L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (10 page)

It was late when Wattles said, “I can’t see straight. Let’s start fresh in the morning.”

I was sure he’d forgotten me, but sure enough, he told Celia to find me and ask if I was ready. I watched him give Bettina a kiss and tell her he’d see her later, I watched Iris hurry off, probably into the big-shot producer’s arms.

Wattles and I stepped outside into the dark summer night. A fast, parched wind brought the smell of something burning in the distance.

“Crazy wind,” Wattles said. “Drives you nuts.” The valet brought his car around. A red convertible MG.

“Most guys like me have a driver,” he said. “But I like the feel of the wheel. You trust me, right?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” I said.

“How long have you been in L.A.?” he said.

“Since Okinawa.”

“Right,” he said. “Okinawa.”

He drove down from Pasadena, west on Hollywood Boulevard, then onto Mulholland Drive. The city glittered beneath us.

“Pretty, huh?” he said.

After a while I got up the nerve to ask, “How come you didn’t fire me? You know I won’t to be able to do that scene.”

Wattles drove on, taking the curves a little hard and fast, maybe, but he knew what he was doing. He was silent for so long I thought he hadn’t heard.

Finally he said, “I saw something in your eyes. I don’t want to sound like a sap, but call it respect for human life. I thought, Jesus Christ, if I could bottle whatever that is and sell it, all the world’s problems would be solved. No more murders, no more wars. You couldn’t kill that girl, no matter how much you wanted the job. You couldn’t even pretend. And I admired that, I respected that. It made me admire you. And when I heard about your being a veteran… I have a bad ticker. Skips one beat out of a hundred. But it kept me out of the service.

“Like I said, I saw something in you. It made me want to help out. I can’t rewrite the script or give you another part. But I can help you play this one, and you can go on from there. I could list a dozen big stars, who got famous playing killers. Ever hear of Burt Lancaster? George Raft? Jimmy Cagney?”

“Sure,” I said. “Who hasn’t?”

“It’s something you can work on,” he said.

For a second I had the creepy feeling he was going to give me the name of a shrink who would get me over my traumas. Everyone in Hollywood was suddenly getting their heads shrunk, the most sought-after Hollywood head docs were starting to out-earn the producers. Me, I couldn’t see myself lying on some bearded guy’s smelly couch and boring us both with my problems.

“There’s a class,” said Wattles. “An acting class. This French guy in Santa Monica… he specializes in teaching actors how to kill. Because let’s face it: you watch enough pictures like ours, you might think no one likes anything better than murdering someone. Preferably another actor. But the truth is, and let’s be grateful, it doesn’t come naturally to most people. Not even actors. Good actors. Big talents. Most people don’t enjoy killing, and if you can’t get someone to do the crime and look like he enjoys it, how are you going to make crime films?

“So my man in Santa Monica, he finds himself a niche. He trains actors who have gotten parts or want to play killers. And they need a little help. A gentle push. Training. Motivation.”

“I’d like to take a few classes,” I said. “I used to take classes when I lived with my girlfriend Caroline. She and I took them together.”

“The beauty part is,” he said, “this guy I have in mind—it’s a one-shot deal. One class is all it takes. He’s a master at what he does, like some kind of magician. One class and you come back to the set and do what needs to be done. We won’t have to interrupt production, just juggle the schedule a little. I’ll call the guy for you and set the whole thing up.”

My heart sank. “How much is that going to set me back?”

“I’ll write it into the budget.” Wattles zoomed around a sharp curve. The MG spit and kept going. “I’ll level with you. I already set it up. I called before we left the set.”

“Gosh,” I said. “That’s so generous. I don’t know to repay you.”

“Just go to the class tomorrow, then come back on set the next day and prove me right. I meant what I said about you setting the tone for the picture.”

He asked where he could drop me. I was embarrassed for him to see where I lived, in one of the crappy bungalows at the Flamingo Gardens. I told him to leave me half a mile away, I said I wanted to walk, clear my head. He said he couldn’t imagine that hot wind clearing anyone’s head.

As I got out he gave me the acting coach’s card. He told me to be there tomorrow at ten, and I said I would.

