My Dark Places

by James Ellroy

  He became a cop at just the right time. He could cleave to simple notions with a clear conscience. He could kick ass with legal impunity. He could postpone aspects of his cop education and come of age as a homicide detective.

  He bought the whole illusion back in 1962. He knew the system worked. Jail duty was doable. He got a twisted kick out of the inmates. They played their roles according to the script of the time. The jailers did, too.

  He married Ann in December ’62. He transferred to Nor-walk Station a year later. He spent his first anniversary out in a patrol car. Ann was hurt and pissed.

  They started fighting. Ann wanted all of his time. He wanted all of her time precisely synced to his schedule. The L.A. County Sheriff’s demanded most of his time. Something had to give.

  They fought. His marriage turned into his parents’ marriage with the volume up and lots of “Fuck you”s. Ann had this abandonment complex. Her mother left her and shacked up with an armed robber. The guy took Mom with him on a cross-country heist spree. Ann had this overtly screwed-up childhood.

  They fought. They reconciled. They fought. He resisted scads of cop-chaser women out to throw him some trim. The LASD hovered as his potential divorce co-respondent.

  He loved patrol work. He loved the flow of unexpected events and the daily mix of new people in trouble. Norwalk was a “gentlemen’s station.” The population was white and the pace was slow. The county ding farm was on his beat. The dings wandered off and pulled amusing stunts stark naked. The Norwalk deputies ran a ding taxi service. They were always running some ding back to the farm.

  He enjoyed his Norwalk tour of duty. The system worked and crime was containable. Some of the older guys saw hard times coming. The Miranda decision was fucking things up. The balance of power had shifted from cops to criminal suspects. You couldn’t log confessions with sweat-box tricks and phone-book shots to the kidneys.

  He didn’t hold with those tactics. He didn’t pack black-leather sap gloves with 16-ounce palm weights. He wasn’t a violent guy. He tried to reason with unruly types and only fought when he had to.

  He flipped his patrol car in mid-pursuit and almost died on the spot. He tangled with a teenage glue sniffer and took some heavyweight lumps. He responded to an accident call and swooped down a two-vehicle pile-up. A man was dead in his truck. His head smashed into the radio dials and kicked the volume way up. You could hear the song “Charade” for blocks around.

  Norwalk gave him some wild moments. They were bush league compared to Watts in August ’65.

  Ann was eight months pregnant. They were driving north on the Long Beach Freeway. Their view was high and expansive. They saw a dozen fires blazing.

  He pulled off the freeway and called Norwalk Station. The watch commander told him to suit up and report to Harvey Aluminum. Harvey was deep in a labor-management conflict. The LASD had a command post set up there already.

  He dropped Ann off and blasted over to Harvey. The parking lot was jammed with black & whites and deputies in full riot gear. The command post was dispatching four-man units. He grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and three temporary partners.

  The deal was 12-hour shifts. The deal was go bust looters and firebugs. The deal was scour Watts and Willowbrook—the flashpoint of all this nigger voodoo.

  He went into it in broad daylight. The heat was somewhere up in the 90s. The fires added some heat. His riot gear added some more. South L.A. was all heat and frenzy.

  Looters were gutting liquor stores. Looters were guzzling brand-name stuff right there. Looters were pushing shopping carts down the street. The carts were chock-full of booze and TV sets.

  Gunshots popped continuously. You couldn’t tell who was shooting who. The National Guard was out in force. They looked young and dumb and scared and plain trigger-happy.

  You couldn’t patrol logically. Too much came at you too fast. You had to snag looters at random. You had to work by whim and the stimulus of the moment. You couldn’t gauge the direction of gunshots. You couldn’t trust the guardsmen not to spray rounds and kill you with ricochets.

  It was uncontainable disorder. It grew in direct proportion to their attempts to control it. A deputy was pushing a crowd back. A looter grabbed his shotgun. It discharged and blew his partner’s brains out.

  It went on and on. The action dispersed and reconstellated unexpectedly. He worked three whole days of it. He shagged dozens of looters and lost weight from heat exposure and adrenaline overload.

  The action tapped out from some kind of mass exhaustion. Maybe the heat wore the rioters down. They made their statement. They brightened up their shitty lives. They gorged themselves with cheap booty and convinced themselves they’d gained more than they lost.

  The cops lost their collective cherry.

  Some denied it. They attributed the riot to a specific series of criminally spawned events. Their logic of cause-and-effect went no deeper.

  A lot of cops went into default mode. Unruly niggers were unruly niggers. Their inbred criminal tendencies should now be suppressed even more rigorously.

  He knew better. The riot taught him that suppression was futile. You don’t burn down your own world for no good reason. You couldn’t shut people down or keep people out. The more you tried, the more chaos would supersede order. The revelation thrilled him and scared him.

  The twins were born a month after the riot. His marriage ran smooth for a while. He studied for the sergeant’s exam and worked Norwalk Patrol. He pondered the lessons of Watts.

  He lived in two worlds. His family world was uncontrollable. The lessons of Watts failed him at home. He knew how to handle criminals. He couldn’t handle the volatile woman he loved.

