Courtney get her up the stairs and into her room, where she lay face down on the bedspread with the door open.
I stood in the doorway while Boris and Courtney got her shoes off—interested to see, for once, the room that she and my dad always kept locked up. Dirty cups and ashtrays, stacks of Glamour magazine, puffy green bedspread, laptop I never got to use, exercise bike—who knew they had an exercise bike in there?
Xandra’s shoes were off but they’d decided to leave her dressed. “Do you want me to spend the night?” Courtney was asking Boris in a low voice.
Boris, shamelessly, stretched and yawned. His shirt was riding up and his jeans hung so low you could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Nice of you,” he said. “But she is out cold, I think.”
“I don’t mind.” Maybe I was high—I was high—but she was leaning so close to him it looked like she was trying to make out with him or something, which was hilarious.
I must have made some sort of semi-choking or laughter-like noise—since Courtney turned just in time to see my comical gesture to Boris, a thumb jerked at the door—get her out of here!
“Are you okay?” she said coldly, eyeing me up and down. Boris was laughing too but he’d straightened up by the time she turned back to him, his expression all soulful and concerned, which only made me laugh harder.
xix.
XANDRA WAS OUT COLD by the time they all left—asleep so deeply that Boris got a pocket mirror from her purse (which we had rifled, for pills and cash) and held it under her nose to see if she was breathing. There was two hundred and twenty-nine dollars in her wallet, which I didn’t feel all that bad about taking since she still had her credit cards and an uncashed check for two thousand and twenty-five.
“I knew Xandra wasn’t her real name,” I said, tossing him her driver’s license: orange-tinged face, different fluffed-up hair, name Sandra Jaye Terrell, no restrictions. “Wonder what these keys go to?”
Boris—like an old-fashioned movie doctor, fingers on her pulse, sitting by her on the side of the bed—held the mirror up to the light. “Da, da,” he muttered, then something else I didn’t understand.
“Eh?”
“She’s out.” With one finger, he prodded her shoulder, and then leaned over and peered into the nightstand drawer where I was rapidly sorting through a bewilderment of junk: change, chips, lip gloss, coasters, false eyelashes, nail polish remover, tattered paperbacks (Your Erroneous Zones), perfume samples, old cassette tapes, ten years’ expired insurance cards, and a bunch of giveaway matchbooks from a Reno legal office that said REPRESENTING DWI AND ALL DRUG OFFENSES.
“Hey, let me have those,” said Boris, reaching over and pocketing a strip of condoms. “What’s this?” He picked up something that at first glance looked like a Coke can—but, when he shook it, it rattled. He put his ear to it. “Ha!” he said, tossing it to me.
“Good job.” I screwed off the top—it was obviously fake—and dumped the contents out on the top of the nightstand.
“Wow,” I said, after a few moments. Clearly this was where Xandra kept her tip money—partly cash, partly chips. There was a lot of other stuff, too—so much I had a hard time taking it all in—but my eyes had gone straight to the diamond-and-emerald earrings that my mother had found missing, right before my father took off.
“Wow,” I said again, picking one of them up between thumb and forefinger. My mother had worn these earrings for almost every cocktail party or dress-up occasion—the blue-green transparency of the stones, their wicked three a.m. gleam, were as much a part of her as the color of her eyes or the spicy dark smell of her hair.
Boris was cackling. Amidst the cash he’d immediately spotted, and snatched up, a film canister, which he opened with trembling hands. He dipped the end of his little finger in, tasted it. “Bingo,” he said, running the finger along his gums. “Kotku’s going to be pissed she didn’t come over now.”
I held out the earrings to him on my open hands. “Yah, nice,” he said, hardly looking at them. He was tapping out a pile of powder on the nightstand. “You’ll get a couple of thousand dollars for those.”
“These were my mother’s.” My dad had sold most of her jewelry back in New York, including her wedding ring. But now—I saw—Xandra had skimmed some of it for herself, and it made me