I’d been having nightmares, on and off, since the war. But that night was the worst. Sometimes I was in Hollywood, sometimes in Okinawa. Sometimes the hammerhead shark face of Harry Wattles turned into the fat blubbery puss of Lieutenant Mather. I dreamed that Mather was ordering me to kill someone. Only this time the victim was Iris Morell and not the little old Japanese lady that Mather shot. The little old Japanese lady appeared in another dream. Directing a picture. Wattles, Iris, Bettina, Jimmy, and I were all starring together. This was a nicer dream, or it would have been if half the old lady’s head wasn’t half torn away, like it was on that day I’d been trying to forget.

I woke up with a headache, as if I’d been drinking all night, though I hadn’t touched a drop. I wanted to be clear.

By the time I found the school, the crisp business card that Wattles gave me was gray with fingerprints and creased by all my taking it out and looking at it and putting it back in my pocket, as if I couldn’t remember the few words in simple black type.

Professor Gaston Landru. A Santa Monica address.

There wasn’t even a phone number. That’s how classy the operation was. You had to know someone special to find out.

4130 Eucalyptus was a three-story office building, a pointed roof and a tower like a medieval castle. Peeling yellowed white plaster. I was half an hour early. I drove around the block. Not that I could afford the gas, but I couldn’t sit still.

The classroom was up a few flights that reeked of cheap-carpet mildew. The office—the school, I should say—looked like the place where a seedy PI or loser lawyer would work, in a picture like
Not Guilty!
On the door a sign in flaking black letters said, M
AITRE
G. L
ANDRU
.

I knocked. No one answered. I pushed open the door to find a dozen men and women—mostly young, attractive—sitting in a circle of folding chairs. It looked like the AA meeting that Caroline dragged me to before she walked out. The last one of those I went to. I told her, it wasn’t for me.

Landru’s students turned around and gave me the hairy eyeball. I had the feeling they were expecting me. And then an even crazier feeling that they were actors paid to play actors learning how to act. It wasn’t a useful thought. It wasn’t going to help me get the most from the class.

I nodded and smiled and shook it off and focused on Professor Landru.

Hello, Central Casting? Can you get me an arty French guy? Slight, quick, pencil moustache, little goatee, paisley ascot. Even a beret. But even with all those clothes on, he was what they call a cool customer. The only one not sweating.

His thick French accent felt put-on. One of those guys, you wake him up in the middle of the night, and he speaks the king’s Brooklyn English.

In fact as he started talking—and talking and talking—the accent migrated from the Left Bank of the Seine to the Bronx River Parkway. He sounded like a friend of my dad’s. And why was I taking lessons from a guy who couldn’t even keep up an accent? Then I remembered. He wasn’t an accent coach. He taught people how to kill.

“Take zat chair,” said Professor Landru. I sat between a red-haired girl in a yellow dress and a young guy in jeans and a denim jacket. Neither of them looked at me. It was like they were afraid to.

The professor introduced himself. Then he basically ran through every film we’d ever heard of and a lot we hadn’t, every famous and obscure picture made in the last thirty years. That is, every picture that featured a homicide.

This strangling, that poisoning, that shooting. He boasted about his work. The machine guns that gangsters would never have picked up without his coaching! That woman pushed out the window. “Defenestration,” he said. “The defenestration of Miss…” He mentioned an actress whose name made everyone gasp. That was early in her career, but there were many actors—he listed a dozen major stars—who’d required his coaching.

“What would we make films about if there were no murders?” He gave a little giggle. “But you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t understand that most human beings don’t want to murder other human beings. It’s not as natural as we might think. It… goes against the grain.”

I
sure didn’t think it was natural. That’s why I was there. The other students were all nodding. And scribbling in their notebooks.

“It’s something that must be learned,” Frenchie said. For personal reasons he preferred not to discuss, this had become his specialty.

Today we would run through a series of exercises designed to tap into certain feelings. We will draw on our own experience and recall sense memories we’d forgotten or never knew we had…

It was always easier to demonstrate than describe. The professor asked for two volunteers. Two girls waved their hands in his faces. Both had ponytails and smart little secretary dresses.

