by James Ellroy
I was severely beaten by somewhere between twelve and sixteen of my brother LAPD officers and spent four days at Central Receiving Hospital. My broken nose, facial lacerations and asymmetrically bent ears have enhanced my rather bland good looks and have added to my incipient black-militant cachet. I have Mr. Holly to thank for that. Mr. Holly sensed my gameness and willingness to play, and I will reward him with hard work and a very commanding performance as I pursue my own goals within the context of this operation.
The local newspapers, radio and television picked up the story of the horrible fracas between a black and a white policeman at a “convivial watering hole frequented by LAPD personnel.” Mr. Holly served as the unseen publicity director for this event. The LAPD launched an internal investigation, and—of course—all the eyewitnesses lied, stating that I sexually accosted the barmaid and attacked Sergeant Robert S. Bennett proactively. Scotty got a broken nose and one week’s “compassionate leave”; I was bound over for an interdepartmental trial board—i.e., a kangaroo court. Mr. Holly hired me a jabbery and flamboyant black lawyer reminiscent of Algonquin J. Calhoun of Amos ’n Andy fame. The lawyer spouted more racially charged malapropisms than the worst mail-order black preacher ever to bang a pulpit for power and profit. I was hosannaed as the “Black Jesus”; Scotty Bennett was excoriated as the “White Judas Iscariot.” I was, of course, summarily fired from the Los Angeles Police Department. Mr. Holly later told me that the lawyer was a defrocked minister with a sinecure as a public defender in Visalia County. Gorgeous black-and-white collusion: white judges and prosecutors hire this man to assure the convictions of black clients they need to get off the streets.
I then became an oracle of racial bias, memorizing the blindingly articulate scripts that Mr. Holly wrote for me, withering critiques of institutional racism and the authoritarian mind-set—full of indignation, social rigor and righteous fury, all penned by a white lawyer cop with roots in the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Holly read me through the scripts, well in advance of my speaking them. I was astonished and almost swoony. Mr. Holly is a big, handsome man and a powerful public speaker. I got the uncanny feeling that he actually believed the words he wrote as he was speaking them.
Mr. Holly is a very difficult man to decipher. He understands racial bias and says “jungle bunny” routinely.
I was invited to a fund-raising party for Senator Hubert H. Humphrey at a big home in Beverly Hills. Mr. Holly told me to go, so I did. I was quite the center of attention, until some movie stars arrived and eclipsed me. Natalie Wood made a fuss over my facial wounds and slipped me her phone number; Harry Belafonte shook my hand; numerous liberals boo-hooed the recent passing of Senator Kennedy and Dr. King. People looked to me for expressions of political outrage. I had none to give them, because I now require Mr. Holly’s script-writing services in order to sound properly enraged. I will soon be a wonderfully apostatized black-militant convert, because a Klansman’s son will fuel my anger with his radical perceptions, leaving me to wonder at their origins and marvel at the man himself all over again.
Mr. Holly gave me $8,000 in cold FBI funds and told me to move farther south into the “Congo.” I should start frequenting the “jig joints” where my “soul brothers” congregate, to see what kind of “shine action” I draw.
Mr. Holly calls me a “shit magnet,” and I think he’s rather suspicious of me. I’d like to indulge “the Bent” right now, but I can’t. Mr. Holly might be having me spot-tailed. I have to keep my personal pleasures on hold until I feel more secure in my role.
I have an entirely new life now. My mother is dead; my father is elderly and living in Chicago. I have no real friends and my relationship with Mr. Holly is mutually usurious. I now have a dauntless and implacable enemy in Scotty Bennett. I’m sure that I know more about Scotty than Scotty knows about me. I have read the sanitized official reports on the eighteen armed robbers Scotty has killed in the line of duty. They were all black men. They were all summarily executed, per the unspoken LAPD mandate that armed robbers must die. The policeman in me condones this sanction; there is a large body of empirical data that states that most armed robbers take innocent lives and must be preemptively interdicted. It is the ghoulishly cherry-picked “male Negro” armed robbers that makes Scotty so unique. Other hard-charging Robbery cops have a middling “equal-opportunity” mélange of white and Mexican kills. Not our Scotty. Oh no.
