The Secret Life of Anna Blanc (22 page)

Anna sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. If failure was inevitable, trying was illogical. Therefore, Anna wouldn't try. Why should she? She wouldn't kill herself typing, only to fail. She would spend her time doing the men's work for them. She would investigate murder.

She brought out the list of dead brothel girls, closed her eyes, and reviewed the cases in her mind. She thought about how she would commit suicide if, for example, Edgar Wright refused to marry her. First choice, she would blow out her pilot light, turn up the gas, arrange herself in her best clothes, and simply go to sleep. Opium might be nice, except people sometimes drowned in their own vomit. In a pinch, she might fall on her lover's sword like Juliet, but she would definitely not mar her neck with a big bloody gash and leave her body to be pecked apart by vultures. She wouldn't attend her own wake mutilated.

Anna knew that Peaches Payton had not committed suicide, even if Chief Singer didn't trust her evidence. There had to be another clue, something that would verify Madam Lulu's conviction that brothel girls were being murdered, so that the men would finally believe her, catch the villain, and stop the brutal killings. Otherwise, there would be more blood. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

If brothel girls were being murdered by some deranged killer, and the deaths were being disguised as suicides, etc., wouldn't there be more deaths attributed to suicides, etc., than usual? Anna may not have bodies or crime scenes to examine, but she could count.

Madam Lulu said that the murders began six months ago in January. Anna started a new list, grouping deaths and disappearances by date in six-month increments. She started five years back and worked forward.

From January 1902 up until July 1902 there were two incidents among brothel girls, one death due to drug overdose, and one girl committed suicide. From July 1902 up until January 1903, there were two deaths, both suicides, and one girl reported missing. Anna continued counting in this manner, ending with the death of Peaches Payton that July.

1907 had the highest number of incidents by far. Four girls had disappeared in the past six months, while only one went missing over the previous four and a half years. Six girls had died since January, yet only eight had died in all the other years put together.

Prior to 1907, on average, two brothel girls committed suicide or overdosed each year. Since January, the number of deaths and disappearances had increased tenfold. Anna could think of no reason that
the numbers would jump so precipitously, except for murder. But Anna didn't know about prostitutes, except that they were young, pretty, and sometimes did it to feed babies. She knew that Peaches was murdered, but not about the other girls.

She looked over at Snow, who struggled to write something, his forehead wrinkled like a cabbage. He had been the investigating officer in Peaches Payton's death. If she told him about the increase in deaths, he might re-open the investigation. More likely, he would take insult, bark at her, and then tattle to Wolf.

Anna had already asked Captain Wells and Police Chief Singer to take the investigation deeper. Despite her perfectly apodictic logic, they patronized her, lied to her. Now, with the Boyle Heights debacle, her credibility had reached an all-time low.

The captain needed to hear the evidence from someone other than herself. Someone who had his ear. Someone related to him, who ate enchiladas at his house. Someone who looked like the Arrow Collar Man and who wasn't speaking to her at present.

Anna found Joe Singer in the stables, a long, low building where six of the dozen or so police mounts were loitering in their stalls. There was a loft, and it had that lovely stable smell of hay, leather tack, and horses. She heard a shovel scraping on pavement and his familiar tenor. “I wonder if she's got a boy? The girl who once filled me with joy. I wonder if she ever tells him of me? I wonder who's kissing her now?”

Anna's heart beat a little faster and she wondered who Officer Singer had been kissing before last night, because it seemed like he had practiced. She wondered if it was Eve McBride.

She found him in a stall with a steaming pile of horse manure balanced on his shovel. He tossed it in a wheelbarrow and winced at the motion. She unlatched the rusty gate and pushed it open. It creaked. She put on a tentative smile. “Hello.”

He ignored her. That wasn't such a bad sign. If this were to be a one-sided conversation, at least she'd have ample opportunity to make her point. She cleared her throat. “You must think this is all a game to me, that it means nothing. That I'm just going to cock things up and go back to my money and my…”

“I wouldn't talk so loud if I were you,” he said. “I'm pretty sure Wolf is in the hay loft.”

“In the hay loft?” Anna looked up and saw the hay shifting curiously above her, but no sign of Wolf. She looked to Joe for an explanation. None was forthcoming.

“Go on.” He leaned on his shovel and looked impatient. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hair was damp around the edges from the heat.

She frowned. She had lost her train of thought. She cleared her throat again and whispered. “I want to capture the rape fiend just as much as you do. And I want to find out who killed Peaches Payton.”

“It was a suicide.” He started shoveling again, scraping the cement, heaving the manure, wincing.

“No woman slits her own throat. It's ugly and violent.”

“On occasion, Sherlock, life is ugly and violent. Why don't you speak to Wolf? He's the lead detective.”

