I pushed the compliment aside. “Do you know what ‘Poor Georgie’ did?”
“Yes. From the beginning. I saw Georgie and the Short girl leave the house that night in Georgie’s truck. Maddy and Father didn’t know I knew, but I did. Only Mother never figured it out. Did you kill him?”
I didn’t answer.
“Are you going to hurt my family?”
The pride in the “my” knifed me. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“I don’t blame you for wanting to hurt them. Father and Maddy are dreadful people, and I went way out on a limb to hurt them myself.”
“When you sent in Betty’s things?”
Now Martha’s eyes fired up. “Yes. I tore out the page in the book that had our number, but I thought there might be other numbers to lead the police to Father and Maddy. I didn’t have the courage to send _our_ number in. I should have. I–”
I held up a hand. “Why, Martha? Do you know what would have happened if the police got the whole story about Georgie? Accessory charges, court, jail.”
“I didn’t care. Maddy had you and Father, Mother and I had nothing. I just wanted the whole ship to sink. Mother has lupus now, she’s only got a few years left. She’s going to die, and that is so unfair.”
“The pictures and scratch marks. What did you mean by them?”
Martha laced her fingers together and twisted them until the knuckles were white. “I was nineteen, and all I could do was draw. I wanted Maddy smeared as a dyke, and the last picture was Father himself–his face scratched out. I thought he might have left fingerprints on the back. I was desperate to hurt him.”
“Because he touches you like he touches Madeleine?”
“Because he doesn’t!”
I braced myself for the spooky stuff. “Martha, did you call the police with a tip on La Verne’s Hideaway?”
Martha lowered her eyes. “Yes.”
“Did you talk to–”
“I told the man about my dyke sister, how she met a cop named Bucky Bleichert at La Verne’s last night and had a date with him tonight. Maddy was gloating to the whole family about you, and I was jealous. But I only wanted to hurt her– not you.”
Lee taking the call while I sat across a desk from him in University squadroom; Lee going directly to La Verne’s when _Slave Girls From Hell_ drove him around the twist. I said, “Martha, you come clean on the rest of it.”
Martha looked around and clenched herself–legs together, arms to her sides, fists balled. “Lee Blanchard came to the house and told Father he’d talked to women at La Verne’s– lesbians who could tie Maddy in to the Black Dahlia. He said he had to leave town, and for a price he wouldn’t report his information on Maddy. Father agreed, and gave him all the money he had in his safe.”
Lee, Benzie-crazed, absent from City Hall and University Station; Bobby De Witt’s imminent parole his reason for blowing town. Emmett’s money the cash he was flaunting in Mexico. My own voice numb: “Is there more?”
Martha’s body was coiled spring-tight. “Blanchard came back the next day. He demanded more money. Father turned him down, and he beat Father up and asked him all these questions about Elizabeth Short. Maddy and I heard it from the next room. I loved it and Maddy was wicked mad. She left when she couldn’t take any more of her beloved daddy-poo groveling, but I kept listening. Father was afraid that Blanchard would frame one of us for the killing, so he agreed to give him a hundred thousand dollars and told him what happened with Georgie and Elizabeth Short.”
Lee’s bruised knuckles; his lie: “Penance for Junior Nash.” Madeleine on the phone that day: “Don’t come over. Daddy’s having a business soiree.” Our desperate rutting at the Red Arrow an hour later. _Lee filthy rich in Mexico. Lee letting Georgie Tilden go scot fucking free_.
Martha dabbed at her eyes, saw that they were dry and put a hand on my arm. “The next day a woman came by and picked up the money. And that’s all of it.”