Destination: Morgue!: L.A. Tales

by James Ellroy

  The Feds linked shotgun pellets to shells. The link led to an SLA hideout. Forensic confirmation—waaaay overdue.

  The Sacramento cops moved. It’s 1/16/02. It’s synced to gnat’sdick-hair margin.

  Emily Harris—popped at 8:02 a.m. Her ex Bill and Michael Bortin—popped at 8:18.

  Tight spread—16 minutes/shotgun sharp.

  Olson-Soliah slinked to her lawyer. She spent 1/18 in court.

  She got sentenced. Bam—the car-bomb caper/20 to life. She got arraigned for Carmichael—211 and Murder One.

  She pled not guilty. It didn’t matter. She was karmically crucified, french-fried, and fucked.

  There’s the view. All crime all the time. Courtrooms and lockups.

  Cooley gawked. Sometimes there’s justice. Sometimes the plain truth works out.

  Myrna Opsahl, God bless you—I’m glad I could help. We’re all here on the Good Lord’s dime. Someday we’ll hook up.

  Little Sleazer and the Mail-Sex Mama

  The snuff vibed ’70s. The slime factor, the cheap angst, the Valley mall bit. It should have been then. The Victim was young. The Suspect had a career.

  The Herald flourished then. L.A.’s tattling tabloid as broadsheet. The Herald flew low. Crime reportage sans condescension. Bright flashbulb pix.

  There’s the Victim. She’s ripe in acrylic tops and buckskin skirts. The Suspect’s short. Short was in then. He’s smug and cool. He’s tall on TV. There’s a bird perched on his cue-stick.

  The tale demands a two-name title. The ’70s ran rife with such. They lauded larcenous losers. They deified disaffection. They freeze-framed the freon cool as the System ate them up.

  Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. Freebie and the Bean. The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox.

  Lascivious lovers. Furious fuzz. Hell-hurtling heroes and the fabulously fucked up.

  Boffo box-office then. Mainstream moviemaking masquerading as maverick art. A prattling prophecy of “Nicole and O.J.” and tabloid tell-all TV.

  Then was then. Hindsight hinders and perverts perspective. Deconstruction de-hinders. Nab some noxious nostalgia. Move with the movie-biz metaphor.

  It’s a Hollywood story. The title crawls change. The same shit applies then to now.

  They might indict the Suspect. They might discard assumption of guilt. Leads might tweak them elsewhere. Clues could cull collectively and radically ratify thinking. New suspects could slide in.

  It’s a mid-sized celebrity murder. It’s the first L.A. job post-O.J. Victim and Suspect lack Simpson-Goldman sizzle. They reign rancorous and raggedy-ass. They won’t mount a media Matterhorn. They define despair and ladle on lowlife ennui. Simpson-Goldman bid you to vulture and voyeurize. It was filthy and fitness-crazed and fittingly fitted with money and sex. It set a prosecutorial precedent that juliennes justice and trashes the truth to this day.

  Actor Robert Blake, second from left, portrayed murderer Perry Smith in the 1967 film In Cold Blood. (Culver Pictures)

  Then to now. Seven years. Brentwood ’94 to the Valley 2001.

  Then:

  The prosecutors’ duty: Secure the truth and win or lose accordingly. The defense attorneys’ mandate: Win at all moral cost. The O.J. prosecutors damned O.J. with circumstantial facts and DNA. DNA is unassailably precise. DNA is boring science. The prosecutors overexposited it and put jurors to sleep. The O.J. defense team caught their blows and punched counterclockwise. They concocted conspiracy theories. They capitalized on a racist cop nailed by the word “nigger” and craftily crucified him. They synthesized a siren song of racial injustice and lashed logic with it.

  The jurors dropped behind drama. The jurors reached out for racial grievance and ignored the inviolate truth.

  O.J. walked. Dig the dysfunctional dynamic. Then to now, dig the dilemma.

  Celebrity snuffs scare prosecutors shitless. The dramatic potential diminishes their shot to convict. Said potential is perennial. The O.J. case redefined it. It was a shivering shock. It was hellaciously Hollywood. Reason versus drama in this town—no way, Jose.

  There’s the truth. There’s dramatic logic. There’s age-old movie themes. There’s the victim as killer and the killer as victim and the victimhood cult in L.A. The Victim’s a sleazebag, the Suspect’s an actor—oh shit, we’re fucked in L.A.

  MAYBE. MAYBE NOT.

  The L.A. D.A.’s a reformer. The post-O.J. malaise helped make him. He’ll follow the facts. He’ll track the truth. He’ll assess and scrutinize. He’ll indict or bop off indictmentless.

