Satin Doll

He told the studio he needed a day—two days max—off. Barbara Payton needed nursing. He was flying out to Chicago and then hopping a train up to Minnesota to babysit the newlyweds. It’d be worth it, honest. Of course he was more than pushing his luck. He really wasn’t in that kind of league. And the chances of getting caught showed this was a sucker’s bet.

The sound of his own voice on the phone with the studio made him sick.

How could he turn it on so fast, that hot, easy pit-a-pat?

What was wrong with him? He touched his face and it was shiny-smooth, cool, like molded plastic, and if you tapped it, there was the soft sound of a perfectly hollow center.

On his way to what he hoped would be Iolene’s hideaway, Hop stopped at a dismal-looking diner on Fountain Avenue. He realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a meal. Was it with Bix Noonan the previous afternoon? Or had he just had coffee? All he could remember for sure was the stale pretzel grounds and stray peanuts he’d scooped up at the Eight Ball.

He sat at a corner table swabbed with coffee stains and made his way through a plate of runny eggs and crushed potatoes, scraping up the last slick yolk with a brittle slice of bacon.

The waiter, a hatchet-faced old fellow with arms like a scarecrow, picked up his dishes with surprising care.

“I could tell you was hungry,” he said. “Coming from a funeral?”

“No,” Hop said. “Why?”

“You got that look.”

Hop tried to summon a friendly rejoinder, even a wisecrack, but nothing came, other than the sour taste of the coffee clinging to his teeth. And the rind of grease coating his mouth.

He paid in a hurry and walked to the five-and-dime next door. He bought a toothbrush and a packet of tooth powder. Without bothering to ask, he pushed into the employee restroom and washed his teeth briskly, messily. Then he ran water over his stubbled face.

He looked into the mirror, and as he did …

As he did, he felt something was slowly slipping off him, some silky veneer, a loosening and dropping to the floor of a something—a something he had worn so well.

The waiter was right. There was something in his face. And something missing from it, too.

Oh, fuck, Hop, you just need a good eight hours of sack time a

shower, and a shave.

Maybe a nice alcohol rubdown at the fancy place in Beverly Hills.

Fuck, Hop, you’re taking it all too hard.

Now he was snaking his way through random side streets in Hollywood, trying to find Perdida Court. He imagined seeing Iolene again, if she was still there, and how he would handle it. He also wondered how to dance with Peggy Spangler just close enough to avoid making her mad—mad enough to call Frannie Adair, for instance. Or the police.

Poor Jean. Life isn’t tough enough for you, you gotta have a green-eyed cuz who stomps over your—dare he think it aloud— your grave to try to make a buck off you.

But then the thoughts of what Iolene and Jean may have been up to started to irk him. Less than ten hours ago, he’d been staring at that stained blanket and thinking of Jean Spangler as the wretched victim of a studio-protected sex maniac who, at some point, had veered into bloodlust. Now… What could those girls expect, playing this kind of game? They must have had big-league backers. If so, maybe they were strong-armed into it, walking the plank for Mickey Cohen’s crew, who were known for running operations like this all over town. And always with starlets on their way up and down and out. But Iolene, really? And if they were so hooked in, how come Cohen couldn’t protect them from the likes of Gene Merrel? Maybe they weren’t worth the trouble.

He thought about all the things Peggy had said. And the last thing: “Iolene’s been sitting on this golden egg for long enough.

Too scared to do anything about it after Jean … Somebody might as well skim off that cream.”

“How do you know she’s not perched on it when I get there?”

“Don’t you reporters do stakeouts?”

“Do I look like that kind of reporter?”

“Today? A little bit.” She’d smirked, eyeing his crumpled suit and stubble.

She’d handed him a piece of paper with a Hollywood address. Hop had stopped himself from saying that he thought Iolene lived in Lincoln Heights. Why let her know? Clearly, Iolene was not sticking to one place but was darting around, circling and tiptoeing, jumping and running all over town.

“So you’ll bring the photos back here? Or should I come to you?” Peggy had said, moving so close to Hop he could smell her coffeed breath, sweet with milk.

“I’ll call you,” he’d said. “Let me get the lowdown and call you.

