Blood's a Rover

by James Ellroy

  They were forty miles out. They wore lampblack and frayed fatigues. They carried combat knives and silencer-tapped Magnums wrapped in plastic.

  The shark escort bobbed and snapped. Mesplede baby-talked them. The chum was all cat innards. Mesplede had a pal with a cat-killing pit bull named Batista. Batista was a Bay of Pigs K-9 Korps vet. He raged to kill cats in a free Cuba.

  The speedboat zoomed and crunched waves. Crutch fought flashbacks: Horror House, the meeting list, Joan Klein and Thomas Frank Narduno.

  A shark brushed the boat. Mesplede petted him. The chum smelled ten times worse than cat shit. They hit the ten-mile point. The chum ran out. Mesplede cut the motor and let waves push them in.

  Swells rode them toward shore. It was bumps and chop and water knee-high in the boat. Crutch ate more Dramamine and took deep breaths.

  They saw the shore. They dropped anchor by some shoals sixty yards from the beach. They had infrared binoculars. They saw five militia guys playing cards at a picnic table.

  Exile intelligence. A guy in the Cuban Freedom Council tipped Froggy. The cardplayers: all torturers at La Cabana prison. They castrated rightist insurgents. They walked from their barracks and played cards Tuesday nights.

  The boat was moored. Gull noise killed the scrape-against-rock sound. Crutch put on goggles. Mesplede wore a mask. Their weapons were triple-plastic-wrapped.

  They rolled into the water. It was freezing cold. They swam diagonally. A beachfront tree line covered the moon. The cardplayers smoked. Cigarette tips glowed—little sighting devices.

  They reached the beach and rolled. Dark sand and white sand dusted them. They dumped their headware. They got more breath. Crutch ate sand and willed back stomach cramps.

  Ten feet to the table. Two shapes sand-drift rolling. Five targets, twelve bullets, close range.

  Mesplede gave the signal. They positioned themselves prone, two-hand aimed and fired. Their muzzles flashed, their silencers thunked, they heard body impact. Table chunks shattered. They saw cigarettes drop. They heard skull-crack impact and saw two men pitch forward.

  Three men stood up—big body-mass targets. Three men jabbering and unsnapping holsters.

  Mesplede fired. Crutch fired. They took their legs out, knocked them down and gut-shot them. Crutch buried his head and sucked sand.

  Silencer echo and wave noise. Gulls squawking and no return fire.

  Crutch pulled his head up. Mesplede was standing by the table. His flashlight was out. Crutch weaved over.

  Five dead men. Three cigarette tips still glowing.

  Froggy said, “Scalp them.”

  Crutch shook his head. Froggy grabbed his hair and yanked him into the table. Crutch banged his knees and went down in the sand. He was kiss-close to a faceless man. The man’s hairline was powder-scorched. A flap of skin dangled.

  Froggy watched. Crutch pulled his knife. He said some kind of dumb-kid prayer and jammed the blade down. He missed the flap and yanked up from the eye socket.

  55

  (Las Vegas, 12/27/68)

  Mary Beth wore his Christmas-gift sweater to bed. It was way too big. She tucked her chin under the turtleneck and goofed on him. She pulled the cuffs over her hands.

  “There’s no guarantee that you’ll find my son, but you’re determined to spend all that time and money anyway.”

  The bedroom drapes were open. The Nixon signs were down. The hotels were hawking yuletide cheer now. The green bulbs reminded him of that emerald. It was like a dream revived.

  “There’s no guarantee that I’ll find him, but my instincts keep telling me L.A. I’m building an informant network there, so there’s always the chance that something will pan out.”

  “Have you done something like this before?”

  Wayne rolled away from her. He smelled her shampoo on the pillow. He took a breath of it.

  She said, “You found Wendell Durfee, didn’t you?”

  Wayne looked at her. “Yes, I did.”

  “And you killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  She pulled the pillow over and got their eyes close. She did that a lot. She said they both had these green flecks.

  “Sweetie, I already figured that out.”

  56

  (Los Angeles, 12/27/68)

  The Bureau kept a suite at the downtown Statler. Karen’s baby was just born four blocks away. Joan wore a red dress. Dwight wore his most-Fed gray suit.