  Said facts:

  It’s Friday, May 4, 2001. Victim and Suspect are newlyweds. The marriage is six months in. She’s 44. He’s 67. They lack that newlywed glow.

  She got pregnant. He got pissed. They considered a scrape. She slept around. A DNA test nailed his daddyhood. They got hitched and had a baby girl.

  They shacked apart. They had two pads on his property. He made her sign a prenup. She swore off bunco schemes. She vowed to drop her known-felon buddies.

  Said Friday:

  8:30 p.m. Victim and Suspect nosh at Vitello’s restaurant. It’s a mid-range dago joint on Tujunga. The Suspect’s a regular. There’s a pasta dish named after him.

  They live nearby. They drive up in his Stealth. They park a block away. Why dat???—there’s spaces much closer in.

  They eat. They split to the car. The Victim gets in. The Suspect unkinks a brain cramp. Fuck—I left my gun in the booth!

  He packs a roscoe routinely. He’s got a carry permit. The Victim is a larcenist. The Victim has enemies. You gots to protect yo bitch!!!

  He hotfoots it back to Vitello’s. He retrieves his rod. He recalls it vividly. No eyeball wits confirm it.

  He bops back to the car. He sees the Victim. She’s got a gunshot head wound. She’s slumped in the seat.

  Panic now—

  The Suspect runs. The Suspect crosses the street. The Suspect bangs on Sean Stanek’s door. Stanek knows the Suspect by sight and reputation. The cat’s a local habitué.

  The Suspect begs help. Stanek calls 911. They run to the car. The Victim gasps. Her eyes roll back. Her window is down. There’s no shattered glass.

  Panic City—

  The Suspect runs to Vitello’s. Eyewits recall this trip. The Suspect is frantic. He begs water and gulps it. His wife “got hurt or mugged or something.”

  The restaurant boss wants to call 911 quicksville. The Suspect says it’s redundant. He walks to the car. The victim is insensate. He starts vomiting in the street.

  Paramedics arrive. The LAPD shows. Code 3 service—seven minutes to the scene.

  The Victim expired. Cops braced the Suspect streetside. Cops braced him at his crib. Cops braced him for five hours straight.

  He declined a polygraph. He took a gunshot residue test. Results: inconclusive. He’d handled his carry piece.

  He denied all guilt. He detailed the Victim’s bunco scams. He flung the fuzz a nebulous knot of her nameless enemies. His blood pressure pressed up prestissimo. He hospital-hid overnight. He hired a crack criminal lawyer. Said shyster shivved and sheared the Victim postmortem. The Suspect sulked submissive. The Suspect submitted to search warrants and gave up his guns. They passed ballistics tests bellissimo. Cops carted off cartons of the Victim’s belongings. They cried out her criminality and signed in as sick souvenirs.

  Days dipped by. A dumped Dumpster delivered the murder piece. The bin stood near the crime scene. The bin was deep with debris from May 4th and 5th. The roscoe reeked of gun oil. The roscoe was fingerprint-free. The roscoe’s registration remained anonymous. No way to sully the Suspect. No way to hitch him to some hired hit man.

  The Suspect was subsumed by sadness and wracked with regret. He doted on his daughter. His mouthpiece maligned her mother. The Victim’s family shagged a shyster. A PR war waged. Cop PR dithered disingenuously. There’s the Suspect suspended as a non-suspect—just like O.J. was at first.

  The snuff vibed ’80s. The heedlessness, the self-absorption
, the glut. Time-trip then to now and dig the disjuncture.

  Little Sleazer at fifty. Pint-sized and pumped with allure. The Mail-Sex Mama looking gooooood.

  Robert Blake, left, covers his face as he arrives back at his Studio City home with his attorney, Harland W. Braun. (Luis Sinco/L.A. Times)

  Ron Reagan’s in the White House. El Jefe hails from Hollywood. Cocaine comes to conquer. L.A. blurs in the blowout and pounds with postnasal drip.

  The era etched early earmarks. Plea bargains began mounting up. I’m a victim/I’m an addict/don’t judge me cruel. All this excess engulfed me.

  Dope delivered the deus ex machina. Dope molded mitigation pleas. The boom era boomeranged with furious forfeit. There’s Little Sleazer and the Mail-Sex Mama trapped back in time. They’re coked up. They writhe in relinquishment. They’re pouring out postnasal drip.

  It’s a Hollywood story. The title crawls change. The same shit applies then to now.

