by James Ellroy
The meeting went well. It was instinctively collaborative. A level of trust built both ways. Thornton was politically versed and self-interested. Joan got dirt on him as an insurance policy.
She gave him the stained and non-stained cash. Reginald developed a compound to obscure the ink markings. She let Thornton trade the money up, down and sideways. The base sum grew in a hidden bank vault. She let him implement Reginald’s emerald-disbursement plan. The green stones formed a circuit back to Isidore Klein and his struggle. That gave Joan a bare semblance of peace.
Thornton did his job and kept his word. Scotty Bennett and Marsh Bowen killed him. He did not reveal Jack’s name or hers.
Reginald remained in Haiti. He was still there. His exact whereabouts were unknown. He forgave Joan and Jack. He was nineteen, he was eager, he was easily led. He was passively complicit and as guilty as they were. He bought revolution unblinkingly and never saw through to the cost. Joan understood a bit of that now. She was thirty years in the game.
The heist aftershocks subsided. Joan rode the ’60s zeitgeist. Jack stayed with the Bureau. He disseminated information. He redacted and misplaced their comrades’ files. Joan kept up with Karen Sifakis. Karen described her love affair with a rogue Fed named Dwight Holly.
Dwight did terrible things for Mr. Hoover. Dwight was dead-wrecked in the spring of ’68. Tommy Narduno sensed the FBI behind the King hit. Tommy saw Dwight in Memphis a few days before. Joan kept Tommy’s thoughts from Karen. Karen said Dwight was planning a COINTELPRO. He needed an informant. Joan knew it had to be her.
BAAAAAAD BROTHER entered the planning stage.
A non sequitur clash occurred. Jack called Joan and reported rumblings.
It was Dr. Fred. He put together some leads on the heist, gleaned from Clyde Duber’s file. He wasn’t looking for revenge. Balaguer and Papa Doc had refunded his money. He wanted a second shot at the stones.
Hiltz wanted to run his heist leads by Mr. Hoover. He was a trusted CBI and a Hoover phone-chat pal. Joan summarily acted.
She knew about Dr. Fred’s bomb-shelter stash. Leander knew of Jomo Clarkson, via the black-militant grapevine. Joan cutout-worked Jomo and fed him the plan. Steal Dr. Fred’s money. Don’t hurt him. Scare him into silence per 2/64. He’ll fold off that.
She didn’t want more death. She got it anyway. Jomo and his partner killed Dr. Fred. The partner absconded. Jomo found him and killed him.
BAAAAAAD BROTHER went forth. Joan became Dwight’s informant and lover. The wild-card clash of Marsh Bowen and Scotty Bennett occurred. Joan and Dwight did not know the extent then.
Marsh and Scotty wanted the money and the emeralds. They colluded and betrayed each other and died for their cause. Dwight and Joan colluded and conspired. She betrayed him only by her silence. They had crafted an operation that would serve to right all their wrongs. Dwight pulled out, unilaterally. Their paperwork was stashed at a comrade’s house. She’ll honor Dwight’s decision to abort their plan. She lacks the requisite will.
Celia was lost on that island. La Banda and the Tonton had X-marked her. The warrants derived from her work with Wayne Tedrow. Celia was past reason in some regards. María Rodríguez Fontonette was almost certainly murdered in L.A several years back. Celia felt complicitous. She had hexed Tattoo. It was preposterous. Voodoo was barbarous capitalism cloaked in magic. Celia thought otherwise. It didn’t matter. Celia was courageous beyond ideology. Belief works that way.
She should have told Dwight the story. One thing hexed her, still. Her last word to him should not have been “No.”
The clouds broke and spilled rain. The boy looked different. The length of her tale matched the breadth of his surveillance. That pop-up face always there.
I know you want to touch me.
So I’ll let you.
He caught the signal and leaned in. She thought he’d be clumsy. He brushed dried blood off her wrists and kissed the part in her hair.
120
(Los Angeles, 3/27/72)
THE ELECTRIC CHAIR, THE HANDS AND FEET, THE EYE.
The fried skin, the stumps, the flamethrower stink. Cinerama and Smell-O-Vision. Wait—there’s a dog in a voodoo hat and a palm tree on fire.
Crutch woke up. The barking dog was a dog outside. The flames were a 6:00 a.m. sun.
