Twenty-five
Bertha snapped awake just after dawn. She raised her
head from the twin bed with its too hard mattress. “How long have I been
out?” she asked of Gabby sitting at the kitchen table with his hands
folded in front of him.
Gabby glanced at the clock. “About a half hour.”
“Oh. Damn. I guess I can’t sleep.”
Until they heard back from Jennifer, nobody would be
doing much sleeping. The apartment building was awfully quite, which at
least meant that Dimitri was still alive. Francis was watching over him,
anxious to make the trade with Jennifer’s would-be murderer and get them
all out of danger. Emily was no longer pacing upstairs, but Sally hadn’t
been taking the excitement well, so the two were probably together.
Gabby looked around at her from his seat at the
table. “What’s going on around here? Who are you girls anyhow? And that
man upstairs. He’s been shot.”
“What’s your best guess, Gabby?”
“You’re whores. You’re them prostitutes that sell
yourselves for money, and you’re in some kind of serious trouble.”
“Do you think of me as a whore, Gabby? Haven’t you
got a better word to use?”
“Ladies of the night,” Gabby murmured
self-consciously.
“Vampires, maybe?”
Gabby was not amused. “I don’t know no other words.”
“So what are you so upset about? Don’t you think
I’ve got myself a legitimate career? It pays well.”
“You’re just a baby. How did you ever manage to get
yourself involved in stuff like this?”
“I started out as a waitress,” Bertha said. “A
couple bucks an hour part time and tips. I was so little and cute that
the truckers wanted to eat me up with their donuts for breakfast. At
least that’s what they kept telling me.
“The cook owned the cafe, a fat man we called Porky,
like in the movie. The two had a lot in common. Porky had a hard time
taking no for an answer, and one afternoon when we didn’t have any
customers, he didn’t hear me saying no at all. There wasn’t much I could
do about it, because in the little redneck community where I was brought
up, they think rape is a joke. You gotta have broken bones to go crying
to the sheriff, so on the way out, after Porky was finished with me, I
just helped myself to the cash register. He had one hundred and thirty
six dollars and forty-two cents in it.
“A week later I decided it wasn’t enough, so I went
back in during busy hour and emptied it again, except that this time Porky
said that if I wanted money twice, I had to put out twice. I doubled the
price and he said he’d triple it, and then the truckers got in on it, and
I was a rich girl by the end of the month. I bought a brand new car and
drove to California and thought I’d pay my way through school, except I’m
lazy and not as smart as Jennifer, so I met up with Francis when I flunked
out, and the rest is history.”
Gabby gawked at her for a time, but managed to switch
gears. “What’s with the bastard upstairs? Why did he try to hurt you?”
“Oh, he’s just trying to cover up the other three
girls he murdered. And Ed, a friend of ours. He killed him, too.”
Gabby looked stricken by horror. “You should go to
the police, Bertha!”
“Dimitri’s father is way too important to get blamed
for having a son who killed a whore. They’d rather just shut us up and
let it go at that.”
“Holy shit.”
Bertha shrugged her helplessness. “You gotta watch
who you play games with in this world, Gabby. If you don’t get a hand
making the rules, there’s no sense in playing by them.”
“It still ain’t right what you do. I’m not saying
I’ve been any better, but that still don’t make what you do right.”
Bertha disagreed with his reasoning with another
little shrug of her shoulders. “People have a rough time agreeing on
what’s right and wrong, or haven’t you noticed?”
“Yeah, well, what about what’s right and wrong like
in the Bible? Or don’t you girls believe in God?”
Bertha smiled. “Whose god, Gabby? Whose bible? My
own definition says that wrong is hurting people, and people who think
they own the world and can make the rules. Most rules are made by men
like that, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“So, are we bad people?” she said with a smile.
“You don’t scare me no more,” Gabby said with a note
of childlike pride.
“That’s good, because I’m nobody to be afraid of.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. You’re worse than a
badger ripping the balls off an old bull moose when you get riled. I
thought you was a baby, an innocent. You’re not.”
Bertha rolled to her feet and yawned. “Well, while
we’re on the subject of right and wrong, I want to go have another
look-see at the backside of your mirrors.”
Gabby grimaced.
“I’m not going to do any moralizing, Gabby. You and
your mirrors saved my ass. I’m just curious. And fascinated. It all
goes to show the mischief little boys can get into when they put their
minds to it.”
Gabby watched her pass through the hidden door in the
back wall with a pained look, and then followed her through.
All eight bathrooms had been built back to back,
four pairs of two.
Bertha went up the narrow stairs to the ground floor and looked through
the back side of the one-way mirror of one of the empty apartments. She
then went to the second floor.
Daylight filtered through from the broken mirror in
the apartment she and Jennifer had shared. If Gabby hadn’t taken her bait
and spied on her, Dimitri would have field dressed her like a deer. The horror of it crawled through her mind like a nightmare that couldn’t
find a way out. It insulted her that she had come so close to dying in so
awful a manner. It haunted her knowing it would happen anyhow, someday,
even if it happened in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her, and
that the universe would carry on without her without missing a beat.
Knowing perfectly well what Gabby meant about right
and wrong, Bertha felt guilty squeezing through the narrow entrance to the
space between the two back apartments. Voyeurism had a powerful lure to
it, the power of the soap opera, the power of fiction of all kinds,
because the lure was simple human curiosity into other human lives.
Through one of the remaining mirrors, she could see
Francis Peugeot pacing in the bedroom. Dimitri lay upon the bed like a
corpse at visitation, overly ripe and long overdue for burial. And yet he
continued to breath.
Through one of the other mirrors, she found herself
only inches from Emily and Sally sharing a stream of water pouring from
the overhead shower head. Sally’s deep, auburn hair was plastered against
skin the color of ivory. Emily was embracing her, and Sally wept gently,
staring seemingly directly at Bertha, except that she was seeing nothing
but a reflection of herself.
Bertha had always suspected that there was more to
the relationship between the two women than anyone suspected. They
weren’t open about it. If either of them had been thinking straight, they
would have remembered the danger of the two-way mirrors. But Sally was
scared silly, and Emily was thinking of nothing but the need to comfort
her.
Bertha went back down to the basement apartment with
Gabby trailing in silence and dropped to the couch feeling despondent. “I
can’t believe you bastards had the gall. That’s major league rotten
watching people in private moments.”
“What’s Miss Peugeot going to do about everything?”
Gabby asked meekly.
“Right now,” Bertha said, “we’re waiting to hear from
Jennifer on whether we’re going to live or die.”
