by James Ellroy
His last tour. He had to do visible damage. He couldn’t come back. Her presence here was a long shot. He had to try.
Lock picks, pry bar, crowbar, flashlight, penlight. Burglar’s jerry-rigged stethoscope, three hours to dawn.
He walked the house top-to-bottom. He opened every drawer and scanned every shelf. He cut open every piece of upholstered furniture. He looked behind every framed picture and pulled up every rug.
The house was cold. Cold sweat drenched him. He dropped his tools, wiped his hands dry and kept going.
He climbed ladders and checked every wall and ceiling beam. He beat rats to death with a shovel in the attic and combed every inch. He pried off the downstairs floorboards and poked through cobwebs, insect nests and dirt.
It was raining. Dawn was breaking slow. That gave him more time. He was dirt-caked. His sweat turned it to a thin mud.
He tapped every wall panel. He put his ear to the stethoscope and listened for hollow thunks.
It was Christmas morning, he heard church bells, he almost cried.
Clouds passed outside. Some daylight streaked in. He saw a loose step near the top of the staircase.
He walked over. It was the upper part of the step. The nails were loose. The two pieces wobbled.
A one-inch gap showed. He pried the piece of wood off and saw a hidey-hole. It was two feet long and half a foot high. Inside it:
A rusted-out .38 snubnose. Rusty pistol ammo. Four mildewed pro-Castro pamphlets. Nine pro-wetback flyers. A U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM poster. A small notebook—stapled pages, smudged ink and eroded text throughout. One visible date: 12/6/62.
Crutch held his penlight up to the pages and squinted. He couldn’t discern words. He saw numbers and got an instinct: foreign cash-exchange rates. He got the general format: meeting minutes for some Commie powwow.
The page-by-page text devolved into blurs. The last page held three clear signatures at the bottom.
Terry Bergeron, Thomas F. Narduno, Joan R. Klein.
HER.
Crutch touched her name. He was sweating and dripping mud. The page fell apart in his hand.
Something else tweaked him. “Thomas F. Narduno,” brain tease.
It took some time just standing there. It came in a burst.
The St. Louis papers. The piece on the Grapevine killings. The odd left-wing victim: Thomas F. Narduno.
He cleaned out the hidey-hole. He put everything in his toolbox. He heard the church bells again. He walked outside and stood gasping in the rain.
52
(Los Angeles, 12/26/68)
Wayne said, “You have options within the ultimatum, sir. We’re allotting you considerable autonomy.”
Dwight rolled his eyes. “You’re a stalwart of the local Negro community and a Democratic Party bagman, I’ll grant you that. Beyond that? You’re a mobbed-up money washer in hock to the Boys, and all we’re asking you for is more of the same.”
The office was oak-paneled. The chairs were green leather. The MLK oil portrait overruled the room. Wayne willed his eyes away.
Dwight said, “The brothers around here call you ‘Lionel the Laundryman.’ You’re like that guy on the detergent box. They call you ‘Mr. Clean.’ ”
Lionel Thornton smirked. He was five-three. His desk was seven-three. Wayne and Dwight had small chairs. He had a throne. Wayne and Dwight were big white men. He was a small black man. He wore the world’s sharpest chalk-stripe suit.
Wayne said, “You wash some foreign-bound construction money and casino skim. You stay on as the bank’s president. You help Mr. Hoover and Agent Holly out with information as requested, which allows you to personally keep 3% of every dime you wash.”
Thornton smiled. Dwight hummed the Mr. Clean jingle. Wayne peeled his eyes off Dr. King.
Dwight pulled out his cigarettes. Thornton shook his head. Dwight started to light up. Wayne stopped him.
“I’ll go to 3½%, a 5% pay raise for your employees and a 15% salary raise for you. There’s twenty thousand dollars in my briefcase. That’s your bonus for cooperating.”
Thornton lit a cigarette and blew smoke Dwight’s way. Dwight stood up. Wayne nudged his foot. Dwight sat back and folded his hands.
Dr. King in burnished oils—more handsome than in real life.
Thornton said, “Give me the briefcase, too.”
