“You and me. You were inside me, you were my courage. You gave me courage, Eve. I was so grateful. I wrote you a note on the wall. Why don’t you see I’m your friend?”
“Why did you put Bastwick in bed?”
“It’s tidier. It’s respectful. Just because she was disrespectful doesn’t mean we have to sink to her level. It’s nice to talk to you like this. Just the two of us. It’s all I wanted.”
“Take me through it, Lottie. Take me through Bastwick.”
Once she had, Eve led her to Ledo, then to Hastings.
“I failed. I almost tagged Dawson, told him I was sick, but I wanted to see you that night—at the Hastings scene. I wanted to see if you were upset with me. And I heard you say things to Peabody that weren’t nice about me. You said things on screen, too. It hurt my feelings. Why don’t people see I have feelings?”
“Your mother, your sister.”
She looked away. “I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Fine. I just wondered. The kids who killed them got off pretty light.”
“Because there wasn’t justice. My father cried and cried, no justice, he’d say, and sob and sob. But they died together, he said that, too. They had each other at the end, and they’d always be together. The two of them. They didn’t want me with them. I was the smart one! But my sister was the pretty one, the clever one, the sweet one. So she got to go with our mother, and I had to stay.”
“You got to live,” Eve pointed out, and Lottie’s mouth twisted.
“I got the leftovers, like always. Got the responsibilities, like always. And my father didn’t even see me. Nobody saw me. Be good, Lottie, behave, Lottie. Study hard, Lottie. I did, I did, I did. And nobody paid attention. I could’ve been a cop, but he said, no, no, you’re too smart. Be a scientist. Be good. So I did, and so what? I did everything right, and what happened?”
“What happened, Lottie?”
“I did everything he wanted, and he got married again! And her daughter’s the pretty one and the clever one. And they didn’t see me.”
“It wasn’t respectful of him.”
“No! It wasn’t respectful. It wasn’t right. ‘Oh, Lottie, I’ve been alone for ten years—’” She whined it, disgust on her face. “He said that to me. I was right there, wasn’t I? How could he be alone when I was there? Then my grandmother got sick, and it was ‘Lottie, you can take care of her.’ So I did. Five years. She died anyway. Just died, after five years of my life taking care of her. But she left me a lot of money, so I could come to New York, and I could study and train. And I saw you, on screen. Talking about dead whores. Oh, you were respectful, but they were whores, and that’s disgusting. And even so, you worked to give them justice.
“Can I have a tube of Pepsi? Maybe you could have one, too.” She smiled again, eyes shining. “We can have a drink and talk.”
“Yeah, sure.” Eve rose. “Dallas, leaving interview.”
She stepped out. Just stood a moment to breathe before she started toward Vending.
Roarke beat her there. “I’ll get it.”
“Thanks. Machine would probably laugh at me, and I’m in the mood to beat the crap out of something. Jesus, Mira nailed it. She’s fucked up inside out. Sick, selfish bitch. Dead mother, dead sister, grieving father who was probably doing the best he could. Not enough for her. She’s got brains, skills, but she decides she’s not important enough to anybody instead of making herself important to herself.”
“That alone is why while she thinks she knows you, she never has, never will.” He handed her the soft drinks.
“This is going to take a while. I need to take her through all of it, get it all on record. Some bleeding heart may try to get her off. She needs to go away.”
“Agreed. We’ll be here.”
“Look, if somebody gets dead, one of the cops in there has to go handle it.”
“I’m sure that’s understood.”
She went back in. Lottie smiled at her as she went back on record. “This is really nice. I’m glad you stopped me or we wouldn’t have this time. I guess I got upset. I don’t like to get upset. Once I got upset and took a lot of pills, but then I threw them up.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, the day my father got married. I thought about doing it before. Putting the pills in dinner. His and mine. We could die together, too. Be together. But I got scared.”
She took a sip of Pepsi. “Everybody said how I didn’t cry when my mother and sister died, but I didn’t want to get upset and have everyone looking at me, thinking I was bad. I was the good one.”