Chapter Six
Six
Elsie had received an agitated call from Beverley, who’d remembered what the police had said about the body of the Jane Doe. She’d then asked Elsie if she knew anything about a gang known as the Kings, if she might be able to find out more about them at work.
She had been surprised that Beverley was taking such an interest in the case, but then she’d remembered the scrapbook, Beverley’s need to collect and categorize bad news—as if keeping on top of awful things was a way to stay in control, to stop more awful things from happening.
There was clearly something up with this murder, more to the story, something the police were concealing.
So Elsie was interested, too. And wasn’t it her job as a journalist—well, okay, a journalist’s assistant—to find out what was being hidden?
She already knows the cops have given the woman a nickname, “Blondie”—that’s what the county sheriff had said on the phone—but she knows she’ll get no further information by asking them anything directly.
She’s already tried, of course—called the number from the note that she’d stashed in her pocket, received nothing in return but a slammed-down phone and a dial tone.
She takes a sip from her third stale coffee of the morning and ignores her pounding caffeine headache.
She scours the office floor for Robert Heston, the Signal’s chief crime reporter.
She needs more information about this Jane Doe, and she knows Heston could be a way to get it—if she asks delicately enough.
But Robert Heston is not an early-morning sort of guy.
Robert Heston chain-smokes Chesterfields and smells as if he has been out drinking all night, every night—because that is exactly what he has been doing.
His skin is pale, and there are large bags under his eyes.
She has never once seen the man look rested.
His hair is dull. His expression is often vacant, uninterested.
Elsie thinks he is the most inspirational man in this office.
An hour or so—and two more coffees—later, the reporter finally lopes in.
Elsie waits for him to take a seat, her teeth buzzing from the caffeine.
She watches as, instead of reaching for his notebook or his typewriter, he leans his forearms on his desk, collapses his head into them and groans.
He must be hungover again. Elsie cuts a glance over her shoulder, but she knows Hunter’s not in yet—not that he’d punish Heston for arriving at work in this state.
Heston is the best crime reporter in California; Elsie knows he’s at the Signal only because he got fired from the Times for getting wasted at the Christmas party and urinating on the editor’s desk.
Before that, he broke the story of the Elmwood Avenue Killer.
He got the only interview with Jack Ruby’s attorney.
He scooped everyone else in the city when he exposed police wrongdoing in the Toogood case—an officer had ignored vital evidence in the Klan’s murder of a civil rights activist. His editor would have been pissed about that—Heston could have jeopardized the paper’s relationship with the police with that exposé—but Heston won a Pulitzer, so who was anyone to argue?
The man is a stellar talent, a wordsmith, a genius. Right now, he appears to be drooling on his desk.
Elsie makes her way over and hovers at his shoulder, clears her throat. Heston does not move. She clears her throat again, more loudly. He slowly rolls over, peering up at her from under an elbow.
“What does he want?” he groans.
In her peripheral vision, Elsie notices Patricia Fowler watching them.
She can’t imagine Patricia ever turning up to the Times reeking of bourbon.
In fact, she can’t imagine many other reporters getting away with what Heston gets away with.
She looks down at him and smiles politely.
The veins in his eyes have burst, his hands are covered in scratches and she’s pretty sure his shirt is stained with burger relish.
“Paul didn’t…Mr. Hunter didn’t send me.” She straightens her shoulders. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“What’s that?” Heston flops back onto his forehead, then pushes himself up with his hands, shaking his head quickly and widening his eyes to sober up.
Elsie steels herself.
“I wondered if you’d heard anything about a Jane Doe—someone the LAPD might be referring to as Blondie, someone who might have some links to the Kings.”
“To the what?” He straightens, and frowns at her. “Why are you asking about the Kings? You’re a…secretary.”
“Personal assistant.”
She was a secretary once, when she first started at the Signal.
She was fantastic at that job, a meticulous Clacker.
She never let any errors slip through, as if her brain were a tightly strung net cast over the words, scooping up anything found wanting.
She’d present her pages to the editors at regular intervals, her eyes shining, chest full.
She’d long for them to appraise her work, to grade it as if writing a report card, to tell her she was at the top of the class.
It was a need for constant validation that she’d had ever since she was a child growing up in England, her father far away, on the muddy beaches of France, for the bulk of her life, until he returned with a parasite, a malevolent rage inside that changed things forever.
“Get out of here,” Heston orders. “Less questions.”
“Fewer,” Elsie tries to interject.
“More…typing, or whatever it is you do.” He waves his hand, then returns his head to the desk.
Elsie turns away, forces a stage laugh; she doesn’t want him to see that his words have scorched her.
She makes her way back to her typewriter, then takes a seat, rearranging a stack of notepaper to keep her hands busy.
Her eyes prickle with the threat of tears, which makes her even more frustrated.
Why will they not treat her like one of their own?
Yes, she’s “just” a personal assistant, not a reporter, but she has proven herself to be good at her job.
If only they would let her write, if only she could show them that she can do it…
She was primed for this job. After it all happened—after she discovered the extent of what Albert had been doing, just how many there were—she became ravenous for facts.
When the trial and the sentence and the media frenzy had passed, any facts would do.
She read encyclopedias, road atlases, phone books.
She needed to know things—anything at all.
That was when the puzzles started, too, when she found a taste for crosswords, for Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American—an insatiable desire to solve, to put things in order, to trust her own brain again.
After she learned of Albert’s crimes, the grimy details of the world refracted into sharp focus.