Wayne bowed. Dwight smiled. A gunshot popped outside. Dwight jerked and touched his belt gun. That goddamn portrait. Oak panels in a black slum.
Thornton said, “Mr. Hoover has an operation going. Mr. Holly’s presence today attests to that. My guess is that you’re hassling some deluded black militants. I’ll wish you well and leave you to it, but I cannot inform for you or offer you on-premises oversight, or keep separate books for you.”
Wayne nodded. Dwight’s chest was pounding—Wayne saw his shirt move. Thornton stood up and teetered on platform shoes.
“One last favor. For Mr. Holly, I think. I noticed the sap in his waistband.”
Gunshots overlapped—closer this time.
“My wife’s ex-husband is bothering her. I’d like him to desist.”
An intercom buzzed. Wayne and Dwight stood up. Thornton pointed to the portrait.
“Vicious white motherfuckers like you killed him, but his voice will prevail in the end.”
Wayne said, “Sir, I hope so.”
He refurbished the lab. He dumped the heroin makings and added a collage. Reginald Hazzard photos four-walled him.
Partitions set off a file space. He brought in file boxes and reams of paper. He’d worked LVPD Intelligence. He knew how to build case files and log information. Mary Beth bought him a cashmere sweater for Christmas. He told her he really wanted a Teletype machine.
Mary Beth said, “You’ve got all these pictures of my son but no pictures of me.” He told her he wanted to find her son because he’d already found her. She told him to keep going. He said she looked different every time he saw her, so pictures would spoil the surprise. She told him to keep going. He said they never met outside his hotel suite. He enjoyed imagining the ways she looked in the world.
The file space had potential. The lab was small and well equipped. He had a spectroscope, a fluoroscope and the proper chemicals to work on Dwight’s pages.
Wayne unplugged the telephone and sat down to work. He talked to Carlos and Farlan Brown earlier. His news: Lionel Thornton folded. Farlan’s news: the prez-elect was sending permission letters for the casino-site team. Also included: passes to the inaugural hoo-haw. Funny, but: Mesplede wanted Dipshit Crutchfield on the team. Wayne relented. Dipshit worked cheap and might mandate a nuisance hit at some point. Keep the punk short-leased.
Dwight’s chem job was improbable and exacting. The file pages were carbon acid–based and burned under caustic applications. He’d been at it part-time for two months. He’d destroyed two-thirds of the Joan Rosen Klein file and failed to peel through a single line of redaction. A notion hit him this morning. Throw spectroscope and fluoroscope light on the typewriter marks. Bombard the ink lines with contrasting rays. Dab high-pH hydroxic acid on the perceived letter shapes and see what forms and what erodes.
He rigged his light bars, documents, acid base and swabs. He wore tinted magnifying goggles. He slid a redacted sheet on an absorbent blotter. He let the lights fly. He squinted and thought he saw a capital S, J, R and K near-microscopically outlined. He realized that he’d extrapolated. He knew FBI file parlance. He’d thought his way through to “SUBJECT JOAN ROSEN KLEIN” and no more.
BUT:
He could sacrifice that ink line. He could look for the other logically following boldface letters. He could refine his light and application technique that way.
More light now. Different angles. More hydroxic acid, more/less/more/less—
He burned through the possible “JOAN ROSEN KL”—fizz straight onto the blotter.
The acid pooled and bubbled.
An ink line blurred and faded.
The type
writer marks for “EIN” showed up faint on the page.
Wayne trembled. He pulled out the test page and slid in the page marked “Known Associates.” He counted fourteen black-inked lines and brought down the lights. He dabbed hydroxic acid. He burned ink lines, he faded ink lines, he blurred ink lines and got typewriter marks pure unreadable. He squinted. He refocused his lights and singed paper. He refocused and got blots. He refocused and redabbed and got the visible numbers “7412.” More burns, more blurs, a U, an L, a T. He refocused and dabbed again. He got the blur-faded, typewritten-marked “Thomas Frank Narduno.”
53
(Los Angeles, 12/27/68)
Sap gloves broke bones and spared your hands. They maximized hurt and minimized self-damage.
