L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories

POSTWAR BOOM Andrew Vachss

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“What difference?”

“Come on, pal. We’re gonna be working together next couple of weeks or so. Just two vets, riding around, seeing the country. That’s the story they gave us. So I gotta have something to call you by, just in case.”

“Case of what?”

“It’s one hell of a drive, all the way to L.A. Cops stop us, I should know what name’s on your ID, right?”

“I was hitching a ride.”

“In that suit? Not gonna fly. Makes it too complicated, anyway. Down the road, I mean.”

The short, compactly built man in the passenger seat of the big sedan said nothing for a few seconds. Finally, as if conceding the reasonableness of the driver’s request, said “Mendil,” without turning his head.

“Mendil?” the thickset man behind the wheel said. “What kind of name is that?”

“Just a name.”

“There ain’t no such thing as ‘just a name,’ pal. Take me, for instance. I tell you my name is Seamus O’Reilly, you know I’m Irish, am I right?”

“No.”

“No?! What other kind of name could it be?”

“Fake.”

“Huh! Well, right you are at that one. But my mug’s a map of Galway, as my mother used to say.”

The passenger pulled the front of his felt fedora down over his eyes, as if to shield them from the sun.

The driver took the hint… for about ten minutes. “Seems funny, don’t it? The war’s been over for a couple of years, and here we are, driving all the way across the country right back to where it started.”

“The war didn’t start in L.A.”

“Christ, you must think I’m as thick as a paving stone! I just meant the West Coast. That’s where the Japs made their move. Fucking ambush, it was. After that, even a pansy like Roosevelt, he didn’t have no choice.”

The passenger snatched a pack of Lucky Strikes from the top of the dashboard.

Damn! I didn’t even see his hand move, the driver thought to himself.

The passenger flicked his wrist. A single cigarette shot into his mouth. His thumb cracked, and a wooden match flared into life. He took a measured drag, carefully replaced the pack, and used the tap of a single finger to send it sliding across the dashboard.

“Nice to see these in a white package,” the driver said, pushing in the dashboard lighter.

Silence reigned for another twenty minutes. The miles slipped past as the big car gobbled long patches of concrete.

“They say you go without smoking for a few weeks, you lose your taste for them. What a crock. Me, I didn’t have one for months. Fucking Japs. I still don’t know how I made it through that march. Walk or die, that’s what they kept saying. Walk or die. Far as I’m concerned, we should have bombed that whole island into the ocean.”

“Too valuable.”

“Yeah, I guess it was. The island, I mean. But those little yellow monkeys… I wish I’d killed a few more of them, at least. It feels better when you handle that kind of work yourself.”

“True enough.”

“You were there?”

“Europe.”

“So you didn’t see how they—”

“I saw how they fought.”

“How the hell could you see Japs fight in Europe?”

“Nisei brigades.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard about them. Crazy bastards.”

“They had something to prove.”

“I guess so. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I do.”

“Yeah? How could that be?”

“I had something to prove, too.”

“You? The boss told me you did stuff, but he didn’t say what.”

The passenger leaned back in his seat, rolled down his window, snapped out the still-burning stub of his last cigarette, and closed the window again.

“They gave me a dishonorable,” he said, after another minute of silence.

“For what?”

“Killing Nazis.”

“That was the whole point, right? I mean, that’s why they sent us over. Guys like me and you, right? We were supposed to kill the other guys.”

“They said I killed some Nazis after they surrendered.”

“How were you gonna do that? Once it was over—”

“It wasn’t over. What they said was, I gunned down a bunch of them while they had their hands in the air.”

“What the fuck? Who cares?”

“Eisenhower, I guess. Whoever was in charge.”

“Why’d you—?”

“Camp guards,” the passenger said, as if that explained everything.

“How’d they even find out? There weren’t any generals on the front lines, pal.”

“Somebody talked.”

“Ratted you out?”

“You could say that.”

“I’ll bet the louse got a medal for it, too.”

