by James Ellroy
It worked for a while, but gradually I began fucking up. My performance on the streets deteriorated as my dependence on alcohol grew. I finally committed an irrevocable act, and my career was over. Fortunately I had done Cal Myers a big one during my days with the Vice Squad, and now I was the repo-prince of the new car king of the Valley.
I remembered what Stan The Man had said last night: that he didn’t have to be a caddy. My feeling three days ago as I was waiting for Irwin had been prophetic: my life was changing, my vistas were endless in this charisma fixated society—if I didn’t blow this case.
I parked and walked several blocks to the ruins of Solly K’s fur empire. From a block away I could see a crowd of spectators looking interestedly into a roped-off area. Two patrolmen were watching the crowd. There was one patrol car and two red fire-marshals’ cars parked on the sidewalk.
When I got to the site of the leveled building I saw men in business suits poking in the rubble, carrying evidence kits and talking guardedly among themselves. I waited for them to finish. The site was one of total devastation: mountains of charred wood and insulation, piles of ashes, soot everywhere. It had settled on adjoining buildings and some storeowners had set workmen out to scrub down their walls.
I had no idea how large Kupferman’s warehouse had been. The facade was deceiving—the structure itself had extended back a quarter of a city block. From what I could see, no other buildings had been even singed by the fire. Fat Dog’s arson skills had improved since his Molotov Cocktail days. I was impressed.
One of the detectives was walking out of the rubble, brushing soot from his pants and looking worried. He was a burly cop, about fifty. I watched him move away from the crowd of onlookers toward an unmarked police car. I intercepted him as he unlocked the door. “Excuse me,” I said, “my name is Brown. I’m a private investigator.”
I handed him my photostat to prove it. He checked it out carefully and handed it back. “What is it, Mr. Brown? I’m very busy.”
I ran off my hastily prepared cover story: “I won’t keep you long. Sol Kupferman has hired me to look into the fire. He trusts the police and firemarshals to do a thorough investigation, but he wants this thing covered from all angles. Right now I only want to know one thing. Was it arson?”
The cop looked me over from head to toe. “You should know that police officers at crime scenes do not give out confidential information to civilians. We will be in touch with Mr. Kupferman. Good day.”
I watched him get into his car and drive off. He had the drawn, abstracted look of a veteran cop just handed a tough one. His worried expression was more than enough confirmation. I walked back to my car, then headed for the gas station at Franklin and Argyle to see Omar Gonzalez, conspiracy buff.
Franklin and Argyle was a blast from my past; one of the big ones. In June of 1972, on information supplied by Jack Skolnick, I led a raid on the notorious Castle Argyle, methedrine capitol of the West Coast. An eight-story Moorish apartment house built in the 20’s, the Castle Argyle was a hotbed of hippie intrigue in the early 70’s. Skolnick had told me he had been approached by one “Cosmo,” a UCLA chemistry major and resident of the castle, with an offer to sell him three gallons of liquid meth amphetamine for $5,000. The street value was close to half a million. I was hot for adventure and began staking the castle out, along with an obnoxious rookie patrolman named Snyder. We never told our superiors or the guys in Narcotics what we were doing. We were rogue cops, out for the big kill.
Cosmo lived on the sixth floor and had dozens of visitors nightly. Hiding behind some towering hibiscus plants, Snyder and I heard Cosmo’s departing guests remark on the great quality of his stuff. After three nights of this, we decided we had enough to act on and scheduled our raid for the following evening. We could have pulled it off low-key, dressing in hippie disguises of beard, moustache, and love beads from Bert Wheeler’s Magic Store on the Boulevard, and making a discreet buy before lowering the boom; but fueled by large quantities of Old Grand Dad, we decided to break the door down and go in with shotguns.