She saw the film of grime on everything—the peeling paint on otherwise beautiful buildings, the rats on the subway tracks, the discarded gum on the undersides of railings.
She saw that muddy finish on people, too, could see their bad parts with only a glance.
In the office, she surveys the books on her desk, stories of men gone rotten, of the ways in which humans can so easily harm one another.
Those who kill are often lionized in the press; Elsie knows that now.
Revered, in a way, for their charisma, for the alien wit with which they can outsmart their victims. As if their brutal transgressions propel them to a different plane than the one the rest of society is on.
But Albert was not really that smart. Albert was boring; he was awkward.
Albert could never have been described as “magnetic.” Eczema bloomed around his eyebrows and on his elbows, which were cracked and red.
The back of his head was beginning to lose its hair, revealing a shining, freckled expanse of skin, like a monk’s tonsure.
There had been nothing dangerous about him, and everything dangerous about him at the same time.
But it was easier for the police to cast him simply as otherworldly, wily, “different from us,” because only that could explain why it took them so long to catch him.
“Hey.” Someone is calling out to her in a hushed voice. “Hey, assistant girl.”
She turns, and when she realizes it’s Patricia, her cheeks betray her.
“Why are you asking about the Jane Doe?” she questions when Elsie hurries over. Patricia has a low voice for a woman, a drawl more than anything else; it stirs something strange in Elsie’s stomach.
“I’m sorry,” Elsie stammers. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
Patricia leans back and smiles. A suede jacket is slung over her chair. Elsie could never get away with a suede jacket.
“You looking for a story or something?” Patricia asks, the side of her mouth quirked.
Elsie falters, gives a fractured, unconvincing laugh. “I’m just a secretary. I mean, a personal assistant.”
Patricia laughs drily. “If I’d accepted being just a secretary, I would have made my father very happy. And let me tell you, no one wants to do that less than me.”
Is it a trap? What if Hunter is listening in?
“I can’t help you unless you tell me why you’re asking.” There’s something confrontational, schoolboyish about Patricia.
Elsie looks quickly around her again. Robert Heston, out of earshot, has a line of coffee cups arranged in front of him and he is downing them in quick succession.
“I heard there was something unusual about the body,” Elsie ventures, trying to hold Patricia’s gaze even though she feels entirely out of her depth.
“Okay.” Patricia considers this, smiles again. “Well, firstly, the Jane Doe’s not a Jane Doe anymore.”
“What?”
“She’s not blond, and she’s not a hooker, despite what the cops want us to believe.”
“How do you know that?” Elsie hates how eager she sounds, but this is gold; Patricia has the details she needs.
“Eh.” Patricia waves a hand. “I used to help the crime guys at the Times when they were short-staffed. They let me in on it.” She reaches for her coffee and takes a gulp. “I’m just enjoying making that guy’s hangover worse.” She gestures to Heston.
“What else do you know?” Elsie takes the seat next to Patricia, hoping she won’t be put off by her zeal, and pulls out her notebook.
Patricia chuckles at the sight of Elsie with her pen poised, and taps the bottom of a pack of Lucky Strikes.
“Cheryl Herrera. She ran track.” Patricia lights the cigarette, takes a drag. “Was about to go professional, by the sound of it.”
“Herrera?” Elsie’s pen moves fast. “How old?”
“Twenty-one. Final year of college.”
Elsie pauses her scribbling, swallows. “How did she die?”
Patricia takes another long drag on the cigarette, blows out the smoke.
“Strangled.”
Elsie grips her pen harder.
“Then whoever did it put an arrow through her eye.”
Elsie’s head whips up. “They…Sorry—what?” She cannot have heard that correctly.
“Mm-hmm.” Patricia nods. “Right in the eyeball.” She points at her own eye socket. “I’ll eat my hat if it’s the Kings. Too ostentatious.”
Elsie wavers, unsure what to write in her notes, hypnotized by the image of an eyeball, an arrow. This must be what the police were talking about when they said there was something unusual about the body.
She frowns. “If she wasn’t blond, why were the police calling her Blondie?”
“Yep. Not blond.” Patricia flicks ash into the remains of her coffee. “Dark hair, olive skin.” She looks briefly around the office, then tilts her head toward Elsie’s. “But whoever did it put a wig on her—blond.”
Elsie’s mouth gapes. Is this what it feels like to be a reporter? To know what the police know but aren’t telling anyone? It’s like a drug in her system.
“How do I find out more about her—about Cheryl?” she asks.
Patricia considers. “Buy me lunch and I’ll get you an address.”
Elsie bristles. She can’t do that. It would be breaking the one rule she set for herself when she started at the Signal.
No friendships. She can’t let her colleagues get too close.
They’d never understand how Albert hid it from her.
They’d never understand how it makes you question yourself—that reckoning with your own sanity, what’s happening inside your own brain.
Plus, if they find out about her past, she’ll be sacked, or shunned, her own story spread across the front page.
No one would ever be convinced by an investigative journalist who’d failed to see what was happening right under her own nose.
She can’t risk Patricia’s finding out the truth about her. It would ruin everything she’s worked for since Albert’s arrest.
She should really wait for Hunter to get in. She should type his missives, fill his coffee cup.
But she’s not letting anyone else have this story.
“Thank you, Patricia. Thank you. I’ll just grab my coat.”
“Please.” The words come through a plume of fresh-puffed smoke: “It’s Patti.”