“Maybe posthumously.”

“What?”

“After his death.”

“He got killed over there, you mean?”

“No. After he testified.”

“You mean, like, right in the barracks?”

“Barracks? No. He was back here. In this clubhouse. Yorkville, you know where that is?”

“Way over on the East Side?”

“Yeah. He was supposed to make a speech or something; I’m not sure.”

“He got drilled right there?”

“Not just him. Whole place blew up.”

“Hey, I heard about that. I mean, it was on the front page and everything. That was some blast.”

“There’s been bigger.”

“Wait a minute! That guy, he wouldn’t happen to be… what the hell was his name?… people were saying he was going to run for city council?”

“Hendricks.”

“That’s the one! Big war hero. He was a shoo-in. What the hell was he doing over in Yorkville?”

“That’s the district he was running in.”

“But that’s Germantown.”

“So? They get to vote there, too.”

“I guess that’s right. At least he was a white man. When we had to pass through Chicago to change cars? One thing the boss was clear about—we stay outta the South Side. The niggers’re bunching up over there. Making their own plays. That’s what we get for letting them fight.”

“Yeah, that was a real privilege.”

“I don’t mean that part. I mean, teaching them all about… you know, guns and stuff.”

“You think they didn’t know before?”

“Down south, sure. But if you look close, you see they never turned those guns in the wrong direction. Not until after the war, anyway.”

“Rifles for food, pistols for each other.”

“Yep! That’s it, exactly. But we send them over, we’re telling ‘em to shoot at white men. Probably never thought of it before.”

“You really believe that?”

“Huh?”

“The IRA never thought of shooting a Protestant?”

“Hey! You don’t know what you’re talking about, okay? The IRA, all they ever killed was—”

“Enemies.”

“That’s right, enemies!”

“Enemies come in all colors, yeah? Some of them even wear camouflage.”

“I… okay, I see what you’re saying.”

“Hitler and Hirohito, they kept everything down to one color. What do you think happens if they’d’ve won?”

“I guess they’d… okay, I see it. They’d start in on each other, is that what you’re saying?”

“You see any coloreds fighting alongside the Japs?”

“And you didn’t see any in your unit, either, right? I get it.”

“Up to you?”

“What’s that’s supposed to mean?”

“You get it, you don’t get it, that’s your choice. It’s not a puzzle you figure out; it’s just the way you look at things.”

The driver turned his head and stared at the man in the passenger seat for a long minute. Then he said, “You see that sign back there? Says we’re in Idaho.”

“Odometer show another four hundred?”

“Three sixty-eight.”

“Try and find a gas station. Better if we make the switch without stopping on the side of the road.”

“I know. Damn, this is one endless journey, you know? Why the boss has to send us all the way across country just to do this one job, I’ll never know.”

“What difference?”

“What difference? You’re joking, pal. We got to change drivers every few hundred miles, change cars every day or two, spend every night in some crummy motel, eat diner food, no stopping for even a little bit of fun… and for what?”

“You know.”

“Yeah, I know. But this job, it ain’t no big deal. Must be a hundred local boys who could handle it.”

“A hundred suspects.”

“That’s what you think this is all about?”

The passenger shrugged. As if acting in unison with his shoulders, night fell.

“This is more like it,” O’Reilly said. “Brand-new Buick. Rides like a cloud. Too bad we can’t take it all the rest of the way.”

“Only a couple of more switches to go,” the passenger said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky again.”

“All the guineas want Cadillacs. ‘Course, they can’t have one even if they got the scratch—bosses wouldn’t like that. Freelancers like you and me, we don’t got that problem. You know what I’m getting? Present for myself when this job is done?”

“No.”

“A Lincoln Continental. Now that’s the cream of the crop. Don’t see many of them. Something special. You drive a car like that, everybody pays attention.”

“That’s what you want?”

“Not while we’re working, for Christ’s sake. Hey! Maybe that’s the idea.”

