L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (11 page)

“Let’s start with the last gentleman. You committed the perfect crime. But somehow the cops found out, and they’re coming to get you. Slump in that chair across from your dead sisters and contemplate the enormity of what you’ve done and what lies ahead in the future.”

The actor slid down in the chair. It seemed to me I could see the history of Cain and Abel and of every crime that ever happened playing over his face. I was thinking about Okinawa—

“Thank you,” said Professor Landru. “And now before we stop, let’s do one more scene.”

I knew he was going to call on me. I knew it as well as I knew anything that ever happened. I was nervous, I won’t lie. But I thought, That’s what I’m here for. That’s why Harry Wattles is paying, so I can go back there tomorrow and pretend to kill Iris Morell and set the tone for the picture. And maybe there
will
be some producer somewhere who will see me and sit up in his chair and say, “Who’s his agent? Chuck? Get Chuck on the phone!”

I could practically hear the producer’s voice as I walked to the front. The professor asked a girl to come up, a girl who looked so much like Iris that I had to blink twice to make sure. That was a coincidence. But it made sense, in a way. Maybe Wattles had given the professor a heads-up about the dame I had to finish off.

“All right,” said the professor. “The two of you stand facing each other. A few feet apart.”

The girl and I looked at each other. I was going to fail. I couldn’t even pretend to hurt this innocent stranger.

“Who is she?” he asked me. “And why do you want to kill her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the problem.” I couldn’t kill a pretty blonde. I couldn’t even fake it.

“All right,” he said. “Take a little journey with me. I’m seeing a jungle scene; I’m seeing a little redheaded guy in a uniform. Short and fat and pasty. I’m seeing him with his mouth wide open, yelling, shouting, shaming people, insulting them, a regular bully. Concentrate.

“Now look at her. At the girl! It’s not her you’re seeing. When you look at her, you’re seeing
him
.
Now
tell us how you feel.”

“Dizzy,” I said. It was like the sound of his voice had hypnotic powers.

As I looked at the girl who looked like Iris, her face sort of melted away, and in its place was the face of Lieutenant Mather. Just like the professor said. I watched him yelling and shouting and bullying everybody—especially me. I saw him getting ready to shoot that old woman in the head. I realized, This time I could save her…

I dimly heard the professor’s voice, asking, “How you feel?”

I said, “I want to kill him.”

“Do it,” said the professor.

I lunged at the figure in front of me. I put my hands around his neck and squeezed.

The next thing I knew, they were pulling me back.

“All right, it’s done,” said Professor Landru. “You’ve killed her. You’re guilty. Now wait.”

The professor pushed a chair over to me, and I sat down and waited to be taken away to a trial, life in prison, execution. It didn’t matter. I’d done what I had to do. What I wanted to do. What I should have done in Okinawa.

I heard a guy say, “Are you okay?” But he wasn’t asking me. The girl I’d played the scene with—the one who looked like Iris—was rubbing her neck and glaring at me as if I’d actually tried to kill her.

“Hey, I got marks on my neck!” she said. “What the hell am I going to tell my boyfriend?”

“Tell him you played a scene with a real actor,” said Professor Landru.

I stood and faced the rest of the class, and they burst into applause.

“Bravo,” said Professor Landru. “There’s not a doubt in my mind that tomorrow you can go back on the set and do what has to be done.”

Maybe you would have thought I’d have bad dreams that night. But I slept like a baby. I woke up feeling terrific.

Walking back onto Harry Wattles’s set, I felt like a new man. Wattles asked how I liked Landru’s class. I said it changed my life. I couldn’t thank him enough.

He said, “Don’t thank me. When I’m watching the dailies, and I see you doing what I know you can do, and the picture takes off from there… that will be thanks enough.”

Just like yesterday, we set up the scene. Iris kissed Jimmy good night. I waited for her in the bedroom. She was back into her part again, this time she didn’t seem nervous. She’d fooled herself into forgetting me. She was an actress, acting.

I sneaked up behind her. I turned her around. She looked up into my eyes. I saw her face, and her face disappeared, and I saw Lieutenant Mather.

I lunged at her. I grabbed her throat and shook her. I squeezed till I felt something crack, and I kept on squeezing. I heard screaming and shouting, but I dragged Lieutenant Mather over to a corner of the set and kept squeezing until he was heavy in my arms, and I put him on the ground.

I looked at the body on the floor. It wasn’t Lieutenant Mather. It was Iris Morell. Everyone was running around and yelling. Harry Wattles came over.

