L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (2 page)

The Girl

Megan Abbott

The house was famous. A Mayan fortress made of ferroconcrete blocks stacked like teeth. A powerful man lived there. June had heard of it long before this, her first introduction.

The talent agent who brought June called it the Shark House.

It was in Los Feliz and you could drive by a hundred times and miss it. But once you saw it, you couldn’t turn it away. There were no windows. The tiny lawn sloped up, feathered with ivy that looked red in the strange light. It was a house that seemed to hold things inside. You felt you might be walking into a maw. You were.

“Huston will be here,” the agent said. “
Key Largo
. The part’s perfect for you.”

“Claire Trevor’s got it sewn up between her thighs,” June said softly, looking up at the house from the open door of the agent’s middling car. “Ten years, every bed I land in is still warm from her.”

“She’s not married to Guy,” the agent pointed out.

“You can see how far that’s got me,” June said.

The agent was very young, with a scruff of dandelion hair, a splashy tie, and shiny cheeks. She almost wanted to take a bite out of him. Then spit him out.

There were always young men like this and, for a decade or more, they’d look at the line of June’s bust and her slanting smile and figure maybe they could sell her. But she looked in the mirror and saw everything.

Two years ago, she’d married Guy, who ran sports book on the West Side for Mickey Cohen and liked to trot her up and down the Strip, his “actress wife.”

Now, the talent agents saw different kind of possibilities in June, different ways to lay odds. They knew producers cast actresses for all kinds of reasons, including big vigs they needed to pay off, big secrets they needed to hide. Sure, her carnival days might be over, but she may still have sheen left, they told her.

But June had long given up on sheen. She wanted a job.

“What does it matter?” her friend Gladys asked. “You married the honeypot. Just slip on your silver mink, prop your feet up, and listen to Dick Haymes all day.”

Sometimes she considered it.

But June held onto a few small things from when she first came to the City of Dreams. A button from her baby brother’s shoe, her first pair of silk stockings, and a deeply felt longing to show someone something sometime. Something inside her that no one else had ever seen. All these years of lifted skirts and pearl-mouthed hangovers hadn’t scrubbed that yearning away. It was her favorite part of herself and she would not let it go.

When June was young, before her father left the first time, before he became a forgotten man and ended up in Chicago and married a hotelier’s daughter, a bigamist in three states, by her mother’s count, he would pull her on his lap and read her stories from a big book with crumbling foiled edges she liked to touch while he read.

She would lie against his humming chest and watch the gold dust gather on her fingertips.

The story she always remembered, her favorite, was the one about the miller who had fallen on hard times. One day, the devil approached him in the woods and promised the miller all the riches in the world in return for what stood behind his mill. The miller, knowing all that lay behind the mill was a gnarled old apple tree, eagerly agreed. What he did not realize was that his beloved daughter, at that moment, was standing behind the mill, sweeping the yard. And now she was the devil’s own.

It was a long story, with many turns, and June couldn’t remember all of it, but she did remember this: the devil tries to take the daughter but is unable to because she is pure. He tells the miller that he must chop off her hands. The miller cries and cries and his daughter hears him. The daughter, who loved her father, held out her hands.

“Dear father,” she said, “do with me what you will.”

At this point, June’s father always lifted his hand and dropped it on June’s tiny wrists and laughed. They both laughed, maybe.

“That’s a terrible story,” her mother would say, from the laundry tub.

“It is,” her father would reply. “But she loves it.”

As they walked up the pathway to the house, the fleshy succulents tingling around them, the air itself changed, became wet and thick and scented. The leaves curled against June’s face, cradling her with long fingers.

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.

Things were starting to turn, and there seemed no life to anything suddenly, not even the bodies pressed close. The girls had hooded eyes, stone faces, lacquered bodies, hard and merciless. The men didn’t seem to have faces at all, only smears of antic pleasure, over as quickly as it began.

Maybe there was more, June thought.

But she and the girl were sunk deep into a low velvet couch and it was very hard for her to get up. Finally, she did, and the girl followed.

It had been years since she’d fallen for slugged booze. When a different man came, this time with a gold-flecked decanter, June refused and the girl did, too, her eyes already like
X
s.

“In three weeks, it’ll be 1947,” the girl whispered, then turned and seemed to look at her, blankly. “Did you ever think you’d be so old?”

June, her head a greening fuzz, felt certain the girl meant
you, you, you.

She felt something rancid rise up in her and that she might say something very cruel, but then she started to wonder if the girl had meant it that way, or had said anything at all. Had she?

There was music coming from the far end of the courtyard and it drew them, beguiled them.

Trawling, hypnotized, across the courtyard, through the low thicket of agaves, their crimson-tipped leaves a woman’s nails, razored to crimson points, they couldn’t stop.

There was a narrow hall that emptied down into some stone-stepped subterranean keep. From within, they heard laughter, keening.

“I wonder what’s down there?” June asked, the girl’s fingers prickling on her.

“Is that you, Junie?” a voice shouted from below, the talent agent. “Guess who’s down here.”

“Huston?” June whispered into to the black, the drink still telling on her, her fingers seeming to slide down the stone wall, which felt wet and private.

“Come down,” he said, his voice manic and unwholesome.

Before she could do anything, the girl grabbed onto June so fast and hard June felt herself nearly fall.

“I don’t think I can go down there,” the girl said. “I think I’ve been down there before.”

June looked at this frailing girl, a girl like so many she had known. A girl to whom things just happened. June was not that girl and hadn’t been for some time. It had cost her.