“No.”
“That’s good. You don’t want to know anything about the Colombians,” Lenny said again.
She was thinking about the Colombians and Bogotá and the town where Lenny said he had a house, Medellín. She was thinking they would have called her gitana, with her long black hair and bare feet. She could have fanned herself with handfuls of hundred-dollar bills like a green river. She could have borne sons for men crossing borders, searching for the definitive run, the one you don’t return from. She would dance in bars in the permanently hot nights. They would say she was intoxicated with grief and dead husbands. Sadness made her dance. When she thought about this, she laughed.
The driveway seemed sudden and steep. They were approaching a walled villa. Lenny pushed numbers on a console. The gate opened.
He parked the red Ferrari. He opened the car door for her. She followed him up a flight of stone steps. The house looked like a Spanish fortress.
A large Christmas wreath with pinecones and a red ribbon hung on the door. The door was unlocked. The floor was tile. They were walking on an Oriental silk carpet, past a piano, a fireplace, a bar. There were ceiling-high glass cabinets in which Chinese artifacts were displayed, vases and bowls and carvings. They were walking through a library, then a room with a huge television, stereo equipment, a pool table. She followed him out a side door.
The pool was built on the edge of the hill. The city below seemed like a sketch for a village, something not quite formed beneath the greenery. Pink and yellow roses had been planted around two sides of the pool. There were beds of azaleas with ferns between them and red camellias, yellow lilies, white daisies, and birds-of-paradise.
“Time to swim,” Lenny said.
She was standing near the pool, motionless. “We don’t have suits,” she said.
“Don’t tell nobody, okay?” Lenny was pulling his shirt over his head. He stared at her, a cigarette in his mouth. “It’s private. It’s walled. Just a cliff out here. And Bernie and Phyllis aren’t coming back. Come on. Take off your clothes. What are you? Scared? You’re like a child. Come here. I’ll help you. Daddy’ll help you. Just stand near me. Here. See? Over your head. Over baby’s head. Did that hurt? What’s that? One of those goddamn French jobs with the hooks in front? You do it. What are you looking at? I put on a few pounds. Okay? I’m a little out of shape. I need some weights. I got to buy some weights. What are you? Skinny? You’re so skinny. You one of those vomiters? I’m not going to bite. Come here. Reach down. Take off my necklace. Unlock the chain. Yeah. Good. Now we swim.”
The water felt strange and icy. It was nothing like she expected. There were shadows on the far side of the pool. The shadows were hideous. There was nothing ambiguous about them. The water beneath the shadows looked remote and troubled and green. It looked contaminated. The more she swam, the more the infected blue particles clustered on her skin. There would be no way to remove them.
“I have to leave,” she said.
The sun was going down. It was an unusual sunset for Los Angeles, red and protracted. Clouds formed islands in the red sky. The sprinklers came on. The air smelled damp and green like a forest. There were pine trees beyond the rose garden. She thought of the smell of camp at nightfall, when she was a child.
“What are you? Crazy? You kidding me? I want to take you out,” Lenny said. He got out of the pool. He wrapped a towel around his waist. Then he wrapped a towel around her shoulders. “Don’t just stand there. Dry off. Come on. You’ll get sick. Dry yourself.”
He lit a cigarette for her. “You want to get dressed up, right? I know you skinny broads from Beverly Hills. You want to get dressed up. Look. Let me show you something. You’ll like it. I know. Come on.” He put out his hand for her. She took it.
They were walking up a marble stairway to the bedroom. The bedroom windows opened onto a tile balcony. There were sunken tubs in the bathroom. Everything was black marble. The faucets were gold. There were gold chandeliers hanging above them. Every wall had mirrors bordered by bulbs and gold. Lenny was standing in front of a closet.
“Pick something out. Go on. Walk in. Pink. You like pink? No. You like it darker. Yeah. Keep walking. Closet big as a tennis court. They got no taste, right? Looks like Vegas, right? You like red? No. Black. That’s you. Here. Black silk.” Lenny came out of the closet. He was holding an evening gown. “This your size? All you skinny broads wear the same size.”