“What have you done, you crazy son of a bitch? What the hell have you done?”

I kept thinking, He’s acting.

“She’s dead,” said Wattles. “Can’t you see that? You’ve killed her, you maniac!”

“Dead?” I said.

“Dead,” he repeated. “You strangled her, you fool!”

I had one of those moments of clarity.

Wattles had set me up. He’d sent me to Professor Landru’s. He’d sensed something about me, something dark and desperate. He knew that I could kill—that I wanted to kill, that I could kill with pleasure—if someone pushed the right buttons and pulled out all the right stops.

But what could I do? I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t blame acting class. It was me who’d killed her, all these people saw me do it. It was my fault. I was guilty. I’d just been so goddamn desperate.

There was only one thing to do. I sat down and waited.

What’s in a Name?

Jonathan Santlofer

I start feeling it in the middle of the afternoon and it gets worse by night, pictures flashing inside my head, that gnawing feeling in my gut like I’m starving, obsession building like steam under the goddamn L.A. streets, ready to blow.

I stare at the cracks in the ceiling of this lousy rooming house on Hollywood Boulevard and imagine Bugsy Siegel getting shot while he’s reading the L.A.
Times
in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room, just sitting there minding his own business, and I think: No one’s safe nowadays, and picture it—four bullets blasting Bugsy’s head apart, one blowing his eyeball clear across the room, according to the papers, and I imagine his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, coming home from Paris, where she’d gone after she and Bugsy had one of their big fights, and finding it in a corner half under the rug, wondering at first what it is, then going all sick. I know everything there is to know about Bugsy, like his real name, Benjamin Siegelbaum, and that he’s Jewish, from Brooklyn, a poor kid who made good, and I admire that, the way he had an idea to build a gambling casino in the middle of the desert and no one could stop him spending millions that he didn’t have, which is what got him into trouble. The Flamingo opened last Christmas with all sorts of hoopla, in every paper, even a newsreel, movie stars like June Haver and George Raft there for the opening, though it didn’t go so well on account of it not being finished and the air-conditioning in them fancy suites not working and everyone mad as hell at poor Bugsy.

Me, I would’ve given anything to be there, hobnobbing with movie stars and the likes of Lucky Luciano and especially Mickey Cohen, real name Meyer Harris Cohen, also Jewish and a poor kid, like Bugsy. I know all about Mickey, too, that he trained as a boxer and wasn’t half bad but gave it up when he got in with Meyer Lansky, the mob’s accountant, real name Majer Suchowliński, again Jewish, and it got me thinking I’m a lot like those guys, starting out poor and all, with big dreams, and how I’ve changed my name, more than once, though I don’t know if I’m Jewish because Carole never told me. She never told me anything. What she said was:
You’re nothing.

The sheets are rough and itchy, but I lie still, like I’ve been taught, and picture that I save Bugsy from the hit and he repays me by making me his number one, like Johnny Stompanato is to Mickey Cohen; Johnny, who dates movie stars and gets me a date with Ava Gardner, and I see us, me and Ava, in front of Grauman’s Chinese, lights crisscrossing the air, big horde pointing, oohing and aahing, and Carole’s in the crowd, a ghost, watching, filled with envy; Carole, who wanted to be a famous movie star so bad, which never happened. But I’m not like her. I’m already famous, it’s just that people don’t know it, not yet. But soon.

Some neon sign is driving me crazy, lighting up my window every other second bluish-white, and I stop thinking about Bugsy and Mickey and think about Myrna, skin so pale and white the veins showed through, giving it a bluish cast, and the way she cried and begged and how I told her to think about something else, how that had always worked for me, and I got so good at it I’d be surprised when I came back to real life and the men were gone and Carole was snoring beside me, and how I’d find a bruise the next day or dried blood on my lip where one of the guys had hit me and I hadn’t even felt it, and I wanted that for Myrna, and the others, too. I’m not a monster. I’d say,
Think about your favorite picture star, Gary Cooper or Claudette Colbert,
and in my mind I’d see all the pictures I’d stored and the ones Carole had cut out of
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen,
photographs of Ginger Rogers and Jean Harlow and Lana Turner and Carole Lombard, who she claims she was named after, all bottle blonds like Carole, covering the walls of our crummy apartment. She’d say,
You know, Lana was discovered at Schwab’s drugstore, just sitting there at the counter in her tight sweater,
and she’d pull on a sweater and stick her chest out and study herself in the mirror, drawing red lipstick above her thin upper lip, and ask me,
How do I look? Like Lana, huh?
And I’d say,
Better,
and she’d give me one of her rare smiles.