He got his bearings. It was pad #3/safe house #1. Scotty was dead. He didn’t have to hide.
You have to go back. There’s where she took you. It cost her everything. She punched your surveillance card. You clocked out at three years and nine months.
Crutch made coffee and wrote out a question list for Celia. She knew things about Tattoo. He wondered if she still cared.
He fucked with his chemistry set. The story kept re-spooling. The tape jammed here and there.
The Operation. Joan and Dwight’s plan. It could only be That.
Crutch drove to Clyde Duber Associates and let himself in. It was 7:10. He could log private time.
He read Clyde’s heist file and Marsh Bowen’s personnel file. He had Joan’s story now. Facts clicked in, redundant. Who gives a shit?
Farewell tour. You can’t peep and prowl paper the rest of your life. You’re fucked-up in the head.
Crutch split and cruised by the wheelman lot. Phil Irwin and Bobby Gallard snoozed in their sleds. Clyde was throwing a wake bash for Scotty. The lot would be tartan bunting–draped and lit up.
Joan had gotten a second wind and riffed before he left. She told him about the blacklist and all the people Hoover trashed. He memorized their names. He wanted to touch her scar and show her the scar on his back.
He cut east. He parked in front of the fallback and walked up the steps. The buzzer didn’t work. He knocked a bunch of times, loud. The lock was too lame not to pick.
She’d made a nest on the floor. Dwight’s jackets and sweaters, Dwight’s Fed suits. He smelled her cigarette smoke and Dwight’s aftershave. The suits were blotched up with it. She’d doused them good.
Crutch walked out to the terrace. A cool pair of Bausch & Lombs sat on the ledge. He adjusted the sights and looked down at Karen’s house. Karen and Joan were burning paper in the backyard bar-b-q. Joan had bandaged up her wrists.
The little girls played catch. A blood-crusted towel was draped over a chair back. He zoomed in very close. Joan almost smiled and laughed.
He got AN IDEA. He didn’t hex it by stating it, inside or outside of his head. His chemical shit was stashed at pad #3. He Walpurgisnacted and worked till he dropped.
Blowfish toxin and stinging nettle. Tree-frog livers from his icebox. Rigorous formulas, potpourri and improvisation. Three hot plates boiling and mushroom clouds like Hiroshima.
Build, reduce, enhance, revise, re-calculate and re-try. It’s like Brylcreem: “A little dab’l do ya.” Re-formulate and get it down to sub-atomic size.
He got close. Eyedrop portions burned paper and wood. He recalculated and re-tried. He futzed with endless molecular strings and brought down the dose. He thought he got sub-ultra-close and miscalculated. He got closer than that first close and yelled Halt! before he collapsed.
He squeezed a particle on a piece of cheese and left it on his back porch. He popped two red devils and slept it all off.
Sedation. No nightmares. No Zombie Zone flashbacks.
Bird noise de-comatized him. He lurch-walked out to the back porch.
There’s the cheese and a dead rat. A minuscule nip chilled his rodent ass flat out.
121
(Los Angeles, 3/28/72)
“Who killed Scotty Bennett?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“I remember the first time you said that.”
“It was 1944. You asked me if I was sleeping with the boy from the Young Socialists’ Alliance.”
“Were you?”
“I’m not telling you.”
They sat in Jack’s car. Elysian Park was still rain-wet. She met Dwight there early on. Stone’s throw: the LAPD Academy. Dwight’s inti
midation spot.
Jack said, “Did you destroy the file?”
“Karen and I burned it yesterday.”
“Had she read it?”
Joan lit a cigarette. “She didn’t have to. She knew it couldn’t be anything else.”
A black & white rolled by. Joan watched it. Jack said, “We could have leaked some pages on Bowen and BAAAAD BROTHER.”
“Not without hurting Dwight.”
“Dead’s dead. Lost comrades serve the Cause from the grave routinely. ‘Don’t mourn. Organize!’ Don’t tell me you haven’t heard that one.”
“Things have shifted.”
“You and the ‘Enforcer.’ ”
“ ‘Some people you wait your whole life for.’ Wayne Tedrow told me that.”
Jack lit a cigarette. The sun hit his eyes. He pulled the visor down.
