Destination: Morgue!: L.A. Tales

by James Ellroy

  The story made no sense. Gelff didn’t live there. Dave S. nixed a polygraph. Dave S. split the interview. Dave S. called back. He said he’d take the poly now.

  They set up the test: 7:00 p.m., 6/21/66. Dave S. called up and cancelled. The detectives talked to Bob Gelff.

  Shit, we sold the house. The Gormans bought it in ’61. The Gormans had it in ’65. Shit, Dave knew where I lived.

  The cops rebraced Dave S. They requested a formal statement. He refused. They arrested him.

  They got him a public defender. He refused to talk. They booked him for Murder One.

  He spent two days in the shitter. He agreed to a poly. He took the test. He came up clean.

  His prints didn’t match. He owned no guns. George Iwasaki viewed him. George Iwasaki said nix.

  They released Dave S. Orange County grabbed him. Bam— bad-check warrant extant.

  The Gorman job was 11 months old. It was dead-stalled and fucked.

  RICK JACKSON TOLD me about Stephanie. My neck hairs stood up.

  Rick works LAPD Homicide. He’s a superb detective and one of my best friends. We talk long-distance. We prowl crime-historical L.A. We talk CRIME. We dig the horror. We transmit chills. We rap logic and moral perspective. We dig crime as social barometer and buffoonish diversion. My wife says we cackle like schoolgirls.

  Stephanie Lynn Gorman. DR 65-538-991. DOD: 8/5/65.

  Rick gave me a synopsis. Details nudged me. A pinprick memory blipped.

  It’s summer ’65. I’m 17. There’s a Hollywood newsstand. There’s a girl’s picture. It straddles a newspaper fold.

  Blip—no more, no less.

  Rick said the case went active. It was a fluke. It happened like this:

  It’s 2000 now. The older sister’s middle-aged. She attends a party. She meets an LAPD man. She mentions her sister’s case. She wonders. She requests a status update.

  The man calls Robbery-Homicide. Detective Dave Lambkin picks up. He works the Rape Special Section. He’s a 20-year officer. He doesn’t know the Gorman case.

  The man shoots the sister’s request. Lambkin responds. He reads the Gorman file. He notes the unknown prints. He sends them to the FBI.

  The Feds run them through the CODUS computer. They get a single-print match.

  The kickback supplies a name. The man was young then and old now. He’s now a suspect.

  That blip. That picture. A slight expansion—her pageboy hairdo.

  Rick’s synopsis. The horror. The Watts Riot bit. My L.A. ’65 summer. Stone’s throw to her.

  Show me the file. I need to see.

  I FLEW OUT. It was December 2000. I booked a room in Beverly Hills. Beverlywood adjoined it. Stone’s throw to Hillsboro and Sawyer.

  It was cool. L.A. smelled like fresh rain. I ignored it. I conjured up the hot summer of 1965.

  I rented a car. I drove to Parker Center. Rick introduced me to Dave Lambkin. He was mid-40s, bald, and fucking bug-eyed intense. He talked fast and articulate. His thoughts scattergunned and coalesced precisely. He said the file ran fourteen boxes. He gave me the suspect update.

  Call him Mr. X. Mr. X is sixty-nine now. Mr. X was thirty-four then. He had a minor rap sheet. Très that—one receiving stolen goods bounce, à la ’71.

  Hence: prints on file. Hence: the CODUS match. Hence: major suspect status.

  No Gorman link. That’s good. It jukes the random-sex factor. Ed Gorman’s dead now. The mother and sister don’t know X-Man. They’ve wracked their memories.

  So:

  We’re running background checks. We’re feeling positive. We’ve placed him in West L.A. then. We’ve surveilled him. We’ve got his prints on a coffee cup. We snatched it at a diner.

  We need more facts. They’re armament. They’ll fuel the search warrant. They’ll define the approach.

  Show me the file. Show me the pictures first.

  We walked to the Rape Special cubicle. I saw the boxes and binders. I saw a taped-on wall tableau. That memory blip blew out full.

  The L.A. Times. The pic on the fold. The pageboy girl.

  Lambkin passed me the pictures. They were faded Kodachrome. The colors looked sun-bleached. Shades beamed surreal.

  There’s the patio. There’s the bloody towels. The south bed’s askew. There’s one spent shell.

  I clenched up. I knew she’d be next. I wanted to see it. I trusted my motive. I know my eyes would violate.

  There—

  I couldn’t peel her beauty back from the horror. I felt immodest and clinically focused. Her softness merged with the blood.

  I CALLED IT quits early. The file boded vast and too detailed. The pictures held me for now.

