Denise Hamilton - Los Angeles Noir

In the morning he awoke in the stale motel room with its walls bleached of color and greasy cracked windows. He took the toiletry items out of the black plastic bag from the 7-Eleven. Overhead yet another plane rattled the threadbare room. In the few pieces left of the broken mirror over the rust-stained sink, he studied his face while he lathered.

Wasn’t there more gray in those whiskers today? The bags more pronounced? And wasn’t that some gray edging into his temples? No matter. He had big things to do. Razor poised, having lubricated his stubble for the requisite five minutes, Roger Crumbler considered his shave.

Pacific Palisades

It’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m all alone closing down Burberry’s when my cell goes off. The caller ID says it’s Cherie, which probably means a conflict with tomorrow’s schedule, but I pick up anyway.

“Hi, Tate. I need you to help me out with something.”

“Right now?”

“Are you almost done closing?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Can you come out to Pacific Palisades when you’re done?”

“I guess so.” I live in Koreatown, so the Palisades is miles out of my way; like half the guys who walk into Burberry’s, though, I have a great big boner with Cherie’s name on it, and if she asked me to shovel shit I’d ask her how fast she needed it shoveled. “Where, exactly?”

She gives me an address in the highlands accompanied by minutely detailed instructions, including a warning to park at the base of the street. I rush through the rest of the closing process and on the way out buy a package of condoms from the machine in the men’s room, dropping an extra fifty cents for the strawberry-flavored ones. When I set the alarm my hands are cold with sweat, and pressing a finger to my wrist I clock my pulse at eighty. Thirty-four years old and I feel like a teenager heading to the prom with a diabolical cross between the homecoming queen and a middle-aged hooker.

It broke a hundred in the Valley today for the fifth day in a row, but the night air is cool and quiet. I pull my old Saturn onto the westbound 101, so nearly deserted at a quarter to 3:00 that I hate to merge onto the 405 after a mere three exits. The 405 is even better, though, ten lanes of empty, untrammeled joy; I’ve had flying dreams that were less spiritually nourishing, and I’m not even speeding. Well before 3:00 I’m headed west on Sunset toward the Palisades, window rolled down for the breeze on my neck and bare arms.

The shops and restaurants of the village are dark as I pass through, the only moving vehicle in sight an LAPD cruiser that crosses in front of me just before my right turn onto Via de la Paz. At the crest, the cruiser turns left and I turn right, taking it slow, careful not to miss any of the indicated streets. The house is at the top of a nearly vertical, circular one, and when I park the Saturn at the bottom I make sure the hand brake is on and the wheels turned out.

Cherie is the ur-cocktail waitress, tall and leggy with hair dyed blond, hanging straight with an inward flip just below her jawline, and looking at her face and body you wouldn’t take her for more than forty.

In which case you’d be wrong. She came to L.A. from East Lansing, Michigan to be an actress back in the ’70s. Knowing that, you might take her for the embodiment of a cliché-prettiest girl in some provincial town comes to L.A. with dreams of stardom, never gets a part, ends up bitter and old, taking drink orders in the Valley-but here again you’d be wrong: Cherie did make it for a while. On cable you can still catch her in old episodes of Starsky and Hutch and Barnaby Jones , and at least one Columbo (in which she plays-unconvincingly-a cocktail waitress). Once in my presence she made the unlikely claim that she was the producers’ first choice for the Linda Evans part in Dynasty , and Dean Berg, who tends bar in the afternoons, swears she did an episode of the original Star Trek . While we all cherished the thought of her in one of those short red uniforms with the leather boots, when he repeated the claim in front of her, she busted a gasket and said she didn’t even come out here until years after the show went off the air. When Cherie’s annoyed she clenches her teeth, and she’s spent so much of her life in a state of annoyance that the muscles lining her cheeks actually bulge outward. Her jaw didn’t unlock for three days after that.

We get guys all the time with crushes on her, some of them very young; they come in on a daily basis for months sometimes before they accept the fact that she’s never going to respond to their devotion, and lots of them keep coming even after that, just to pine. She’s worked at Burberry’s since at least ’91, long after the end of her acting career. What she did in the meantime is a mystery, but according to Dean she lived for a while with Lyle Hobart, one of the owners. Lyle is married these days to a former Playmate of the Month who doesn’t let him set foot in Burberry’s without her, so terrified is she of Cherie’s lingering influence on her weak-willed husband. Her fears aren’t misplaced; it’s due only to Lyle’s protection that she’s still employed. I’ve been at Burberry’s since my divorce, a year ago, and she’s the most unreliable waitress I’ve worked with in ten years of on-and-off bartending: noshows, bad arithmetic, ignored customers, the whole roster of waitressing sins. Her looks, combined with a certain flirtatious affability, have kept me-have kept the entire male portion of the staff-from turning on her, but the other waitresses loathe her, and she wouldn’t last a week anywhere else.

The house is at the summit, the street curving downward in either direction away from it. The front door is locked, the windows all dark, so I double-check the address before ringing the bell. From the outside it looks modest, but in this neighborhood at this altitude facing seaward you’d be looking at a couple million dollars’ worth of bungalow. When the door finally opens it’s Cherie, and she greets me with a finger to her lips.

“Hey, Cherie,” I say.

“Shut the fuck up,” she hisses, beckoning me inside.

It’s completely dark, and she takes my hand and leads me down a staircase into what turns out to be an enormous living room with a panoramic view of the Pacific. There’s another staircase leading down, and outside I can see more house going down the hill, and I understand that this is one of those four-story houses that you enter through the insignificant-looking top floor. I try to revise my estimate of the house’s worth and fail. This is one of those places you read about on the front page of the Times ’ real estate supplement, the part Harry Shearer reads aloud on the radio Sunday morning. For the first time I begin to feel uneasy about what Cherie might be doing here.

She’s in her uniform, and she sidles up to me and slops her mouth onto mine. Up close she smells like cigarettes and perfume and wine, and her mouth doesn’t taste half bad, considering.

I pull away, determined to find out while I still can exactly what I’m buying into. “So what’s the favor, Cherie?”

“The favor is I’m horny, stud, and I want to make it with you.” One of Cherie’s more endearing traits is a tendency toward ’70s slang that dates her in ways her face and body fail to.

“Just all of a sudden out of nowhere?”

“All of a sudden I got this great housesitting gig and I thought it was sad to be staying in a beautiful pad like this without a lover to share it with.”