“IA’s buried Scotty. They found his file, with Bowen all over it. They made Scotty and Bowen for the Thornton job, belatedly. We weren’t in the file. I’d have heard if we were.”
Joan cleaned her glasses on her shirttail. Jack did the same thing. She remembered the first time: Brooklyn, ’46.
“We have seven million dollars.”
“I know.”
“I miss Celia. I’m too well known to go back to find her.”
Jack said, “She knew the risks. You instilled them in her. She told you not to find her if this happened. You have to respect that. It’s how our world works.”
Joan tossed her cigarette. “You could go back.”
“I’m not going to.”
“On principle?”
“Yes.”
“Solely on principle?”
Jack squeezed her arm. It hurt. It was a jilted comrade/lover’s move, ’46.
“You called off the Operation. I did not. You had a sentimental lapse. You put a personal relationship before a duty, and I did not.”
Joan looked out her window. A young cop waved to her. She waved back.
Jack said, “I picked up a tip.”
“I’m listening.”
“Dwight put a black-bag team together for Nixon. We could capitalize on it.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’m not telling you.”
Jack laughed. Joan dry-popped two pills.
“We should have had a child together.”
Jack squeezed her arm, soft. “I remember the first time you said that.”
“When was it?”
“Fall ’54. The Army-McCarthy hearings were on TV.”
“Why do we remember things that way?”
“Pure arrogance. We’re self-absorbed and confuse our lives with History.”
Joan smiled. Jack opened his briefcase.
“I’ve got a file on your new friend. It was in Dwight’s desk. Clyde Duber built it. He thought the kid might get out of line one day.”
• • •
DONALD LINSCOTT CRUTCHFIELD. Born Los Angeles, 3/2/45. Brown hair, brown eyes, 5′9″/158.
Joan read at the fallback. The clothes nest smelled like her now. She caught less and less of Dwight.
Clyde Duber cribbed from PD reports and typed in his own notes. A Fed CBI carbon was clipped at the back. The persistent blur takes shape.
The racetrack-bum father. The missing mother. The boy at age ten. She sends him five dollars and a card every Christmas. The boy investigates.
Clyde Duber’s postscript:
He located Margaret Woodard Crutchfield, May ’65. She drank herself to death in Beaumont, Texas. He couldn’t break the kid’s heart. He tapped old pals nationwide. They continued the Christmas-gift tradition. The search gave the kid a non-perv task.
The kid was deft. “Voyeurs make good wheelmen and sometimes good investigators.” Clyde got the kid out of trouble and gave him work. He noted his intransigence and invisibility. He feared his “weird tendencies.” He noted the Dr. Fred Hiltz/Gretchen Farr case.
So it started then. You found me there.
Celia was Gretchen that summer. She was near mad in that guise. She was bilking men and taking drugs and transporting cocaine in rented airplanes. She was off in a mystic phase. Revolution bored her. King’s death and RFK’s death produced vile hippie pranks. She was worried about Tattoo. She had hexed and de-hexed her. She devoutly believed that Tattoo was in jeopardy. Summer ’68. The boy sees you.
The Duber typescript ended. Joan hit the CBI report. The boy knew a wheelman named Phil Irwin and a divorce lawyer named Charles Weiss. Irwin was an FBI informant. He snitched cheating spouses from his rope jobs. His FBI handler quoted him:
“Yeah, I’ll admit it. My buddy Chick and I like to peep. We studied under the best, Crutch Crutchfield. There ain’t a window in Hancock Park that that twisted cocksucker ain’t put his snout up to. He never knew it, but Chick and I used to tail him and study his technique. Chick said he ‘scaled the Peeper Parthenon,’ whatever the fuck that means.”
Three muni PD file notes were listed below. Santa Monica PD: Irwin and Weiss questioned for loitering, 9/67. Beverly Hills PD: Irwin and Weiss questioned for loitering, 4/68. LAPD file note, 5/68: Realtor Arnold D. Moffett questioned per “porno parties.”
She remembered the name. He rented “Gretchen” a house.
LAPD dropped the inquiry. Porno parties—so what? A KA list was footnoted: four names, plus Charles Weiss. “Mr. Weiss shares Mr. Moffett’s penchant for bizarre Negro art.”
Joan thought about the boy. Show him the file? Maybe, in part.