  Christmas lights blinked on Wilshire. The prior tenant left a bottle of Ten High. Joan saw Dwight’s ratched hands and dosed them with bourbon on a washcloth. It stung. Dwight held tears back. He thought of Thomas F. Narduno and wondered what Joan knew about everything. He thought of Karen and Eleanora.

  Joan said, “Save your hands. You’re fifty-two years old.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “What do you want from all this?”

  “Tell me what ‘all this’ means.”

  “The job. The oper—”

  Joan touched his lips. “I’m here because I want to be. I would have asked you if you hadn’t asked me.”

  His hands burned. Some tears leaked. Joan stood on her tiptoes and kissed them off his cheeks. The outside lights shaded them weird colors.

  They fell on the bed. Joan held his head and kissed him. Her breath tasted like cigarettes and dry wine. She wiped off his tears with her thumbs.

  He held her in with his arms. His hands were useless. He wanted to grab her hair. He knew it would kill his hands. He couldn’t stand this wet-eyed thing. If he touched her hair, he’d hurt himself and never want it to stop.

  She pushed his head back. She kissed him. She leaned over him and pinned his wrists and let her hair fall on him. He nuzzled the dark parts and bit at the gray streaks and forced her legs apart with his knees. She pulled his arms up and pinned his wrists above his head. Lights played over her underarm stubble and her knife scar. She saw that he wanted it. She let his wrists go and let him roll into her sideways. She held her arms up and let him kiss her there. He heard himself gasping and saw them both naked and knew he’d lost track of the time. She said things. They weren’t quite words. She might have said his name. She held him softly. She took his hands softly and let them brush here, here and here. He kissed all the places his hands touched. She held his hands and held his head there every moment. She spread her legs for him to touch and taste and be held there. She gasped as he gasped and his eyes burned from all the tears and his hands didn’t hurt at all.

  DOCUMENT INSERT: 1/12/69. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

  January 12, 1969

  I’m being courted. The pace is slower than Mr. Holly would like. Both the BTA and MMLF have found me, along with the Panthers and US. Eldridge Cleaver invited me to lunch. He brought with him a dubious literary agent, who wanted me to write a memoir entitled Brother Pig: An Ex-Cop Tells It Like It Is Within the Genocidal LAPD. I declined. Mr. Cleaver looked at me suspiciously. The ghetto rumor is that Mr. Cleaver is a very well-placed informant himself and reports to cutouts at various Federal crime commissions that no longer trust Mr. Hoover to rationally assess information. Brother Cleaver had the look of informant/arriviste, and I think he may have seen it in me.

  I’ve nixed the Panthers and US. My relationship with Jomo Clarkson has me leaning toward the MMLF. Jomo is rumored to be heisting liquor stores; if I come across anything more specific on that, I’ll report it to Mr. Holly.

  The southside clubs are the chief recruiting arms of both organizations. If one spends time at Sultan Sam’s Sandbox, Rae’s Rugburn Room, Nat’s Nest, Mr. Mitch’s Another World, the Snooty Fox, Tommy Tucker’s Playroom and the Carolina Pines on Imperial Highway, one will be approached by BTA/MMLF brothers, who will speak injudiciously, suck up a bit and urge you to attend rallies and other planned activities. These men love to talk and describe their criminal actions. I have met pimps, ticket scalpers, the burglars of pornographic bookstores. A BTA
member fed me 190-proof liquor from his basement still and took me to a Lakers game with counterfeit tickets. BTA kingpin Ezzard Jones—replete with bogus divinity degree—solicits funds with limited success at southside churches and complains that his girlfriend is getting it on with that persistent white woman, Joan. Benny Boles cruised me at a BTA bar-b-q and pushed all my danger buttons. He has an armed robbery conviction (’64) and alledgedly killed a male-prostitute lover in ’58. Leander Jackson is charming with his Haitian lilt, vexing with his voodoo talk and hard to picture as an arms dealer, former member of the Tonton Macoute Haitian secret police and heavy conduit to leftist groups in the Caribbean. J. T. McCarver runs dice games for the MMLF, is a reputed pharmacy burglar and deals goofballs to Jordan High School students while Claude Cantrell Torrance, the MMLF’s Minister of Finance and Minister of Extortion, deals to the Manual Arts student body. (Note: The MMLF are Manual Arts football fans; the BTA are Jordan High fans, and both groups push hate-whitey and kill-the-pigs pamphlets on and off the two campuses.)

