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

“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.

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.