She found her pocketknife. She blade-redacted the lines on Margaret Woodard Crutchfield. The knife fit her hand precisely. She’d stabbed a picket-line goon with it in 1956.
122
(Los Angeles, 3/29/72)
Redd Foxx said, “Scotty was fucking a porcupine. I gots to tell you motherfuckers that it was a female porcupine, so I don’t see nothing perverted in it.”
Yuck, yuck—the crowd laffed, misty-eyed. Some coons offed Scotty—let’s get zorched and mourn.
The wheelman lot. Early Christmas lights and plaid bunting. Booze and jelly bean–jar pharmaceuticals. You gots to love it.
Crutch, Clyde, Buzz, Phil Irwin and Chick Weiss. Milt C. onstage with Redd and Junkie Monkey. Ex-governor Pat Brown and numerous pigs. Fourteen Black Panthers. A colored heist guy turned TV evangelist. Frau Scotty and six of his girlfriends.
Junkie Monkey said, “Scotty popped my simian ass for a chump-change 211. I stole six moon pies, four bags of pork cracklings, a case of T-Bird and ten cartons of Kool king-size. Scotty saw that I had soul and let me live. We consumed all that motherfucking shit on the premises and went out lookin’ for bitches.”
Yuck, yuck—we’re grief-struck, but it’s fun. Frau Scotty passed a joint to Girlfriend #4. Girlfriend #5 nibbled a hash brownie.
Redd Foxx said, “Scotty was out searchin’ for this brother name of Cleofis. He was a stickup man and a booty bandit. He was robbing liquor stores with a sawed-off shotgun and banging Scotty’s bitches with a piece of hard black steel ten times that size.”
Girlfriend #3 roared. Girlfriend #2 hugged Frau Scotty. Phil Irwin popped a Quaalude in the air. Chick Weiss caught it with his mouth. Pat Brown blinked—Why am I here?
The bash noise bashed him. He’d spent the day re-memorizing and phone calling. The parlay: D.R. safe houses and Hoover victims.
He re-memorized the CIA-safe-house list. He re-memorized the safe-house list from Joan’s file. He got on the horn at pad #3 and called folks.
They vibed him as fuzz more than comrade. Joan’s name got him some trust. It was name stew out of Joan’s story and monologues. He ran phone checks and got numbers. He called and schmoozed the folks. He got updates and little tales back. J. Edgar fucked you—tell me about that.
They grapevined him. Jail terms, suicide, despondency. Early death and harassment. Lots of rat-out-your-pals barters—some succumbed to, some not.
He kept calling. The fuckers kept talking and feeding him numbers. He ran up his phone
bill. The bad news avalanched him. Feds lurking at your window and your kids’ school. You ragged Gay Edgar, loose chitchat, now we’ll get you.
It got to him. It re-fueled That Idea. More suicides. More vanished loved ones. The grief had him earthquaked and tidal-waved.
Frau Scotty hopped onstage and got schmaltzy. It cued the Panthers to waltz. Junkie Monkey leered at Girlfriends #1 to #6. It cracked them up.
Crutch veered to the pay phone. It was still early. He could log more call-outs and more fuel. He coin-checked his pockets. Zilch on dimes and nickels. He pulled this sparkly emerald out.
His good-bye embrace. She slipped it to him then.
Babe, you didn’t have to. You already sent me Red.
Sills Tip-Top was North Vegas. The drive sapped him. She called it her lucky-charm place. If you have to come, meet me there.
It was a bum-fuck coffee shop near Nellis AFB. The a.m. crowd was enlisted geeks and lounge-act debris. He made it on time—snatch-hair margin.
She waited in a back booth. The joint was integrated. Minimal tension buzzed.
He sat down. Mary Beth said, “You always look like you’re out of breath.”
A waitress poured him coffee. Crutch guzzled it and burned his mouth.
“I’m always running here to tell you something. I called ahead this time, though.”
Mary Beth sipped coffee. “You always look different. Maybe it’s because I only see you at intervals and always in such distress.”
Crutch fumbled at his cup. Coffee spilled. Mary Beth wiped it up.
“You remind me of Wayne.”
“I’m so goddamn sorry for that.”
“Wayne made his bed. I was grateful to share it for a while, but it had to end the way it did.”
An air force chump evil-eyed them. Crutch hard-eyed him back.