  Little Sleazer is an actor. All actors are fucked up. They are their art. Their gift is impersonation. It’s nonmeditative art. The goal is to become something you’re not. The goal entices narcissists. The cessation of self bodes warm. It’s a riff on Woody Allen’s line: “My one regret is that I’m not someone else.”

  Good actors impersonate across a wide character plane. Their mental gifts and neuroses mesh. Bad actors run with their egos unchecked. They rage effusive and grotesque. Successful bad actors tailor their personas to the media marketplace. They possess physical grace and/or outsized presence. Their need to impress manifests as dynamism. Their effusiveness stops short of desperation. Their grotesquerie seduces more than repels. They become themselves hyperbolized and repackaged for large and small screens. Successful bad actors push one creative envelope. Their drive is conscious and unconscious and ruled by casting-call nods. Successful bad actors find roles that allow them to be themselves and explicate their offscreen potential.

  Little Sleazer plays killers. He plays them with hambone humanity and the requisite reptile rage. He chewed scenery as Perry Smith in In Cold Blood. Sawed-off serpent Smith had an abusive father. Little Sleazer copped to the same. His performance was silly symbiosis. It’s all tics and mugs and squints and goofball grins. It recalls real-life rodent Charles Schmid, “the Pied Piper of Tucson.” Schmid killed teenage girls in the ’60s. He was short, dark, and narcissistic. He wanted to be an actor. He wore eye shadow. He jammed tin cans in his boots and boosted his height.

  Little Sleazer as Smith via Schmid. The four In Cold Blood victims plus the Pied Piper’s three. Little Sleazer as current murder suspect. Little Sleazer’s rap on murder in People magazine:

  “A murderer only becomes a murderer after he or she kills somebody. But what are they before they’re on death row? They’re you or me.”

  Jive wisdom. The universal-guilt chestnut. Nonjudgmentalism as actor’s creed.

  Little Sleazer on murder redux:

  “I have played a lot of people who killed. I have been on death row. You know, I have never met a murderer in my life. That’s because there ain’t any. There are people who crossed the line. Some of us don’t cross the line.”

  Wooooo! Heavy shit. Sinatra might make it work. A shrug, a Pall Mall, a martini. A sharkskin suit from Sy Devore. The frail frame that boffed Ava G. The Chairman, maybe. He granted grace and gravity to the sheerest of shit and stung you with style. Little Sleazer—no, nein, and nyet.

  He’s lachrymose killer Perry Smith—that crap-your-pants crybaby. He’s funky führer Jimmy Hoffa toned down for TV. He’s family slayer John List—he didn’t kill no one, there ain’t no killers, there’s just you and me.

  Little Sleazer played Baretta. He frappéed us frigid and fried us with that bird on his cue. He was fortyish. He was cooool.

  Cooool is childish. Cooool is nonsense. Cooool is the pinnacle of male-gender jive. If you don’t know it at forty plus, you never will.

  Combine coolness and rage. Merge them maladroit. You get the psycho default mode of bad actors.

  Who tend to indulge bad habits. Who tend to disdain inhibition. Who tend to confuse their lives with their roles.

  The Mail-Sex Mama’s mama on her brief son-in-law:

  “He would be real nasty and sometimes he would be sweet. She liked him when he was sweet. I told her that he’s an actor, and how is she going to know when he’s acting?”

  SHE DIDN’ T . She was acting. Her wife-coquette performance blunted her to cues. She was a narrow-range actor. She deployed her fading assets. Her default mode was sex.

  She was a con. She ran her short con from mail drops. She read lonely hearts and singles mags and made her marks from plaintive pleas for poon. She placed classified ads. She sent out skin pix and dunned dolts for money. Her long con was celebrity marriage and judiciously unplanned pregnancy.

  She was a hell-bent harlot. She hailed from New Jersey. She died a month shy of forty-five. She wanted to be an actress. She wanted to marry a movie star.

  She married a Jersey guy. They had two kids. She boogied. He watched the kids. She pursued “careers.”

  The law nailed her. Bad checks/Jersey/’86. Dope busts in ’88 and ’89. A widower answered her ads. She married him in Nevada. He gave her a roll of quarters. She split. He never saw her again.

  Check beef #2—1994. Jail time and a move on. Arkansas beckons. Ditto the fuzz. Stolen credit cards/’96/a fine and probation. California beckons. She stalks Jerry Lee Lewis. She has a daughter. She claims that Lewis fathered it. Lewis denies it. She declines a blood test.