  Both groups front programs to feed wholesome breakfasts to impoverished ghetto children. White liberals find this fetching and donate money that the MMLF and BTA spends on hate-lit supplies, guns and dope. The breakfasts are homey affairs, often written up and photographed by a doting media. The breakfast food is extorted from local merchants and the children are fed sugar-packed concoctions like Fruit Loops, Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Crispy Critters and Puff-and-Stuff Pals. Sunday breakfasts are often followed by “media mixers,” featuring Bloody Marys, soul food and reefer. These are hilarious, mixed-message, mixed-race moments. Yeah, we wants to kill all de pigs and destroy de white power structure, but we thinks you cool.

  And these dumb white motherfuckers think they are cool. And these dumb white motherfuckers feel exalted in the presence of swinging black militants.

  So, the BTA and MMLF are rivals, and I bop between both groups and keep my eyes open. Individuals are viciously bad within both groups, but I do not see a percolating or slowly assertive group viciousness in ascent. Both groups have guns stashed in safe houses (Joan Klein allegedly holds guns for BTA members), but both groups are primarily in love with guns for their implied statement of masculinity and rarely carry them, for fear of LAPD street rousts. There is much talk of dealing heroin to finance revolution, but “revolution” is a comic-book, racist-polemic pipe dream to these people, and I doubt if they could put together the seed money necessary to buy heroin in significant quantity.

  So it’s pamphlet sales, parties, pub crawls, rallies and big talk in great quantity. Both groups peddle bootleg editions of Mao’s Little Red Book and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. I’ve read both books. They both contain wisdom. Given my life in Los Angeles, my parents’ horrible tales of life in the South, my own LAPD experience and my two auspicious beatings by LAPD, I empathize as much as my compartmentalized psyche and soul will let me. But revolution? Accomplishing anything other than a glancingly ephemeral social good? These people are lost in the overall puerile, selfish, ride-the-zeitgeist game of it, things will go wrong in the end, and my efforts of suppression and interdiction may provide my own brand of glancingly ephemeral social good.

  I can only allot “social good” a smidgen of ink. I’m here for the adventure and to solve the armored-car heist case and accrue all financial benefit.

  I’m being courted. I’m listening, I’m learning. I think I’ll be specifically recruited for criminal enterprises—based on misreadings of my ex-cop status—before too long.

  I see Scotty Bennett out cruising sometimes. We always wink and wave at each other, because we’re both addled by the notion of stoicism and acting cool while you harbor big emotion and hate. Scotty bought me the key to the ghetto, and I’m grateful to him for that.

  I’ve got both beatings in perspective now, I think. I sense that they are bringing me closer to the money, the emeralds and the secrets of 2/24/64.

  Mr. Holly and I continue to talk via phone drop every third or fourth day. He’s looking for a cutout to work me on a more regular basis, while he continues to run the operation. I’ve indulged the Bent at Queen Anne Park a few times since Christmas, and I must remind myself to be more cautious and discreet. I had coffee with Joan on Christmas Eve. She seemed to be coming on to me—sorry, no sale—and working me on some level. I either dreamt of her or saw her that night I slept at Jomo’s crib, which is odd in itself. Women are, by and large, difficult for me, and I find Joan unsettling and a little frightening. I may write up my perceptions and get them to Mr. Holly.

  Mr. Holly continues to trouble me. I find myself thinking about him much more than I should.

  DOCUMENT INSERT: 1/16/69. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

  January 16, 1969

  Eleanora is squalling and keeping me up all night and I’m realizing that the joy of Dina as a full-fledged child and a developing moral being had blunted me to the debilitating regime of new motherhood, this time at age forty-three. I’m not sleeping, W.H.N. is staying in L.A. full-time to help, his constant presence hinders my internal life and in no way compensates for the assistance he’s giving me with Ella. I haven’t seen Dwight since Ella was born; W.H.N.’s presence has effectively quashed that. Dina misses Dwight and asks about him when W.H.N. is out of earshot; I assure her that he’ll be back soon, to tell her wonderfully sanitized tales of his adventures with the FBI.