“Guess I better give you my number,” she’d said, writing it down on the same paper as the address. “You wouldn’t double-shuffle me,

would you?”

“Me?” He’d tried to put his winning face back on. It wasn’t easy.

“You came here looking to outscoop your fellow reporter and look what you get,” she’d said, smiling. Hop smiled back so hard his face hurt.

Perdida Court was a series of small, tidy bungalows. The house in question was batter-white with a green roof jutting out over a

modest front porch. There was no driveway and the street was dotted with cars, so Hop couldn’t be sure if anyone was at home.

Faded green curtains were pulled shut across the front window.

He stepped out of his car and walked up the front path, ignoring a slight wobbly feeling in his legs. Before he could think about what it would mean to see Iolene, or not to, he rang the bell.

No answer.

His collar itched, His hair felt oily, like the pelt of an otter. His feet were swelling in his crocodile shoes. And damn if he didn’t want to toss Peggy Spangler out the nearest window for making him lose his temper back there, so rare an act it surprised him.

So, he decided, I go in like the sneak thief I am. How low can you sink, Hop? But then he remembered back in his newspaper days he’d once looked through a councilman’s trash cans, the heel of his hand sinking uncomfortably into old spaghetti and coffee grounds.

Broad daylight on a Sunday. Better not try the front windows. He walked toward the back of the house, keeping an eye out for random neighbors watering lawns or hanging laundry. Luckily, a tall fence blocked the view between this lot and the one next door.

As he turned the corner, his leg hit a trash can and the clatter nearly made him jump out of his skin. Christ, Hop, pull it together.

Every window was shut and a quick scan of the latches showed them to be locked tight, despite the warm weather. Come back at night when you might have a shot at breaking one? Could he really wait? Frustrated, he walked up two steps to a back entrance. The screen door squeaked open on its hinge and Hop, for the hell of it, tried the knob on the inner, wooden door. He felt a lock engage but barely. Turning to his side, he began leaning and turning the knob, jiggling it and pressing the door with his shoulder as hard as he could.

He could feel the lock nearly spinning around, just about to give way. He turned with his back to it and gave a quick kick to the spot directly to the left of it. The door flew open.

He felt a gust of something blast in his face, up his nostrils. Walking into a bright white kitchen, he immediately spotted a trash can sitting by the window. The top was slightly tilted and Hop guessed it must’ve been filled to the brim to give off that smell. Left town in a hurry, Hop figured. Sure looked like it.

Deciding he better not open the windows, he placed a handkerchief over his face. He walked through the kitchen and into a small dining room, which led to a living room straight ahead. The furnishings were simple. A round table and chairs, muslin curtains, a gold-green damask sofa with two matching chairs. Dust motes in the air. A highball glass sat in an evaporated ring on the dining-room table as if someone had set it there for a moment to get a coaster.

He saw a small stack of mail fanned across the sofa cushion. Utility bills. A grocery-store circular. An advertisement for a modeling agency. Hop peered more closely at the address labels. Not Iolene Harper. Not Jean Spangler. The name was Merry Lake. Previous tenant or nom de hideout, Hop wondered.

Then, it hit him. The smell—it was familiar. It was a smell he knew. From back hospital corridors. From a long-ago hunting trip with his father by Lake Ontario. The stench from the center of the enormous devil’s tongue flower he stood over at the traveling sideshow his pop took him to when he was five years old. An organic smell, sweeter and heavier and … he walked quickly toward the only room left: the bedroom.

The first thing he saw was a neat curl of tan patent leather, the tip of a shoe, jutting out on the floor from behind the ajar bedroom door. As he moved closer, he could see a full-wedge sandal and the bronze stocking foot, graceful, elegant. Lovely Iolene.

At first the stocking looked patterned, but as he squinted and stepped closer to the door, it was as though her leg itself were marbled, green and black wisps winding around her limbs which looked puffy, straining the seams. Hop felt his body rise out of his skin, hover there a second, and then thud back down to earth.

He pressed his fingers on the door and the smell lunged into his mouth and nose so strongly he saw stars, felt his tongue swell, dry and sludgy at the same time.

