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

I told her I’d help her out.

Even though I barely cleared six grand in a year, let alone two days.

The words were barely out of my mouth—

“Don’t worry, Bonnie.”

—and I knew exactly how I was going to do it, too.

Professional land surveyors use simple gear—a tape measure, a level, a theodolite. We use our instruments to measure the distance and angles from a fixed location to points unknown.

Right up until the day I met Bonnie, I thought life worked the same way. You start out in a fixed location, and through careful triangulation, you can figure out the unknowns.

My fixed position, right at that moment:

I loved Bonnie.

Bonnie loved me.

Someone wanted to hurt Bonnie.

Simple triangulation…

… that pointed me to the obvious solution.

Couldn’t be easier, really.

Shep was sleeping it off in the back room, like he frequently does during lunch hours. Mallahan was off to Philippe’s for his usual beef sandwich, his usual cup of nickel coffee, leaving me in charge.

I took the key from Shep’s top drawer. Went back into Mallahan’s office. Slipped the key into the lock. Opened the metal lid. Extracted sixty one-hundred-dollar bills—about a quarter of the money there, leaving a noticeable dent.

I also snatched an extra hundred in twenties.

(A per diem for embezzlement, I told myself.)

I closed the lid, relocked the box, replaced the key, left a note for Shep and Mallahan that lunch wasn’t agreeing with me, and left the office.

That’s how easy it is to ruin your life.

When I told Bonnie I had the money, she told me she wanted to meet for dinner at eight. Which was a first. Didn’t she have work? No, she said. She’d already arranged it so she could work late.

She chose a woody steak house right off Olive Avenue in Burbank, across the street from the Warner Bros. lot. I sat in my apartment on West Temple, staring at the walls and wondering if Mallahan would be checking that metal lockbox anytime soon.

I wasn’t worried about getting caught; at that point I was thinking that the chips of my life would fall where they may. The important thing was saving Bonnie from the sharks.

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.”