Los Angeles Noir

by Denise Hamilton

  Then he sees her.

  He holds up his free hand, trying to wave the image away as he fights back the nausea. Looking around, he sees he’s in what appears to be a large circular room. Off to one side hangs a camp lantern that barely illuminates the scene.

  In the center of the room are two large pieces of sheet glass, hung vertically. They are sealed together at the four corners with over-sized metal bolts. Between the glass is pinned a young girl, wearing only a white T-shirt, a white pair of underwear.

  The glass holds her up off the ground. She is pressed together so tightly that her face is distorted, her cheek blotchy and spread wide, her lips puckered like a fish. Her eyes are closed.

  “No more.” Her voice, a dry whisper. “Please, no more.”

  He catches himself staring with incomprehension before he snaps out of it and rushes to her, examining the glass for some type of latch or opening. Finding none, he fights with the bolts. His hands burn at the friction of the unmovable metal.

  “Please … I’ll do anything … I’ll let you do anything,” she says.

  The bolts appear to have been tightened by some massive wrench. He looks around the room for it, but finds only a metal pipe.

  “Just whatever you do … Don’t ring the bell anymore.”

  He stops, looks at her, really looks at her. “What?”

  She opens her eyelids, and her eyes searchlight the room. “Who … who are you? Where is he?” Her voice gets more and more excited, and her eyes go crazy. Except for this flurry, she is unable to move. “Get me out, get me out, get me out!”

  “I’m trying. Just calm down. Everything is going to be all right.”

  He tries to pry the two panes apart, first with his hands, then with his shoe. Her cries are getting louder; his blood pressure, rising.

  The glass does not budge. Now a scream: “Get me out! He’s coming! He’s coming back with the bell! No no no no …”

  He tries to quiet her, tell her that he’s here to help. He does not tell her that her kidnapper is dead, in the river, unable to hurt her anymore. The idea of what he did to her burns him, keeps him quiet.

  Her screaming shows no sign of stopping. She screams dry, hollow, hyperventilated screams—she can’t get enough air to properly bellow out. It would be better, he thinks, if she could really let it all out. But she is so constricted. Her wheeze crawls up his spine and pools into tension.

  He grabs the metal pipe.

  “Look. The only way I’m getting you out is to break the glass.” He weighs the pipe in his hand. “But I think it’s too dangerous. You could really get hurt. I’m … I’m going to go for help.”

  “No! He’ll come back! You have to do something!”

  “He’s not coming back!”

  The noise she’s making reminds him of her sister’s last sound, that final emptying scream. Could he have done more to help her? Should he have done less?

  He can’t concentrate with her crying. The opportunity is slipping by. What would he be willing to do to free her? Anything? A moral lapse? No. To lapse is to fall. This is a leap. This is worth the price.

  He swings at the glass with the pipe, aiming near her upper leg. The impact makes a loud reverberating bounce that echoes through the underground tunnels. The glass does not break.

  “No! Stop! That hurts! Get me out of here!”

  “I’m trying—”

  “Get me out!”

  “I’m trying!” He swings. “I’m trying!”

  Again and again, until the glass shatters. She falls forward onto the shards.

  He throws the pipe away and goes to lift her up. Blood has already soaked her thin shirt. She presses herself onto him, holding him, crying deeply, allowing big gulps of air to enter her lungs.

  “I’ll take you somewhere safe,” he tells her, but all she can do is moan.

  In his car. He drives her to the nearest hospital. She hasn’t said anything since he carried her up through the tunnels and out of the river. He continues to glance over at her, hoping she will say something, anything. When she doesn’t, he speaks just to break the still air.

  “He can’t hurt you anymore.”

  She looks out the window. “When I woke up in that thing, he began telling me stories. He would tell me about the horrible things he was going to do to my sister. Only, every time he would describe something really bad, he would ring a bell. At some point the stories stopped. He would just come and sit next to me and ring the bell.”