Dwight beat on a bantamweight Negro named Durward Johnson. Lionel Thornton watched. Johnson looked like Billy Eckstine, minus the mustache. The gig went down behind Johnson’s house. Baldwin Hills was high-end colored. The alley was paved. Christmas lights lined the fence tops.
Dwight pulled his punches, went in light and broke bones regardless. Thornton stipulated face work. Johnson grasped a fence link and kept himself upright. Thornton stood out of spray range.
Jabs and right crosses. The cheeks and the jaw—don’t fuck with his eyes or his brain.
His nose broke audibly. His teeth dribbled off his split tongue. Dwight’s glove seams popped and leaked ball bearings. Johnson’s toupee flew off his head.
He stayed upright. He spit out cracked bridgework and hit Thornton’s shoes. Thornton smirked. Johnson said, “I fucked your wife, nigger.”
Dwight threw a big right. Johnson grasped the fence two-handed. Dwight stumbled and fell into the punch. It landed full force. It took Johnson and a stretch of fence links down. Dwight fell along with them.
The world went upended. Christmas lights blinked above him. He got up and helped Johnson up. Thornton was gone. Johnson weaved into a neighbor’s backyard and crashed in a pool chair.
Dwight pulled the gloves off and walked back to his car. A business card was stuck under the wiper blades.
Sergeant Robert S. Bennett/Robbery Division/LAPD. Below that: “Vince & Paul’s, 1 hour.”
That pedophile was nothing. The guy fucked with kids and Joan wanted him hurt. He showed Joan the Poloroid. The perv was beat to shit. She touched his arm then. He leaned into her and let their hands brush. They held the pose to tell each other something.
Durward Johnson was shitwork. Thornton was a maladroit dwarf. It was ugly. His hands ached. It gave him that hide-out-and-drink-yourself-well-again thirst.
Dwight flexed his hands. He had two sprained fingers. His cuticles bled. Ball bearings were jammed under his nails.
He called Joan before the Johnson job. They discussed Nixon’s inaugural. She said some rogue Reds were flying to D.C. They had guns traceable to a Florida bank job. They planned to wear Nixon masks and clout three banks on inauguration eve. Joan provided their names and addresses.
He called the Miami Office. The bank team nailed the fucks at the airport. They were en route to Austin, Texas. They planned to clout three banks dressed as LBJ.
He called Karen then. He offered her a monument bombing to celebrate the bust. Karen was headed to the hospital. Eleanora wanted out now. Dwight heard What’s-His-Name in the background.
Vince & Paul’s was slow. The waitresses wore Santa’s wench garb. Dwight squeezed three ball bearings out of his hands and bloodied the tablecloth. He ordered just-this-one-drink-and-no-more.
The waitress brought him a double scotch. The first sip warmed him, the second sip blared an alarm. He felt his legs return. Scotty Bennett slid into the booth.
“You should have told me.”
Dwight stirred his drink. “Who, in fact, did tell you?”
“Those cops you paid to whip on Bowen.”
“I’ll apologize in advance, then. It’s Mr. Hoover’s operation. He wanted you bypassed.”
Scotty sipped his bourbon-rocks. “You’re sheep-dipping Bowen. The Panthers and US are too well infiltrated, so you’re sending Bowen in to work the BTA and MMLF.”
Dwight said, “Off the record, yes. On the record, our greatest chance at success stems from Bowen’s altercation with you.”
Scotty chewed an ice cube. “Let’s get this back on the right footing. I want to see all Bowen’s reports and all the filed Bureau paperwork.”
Dwight said, “No.” Scotty killed his drink. His barmaid girlfriend brought him a refill.
“The BTA and MMFL are clowns. They’re not worth working. They couldn’t find their ass on a toilet seat.”
Dwight shook his head. “I disagree.”
“Why?”
“They’re career criminals with a valid grievance. A fair segment of this society condones their actions. There’s a rule of thumb to organizations like these. The most forceful psychopath assumes leadership and creates the agenda, and the BTA and MMLF have some doozies.”
Scotty smiled. “You talk like a lawyer.”
“I am a lawyer.”
“And you know about psychopaths, because you’ve spent twenty years doing strongarm jobs for Mr. Hoover.”
Dwight raised his drink—touché.