As he entered the room, the room seemed to enter him, swallowing him up with the stench, the balm, the sound of the flies buzzing, the sight of Iolene, her graceful, lissome body in a rust-colored dress with black trim, her copper-tinted hair piled high on her head, her wrists and arms patterned with tortoiseshell bracelets, and her face … her face he couldn’t see. It was turned away, nearly covered by the edge of the bedspread, cheek facing the wooly, worn carpet.

He crouched down, hands covering his face and mouth, still a good six feet from her. No more coffee-with-cream skin. He tilted his head to one side and took a deep breath before peering at her head. That was when he saw the piece of plaster on the floor.

That was the moment before he realized it wasn’t plaster but bone, skull.

He didn’t want to touch. Didn’t dare touch. So he began crawling around.

A circle of soot surrounded the hole neatly, like a tattoo. The hole at her temple, nestled in the delicate whorls of dark hair so artfully arranged there.

He couldn’t stop himself from looking more closely. A few green bottle flies stuck in clumps to the hole.

Her eyelids were swollen, and her berry-stained lips. Her eyelids were swollen but her eyes still looked open. He could see the glistening between her lashes, or thought he

could. He thought maybe the buzzing sound would never leave his head.

He thought maybe the smell would be with him forever.

For a moment, he thought he might never leave this moment.

The shine of the eye, the glitter of the silver bobby pin in her hair. The feeling of something undulating in his stomach, burning in him, making his face hot and sending a strange pulsing rhythm through his own temples. He could feel his collar hanging forward as he kneeled over her and a wetness on his neck as the heat clawed at him. The smell coming harder.

He stood up, startled by the snap of his own knees as he rose from his crouch. He took several long breaths. He walked slowly to the bathroom and turned the water on. Holding on to the sink’s edge, he tried to forget about the grinding sensation of his breakfast moving around in his gut. But it was too late. Falling to his knees, he leaned over the toilet and—quickly and efficiently—threw up everything. He flushed the toilet and rinsed out his mouth with water.

He walked out of the bathroom. Then he walked through the dining room and into the kitchen. He almost walked out the back door, but the sound of a neighbor’s dog barking stopped him.

Then he got smart.

He walked back into the bathroom and, with his handkerchief, picked up a washcloth and began wiping the sink handles, the toilet seat he’d clutched. The doorknob. He didn’t think he’d touched anything else.

Then, he walked back into the bedroom, keeping his eyes straight ahead and holding the washcloth over his nose and mouth.

He looked around. Using the handkerchief, he began opening drawers. They were all empty. Iolene wasn’t living here.

It wasn’t until this second turn around that he saw the suitcase on the floor on the other side of the bed. It was open, with a few plain dresses streaming out. He looked more closely. A spare pair of shoes. A cosmetics bag. All packed so neatly it made Hop wince. She was on her way out of town. Stopped here to do something, get

something, and skip.

The photos.

Where had the photos been, anyway? Had Iolene been killed for the photos? For what she knew about Jean? Both?

He looked under the bed and saw nothing but a thin carpet of dust. He walked to the long sliding closet doors on the adjacent wall. The closet was nearly empty, too, but for a small metal file cabinet with two drawers.

Not the subtlest of hiding places, Hop thought.

He opened a drawer. Empty. He opened the other. Except for a stray paper clip, a few bent staples, empty again. Whoever followed

her here found what they were looking for.

Wait. Strike that.

As he began to shut the drawer, something caught his eye, something white wedged in the far corner, just barely peeking through. He tugged it and pulled up an old file tab, along with its paper label still tucked in its sleeve.

The label read:

RX copies 1945

He slid the tab out from the sleeve. Typed on the back were the following words:

Dr. Stillman-1455 S. Hill Street, Los Angeles

This was something. He knew this was something. He remembered:

Kirk, can’t wait any longer, going to see Doctor Scott. It

will work best this way while mother is away,

Okay. Scott wasn’t Stillman, but it was something. Something was there. He could feel it. Why would Iolene have a doctor’s file folder in her apartment?

If Jean Spangler was the victim of a botched abortion, the timing of which just coincidentally followed the night at the Red Lily, maybe Iolene was hiding the evidence. Protecting somebody. Or maybe Iolene had done some sleuthing of her own. For which she’d been given this hasty farewell.