  The novelty of kids wore off. They started fighting again. They fought in front of the boys and felt bad about it.

  He made sergeant in December ’68 and transferred to Firestone Station. Firestone was high-density, high-crime, all black. The pace was frantic. He learned to work at triple his Norwalk rate.

  He worked as a patrol supervisor. He ran from Code 3 call to Code 3 call every shift. Firestone was dope and armed robbery and brutal domestic calls. Firestone was a riot zone back in ’65. The folks there had their own post-riot revelations going. Firestone was sidewalk crap games and guns. Firestone was the child who climbed into the dryer and got burned and spun to death. Firestone was decelerated chaos. Firestone could blow fast.

  He spent four years there. He finished his patrol tour and went on the station detective squad. He did some community relations work. Anything that bridged the cop-civilian gap was good for business. The LAPD had fucked cop-civilian relations to an all-time fare-thee-well. He didn’t want the Sheriff’s to follow their lead.

  He transferred to the auto-theft detail. He developed sound detective skills and reveled in the specific nature of the work. Theft crimes were cut-and-dried. They boiled down to violated ownership. They were isolated problems that ended with the apprehension of specifically guilty parties. He didn’t have to pop harmless kids for marijuana. He didn’t have to referee domestic disputes and dispense marital advice like he knew what he was talking about.

  Detective work was his calling. He had the social skills and the temperament for it. Patrol work was a breathless sprint with no fixed finish line. Detective work was sedately paced by comparison. He plugged into suspects one-on-one and co-opted their knowledge. He moved deeper into the cop-criminal matrix.

  He came to Firestone as a policeman. He left as a detective. He went to Internal Affairs Division and hounded other cops.

  Cops who stole money. Cops who leaned too hard on their nightsticks. Cops who used dope. Cops who jacked off at porno movies. Cops who gave blow jobs to inmates in county holding tanks. Cops who were ratted off for imagined offenses out of pure spite.

  IA was brutal. The moral turf was hazily defined. He did not enjoy hassling fellow cops. He sought out the literal truth pertaining to their situations and stressed mitigating factors. He felt empathy for some ve
ry twisted men. He knew how the job undermined family contracts. A fair portion of the cops he knew were functioning alcoholics. They were no better or worse than cops accused of smoking dope.

  He had a handle on his own shortcomings. He used them to illustrate the big bottom line. You don’t steal or use dope or engage in perverted activities. You don’t exploit your cop status for illegal gain. You have to impose those restrictions on the cops you investigate.

  It was a morally valid line. It was an ego-driven simplification.

  His marriage was dead stalled. He wanted out. Ann wanted out. They kept waiting for the other one to get up some guts and end it. They bought a house and sunk their hooks in each other deeper. He fought a persistent urge to chase women.

  He left IA in ’73. He went to the Lakewood Station squad and worked auto theft and auto burg for two years. He went to Metro in ’75.

  Metro worked county-wide. He ran a five-man surveillance team all over the county map. LA. County expanded for him. He saw crime booming in poverty pockets where people had just enough coin for drugs and cheap pads. The landscapes there were flat and polluted. The people lived in operational squalor. They moved between smoggy towns like rats in a maze. Freeways spun them around in circles. Drugs were a closed circuit of brief ecstasy and despair. Burglary and robbery were drug-adjunct crimes. Murder was a common by-product of drug use and illegal drug trafficking. Drug enforcement was a futile closed circuit. Drug use was an insane and entirely understandable reaction to life in bumfuck L.A. County. He learned these things driving elevated freeways.

  He worked Major Frauds in ’78 and moved to VOIT in ’79. VOIT stood for Violent Offender Impact Team. It was a small unit mandated to apprehend serial armed robbers. The job crossed over to Homicide.

  Ann got a calling. She obeyed it on instinct. She entered nursing school and excelled at the work. Her stab at independence resurrected their marriage.

  He respected her profession. He respected her pursuit of a career at age forty. He liked the way her calling meshed with his new calling.

  He wanted to work Sheriff’s Homicide. He wanted to investigate murders. He wanted it with a passionate sense of commitment.

  He called in some favors and got it. It brought him to the body off the roadside and the body in the Marina. It brought him to the girl stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.

  His ghosts.

  13

  He learned some things about murder early on. He learned that men killed with less provocation than women. Men killed because they were drunk, stoned and pissed off. Men killed for money. Men killed because other men made them feel like sissies.

  Men killed to impress other men. Men killed so they could talk about it. Men killed because they were weak and lazy. Murder sated their lust of the moment and narrowed down their options to a comprehensible few.

  Men killed women for capitulation. The bitch wouldn’t give them head or give them her money. The bitch overcooked the steak. The bitch threw a fit when they traded her food stamps for dope. The bitch didn’t like them pawing her 12-year-old daughter.

  Men did not kill women because they were systematically abused by the female gender. Women killed men because men fucked them over just that rigorously and persistently.

  He considered the rule binding. He didn’t want the rule to be true. He didn’t want to see women as a whole race of victims.

