Jan Burke: Remember Me, Irene

I tried to struggle, but he tightened his grip on my waist and jaw until I stopped. There was nothing but darkness and his scent mixed with that of dust and old wood. At first I thought we were in some sort of closet compartment in the old bar, but we began moving. He was carrying me down a set of stairs, it seemed. The bar must have covered some passageway, probably a means of getting booze in and out during its speakeasy days.

He stopped, then loosened his grip on my waist long enough to open a door. The air was cooler, but it was still very dark. He set my feet on the ground.

“If I let go of you, will you be quiet?” he whispered in my ear.

I nodded.

“I don’t want to hit you, but I will if you make noise.”

I nodded again.

He lifted his hand a little, as if testing me, then took it away completely. I rubbed my jaw.

Where was Lisa? I told myself that even going downstairs in a panic, fourteen flights would take some time.

He still had hold of my waist. His head was cocked to one side, as if he were listening to something. I heard it, too. Footsteps above us. Distant, but crossing the large room above. The old wooden floor was creaking.

Looking for me! I thought frantically. She’s found help and they’re looking for me! I opened my mouth to call out, but Two Toes’ big hand came over it again. As he dragged me along, I wondered how Lisa had managed to find help so quickly. The security guard? Maybe my luck was improving.

Soon I realized that we had come out into the hallway of the floor below. The one where Lucas had died.

Two Toes knew which room that was-he had been there. He was going there again. I heard myself whimper as he pulled me into the room.

“Shhh!” he hissed, and shut the door.

IT GOT WORSE.

If Two Toes had stopped in the room itself, maybe I would have managed not to think about where I had seen Lucas’s body, about the pennies on his eyes. Maybe not.

He kept moving. He dragged me first into the bathroom, but when I used my legs to kick against the fixtures, he seemed dissatisfied with it as a hiding place. He dropped my purse into the old clawfoot bathtub, then reestablished his grip on me.

“Stop it!” he whispered fiercely, dragging me back out into the room. “I don’t want to hurt you! I don’t!”

He moved out of the bathroom, back into the bedroom itself, where there was a little light. Very little. He closed the bathroom door with his foot, and moved toward the windows. I felt a little relief until we seemed to be going straight to the bloodstained radiator. He moved away from it, though, and into the small closet. He shut the door, and we were in absolute darkness.

If being unable to escape from a small, dark, confined space was not my worst nightmare come to life, it was only because I had failed to add the prospect of being there not alone, but with a hulking maniac. He turned me so that I faced him, pressed himself full-length against me. He had an erection.

I stopped struggling. I don’t think I’ve ever held so still in my life.

“Oops,” he whispered. “I’m not being a very good angel.”

He shifted his pelvis slightly. His weight still held me against the wall, but at least I wasn’t being prodded through our clothes.

It was that small act of consideration that finally made me reconsider what was happening to me. He wasn’t hurting me. He was hiding me.

Then I realized how quiet the building was.

If, by some miracle, Lisa had found help quickly and the police had arrived, there would have been lights and sound. They would have treated this as a hostage situation-it wouldn’t be quiet, like this.

Maybe it was just Lisa and the security guard. Maybe the security guard was trying to be John Wayne. Maybe he was silently looking for me while the police tried to find the place. After all, the Angelus probably hadn’t been operating as a hotel for over a decade…

But Lisa knew right where it was. Lisa, who wouldn’t have been out of high school when it closed. When I had spoken to her on the phone, I had asked, “Do you know where the Angelus Hotel is?” and she had answered “Yes.” Without hesitation.

But the implications of that made me argue against myself. Maybe she had seen the hotel mentioned in one of the papers in the attic. Or overheard Andre talk about it. Maybe Roberta told her that Lucas died in this hotel, and Lisa came by to see it. That didn’t seem likely. I tried to think of other explanations. I was sure there had to be one.

Sure, until I heard the stairwell door close at the end of the hallway. Whoever was coming onto this floor made no attempt to hide his or her presence.

She might have known where the hotel was by some other means, but Lisa wouldn’t have known which room he had died in, what floor it was on. Not unless she had been here on the night he died.

Had he been alive when she saw him?

I remembered what Two Toes, my “guardian angel,” had said when he last appeared before me, in the alley near my car. He spoke of Lucas being turned away from the shelter, coming to the hotel. He had said that Lucas had a guardian angel of his own:

The one that watched over him wherever he would go. He talked to the angel, and the angel went away…It scared me to watch that angel.

Lucas had been alive.

Alive on a cold wet night visited by an angel carrying a thermos full of coffee. The thermos in the room was not Lucas’s thermos. Did Lisa have one? Maybe it was Jerry’s, filled with hot coffee from his kitchen, with the pills taken from the spare supply of heart medication from his cabinet-heart medication Jerry kept on hand to save his father’s life. This had been a different kind of emergency.

If Lucas had made it into the shelter, would she have gone in like a Good Samaritan? The director’s young friend Lisa, sharing coffee and visiting with an old friend? Or did she delay him in some way, make certain that he was too late to find a bed there?

Heart medication. It wouldn’t be such a difficult way to kill someone. In the coffee, it would have been tasteless. Heart medications are powerful drugs. What will save one person could kill another; enough of it will kill anyone. What had she said to him? The same thing she said to me? My father hid some papers in an attic? He’s never loved me, I want to help you?

I pictured Lucas beguiled by her. Compassionate, trusting her. Drinking the coffee until he had enough in his system to do the damage. In that moment of dizziness before he fell against the radiator, did he know? Clutching his ring against his chest, did he know his trust had been betrayed again?

I shuddered. Two Toes leaned his cheek against the top of my head, moved the arm around my waist to pat my back. Childlike.

Childlike. The thought that Andre’s daughter might be just as manipulative and ruthless as her father was one I didn’t like to face. The apple never falls too far from the tree, Jerry Selman had quoted to me. I had been looking at the wrong apple.

Lisa. Why? Why?

Was she so angry with Andre ignoring her that she’d try to frame him for murder? Was that why she had come to me? To make me a party to the accusations? Get the newspaper reporter to say it, so that she didn’t have to? No wonder she was upset when I defended him in any way.

And now she had Ben’s calendar pages, Ivy’s faxes, the copy of Jeff McCutchen’s suicide note. How ironic that she didn’t need to frame Andre-he had probably already committed a murder.

The footsteps in the hallway were cautious, but steadily approaching. Two Toes seemed to notice that I wasn’t trying to struggle. He relaxed his grip. I wanted to communicate my trust to him somehow, but didn’t dare to even whisper. I couldn’t see his face, he couldn’t see the change in mine. He eased away slightly. I reached for his hand, gently squeezed it. He squeezed mine back, just as gently. He stood back a little more, dropped his arms, no longer covering my mouth or holding me to him.