At last, in spite of his best efforts, Hop let himself really think about the fact that it was Iolene, sweet Iolene, on the floor. Slowly, he turned his head and looked back at the body.

At her.

They didn’t even bother to make it look like suicide, he thought.

He shoved the tab in his pocket. He wiped the drawer handles with his handkerchief once more for good measure. The smell was beginning to rock his stomach again.

He knew he should leave, but he was looking at her. He was thinking about her dancing. He was remembering that once, before everything, when he was still shilling for Cinestar, he’d run into her at Fox, where she was shooting a Betty Grable picture. She was a chorus girl in an ole plantation number, wearing a topknot and, inexplicably, a sequined merry widow with fishnet tights. She was tapping her feet and looking bored, waiting for the crew to relight the set. The musicians, also bored, began improvising a ragtime number. Hop, who’d just interviewed Grable about her new baby girl, had spotted Iolene from fifty feet away, and as he got closer, he kept saying things like, “When I get there, Iolene, you’re going to dance with me. This is it, you’ve got to give me a tumble. You know it’s time. You’re going to dance with me.” And finally she laughed and she let him twirl her around for a few minutes, his face pressed against the white netting on her headpiece, the crunch of the sequin and taffeta against his chest, her voice curling warmly in his ear. The smell of… of… he thought it must have been gardenia, radiating from her body. She always smelled like flowers. And his hand on her back actually met some of her skin and it was like stretched satin, it was like … the music was… she was…

And now this.

He took one last look around. That was when he noticed the front door had been unlocked all along. Must have been how they left, Hop thought. They … they … What did this have to do with Jean Spangler or Sutton and Merrel? Someone knew about the pictures and wanted them or wanted them to disappear. He remembered what Jimmy Love, Iolene’s pal, had told him at the King Cole:

Those boys have been closing in. Boys you don’t want to make unfriendly with, Hoppity.

Connected?

Hell, ain’t we all? You can’t live in this town without it sticking to you like tar paper. But no, these fellas were up some notches.

Sutton and Merrel, back against the wall, could make something happen. It would be no surprise if they had old mob connections from their nightclub days. Could be any number of thugs. Somehow, it no longer seemed to matter. The story of the savaged girl and her frightened friend was turning now, bit by bit, into just another girlson-the-make-pay-the-price yarn.

Couldn’t anyone give him a new scenario? He’d seen this one more times than he could count.

Without even thinking, he found himself outside the house and walking to his car. Without even thinking, he started it and began driving away from the house, lurching along with any number of sick

tastes in his mouth.

As he got back on Sunset, his head played nasty games.

How did I get here? Six years ago, working at the Examiner, caught by the assignment editor sleeping off a drunk in the display-ad office, he expected the usual punishment, obit duty, and the thought of it made him want to write his own. But the Hollywood-beat reporter picked that night to elope with a San Francisco tie salesman and Hop ended up at Grauman’s Chinese covering the premiere of some swooning bedroom melodrama with Joan Crawford and a cast of also-rans. It was afterward, at the premiere party, that he met the gray-haired, tired-eyed senior editor from the East Coast office of Cinestar. Nice fella, liked his jokes, ended up buying three rounds of sidecars, told Hop that he reminded him of himself a quarter century ago.

During their second round at Mocambo, the editor had asked him, “If you were covering this party for Cinestar, what would be your lead?” Hop had placed his fingertips on his chin in thoughtful repose and said, “Mocambo, where the stars mingle and make hay, was aglow last night. Revelers swarmed there following the thrilling premiere of Lover for a Day. Star for a century Joan Crawford drew all eyes as she entered the exotic nightclub on the arm of a dashing young man. Ms. Crawford demurred when asked the name of her mustachioed date, but she did offer the sweetest of smiles when queried about her recent divorce from actor Phil Terry. ‘He was a wonderful man, but we’d grown apart. I wish him well.’ And we wish you well, Joan, our forever-bright star, our flapper of yore, now Hollywood’s grandest of grand dames.”

“Not bad,” the editor said thoughtfully. “Toss the reference to how long Crawford’s been in the biz, but other than that, honey, you’ve got more sweet corn in you than between my uncle Joe’s teeth back in Iowa.”

