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PART II
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

73

TO HIS IRRITATION, Marina was silent as she made breakfast except for informing him that she had plans that did not include Fairyland, which he took to mean that she wanted him gone pronto.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

She didn’t answer. She slid his breakfast in front of him and went outside. Her shirt color said it was wash day.

At least she hadn’t burnt the bacon in retaliation.

He took a piece and wandered outside to see her pinning clothes to the line. He leaned against the back porch post. “Say, um … I finished Seven Dials.”

She didn’t pause, didn’t say a word.

“It wasn’t as good as her others.”

Nothing.

“Goddammit, Marina!”

She still didn’t acknowledge him or his frustration.

“Marina,” he growled, “I’mma go to work. Lemme know when you feel like talking, ’cuz I ain’t gonna put up with the silent treatment. I can give as good as I get.”

Silence.

He turned around and went to get ready for work, but he couldn’t resist trying again. He really did not want to go to work without at least getting yelled at.

“I ain’t tryin’a get away from you,” he said gruffly. “I think my shipment of Remus is due today.”

“Your Remus will be in Thursday at roughly 3:43 p.m.,” she said crisply, “about a mile south of Strawberry Hill.”

His jaw dropped. “What the hell!”

“Every nineteen days plus exactly twenty-two hours and average forty-three minutes, from the time you sign off having received your bill of lading, another one gets checked in as having arrived at its destination. The destination points are roughly in a star pattern that shifts about three miles counterclockwise every time, roughly twelve miles from point to point, revolving around Union Station. As closely as I can calculate, you have gone through almost three full rotations since you met with George Remus eight years ago to start bootlegging on your own. I can’t explain the deviation of the one Union Station delivery. I don’t have enough information.”

Trey stood there like a dummy. “How … ” he croaked.

“It’s clear as day.” That was when she looked at him contemptuous­ly. “If you’d bothered to make a chart and plot it out on a map, that is.”

Trey felt his mouth open and close like a fish’s.

“It was a puzzle to solve. Geometry and whatnot,” she sneered. “I did it last night since you fired my tutor and Dot has a regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday shift at the veterinary now and I told Miss Stanley to go away and never come back. I didn’t have anything else to do and I’m sick of helping with Sister Albright’s baby. I have realized I don’t like babies. In fact, I don’t like children. They’re noisy and messy and they talk back constantly and they will destroy a nice house, so you can’t have any nice things at all until you’re old.”

She turned back to her laundry and Trey flopped onto the top step of the back porch helplessly. “That’s … a problem,” he croaked because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Perhaps it’s just the Albright boys I don’t like. I hope so. I am hoping I won’t feel that way about my own baby. I don’t know what I’ll do if I do. That would be horrible for it. Trust me, I know.”

He didn’t know Marina could be this vicious. He didn’t like it, but now he had to tread carefully because he’d shaken her like a bottle of warm NuGrape and popped the top. “Ah … I can find new tutors,” he offered weakly.

She said nothing.

“Marina,” he groaned. “Talk to me, please.”

“I have nothing to say,” she said matter-of-factly around the clothespins in her mouth.

“We’re best pals. Best pals argue,” he wheedled.

“You are not my pal, best or otherwise.” Trey’s mouth dropped open. “But Dot isn’t either anymore, so you needn’t feel as if you are competing with her any longer.”

“But—”

He stopped. The only noises were the breeze through the leaves and the clothes flapping and snapping. An ambulance pierced the quiet. Over all that, birds were singing. Assholes.

“I’m sorry.”

Nothing.

What could he do right now? He didn’t have enough experience with women to know what would make her happy. He’d never gotten to arguing stage with any of the girls he dated. His employees were, well, his employees. It vaguely occurred to him he’d never really felt like a husband and now he did because his wife was mad at him but he wasn’t the type of man to punish her for it. Men who cared about their wives’ feelings … well, cared. Like Pendergast and Lazia.

And he did care about Marina. He always had. He looked her over, all sweet in that pink gingham shirt that made her cheeks so rosy. He blinked. Leaned forward and looked again. He approached her carefully and took her arm, caressing the angry red streaks around her wound, spreading too far outward to suggest healing. “Sugga, you been pickin’ at this again?”

She jerked her arm away and glared at him.

“C’mon, lemme tend that. Before you know it, it’s gonna get infected and then it’ll never heal and then you’ll get gangrene and then your arm’s gonna get cut off. Every time you get a good scab going, you peel it off. And look here, you’re scratching yourself raw, making more sores and scabs, and picking those off, too.” Her glare turned vicious and he dropped the subject with a heavy sigh. “Marina, you’re a good woman, a good wife.” Her back stiffened. “You’re smart. Obviously smarter than me.” He barked an unamused laugh. “I’ve been trying to figure out that pattern for years so I can plan. I care about you. I don’t want to hurt your feelings but I do and I’m gonna because I can’t keep my fucking trap shut or say the right thing. I wanna be your best pal because you’re my best pal whether you wanna be or not.”

