chance to reminisce, to tell stories.
He’d speak about his time in the military, about the travels he’d made as a young man, about his childhood in Chicago.
She’d drift off, soothed by the low timbre of his voice, the comforting presence of someone there in the room.
Once Roger has gone, she locks the door behind him, then clicks into the monotony of her nighttime routine.
First, she checks all the windows and grabs the flashlight from beside the radio.
She opens the back door but does not step out into the yard.
The moon has retreated; the night is clear, crammed with stars, the twitch of heat still alive in the air.
She flicks on the flashlight and roams the shadows with the beam, focusing on corners and any shrubs she hasn’t cut back quite far enough.
When she’s satisfied, she turns it off and shuts the door, locking it, then trying the handle.
She makes her way to the entrance hall and stands at one end of the sideboard there.
Leaning her whole body weight against it, she pushes it along the wall until its edge is at the front exterior wall.
Then she swivels it, as best she can, ninety degrees, so it is flush against the front door, sealing everything off from the outside world.
After that, she goes to the living room, grabs a glass vase and three heavy books.
She returns to the sideboard, places the books on top of one another and then finishes with the vase.
If anyone even tries to open the door in the middle of the night, the glass will smash and Beverley will be alerted.
Then she pours herself a drink and retrieves the box from the pantry.
Inside the box is a scrapbook, the size of a large photo album, ring bound and well-worn.
She opens it and flips through the pages.
Newspaper clippings are stuck neatly throughout.
She runs her fingers over the first and hovers them over the picture: Henry working a grill at a backyard party, tongs in hand, hamburger meat sizzling away.
The editors had clearly chosen a picture intended to make him look like your average Joe, but Henry was never average, at least not physically—that thick, black hair; those eyes that looked as if they had been whittled from stone simply to gaze at her, eyes that would bore in so that she felt forever pinned by him.
She remembers the picture being taken. It was the Fourth of July and they’d invited Beverley’s mother and a few of Henry’s coworkers from the air-conditioning company over for a barbecue.
The yard was strung with stars and stripes and the weather was fine, bees idling around the jasmine.
She’d worn a sleeveless blouse with heart-shaped buttons.
She remembers fiddling with them while the wives tried to engage her in conversation about potato salad.
She’d been distracted. She and Henry had argued just before he struck the pose for the camera.
She had bought the wrong frankfurters from the grocery store, and Henry had called her out in front of everybody.
When they’d turned away, he had administered his punishment.
She flexes her wrist now, as if she can still feel the sting of the tongs, still hear the hissing of her own flesh.
She trails her fingertips over her skin.
There is a patch where it has lightened, been toughened by scar tissue, grown harder over the years.
She smooths the edges of the clipping. The headline—The Heatwave Killer Unmasked—still leaves her numb.
She flips quickly through the rest of the book, each article detailing a different crime, a different murderer, cases from the Bay Area to San Diego.
Elsie’s ex-husband is in there: Albert Moss, the community college teacher who trailed women home after his classes.
There are all sorts of men trapped between the pages—men who bludgeoned women to death with hammers, loners who stalked girls from their cars late at night.
Beverley never liked to overlook anything.
If a woman went missing in Sacramento, she’d add a clipping to the book.
If a husband shot his former lover in Santa Maria, she’d neatly score the story out from the newspaper, find a fresh new space, fix it to the page.
She scans more articles, murderers allotted paragraph upon paragraph while their victims are sidelined to passing whispers of acknowledgment.
When the women are given space, it is to make clear that they had brought their own murders upon themselves.
By making themselves known. By staying out late.
By kissing the guy. By wearing the short dress.
By not taking self-defense classes. By being pretty.
By not being pretty enough. By being fat.
By being short. By being striking and loud and ambitious.
Women brought death upon themselves simply by being women, it seemed.
Avoiding death was just an expected part of life for them—the constant mental calculations, the weighing up of choices, of risk.
She turns to a clean page and pulls scissors and a tube of Elmer’s Glue-All from the box. Then she goes to the pile of papers on the countertop and picks up the copy of the LA Times that Margot had left behind on the patio.
She is flipping quickly past stories of space missions and civil rights marches when a small photograph toward the back of the paper makes her pause.
She smooths out the page so she can examine the article more carefully.
She wasn’t sure if the story would have been picked up yet, but here it is: a grainy crime-scene shot—a gurney with a body bag laid out on top; police tape; the glow of lights on the sidewalk.
POLICE WORKING TO IDENTIFY MYSTERY VICTIM
The article beneath the photograph is perfunctory, scant on details, but Beverley immediately knows this is the victim from the night of the gala, the woman Roger had referred to as a good-time girl.
A woman working as a prostitute, Beverley supposes, but nevertheless a woman just like she was, whose identity has now been lost, plastered over, replaced with the stark image of a body bag and the rear wheels of waiting police cars.
The moment jolts back into Beverley’s mind—the coarse blare of the spotlights, Tom Cornwell’s eyes widening, the officer at the bottom of the stairs.
She runs her fingers over the photograph, picturing uniformed men in muttered discussion, tense looks; a woman’s fragile body left on the sidewalk, abandoned, life snuffed out. Having been in the area, so close, on the night the woman was killed, Bev can’t help but feel like part of her story.
It’s unusual. That’s what Cornwell’s officer had said. You’re not going to want to miss this one. She clearly remembers that now. But Roger didn’t mention anything unusual about it tonight. Nothing unusual is mentioned in the article, either.
She lifts the paper, holds it a little closer, studies the photograph again.
What are they hiding?