by James Ellroy
“Caddies on the pro tour is absolutely necessary, of course, but that’s another story. The club caddy is on his way out. Carts is coming in. Riviera went cart three years ago. Caddies is gonna blow it. They’re too unreliable. Never showing up, or showing up drunk. I’m lucky. If worst comes to worst, I can always do reupholstering. That’s my trade, but I hate it. I like looping for the freedom. I’m my own boss, except for the time I’m picking cotton. Besides, it ain’t too late for me to change my life. I’m only thirty-nine, like Jack Benny. My probation officer and my shrink have been helping me out a lot. I ain’t stolen no cars in over a year. Group therapy’s been helping me. My shrink tells me I don’t have to be a caddy if I don’t want to. That I can be what I want.
“It ain’t that way for Fat Dog, though. He’s locked into it. He don’t want to do nothing else. He hates niggers and he hates Jews, and that’s all he’s got. The shrink told me that people who hate other people real bad usually hate themselves. Maybe that’s how it is with Fat Dog. He’s got no friends, except Augie Dou-gall, who’s the only one in the world lame enough to put up with his shit. Fat Dog is always talking about this rich and powerful guy he knows, that he’s gonna team up with someday, but that’s bullshit. Fantasyland. If he wasn’t such a cheap, nasty prick, I’d feel sorry for him.
“Looping wouldn’t be such a bummer if it wasn’t for the guys who loop. Golf’s a great game, and golf courses is beautiful. It’s just the poor sad fuckers who pack the bags for a bunch of poor sad fuckers who can’t hit the ball that makes the whole thing so sad.”
Stan The Man finished his soliloquy, and I sighed in the darkness. I said, “I feel for you. I know how it is to be trapped, watching your life hotfoot it away. If your upholstering gig falls through, I can help you get started in the repossession racket. I know a lot of people. You could get paid for ripping-off cars. You’d have lots of free time to pursue whatever you wanted. Consider repo-ing, you might like it.” I took one of my business cards out of my wallet and handed it to him. “You can reach me at one of these numbers. I’ll do all I can to get you started.”
Stan put the card into his pocket and stared at me for a long moment. “Thanks,” he said. “I mean it. This has been one crazy night. I always figured that if someone offered me a break it would be some rich member at the club who liked the way I called putts, not some private eye repo-man. Let me think about it, okay? This is all happening real fast.”
“Think it over. Kick it around with your shrink. He might think it’s a bad extension of your disease, like me drinking all this fucking coffee to get a little wired. Let’s get out of here. I’ll look for Fat Dog later. Right now I’m cold and tired.”
We walked back to the car. A heavy fog was rolling in, clinging to the greenery and creating deep oceans of mist. There was a silence in the maintenance shack as we passed it. I drove Stan to his hotel in Culver City. We shook hands. He thanked me effusively, and promised to consider my offer. As I drove back to my pad all I could think of was one phrase: “Looping is sadness.”
The following day it seemed like a good idea to let sleeping Fat Dogs lie, at least for the moment. There were other angles to check out. My case was turning into a splendid example of inductive logic: searching for evidence a decade old to convict a killer whose identity I already knew. Since I was seeking to link Sol Kupferman to the Club Utopia, it seemed logical to start with the owner, Wilson Edwards.
Remembering that McNamara told me Edwards had a criminal record, I called Jensen at R&I for an address. He came through: Edwards had been busted the year before for possession of heroin. His address at that time was the Hotel Rector on Western Avenue just south of Hollywood Boulevard. I put on my intimidation outfit; a checked cotton sportcoat, tie, and contrasting slacks, and drove there.
The Hotel Rector was a thousand years old, and bespoke a despair that was uniquely Hollywood: the lobby was crowded with elderly pensioners awaiting their monthly stipends, black prostitutes, and low riders drinking beer. It smelled of urine and liniment. The loneliness there was almost tangible.
The old man at the desk told me that Wilson Edwards was still at the Rector and staying in room 311. I took the stairs. The hallways didn’t smell any better than the lobby and hadn’t been swept recently.
