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

Slipping her mink from her shoulders, she felt, for the first time in long while—years, maybe—nervous, though she couldn’t say why.

The agent was talking behind her.

“I know Georgie Tusk will be here. He’s running B unit over at Warner Bros. and he’s got big eyes right now.”

But June had met Tusk a dozen times at three different studios, and no soap. Women she knew, starlets, made jokes about him, how he was married to that beautiful actress who was big the decade before and all he cared about was poking his tusk in her and they couldn’t get any flash from him.

Suddenly, there were voices buzzing in front of them and another couple was suddenly there, suspended at the front of the house. A man in a pale seersucker suit and a big-eyed girl with tight curls and a coral gash for a mouth. Her face was the studio mask but behind it was something else, maybe something softer. You could never tell, though. And June had long ago stopped trying.

The stacked blocks of the house were white under the moon. Everything looked wet, gleaming, like teeth. Everything was like teeth.

“It’s a cave,” the girl whispered.

“A lair,” the seersucker man said.

“A tomb,” the agent joked, but his voice went high.

When June first hitched to Hollywood, age fifteen, a man picked her up outside of San Francisco. He drove her to a place called the Moaning Cavern, near Vallecito. He told her that, inside, all the mysteries of life would be revealed to her.

They walked a long way until they reached a space so narrow they called it Pancake Squeeze, and he did in fact show her what life was all about.

He also gave her bus fare for the remainder of her trip. On the way out, a stalactite pierced his hat, and June was glad.

Since then, and a thousand thens thereafter—“Let me show you my private office,” “Won’t you come to my wine cellar, baby girl?” and “I have a little house out in Malibu with a peach of a view”—June had stopped feeling scared of men taking her to dark places. In the end, the dark places were all the same, and you’d better get a mink coat out of it or you were a fool.

The coral-mouthed girl next to her did not have a mink, but she had a leopard swing coat, which she dragged along the ground.

“I heard about something that happened here,” she said. “I know a girl.”

June had heard things, too. About the house’s owner, everyone had. An elegant widow’s peak and a European way. A collector, an importer, a private dealer in things, objects. No one knew. She had seen him once at the Mermaid Room, where girls swam in tanks, their twitching smiles painted red, fingertips tapping on the glass. Eyes hidden behind a green-tinted pince-nez, he did not look up at the girls but seemed always to be whispering in the ear of his date, a tanned woman with a square face and large slanted eyes, a thicket of peacock feathers spiked through her brown hair.

June had heard he was a man acquainted with artists and occultists and intellectuals and all the other people who made June feel, despite her I. Magnin suits and cool voice, like a Woolworth’s counter girl who turned tricks every other Saturday night.

“What’s the big deal? Another rich stiff with a taste for Tinseltown trim,” the agent said.

The seersucker man, whose hair was white-blond, and his eyelashes, too, blinked three times but said nothing.

The entrance was hidden under the slab projecting from the center of the house, its heavy tongue. There, on the copper gate, the chevron pattern repeated itself, slashing wrought arrows pointing up, into the house’s dark interior.

The seersucker man pushed it open and they crept up a stone steps to a front door with a flickering glass lamp at the top, a Cyclops eye.

They turned, and turned again, and June felt something brushing her ankle, and it was the girl behind her, the feathers on her gown quivering.

Finally, they found the door, which opened with a shuuusshh.

The girl gasped.

“Oh,” the girl said, as they found themselves in an outdoor courtyard lined with canted columns, wall torches pluming flames, light blazing hysterically from the rooms that faced it.

Through half-open doors, June could see women with severe hair and pendulous earrings, their arms laced high with Mexican bracelets. Men with pencil mustaches and the slick look of morphine and Chinatown yen-shee, their cuff links dropping to the floor, their heads loose on their necks. Some were dancing, hips pressed close, and others were doing other things, straps slipping from shoulders, bracelets clacking to the tiled floor.

Everyone seemed to be having a marvelous time.

Then June saw, under a darkening banana tree in the center court, two women, ruby-haired both, their bodies lit, swarming each other, their silver-toned faces notched against each other. They were famous, both of them, famous like no one ever would be again, June thought, and to see their bodies swirling into each other, their mouths slipping open, wetly, was unbearably exciting, even to June.

“Let’s see the sights,” the seersucker man said, gesturing inside one of the rooms.

But suddenly the coral-mouthed girl didn’t want to and June’s agent had a darting look, and said he’d spotted George Tusk and had a sweet deal he wanted to seal over a pretty girl’s bare back.

The seersucker man drifted away and it was only June and the girl.

A dark-haired man in glasses came up to them. He had in his hand a tall green bottle and a pair of balloon goblets crooked in his finger.

“Please?” he said, lifting the bottle.

“Are you the owner?” June asked.

The man grinned wetly, his face a white streak under a torch flame.

Slowly, he set the glasses on a rosewood table and poured the green liquid from the bottle.

“Are you him?” June asked again, the alcohol—whatever it was—hitting her the second it hit her tongue, tingling through her mouth like cocaine.

“Oh,” the girl said, touching her greening lips. “It’s very fine.”

The man starting talking to them about the Mayans.

“They’d fasten a long cord around the body of each victim. After the smoke stopped rising from the altar, that meant it was time.”

June was not listening because he did not look important. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves and she saw a tattoo of a woman with a long webbed tail on his forearm.

“They’d throw them into the pit,” he was saying. “The tribe would watch from the brink and then pray without stopping for hours. After, they’d bring up the bodies and bury them in a grove.”

June couldn’t really hear, her head starting to feel echoey and strange.

The man was suddenly gone and June couldn’t remember him leaving.

What had they drunk? She felt her dress slipping from her shoulders, her own mouth seeming to go wider, spreading across her face.

She felt the girl’s hands on her, and they were walking on the faintest of feet, their tiny shoes tapping on the courtyard.

They stood under an arching tree hung thickly with long soft blooms like red bells. The bells tickled June’s hair and made her skin rise up.

“I’ve been here before,” the girl said, eyes saucering. “Have you?”

“No,” June said, brushing the blooms from her face, the musked scent from her nose. “I don’t think so. Do you know the owner?”

“I’ve been here before,” the girl whispered. “I know where that hallway goes. I was brought here. I had something done to me here.”

June didn’t say anything, but the way the girl was tingling her arms around her bare shoulders made her skin quill.

It was later, maybe much later, and June was shaking off the drink, which had fallen on her like silk, flooding her mouth and covering her eyes.