L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (13 page)

But if Mallahan were to put it together quick and send the LAPD to my front door, Bonnie wouldn’t get her money.

I decided to drive around town until dinner.

I put the six grand into a small brown paper bag like it was a packed lunch and stuffed it into the crowded trunk of my Lincoln, wedged in with all of my surveying gear. My theodolite looked up at me with its cold black eye.

Almost judging me.

The 101 took me out of downtown and up into the Valley, and then I followed a curving road up to Mulholland and proceeded to drive down my own little memory lane high above the city. Before I knew it, I was recharting the peculiar topography of Bonnie and Me. The old familiar places looked strange in the naked daylight. I pulled onto the overlook where we’d first kissed and was startled by the number of houses clinging to the side of the hill. I thought we had been utterly alone up there in the darkness, perched on the rim of the bowl that was Los Angeles, where no one could see us. Now it felt like the entire city had been watching.

After a while I got itchy again thinking about how easy it would be for Mallahan to give the cops my license-plate number (“Yes, officer, he drives a dark-red Lincoln Continental, plate number 3C8…”) so I kept going down Mulholland, ducking into the overlooks, checking my watch, thinking about the lunch sack full of cash in the trunk. Soon I passed the intersection where I’d had that first crack-up. Under the cover of night I thought it had been the most treacherous hairpin turn in all of Southern California, but now I saw it was a simple gentle curve.

Before I knew it I was all the way to the ocean. I stared at the sun as it slowly plummeted toward the flat gray water like a slow-motion ember.

So different out here in the daylight…

You start out in a fixed location, and through careful triangulation, you can figure out any uncertainty.

But all good surveyors check their work twice.

She was already seated at a table, a full highball in front of her. She was beaming as I started to cross the length of the room, but the corners of her mouth had already turned down by the time I reached her.

“Do you have it?” she said, almost wincing.

I sat down, craving a slug of whiskey and a cold beer like you wouldn’t believe. I searched the room for the waitress.

“Billy,” she said, “please tell me you have it.”

“I have it,” I said.

She exhaled.

“We’re going to have dinner, and then I’m going to go to Ray’s and work all of this out. The right way.”

“What… what do you mean, ‘work it out’? Don’t you have the money?”

Oh, I still had the money, I explained. It was in a paper bag in the trunk. But as I sat on the beach, recalculating my position, I realized I was being a fool. There were other solutions. Ones that didn’t require ripping off the very men who’d been nothing but decent to me ever since I’d arrived from Cleveland.

I told her what I had in mind. The installment plans, the sliding rates, the whole ball of wax.

It was foolproof. These were businessmen; they’d listen to reason.

“You stupid bastard,” she said. She threw her full drink at me, then stormed out of the restaurant.

It was at that moment, as the expensive Scotch dripped down my face and onto my bow tie and Bullock’s special, that I realized my measurements had been way, way off, because my fixed position was erroneous.

And I had just made the biggest miscalculation of my life.

After drying myself off as best I could, I raced the Lincoln back down the Cahuenga Pass, telling myself there was still a chance to fix everything before Mallahan checked the metal box.

This was Thursday evening. Mallahan was probably home with his wife and daughters out in Glendale, peeling the top from a can of beer and not even thinking about the Greater Los Angeles Title Co., Downtown Division. He didn’t tally the cash in the box until Friday morning, after he’d doled out the per diems for the staff. I could get there tonight and replace the six grand and he would never suspect.

Unless he’d already checked earlier in the day…

I stopped at my apartment first to change my soaking shirt. Oh, she had been good. To think that I had been so willing to plunge myself into debt for her after-dark kisses. She must have seen my tripod and bow tie and thought she’d landed her ticket out of Ray’s. Sorry, sweetie, the depot is closed.

There was a knock at my door.

My first thought was:
Mallahan.