Hop had grinned. He had a knack. What could he say? He was going places.

And now, after the nightclubs, round tables at Romanoffs, dog races with movie stars, fluffy beds at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fast rides on pretty costume girls and hairstylists, hat models and manicurists—now this. A separate track he’d careered onto and now there seemed no crossing back over. The other track was gone, its simplicity, the pinwheels and soft lights and perfumed whispers and we two against the world—all gone. No chance of return.

He was driving for a long time, trying to shake the smell from his throat, clothes. A few miles away, he threw his handkerchief out the window.

Iolene, Iolene. Playing far too close to the line and now look. He knew he should be thinking about how he might have helped her. He wanted to be that kind of guy. But how could you stop something like this? These fellows know what they’re doing. They’d have found her anywhere.

So that’s it, right? I’m done, Hop thought. The last possible squeaking wheel got greased. No one else had any incentive to talk about that night. No one else was talking at all. It was done, deader than Tin Pan Alley.

Who was he kidding? He was going to Dr. Stillman’s. After all, the squeaking wheel may be gone, but why not set your foot in that last visible footprint and run your foot over it and be done?

He tried again to think about Iolene and what might have happened to her. But instead, all he could think about was the way these women concealed themselves. Some kind of fan dance. Victim, wave of fan, perpetrator. Angel, whore. They all played it so straight, as if they were just girls, girls with gentle smiles and simple needs. But the truth was they all lived in a gasp of tension. You could feel it like a physical thing around them.

When he met Midge he thought, Here she is. Finally, one of those women like Jerry always has half off his arm. The ones with their own jobs and nice apartments with soft lighting and softer sheets. Women with other boyfriends he never saw but who still liked him best and would break a date if he called but without ever raising a voice, smooth as the martinis they’d pour, as their taut silk dresses and shiny stockings. Women who were ageless, young without a scary eagerness in their eyes, mature without a hint of lines in the face or desperation in the voice. It had been a terrible trick, hadn’t it? How she’d made him think it would be so easy.

Driving to the Hill Street address brought him directly past the Examiner building on South Broadway and Hop couldn’t help but look for Frannie’s car, which wasn’t there. Jerry’s gray sedan was there, though, and before he could stop himself, he’d pulled over. Seeing his friend now, the one solid, fixed thing in his life—that might help him pull it together, get him through the last stretch. But he didn’t want to go upstairs, didn’t want to risk Frannie showing up, didn’t want to do another dance with her. He walked to the fraying coffee shop across the street and found the phone booth. When Jerry got on the line, Hop was embarrassed to hear his own voice shaking.

“Christ, Gil, you sound as lousy as I ever heard you. Stay there and I’ll come by and slap some sense into you.”

Sitting at the empty counter, Hop ordered a coffee while he waited, his hand wobbly as he lifted the cup. The counterman kept a close eye on him, wiping glasses with a rag, one after the other, like a barkeep in an old Western.

Ten minutes later, Jerry arrived and took a seat beside him.

“You never looked this bad when we were in North Africa,” Jerry

said, lighting a cigarette and snapping his Zippo shut.

“The salad days.”

“You usually play hard to get. Now I see you, what, three times in two days? People’ll start to talk,” he teased, but there was concern in his eyes and it made Hop worry about himself. Christ, how bad did he look?

“And Midge was up all night,” Jerry said, nodding to the counterman as he set down a cup of coffee for him. “Gil, you’ve got to … Gil, she’s a wreck.”

Hop looked at him, remembering Midge’s visit the night before. Frannie’s fishing around, trying to get something from Midge. Had that just been the night before? “Because of the call?”

“What call?” “Frannie—Miss Adair.” “Frannie Adair called Midge?” Hop tried to conceal his surprise. Midge hadn’t told him? Her

knight in shining gabardine? He decided he’d better follow suit. “No, no. Frannie was trying to find me and got Midge instead.”

“How—”

“Never mind. Never mind. And, listen, about all this … I’m sorry I keep flying off. I’m sorry. I don’t know why.” His head pounded.

“Frannie’s got something on you?”

“Maybe. Turns out I’ve left a lot of fingerprints, footprints, all kinds of prints in my day.”

