Page 85 of Concealed in Death

“They wouldn’t get you. I did. Do you ever wonder why? I got you, almost from the bounce—or the bust. You were so official, and so grumpy in your uniform.”

Those hard black cop shoes, Eve thought. God, how she’d hated them. She probably had looked grumpy.

“And you looked like some kid playing fairy princess dress-up, even with your hand in that mark’s pocket.”

“I didn’t even have his wallet yet.”

“And tried to tell me you were just trying to get his attention. Bogus.”

“I was pretty good at the lift, even though I mostly ran cons. But now and again you’d see some tourist just asking for it, you know? You know?” she repeated to Roarke.

“I know very well.”

“You ever think about that, Dallas? Your man and your best girl, thieves and grifters.”

“Night and day.”

With a watery laugh, Mavis leaned her head against Leonardo’s arm a moment. “My moonpie here, he knows it all, all the way back. When you love somebody, they’ve got to know who you are, even if you’re not exactly who you were. Did she tell you about me—back then?”

“No,” Roarke said, “not, I think, all of it.”

“You wouldn’t.” Mavis looked at Eve, and saying nothing told her she, too, kept her friend’s secrets. “Some’s in the bio. It plays okay, former grifter, turns it around and scores on the music charts. The before that? Wouldn’t ring so sweet, so I twisted it around some.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” And on that, too, Eve had kept her silence.

“We do what we do, right? Let me spread it all out, okay, so we’re all up on it. And maybe it’ll help settle the jumpies.”

As Mavis was beginning to sound more like Mavis, Eve nodded, then rose to take a chair and the wine Roarke handed her.

“Start wherever you want,” Eve told her.

“Okay, well, big entrance. My mother was a drunk and a junkie. She’d drink, smoke, pop, and stick anything when she was rolling. The father wasn’t around much, then not at all. I don’t remember him very well, and I don’t think she did either. We lived mostly around Baltimore. Sometimes she worked, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes we’d skip out on the rent in the middle of the night because she’d snorted it up. It made her crazy, but when she was using she mostly left me alone. It was better when she was using.”

She paused a moment, seemed to gather herself. “But she’d get busted, maybe I’d get shuffled out unless I slipped the leash. Then we were in the rehab cycle, and when she was in that mode, she’d get religion. The kind where she’d have me by the neck twenty-four/seven, preaching weird stuff, not your basic God stuff, the hellfire crap.”

She sighed a little, nuzzled into Leonardo. “I don’t get why some people want God to scare the shit out of you. Anyhow, she’d throw out all my things—my clothes, my discs if I had any, the lip dye I’d probably shoplifted. Everything. “New broom sweeps clean,” she’d say, and make me wear these dresses—always brown or gray, high neck, long-sleeved, even in the summer. And—”

She stopped to swallow, to breathe out. “She’d cut my hair—shorter than Dallas’s—especially when I started to bud some. She’d whack it off, so it wouldn’t tempt men. If she caught me at anything she didn’t like, she’d take a belt to me, beat out the devil kind of thing. And I’d have to fast, no food for however long she figured.”

Saying nothing, Leonardo shifted her just a little closer. And that, Eve thought, said everything.

“Then she’d start using again, and it was better. Until it wasn’t. Round and round, you never knew who she was going to be on any given day. Am I taking too long? It’s a messy memory lane deal.”

“You’re not.” Roarke topped off her wine, brushed his fingers down her cheek, then sat again.

“It’s just—I was afraid, for a long time, it was like passed down. Like the whole gene thing. I was never going to get totally about a guy or have kids.”

Her voice broke, and while she struggled to control it, Leonardo pulled a blue hankie with silver snowflakes out of his pocket, dabbed at her eyes himself.

“As if I could help it,” she added, “once I found you. But it wasn’t the gene pool thing. She’d messed herself up, fried her brain, fucked it up good. So one night, she woke me up. Middle of the night, middle of the winter. She was using again, but it was different this time. It was like the worst of both ways she could be. Hellfire and beat the devil, and that dead look in her eyes. She... Dallas.”

“They were living in a flop,” Eve continued. “Junkie flop. She had a couple of guys hold Mavis down while she cut her hair off again, and sold Mavis’s clothes for junk. The others used her like a slave, and some of the men wanted to use her for something else. The mother didn’t give a shit, and when she got offered some Zeus one of the fuckers claimed to have coming for Mavis, the mother made the deal, said it would be Mavis’s initiation.”

“That’s when I was scared, the most,” Mavis murmured. “That’s when I knew I had to get away, all the way.”

“Mavis was supposed to fast, purge, clean up—all this weird ritual prep. Instead she ran, grabbed whatever she could carry and she ran, all the way to New York.”

“I was always going to run—I mean once things got really bad, and the flop was really bad. I was hiding some money, stealing it mostly. I was just waiting for better weather, but the idea of her selling me to that guy? Time to book it complete. I was going to go south, follow the sun, you know? But there were a couple of cops at the transpo station, and it spooked me. I got on the wrong bus, ended up here.”