“Maybe your son wrote it.”
“My son wouldn’t lure me here.”
“You cain’t tell what a man will do when his life is in danger, war hero or not.” He lowered his hand to his belt and hooked his thumb in it, his fingers hanging below the buckle. He smiled at her almost kindly.
“I don’t think I can do what you’re asking me to,” she said.
“Sure you can. You know, you’re cute when you say it like that. Come on, hon. Time’s a-wasting. Let’s get with it.”
“I hurt my back. You have to help me up. I’ll undress.”
“It’s all right if you try to buy time. They all do. But you’re not leaving here until the right things happen. That’s the way it is.”
“I understand.”
“That’s a good girl. Now get them bloomers off.”
She raised her arms to him and waited. He grasped her by the wrists and pulled her to her feet. He was grinning, his teeth like kernels of corn, his breath rife with the smells of nicotine and fish. “You’re quite the little heifer.”
She pulled the pin from her hat, gripping the glass knob tightly in her palm, and drove the point into his mouth. He gagged and tried to push her away, but she drove the point deeper, past his teeth into the cheek, scraping bone, piercing the skin behind the jaw, the glass knob wedging against the roof of his mouth.
“Where is he? Tell me where my son is,” she said, kicking his shins, flailing at his head with her fists.
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Whatever he tried to say was lost in the blood clogging his throat. She leaned down to pick up a loose brick and heard him grunt as he pulled the hat pin from his mouth. She lifted the brick above her shoulder and hit him just below the eye, caving in the cheekbone.
But he wasn’t done. He ran at her with his full weight, swinging his fists, and knocked her to the floor again. A moment later, he was out the door and running down the alleyway into the storm. The manikin lay beside Ruby, its face turned toward her, as glossy and smooth and eyeless as a darning sock.
RUBY SAT ON the side of the bed in her hotel room and told Hackberry everything that had happened behind the door in the alleyway. When she finished, he sat beside her and put his arm over her shoulder. “You didn’t want to wait on me?” he said.
“I didn’t know when you’d be back,” she replied.
“His name was Jessie? And you’ve never seen him?”
“Would the police have a photograph of him?”
“It’s unlikely. A man like Beckman doesn’t hire known criminals. Or he brings them in from somewhere else and then gets rid of them.”
“What do we do now, Hack?”
“I see only two choices. Maybe they’re not the best, but I don’t know a third one.”
“What are they?” she asked.
Through the window, the sky seemed unrelenting in its darkness, as though neither the moon nor the sun would ever be more than a vaporous smudge.
“I want to use the telephone in my room,” he said.
“Use it here.”
“I need to have a conversation of a kind I’ve never had.”
————
BACK IN HIS room, he asked the switchboard operator to dial Beatrice DeMolay’s number. She picked up the phone immediately. “Mr. Holland?”
“How’d you know it was me?”