We did and it worked. Until Snyder got disappointed. Cosmo and his girlfriend submitted quietly, scared shitless by the two oversized short-hairs with badges pinned to their chests and wielding heavy firepower. They led us to their stash, let us handcuff them, and waited meekly as we phoned for a patrol car and a matron for the girl. But Snyder wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to shoot off his shotgun. He was heartbroken that he had missed his opportunity. He said the bust was like getting laid without getting your dick sucked first.
He rumbled through the apartment opening drawers and knocking over chairs. Then he saw the Che Guevara poster, life-size, taped to a gilt-covered bedroom mirror. “Brownie,” he called, “look at this.” I came into the bedroom, leaving my handcuffed prisoners unguarded. Snyder, late of the U.S. Marine Corps was aghast with indignation. “I’m gonna kill him, I’m gonna kill that Commie cocksucker!” he cried, and blasted Che Guevara, the mirror, and a good part of the bedroom wall to kingdom come with his Remington pump. Before I could stop him, he blasted the other wall, sending Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to hell. When the dust cleared, Snyder was grinning like a sated lover, our prisoners were screaming “Police brutality” and I quite literally shit in my pants.
A few minutes later we heard the sirens. I looked out the window and saw eight black-and-whites jamming up the streets. Knowing my trigger-happy colleagues craved excitement as much as my lunatic partner and I and might open fire at any moment, I ran down six flights of stairs, through the lobby and out the door of the building. When I hit the long walkway that led down to the street, I threw my hands above my head and yelled, “Police officer, don’t shoot!”
Some of the cops standing by their patrol cars with hardware at the ready recognized me and motioned me to join them. My mind racing with stories to explain the shooting, I ran toward them. Just as I was about to reach the street my half-empty pint of Old Grand Dad slipped out of my waistband and broke on the sidewalk in front of me. At that moment a merciful death was all I wished for. Liquid feces were running down my legs and my career was ruined. I would have to get a job as a security guard for a buck fifty an hour and drink Gallo muscatel. It was all over. Until a tough-looking old patrol sergeant started to laugh. Others joined him as I stood there, mute, lest I increase my culpability. The laughter was getting louder as the old sergeant pulled me aside and whispered “Is there anyone hurt up there, son? Is your partner okay?”
I told him everything was okay, except for some property damage.
“We can handle that,” he said. A group of officers went upstairs to rescue Cosmo and his girlfriend from Snyder, and Snyder from himself.
I was driven back to the station where I took a shower and changed clothes. In the report that was filed, no mention was made of the shotgun blasts (the suspects having been coerced into silence), my bottle, or the shit in my pants. Snyder and I received a commendation and by the perverse logic of the macho mentality my floundering police career was back in full stride.
The Mobil Station where Omar Gonzalez worked was catty-corner from the scene of my past triumph. The place was deserted when I pulled in, so I pulled up to the ethyl pump and served myself. I looked in vain for a Chicano in his late twenties. When my tank was full, I went searching for the attendant and found him under the lube rack working on a car. He turned around to face me, a stocky, affable-looking kid of about twenty. “I’ve got the exact change,” I said, “I know you guys appreciate it.” The kid gave me a pleasant smile as I handed him the money. “By the way,” I said, “is Omar around? I’m a buddy of his.”
The kid looked at me strangely. “Omar ain’t been around for two weeks. He ain’t at the recovery house, either. I don’t know where the hell he is. He gets away with murder ’cause the customers like him. The boss would give me the axe quick if I pulled the shit Omar does.”
“What kind of shit does Omar pull? I asked. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”
I walked over to check out Omar’s car. I wrote down the license number on my notepad, then looked in the front window. The seats were upholstered in white naugahyde and the brownish matter that was caked in splotches on the driver’s side looked like dried blood. The back seat was covered with a green tarpaulin and underneath it were shapes resembling boxes. I didn’t have to think twice. The doors of the car were locked and my master keys were back at my pad. I ran to my car and opened the trunk, digging out a blank repo order and my bumper jack.