Sometimes Carole would sneak me into a picture show and leave me there all day and I’d sit through
It Happened One Night
seven or eight times until I could recite the lines along with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and even now I can hear the dialogue and see that picture in my mind and freeze it when Claudette Colbert raises her skirt to hitch a ride and sometimes, when I’m feeling bad, I do that and it lifts my spirits. I saw lots of pictures that way,
King Kong,
which made me cry, and
The Invisible Man,
who I wish I could be and maybe I am. Sometimes, Carole would forget to come back for me and my eyes would blur, imagining my hands on Barbara Stanwyck’s neck or Mae West’s rear end, and next thing I knew the matron was rapping my feet and telling me to scram and I’d walk home in the dark with all those pictures flickering in my head and I’d imagine doing all sorts of things, like kissing Veronica Lake or just lying next to Loretta Young telling her all sorts of things, secrets I’d never tell anyone else, and knowing she’d listen and pat my head, and say,
There, there,
and those were my favorite days, my best days.

When I finish counting the cracks in the ceiling I start counting all the girls, but after nine, Mildred or Mabel, I can’t keep their names straight. Names can be confusing, like mine, which is John, I think, though when I learned to write, Carole said it was Jon without an
h,
or maybe James, and when I asked her which one, she said,
Who cares?

I try to picture the girls’ faces but they’ve started to blur and it’s like maybe I made them up or dreamed them, or maybe the made-up part is
me,
lying here in this bed, you know what I mean?

I run my hands along my arms and they feel solid enough but I’m still not sure so I sit up and stare at my reflection in the mirror at the end of the bed and I see some regular-looking Joe, dark hair shiny with Brylcreem, sticking up, and I remember how Carole would never let me cut it, how it got long and wavy like a girl’s, and I try to smooth it down but it pops up and I think,
John the scarecrow, that’s me,
or Jon without an
h,
or James, and then I’m thinking about Carole bringing home some old guy who wasn’t so interested in her, and she’d say
How about the kid?
And he’d say,
Is it a girl or a boy?
And she’d say,
What do you want it to be?
and I’d lie there pretending to sleep, curled up tight as could be, and sometimes the guys would hit me because I wasn’t a girl or because they just felt like hitting me, and if I cried Carole would hit me, too, and tell me to shut up, so I learned to be still and replay the last episode of
The Shadow
in my mind or just listen to Carole humming “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” really loud until they finished.

I stop looking in the mirror and lie back but it’s like ants are crawling all over me, I’ve got the heebie-jeebies so bad. The papers say hot winds are blowing out of the Great Basin all the way from Nevada to California, making people crazy, but that isn’t it: the pictures in my head won’t stop, and I know it’s too late and I’ll never get relief.

I look around the room, no better than the place in Mission Junction, which I had to leave because the police came around asking my landlady questions about me. Luckily, she liked me, they all do, the women, I mean, but the cops had found the girl, Mabel or Mildred, so it was time to get going, like the other times and other places. Now I’m wondering if coming back to L.A. was such a good idea, but it had called to me like Western Union. Funny, right? But it was really like that, like I heard it calling:
Come back to L.A.
Maybe ‘cause it’s my birthplace. Carole said I was conceived with a sailor right under the Hollywood sign, another time she said it was in Griffith Park with a soldier, and then in Silver Lake with a car mechanic, who smelled like gasoline and grease, but it’s all L.A., right, except for our landlord, in Vernon, who Carole said she paid off in trade starting a year before I was born, so it could’ve been him. We lived there till I was six or seven or eight, depending on what year Carole said I was born, 1916 or ‘17 or ‘18, but I don’t remember the landlord, only the stench from the nearby meatpacking plants. After Vernon, we moved to Cudahy, which had even more meatpacking plants and the same bad smell, like the stink was following me.

I push the shade aside and look down onto Hollywood Boulevard, see a colored man leaning against a shiny new Kaiser puffing on a cigarette and blowing smoke rings, then a white girl, no more than fifteen, with a painted face, comes by and hands him a stack of bills and he stuffs them into his pocket and I think about Carole’s painted face and marcel waves and penciled eyebrows and red lips, and all the others just like her, and the one from the other night, at the hotel where I man the front desk and carry bags up to rooms and fix the plumbing when it goes on the fritz, which is more often than not, a regular jack-of-all-trades, that’s me, another name to add to my list.