“What’s it all about, Gil? The Spangler thing? Is someone shaking you down?”

“Jerry, I’ve half lost track. Frannie Adair’s poking around. She thinks there’s something there. It’s my own fault for getting her hot on it. And, Jerry, that girl I told you about, the one who came to see me? She’s dead.”

“Jean Spangler’s friend? How?”

“I’m guessing the pistol blast to the head did it.”

“Well I’ll be. How’d you find out?”

“Up close and personal-like,” he said, wanting to tell Jerry all of it.

But he couldn’t do it. “I was worried about her. I went to her place. The door was open. And she was lying there.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“No.”

“Did you leave any prints?”

“I don’t know. No. Maybe. I tried to be careful.”

“Better get yourself a story, boy. You were with me whenever it was.”

“I’m not worried about that. I’ve got too much else to worry about. Believe me.” Hop finished his coffee and grabbed his hat. He knew Jerry wanted to talk, but he had to go. He had to go before Jerry saw something. Saw something Hop didn’t want him to see. Saw Hop fall to pieces right there.

“Why’d you do it, Hop,” Jerry said suddenly, as Hop was almost to the front door.

“Do what?”

Jerry walked toward Hop. “To Midge.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Hop said wearily.

“You know what I mean,” he said in a tone too grave for Hop to brush off.

There were a lot of things Hop wanted to say, things that were gathering in him, knocking around, tangling his nerves, rising up under his skin, beneath his eyes. But he couldn’t do anything with them. He wasn’t sure why. Instead, he just shook his head.

Jerry looked at him for a moment. Then, with a sigh, he said, “She tells me she was never mad a minute in her life until she met you.”

“I’m just lucky, I guess.” Hop managed a grin and wondered if he’d be able to keep upright long enough to make it to Dr. Stillman’s. “See you later, sweetheart.”

“Gil…” Jerry’s eyes were heavy. His mouth was slightly open as if he were going to say more. This was a classic Jerry gesture. Hop knew it meant Jerry was saying everything all at once. Then, finally: “Gil, a thing about Frannie Adair. She got a reputation early on for being willing to roll with some hard boys for a story. Hasn’t been able to shake it since. Maybe you can use that. If you need to.”

“Thanks, pal,” Hop said, head swirling. “I just might.”

Dr. Stillman—1455 South Hill Street, Los Angeles.

The address was on a slightly shabby block of cavernous office buildings with worn facades, a small hotel with a barbershop in the lobby, a high-ceilinged Irish bar with wide-open doors spilling mournful tenor lyrics and the smell of balmy beer onto the sidewalk out front.

Hop walked the half block from his car to 1455, a smaller building with a shuttered dental clinic on the ground floor. Opening the heavy, soot-rimmed front door, he entered a dark lobby inhabited only by a newspaper stand. A lone man in suspenders stood behind its counter, dining noisily on a strong-smelling container of what

looked like pickled beets and cabbage.

Hop eyed a building directory in a musty glass case.

STILLMAN, DR. MITCHEL……..443.

“Pack of Pall Malls,” Hop said.

The man reluctantly set down the container and reached under the

counter for a pack, which he laid down with a match-book.

“Quiet today, huh?”

The man shrugged. “Only a few offices open on Sunday,” he said.

“Hardly worth my time. You here for the locksmith? The dentist closed at two.”

“I’m actually looking for Dr. Stillman.”

“You’re a little late, pal.” The man sloshed his container around and the briny smell kicked Hop in the face.

“Gone for the day?”

“Gone for the year. Or close to it. Ain’t seen him in a blue moon. He must be paid through the year because the management ain’t cleaned out his office or rented it to someone else.”

“Where’d he go?” Hop said, trying to sound casual, despite his mounting frustration. To come this far and not know, what could be worse? That file tab, a last faraway whisper.

He raised a brisdy eyebrow. “Just a guess but probably someplace cooler, buddy. Get it?”

“Not really.”

‘You don’t know too much, do you, buddy?”

“Less than that.”

“He was a lady doctor—you know, a doc for ladies. Things can get hot.”

Hop nodded. ‘You mind if I go up and check it out?”

