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

“I’ll be damned,” she said, and smiled. “You.”

“Yeah,” Coats said. “Me.”

She came over smiling and took his hand and led him along the corridor until they came to a room with a table and chairs. He put his hat on the table. They sat in chairs next to one another and she reached out and clung to his hand.

“That’s some butler you got,” Coats said.

“Warren. He’s butler, bodyguard, and makes a hell of a martini. He said it was the police.”

“It is the police,” Coats said. He took out his badge and showed it to her.

“So you did become a cop,” she said. “Always said you wanted to.”

She reached up and touched his face. “I should have stuck with you. Look at you, you look great.”

“So do you,” he said.

She touched her hair. “I’m a mess.”

“I’ve seen you messy before.”

“So you have, and fresh out of bed, too.”

“I saw you while you were in bed,” he said.

She didn’t look directly at him when she said, “You know my husband, Harris, died, don’t you?”

“Old as he was when you married him,” Coats said, “I didn’t expect him to outlive you. Of course, he had a lot of young friends and they liked you, too.”

“Don’t talk that way, baby,” she said.

As he thought back on it all, bitterness churned inside Coats for a moment, then settled. They had had something together, but there had been one major holdup. His bank account was lower than a snake’s belly, and the best he wanted out of life was to be a cop. The old man she married was well-heeled and well connected to some rich people and a lot of bad people; he knew a lot of young men with money, too, and Ali, she saw it as an all-around win, no matter how those people made their money.

In the end, looks like they both got what they wanted.

“This isn’t a personal call, Ali,” Coats said. “It’s about Meg.”

And then he told her.

When he finished telling her, Ali looked stunned for a long moment, got up, walked around the table as if she were searching for something, then sat back down. She crossed her legs. A slipper fell off. She got up again, but Coats reached up and took her hand and gently pulled her back to the chair.

“I’m sorry,” Coats said.

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“The dog paw, like you have.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

They sat for a long time, Coats holding her hand, telling her about the block of ice, the boy finding it.

“Any idea who might have wanted her dead?” Coats asked.

“She had slipped a little,” Ali said. “That’s all I know.”

“Slipped?”

“Guess it was my fault. I tried to help her, but I didn’t know how. I married Harris and I had money, and I gave her a lot of it, but it didn’t help. It wasn’t money she needed, but what she needed I didn’t know how to give. The only thing I ever taught her was how to make the best of an opportunity.”

Coats looked around the room and had to agree about Ali knowing about opportunity. The joint wasn’t quite as fancy as the queen of England’s place, but it would damn sure do.

“I couldn’t replace Mother and Father,” she said. “Them dying while she was so young. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Coats said. “You weren’t much more than a kid.”

“I think I can blame myself,” she said. “And I will.”

Coats patted her hand. “Anyone have something against her?”

“She had gotten into dope, and she had gotten into the life,” Ali said. “I tried to pull her out, but she wasn’t coming. I might as well have been tugging on an elephant’s trunk, trying to drag the beast uphill. She just wouldn’t come out.”

“By the life, you mean prostitute?” Phillip asked.

Tears leaked out of Ali’s eyes. She nodded.

“Where’d she do her work?”

“I couldn’t say,” she said. “She was high-dollar, that’s all I know.”

Coats comforted her some more. When he was ready to leave, he picked up his hat and she walked him to the door, clutching his arm like a life preserver, her head on his shoulder.

“I can’t believe it, and I can,” she said. “Does that make any sense?”

“Sure,” he said.

“You got married, I heard.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was great. For about six days.”

When Coats opened the front door the hot wind wrapped around them like a blanket. Coats put on his hat.

“It’s just awful out there,” Ali said.

When he stepped down the first step, Ali said, “You could come back and stay here, you know. There’s plenty of room. You could stay as long as you like. You could stay forever.”

He turned and looked at her. He looked at the house. It was one hell of a place and she was one hell of a woman. But it was too much of either one.

“I don’t think so, Ali.”

The upscale part didn’t tell Coats much about Meg’s work habits. She could have worked anywhere. The only thing it told him is she gave sexual favors to people with money. Coats didn’t like to think it, but she and Ali weren’t really all that different. It’s just that Ali made her deal the legal way.

On the way back to his apartment, Coats drove by the now-defunct Polar Bear Ice Company. It was just another reminder of what he had found in the alley, and it made his head hurt. He drove a little farther and an idea hit him. He turned around and went back.

He parked out front of the ice company in a no-parking zone and walked around back. There was a chain through the sliding back door and there were boards over the windows. The boards over one of the windows were easy to pull loose, and Coats did just that. He crawled inside and looked around.

Before today, last time he had seen Ali was through the prism of a polar bear made of ice. She had decided he was a bad prospect, and started seeing Old Man Harris from way uptown. He heard she was at a party and he went over to see her, thinking maybe he’d make a scene; went inside like he belonged there. And then it hit him. Everyone there had an air about them that spoke of privilege and entitlement. They were everything he was not. Suddenly, what he was wearing, what he had thought was a nice-enough jacket, nice-enough shoes, felt like rags and animal hides. He saw Ali across the way, her head thrown back, and above the music from the orchestra in the background he heard her laugh. A deep chortle of pleasure that went with the music and the light. She was laughing with a man who wasn’t the man she married. She was laughing with Johnny Ditto; a gangster, drug seller, and prostitute wrangler. He was known for handling the best girls, high-end stuff. Johnny was tall, dark, and handsome, splendid in a powder-blue suit with hair that was afraid to do anything but lay down tight and hold its part.

Coats stepped aside so that he was between them and a table mounted with a big ice sculpture of a polar bear on an ice floe. Below the ice was a ring of shrimp, tight up against the sawlike cut at the bottom. Through the sculpture he could see Ali, made jagged by the cuts and imperfections in the carving. He lowered his head, feeling as out of place as a goat at the ballet. He slipped out quick. Until today, it was the last time he had seen Ali.

What he realized now was that the sawlike cut at the bottom of the ice that night was locked in his head, and it was the same jagged cut he had seen on the ice block in the alley. And that polar bear on the table—was that the ice company’s emblem? It made sense, connected up like bees and honey.

Coats walked around and found a room in the back with a bed and camera and some pull-down backdrops. He toured all over, came to the ice freezers with faucets and hoses and frames for shaping the ice. One of the frames was about the size of the big block of ice in the alley. The kind of block an ice sculptor might chop into a polar bear, or use to house a cold, dead angel.