Los Angeles Noir

He touches her between her shoulder blades. “He wanted to meet you alone at night in the river? How did it get to that point?”

She walks away from his fingers. “Didn’t you ever want something so bad that, well, it’s not that you’d be willing to do anything, it’s that each step adds up and soon you find that you’re over the line, somewhere you shouldn’t be? You’ve got to help me, Jim.”

He does not say anything. His mind is already made up.

She points to where the body is, although he has a hard time seeing it at first. He must walk several yards farther north to where the embankment is gentle enough to descend. He makes his way down, his feet sideways so he doesn’t slip.

The body lies crumpled on the bone-dry, flat edge of the riverbed, several feet away from the small swash of water tracing the center of the channel. The man is dressed in a gray sports coat and jeans. His neck is twisted. His face is down.

“Hey,” he whispers, nudging the guy in the rump with his shoe. “Hey.” He leans down to find a pulse. The guy’s neck is cold.

She whispers down the embankment. “Is he definitely dead?”

“I wouldn’t think a fall down here would kill a guy.”

“He must have snapped his neck. It was a bad fall. From here it’s almost a straight drop.”

He looks up at her.

She says, “What? What are you thinking?”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

He hears her breathing heavily through the sobbing. “He… he took her.”

“Who?”

“Before I pushed him, he, he said I could find her… through… through the six cats. Should’ve went right away, but… got scared. Thought you could help.”

“You’re crazy-you’re not making any fucking sense.” He continues to examine the body, looks in the guy’s pockets. No wallet, no ID, a few dollars in cash. “I’ll help, but you need to start filling me in.”

“What… what are you doing?” Her voice rises like helium.

He pulls something from the body’s right suit pocket. A small metal object. A bell. Caked in dried mud.

He walks to the center of the river, to the water.

“Where are you going? What are you doing?” she asks.

He tries to wash the bell. He shakes it under the water, as if ringing it. No sound comes up past the surface. The cold water is surprisingly swift, like a full-force faucet running over his hand.

“I know you want me, Jim. And I know why you think you can’t have me. Doesn’t matter to me anymore. Find her and… I’ll do anything… I’ll let you do anything.”

Something in the water touches him, something that floats around his hand, something that feels like fingers. He flinches. The bell slips from his grasp.

“Shit,” he says.

“What! What’s going on down there?”

He splashes his hand in and out of the shallow water, but he can’t locate the bell.

“Shit. That guy had something in his pocket and when I tried to clean it off in the river, I dropped it. Now I can’t find it.”

“Was it the bell? Was it?”

He turns around to look up at her. She screams, using all her energy. The effort actually deflates her. Her body withers, goes limp. Her knees strain against the short chain-link fence. It buckles. She topples.

The drug. His drug. Now is its time. Its damage, far from expected, doesn’t seem real. Had she stayed a couple feet back, he would be crawling out of the river, gathering her unconscious body, and returning her home.

But she is too close to the edge. The fence cannot hold her body when she loses consciousness. Her upper body folds over the edge, the momentum carrying her head down fast in a dive. Her feet flip over the fence, and she’s falling. He watches her as she goes down with impressive velocity. Her limp condition might have saved a more substantial body, but her delicate frame snaps when her curved neck crashes into the dry gravel at the bottom. He runs to her, stops in front of her twisted, broken form.

He can hear the river churning, flowing fast behind him; its thimble-full of water, a flood.

He hyperventilates, looks for something to hold, to steady himself. His tongue pumps piston-like into the back of his throat.

What is happening?

He doesn’t bother with a pulse this time. He is afraid to know; although he knows he knows.

He speaks out loud, hoping his voice will give truth to the lies: “This is not my fault. This is not my fault. This is not my fault.”

This is a trap, he thinks, his heart still racing. I see it clearly, this quicksand of culpability. If I do nothing, I sink. If I struggle, I go down faster. I must remain calm, go backward up along the path that brought me here, until another path presents itself. A tiny pocket. A window. An escape. If not from responsibility, from guilt.

Her dress has come up above her knees. He glances over to the man’s body. The head is cocked on its broken axis. Jim imagines the body looking back at him, even though only one eye is open. The man would say, You can look. Take a peek. It’s okay. You haven’t gone any farther than the rest of us. Don’t worry about crossing the line. I am the eraser. The line is gone.

He walks away from the bodies, climbs out of the river. He takes her purse, checking for her keys and wallet. He leaves.

It takes him almost an hour to walk back to Chinatown. All the while he repeats to himself: You can find her through the six cats.

Who is she? How can he find her? How can he help her?

He gets to his car, drives to the dead girl’s place, a one-bedroom cottage in Echo Park. With her key, he enters. He goes straight for the bedroom.

The scent of the place is familiar. It smells like her. He has been here a couple times, but never has he come into this room. He allows himself a moment to take it all in.

He opens the closet’s double doors. She has pushed a four-drawer dresser into the closet, clothes hanging on either side. On top of her dresser are two photos in stand-up frames. One is a picture of her with another girl, much younger. They are laughing, standing arm in arm. Sisters. The other is a picture of a young lady, taken at the beach. The sunglasses the woman is wearing, as well as the color and quality of the print, date it. Most likely, her mother.

Starting with the top drawer, he goes through the contents of her dresser. Bras, panties, socks, scarves, sweaters. What would have been a puerile thrill has become numerous slugs to the stomach. Still, he finishes, digging under the piles of folded fabric, knocking the four corners of each drawer, hoping to uncover a hidden relic of some sort.

Secret photos, perhaps. A bundle of old love letters. A diary.

He moves onto the shelves, finds a leather-bound volume of lined paper with less than half of its pages filled. He reads the first entry. As he reads, her voice rings in his ear.

He closes the book, looks around the room. He shakes his head and feels his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s hot.

He must not get distracted by emotions. There is a task at hand, he reminds himself. Whatever she was doing in the river remains unfinished. He owes it to her to see it through, all the way to the end. He remembers the list of clues he’s assembled: a missing girl, Pavlov, six cats, a bell.

He opens the book again. He tries speed-reading the diary to see if any of these things are mentioned. Nothing. The information is either not there or he’s too impatient to find it.

Frustrated, he turns to the last entry. Ten days ago. It’s an inconsequential write-up, but it gets him thinking: Wasn’t that the night of their last get-together?

Flipping through the pages, he searches for his name. He tries to remember the exact day of their first date.