  He grips the steering wheel tightly. “You know, I had it in my hands. I had the bell, and it slipped away from me.” He looks at her, her confused expression. “It’s gone now. It’s all gone.”

  She puts her hand on the door handle, turns to him. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of your sister.” He sees a tear roll down her cheek, a tear she does not wipe away.

  She says, “I think you should just let me out here.”

  He turns onto San Fernando Road. “The emergency room is right there. Just let me—”

  She throws the door open; he slams on the brakes. She uses the recoil of being thrown back to push herself out of the car. She gets to her feet and runs toward the hospital, flailing her arms as she goes.

  There is nothing more he can do. He reengages his stalled engine. He leaves.

  He puts his window down, even though the late-night air is cool. He wants to drive forever, wants the car never to run out of gas, never to stop. No acceleration, no deceleration. A constant, smooth, uninterrupted drive.

  This fantasy cannot hold. He knows he needs to go home. He looks down and remembers her blood all over his clothes. He can’t go home like this. He’s too tired to want to figure things out, though he knows he needs to. But then, as ideas do, something comes to him.

  For the last time tonight he heads to the river.

  He finds their bodies, largely unchanged since he left them hours ago. He examines the man, stiff and cold, roughly his same build. First he takes off the man’s jacket. Then his shirt, his pants.

  They fit him well enough. At least they are clean.

  He dresses the man in his clothing. Now the kidnapper is wearing the blood of the sister of the dead woman next to him. For him and for now, this is enough.

  As he reclaims his personal belongings from his exchanged clothing, he finds the empty powder packet in the suit jacket. He leaves it in the possession of the corpse.

  “You,” he says to the dead man. “This is your fault.”

  Home. He tries to be quiet as he opens the door. He closes it softly. He crosses the front room, slinks into his office and into his chair. He breathes in and out, trying to calm down. His skin is clammy from the lack of sleep.

  He goes into the bedroom. His wife is sleeping. He sits down on his side of the bed, trying not to wake her. He doesn’t bother to undress.

  She turns to him, still asleep. She manages to mutter, “Poor baby, always working late. You get a lot done?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s great. Mmm, I got to get up soon. Wake me up at 7, ’kay?”

  “Sure.”

  He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, sets it on the nightstand next to his pillow. Does the same with his keys, his change. He reaches into the suit jacket. The right pocket. He finds it there.

  The bell, washed clean by the river, traveled on its journey, has arrived here.

  Maybe it’s the fatigue, but he’s not so concerned with how as he is with why. The bell demands a story, a confession.

  He holds it in his hand, examines the detail.

  He does not move. He stays this way for a long time, as long as he can.

  His concentration broken, he looks at the clock.

  Five till 7.

  Everything seems to change.

  He rings the bell.

  CITY OF COMMERCE

  BY NEAL POLLACK

  Commerce

  The call came at 4 p.m., just when I was starting my prep for the day’s first bo
ng hit. It had been weeks since I’d heard from my agent. I put down my gear and listened.

  “Some cherry producer at New Line likes your treatment for Cedar Fever,” he said.

  This was a crappy horror comedy that I’d written two years before, about people whose allergies get so bad they start turning into plants. Not exactly what I’d dreamed about when I moved here. But after a while, you’ve sleepwalked long enough so you’re not really dreaming anymore.

  “No shit?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Stupid fuck read your book, and he thinks you can still write.”

  Silence, as I decided whether or not to defend myself.

  “You got a clean shirt, one with buttons?” he asked.

  “I am still married,” I replied. “So probably.”

  “Good. Because I scored you a sit-down at 3:30. Do not be late to this one …”

  He bitched at me for a few minutes, then turned nice when he asked if I knew where he could get some weed. By the time I got his ass off the phone, Karen was coming in the door, looking fine as ever. Admissions of love came less and less frequently from her these days, not that I blamed her. One minute she was at a Santa Monica beach party getting felt up in a hammock by a promising novelist, and before she could hiccup, she found herself paying the mortgage on a two-bedroom condo in Glassell Park and coming home every day to an unshaven, unemployed stoner. She was as bitter as an unripe plum, so I was glad to have some good news for her. I just about fell on my ass when she threw her arms around my neck and put her tongue in my ear.