Last August 5, two University Division officers shot it out with four Black Panthers. The officers survived, but the Panthers did not. Two days later, Chief Reddin sent Scotty down to the Panther headquarters with pizza, beer and a pound of confiscated marijuana. Scotty was, by all accounts, courtly. The Panthers welcomed him with apprehension and seemed befuddled by his gifts. Scotty advised them not to shoot at Los Angeles policemen again. Should they do so, reprisals would be instantaneous and brutal. For every L.A. cop shot at, wounded or killed, LAPD would kill six Black Panthers.
Scotty walked out then. He did not take questions or linger for a slice of pizza and an ice-cold brew.
My admiration and hatred of Scotty Bennett run roughly equal. He was there on February 24, 1964. He has no idea that I was there, too.
I was nineteen. I had graduated Dorsey High School two years earlier and was living with my parents at 84th and Budlong. The sky was the first thing I saw. There were weird prisms of color and a gas stench in the air. I stood on the roof of my house and saw streams of police cars approaching. The siren noise was near deafening. I saw a crashed-up armored car and a milk truck and dark shapes emitting fumes on the ground. I saw a very tall man in a tweed suit and bow tie drive up and survey the scene.
My father made me abandon my perch. Three dozen policemen roped off the street. Rumors soon flooded the neighborhood: the dead robbers were white; the dead robbers were black; the bodies were scorched past recognition and were racially unidentifiable. The absence of the robbers’ vehicle meant that at least one man got away.
Two men got away. I know this as fact. Scotty Bennett may know it, as well. I cannot prove Scotty’s knowledge. I simply sense it.
LAPD was out in brutal force. Scotty was running viciously indiscriminate roundups of local “suspects” at 77th Street Station. The local citizenry was outraged. I was outraged. I went roaming the alleyways behind my house, a kid looking for adventure, coveting my proximity to history. That is when I saw the second man.
He was hiding behind a row of trash cans. He was young, in his teens or early twenties, and he was black. His face was chemically scalded, but extra precautionary gauzing, a mouthpiece and a bulletproof vest had saved his life. I took the man to an elderly doctor neighbor; he was in shock and refused to discuss the robbery-killings at all. The doctor treated the man’s burns, fed him morphine and let him rest. Scotty continued to steamroll his investigation. Detained and released “suspects” came home bruised and pissing blood. The doctor decided not to turn the wounded man over. He had saved the man’s life and could not now condone physical abuse that might well result in his death.
The man left the doctor’s house after two days of care and never divulged his identity. He left the doctor with $20,000 in ink-stained cash. The doctor deposited it in the Peoples’ Bank of South Los Angeles and told the manager, Lionel Thornton, to leak it back to the community in charity donations, if it could be done safely, with no harm to the recipients. Thornton somehow found a way to partially obscure the ink markings; the bills surfaced sporadically in southside Los Angeles. Scotty Bennett tracked that money assiduously. He detained and leaned on the innocent people passing the bills in his unique and uniquely persistent manner. The case remained unsolved. The racial identity of the heist gang’s leader and the other dead heist men has never been determined. Scotty had become obsessed with the case, and so had I.
The doctor died in ’65. The ink-stained bills continued to circulate through southside L.A. I maneuvered my way into a menial job at the Peoples’ Bank, learned nothing substantive and quit. Scotty Bennett
fascinated me. I wanted to test my courage by going up against him and to see if he would reveal information within the brutal context of a back-room interrogation. I had pilfered a stack of ink-stained twenties from the bank and began passing them. Scotty found me, toot sweet.
The room was ten by ten feet and walled with soundproof baffling to keep screams at a dull roar. I protested my innocence. Scotty was genial when he wasn’t beating me. He deployed a phone book and a rubber hose; he loosened my teeth and decimated my kidneys. I stoically asserted my innocence. Scotty revealed no inside knowledge of the case. I refused to scream. After two hours, I got my pro forma phone call. I called a friend; the friend called his friend Clyde Duber; Clyde made some calls of his own and got me out.
Clyde liked me. Clyde had his own fixation on “the Case.” It’s a hobby for him, no more. It’s a consuming quest for Scotty and me.