“You’re not sisters, are you?” he said.

“No sir,” they said. “We never met before.”

“Good. I want you to play sisters. Fiendishly jealous since childhood. And now you are both in love with the same man. One of you”—he pointed at one, at random—“is going to strangle the other.”

You could see why these dames needed lessons. The victim bugged her eyes and shrieked. The killer sister puffed herself up like a robin whose worm the blue jay has stolen.

Landru stopped them and said to the killer girl, “You
do
have a sister, don’t you?”

“Sure. How do you know?”

“I have my little ways. Now I want you to remember back to when you were a little girl, and your sister first came into the house. Back to when you first realized your parents loved her more than you. Back to when you found out they’d given her your crib, your stroller, your toys—”

“How did you know about that?” She looked as if she’d caught the professor reading her diary.

“Oh please,” he said. “Acting requires being something of a mind reader, don’t you think?”

I guess the girl must have thought so. The other “sister” must have, too. I saw a funny look in her eyes. Like she was actually frightened.

“Concentrate,” said Professor Landru. “Remember. Put yourself back in that girl’s shoes. That little girl who was you.” He paused. “Now play the scene again.”

This time the killer sister flew across the room like a cat and dug her claws into the other sister’s neck. It went on for quite a while before we realized what was happening. Then two guys got up and dragged one girl off the other, who was yelling with real terror.

When things settled down, when the actresses stopped hyperventilating, and our hearts stopped slamming around, Professor Landru said, “Of course an important part of the training is learning to keep things under control. Oh, and by the way… The scene you’re playing doesn’t have to correspond directly to a situation in life. You needn’t have wanted to kill your mother to play a son who murders mom for the inheritance. All that matters is the emotion. Shall we try another scene?”

This time it was harder getting volunteers. We’d seen what his method could do, and no one was so eager to stand up and kill or be killed.
Almost
kill or be killed. Still, it was school. Harry Wattles had paid my tuition. The others had probably paid their own way, and they were damned if a little squeamishness about murder was going to keep them from getting their money’s worth.

He called up two women and a man. He told them the man was going to poison his sisters because they wouldn’t let him marry the only woman he’d ever loved. They’d driven him into this corner from which he could only fight his way out. Fight to the death.

The actor who stepped up was the guy in jeans who’d been sitting next to me.

“Take a good look at this fellow,” said the professor. “You’re looking at a future star. The face of an angel grafted onto the soul of a street criminal.”

The rest of us checked him out. He wasn’t any better looking than half the guys in Hollywood. By now a lot of us were wishing
he
was the one getting murdered.

Professor Landru sat them down at a table, the man facing the two women. The girls had their backs to us.

The professor said, “Young man, was there ever a time in your life when you felt totally cornered? Completely trapped? With no hope of escape?”

The guy gave him a long look.

“Jesus Christ have I,” he said.

“This is then,” said Professor Landru. “Those women are trapping you. And there’s only one way they’ll let you go. This is their tea. This is the poison. Did I mention you’re a doctor? No one will ever find out, it’s the perfect crime. You just have to do it.”

I don’t know what I picked up on first. Some new tension in the women’s shoulders, the look on the guy’s face. That innocent kid in denim
wanting
them to die so he could get out of that corner. It was so real we couldn’t look. Everyone stared at the floor.

Landru said, “We don’t need to see the girls turn blue to know that our experiment has worked… Before we go any further, there’s another lesson, another part of the training I call ‘the wait.’ It’s not always in the script. As you know there are plenty of films in which the killer only gets caught in the last scene. But eventually he does get caught. Your childish film board insists.

“So there comes a moment after you have committed the crime, the moment I call ‘the wait.’ Either you will come to your senses and sink down into the nearest chair and wait for the cops to come. Or you will run till they catch you—and then wait to see what happens next. In both cases, the wait is the same. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. And it takes practice. Because unless you can imagine the crime, as we’ve been doing today, you cannot imagine the guilt, or the expectation of punishment, the sorrow or the relief.