Линда Ла Плант: Cold Blood

It was hard to explain how each day Lorraine felt more isolated, because in physical terms she wasn’t: Rosie and big Bill Rooney were always there. It wasn’t that she didn’t have anyone to talk to, interact with — it just felt that way. Her mind seemed to be atrophying and she felt drained, lethargic; sometimes she wanted to weep, out of a deepening feeling of utter loneliness, or was it lovelessness? Whatever it was, it was having a more and more destructive effect on her, and she felt its undertow sucking her down.

Lorraine flicked the old Venetian blind that didn’t quite fit the windows. She gave a sly look at her plump room-mate as she stubbed out her cigarette. She didn’t even live in a place of her own, but was sharing Rosie’s small apartment in a run-down district off Orange Grove. She was thirty-seven years old; almost six of those years had been lost in a sea of drugs and alcohol addiction, and sometimes, especially at times like this afternoon, she felt it was all a waste of time; in reality she was never going to get back into the only business she knew or had known when she had been a cop.

The two women had met when Lorraine had been recuperating from a near-fatal hit-and-run accident. It wasn’t the vehicle that had almost killed her, but her drinking and self-abuse. Now she had been sober and attempting to get her life organized for nearly two years. As an ex-lieutenant attached to the Pasadena Homicide Squad, she had experience not only in the field but as a detective, and she had been a very good one. ‘Had’ being the operative word: after drinking took over her life it had cost her the husband she had loved and the two daughters she had adored.

‘What you thinking about?’ Rosie asked, pretending to be immersed in her magazine.

‘Nothing,’ Lorraine answered, but she quite obviously was. She wondered if she should attempt another reconciliation with her kids. Yet as always whenever she thought about them, she decided they were better off without her intruding on their new life, a life she had not been a part of for too many years. Added to that, her ex-husband had remarried and her daughters called his new wife ‘Mother’. They didn’t even want to see her.

Rosie pored over her magazine again. Lorraine’s long sighs made her aware that something was coming, but she said nothing, flicking over the pages to a new diet that guaranteed you could lose weight with ease if you sent off for their special-priced ‘slimming drinks’. But as she’d attempted most diets, including slimming drinks, and none had worked, she flicked over to a knitting pattern.

‘This is a farce, you know it and I know it. I mean, I dunno what else we can do. How many more adverts can we afford to run, if we don’t drum up any customers by the end of the week?’

Here it comes, thought Rosie, scowling. ‘You’ve said that every week.’ She hated it when Lorraine started on this tactic, partly because she knew everything she said was true but also because it made her afraid. Afraid Lorraine would leave, afraid that without Lorraine she would go back on the booze, afraid Lorraine would too.

‘Got to face reality.’ Lorraine prodded her empty cigarette carton, hoping she’d overlooked a stray one. But it wasn’t to be, so she looked over the stubs in her ashtray again.

‘Yes, I know, I know, and I hear what you are sayin’, but at the same time we got to stick at it. Everyone knows any new business takes time to lift off, even Bill Rooney told us that.’

Lorraine appeared not to be listening as she rummaged in her purse and started to check her loose change.

‘I mean, we could get a case in tomorrow that’d make everything you just said obsolete,’ Rosie said a little too cheerfully.

‘What?’ Lorraine asked challengingly.

‘Obsolete,’ Rosie repeated flatly.

‘Really? Well, you’ve been saying that for the past month and we’ve not had so much as a telephone call. And if you want to check the diary out, we are hardly likely to get some case off the street that’d pay for your cup cakes and my cigarettes, never mind the rent on this place and your apartment, so straighten out, Rosie. Shit, I need a cigarette.’

Lorraine crossed to the hooks by the toilet closet. She yanked down her raincoat.

‘Maybe the rain’ll stop soon.’

Lorraine pulled on her raincoat. ‘Oh yeah, so it’s all gonna be okay if the sun shines, is it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re a dumb optimist.’

‘What?’

‘Optimist, Rosie. Even if the sun cracked the paving stones that’s not gonna help us. Two stray dogs, a missing senile grandfather, a two-week stint in a department store to cover for their in-house detective’s vacation, five car traces, four warrants and a woman suspecting her husband of having an affair with his secretary, and as the wife was your size and his secretary looked like Julia Roberts, it didn’t take us long to investigate, and that... that is it, Rosie, that’s been all there’s been for the past nine months.’

‘You always gotta get personal. If you look on the good side, you’ve been sober nine months more, so have I come to think about it, so my guess is we’ll make it. This is just a bad patch.’

Lorraine clenched her teeth. ‘No, it isn’t, Rosie, it’s just a fact. We are flat broke and searching my ashtray for dog-ends is not exactly what I had planned for the future. We might as well admit it, face it, before we get any deeper in debt.’

‘But we are facing it,’ Rosie said stubbornly.

Lorraine closed her eyes as if talking to a child, her voice sounding annoyingly over-patient. ‘No, we are not. Fact is this whole idea was shit, and to be honest I am not feeling like patting myself on the back ’cos I remained sober. Truth is, right now I feel like tying one hell of a load on and the only thing stoppin’ me is that I have no money.’

‘Never stopped you before,’ snapped back Rosie.

Lorraine’s eyes were like cold chips of ice. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? What are you suggesting, Rosier Come on, spit it out, are you saying I go out and screw a few guys to keep this place open? That what you think I should do?’

Rosie blushed and turned away. She loathed Lorraine when she was like this, she could get so cold, so unapproachable, so downright nasty. But unlike the times they’d bickered about the agency before, there wasn’t another sarcastic retort forthcoming, just an ominous silence.

Lorraine was staring at herself in the small mirror glued to the back of the door. Her hair needed a cut and new highlights. She leaned closer, frowning, as she checked the scar running from her left eye down to midway of her cheekbone; that needed to be fixed but plastic surgery cost. She stepped back, giving herself a critical appraisal. Considering the punishment her body and insides had taken from all the abuse, her skin looked remarkably clear, but there were fine lines at the sides of her eyes and they were getting deeper. Either way, she didn’t like what she saw, and kicked the door closed.

Lorraine picked up her gym bag and flicked off the main overhead light switch. Her shadow etched across the main office wall as she reached for her purse. Caught in the half-light from the lit-up screen on Rosie’s word processor, Lorraine’s chiselled features never ceased to make Rosie’s heart lurch. She obviously didn’t see herself as Rosie did, because she was still a very attractive woman. Perhaps not as ethereal as Rosie thought, but for her age, and considering what she had been through, Lorraine Page was still a looker. The stronger she had become physically over the past twenty-one months, the more her natural beauty shone through. Lorraine’s strict diet, her almost obsessive work-outs at the gymnasium, had proved that a woman who lost six years drinking herself into oblivion, who had become a hopeless, scrawny, sickly alcoholic when she and the overweight Rosie had first met, could now pass for an athlete. The only thing ex-Lieutenant Lorraine Page could not recapture was her career, and her husband and two daughters. She never spoke of them, either to Rosie or at AA meetings, whereas Rosie spilled many tears about wanting to be reunited with her son.