  Dead women own you. Call it blunt and simple. She’s Geneva Hilliker Ellroy redux.

  I went back to the hotel. I time-traveled. I placed myself in context with that blip.

  It was “Freedom Summer.” I was seventeen. I was a year and three months older than Stephanie. I lived five miles northeast. I attended Fairfax High School up to mid-March. Fairfax was largely Jewish. I was gentile and fucked up. I craved attention, love, and sex. I did nothing constructive to earn it. I lusted for Jewish girls. I stalked them by bicycle. I pulled anti-Semitic stunts in school. I got my ass kicked. Fairfax kicked me out.

  My dad was old and frail. He let me join the army. I hated the army. It scared me shitless. My dad had a second stroke. I faked a nervous breakdown. An army shrink bought it. My dad died 6/4/65. The army kicked me loose.

  I bopped back to L.A. I was seventeen and draft-exempt. The army gave me go-home pay. I forged my dad’s last three Social Security checks. I had a roll. I got a cheap pad. I got a handbillpassing job. I shoplifted food and booze. I popped pills and smoked weed. I ran 6′3″ and 140. Everything frightened me. I read crime books, fantasized, and jacked off. I was a teenage-misanthrope/hybrid-scaredy cat.

  I stalked girls. My mode was the all-unilateral monogamous crush. My anti-Jewish stance was a shuck. It was kid iconoclasm. It was a love scrounger’s yelp for help. Fairfax High was snotty and rigidly stratified. The Fairfax district bordered Hami Hi’s. Hami was equally Jewish. Hami was allegedly more snotty and more stratified. Hami kids were hip, Hami kids disdained geeks, Hami kids rode the cool zeitgeist.

  Proximity.

  Stephanie was lovely. I did not doubt her good-girl status or sound character. She would have beckoned. I would have stalked her. I would have harbored tender thoughts. Booze might fuel a real approach—T-Bird chased by Clorets. She might reject me flat. She might reject me gently. She might hear me out. I was tall, I had my own pad, I had a murder-vic mom—sometimes the desperate impress.

  Not likely. Lovely girls scare desperate boys. Ed Gorman would nab my shit quicksville. He’d kick my goy ass off his porch.

  Yeah, I would have stalked her. No, I’d never harm a hair on her head.

  THE HOUSE WAS INNOCUOUS. The northeast bedroom light was on. Rick and I staked it out.

  Daytime crime, nighttime surveillance. We both loved crime locations. They spoke to us. They inspired time travel. They juked our talk.

  We sat in Rick’s car. Holiday lights beamed—Christmas sprays and menorahs. I mentioned a book. I read it circa ’65. It was a thriller called Warrant for X.

  Rick said X-Man looked good. He was at the crime scene. They didn’t know when. They did know he did not know the Gormans. He matched the peeper sketch. He was a Latin-type Caucasian. I speculated. Stephanie fought him. He panicked and shot her. Rick quoted Dave Lambkin. Dave was a sex-crime expert. Dave had this factors-in-place riff.

  Would-be killers harbor fantasies. They rarely act them out. Most would-bes never kill. Sometimes factors converge. The right victim appears. The opportunity hits. Stress factors goose the would-be. Family grief, sex abstinence, booze or dope impairment. His switch flips. He acts.

  I said that might apply to my mother’s case. It’s the victim-killer nexus. Specific men kill specific women and kill no more. They bring fantasies to the act. The
y juxtapose their rage and lust against a female image. Maybe my mother vibed loose prowess. Maybe Stephanie vibed kindness to plunder. The killer killed my mother. He probably hit her and raped her unconscious. Stephanie screamed and fought. She got off the south bed. She disrupted her killer’s fantasy.

  He killed her. The act traumatized him. He never killed again.

  Rick said maybe, maybe not. It didn’t vibe intentional snuff. It vibed rape panic and rape escalation. The fuck brought the cord and gun. The gun for threat, the cord for suppression. Most rapes went unreported. Rape as social stigma—1965. Stephanie might be vic 16 or 60. The nexus, the alchemy—something made him kill her. I said her beauty and softness. Bam—his switch drops. He sees outtakes from his shitty life. His stress context implodes. A happy kid dies.

  Women as one-way mirrors. Women as Etch-a-Sketch boards. The killer snags one real image and starts to revise. His revisions tap signals. It’s sex semaphore. Details get distorted and magnified. It’s a funhouse mirror now. It’s all in his head. The woman loses proportion. She gains bizarre shapes. She gets dehumanized.