The passenger lit another of his endless smokes. “What’s the idea?”

“We cancel this guy in L.A., and we come back home. Doesn’t matter who the cops are looking for—it won’t be us.“Now I get it. Airplanes, you got to buy a ticket. Even trains, buses, there’s people to deal with. But we go back just like we got out there, there’s nothing. We pay cash for gas, and we change cars all along the way. By the time we roll out of Cleveland, we’re driving a car with New York plates.”

The cream-colored Oldsmobile fastback coupe turned off the highway and slowly made its way through the city, the passenger calling out directions as they rolled.

A huge billboard high above the boulevard announced Lana Turner would soon be blazing across the screen in Green Dolphin Street.

“Now that’s a babe,” the driver said.

“Turn left two blocks down.”

“You see the all those palm trees? I thought it never rained in this part of the country.”

“It rains everywhere.”

“Bullshit. What about deserts?”

“Rains less, that’s all. Four more lights, turn left again. The garage on Barton Avenue, that’s what we want.”

As the car pulled inside the unnamed garage, the doors closed behind it.

The two men climbed out slowly.

“Over here,” a voice called.

A morbidly obese man sat behind a desk covered with aging cartons of takeout food. The free-range cockroaches who roamed the desktop didn’t seem picky, just plentiful.

“I guess I don’t have to ask which one of you is O’Reilly. The car’s over there,” he said, tilting his watermelon-size head to one side. “Got it all fixed up so it looks like one of those zoot-suit boys hit it big. Being a Mex, naturally, all the dough goes into his car. They ain’t hot-rodders. In fact, they drop those things so low you can’t drive ‘em fast at all. They’re all show, no go.

“Now here’s the beauty part. You’d think, with all that crap that happened a few years ago, the beaners would get themselves together. At least stick together. But no, not those chumps.

“They don’t got time to find jobs, but they got all the time in the world to shoot each other. Got gangs all over the East Side. And territories, can you feature that? It ain’t like they do nothing with these ‘territories’ of theirs. But if you ain’t a member of this club or that club, they will seriously fucking shoot you in the head for just walking down ‘their’ street.”

“How’s that help us?” O’Reilly asked. “That car may be what your spics drive out here; I wouldn’t know. But him and me, we don’t exactly look the part.”

The piggish man laughed. “The part. Yeah, that’s it. This town’s fulla broads who’ll drop right down and suck your cock, you even say those words, the part. Movies. That’s the magic word in this town. You wouldn’t believe how much stag film we got stored up.”

“Why store it? That don’t make you any money.”

“We store it ‘cause the boss said to store it. But I know why he said it, and it makes sense, you give it some thought. Some of those broads, they’re gonna be famous. Movie stars. That’s when we cash in, see? The boss, he’s even got things on schedule, like. We shoot the footage, then the girl’s got five years to make it. She does, we cash big—those studios, they’ll pay anything to keep stuff like that quiet… especially if the star’s supposed to be lily-white. You own a piece of property, you put up a fence, see what I’m saying?

“And if the broad never makes it, we just put the movies on the market. Pretty slick, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. But you still haven’t told us what’s gonna be so easy about this job.”

“Those stag films, we shoot them right here,” the fat man said. “In the back. It’s like a real studio and all. Now it wouldn’t be a studio without a prop department, am I right? We got all kinds of stuff back there. Even some of those zoot suits.

“Now, this guy, the one who’s gotta go, he operates out of a dump on Melrose. Actually, it’s on the street just behind Melrose. From the front, looks like a liquor store. But for his real business, he just walks out the back door and right through to the other joint.

“Now, you don’t never wanna park on Melrose. Too many cars, you can’t be sure of a spot. So this guy, he parks around back, then he walks down the street, makes a sharp right, and goes in the front door. Every night.