“It’s that ‘valid grievance’ line I’m not buying.”
“Come on, Sergeant. We’re both white cops. We didn’t create the world, but we both know how it works and we both know you can’t let pissed-off coloreds cash in and fuck up the world because their people got a raw deal and some hopped-up white kids think they’re cool.”
Scotty cracked his knuckles. “If Bowen goes bad, on his own or in a context you placed him in, I will not hesitate to take him down for it. That means any and all criminal actions. That means I’ll go in unilaterally, without fear of you, Mr. Hoover, Chief Reddin or anyone else involved in this operation.”
Dwight cracked his knuckles. His shirt cuffs were exposed. They were blood-soaked.
“Will you keep quiet about this operation?”
“Yes.”
“Will you refrain from entrapping Marsh Bowen or going after him proactively?”
“Yes.”
“Will you inform me of any tips you may have picked up on the BTA or MMFL?”
“No.”
“Will you maintain a hands-off policy on the BTA and MMLF during this operation?”
“No.”
“Suppose I go over your head and talk to Chief Reddin?”
Scotty smiled. “You won’t do that. We both know where it would take us.”
Dwight smiled. “Let’s step back and give each other one concession.”
Scotty said, “I’ll go first. Will you inform me of any pending armed robberies to be performed by BTA or MMLF members?”
“Yes. My operating parameters are very strict on that. Bowen will inform me of pending robberies, and I will inform you.”
“And if Bowen has no knowledge and I learn of pending robberies on my own?”
Dwight raised his glass. “Then embellish your reputation and kill the motherfuckers with my best wishes.”
Scotty raised his glass. “What’s my concession?”
“Talk up your hatred of Bowen to cops, your informants, anyone who’ll listen to you. The more you hate him, the more clout he’ll have with the brothers.”
Scotty shrugged. “That’s not much of a concession. I’m doing it anyway.”
The jukebox snapped on. The music went LOUD. Dwight pulled the cord out. The music swooped and died. Dwight got a range of schizzed looks.
Scotty stretched. His shit got exposed: belt gun, shoulder gun, toad-stabber, knucks.
“It’s Christmas. Ask Santa for another concession.”
“Try not to kill Marsh Bowen. It goes against your nature, but it’s the white thing to do.”
Scotty said, “Deal.” His barmaid girlfriend walked over. Scotty motioned her away.
“You know, I have quite a few southside informants.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I’m listening.”
“Marsh Bowen is a faggot.”
The hospital sent a telegram to the drop-front. Eleanora Sifakis, seven pounds and four ounces, healthy. “Mother will call soon.”
Dwight poured himself just-one-more-drink and ice-packed his hands. His head swerved—Karen/Joan, Karen/Joan, Karen/Joan.
He sipped his drink. He salved his fingers. He swerved with Eleanora on earth and Marsh Bowen as a queer. The phone rang at 11:14 p.m.
He picked up. Wayne said, “I burned through most of the file pages, but all I got was one KA name. Thomas Frank Narduno. It sounded familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. Ring any bells?”
Big bells:
The lefty Grapevine vic. Heist suspect: New York and Ohio. Bug devices found on his body.
Wayne said something about fluoroscopes and hydroxic acid. Dwight hung up and poured just-one-more-drink.
It burned and brought up shudders. Dwight dialed the scrambler-phone number.
No rings on scramblers. Just faint hiss and “Hello, Mr. Holly.”
“May I sleep with you tonight?”
Joan said, “Yes.”
54
(Cuban Waters, 12/27/68)
Fins and churned waves. Mesplede tossed chum. Sharks hovered and snapped high for it. Bright moonlight made them glow. The speedboat launched from Boca Chico Key. Destination: Varadero Beach, Cuba.
Mesplede had called him in L.A. Wayne approved him for the Nicaragua and D.R. trips next month. Froggy filed a negative Panama report. Panama was out. Nicaragua would get nixed. The D.R. would get the nod. Cuba was close. His case was all there.
Crutch ate Dramamine. He was seasick green. He wanted to fortify: booze, pills, hash. Froggy said nyet.
“This will be intimate, Donald. I want to see how you perform.”