Lenny handed the dress to her. He stretched out on the bed. “Yeah. Let go of the towel. That’s right. Only slower.”
He was watching her. He lit a cigarette. His towel had come apart. He was holding something near his lap. It was a jewelry box.
“After you put that crap on your face, the paint, the lipstick, we’ll pick out a little something nice for you. Phyllis won’t need it. She’s not coming back. Yeah.” Lenny laughed. “Bernie and Phyllis are entertaining the Colombians by now. Give those boys from the jungle something to chew on. Don’t look like that. You like diamonds? I know you like diamonds.”
Lenny was stretched out on the bed. The bed belonged to Bernie and Phyllis but they weren’t coming back. Lenny was holding a diamond necklace out to her. She wanted it more than she could remember wanting anything.
“I’ll put it on you. Come here. Sit down. I won’t touch you. Not unless you ask me. I can see you’re all dressed up. Just sit near me. I’ll do the clasp for you,” Lenny offered.
She sat down. She could feel the stones around her throat, cool, individual, like the essence of something that lives in the night. Or something more ancient, part of the fabric of the night itself.
“Now you kiss me. Come on. You want to. I can tell. Kiss me. Know what this costs?” Lenny touched the necklace at her throat with his fingertips. He studied the stones. He left his fingers on her throat. “Sixty, seventy grand maybe. You can kiss me now.”
She turned her face toward him. She opened her lips. Outside, the Santa Ana winds were startling, howling as if from a mouth. The air smelled of scorched lemons and oranges, of something delirious and intoxicated. When she closed her eyes, everything was blue.
She didn’t see him at her noon meeting the next day or the day after. She thought, Well, that’s it. She wasn’t sorry. She got a manicure. She went to her psychiatrist. She began taking a steam bath after her aerobics class at the gym. She went Christmas shopping. She bought her daughter a white rabbit coat trimmed with blue fox. She was spending too much money. She didn’t care.
It was Christmas Eve when the doorbell rang. There were carols on the radio. She was wearing a silk robe and smoking. She told Maria that she could answer the door.
“You promised never to come here.” She was angry. “You promised to respect my life. To recognize my discrete borders.”
“Discrete borders?” Lenny repeated. “I’m in serious trouble. Look at me. Can’t you see there’s something wrong? You look but you don’t see.”
There was nothing unusual about him. He was wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket. He was carrying an overnight bag. She could see the motorcycle near the curb. Maybe the Colombians had the red Ferrari. Maybe they were chewing on that now. She didn’t ask him in.
“This is it,” Lenny was saying. He brushed past her and walked into the living room. He was talking quickly. He was telling her what had happened in the desert, what the Colombians had done. She felt like she was being electrocuted, that her hair was standing on end. It occurred to her that it was a sensation so singular that she might come to enjoy it. There were small blue wounded sounds in the room now. She wondered if they were coming from her.
“I disappear in about five minutes.” Lenny looked at her. “You coming?”
She thought about it. “I can’t come, no,” she said finally. “I have a child.”
“We take her,” Lenny offered.
She shook her head, no. The room was going dark at the edges, she noticed. Like a field of blue asters, perhaps. Or ice when the sun strikes it. An
d how curious the blue becomes when clouds cross the sun, when the blue becomes broken, tawdry.
“I had plans for you. I was going to introduce you to some people. I should of met you fifteen years ago. I could have retired. Get me some ice,” Lenny said. “Let’s have a drink.”
“We’re in AA. Are you crazy?” She was annoyed.
“I need a drink. I need a fix. I need an automatic weapon. I need a plane,” he said. He looked past her to the den. Maria was watching television and wrapping Christmas presents.
“You need a drink, too,” Lenny said. “Don’t even think about it. The phone. You’re an accessory after the fact. You can go to jail. What about your kid then?”
