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

Tinka reached out and touched Edna’s downy cheek. “But I could tell he liked her best.”

Watching her, June knew suddenly that Tinka, in her smocked nightgown and with ribbons in her hair, wasn’t a girl at all anymore but something else. She felt she could see sharp teeth poking from the corners of her mouth.

“There’s a man here,” Tinka said. “With white hair and spectacles.”

“He makes jungle pictures,” Edna chirped, lifting herself up, her palm pressing down on Tinka’s shoulder. “He saw us by the pool in our suits.”

“He said she had ants in her pants,” Tinka said, her eyes glittering as she surveyed the girl, the girl’s feather-softness. “He said he could tell by looking at her.”

Watching Tinka, June remembered a hundred introductions she herself had made, more and more of them as she was no longer the one being introduced. Everyone already knew her, the softest pair of very fine shoes. Now, at nightclubs, at parties, coming out of powder rooms at private homes, June was the one who made the introductions, facilitated the transaction, occasionally procured the goods. The girls.

These girls, all of them, always looked just like Edna might in five years.

At Edna’s age, these girls were still back in Omaha, Cleveland, Poughkeepsie. Were still yawning through algebra class at PS 12, sitting on midwestern front porches with firmly belted suitors. In church with their fathers.

Edna smiled at June, her face flushing, her body shifting, like it itched. Like she had ants in her pants.

“Do you think I could try your coat on sometime?” the girl asked her.

They both looked down at June’s smoky gray pelts.

Before June could answer, Tinka leaped to her feet.

“It’s time,” she said. “I’m going to check on the pink room.”

They watched as Tinka prowled down the hallway, her nightgown billowing like a polluted angel.

“Just you wait,” Tinka was saying as she skittered away.

Edna kept talking, but June was remembering something. The girl in the story her father used to tell, the girl with no hands. And how a king heard what had happened to her and because she was so beautiful and pure, he fell in love and had silver hands made for her, and took her as his wife.

“Do you think he’ll put me in a picture?” Edna was saying. “Like Dorothy Lamour?”

June looked at the girl, gum slipping in and out of her unkissed lips, but said nothing. She was working something out. About these girls and what was happening.

“All the important movie people all come here,” Edna said, flipping her braids with her fingers. “They put you in a big pink room with a big pink bed. Like Lana Turner might have. There’s even a lamp with a pink bulb in it.”

June knew all about pink rooms. For ten years her whole life had been pink rooms. But she knew pink rooms here might be even worse than the beaded-curtain ones.

“And they ask you to perform scenes,” Edna said. “I think I will do Jennifer Jones from Song of Bernadette . Tinka says it’s a magical room and I will never forget it.”

“Take your gum out first,” June said, hard as she could. Hard so her voice would not shake.

But Edna just giggled.

As June watched her, something was happening inside.

She was seeing a girl age seventeen, plaited hair and middy blouse, slipping off a bus at Sixth and Los Angeles Street a dozen years ago.

The whole ride down, nearly two days, this girl could think of nothing but what she had done with the man in the cave. But that it was okay because the man smelled of Pinaud’s Lilac and was a talent agent and had an office on Hollywood Boulevard, or so his creasy card said. The girl was sure there would be many more cards.

The girl—all those years still ahead of her, her teeth turning soft and the rest of her hard—who believed in everything with a pure, pure heart.

The girl who just knew that the world would give her things because life had been hard already and she was very pretty and was made to be a star.

The girl who had written, in grease pencil, on the inside of her cardboard suitcase, “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”

The girl who held her hands out, wrists up, for every man with a casting sheet and a promise.

June slipped the pearl-gray pelts around the young girl’s shoulders.

“I didn’t think you’d really let me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t sure,” June said.

“Are you taking me to the pink room?” the girl asked as they rose.

“Yes,” June said. “That’s where I’m taking you.”

The walls were cold and even wetter and June held the girl’s hand behind her the whole way up.

The girl tried to stop under the heavy hanging red bell tree. The coat tangling beneath her, she tried to fix her shoe.

“You can’t stop here,” June said. “You can’t stop.” And she grabbed the girl’s hand tighter, which was cold as silver.

“Don’t stop,” June said. “And never let go of my hand.”

In the courtyard, with all the stone faces turning, all the ivory heads lifted, tusks raised, June pulled the mink over the girl’s head.

No longer lost, June guided the girl through the flaming center of the house, which she knew better than her own. Better than anyone.

She didn’t let anyone see the girl.

Red light’s on, so I guess that thing’s recording. This whole project you’ve got, this oral history, I’ll confess I didn’t see the point of it. You running a tape recorder while an old man runs his mouth.

But it stirs things up, doesn’t it? The other day—Wednesday, it must have been—all I did was talk for an hour or two, and then I went home and lay down for a nap and slept for fifteen hours. I’m an old man, I got up every three hours to pee, but then I went back to bed and fell right back asleep again. And dreams! Can’t recall the last time I dreamed so much.

And then I got up, and my memory was coming up with stuff I never thought of in years. Years! All the way back to when I was a boy growing up in Oklahoma. You know, before the dust, before my old man lost the farm and brought us here. Memories of nothing much. Walking down a farm road watching a garter snake wriggling along in a tractor rut. And me, kicking a tin can while I’m walking, just watching the snake, just kicking the can. Del Monte peaches, that’s what the can was. Why’d anybody remember that?

Mostly, though, what I kept going over in my mind was something that happened in my first year on the force. If it’s all the same to you, that’s what I’ll talk about today.

Now, you know I wasn’t but sixteen when the Japs bombed Pearl, and like just about everybody else I was down there the next morning looking to get into it.

They sent me home when I told them my age, so I waited two days and went back, and wouldn’t you know the same sergeant was behind the desk. This time I told him I was eighteen, and either he didn’t remember me from before or he didn’t give a damn, and they took me.

I went through basic and shipped out to England, and from there to North Africa, and what happened was they cut me out of the infantry and made an MP out of me. But I don’t want to get sidetracked here and tell war stories. I came through it fine and wound up back here in Los Angeles, and I’d been military police for better than three years, so after a few months of beer and girls I went down and applied to join the LAPD.

Now, what they would do then, and they probably still do it, is when they were done training you they’d partner you up with an older guy. You were partners, you’d ride around together, take turns driving, all of that, but he’s the guy with the experience, so he’s more or less in charge. He’s showing you the ropes and it’s something you can’t get from a book or in a classroom.