The one thing I know is how to talk to women, especially the unhappy ones, the ones who are sick to death of their husbands and their miserable lives, the ones who’ve packed their bags and left, who drink too much and wear their rayon skirts too tight and who stink of cheap perfume, just like that dame who checked in two nights ago, Mary something-or-other, who I’d pegged at forty-something, though she claimed to be thirty, gammin’ for me, acting all Fifth Avenue when she was anything but, complaining about this and that, like the world owed her a living, while I lugged her bag up three flights, doing my best Bing Crosby, nodding and smiling,
I know, I know,
and her showing off how she worked at the May Company department store selling dresses and how she knows
everything
about fashion, something called the
New Look,
and me saying,
That’s swell,
nodding and smiling till my face hurt and then, later, she’s downstairs again, bending my ear and crying on my shoulder and I’m all sympathy till some sailor comes in, twenty-one, twenty-two, and she stops talking to me just like that and starts laughing it up with the kid and next thing I know they go off arm in arm and she doesn’t so much as give me a second glance or bother to say good night, but two hours later she’s back after dumping the sailor, or more likely he dumped her, staggering on her open-toed pumps all drunk and teary and wants to talk again, and my shift’s about to end so I say,
How about a cup of coffee?
and she says,
That’d be swell,
and I say there’s an all-night diner up on Mulholland and we get into my beat-up Dodge coupe and I drive to a deserted lover’s lane, and when I pull to a stop, she asks,
Where the hell are we?
but I don’t say anything, just lean over to kiss her and she slaps me across the face and I think, that’s it for her. I punch her and her head hits the side window so hard I think it’s going to break the glass but the only thing that breaks is her head, blood all over my goddamn window and upholstery, and I leave her there a minute, get out of the car and come around and open her door and she slumps out, moaning, and I drag her across the field by her arms and she’s kicking and scratching, crying and stuttering,
N-no—p-please—no,
but all I’m seeing is Carole tucking bills inside her brassiere and hands coming over my face and covering my mouth and the smell of old man whiskey breath while my fingers tighten around her neck.

When I stop, she’s lying still and I’m out of breath and have to sit on the damp ground for a minute and I look at her face, all purple and bloated, and I don’t feel so good anymore. I thought that would do it, calm my urges, but here they are again, begging to be fed sooner than expected, like someone has wound my muscles and nerves too tight and my head is pounding and there’s only one way to get relief.

I pace back and forth in my room feeling sad and mad and disgusted because I’d planned to start over in L.A., have a new life, but it’s just the same old thing.

The sun finally comes up orange and soft under the smog and I go down the hall to the bathroom, take a leak, cover my mug with Barbasol, use my finger to create an ear-to-ear grin, careful not to nick myself while I shave. Afterward, I splash on Skin Bracer and rub more Brylcreem into my hair and use my comb to make a perfect part, and think,
John or Jon or Jamey, you look pretty darn good,
and I feel better, too, almost calm, like maybe everything’s going to be okay after all. I put on a clean shirt and a tie and go downstairs whistling “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries
,
” head west on Hollywood Boulevard, the air warm and a little thick, until I reach North Cherokee and see the pale green sign for Musso & Frank Grill.

Inside, still feeling good, I order my favorite breakfast—flannel cakes, the Musso & Frank version of pancakes—which is the cat’s meow. I sip black coffee and open the L.A.
Times,
read all about President Truman trying to stop communism and the United Nations voting to create a place just for Jews who suffered so bad during the war, then I turn a page and there it is in big bold letters: L
OVER’S
L
ANE
M
URDER
. I skim the article, heart thumping like there’s a rabbit inside my chest, not sure what I’m looking for, my
name?
Maybe. Both wanting to see it and dreading that I will. I’m just reading how the police have booked the dame’s husband on suspicion of her murder when the waitress brings my pancakes and I practically jump out of my seat.

“Honey,” she says. “You’d better lay off the coffee,” and smiles, lipstick creeping into the sides of her mouth, and I picture Carole’s lips but manage to smile back and say, “Hi-de-ho,” and she pivots on her low-heeled waitress shoes and I smother my flannel cakes with syrup and drink two more cups of coffee, in no hurry to get moving, the day yawning in front of me with nothing to do till my shift at the hotel and I feel okay now, my nerves under control.