I entered Clyde’s kid-private-eye world and began infiltrating left-wing groups for his rich and richly paranoiac right-wing clients. I became a fine actor, prevaricator, dissembler, spy and snitch. I learned how to improvise, extrapolate and work off of Clyde’s rough scripts. I have never had a role as demanding as the one Dwight Holly has prepared for me, and I have never had a scriptwriter as brilliant as Mr. Holly.
I joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1967. Scotty tried to quash my appointment and failed. “The Case” remains unsolved. I remain determined. I’m convinced that the answer resides in southside L.A. I choose to believe a persistent ghetto legend: here and there, black folks in trouble receive a single, very valuable emerald anonymously in the mail.
I think Scotty knows more about the events of 2/24/64 than the rest of the LAPD combined. I think he wants the money and the lovely green stones for himself. I view OPERATION BAAAAAD BROTHER as nothing but a godsend, despite Mr. Hoover’s draconian intent. I have the perfect southside cover now. People will tell a radically reconfigured black militant things that they would never tell a cop. I must be very bold and very cautious, and work my way around Mr. Holly with the utmost circumspection.
42
(Los Angeles, 10/18/68)
Spot tail:
Marsh Bowen’s pad, 54th and Denker, lace-curtain Niggertown.
It was Night #6. Dwight Holly hired him, through Clyde Duber. Clyde was unsure of Big Dwight’s motive. Maybe Bowen vibed comsymp or security risk.
Bowen’s sled was out front. He drove a ’62 Dodge. Candy-ass wheels. Bowen was a nosebleed. He went to doofus parties and played Zulu chief. Bowen fucked with Scotty Bennett and got sacked off LAPD. It got him clout with loser liberals and showbiz Jews.
Crutch yawned. He’d clocked in at midnight. It was 2:06 now. He tilted the car seat back and scoped his dashboard frieze. He got the idea from Scotty.
Scotty had his heist pix all taped up. Crutch rigged his own version. There’s Joan, there’s a groovy D.R. beach, there’s voodoo-vile spooks in Haiti.
The Bowen job torqued him and distracted him. It diverted work on his case and his dirty-tricks gig with Mesplede. Bowen was half-ass tail-savvy. It was like he sensed a car frogging him.
Crutch played the radio low. The tunes vexed him. It was all peacenik pap and jungle jive. Brainstorm: rig Bowen’s car with a voice box and night-light.
He got out his toolbox, squatted down and ran over. He took a corkscrew and popped a hole in the left taillight. He taped a 9-volt battery voice box under the right wheel well and flipped the dial to Frequency 3. He ran back to his car and got out the receiver. Click—there’s Channel 3 and current ambient sounds.
Crutch re-settled and re-zoned his head. He shined his penlight on the Joan pix. He had the knack now. He knew how to make those gray streaks glow.
Bowen walked out and got in his car. Night owl—2:42 a.m.
He pulled out. Crutch long-distance frogged him. That taillight hole supplied range and direction.
They drove. Crutch hovered six car lengths back. Coontown hopped. Bowen slow-cruised all-night rib cribs and bars locking up. LAPD was out BIG. Sidewalk dice games vaporized as The Man passed. Bowen drove by two black-power storefronts—BTA and MMLF. You be window-shoppin? What be wrong wid you?
Street noise bopped off Channel 3. The jungle be late-nite loud. Bowen U-turned and shagged ass westbound on Slaus on and northbound on Crenshaw.
Now, it’s more white. Now, it’s more civilized. Channel 3 is amping down. He’s heading west on Pico, north on Queen Anne Place, right by the park.
Bowen bumped the curb and took the center walkway. Fuck—no way to frog close.
Crutch doused his lights and perched at the east curbside. The park was all wet grass, shrubs and trees. He eyeball-tracked the taillight hole and saw Bowen slow-weaving.
The light went off. The car sounds died. Crickets chirped on Channel 3.
Silence. Bowen’s car door opening and closing. It’s dark. It’s all audio now.
More silence. Then two male voices. Then zippers snag and belt buckles rattle and all these scary moans.