“I did,” she whispered. “He told me to drop it. You can't tell Wolf that I'm investigating. If he finds out, he'll probably fire me. So, you have to do it.”

Joe laughed. Anna lifted her skirts and picked her way into the stall, looking for little patches of clean among the filthy. She moved closer so that she wouldn't have to speak so loud. “Listen to me. It isn't just Peaches Payton. Four brothel girls have disappeared in the past six months.”

Joe stopped and scraped dung off his shoe with the edge of the shovel. “That doesn't mean anything. Girls move around, go to new brothels in other cities so they can be the new face in town. It's good business. It doesn't always make the papers.”

Her brow arched up. She wondered how he knew that. She certainly had not. “That may be true, but why then had only one brothel girl been reported missing in the previous four and a half years put together?”

He looked surprised. “You went through the files and counted them?”

“I stopped at the letter S.”

“So you don't really know how many girls went missing.”

Anna made an impatient sound. “Not yet. But I don't believe alphabetical order has anything to do with missing prostitutes. You can't possibly think all the Fs would run away and all the Ys would stay home!”

He swiped a handkerchief across his forehead. “I hadn't thought about it at all.”

“I'm asking you to! In addition to the missing girls, six brothel girls committed suicide or overdosed in the past six months.”

“I'm telling you, Sherlock. That's life in the low lands. You don't know it because you live on the hill.”

“I understand that brothel girls are miserable and they sometimes kill themselves, accidentally or on purpose, but that's six times the six month average over the previous four and a half years.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Sherlock finished high school.”

She made a sound of exasperation. “You're not taking this seriously! Just like you didn't take Douglas Doogan seriously. I saw him in Boyle Heights last night with a big, long knife. The ladies of Los Angeles thank you for your protection, Office Singer!”

Joe blinked. His face flushed ruby red. “I'll take care of Doogan, all right? How did the girls commit suicide?”

Anna's heart beat faster. He still glowered at her, but he was listening. “Every way you can think of, throwing themselves off cliffs and in front of trains, poison, hanging. Some girls cut themselves. One girl weighted herself down with rocks and went swimming.”

“So, every girl died differently?”

“Since January? There were six girls and six different ways.”

“Did they all leave notes?”

“Some did and some didn't. But they weren't addressed to us, so we don't have them.”

Joe shrugged and spun the shovel like a top. Anna stopped it with her hand. “Maybe there's something else that can explain the suicides and disappearances, but I don't know what it would be because I don't know about brothel girls and apparently you do!”

He laughed cynically. Anna frowned. “Your father is the police chief. You could convince him to have someone else besides Snow look into it.”

He shoveled another load of green manure. “I could, but I won't.”

Anna snatched the shovel from his hands and the manure fell back into the stall with a splat, spattering his shoes. She glared. “Why won't you help me?”

Joe snatched the shovel back. “Because coroners know a whole lot more about murder and dead people than you do, and I'm not going to accuse ours of incompetence just because you have a hunch!”

Anna stomped her foot. “No! I don't think that's the reason. I
think it's because I embarrassed you. Shot you with your own gun. Well, I'm very sorry, Officer Singer. But it takes two to do the tango and you should be sorry too!”

He threw his hands in the air. “Sorry for what?”

“Your impropriety! The real reason we didn't capture the rape fiend. If you hadn't gotten fresh…”

“You said you wanted to spoon!”

Anna let out a cry of indignation. “No. I said lovers would be crooning and spooning. I didn't intend…”

“Oh come on, Sherlock. You were batting your eyelashes so fast, I was afraid you'd fly away.”

Anna's cheeks went candy apple red, a deeper shade than the whole crowd of mocking policemen could inspire. With a shriek of exasperation, she turned and stomped toward the stable door.

A pair of ladies' drawers sailed down from the hayloft and snagged on her bun, covering her face as she tried to open the gate. Anna screamed and swiped at them like they were wasps on attack. She knocked them to the ground, flung the gate open, and fled.

Joe called after her, laughing. “I'm not sorry!”

Truth be told, Anna wasn't either.

That evening, Anna met with her seamstress to be fitted for the best—no, the only—formal equestrian dinner gown in Los Angeles. She and Edgar had been invited to a dinner on horseback at the Raymond Hotel. Anna straddled a sawhorse brought into her bedroom for that purpose. Its four legs, balanced on towers of concrete block, raised Anna to horse height while her seamstress swathed her in a white satin that shimmered like starlight and would be the perfect contrast against her midnight-black Arabian. When mounted, the fabric spilled and rippled almost to the ground. If Anna should ever try to walk in it, it would drag behind her like a deflated hot air balloon.