I knocked on 311. No answer. I knocked again. This time I heard the rumbling of a voice aroused from sleep. I knocked again, louder. Footsteps approached the door. “Eddie?” a voice called tentatively. “Is that you?”
Not wanting to disappoint anyone, I answered, “Yeah, it’s me. Open up.”
The man who opened the door was truly horrific. He looked like one of the concentration camp victims on the walls of Fat Dog’s shack: his gray skin hung slackly from prominent cheekbones, his eyes were sunken and filmy and the T-shirt and boxer shorts he was wearing encased his shrunken torso like a tent. He was shaking, and it took him several moments to realize I wasn’t Eddie. “You’re not Eddie,” he said finally.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not. Are you Wilson Edwards?”
“Yeah, are you fuzz?”
“No, I’m a private investigator. May I come in? I’d like to talk to you.”
His eyes turned shrewd, and as he sized me up he grabbed the door jambs with both hands for support. The veins in both arms were nearly obliterated. He was a long time junkie. I grabbed his left wrist. He tried to pull away, but I held on. Some of the tracks were recent.
“Is Eddie your connection?” I asked. “Are you sick now? You can tell me.” I tried to soothe him. “I won’t hurt you, I just want to ask you a few questions. It won’t take long.”
Seeing that he had no choice, Edwards motioned me inside. “I’m not sick yet, but I will be soon,” he said as I shut the door behind us. Then he started to laugh. “Man, that’s funny. I’m dying of cancer but I’m not sick yet. That’s funny.” He pointed to a beat-up armchair. “You have a seat. I’m gonna geez. I can’t talk to you till I get over these shakes.”
I sat down and Edwards went into the bathroom and shut the door. I checked out the room: it reeked of body odors, but was clean. Edwards was evidently something of a jazz buff. There were dozens of albums arranged neatly on a wall shelf, mostly be-bop and modern jazz. There was no phonograph in sight. Edwards returned to the room. He looked relieved, but no healthier. His eyes were dilated and his shakes had stopped.
His voice was somewhat calmer. “Dilaudid used to be delightful, but now I’ve got to be smacked-back for all the pain to go. Let’s make this fast. I don’t want you here when Eddie shows up.”
“How long have you got?” I asked.
“Maybe four, five months.”
“You should be in the hospital.”
“No way, José. That chemotherapy shit is a bum trip. I want to go out walking with my Lucy.” He made a gesture with his hand, indicating shooting up.
“Who supplies your stuff? It doesn’t look like you’ve got much money.”
“You didn’t come here to ask me that, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. I came here to talk to you about the Club Utopia.”
For an instant, surprise flashed into Edwards’s eyes, then he recovered and gave me a death’s head smile. “The Club Utopia burned down on December 10, 1968. The guys who did the job shuffled off this mortal coil two years later. The whole scene is a long-gone dead duck.”
“Perhaps. You owned the place, didn’t you?”
“Right.”
“Where did you get the money to buy it?”
“I saved it.”
“Where did you get the money for the liquor license?”
“I saved that, too.”
“You need juice to get a liquor license. Who did you know at the licensing bureau?”
“I knew a guy. I forget his name. It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t buy it, Edwards. I’ve got you pegged. A smack addict jazz fiend, circa 1950. All those records and you don’t even have a record player. A record player
has got to be good for five or six spoons. You’ve never had a pot to piss in, except maybe while you were fronting for the real owner of the Utopia. Those tracks on your arms tell your whole life story.”
“Things were different then. I had my shit together.”
“Don’t shit a shitter,” I said, raising my voice. “I want the truth. It’s important to me. We can do this either of two ways. One, we can wait until Eddie shows up, and I bust both of you for possession. That way you die in the jail ward of the County Hospital. Or, two, you can tell me what I want to know, and make a few bucks for your trouble. The choice is yours.”
Edwards gave it some thought. Fear quashed his hipster act. “If I talk to you and it gets back to certain people, it would be bad for me. I just want to die in peace. You can dig that, can’t you?”