  “You get this gig,” she said, “and I’ll cruise you up to Ojai for a weekend of blowjobs you’ll never forget.”

  I hadn’t received an offer like that in nearly a decade. She still loved, me, maybe. But I was feeling a little jittery at that moment, and I told her so.

  “Maybe I should …”

  She blanched whiter than a snow leopard in February.

  “No, Nick,” she said. “You’re not fucking going to the casino. Not tonight. Not before the biggest meeting of your life.”

  “I’ll play a few low-stakes hands and be home by mid-night,” I said, reassuring myself as much as her.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Come on, babe,” I said. “You know it relaxes me.”

  “It does anything but.”

  I picked my keys off the kitchen counter and headed for the door.

  “You’re going now? You’re not even going to have dinner with me?”

  “The 5 can be a real bastard this time of night,” I said.

  I was out the door so quickly she couldn’t possibly have jinxed my opening flop.

  Before I moved to California, I played poker occasionally at basement tables with ten-cent antes, where the real object was to drink as much Old Style as possible without vomiting. Winning meant zero, and losing even less. I had no idea that I was coming to a place where poker transcended hobby, leaped above pastime, and approached something near civic religion. The first couple of home games almost turned me back toward the path of righteousness; one was full of twenty-five-year-old schmucks hatching plans to date-rape a stripper in Malibu, and the other featured new dads who were busy discussing home renovations and the difficulties of finding a reliable nanny who’d work for less than seventeen dollars an hour. Neither scene appealed much. In fact, I couldn’t think of any home game I’d enjoy, unless I were sitting around a table with nine clones of myself. Other men can be a real pain in the ass.

  Then one night, a guy mentioned that he was heading out to Commerce that weekend to play in some tournament that might get him into some other tournament that might get him into the World Series of Poker. I guess it had never occurred to me that the three thousand gambling billboards I saw a week could be advertising poker rooms. And when he said that the games ran twenty-four hours a day, all year, the amateur anthropologist in me began to quiver. This, I thought, could be the ideal canvas for my art, so I went along.

  City of Commerce may be the most ironically named place in America, which is saying a lot. I suppose it was once full of factories that made things. But that’s not what commerce is about in this world anymore. The only commerce now is a five-cent rake on the pot. One person in fifty goes home with a profit and one in five thousand actually makes a living. If those had been the commercial odds during the Industrial Revolution, Californians would still be riding donkeys down to the San Diego Mission. Maybe we’ll get there still.

  From the moment I first walked in under the faux-gold-mirrored awning, lit with a circumferential rectangle of two-inch-wide bulbs, I knew I was sunk. This hardly represented the seamiest gambling scene I’d encountered—that honor goes to the Friday midnight riverboat blackjack cruise in Joliet, Illinois—but it was probably the most baroque. The place obviously prospered beyond measure. However, unlike Vegas patrons, these players required little frippery. The most lavish theme in the world couldn’t draw the casual gambling tourist to City of Commerce night after night. They were here to play cards.

  I’ve never seen garbage on the floor. Someone’s always vacuuming the rugs or polishing the faux-marble, and there’s no sign of chipping paint. The casino has a sushi bar and a sports bar full of flat-screen TVs. Yet the place always seems suffused with a kind of jaundice; the lighting scheme encourages the shakes, and nausea. It’s ugly, almost as though the casino were deliberately trying to throw us off our game.