Anna held still and amused herself thinking up clever refutations that she should have said to Officer Singer that afternoon in the stables. Anna wasn't good at clever refutations. Plus, Officer Singer was right. Parts of her had wanted to kiss him. He also had a point when he said she didn't know enough about dead people. She wanted to tell him that she had read
A System of Legal Medicine
, but, as she had stolen it from the coroner, Officer Singer might put her in jail. The book had all kinds of information about dead people—stomach contents, blood spatters, and tips for identifying a body after its parts had rotted off. It discussed thumb types and measuring criminal's faces. But Anna needed to learn about mental diseases, too—diseases that might lead a sufferer to suicide or murder.

When the fitting was over, Anna read. She had severed the covers of Theo's medical books and replaced them with covers from other books that she had borrowed from his collection and dismembered. She'd taken three volumes from a series called
Systems of Medicine
and
re-covered them as
A History of Egypt
, Drummond's
Spiritual Life
, and
A Guide to Child Rearing
. She pulled them out and snuggled down to read.

The texts were heavy, cumbersome to hold, with lots of jargon that she had to look up in
The Wizard of Oz
—a medical dictionary. She found little of what she sought, but liked their dusty book smell, and they had interesting pictures—pictures of people with hair covering their entire bodies, Siamese twins, and one of a naked person who had breasts and, so the text said, male parts, too. Regrettably, they were far too small for Anna to get a good look.

She flipped through a book called
Nervous and Mental Diseases
, which would surely touch on suicide. Out of curiosity, she went to the section on hysteria. It included nothing new about treatment, but various theories as to the cause.

“Behind every symptom of hysteria and the obsession neurosis is a mass of suppressed sexual desire.” So wrote Sigmund Freud. Anna cried out in indignation. In addition to his other crimes, Joe Singer put her at risk of a mental disease. Whether that meant she should avoid him entirely or run into his arms, she wasn't sure—medically speaking. She said a silent prayer to Saint Dymphna, patron saint of the crazy, to save her from the insanity induced by resisting the lips of a delicious police officer.

Anna went to her dresser and picked up
A System of Legal Medicine
. She had read it thrice already and had mastered most of the information, but she still lacked practical experience. She needed a real rotten, fetid corpse to examine. She yawned and rested her cheek, just for a moment, on the open book. Her breathing slowed. She fell asleep. She dreamed of hairy Siamese twins, moldering corpses, and insanity in the arms of Joe Singer.

The next morning, Anna slumped into the station, out of sorts and heavy with disillusionment. The LAPD cops were nothing like the bright, heroic, upstanding detectives in novels. Detective Snow was
incompetent, Detective Wolf was profligate, and Officer Singer was a cowardly, crooning Arrow Collar Man who recklessly sent women over the brink.

Still, whenever Officer Singer was in the station, Anna's eyes wandered over to where he was and lingered there. Whenever he returned her gaze, she looked away. She thought of friendly things to say to him, like, “Do you ever go to the beach?” but she never did.

Late that afternoon, Joe sat at his desk tallying traffic accidents. Wolf sauntered over and leaned his elbows on Joe's desk. His pomade smelled overwhelming. “I'm jealous of you, young Joe.”

Joe grinned, sat back in his chair, and stretched. “Oh, why's that?”

“Mrs. Holmes is always looking at you, although I can't say I approve of her taste.”

Joe's smile melted away. “Wolf, you are full to the eyebrows with horse shit.”

Wolf looked over at Anna, who appeared to be doing nothing, staring at the ceiling with a pen between her lips. “She's always flashing those big blue eyes in your direction.”

Joe followed Wolf's gaze to Anna. “They're not blue. They're more like…ocean gray.”

“The ocean's blue.”

“Yeah. Sometimes. But her eyes are like the ocean when it's overcast—grey. It still sparkles, you know, from sunbeams.”

Wolf flashed his teeth. “Officer Singer, that's tantamount to a confession.”

Joe sighed. “Look. She's a matron—a respectable girl. And she's engaged.”

Wolf snapped his fingers. “I knew she was lying about the husband overseas.”

“I don't have any designs on her.” Joe went back to tallying accidents.

“Watch out. I'm taking that as permission.” Wolf licked his hand,
and used it to slick back his gleaming, brilliantined hair. He swaggered across to Anna's desk and leaned over her shoulder, so close that his cheek grazed her hair. He wafted citrus, lavender, and rubbing alcohol. “Matron Holmes, do you know how to lubricate a typewriter?”

Anna smiled in confusion at his proximity and replied in the singsong of the unsure. “Hm. I think so.”

“Why don't I show you, honeybun? Here, you scoot in close.” Anna scooted her chair flush against the desk and Wolf reached his arms around her to fiddle with the carriage. “That's right.” He cut his eyes to Joe and grinned. Joe glowered.

