The Midnight Substitute

Ciro's smelled like stale beer and expensive perfume. I sat at the bar nursing a whiskey I couldn't afford, listening to the band play something slow and broken. That was when the man in the dark suit sat down beside me and said, "What's your name?"

"Sylvia Malone."

He looked at me for a long moment, like he was trying to place a photograph he'd seen somewhere. "...God."

His name was Mickey Donovan. I knew the name — everyone in Hollywood knew the name. Studio executive, producer, the man who made pictures that made people cry and forget their lives for two hours. He was married to Virginia Donovan until 1944, when she died in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway. Everyone said it was an accident. Mickey didn't say anything at all.

"What do you want?" I asked.

He leaned closer, and I could see his face properly. He was late forties, still handsome in the way that men who'd spent their lives getting what they want tend to stay handsome. "I want you to come home with me."

"That's not what I asked."

"What's your name again?"

"Sylvia Malone."

He reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope. Slid it across the bar. I didn't touch it, but I could see the thickness of it. "My house is in Beverly Hills. You'll have everything you need. Clothes, food, a room. You'll learn how she lived. Her coffee, her books, the way she walked."

"Who?"

"Virginia." His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "My wife."

I didn't need to ask what he meant. I'd seen the pictures of Virginia Donovan on magazine covers and in cinema lobbies. I'd caught my reflection in mirrors and wondered the same things other people wondered when they looked at me — the shape of my eyes, the line of my mouth.

"Why me?"

He set his hand on the bar, his fingers close to the envelope but not pushing it. "Because you look like her. And because I know about Danny."

My brother Danny. His face appeared in my mind like a photograph developing in dark fluid. He owed money to people who didn't accept excuses. I owed them because he owed them, and that was the shape my life had taken — other people's problems, other people's debts.

"How do you know about Danny?"

"I know everything about you, Sylvia. That's the job."

The makeup chair was cold beneath me. Louise Chen's hands moved across my face with the precision of a surgeon, building Virginia Donovan out of powder and paint and false eyelashes. She was one of the few makeup artists in Hollywood who knew how to make a face disappear and replace it with another.

"Open your mouth," she said. I did. She painted my lips a shade darker, reshaping them into Virginia's famous curve. "Laugh." I laughed. She studied her work in the mirror. "Not like that. Virginia laughed like she knew something everyone else didn't. Like this." She demonstrated, and the woman in the mirror was someone I had never met and someone I knew better than I knew myself.

Louise was the only person who had seen both of us — me at the bar and me in the mirror — and she'd said exactly three things about the whole operation: "This is insane." "Don't die." "If you come back with a black eye, tell them it's the lighting."

The Beverly Hills mansion was enormous and empty in the way houses are empty when they've been designed for a person who isn't in them. Virginia's photographs were everywhere — on the walls, on the nightstand, on the dressing table. Her perfume sat on a silver tray like an offering. Her books were arranged by height, spine out. Everything was preserved, everything was waiting.

"Starting tomorrow," Mickey said, standing in the doorway of my new room, "you learn how she lived. Not how you lived. How she lived." He closed the door behind him. The click of the latch sounded final.

I didn't feel like I had a choice. I still didn't. But I had learned in the bars and the flophouses that choice was a word people used when they wanted you to feel responsible for what they'd already decided.

Detective Jake Rourke came to the house three weeks later. He was a private investigator hired by an anonymous client — Mickey paid him, same as everything else was paid for — to look into Virginia's 1944 "accident." He was in his thirties, wore a suit that had been good three years ago and held himself the way a man does when he's tired of knowing things.

He found me in the garden, where I was supposed to be reading Virginia's favourite book but was actually smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out how much of Virginia I'd become.

"You look like her," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I get that a lot," I said.

"Does it bother you?"

"It depends on the day."

He leaned against a tree and watched me with an expression I couldn't read. "I've been doing this case for two weeks. The car's brake lines were cut, Miss — what's your name?"

"Sylvia. Sylvia Malone."

