Jonathan Santlofer - L.A. Noire - The Collected Stories

When they came to the frozen woman, Galloway said, “She’s in ice, all right.”

“You didn’t believe me?”

“I believed you, but I thought you were wrong,” Galloway said. “Something crazy as this, I thought maybe you had gone to drinking.”

Coats laughed a little.

“Odd birthmark,” Galloway said.

Coats nodded. “I couldn’t figure if this was murder, vice, or God dropped an ice cube.”

“Lot of guys would have liked to have put this baby in their tea,” Galloway said.

The ice had begun to melt a little, and the angel had shifted slightly.

Galloway studied the body and said, “She probably didn’t climb in that ice all by herself, so I think murder will cover it.”

When he finished up his paperwork at the precinct, Coats walked home and up a creaky flight of stairs to his apartment. Apartment. The word did more justice to the place than it deserved. Inside, Coats stripped down to his underwear, and, out of habit, carried his holstered gun with him to the bathroom.

A few years back a doped-up goon had broken into the apartment while Coats lay sleeping on the couch. There was a struggle. The intruder got the gun, and though Coats disarmed him and beat him down with it, he carried it with him from room to room ever since. He did this based on experience and what his ex-wife called trust issues .

Sitting on the toilet, which rocked precariously, Coats thought about the woman. It wasn’t his problem. He wasn’t a detective. He didn’t solve murders. But still, he thought about her through his toilet and through his shower, and he thought about her after he climbed into bed. How in the world had she come to that? And who had thought of such a thing, freezing her body in a block of ice and leaving it in a dark alley? Then there was the paw print. It worried him, like an itchy scar.

It was too hot to sleep. He got up and poured water in a glass and came back and splashed it around on the bedsheet. He opened a couple of windows over the street. It was louder but cooler that way. He lay back down.

And then it hit him.

The dog paw.

He sat up in bed and reached for his pants.

Downtown at the morgue the night attendant, Bowen, greeted him with a little wave from behind his desk. Bowen was wearing a white smock covered in red splotches that looked like blood but weren’t. There was a messy meatball sandwich on a brown paper wrapper in front of him, half eaten. He had a pulp-Western magazine in his hands. He laid it on the desk and showed Coats some teeth.

“Hey, Coats, you got some late hours, don’t you? No uniform? You make detective?”

“Not hardly,” Coats said, pushing his hat up on his forehead. “I’m off the clock. How’s the reading?”

“The cowboys are winning. You got nothing better to do this time of morning than come down to look at the meat?”

“The lady in ice.”

Bowen nodded. “Yeah. Damnedest thing ever.”

“Kid found her. Came and got me,” Coats said, and he gave Bowen the general story.

“How the hell did she get there?” Bowen said. “And why?”

“I knew that,” Coats said, “I might be a detective. May I see the body?”

Bowen slipped out from behind the desk and Coats followed. They went through another set of double doors and into a room lined with big drawers in the wall. The air had a tang of disinfectant about it. Bowen stopped at a drawer with the number 28 on it and rolled it out.

“Me and another guy, we had to chop her out with ice picks. They could have set her out front on the sidewalk and it would have melted quick enough. Even a back room with a drain. But no, they had us get her out right away. I got a sore arm from all that chopping.”

“That’s the excuse you use,” Coats said. “But I bet the sore arm is from something else.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Bowen said, and patted the sheet-covered body on the head. The sheet was damp. Where her head and breasts and pubic area and feet pushed against it there were dark spots.

Bowen pulled down the sheet, said, “Only time I get to see something like that and she’s dead. That don’t seem right.”

Coats looked at her face, so serene. “Roll it on back,” he said.

Bowen pulled the sheet down below her knees. Coats looked at the birthmark. The dog paw. It had struck a chord when he saw it, but he didn’t know what it was right then. Now he was certain.

“Looks like a puppy with a muddy foot stepped on her,” Bowen said.

“Got an identity on her yet?” Coats asked.

“Not yet.”

“Then I can help you out. Her name is Megdaline Jackson, unless she got married, changed her last name. She’s somewhere around twenty-four.”

“You know her?”

“When she was a kid, kind of,” Coats said. “It was her older sister I knew. That birthmark, where I had seen it, came to me after I got home. Her sister had a much smaller one like it, higher up on the leg. It threw me because I knew she wasn’t the older sister, Ali. Too young. But then I remembered the kid, and that she’d be about twenty-four now. She was just a snot-nosed little brat then, but it makes sense she would have inherited that mark same as Ali.”

“Considering you seem to have done some leg work in the past, that saves some leg work of another kind.”

“That ice block,” Coats said. “Seen anything like it?”

“Nope. Closest thing to it was we had a couple of naked dead babes in alleys lately. But not in blocks of ice.”

“All right,” Coats said. “That’ll do.”

Bowen pulled the sheet back, said, “Okay I turn in who this is, now that you’ve identified her?”

Coats studied the girl’s pale, smooth face. “Sure. Any idea how she died?”

“No wounds on her that I can see, but we got to cut her up a bit to know more.”

“Let me know what you find?”

“Sure,” Bowen said. “But that five dollars I owe you for poker—”

“Forget about it.”

Coats drove to an all-night diner and had coffee and breakfast about the time the sun was crawling up. He bought a paper off the rack in the diner, sat in a booth, and read it and drank more coffee until it was firm daylight; by that time he had drank enough so he thought he could feel his hair crawling across his scalp. He drove over where Ali lived.

Last time he had seen Ali she had lived in a nice part of town on a quiet street in a tall house with a lot of fine trees out front. The house was still there and so were the trees, but the trees were tired this morning, crinkled, and darkened by the hot Santa Ana winds.

Coats parked at the curb and strolled up the long walk. The air was stiff, so much so you could have buttered it like toast. Coats looked at his pocket watch. It was still pretty early, but he leaned on the doorbell anyway. After a long time a big man in a too-tight jacket came and answered the door. He looked like he could tie a knot in a fire poker, eat it, and crap it out straight.

Coats reached in his pants pocket, pulled out his patrol badge, and showed it to him. The big man looked at it like he had just seen something foul, went away, and after what seemed like enough time for a crippled mouse to have built a nest the size of the Taj Mahal, he came back.

Coats made it about three feet inside the door with his hat in his hand before the big man said, “You got to wait right there.”

“All right,” Coats said.

“Right there and don’t go nowhere else.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

The big man nodded, walked off, and the wait was started all over again. The crippled mouse was probably halfway into a more ambitious project by the time Ali showed up. She was wearing white silk pajamas and her blond hair looked like stirred honey. She had on white house slippers. She was so gorgeous for a moment Coats thought he might weep.