Matron Clemens approached with a file for Anna and a wordless reprimand for Wolf. He straightened up like a guilty schoolboy and race-walked back to his desk.

Matron Clemens's voice was as crisp and clean as a new box of envelopes. “There has been a report that a ten-year-old girl is living at the Poodle Dog. Do you know the place?”

“Of course,” Anna lied. Mr. Melvin would tell her where it was. Or Joe. She glanced over at him. His face was peppermint red.

Matron Clemens continued. “My best hope is that she's the daughter of one of the girls. Please go down and investigate. If you find her, take her straight to Whittier and enroll her.”

Anna nodded. Whittier was a reform school. By reputation, it was more of a training ground for immoral behavior than a haven of reform, but Anna would do whatever Matron Clemens said. Most of the time.

As Anna took the file from Matron Clemens's hand, Snow shuffled by on his way to the door. He held a pair of rubber boots, which were neither the fashion in Los Angeles nor appropriate for the July weather. The last time she had seen him wear rain boots they were covered in blood and feathers. He sat on a bench and slipped the boots over his shoes.

Anna thanked Matron Clemens and sashayed toward the door. She briefly lingered at Mr. Melvin's desk, leaning down as if he had called her over to show her something. “Mr. Melvin, do you have the address of the Poodle Dog?”

Mr. Melvin shrunk away from her, but consulted an address book and began to write directions on a slip of paper. Snow lumbered past them in his rubber boots, trailing the scent of toe jam and whatever horrors he'd stepped in. Mr. Melvin's tiny lip jumped.

Anna whispered, “Did someone report a body?”

He nodded his head and slid her the note.

Anna leaned down and beamed into his face. “Thank you.” His little mouth turned up, ever so slightly.

There was a skip in Anna's step. This was her chance to examine a real, rotting, stinking corpse in situ and improve her detecting skills. She stepped outside and paused at the top of the stone steps, scanning the street for Snow. She spotted him waiting to board a trolley. He held his hat in one hand and was vigorously scratching his head. Anna tailed him at a distance. When he boarded a trolley, she climbed on the car's back fender. When Snow pulled the cord at Orchard Street, Anna jumped off.

Snow lumbered down the dusty street eating a red apple. He slipped between two beer mills into an avocado orchard. Anna followed stealthily. The trees were large and heavy with fruit, their branches dipping down to form caves of cool shadow. She heard his dull, gravelly voice and tiptoed toward it, stepping on soft fallen fruit to muffle the crunching of the leaves. She ducked under the canopy of a tree.

There, peering through the branches was Madam Lulu. She wore a dress the color of a tree trunk.

“What are you doing here?” Anna asked.

Madam Lulu whispered, “Didn't you say I needed evidence?”

Anna crept closer. “I'm learning, too. I've been reading about legal medicine…”

Madam Lulu bulged her eyes at Anna. “Shut up. You're gonna give me away.”

Anna covered her mouth in a pantomime of compliance, and crouched down by the madam. She peeked through the curtain of waxy green and saw part of a death scene, the back of a girl who hung by her neck, her long black hair cascading forward, her head bowed in immeasurable
sadness. She wore a diaphanous white peignoir, as glamorous and expensive as any that Anna owned, with a long ruffled train that dragged in the dirt. The sleeves of her lingerie were slightly too long, covering her fingers, giving the impression of a child playing dress-up. Anna's stomach fluttered as she angled for a better view of what appeared to be a smartly dressed, upper-class corpse. “Jupiter.”

Madam Lulu wriggled her shoulders. “Stop crowding me.”

Snow was hovering near the girl. He took out a knife and began to hack at the rope above her head. The body landed hard. “Boom,” Snow said.

Anna smothered a gasp, and Madam Lulu sneered in disgust. The coroner called from the street some fifty yards through the trees. “Snow! Are you going to help me with the stretcher?”

Snow grunted and galumphed off through the orchard, out of sight. It was the opportunity she'd been dreaming of. Anna sprinted to the fallen body, which now lay stiffly on its back, and knelt beside it. She looked at the clouded eyes, the slightly opened mouth, the pale parted lips. The girl had once been beautiful. Now her tongue swelled like a balloon, and a trickle of dried blood ran from her nose to the corner of her mouth. How curious when a living person became a thing. Anna poked it.

In a moment, Madam Lulu squatted beside her. “One of Monique's girls. Ruby something.”

Anna's eyes flashed. “She's a prostitute? Are you sure?”

Madam Lulu grunted. “I'm sure.”

Lulu's words set Anna's mind racing. Would Anna soon be taking another helpless baby to the Witch? The thought made her angry. She leaned over the woman's dead face and began to speak in a rapid staccato. “Her pupils are dilated. Belladonna drops, maybe.”