  We shitcanned the analysis. We rapped rude and wrathful. We ran a righteous right-wing reverie. The Gorman job was individual forfeit. The Gorman job was moral default. Nothing justified it. The killer had to pay. His childhood trauma and attendant justifications bought him no mercy chits. Fuck the cocksucker dead—

  I DUG INTO the file. I met Dave Lambkin’s partner, Tim Marcia. He complemented Lambkin. He was big and athletic. He walked with a roll. He talked less than Lambkin. He weighed his words and zoomed to the point.

  We dug binders out. I read the autopsy report and first summary report. I rechecked the crime-scene shots. I theorized. I indulged possible wishful thinking.

  No vaginal or rectal hurt. No foreign fluid types. Virgin and nonvirgin assessments. No semen or Jergens cream inside her. Vaginal rupture by natural cause.

  Doc Kade was dead. Koivu was dead. Ditto Munkres and Buckles. Byron was in a rest home. He was senescent. There was no one to clarify.

  My sense: no penetration. The killer didn’t rape Stephanie.

  Tim Marcia agreed. She was young and tight internally. She was struggling. Her legs were unbound. There’s no Jergens on bedspreads/no Jergens floor drip. There’s the east-bed semen stain. Maybe it’s a forced oral cop. Maybe the killer jerked off.

  I asked about vault evidence. I mentioned bedspread DNA. Marcia said a cop tossed it. It was an outrage. Some cop on a spring-cleaning kick.

  I read reports. I skimmed mug shots. I checked the peeper sketch. Dave Lambkin did a cutout trick. He took a side-view mug shot of Mr. X. He placed it against the side-view sketch. They dovetailed exact.

  Mr. X looked good for it. They couldn’t brace him yet. They ached for it. Vengeance beckoned. Knock, knock—come here, motherfucker.

  I read the file. I hobnobbed with the Shoe-Tree and Remorseful Rapists. I read the obscene-phone-call log. I remembered my calls to strange girls. I tried to come off as a kool kat. The girls laughed and made me hang up.

  September 2002: Detectives Dave Lambkin, Tim Marcia, and Rick Jackson stand in front of the old Gorman home. (Todd Hido/Edge)

  I found the San Diego notes. I found the boy’s Christmas card. I read The Collector that summer. It turned me on. The captive woman was a redhead. My mother was a redhead. Samantha Eggar was a redhead. She played the captive in the film. I saw it during the Watts Riot. It played in Beverly Hills—stone’s throw to Hillsboro and Sawyer.

  Tim Marcia and I discussed a wild card. The Gorman job— consensual sex goes blooey.

  Pros and cons. Coronado/the rope trick/the Collector connection. A secret boyfriend unnamed. The gun and rope as book-movie props. The boy’s shaky psyche. Chaste kicks and Stephanie’s imposed limits.

  It flew for ten seconds. It flew apart then.

  Why use the sister’s bedroom? Stephanie’s room was out back. Mom and Dad parked in the rear. They’re home—oops—let’s split.

  And:

  The torn lip/the punch there/the head bump/the drag burns/ the cord by the front door.

  Dave ran the file by a Fed profiler. He posited a front-door approach. The killer knocks. Stephanie answers. It’s her last look at daylight.

  I skimmed the file. I read the Georgia Street Juvie reports. I spent a night at Georgia Street. It was August ’65. I shoplifted some ice cream. LAPD popped me.

  It was scary. Tough kids made fun of me. A friend’s dad got me out. He took me to County Probation. I was too old to adopt. Somebody signed a paper. It made me an “emancipated juvenile.”

  The reports detailed a world wild and wimpy. It’s all middle-class Jewish freaks. Two names jumped out. I knew one guy at John Burroughs Junior High School. I smoked weed with another guy. He knew my pal Craig Minear. Craig crashed his 2-seater plane. He died November ’70.

  I read the file backwards and forwards. I became friends with Dave and Tim. We yukked at phone-call outtakes and picaresque sex freaks. We discussed the rape and no-rape angles. We lauded and mourned Stephanie.

  Tim and I drove to Hami. We checked old yearbooks and found Stephanie. She’s sleek in her Phi Delt sweater. Her pageboy’s down and swept by barrettes. Her expression shifts picture to picture. She’s a pensive kid. She tries to show happiness. She doesn’t always succeed.

  I told Tim that I loved her to death. He said he did, too.

  THE INVESTIGATION BUILT. Dave and Tim built that warrant for X.