They were standing in her living room. There was a noble pine tree near the fireplace. There were wrapped boxes beneath the branches. Maria asked in Spanish if she needed anything. She said not at the moment. Two glasses with ice, that was all.
“Have a drink,” Lenny said. “You can always go back to the meetings. They take you back. They don’t mind. I do it all the time. All over the world. I been doing it for ten years.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. It was almost impossible to talk. It occurred to her that her sanity was becoming intermittent, like a sudden stretch of intact road in an abandoned region. Or radio music, blatant after months of static.
“Give me the bottle. I’ll pour you one. Don’t look like that. You look like you’re going down for the count. Here.” Lenny handed the glass to her. She could smell the vodka. “Open your mouth, goddamn it.”
She opened her mouth. She took a sip. Then she lit a cigarette.
“Wash the glass when I leave,” Lenny said. “They can’t prove shit. You don’t know me. You were never anywhere. Nothing happened. You listening? You don’t look like you’re listening. You look like you’re on tilt. Come on, baby. Listen to Daddy. That’s good. Take another sip.”
She took another sip. Lenny was standing near the door. “You’re getting off easy, you know that? I ran out of time. I had plans for you,” he was saying.
He was opening the door. “Some ride, huh? Did Daddy do like he said? Get you to the other side? You catch a glimpse? See what’s there? I think you’re starting to see. Can’t say Lenny lied to you, right?”
She took another sip. “Right,” she agreed. When this glass was finished she would pour another. When the bottle was empty, she would buy another.
Lenny closed the door. The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamonds, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds cross the turquoise surface, when you suspect something contagious is leaking, something camouflaged and disrupted. There is only this infected blue enormity elongating defiantly. The blue that knows you and where you live and it’s never going to forget.
Editor’s Acknowledgments
In pulling together the table of contents for this anthology, I read hundreds of short stories that steeped me in the richness, diversity, breadth, and depth of classic short fiction about Los Angeles. In addition to my own research, I avidly sought out opinions from others.
So thanks to everyone who recommended authors or stories for me to read. I truly appreciate your enthusiastic suggestions, even if your favorite didn’t make it into this volume.
A tip of the fedora to Steven Cooper for John Fante, Tom Nolan for Ross Macdonald, Margaret Millar, and Leigh Brackett, Francis M. Nevins and Jim Pascoe for Cornell Woolrich, Judith Freeman for Raymond Chandler, Bill Pronzini for Erle Stanley Gardner, Kenny Turan for Paul Cain, Rodger Jacobs for Charles Bukowski, Robert Bloch, and Richard Matheson, Naomi Hirahara and Greg Robinson for Hisaye Yamamoto, Michael Nava for Joseph Hansen and for his own brilliant short story “Street People,” which unfortunately proved too long for this collection. Thanks also to Gary Phillips and Emory Holmes II for ongoing discussions but especially for Donald Goines, Wanda Coleman, Iceberg Slim, and Budd Schulberg’s collection From the Ashes, Voices of Watts, Richard Yarborough for answering my questions about Players Magazine (I still think that would make a good thesis for someone), Paula Woods for Roland S. Jefferson, and thanks to Stephen Sohn, Daniel A. Olivas, Susan Baker Sotelo, and Sarah Cortez.
And lastly, thanks to the hard-working librarians at the Glendale and Los Angeles public libraries who helped me track down some of the more obscure and out-of-print titles. They are the true private eyes of the literary world.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
LEIGH BRACKETT (1915–1978) was born in Los Angeles. Although best known for her fantasy and science fiction, she also wrote mystery novels and Hollywood screenplays. Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and led to her cowriting the scripts for The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye (both based on Chandler novels). Shortly before her death, she wrote the screenplay (with additional revisions made by Lawrence Kasdan and Geroge Lucas) for The Empire Strikes Back, which won a Hugo Award in 1981.