Her mouth tightened around the clothespins.

“And … ” he admitted reluctantly, “I wanna fuck you ’cuz you’re irresistible.” She paused for a few seconds. That might have been the right thing to say. If it wasn’t, he’d said stupider things. “I can’t wait to get home to you an’ then I do, an’ I look at you all sweet and smart and the tiniest bit sassy, I wanna kiss you and hold you, and before I know it, I wanna touch and kiss you everywhere and be inside you and make you come.” He paused. “Carville stood me down. I rarely get my clock cleaned like that by somebody not connected. Oh, hell, never. Felt like I did the day I fell on my face right in front of you. He’s in love with you—”

She gasped and finally looked at him, her eyes wide.

“He admitted it, straight up, I swear to God he did. Then he chewed me out right proper an’ I realized that I’m always gonna be a shit husband to anybody, but you’re the perfect wife for him and probably a whole lotta other cats just like him. An’ I only got the jump on ’em ’cuz I can see through disguises an’ you were too young anyway. I ain’t sorry I got the jump. I ain’t sorry you’re still a teenage girl, ’cuz you ain’t. Not really. I am sorry I ain’t so good a husband as you need me to be, an’ I ain’t never gonna be as good a one as Carville no matter how hard I try, which I won’t.”

She was still looking at him, but now she was wary—clearly not suspicious of his words, but suspicious that he’d bite her again.

“You didn’t think anything of hiring Mr. Carville,” she said low, her voice thrumming with hurt and anger, “and suggesting I feed him supper as part of his pay. Dot told me he’d get a crush on me, but I didn’t believe her but she was right. Again. Sister Albright told me when she got me all fixed up, I’d knock some socks off, but I didn’t believe her. You’d never have suspected if Miss Stanley hadn’t said something because it didn’t occur to you any other man would see me as an attractive woman. At Kresge’s, Jimmy— You really only thought he talked to me because I looked alone and defenseless, didn’t you? Because you think of him as a coward.”

Trey dropped his head in defeat.

“Did it occur to you I might find some other man attractive?”

He tensed, immediately angry, but trying to be careful.

“Because Dot was just as afraid I’d get a crush on a decent man—” Ouch. “—who happened to be handsome. I know what being indecent is now. I wondered what it would be like to be married to a man with a respectable job, who came home at six o’clock at night instead of in the morning, who didn’t come home stinking of whisky and stale cigarette smoke and perfume and kitchen grease.”

Kitchen grease?! He was going to have a talk with Ida.

“I wondered what it would be like to do … that … with him—”

Trey cringed.

“—knowing there would never come a day he thought of me as a loose woman. But I didn’t want to.” She stopped to pin more clothes. “I don’t like what happens at the speakeasy,” she said low. “I also don’t like how loud and noisy the Albrights’ home is. But I don’t want to go back to the Scarritts’ silent life, and life with Mr. Carville would be the same.

“I don’t want all that noise, but I do want something to remind me I’m not a prisoner, a caretaker, a … servant. I might be lonely and you might not care what I did with my day, but I can do anything I want with it and you won’t care enough to be mad. With you, I … I’m a— Well. A budding law student. I suppose. I think that’s too fantastical, but you don’t and … Miss Stanley told Mr. Carville you wanted me to go to college, and he later told me college is for single women who want to be teachers or nurses, not homemakers and mothers. He said women like me don’t need college. Dot said it outright, that women who have children can’t do that.”

“What are you tryin’a say, Sugga?” he asked carefully.

Her mouth turned down and she twisted her lips. She pinned more clothes to the line. Trey thought she wasn’t going to answer, but finally she muttered, “I would rather argue and be indecent with an evil monster who wants me and makes me feel good and risk that someday you will see me as a loose woman than quietly discuss Agatha Christie with Mr. Carville and be indecent just to have babies I don’t want, stuck at home with them and spending my life going from one chore to another with a whole bunch of brats screaming their heads off for me.” She heaved a resigned sigh and slumped over. “He probably wouldn’t even care if I had a body sneeze or know how to give me one if he did care and he doesn’t approve of my having a car, and … I would never choose to be with a man who’d be cruel enough to make me walk to the grocery store with a baby.”

Trey nearly collapsed with relief.

“But I’m still angry with you.”

He nodded slowly.

“So go away.”

Gladly.

73

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