As I crossed the room, buttoning my shirt, I was already formulating my
mea culpas,
wondering what I’d have to do to keep the police out of this. Then I opened the door to see that it wasn’t Mallahan. The man looked vaguely familiar, but I didn’t place him until he narrowed his eyes and his scalp went hot pink.

“I want my six grand, you louse.”

It was the man from the fender bender on Mulholland.

Much later I would learn that he was Bonnie’s husband. But right then, in that moment, there was no opportunity to make proper introductions. That’s because he slammed a beefy fist into my stomach, dropping me to the ground. He dragged me inside and slammed the door shut.

I spent the next few hours writhing on the floor while Bonnie’s husband searched my apartment inch by inch, leaving no piece of furniture unbroken, no garment untorn. “Where’s my six grand?” he’d mutter from time to time.

“My six grand or I’ll kick your face in.”

“Bonnie told me you had the money. So where is it? Tell me or I’ll twist your ears off.”

But he never followed through on the threat, most likely because I was more or less incoherent the whole time, taking deep breaths in between vomiting sessions.

At some point the big balding menace realized that he hadn’t searched my car. Then I thought to myself, okay, that’s it, you’re done for now.

He didn’t even ask for the keys. He rolled me over like I was a burrito and rooted through my clothes until he found them. I tried to grab his hand but he slapped it away.

I would have told him:

You don’t even need the keys. The trunk’s always unlocked, so I can get to my gear quickly. See, I usually don’t have six grand tucked away back there.

But I still had trouble breathing.

The idea of the keys wouldn’t leave me, though. The keys would be useless to him, but I suddenly had the idea that they’d be extremely useful to me…

That was it!

If I could make it out to the car, maybe I could drive away before he found the paper bag with the six grand in the trunk.

I had a spare key in my underwear drawer—the one place the lummox neglected to toss, most likely because he didn’t want to touch another man’s underthings.

Guts grinding, I somehow made it to my feet, over to my dresser, then down the stairs, pausing every few moments to spit out a little more of my own blood.

Bonnie’s husband was still searching the trunk when I made it to the ground floor. I staggered around to the driver’s side, opened the door, sat down, and turned on the ignition. The lummox said,

“What the…”

as I hammered the gas pedal and inertia made the trunk lid go
whomp!
on his head and I peeled down West Temple Street.

Served him right.

Bonnie, too.

The office was only a few minutes away, on Broadway. I started in with the
pleases
. Please let Mallahan have gone home to Glendale without checking the box. Please let me put the six grand back before my entire life goes swirling down the drain. Please let me erase my work and recalculate and remeasure and put everything back in proper order.

When I pulled up, I realized that I didn’t have a key to the office. How was I supposed to get in?

Already I was thinking like a criminal, because the answer came quickly:

A break-in.

I would just break in the front door and replace the six grand and maybe take a typewriter or something, to make it look real. The last person they would suspect would be me—especially with all of the cash replaced in Mallahan’s metal box.

But Broadway was busy this time of night—almost eleven, if my watch was correct. I couldn’t possibly smash my way in with someone watching. Police headquarters was too close.

So I parked across the street and waited for my opportunity.

I ended up waiting until well after midnight. By that time my stomach had calmed a little, and it wasn’t absolute agony to move. When the block seemed clear in both directions, I climbed out of the car and made my way to the trunk. There it was, still wedged in between the legs of my tripod.

Then I checked for something heavy I could use to break the plate-glass door. My theodolite stared up at me, almost saying, Don’t even think about it. I settled for the tripod legs. Sturdy, metal, American-made. They hadn’t let me down before.

I was across the street and about to commit my second felony, the tripod literally in my hands, inches from the glass, when I stopped…

The door was unlocked.

There was a dim light on, back in Shep’s office.

Somebody was already here.

Panic flooded my veins. What was I supposed to do now? There was no reason for a surveyor like me to be stopping by the office this late at night. Maybe it was Mallahan back there with the robbery-homicide guys, and he was showing them the metal box with the wedge of cash clearly missing…

I’d come too far. I had to at least look inside and see what I was up against.