DOCUMENT INSERT: 10/19/68. Verbatim FBI telephone call transcript. Marked: “Recorded at the Director’s Request”/”Classified Confidential 1-A: Director’s Eyes Only.” Speaking: Director Hoover, Special Agent Dwight C. Holly.
JEH: Good morning, Dwight.
DH: Good morning, Sir.
JEH: Do you feel like some campaign chat? The swing states appear close, but our boy Dick seems to be surging.
DH: I think he’ll win, Sir.
JEH: He applied to the Bureau in 1939. I saw his application photo and thought, That young lawyer did not shave closely this morning.
DH: And you altered the course of American history in the process, Sir.
JEH: I alter the course of American history every day, Dwight.
DH: You certainly do, Sir.
JEH: Update me on the shenanigans of our murderous French bonbon J. P. Mesplede and Clyde Duber’s upstart charge Crutchfield.
DH: They’re effective in a gadfly way, Sir. They’re due in Miami next, and I’m sure Mesplede will not be able to resist the lure of that pissant island 90 miles offshore.
JEH: You consider the Cuban Cause to be entirely moribund and existentially futile, don’t you, Dwight?
DH: Yes, Sir. I do.
JEH: I most assuredly do not. Castro has been in power since 1926, and he is a worse tyrant than his predecessors Chaing Kaishek and Cardinal Mindszenty.
DH: Uh, yes, Sir.
JEH: You sound dubious, Dwight. You do not normally falter during our snappy repartee.
DH: I’m fine, Sir.
JEH: You subsist on coffee and cigarettes. They have dulled your memory for established historical facts.
DH: Yes, Sir.
JEH: Would another rest cure at Silver Hill suit you? You might recall the first one. I pulled you off the Dillinger case in ’34. You were drunk and killed those Negro tourists from Indiana.
DH: Uh, yes, Sir.
JEH: “Uh” twice in one conversation? I think you do require a rest cure of some sort.
DH: I’m fine, Sir.
JEH: Moving along, then. Please update me on the Dr. Fred Hiltz case.
DH: It’s covered, Sir. Jack Leahy is overseeing the investigation for the Beverly Hills PD. There’s no way the Bureau will be embarrassed.
JEH: I think the robber-killers are black militants on a rampage. They may well be consorts of a criminal cartel called Archie Bell and the Drells.
DH: I don’t think so, Sir. Archie Bell and the Drells are a musical ensemble, and Jack Leahy thinks—
JEH: Jack Leahy is a duplicitous agent with a seditious sense of humor reminiscent of the late heroin addict/comedian, Lenny Bruce. I track cocktail-party chitchat, you know. When I went in for my gallbladder operation, Jack Leahy told a Chicago agent that I was having a hysterectomy. This was in 1908, and I remember it well.
DH: So do I, Sir.
JEH: I know you do. You were working the Cleveland Office, then.
DH: Yes, Sir.
DH: My infiltrator and informant are both in place, Sir. I’m sure they’ll be approached soon. I don’t think my infiltrator is entirely trustworthy, so I’ve had Don Crutchfield spot-tailing him. Bowen’s done nothing irregular, so I’m pulling the tail as of tonight.
JEH: Ah, young Crutchfield. Clyde Duber’s most persistently voyeuristic foundling.
DH: He is that, Sir.
JEH: And Wayne Junior? Persistently homicidal and racially unlucky? How is he faring?
DH: I’m seeing him tomorrow, Sir. I would guess that he’s grappled with this most recent mishap and has moved on.
JEH: We must all move on. Persistence and tenacity cure all one’s ills in the end.
DH: Yes, Sir.
JEH: Good day, Dwight.
DH: Good day, Sir.
43
(Las Vegas, 10/20/68)
She looked through you and saw you anyway. She made you look back.
He told her his Morty Sidwell story. He stressed the redneck jail, the bailout, the scarred woman. Reginald’s gun charge. Reginald’s books. Her son’s troika: chemistry, left-wing texts, Haitian voodoo herbs.
They perched at the rest stop. They sat in Wayne’s car for more legroom. Mary Beth brought sandwiches and coffee. It was pouring. The rain covered them—nobody shot them cheap looks.
Mary Beth said, “What will you do now?”