KATE BRAVERMAN is the author of Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, and two other novels that define the sordid pseudo-tropics of Los Angeles. She is also a poet and essayist, but is best known for her short stories, described as the “gold standard” for contemporary female fiction. All the rumors are true.
JAMES M. CAIN (1892–1977) was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and served in World War I. After a stint as the managing editor at the New Yorker, he moved to Hollywood in the 1930s. His first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, a crime-fiction classic, was said by Albert Camus to have inspired him to write The Stranger, and has been adapted into several films. Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce are among his other classic novels that inspired classic films. In 1970, the Mystery Writers of America named Cain a Grand Master.
PAUL CAIN (1902–1966) is the pseudonym of George Carol Sims, who authored a series of hard-boiled detective novelettes for the pulp magazine Black Mask beginning in 1932. The son of a police detective, Cain was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and moved to Southern California in 1918. He eventually scripted nine films for major studios under the pen name Peter Ruric, including The Black Cat in 1934. His increasing problems with alcoholism killed off his pulp career by 1936, and his Hollywood career ended in 1944. Sims spent much of the late 1940s and ’50s in Europe. He attempted a Hollywood comeback in 1959, but found his reputation kept studio doors closed to him. Cain contracted cancer and died in a cheap apartment in Hollywood in the summer of 1966.
JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was a Time magazine Best Fiction Book of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT (1910–1995) was born in Milwaukee and began his career as a sports and mystery writer in the mid-1930s, publishing short stories in McClure Newspaper Syndicate and many pulp magazines. He wrote under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Roney Scott and Will Duke. Gault wrote two crime-fiction series, including one that featured Brock “The Rock” Callahan, an ex—L.A. Rams lineman turned South California PI, and another that featured Los Angeles—based Italian PI Joe Puma. He won an Edgar Award for his first crime-fiction novel, Don’t Cry for Me, in 1952, a Shamus Award in 1982 for The Cana Diversion (featuring Joe Puma), and a Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.
DENISE HAMILTON writes the Eve Diamond series and is editor of Los Angeles Noir, an anthology of new writing that spent two months on the best-seller lists, won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, and won the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for Best Mystery of the Year. Her latest novel, Los Angeles Times best se
ller The Last Embrace, has been compared to James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler. For more information, visit www.denisehamilton.com.
JOSEPH HANSEN (1923–2004) wrote nearly forty books under a number of pseudonyms and in a variety of genres. He is best known for his Dave Brandstetter mystery novels about a tough but decent insurance investigator who is also unapologetically gay. The first novel in the series, Fadeout, was published in 1970 a year after the Stonewall Inn riots in New York, with the final book A Country of Old Men (1991) appearing twenty-one years later and winning him a Lambda Literary Award. He won the 1992 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and continued to write throughout his life, publishing the mystery story collection Bohannon’s Women (2002) and the Nathan Reed novel The Cutbank Path (2002) as his health deteriorated. An openly gay man, he had an unconventional but happy home life, living for over fifty years with his lesbian wife, the artist Jane Bancroft, and their transgendered child, Daniel. Hansen died from heart failure at his California home in 2004. A new Brandstetter omnibus, containing all ten mysteries, was published in 2007.
CHESTER HIMES (1909–1984) was born in Jefferson City, Missouri. After being arrested and found guilty of armed robbery in 1929, he began writing fiction in prison, and his early short stories were published in national magazines such as Esquire. Upon his release in 1936, Himes joined the Federal Writers’ Project and became friendly with the poet Langston Hughes. He spent the 1940s in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter and publishing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade. His brief career as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers ended due to racial prejudice, and he eventually moved to Paris, France, where he joined a group of black writers and artists that included James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ollie Harrington. There, he concentrated on writing a series of books about two Harlem detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, including The Real Cool Killers, All Shot Up, and Cotton Comes to Harlem. In the 1970s, he published two volumes of autobiography, The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity. He died in Moraira, Spain, from Parkinson’s disease.
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