The kid was finishing up with the woman in the convertible as I ran by him. I stopped and shoved the repo order in his face. “I’m a private investigator,” I yelled, “This is a repossession order for that car. I’m taking it.”
His jaw dropped and he just stood there while I went to work. I gave a quick look around for cops, then slammed the bumper jack full force into the front window of the Plymouth. The safety glass shattered inward and I reached through the hole and opened the door.
I scraped off some of the dried matter on the seat cover and smelled it. It was definitely blood. I swung the front seat forward, dug under the tarpaulin and pulled out two cardboard boxes. They were light and I slung them easily onto the trunk of the car to open.
The attendant was at my side now, looking nervous. “Hey man, are you sure this is legal?” he said, his voice breaking.
“Yeah, punk, this is legal. Now get the fuck out of my way,” I said, almost screaming.
I watched him retreat toward the lube rack, then dug into the boxes. When I saw what I had I almost fainted. The first box contained bookies’ ledgers, eight or nine of them, bound in brown leather. My Vice Squad experience was paying off: the bettors’ names were in numbered code in one column, and in the succeeding columns were amounts of money, dates, and check marks probably indicating collections. I flipped through all the ledgers quickly. They were identical in their layout. The same margining, but with different codings, dates, and amounts of money. The dates went back twelve years. Wedged into the back of the bottom ledger were eight or ten blank Los Angeles County checks, the kind used for paying employees and disbursing Welfare money. I looked through all the ledgers for envelopes or something else to tie into the blank checks, but found nothing.
I ripped open the second carton and almost died on the spot. The box was filled with pornographic photos, identical in theme and backdrop to the ones I had seen on the walls of Fat Dog’s arson shack: the same women, the same sleazy rooms, the same cheap bordertown souvenirs. Oh Omar, you crazy motherfucker, I kept thinking, what have you wrought! But I wasn’t prepared for what came next: all the blood in my body jammed to my head and my lungs expanded and contracted like an accordion gone mad. I was looking at glossy color photos of Jane Baker, cellist, nude with her legs wide open, her mouth and eyes set in an attitude of sexual challenge: “Take me if you can. If you perform, I’ll make it well worth your while.” She had a beautiful, lithe body and her lust seemed genuine: her pubis was wet and her nipples were swollen.
My mind raced in a thousand different directions, and every variation of the Baker-Kupferman case that I came up with went haywire in the light of this new evidence. All I knew for certain was that I had two cases now.
I ran back to my car, got a crowbar out of my back seat and returned to the Plymouth and pried open the trunk. It was empty. I hauled the two boxes over to my car and locked them in my trunk.
The attendant was sitting in the office drinking a Coke, sullen and dejected. He looked up when I walked in, backing off like I was going to hit him. I controlled my excitement and spoke to him gently: “I’m sorry I yelled at you, but this is very important stuff I’m involved in. I’ve got to get in touch with Omar Gonzalez. It’s urgent. I need his home address and the phone number of that drug rehab place where he hangs out.”
He waited a moment, then flipped through a Rolodex next to the telephone. He called out a number and I grabbed the phone and dialed it. A woman answered on the third ring. I told her it was urgent that I speak to Omar Gonzalez. She said that Omar hadn’t been at the center in over three weeks. She told me that he was an unpaid drug counselor who conducted group therapy sessions with Chicano youngsters, and that he came and went as he pleased. In a condescending voice she said that Omar was a passionate and mercurial young man, given to disappearing for weeks at a time, but a gifted counselor who had real rapport with young people. The woman started to embark on a discourse about the drug problem, but I cut her short and hung up.
The attendant was staring at me, slack-jawed and awe-inspired.
“What’s Omar’s address?” I asked.
He consulted the Rolodex again. “It’s 1983 Vendome. That’s in Silverlake. Tacoland.”