“Sure. I’m a good liar. I can think fast. Wherever your information takes me, you can count on my not revealing my source. I live by the old code.” The old code: never give up your informant unless it can give you access to more and better information.
It didn’t take Edwards long. “What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Who really owned the Utopia, for starters,” I said.
“It was a guy named Sol Kupferman. A rich guy. A furrier.”
“Why was the joint in your name?”
“For tax purposes. Strictly a tax dodge. Kupferman owned half-a-dozen bars and liquor stores under phony names. He used to be in the rackets in the old days, and he couldn’t get any liquor licenses.”
“I heard that Kupferman was a big time bookie, back in the 50’s. Was he running a book at the Utopia?”
“Nothing big. He had a wire going to help defray tax costs and overhead. He was running steady in the black because the wire took care of all that.”
“Did Kupferman run the book himself?”
“No.”
“Who did?”
“He had this guy Ralston, used to be a ballplayer, take care of his action at all his spots. Ralston worked at this country club where he was a member. Kupferman paid him good.”
“How did he work it? Ralston, I mean.”
“He used to come by at odd times to pick up his bets. The bettors would leave their bread with the bartender. Ralston sent a big spade around to pay off. Ralston used to send the bets out to the track with caddies from the club.”
“What else do you know about the operation?”
“Nothing. I don’t know what you’re looking for, or why you’re even interested in all this ancient history. That’s all I know, but I can tell you this: it was just a small potatoes setup.”
Edwards was getting nervous. He was remarkably lucid for a man so close to death, but now the strain was starting to show.
“I can tell you’re starting to hurt. This might take a little longer. Why don’t you go into the can and get straight?”
He took my advice. When he closed the bathroom door, I hopped up from my chair and gave the room a quick toss. I opened drawers and cupboards and checked the contents of shelves. Nothing. Behind his record collection I found a County Disability check and a small prescription bottle of barbiturates. I let them lie. When Edwards came back, he looked no better. A corpse is a corpse. His voice was a little steadier though. He might have been able to handle himself twenty years ago.
“Shake it, daddy, what else do you want to know?” he said. Besides suffering from terminal cancer, he was suffering from terminal hipsterism.
“How did you know Kupferman? Why did he offer you this job?”
“Solly K knew my brother from his racket days. My brother was a punk, but he got around. My brother approached me, told me Solly needed someone to front a bar for him. I’d draw myself a cut each week, keep the books, and show up a couple nights a week to make it look good. For a C-note a week. I took the job, it’s that simple.”
“What kind of man was Kupferman?”
“Solly K is a sweetheart, a truly gentle person. I know for a fact that he’s been helping out a couple of old people whose kids got burned up in the torch. He felt real bad about the bombing. Like he was guilty himself.”
“He’s still taking care of you, isn’t he?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dilaudid is not cheap and heroin is twenty-five dollars a spoon, and you get it delivered. Someone is keeping you from really hurting. You haven’t got any money. Is Kupferman supplying you?”
Edwards began to tremble, and his voice rose to some otherworldly pitch of junkie indignation. “Solly K never hurt anyone! He keeps a lot of people from hurting! You never had a friend like that! Guys like you just know how to hurt people! That’s how you get your rocks off. Guys …” His angry voice trailed off into a coughing attack. I had learned all I was going to. It was enough. I had Fat Dog’s motive for the bombing down pat. I was anxious to be free of Edwards’s death stench. I remembered the money I promised him, but decided against it. Edwards was still coughing as I went out the door. As I looked back at him, he feebly flipped me the finger.
The hot, smoggy air that hit me as I walked out onto the street was a relief. Even the hookers and black pimps lounging in front of the Ail-American Burger looked good.