After setting my tripod down on the sidewalk, I slipped inside, making my way through the darkened reception area and back into the inner sanctum. I heard grunting and creaking wood. A few more steps and I knew exactly who was in the office. This was knowledge I wish I could erase from my memory bank, because nobody should have to see their bosses in such a position. The empty Scotch bottles, the casually dumped pairs of shoes, the trousers hanging over wooden chairs.

Mallahan was definitely
not
back home with his wife and daughters in Glendale. And all at once I knew why Shep always seemed so tired and hungover most mornings…

As Mallahan had once told me, they’d been partners for a long, long time.

I had a choice. I could either leave now, with the money tucked under my arm, and start a new life somewhere else, always wondering if the cops would be closing in on me…

Or I could set things right.

And pray that fortune did indeed favor the bold.

Before I knew it I was crouched behind Shep’s desk, slowly pulling out the drawer, my fingertips feeling for the lockbox key…

“What wuzzat?”

“Huh?”

“Heard something.”

“Shh, now. You’re always hearing something. Calm yourself down.”

“Did you lock the front door?”

“Of course I did. And Betty’s asleep at home with the girls. Now come back over here.”

Somehow, after what seemed like a small eternity, I roused myself from the state of utter paralysis that had set in. My fingers found the key. During a particularly fevered period of grunting I slipped into Mallahan’s office. Opened his desk drawer. Removed the metal box, taking great care not to bang it on the edges of the drawer. I unlocked it. The stack of cash was there, waiting to be reunited with its brothers and sisters. I slowly unfolded the paper bag and reached inside and felt… metal.

As in the metal spiral binding of a surveyor’s notebook.

The bag was packed with six notebooks. All my own, apparently collected from the sloppy insides of my trunk.

Had Bonnie’s lummox done this—pulled a switcheroo? No. That made no sense. He wouldn’t have still been searching the trunk if he’d found the cash.

So where did it go?

No one knew I even
had
the money except for me and…

Bonnie.

If circumstances were different, she would have made an excellent addition to the staff at the Greater Los Angeles Title Co., Downtown Division. Because this was a woman who knew
all
of the angles.

She knew I didn’t lock my trunk, because of how many times I went back there for that scratchy blanket for us to use on the beach. She knew the money was in the trunk,
because I told her so
. And she knew that if she threw a drink in my face, she’d have a few minutes to search my car, take the money, and leave.

And as an added bonus—send her deranged lummox husband after me, just for kicks.

I refused to believe that all was lost. I could still set things right.

I just had to find Bonnie.

Talk reason to her.

And if not… find another way.

I checked my watch and realized that it was already after 2:00 a.m. But if I could make it back to the car and over to Ray’s Café in time, maybe I could still catch her there. Or force someone to cough up her address, damn it…

Which is when the lights snapped on.

Both Mallahan and Shep, naked as the days they were born, standing in the doorway, hands almost touching.

They looked at me, and then at the paper bag, and then finally at the open metal lockbox in slack-jawed confusion.

“Billy?” Mallahan asked.

I could still set things right…

I could still set things right…

I blasted past both of them and ran through the office and reception area and right out the front door—where I promptly tripped over my own tripod. My palms burned as they slid across the sidewalk. Forget it. Get up, get to your car, get over to Ray’s. There were shouts behind me. Probably my bosses pulling on their clothes in hurry so they could catch up with me. But I was already behind the wheel of my Lincoln and gunning the engine and zooming down Broadway.

A plan formed in my head.

I would speed past Ray’s, just to make sure the lummox wasn’t there waiting for me. I’d park around the corner, so Bonnie wouldn’t see my Lincoln and run…

Bonnie.

Her face hung in front of me like a phantom. Her smiles, her megawatt smile, her kiss, her sickening scent of jacaranda trees…

She would help me put things right. It was not too late. You can always take digits from one column and move them to another… right?