  She was asking me questions about J. Edgar Hoover last night. Her father had told her (too vividly) stories of Hoover’s cowardly actions during the 1919–1920 Red Scare. Dina asked me (again, out of earshot of What’s-His-Name) why her father hated Hoover so much, while Dwight held him in such high regard. I did not tell her that Dwight and Hoover share a complex moral history, that her father is an intractably aggrieved ideologue and that Dwight is punch-drunk behind all his conflicting notions of authority and considers it best to tell little children comforting tales. Dina wouldn’t get it, and I wouldn’t blame her. I keep wondering just how far Dwight has gone to appease Mr. Hoover in repayment of the debt he carries for the man.

  I have brought Eleanora into a chaste and duplicitous marriage and into a troubled world, with Richard Nixon poised to assume the White House. Dwight will be buying her odd stuffed animals soon, like the alligators he bought Dina, and she will grow up thinking that predators (like Dwight!) are soft and cuddly. At some point she will point to me for confirmation of this. If I am the least bit candid, I will concede my great love for the man, which will in some small way explain why the teddy bears her father bought her hold no great emotional sway.

  I miss Dwight. I’m going to boot What’s-His-Name out of town soon, so we can spend time together and Dwight can meet Ella. He’s fixated on Joan Klein—I can sense it. As always, I pray that my maneuverings and the connections that I facilitate cause more good than harm.

  57

  (Washington, D.C., 1/20/69)

  “We have endured a long night of the American spirit. But as our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the remaining dark. Let us gather the light.”

  They had boxed seats for the big speech. They had preferred paraderoute passes. They had tickets for six inaugural balls.

  The new prez soaked up applause. Froggy said, “He is a bland man. We must circumvent his lack of commitment to the Cuban Cause.”

  Crutch touched his lapel pin—a solid gold 15. He took the scalps and kept his lunch down. Froggy bought him the pin. It honored his close-range-killer status. He still had nightmares per that eye socket.

  “Our destiny offers, not the cup of despair, but the chalice of opportunity. So let us seize it, not in fear, but in gladness—”

  There’s LBJ—exhausted and vicious. There’s Earl Warren, there’s Dick’s frau, Pat, there’s ex-Veep Humphrey. Hey, Baldy—Froggy and I keestered you!

  Nixon shut it down to cheers and a standing ovation. Froggy mimicked snores. Senator Charles H. Percy scowled at him.


  Everybody stayed standing and milked the moment. Crutch memorized details. LBJ’s heifer daughters. Some stray Kennedys. Hey, fuckers—Froggy shot your Uncle Jack!

  Crutch stood there, clapping. People walked by him. He thought of his mother and Dana Lund. He touched his lapel pin. He thought of Joan. He thought of his case and the D.R. upcoming. The Nixster walked past. He’d shaved close this morning. Nixey sat out World War II on some Jap-free atoll. He killed Commies close range. Jack the K. killed Japs on PT-109. It was a shuck. Boats didn’t count. Jack was no close-range killer.

  The crowd thinned out. Crutch re-memorized. Mesplede said, “Enjoy your extremely minor role in this, Donald. But remember that our destiny lies south of here.”

  “Tell me again, Froggy. I dig the repetition of it.”

  “What is that?”

  “Tell me how we’re going to make the money to buy the guns to kill the Castro guys.”

  “We are going to sell heroin.”

  They ball-hopped. D.C. was all limos and floodlit monuments. The air was gunpowdered. Fireworks caused most of it. The rest was coons shooting guns off in coontown.

  Yippies in Nixon masks weaved in and out of traffic. Crutch saw a mugging by the Lincoln Monument. They shared a limo with some GOP stiffs and Ronald Reagan. Crutch told Reagan he dug Hellcats of the Navy. Governor Ronnie grooved on Crutch and called him “young fellow.”

  The ball-to-ball action was blurry. Crutch saw a million famous faces. Mickey Mantle, Floyd Patterson, some TV-show babes. Mummylike J. Edgar Hoover.

  They got a tip on a bash at the Hay-Adams. They flagged down a gypsy cab and spent two hours driving six blocks. The driver was a Jamaican dinge with braided hair and a crocheted beanie. He said he was Pat Nixon’s lover. He had some homegrown ganga. They toked up and listened to a long travelogue. The dinge extolled the fine Dominican gash and warned them about Haiti. Voodoo be real. You got to bring good gre-gre. You put a virgin’s snatch hair in a locket and dangle it on your dick. You swear fealty to Baron Samedi.