I walked back to the car, turned on the radio news and went into shock. A wail rose up in my throat as I listened: “A fire last night caused an estimated four million dollars’ damage to the Solly K Fur Salon and warehouse in Beverly Hills. The fire broke out at one-thirty A.M., sweeping through the handsome structure on Santa Monica Boulevard and Bedford Drive. Beverly Hills firemen quelled the blaze before it could spread to other buildings, but not before the fashionable fur showplace burned to the ground. There were no injuries and the cause of the blaze is now being investigated. Meanwhile, on a happier note …”
I switched it off. My head was banging like cymbals gone mad, with guilt and fear racing for control of my mind. I fought them off, taking deep breaths and telling myself it was all to the good: Fat Dog’s insanity was peaking and I was the only one who could stop him. I started the car and headed south on side streets, cutting corners and running stop signs.
I caught the Santa Monica Freeway westbound near Washington. There was a midmorning lull in traffic and I made good time. I got off the freeway at Lincoln and headed for the arson shack. The back yard looked the same: forgotten playthings and high grass. The door of the shack was open, and the place had been completely cleaned out: no arson supplies, tools, or pornography. The pseudo-gang graffiti I had painted on the walls had been crossed out with large brush strokes of the same color. Freshly painted obscenities covered the back wall near the workbench: “fuck,” “cocksuck,” “kill fuck,” and “cocksuck bastard.” I got down on my knees and looked around. Nothing.
Leaving the door ajar, I walked up to the front house and knocked on the door. A fat black woman in a muu-muu answered. “Yes?” she said suspiciously.
I sized her up quickly as a T.V. watcher and took my act from there: “My name is Savage,” I said, “I’m with the F.B.I. We have reason to believe that the man renting your back house is an escaped convict. We …” I never got the chance to finish. The woman threw open the screen door and almost threw herself on me, slamming her huge arms against her sides in frustration.
“You arrests that no good bum, officer!” she screamed. “That no good bum took off owing me two months’ rent, and threw all kind of filthy pictures on the grounds for all the little childrens to see. You arrests him! He called me a nigger bitch!”
I placed an arm on her quaking shoulder. “Hold on, ma’am,” I said. “Just let me ask a few questions, all right?”
“All right, Mr. Savage.”
“First of all, is this man who rents from you about forty years old, short, fat, with dirty golf clothes?”
“That’s the no-good bum!”
“Good. How long has he rented from you?”
“Goin’ on four years. He don’t live there, he just keep his Tijuana sin things there.”
&
nbsp; “What do you mean?”
“Dirty books! Dirty pictures! He tells me he the king of Tijuana. He tells me he gonna race dogs down there. He …”
I interrupted. “When did you see him last?”
“I sees him last night. He knocks on my door and says: ‘Bye-bye, nigger bitch. I’m goin’ to T.J. to claim my kingdom, but I’ll be back to throw you in the gas chamber.’ Then he points to the yard and says ‘I left plenty of reading material for the kiddies.’ Then he makes the devil’s sign at me and runs down the street! You arrests him, officer!”
I didn’t wait to find out what “the devil sign” was. I ran back to my car, leaving the woman standing on her porch, slamming her arms and demanding justice.
I took surface streets to Beverly Hills, to give me time to think. I put on KUSC. They were playing a symphonic piece that sounded like Haydn. I was exhilarated, so high that a cup of coffee might blow the top of my head off. I wondered what my elation stemmed from. My case had blown sky high, the two people I had vowed to protect were in grave danger, and Fat Dog Baker was almost certainly in Mexico.
Then it hit me. I was home. For the first time in my life I was on to something important, something vast and complex, and I was the sole arbiter of it. Before this, September 2,1967, had been the pivotal date of my life. I was twenty-one. On that date I had heard, really heard, music for the first time. It was Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Walter had been trying to get me to listen to classical music for years, to no avail. The First Movement of the Eroica went through me like a transfusion of hope and fortitude. I was off with German romanticism, listening to Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and Bruckner six, eight, ten hours a day. I had found truth, or so I thought, and a strange metamorphosis took place: infused with the romance of giants, I gave up my vague academic dream and became a cop. An uneasy, malcontented one at first, until the booze came along and made the low-level administration of power exciting beyond my wildest fantasies.