  They had his CII#, FBI#, LAPD arrest stats. The Auto-Track computer system shot them ten prior addresses. They had his wife’s and ex-wife’s stats. He married the ex in ’62. He lived in West L.A. in ’65. They had stats on his kids and kid brother. The “Family Index” ran 100 pages. It tallied prior addresses and driving records. It listed other people living at old addresses. Mr. X had a son and a daughter. The son was clean. The daughter had busts: dope/theft/prostitution.

  The case hinged on the print. The case would build off X-MAN’S denial. No, I wasn’t in that house. Bullshit, you were.

  LAPD print-solved a ’63 case. It went to court four years back. Hollywood Division/fall ’63. Male killer/female vic.

  They ran unknown prints. They utilized CODUS. They got a match. The man lived in Minnesota. He denied his presence in the pad. He claimed navy duty then. Navy records disproved it. A jury convicted him.

  The print was it. The confrontation would goose a reaction. We’ll make sure his wife is gone. We’ll brace him alone. We’ll hook him in slow. We’ll bring a search warrant.

  Dave was writing the warrant now. It was detailed and legalistic. They were looking for this:

  Personal records. Vehicle records—late ’50s to late ’60s. Firearms and ammo. Docs describing X-Man’s size on 8/5/65. Photos of X-Man in a blue uniform. Mason cord or photos of X-Man with same. Docs establishing X-Man’s whereabouts on 8/5/65. Docs establishing connections to the Gorman family. Photos, film, or video depicting violence against women. Pornography depicting women posed in restraints.

  The approach ran tripartite. The print/the warrant search/ X-Man’s reaction and/or denial. George Iwasaki was dead. Age would alter X-Man’s looks. Eyeball wits were out.

  Dave and Tim were swamped. Breaking jobs swarmed their Gorman commitment. Dave worked the warrant part-time. Other work diverted him. He buzzed through Rape Special. He passed the wall tableau. He always said, “Sorry, Stephanie.”

  I STUCK AROUND L. A . I cruised the Gorman house a.m. and p.m. I read the file. I explored Dave S.’s jive story and exemption. I thought about Stephanie. I brought flowers to her grave. I pondered the “Laura” syndrome.

  The book and movie define it. Homicide cops dig the gestalt. The title woman is lovely and perplexing. She’s a murder vic. A cop works her case. Laura’s portrait seduces him. She turns up alive. The vic is someone else. Laura and the cop fall in love.

  It’s ridiculous wish fulfillment. It negates the hold of the dead. They inhabit your blank spaces. The
y work magic there. They freeze time. They render our short time spans boldly precious. They build alternative memory. Their public history becomes your private reserve. They induce a mix of vindictiveness and compassion. They enforce moral resolve. They teach you to love with a softer touch and fear and revere your obsessions.

  My obsessions were born in 1958. “Son, your mother’s been killed” and the upshot. She was my first untouchable crush. Stephanie was a daughter or a prom date. She’s dancing out of a shroud. I don’t know her. I can feel her. She’s twirling. She’s showing off her prom gown. I can smell her corsage.

  DAVE AND TIM built the warrant. They planned their questions and signals. They brought Orange County cops in. Two agencies conferred. A judge signed the warrant. X-Man’s ex lived in Riverside County. They planned a dual approach. Dave and Tim would brace X-Man. Two cops would brace the ex. She was with X-Man in ’65. She might know some stuff.

  The date was set: 1/23/01.

  I went home. My wife and I talked about Stephanie and digressed ourselves hoarse. I reveled in Helen’s brilliance and flesh-and-blood life.

  We rented Bye Bye Birdie. We scanned the crowd scenes. We couldn’t spot Stephanie. Rick and I talked long-distance. Rick was happy. LAPD was forming a Cold Case Squad. It was all oldies/24-7. Rick, Dave, and Tim were set to start.

  Fuck happy. Rick was thrilled. Time travel unlimited.

  I rented Pollyanna. I saw Stephanie.

  She was ten or eleven. She stood on a bandstand stage right. Hayley Mills sang “America the Beautiful.” A line of girls flanked her. They all wore the Stars and Stripes.

  There’s Stephanie—alive and in color. She’s a child on the safe side of sex. Her eyes dart. The moment flusters her. Her hair was lighter then. She’s got hazel-brown eyes like me.

  I hit Rewind and Fast Forward. I did it x-dozen times. I watched her. I caught every breath. I filled some blank spaces up.

  THE BRACE WENT DOWN. It clicked like clockwork.

  Two units in place. Bam—X-Man’s wife leaves early. Dave and Tim walk up.

  They’re nervous. They’ve got butterflies like Godzilla. They’ve got badges and IDs out. They knock on the door. X-Man opens up.