“Still with me? Okay, at eleven, he’s walking down the street to his joint. On Melrose. And that car over there? It’s waiting just around the corner. One of you walks up Melrose, the other stays behind the wheel. When he gets close, the walking man plugs him. It’s that easy. The shooter—I don’t even want to know who that’s gonna be—he gets in that Mex car, and the driver comes straight back here… it’s not even ten minutes away, that time of night.

“You drive in here, and you drive right out in that nice little Ford we got for you. California plates. You change clothes first, head north. The Mex car disappears, and so do you. Sound good?”

“Good enough,” the smaller man said.

“Not for me, it ain’t,” O’Reilly said. “What if the cops decide to stop that car? Me, I don’t speak Spanish.”

“The cops?” The obese man laughed. “Who do you think runs this town, the fucking mayor? The studios, that’s who’s in charge. The cops already got the license plate. If there’s one car that ain’t gonna be stopped tomorrow night, it’s that one over there.”

The man with O’Reilly lit a cigarette.

“You’d think they’d learn, wouldn’t you?” The fat man chuckled. “I mean, it was only a couple of months ago that they had to take out that yid? You know, the one Virginia Hill ended up with? Now this fuck, he thinks he’s out on this coast, they can’t reach out and touch him, too?”

“I’ve spent the night in better places,” O’Reilly said, surveying the space above the garage.

It was bare-bones, lacking even a radio, but it had two separate cots, a bathroom, and a refrigerator.

“And worse.”

“That, too,” O’Reilly agreed, watching his companion nail a large-scale map of their target area to the wall. “You really think it’ll be as easy as that fat slob says?”

“We come south on Formosa,” his partner said, drawing a line with a thick red grease pencil. “Then left on Melrose. We wait for the target to walk toward us. Soon as he passes by the car, I get out, step behind him, catch up quick, and put a couple in his head.

“I get back in the car. You take off. Make a left on Mansfield—see, right here?—a quick left again on Waring, takes us right back to Formosa. Go up a couple of blocks, make a right, and follow it all the way back here… Barton Avenue, that’s where we are now. After that, there’s nothing for us to do but drive back home.”

“How come I drive?”

“You’re a better driver than me.”

“What kind of piece is that?”

“Luger.”

“Never heard of it,” O’Reilly said. “Me, there’s nothing like the army-issue .45. It ain’t no target pistol, but whatever you hit with it, down they go. They stay down, too.”

“This one’s army-issue, too.”

“Huh?”

“German army. Just for officers—like yours—and very precise.”

“It don’t look like much.”

“Smaller rounds. Nine-millimeter. A little less than a .38, but very fast. Has to be. The way they designed these things, you need a lot of recoil to chamber the next cartridge.”

“Nine-millimeter. Even sounds weird.”

“Nine-millimeter Parabellum, they called it. The Germans, I mean. It’s from Latin. Means: if you want to be left in peace, be prepared for war.”

“Yeah? Makes sense to me. Okay. You want the shower first?”

“I’m good.”

The next night, at 10:57 p.m., a man wearing a black coat with red silk lining turned on Melrose and began to walk down the block. He glanced neither right nor left, but drew covert glances from a wide variety of nightcrawlers.

As he passed a blood-orange 1945 Chevrolet dropped almost to street level, a man got out of the passenger seat, fell into step behind him, pulled a pistol from his suit jacket, and shot him in the back of the head without breaking stride.

He fell to the sidewalk, face up, the red lining of his overcoat mocking the promise of the neon wash from a nearby window.

The shooter stepped close and shot him three more times, carefully placing each round into the dead man’s face.

Instantly, the shooter spun, eyes sweeping a now-empty street. He walked back toward the lowrider. As he passed, he emptied the magazine of his Luger into the driver’s face, head, and neck without breaking stride.

The shooter pocketed his pistol and kept walking to the end of the block. There, he climbed into the backseat of a fog-gray Cadillac that had been idling at the corner.

The Cadillac slid into traffic. Neither of the two men in the front seat turned around.

The man in the backseat snapped a new magazine into his pistol.