I gave the kid one of my business cards. It had my home number as well as the office one on it. “If Omar shows up, you tell him to call me. Tell him it’s very important. Tell him I know who killed his brother.” I patted him on the shoulder and winked at him. He gave me a smile that tried hard to be conspiratorial. I got in my car and jammed for Silverlake.
Silverlake is a beautiful hilly enclave of middle and lower middle-class dwellings east of Hollywood. The hills are steep and the roads circuitous. Houses and apartment buildings are set back from the street and often hung with heavy shrubbery, so it’s easy to get lost.
I turned off Sunset onto Silverlake Boulevard and went under the bridge that marks the informal border of the area. I expected it to take a while to find Vendome, but I blundered onto it, about half-a-mile north of Sunset. 1983 was a court of small bungalows separated by knee-high white picket fences. I parked half a block away and walked breezily into the courtyard. There was a bank of locked metal mailboxes next to the first bungalow on the left, where I learned that Omar Gonzalez lived in number 12. His box was crammed full of mail, so it was fair to assume Omar hadn’t been around for awhile.
Bungalow 12 was at the back end of the court, on the right. Like all the others, it was white clapboard, weather-beaten and musty. I rang the bell and got no answer, then tried the flimsy wooden door. It was locked. I walked around to the side of the bungalow and tried the windows. They were locked, and dust-covered Venetian blinds kept me from peering in.
I went looking for the manager. The mailbox directed me to number 3. I rang the bell and an aging slattern in a housecoat opened the door suspiciously, keeping the screen door shut. When I told her I had a telegram for Omar Gonzalez in number 12, she jumped back as if buzzed by a swarm of bees. “Is something wrong, ma’am?” I asked.
“Omar ain’t been around for weeks,” she said, opening the door a crack and reaching for the nonexistent piece of paper with one hand.
“I can’t do that, I have to give it to the addressee himself. Thank you, ma’am.”
She gave me a frightened look and slammed the door. Something was wrong.
I walked to a liquor store at the end of the block and bought a ginger ale. Drinking it and eyeballing the pretty Chicanas passing by consumed twenty minutes. That seemed like a safe interval.
I walked back to the court. No one was around and the manager’s door was closed and all the shutters drawn. On the porch of number 12, I gave a quick look in both directions, drew my gun and kicked the door open. Crouching in the combat stance, I went into the dark apartment, gently closing the door behind me.
It was dead quiet and I stood there a long moment until my eyes became accustomed to the dark. Gradually the outlines of a turned-over s
ofa, an upended bookshelf, and mound of books became visible. Several potted plants had been knocked off a win-dowsill, spreading broken plaster and dirt on the floor, and a large carpet had been pulled up and wadded ceiling-high into a comer. I moved cautiously, gun first, into the other rooms. The small kitchen off to the right was similarly devastated: the cupboards had been ransacked, dishes lay in heaps on the floor, and the refrigerator had been knocked over, its rancid contents fouling the air. The bathroom was a shambles, but the bedroom had been hit the worst: broken glass from wall mirrors was everywhere, the bed had been torn apart and the mattress ripped to shreds, clothes had been torn out of the closet and lay strewn on top of the other rubble. An old gas heater had been ripped out of the wall and now lay among the pile of mattress stuffing.
The trashers had done a good job: there was nothing personal to be found belonging to Omar Gonzalez. No papers, journals, or memorabilia of any sort, just the detritus of a young man’s life. I poked about in the rubble some more, this time with the lights on. I was looking for bloodstains. There was none. I put my gun back in its holster, went into the bathroom, found a large towel and wiped every plane and surface I could have possibly touched.
The sunlight and hot summer air were jarring as I walked outside. I was troubled. For the first time since the onset of my case, I didn’t know what to do.
Still troubled, I drove to the bank and withdrew two thousand in twenties for operating expenses, then went home and spent a long evening listening to Bruckner. Before I went to bed I laid out my light blue seersucker suit, yellow buttondown shirt, and navy blue print tie. I wanted to look good for Jane Baker.