He shrugged. “I sell newspapers. What’s it to me, bud?”

Hop paid for his cigarettes with a five-dollar bill.

The elevator creaked up four floors. He had to use both arms to drag the grated door open, rust pinching into his fingers.

The corridor walls were daubed with smoky amber sconces. The only sound as he walked was his own shoes skating over cigarette stubs, a candy wrapper. He heard a throaty whistle that startled him until he recognized it as his own—a nervous habit left over from childhood, from visiting his uncle in the TB sanatorium in Onondaga, or his grandmother in a charity ward back in ‘34.

The beveled glass at the end of the hall had M. STILLMAN, MD stamped on it in fading black letters. He took a breath and placed his hand on the knob, which felt cold and greasy and made Hop think of salve on burn wounds.

He wondered what he expected to find. The end of an endless tunnel. The wormy ground at the bottom of a hole. Blood and horror and a churning, red-ringed breach into the void.

Or an empty office as stripped of meaning as anything else?

He turned the knob, but the door was locked. Fuck if this was going to stop him now. Fuck if he couldn’t stare down that gaping breach. Spotting an old brass standing ashtray nearby, he lifted it and plunged it against the beveled glass once, twice, three times and the plate knocked out whole, thudding to the floor, and—a ghost of his old luck remaining—cracked into a spiderweb without shattering. He reached through the window frame and unlocked the door, which wobbled open, revealing a dark outer office with one marbled window bringing in faint, diffuse light from the street. Not much to see: a desk and a row of waiting chairs covered with dust. Walking through, he opened the door to the inner office and saw a glass-front cabinet with scalpels, clamps, foamy rolls of gauze. Beside it stood a rolling table with still-full jars of ammoniated mercury, Vaseline, and Unguentine, glowing red bottles of Mercurochrome. And in the middle of it all sat the metal examination table, with detachable stirrups. A reel of prone women went through Hop’s head. Of Jean Spangler torn and desperate. Kirk, can’t wait any longer, going to see Doctor Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away …

But this wasn’t Dr. Scott. It was Dr. Stillman. And why Iolene would have his files was far from clear.

He looked around cursorily in the examining room before returning to the outer office and the file cabinets. He pulled open the drawers one by one and, as with Iolene’s, each one was empty. He opened the desk drawers and they carried only office supplies, a few open boxes of pens, pads of paper. As he searched, he found himself repeatedly turning his head to look back at the open door to the inner office and the white-papered examination table, which, with its swivel trays and attenuated stirrups, looked disturbingly like a large mechanical spider. Each time he looked he could almost see Jean Spangler’s long legs rising from its center.

Hop, you are losing your mind.

Giving up on the outer office, he knew he’d have to return to the interior examining room, but as he did, he tried not to look too closely at the equipment or to smell the uncomfortable mix of heavy dust, mold, and alcohol.

Scanning the other side of the small room, body radiating with prickly heat, he noticed a closet he’d missed before. He opened the heavy wooden door and saw a few old lab coats and, behind them, several large boxes stacked high.

He slid the boxes out of the closet, took a seat on the wheeled chair, and lifted the lid off the top box. Inside were mostly old receipts, utility bills, carbon paper. The second box, however, was filled with brittle brown file folders.

Heart battering around in his chest, he began pulling out file after file, eyes scanning the folder tabs far too fast to take them in. One overstuffed folder he grabbed so hard and so fast that the box fell to the floor with a grunt. The manila folders inside spilled out into a fluttering windmill and at the top was one labeled, in strangely familiar hand, “Employee Records.” He fell to his knees, one sweaty hand smearing across the folder. Tax forms, ID forms, JEANNE HORELLY, RECEPT. (1944), CARL HAUS, LAB ASST. (1945-48), LAURA SEIDL, NURSE (1946), and so on. Individual photos of stern-faced employees all posed against the same white backdrop that still hung on the wall next to the reception desk. His damp fingers stuck to one and he shook it loose.

Here was finer metal. Long blonde hair gathered high atop her head, heart-shaped face with a round petal of a mouth. Slanty, sexyas-hell eyes. All sizzling beneath his fingers. She always had ‘em. Looks to make you swoon, looks like murder.

Oh, Midge.