  I prepared for my meeting, in my mind, as I whipped the Acura down the 110, and then onto I-5 as I moved through Downtown, crawling past merges like a sheep on wheels being herded off to slaughter. But by the time I was halfway to Commerce, thoughts of pitching grew cloudy, replaced by visions of flush draws dancing in my head. The landscape grew generic, sooty, industrial, less definitively L.A. to the casual observer. This town, to me, isn’t most notable for its candlelit, leather-bound nightclubs or fancy Valley gallerias. Like anywhere else, it’s the outlet malls and truck-stop Arby’s, pathetic little trees dwarfed by ten-foot freeway sound walls. I could be leaving San Antonio, or Atlanta. By the time I get to Commerce, the empty concrete lots, smokestacks, and shoddy public parks call Gary, Indiana to mind. What else can I think about in such an environment but poker?

  The parking lot was as full as visiting day at maximum security. I pulled the car into a spot in the back row, between a gleaming Cadillac SUV and an Oldsmobile that looked like it hadn’t been washed since 1973. There was someone inside the Cadillac. I could see the glint of a cigarette through the tinted windows. I should probably have been looking in front of me instead. In my hurry to make it to the tables, I slammed my right big toe into the curb, sending a hot shard of pain up through my leg. It felt like I might lose the nail. Why the fuck did I wear sandals to the casino anyway? I limped to the awning, past the lifetime smokers getting their hourly fix, and into the California Games Room with its ridiculous Wheels of Fortune and lucky-hand jackpot tables. Then past the two twelve-foot-high gold plaster sphinxes, the casino’s one concession to Vegas-style garishness, and on into the main gaming hall.

  Though I recognized the woman working the board, one of an interchangeable rotation of semi-attractive Filipinas who worked there, she didn’t know me from the other 1,200 low-rent fliers who’d approached her since the start of her shift, asking if there were any open spots at the 3–6 or 4–8 tables. As it turned out, the waiting list was nearly as long as that for Lakers season tickets. She did have some seats, however, at the 2–4 tables upstairs.

  Why not, I thought. I’m only gonna be here a couple of hours.

  On a busy night, sometimes you’ll get stuck in the overflow, a partitioned conference room on loan from the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel. It could have been used earlier that week for a home-equity loan officer convention, or maybe a really sad low-budget wedding. But now it was twenty tables of cheap poker, with decent coffee and tea service and complimentary plates of Chinese food on the hour. I had a five-minute wait, and then they sat me down, throbbing
toe and all.

  I had a pretty good night too, until the Russian showed up.

  At 11 p.m., I found myself up a hundred, maybe 140 bucks. That represented a good night for me, even though I would have had to work a seventy-hour week before it started to resemble anything close to the equivalent of a decent living. Still, I’d drawn the perfect table mix of sour middle-aged Korean ladies, old dudes who bore the perfume and hairstyle of late-era William S. Burroughs, a couple of Persian frat boys from UCLA, and a pockmarked cholo who leaned so far onto a cane when he stood that he fell to a sixty-five-degree angle. Like so many doomed poker players before me, I told myself just one more hand before I leave.

  The Russian sat down three players to my left. I call him Russian, though he easily could have been Ukrainian, or maybe from Georgia, something post—Soviet breakup, vaguely Caucasian. I never got a chance to ask. Regardless, he wore a red two-piece tracksuit and silver-tinted sunglasses, and a big gold chain with a Mercedes medallion around his neck. His tight-trimmed beard made him look particularly ridiculous, since he obviously got his fashion tips from a mid-’90s hip-hop magazine. He slapped down double what he needed to buy into the first hand. This, I knew, was a sure sign of a fast player; you should never, ever gamble until you understand your odds.

  The dealer sent me a jack-ten, suited, worth playing if you’re near the button, which I was. The Russian, who was way out of position, raised when it came to him, probably not surprising given his brazen opening bet. I called. The flop showed a king and queen, off-suit. This was a great straight draw for me. Before I could raise, though, the Russian beat me to it, immediately folding the other two players who remained. I re-raised. He saw me, and raised me again. I called.

  A nine came on the turn. My odds at winning stood at about ninety-seven percent. Yet still he raised me. And again. And then twice again on the river. He turned over his cards to reveal pocket threes. I sucked up his chips like a coin reclamation machine at the supermarket.