The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton

Author:Halley Sutton [Sutton, Halley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

If there was more to Robert Jackal than met the eye, he did an awfully good job of hiding it, although truthfully I never tried to dig very deep. My favorite thing about him—besides that face—was that you never felt like you were missing anything. There was never any wondering what he was thinking.

When Lou brought up Ellen—the story abridged so that what had happened was between her and the ghost of Klein, but we’d all have to be careful about what we said to anyone dancing around the office—Jackal didn’t even flinch. He slurped his drink.

“So if the police come to the office—” Jackal started to say, but Lou cut him off.

“When the police come, you tell them you never even met her,” she said. “Because you never did. Right?”

“I told you he didn’t,” I said. Lou kept her eyes fixed on Jackal. Waited for him to answer.

“Not once.”

“And”—here Lou hesitated, stared at me, tried to tell me something, but I wasn’t reading it—“we’re pausing our cases, everything we’ve been working on. We need to keep a low profile, until all of this blows over. We can’t afford any attention.”

Jackal frowned, and his eyes narrowed. He cocked his head and stared at Lou. “That comes from the Lady? She knows about this?”

“It’s from me,” Lou said, locking eyes with him. Something was happening between them, a power struggle that I couldn’t read or understand. “We don’t want the Lady knowing about any of this.”

Jackal nodded, his lips twisted ugly into a sneer. He turned to me, eyebrows raised. If he was looking for backing from me, he wouldn’t get it. The man looked the other way when his girlfriends took the long snooze. He finally said, grudgingly, “Fine by me.”

That was the last the three of us talked shop that night. Instead, Lou and Jackal launched into a conversation about a movie they’d both seen, a talky shoot-’em-up Jackal couldn’t convince me to sit through. Lou was loose with him, flirtatious and not meaning it, and Jackal, the man who never stepped offstage, wasn’t always searching for his cue. He fumbled with words. He had a goofy laugh, a snorty hyuk-hyuk, when he wasn’t trying to seduce someone. Watching them, I could see the dynamic that must have existed before me. They shared the happy-go-lucky manner of nonmurderers.

You’re drunk, Jo, I told myself, and then realized that it was mostly true but could be truer. I looked around for the bartender. Somehow, the bar had filled up and I hadn’t noticed. No bartender. When it wasn’t Lou calling, he couldn’t be bothered. I stood up to go look for him.

“Jo?”

Behind me, Lou’s voice had taken on a worried pitch. But she didn’t stand up and I didn’t turn around. If she and Jackal were enjoying themselves so much without me, I could find someone to enjoy myself with, too.

I walked to the bar, happy I wasn’t swaying, happy that to anyone who didn’t know me I looked sober enough.

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