  She has a thing with Marlon Brando’s son, Christian. Christian is a killer. He capped a cat named Dag Drollet and did joint time. Jerry Lee Lewis is nicknamed “the Killer.” Little Sleazer plays killers and denies that killers exist.

  Thrill to the theme. Preview the prickles of prick-teaser destiny.

  The Mail-Sex Mama moved on. She placed classifieds. She kept a journal. She made notes to stalk Sugar Ray Leonard and Gary Busey. She stalked retreads within the realm of reason. She dug the dynamic of diminishing returns.

  She looped Little Sleazer. She sent out “Hi, single guy” letters and pix of her twenty years back. Her meshuga marriage moldered as misalliances do. Little Sleazer righteously resented her. She fitfully feared him. She kept an address book. There’s sweaty Jimmy Swaggart and paralyzed pussy poo-bah Larry Flynt. There’s freewheeling Frankie Valli and some doofus from The Dukes of Hazzard. It’s a dizzying D-list descent. It’s a hopped-up heap of hopeless hope.

  Hope springs infernal.

  Right up to May 4, 2001.

  The snuff vibed ’90s. The Clinton climate, O.J.’s ogrehood, victimhood visions reprised. It should have been then. The Victim was younger. She’s white trash worthy of Bill C.

  Little Sleazer played John List then. List lived in New Jersey. The Mail-Sex Mama was born there. Likewise Little Sleazer. It’s sinister symmetry.

  John List killed his family. He wanted to move on. There ain’t no killers. There’s just you and me.

  Blow jobs ain’t sex, but I came on her dress. There ain’t no perjurors or obstructors. There’s just you and me.

  Dig the decade. Tally the tabloid toll. Pry the precedents free. O.J. walks. Michael Jackson slimes loose. Little Sleazer could wiggle. Celebrity deaths and good things both come in threes.

  It’s 2002 now. May 4th is ten months gone. Some cases build slow or evaporate. That means there’s more or less than you see.

  They might indict. They might not. New suspects might bode and retreat.

  He’s got the kid. He’s a single dad. O.J. got the kids. It’s a single-dad symphony.

  Murder is always wrong. Fuck mitigation madness. Fuck the vicissitudes of victimology. Killers exist. There are too many and precious few. They ain’t you or me.

  Little Sleazer and O.J. should talk. They could meet at Vitello’s or Mezzaluna. O.J. knows the drill. They could share spit. O.J. could cuddle and counsel and instill inspirationally.

  Hang i
n. Act your way out. Pose with your daughter. Lies and circumstance might click your way. You might get lucky.

  I’ve Got the Goods

  We want the goods.

  Who knows who. Who blows who. Who’s got the pull and the gelt.

  Who’s got the size.

  Who’s got the habit.

  Who’s got the appetite.

  Family dirt doesn’t count. Shared blood means shared secrets and reciprocal pacts not to tell. Friendship entails codes of silence and threat. Don’t dish my dirt or I’ll dish yours and I’ll dip deeper yet.

  We’re the vigorous vultures of verisimilitude. We feed off the luridly authentic. It makes us feel alive.

  We require a dish-dipping disjuncture. Distance on our disillusionment. We can’t carve carrion too close to ourselves. It subtracts the Allure from Alive.

  Dystopian dish demands a dynamic. Demigods to devirginize. Star-stamped stand-ins for you and me.

  The dynamic digs deep. We want our demigods divinely deigned and delivered defiled. We want them to soar above us and be us under the skin.

  Godlike. Attainable. A confounding contradiction.

  Only fools want to fuck movie stars and models. That anoints us a fool nation. We want Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Rita with the DTs. We want Rock Hudson in Giant and Rock at the Lavender Lounge.

  Some savvy publications have exploited this need. They debuted in the early ’50s.

  The scandal rags.

  Confidential/Rave/Whisper/Lowdown/TopSecret/On the Q.T./ Hush-Hush.

  Cheezy covers. Tall print. Clashing color schemes. Jarring shades that agitated the eye.

  Cheap paper. Typos and misspellings. Back-page ads.

  X-ray glasses. Sex guides. Home law school.

  The rags raged. The rags ran concurrent with the Red Scare. The rags subverted thought in a subversion-minded era. The rags hit right on cue.

  The movie biz was 40 years old. Toga epics and musicals reigned. Film noir redistributed paranoia.

  Nightclubs held sway. TV was new. It fed us jingoism and pap. Joe and Jane America lived through the Big War and got sucker punched by Korea. They dug the boom economy and bought the party line. They suffered night sweats. They built bomb shelters. They sniffed the cultural air. They developed an Us-versus-Them thing.