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

They put me in a car with Lew Hagner. Now, I’d heard of him, because he had a big part in the Zoot Suit Riots in ‘43, and there were plenty of Mexicans who’d have liked to see him dead. And after I was home but before I joined up with the department, there was an incident where he got in a gunfight with three zoot-suiters or pachucos or whatever you want to call ‘em. Mexicans, anyway. He got a scratch, treated and released at Valley General, and they were all dead on arrival. One of them, the wounds were in the back, and the press made some noise about that, but most people wanted to give him a medal.

Lew was fifteen years older’n me, and I was, what, twenty-two at the time? An old twenty-two, the way everybody’s older after a war, but still. Plus my old man died while I was overseas, and a fifteen-year age difference, plus he’s there to show me the ropes; well, I’m not about to say he was like a father to me, but you might say I looked up to him.

Anyway, we’re two guys in a car. And it’s good, and I’m learning things you don’t learn any other way. All the feel of the streets, and what might be trouble and what’s not. What you had to enforce and what you could let slide. When you had to go by the book, when you didn’t even have to open it.

How else are you gonna learn that sort of thing?

A thing he told me early and often was that domestics were the biggest headache I’d ever have. By that I mean domestic disturbances. You just say “domestics,” you could be talking about somebody’s cleaning girl.

A domestic disturbance, he said, you got two people trying to kill each other, and you walk in the door and they’ve got a united front. It’s both of them against you, and they’ll go back to killing each other as soon as you’re out of the picture, but for now they’re a tag team and you’re it.

And even when that doesn’t happen, Lew said, it’s just so fucking frustrating.

I’m sorry, I guess I should watch my language.

No, that’s all right, Charles. Don’t worry about anything like that.

Well, it’s how he said it. But I’ll watch it from here on in. I don’t know what you’re gonna do with all this stuff, but I might as well keep it clean for you.

But about domestics. You get a man’s beating his wife like she’s a rug, and the neighbors call it in or she calls us herself, and he’s there in his underwear, smelling like a bomb went off in a liquor store. And she’s sporting two shiners and a split lip, and that’s her tooth on the floor there, and you want to pack this bum off to Folsom or Q, and you’re lucky if you even get to haul him in. Because maybe six times out of ten she’s hanging onto his arm and telling you it was all a mistake, that she fell down, she’s just so clumsy. And the rest of the time you take him in, and he’s out the next day because she won’t press charges. Oh, officer, it was all a mistake, plus it only happens when he drinks, and he never has a drink except on days ending in a Y .

You get the picture.

Well, we had our share of those. Part of the job, you know? Then one night we get a radio call, “See the woman,” and it’s an address on South Olive. Don’t ask me which block, and anyway that whole part of downtown’s completely different nowadays. Whatever house it was, you couldn’t find it today. Torn down years ago and something else there now, and no loss, because it wasn’t the best part of town.

And Lew says, “Oh, hell, not again.”

And on our way over there he tells me about this woman, Mildred’s her name, and how her husband beats her like he wants to see how much damage he can do. And she won’t press charges. She can always manage to come up with an excuse for him.

“Oh, he really loves me. Oh, it’s my fault, there’s things I know I shouldn’t do because they make him angry, but I do them anyway. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Like that.

“No kids,” he said. “Usually you see kids in situations like this. What they all got in common, they got the oldest eyes in the youngest faces.”

I knew what he meant. You’d see young troops come back from the front lines and their faces’d still be young. But not their eyes, on account of what they’d seen.

“He had kids and beat up on them, be jail tonight and the pen tomorrow. We wouldn’t need her testimony to put him away. But she’s the only one there, and she gets everything he hands out, and the stupid bitch keeps coming back for more.”

The houses on that block were painted different colors, but they were all the same idea—one story tall, and what we used to call bungalows. Maybe they still call ‘em that. I haven’t heard the word in a long time, but maybe they still use it.

This one was like its neighbors in that it had concrete where most freestanding houses will have a lawn. That’s where we parked. I guess she heard us drive up, because she met us at the door, wearing open-toe bedroom slippers and a housedress with the color washed out of it. Stringy blond hair, patchy red polish on her toenails. Imagine what she must have looked like, and it was two, three times worse than that.

He was in a chair, passed out, a bottle on his lap. Three Feathers, that was the brand. It’s a cheap blended whiskey, or it used to be. No idea if they still make it anymore.

The cap was off the bottle, and there was maybe an inch of whiskey left in it. Funny what you remember.

I forget his name, but it’ll come to me.

Lew said, “Millie, you about ready to press charges?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Lew.” Wringing her hands and not meeting his eyes, so you know all I don’t know means is No. “You all put my Joe in jail and then what am I gonna do?”

Joe, that was his name. Told you it’d come to me.

“Live your life,” Lew said. “Find a real man.”

“I got a real man, Lew.”

“Find one who keeps his hands to himself.”

“It’s my fault as much as it’s his, Lew. I know better than to say the things I say. But I go and get him upset, and he’s had a drink or two—”

“Or twenty.”

“—and he can’t help himself. I’ll be okay, Lew.”

We got back in the car, on account of there was nothing else for us to do, and the rest of the night Lew never said a word unless he had to. Long silences, and if I tried to start a conversation it didn’t go anywhere, so I let it go.

It wasn’t two weeks later that we got another call for South Olive. “ See the woman.” Lew let out a sigh when he heard the address, and when we got there it was the same story, except this time Joe hadn’t reached the point of passing out. He was belligerent, and he ran his mouth a little, and that gave Lew the excuse to smack him upside the head. And all that did, besides shut Joe’s mouth, was make her feel the need to stand by her man. I said her name a minute ago and now I can’t think of it. Damn, what was that woman’s name?

I believe you said it was Mildred.

Millie, that’s right. A man gets old and things just come and go out of his memory. First I can’t think of his name and then I can’t think of hers. Joe and Millie, Millie and Joe. “Oh, don’t hit him, Lew, don’t you dare hit my Joe!” And they’re arm in arm, a united front against the damn cops.

We got out of there, didn’t even bother to ask about pressing charges. Would have been a waste of breath.

Rest of the night, same story. Lew’s quiet. We wind up in a greasy spoon a block from Pershing Square, sitting over eggs and home fries and coffee, and out of nowhere he says, “You wouldn’t know it, but that’s a fine-looking woman underneath it all. Beautiful girl, she used to be. Son of a bitch cost her her looks, along with her spirit.”