L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Read Free Page B

tell you) , June weavingly made her way down the stairs.
    Which only led her to another narrow hallway of curving stone, waxing candles strutted along the walls.
    There were strange crooning chants coming from somewhere, a drumbeat like one of those jungle movies June always found herself in, except nothing like that.
    Because there were smells she couldn’t name, sounds, the sense that the house changed as you moved through it, that you could keep walking and end up in places you never guessed, the house like one of those puzzle boxes, only you’re in it. And it’s in you.
    Slowly, in the near-dark, she moved down the first long hallway.
    It was a honeycomb, the wetness on everything seeming to cling to its cold walls like nectar.
    Her arms quilling, she slid her mink back on, fingers clasped over the frog closure. It made her think of Guy and the things he was good for.
    “June, is that you?” she heard the agent say, from somewhere, and soon enough he was at her side, his face a red flame under the torchères. “I’ve got to… I’ve got to…”
    His lips were doing funny things and June couldn’t understand him.
    “Is it John Huston? Can I talk to him about the part?”
    “He ain’t here,” the agent said, shaking his head, his shirt open and wetly red. “I don’t know what kind of man the owner of this house is, but there’s things I don’t care to see. I have a sister. And a wife.”
    “You also have a blonde stashed in a duplex on Sunset,” June said, telling herself he was just high, guilty. “How about George Tusk?”
    “He ain’t for you,” the agent said, shaking his head harder, like an animal in a cartoon. “And you ain’t for him.”
    “Some rainmaker, you,” June started, but the agent started leaning against her, rested his head in her hair and started whispering strange words, like a chant. She couldn’t understand them and she’d never seen him like this. She’d never seen one hair slip from its Vitalis pomp.
    “I think we should go,” he said. “I think we should.”
    But something made June pull from him.
    “I don’t want to go yet,” June said. “I want to see what you’ve seen.”
    When she had first landed in Hollywood, young June had twenty-seven dollars papering her powdered breasts under her swiss-dot blouse. She was an orphan, her mother lost five years before to spots on her lungs and her father knifed in the neck shooting dice behind the Southern Pacific roundhouse two months back. Three days after he died, she found he had left her a shoe tip full of small marked bills in her closet, in her white T-straps.
    Written on one was a note to her: “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”
    The first few years in Hollywood, times were hard and she shared apartments, rooms, even, with a hundred girls, their shared pillowcases flossy with their peroxided hair.
    Working counter girl, working as an extra, working as a department-store model, a girl to look pretty at parties, she got by, barely. She even filled her teeth with white candle wax when they turned brown and died.
    She said she would do things, and she wouldn’t suffer for them. She’d seen where suffering could get you, and it wasn’t her bag.
    So she hustled and hustled and finally found the ways to get all those small roles at Republic, B-unit jobs at Fox. She never could be sure, though, if she was making headway or running on her last bit of garter-flashing luck.
    Until she met Guy. He wasn’t very smart, or very nice, but he was crazy about her in the way men could be. The hard way she fronted her shoulders, her stupendous breasts, the way she could make him milk pudding and then tug down his pinstripes and show him what her mouth was for. It was all he needed to want to marry her. She was sad to learn what a relief it was. To find a man like this, who, before her, had lived with his mother his whole life, God rest her soul.
    And, for the first year or so, she’d stopped the auditions, standing