Back in the facing chairs, I told Julie what I had found out about her sister, which wasn’t much. Her eyes were dreamy, unfocused, and she seemed drunk.
“I brought you something,” she said, handing over an envelope. “It has some of Phaedra’s things. Photos, an address book. That kind of thing.”
In my mind, I was still back in the fifties-with young John Rogers and Opal Harvey and Rebecca Stokes-and the dissonance of being pulled back made me a little cross.
“Julie, I can’t search for Phaedra,” I said. “I’m barely making a living. I said I’d make some inquiries, and I did. No Jane Does who match her description in the postmortem lab. No body drops…”
When I looked up, Julie’s face had reddened and she was crying. I instantly felt terrible.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to-”
“Goddamn you,” she said, sniffling. “You are still angry with me after twenty years.”
I poured us both a McClelland’s. She lighted a smoke.
“Do you know what happened after I left you?” she said.
I made no response.
“I went to San Diego for a week with Chet, whom you were so threatened by.…”
“Yeah, he was a wealthy heart surgeon, and I was a college student and part-time deputy making ten thousand dollars a year,” I said.
“And after a week, he told me he was going back to his wife. So I came back to Phoenix and started waiting tables.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Julie ignored me. “You thought I had this great life because of my looks.”
I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Yes, you did,” she said. “But it wasn’t a great life. I was so young, and I was just…just…overwhelmed by it all. All these men, all of them after me. I know you think it would be wonderful to be so desired, but it wasn’t that way. You’ll never know how lonely it is when somebody just wants to fuck you. I was just too young to know any better.”
I don’t know why I asked this, but it just came out: “Did you ever care about me?”
“Oh, David,” she said in a voice I had heard so many times before. “That’s history.”
She drank the scotch. “I was so fucked up then. Nobody should have wanted me.”
“I did,” I ventured.
“You didn’t know me,” she said. Fair enough, I thought.
“We had a very unhappy home life,” she went on. “I moved out when I was sixteen just to get away. I tried to keep you away from that. I was afraid if you knew, really knew about me, you’d just hate me.”
“I would never have hated you. All those years, I wondered about you.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice a mix of anger and irony. “Do you really want to know? All those years I spent in dead-end jobs, a prett
y ornament on some guy’s arm. I got into cocaine, and God, I loved it.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and drank the last of her scotch. “There was always some asshole, thinking with his cock, who would buy it for me. Before he left me. Then I married a lawyer; God, what a mistake. He controlled me with coke and beat the shit out of me when I mouthed off to him. It was hell, but it was really hard to give up, too. Does that make any sense to you? I loved the money and the beautiful people and the feeling that the drugs gave me.”
I walked to her chair, put my hand on her shoulder, and she came into my arms. I held her a long time while she cried silently, angrily.
“I’m a mess, David,” she said finally. “Everything I touch turns bad.”
Chapter Five
“She got the looks in the family,” Julie said. “And the brains.”