  The issue of free will perplexed him. Many female murder victims put themselves in harm’s way and passively co-signed their death warrants. He didn’t want to concede the point. He had a gender-wide crush on women. It was big and random and essentially idealistic. It kept him faithful when his marriage strayed bad.

  His first victim was female.

  Billy Farrington broke him in at Sheriff’s Homicide. Billy was a black fashion plate. Billy wore custom suits to crime scenes replete with stiffs purging stomach gas and feces. Billy taught him to read crime scenes very slowly and deliberately.

  Billy was 55 and near the end of his law-enforcement career. Billy had a big block of vacation time accrued. Billy let him work the Daisie Mae case solo.

  It was a body dump up in Newhall. A man spotted a burning bundle and extinguished the flames. He called the New-hall Sheriff’s Station. The watch commander called Sheriff’s Homicide.

  Stoner rolled out. He sealed off the crime scene and examined the body.

  The victim was fully clothed. She was white and elderly. Her face was contorted. She looked almost mongoloid.

  She was wrapped in a U.S. flag and some baby blankets. The bundle was cinched with electrical cord. The blankets were soaked in gasoline or a similar noxious accelerant. She looked like she took some bludgeon shots to the head.

  Stoner walked the area. He saw no footprints, no tire tracks and no discarded bludgeon tools. The area was hilly and brush-covered. The killer probably carried the body up from a nearby access road.

  A coroner’s team arrived. They went through the victim’s scorched clothing.

  They found no identification. Stoner found a gold chain necklace. It looked like a peace sign or some kind of weird-ass symbol.

  Stoner bagged it. The coroner’s team removed the body.

  Stoner drove to the Hall of Justice and checked recent missing persons reports. Nothing matched his Jane Doe. He put out a teletype. It stressed the victim’s necklace and said she might be mentally retarded. He called the Information Bureau and told them to put out the word on Jane.

  Channel 7 News ran a TV spot that night. Stoner got a call a few minutes later.

  A man said he made the necklace. The pendant was an AA symbol. He sold the necklaces at AA meetings in Long Beach.

  Stoner drew a picture of the necklace and wrote up the facts on his case beneath it. He added his name and number at Sheriffs Homicide. He mimeographed a hundred copies and distributed them at every AA meeting in the Long Beach area.

  A man named Neil Silberschlog saw the flyers and called him. He said the victim sounded like an old AA girl. She was known as Daisie Mae. She was running with a young guy named Ronald Bacon. Silberschlog lived near Bacon. Bacon was driving Daisie Mae’s ’64 Impala. Daisie Mae was nowhere around. Silberschlog thought the deal was hinky.

  Stoner drove to Long Beach and met the informant. Silberschlog ID’d a morgue photo of the victim. He said she wasn’t retarded. She was just a crusty old drunk.

  Daisie Mae lived nearby. Silberschlog walked Stoner down to her pad.

  It was a dive. An old drunk named One-Eyed Betty was crashed out in the front room. Betty said she saw Daisie Mae’s car in front of Ronnie Bacon’s place. Ronnie had Daisie Mae’s watch. He changed the strap and gave it to his 16-year-old girlfriend. Ronnie just got popped for burglarizing a drugstore. He was in the Main L.A. County Jail.

  Stoner drove to the jail and interviewed Ronald Bacon. He was 25 years old and stone white trash. He said he went to AA for friendship. He knew Daisie Mae—but he sure didn’t kill her.

  Stoner drove back to Long Beach. He searched Bacon’s pad and found an empty gas can. A neighbor said Bacon sold him a blood-soaked couch.

  Stoner talked to One-Eyed Betty again. She recounted Daisie Mae’s last day on earth.

  Daisie Mae just got her welfare check. She wanted to buy a TV set. One-Eyed Betty and Ronald Bacon wanted to help her spend her money. They drove her around looking for cheap TVs.

  They were in Daisie Mae’s car. Bacon made Daisie Mae cash her welfare check. One-Eyed Betty went home. Bacon and Daisie Mae drove off alone.

  Stoner requested a warrant on Ronald Bacon. A deputy DA heard him out and filed homicide charges. Bacon was held to answer for one count of murder one.

  A woman called Stoner at the Bureau. She told him her daughter used to date Ronald Bacon. Bacon wrote her daughter a very suspicious letter.

  The tone was sniveling. Bacon said he just stole some money and was “here in the car with her.” He beat an old woman to death. He started grubbing for sympathy before he to
rched her body.

  A handwriting expert examined the letter and confirmed that Ronald Bacon wrote it. Bacon was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a no-parole stipulation. Stoner solved his first murder. He learned that men killed women and ran to other women in self-pity.

  A Norwalk man shot his wife. He aimed above her head and caught her right between the eyes. The man was just letting off steam. He stashed his marijuana plants before he reported the incident. Stoner popped him for murder two. He learned that men killed women out of boredom.

  A black woman shot and killed her husband. She buzzed Lennox Station and placed an anonymous prowler call after the fact. The dispatcher sent a car by her building. The deputies didn’t see any prowler. The woman called Lennox Station back. She told the dispatcher she shot her husband by mistake. He came in the window unexpectedly. She thought he was a prowler. She didn’t know that all incoming station calls were tape-recorded.