Things We Do in the Dark

Zoe, Jimmy’s longtime assistant, stops by the house. In their conversation, Paris realizes that Zoe knew that Jimmy had started using cocaine again, feeling the pressure from his comeback. Zoe tells Paris that she is quitting Jimmy’s team for good.

Paris remembers her first days stripping at the Golden Cherry. The only way that she could get herself onstage with the music pulsing and drunk men leering at her was to pretend to be someone else, so she took a stage name, Ruby. She knew the reality: “The Cherry was where you landed when life didn’t go as planned” (191). She worried about Betty Savage—Betty was stealing cocaine from her boyfriend’s street operations and was also using. She liked Betty. They looked like twins: same age, same hair, and they were both Filipina. They even got matching butterfly tattoos. Then came the disastrous New Year’s Eve bachelor party.

In the present, Elsie arrives at Paris and Jimmy’s house. Paris is well aware of how Elsie must be grieving because she and Jimmy had been a couple before Jimmy met Paris. Elsie confides in her that she and Jimmy had gone to the same high school and had nearly gone to the prom together except that Jimmy had flirted with another girl. She observes, “The loss must be unbearable” (197). Elsie tells Paris that she is handing her case over to another lawyer, Sonny Everly, because she does not have the experience in criminal law to give Paris her best chance at acquittal.

When Elsie leaves, Paris sorts through the mail and finds another blackmail letter from Ruby Reyes—Ruby has upped the price to $10 million for her silence on whose ashes are in the urn marked Joey Reyes. Paris burns the letter.

On New Year’s Eve 1998 at the Golden Cherry, Betty did not show up for work. Her boyfriend, Vinny, came in and told Joey that he needed to talk to Betty because she had something that he asked her to keep for him. Joey assumed that it was drugs or money or both.

The bachelor party was in full swing when Joey, working the party, recognized Drew as the groom-to-be—“unmistakably, undeniably” (211). Drew recognized her, and his face dropped. As part of the gig, she agreed to go to a back room with one of the groomsmen.

Paris meets her new lawyer. Sonny is gruff and without polish. He does not care whether she is guilty. His job is to package her as not guilty. Sonny compels her to look at the grisly autopsy photo and the small, neat incision in Jimmy’s thigh. Sonny tells Paris that the prosecution will want to know why, if she was so worried about Sonny’s tremors, she would have a set of straight razors in the bathroom. He tells her that customs is having trouble with their surveillance equipment and that they cannot confirm when she returned from Vancouver that night.

Sonny raises the possibility that Zoe might have had more reason to kill Jimmy. Then Sonny questions Paris’s Vancouver alibi. No one at the yoga convention seems to have actually seen her that weekend. A cab company confirmed that Paris had been taken to the airport on the first night of the convention. Sonny notes, “I have a feeling you’re the kind of woman with a lot of secrets” (221).

The truth is that Paris flew out of Vancouver that Friday. She headed to Toronto on a mission to steal the urn with Joey Reyes’s name on it, fearing that ashes could somehow be tested for DNA. She knows who is in the urn. The ashes were at her uncle’s house in Maple Sound—an easy drive from Toronto. When she got to the house, it was deserted because the family was at a wedding. She had not been there since the day of her high school graduation, when she had swiped all the money her uncle and aunt had in the house and headed out to Toronto. She entered the house and began searching for the urn. She got spooked when she thought that she saw her uncle and bolted from the house.

After the disastrous drive back to her apartment with Drew that New Year’s Eve, Joey entered her apartment. She was still upset that Drew was marrying a woman whom he did not love. Then she froze—the apartment had been ransacked. She knew where Betty kept the drugs and money that she stole from her boyfriend: in a fake drawer in her bedside table. Joey took what was there—close to $100,000 and several bound bundles of cocaine—then heard a muffled sound coming from the basement. She found Betty there, blood everywhere, her stomach and breasts sliced open. “This was the work of a sociopath” (233). Panicking, Joey told her friend to be calm, took her limp and cold hand, and told her that she would go for help. Betty moaned and died.

Joey knew what to do. She removed Betty’s navel ring and placed her own necklace on the body. It was time for her to start over. She would take her chances and run. But first, she had to get rid of the body. She scattered books and newspapers, doused them with nail polish, and tossed a lighted match into the mess. As the fire gained momentum, Joey bolted. At a hotel near the strip club, Joey called a friend and offered the stolen drugs and money in exchange for new identification papers. Three days later, he showed up with a driver’s license and birth certificate for Paris Aquino: “Joey was Paris now” (243).