"Sylvia Malone. The brake lines were cut deliberately. The car was pushed off the road. And the person who paid for the repairs on that car was connected to Mickey Donovan." He pushed off the tree and walked closer. "And now you're here. Replacing her."

"I'm not replacing anyone."

"You look like her. You live in her house. You wear her clothes. You probably sleep in her bed."

"I'm sleeping in my bed."

He smiled, and it was the first time I'd seen him smile. It made him look younger and more dangerous. "Right. Your bed. Tell me, Sylvia — when you're sitting at the bar singing, and someone sits down and says 'God,' are you thinking about Danny?"

"You talk to my friends?"

"I talk to everyone."

The rain came to Los Angeles that November like it was embarrassed about showing up. It didn't pour — it drizzled, persistently, the way a problem persists when you can't solve it. I found Mickey's safe on a Tuesday, hidden behind a painting of Virginia in the study. I knew where it was because Louise had mentioned it once, offhand, while doing my makeup: "If you ever need to see the truth, the painting's the place to look."

The combination was easy to guess — Virginia's birthday. The door swung open, and inside was not money or jewels but a collection of audio recordings. Cylinders, really, old-fashioned things, with handwritten labels in Mickey's handwriting. I put one on the player that stood beside the safe and pressed the button.

Virginia's voice filled the room. It was thin and strained and unmistakably alive. "If anyone hears this, Mickey has me locked up. I'm at the sanitarium in the San Gabriel Mountains. He says it's for my health. It isn't. It's because I know too much. I know what he does to the women he finds. The ones he brings home and turns into me. I can't stop him. I can only —"

The recording clicked off. I stood in the study with rain running down the windows and Mickey's paintings watching me from the walls, and I thought about what it means to be a person in a town that treats people like products.

Jake came to my apartment that night. He knocked at eleven, which was late enough that it should have been urgent and early enough that it should have been safe. I let him in. He was wet from the rain, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a street he's trying to cross without knowing which way the cars are coming.

"You found the recordings," he said.

"How did you —"

"Sylvia, I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth." He sat on the edge of the couch, his hands clasped between his knees. "Do you want to be Virginia Donovan? Or do you just want to be free?"

I looked at my own face in the mirror across the room. Virginia's face. "What's the difference?"

He didn't answer. He just sat there in the rain and the darkness and let the question hang between us like a loaded gun.

I went to the sanitarium the next day. It sat in the San Gabriel Mountains, a white building on a hill, surrounded by pines and silence. A nurse made me wait ten minutes in a lobby that smelled like antiseptic and then opened a door and said, "The lady has woken."

Virginia was sitting on the bed, facing the window. She was thinner than in the photographs, her face more angular, her eyes larger. She turned when I came in, and I saw my own face looking back at me — same eyes, same mouth, but hers had been hollowed by three years of confinement and came back at me with something that was almost respect.

"You know what Mickey said when he married me?" she said. Her voice was stronger than on the recordings. "He said, 'Your face is worth five million dollars.'"

"Why don't you leave?"

She smiled. It was a small, tired smile. "Because once a dead woman comes back, there's nowhere to put her. Mickey has me. The doctors have me. The world doesn't have a place for women who were supposed to be dead."

She looked at me, and for the first time I saw what she saw when she looked in the mirror and saw me instead of herself. "You're braver than I was. You walked away from that house. I was too afraid to walk away from the money."

Mickey found out I'd gone to see her. He came to my apartment at midnight with a man I didn't recognize — a big guy in a light suit who stood by the door like a door. Jake was downstairs with a .38 pistol, parked on the street beneath my window, waiting for something to happen. Mickey stood in the doorway of my room, his face pale in the neon light from the sign across the street, and said:

"Sylv, you're always so naive. You think you're the lead actress? In this town, we're all supporting players."

I looked at him. I looked at the man by the door. I looked at Jake's car parked below, its headlights off, its engine running. I looked at my own face in the mirror on the wall — Virginia's face — and I opened my mouth to say one thing.

The rain started again.