by James Ellroy
Mentzer segued to other topics. Stoner and Avila needed more incriminating talk. They had to bug Rider and Mentzer again.
They decided to stage a dope buy. They called in Sheriffs Narco and worked out a plan.
They wired up a room at the Long Beach Holiday Inn. Rider called Mentzer. He said he was making a dope buy and needed a bodyguard. He offered Mentzer $200. Mentzer took the job.
They staged the buy in a parking lot near the hotel. They used real dope. Sheriff’s deputies portrayed coke dealers. Rider brought Mentzer up to his room after the buy. Stoner and Avila were hooked up to headphones next door.
Mentzer ran his mouth nonstop.
He had a load of guns and C-4 explosive stashed in a public storage locker. They shot Roy Radin with soft-point .22s. The stupid cops thought he was shotgunned.
C-4 was pure combustion. Public storage was a public health hazard. Stoner wanted the shit contained. He gave Rider an old safe and told him to call Mentzer. Rider called Mentzer and offered him the safe. Mentzer accepted the gift. Rider and Mentzer hauled the safe to the storage shack and put the guns and C-4 in it. Rider was wearing a body wire.
Mentzer said Larry Greenberger was dead. He shot himself accidentally. It happened in Okeechobee. Mentzer thought the deal was suspicious.
Stoner called the Okeechobee cops. They thought the deal was suspicious. Laney Jacobs was hiding out behind legal counsel. Stoner knew she shot Greenberger.
The Okeechobee cops called Stoner back. They told him Laney Jacobs was running. Stoner started tracking her by her credit card receipts.
It was time to hit hard.
Stoner went to Deputy District Attorney David Conn. He told him the entire story. He played the Rider-Lowe and Rider-Mentzer tapes. Conn gave him the green light.
Charges were filed. Warrants were secured. Stoner cooked up a plan with the Okeechobee cops.
They said they’d help him pin down Laney Jacobs. They’d call her lawyer and set up a meet and promise not to bust her for Larry Greenberger’s death. They’d say they just wanted to question her. They’d question her and bust her on a California warrant abstract. They’d hold her for the L.A. County Sheriff’s.
It was a great fucking plan.
Stoner set up a command post. It was midway between Marti’s house and Mentzer’s apartment. Stoner set up two SWAT teams to hit them.
Carlos Avila flew to Maryland to arrest Bob Lowe. Bob Deremer was on a long-haul truck job. Nobody knew where he was.
10/2/88.
The Okeechobee cops arrest Laney Jacobs. The SWAT teams hit Mentzer and Marti simultaneously.
They cut their phone lines and patch in calls on a closed circuit. They tell Mentzer and Marti to look out the window and see all the cops with guns. Mentzer and Marti look out their windows and walk outside with their hands up.
Search teams are deployed. Dope-and-bomb-sniffing dogs go with them. They rip through Marti’s house and Mentzer’s apartment.
Carlos Avila busts Bob Lowe. Local cops snag Bob Deremer in Lafayette, Indiana.
Deremer waives extradition. He’s transported to L.A. and arraigned on accessory charges. Laney Jacobs and Bob Lowe fight extradition. They remain in custody back east.
Carlos Avila is exhausted. Bill Stoner is exhausted. He’s still hooked on Tracy Lea Stewart. He still has a big hard-on for Bob Beckett Sr.
Laney Jacobs waived extradition at Christmas. She was transported to Los Angeles and held at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. Robbie Beckett went to trial in February ’89.
The trial lasted a week. The jury was out one hour. Robbie was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Daddy Beckett was scot-free. John Purvis was still in prison. The Fort Lauderdale cops gave up on the Hamway case.
Fuck John Purvis. He was already convicted. They had no case against Daddy Beckett, Paul Serio and Paul Hamway. They needed Robbie Beckett. Robbie would not betray his father.
It took three years to adjudicate the Cotton Club case. Prelims, motion hearings and the jury-selection process ate up months. The trial lasted fourteen months. The penalty phase dragged on. Carlos Avila retired. Bill Stoner worked for the prosecution team fall-time. He flew around the country. He interviewed a hundred witnesses. He logged in thousands of airplane miles and thousands of freeway miles. The Cotton Club case consumed four and a half years of his life.
The jury came back on 7/22/91. Mentzer, Marti, Lowe and Jacobs were found guilty. They all got life with no shot at parole. Stoner still didn’t know exactly why they killed Roy Radin.
Mentzer said their torture plans went screwy. Marti goaded Radin in the limo. Marti kept calling him a fat Jew. Marti shot him the moment they hit Caswell Canyon.
Marti told a different story. So did Lowe. Stoner was way past caring.
A Fort Lauderdale cop called Stoner in January ’93. He said John Purvis’s mother just hired a lawyer. The lawyer was going on some nighttime TV show. He intended to start a big ruckus. The Fort Lauderdale PD was reopening the Hamway case.
Stoner wished him well. The Fort Lauderdale cops reopened the case and mishandled it again.
They misidentified Paul Serio. They confused Daddy Beckett’s pal with a Vegas hit man of the same name. They figured the Vegas guy and Paul Hamway set the Susan hit up. They offered Daddy Beckett full immunity if he testified against them. Daddy Beckett accepted the deal and testified before a Florida grand jury. The grand jury handed down indictments against Paul Hamway and Paul Serio. Daddy Beckett told the cops that his Paul was not a Vegas hit man. His Paul was a schoolteacher currently living in Texas.
John Purvis was released from prison. The Fort Lauderdale cops popped the real Paul Serio. Serio contradicted Daddy Beckett’s account of the Hamway snuff and laid all the guilt on Daddy. Serio’s account was worthless. Daddy Beckett was exempt from prosecution.
John Purvis joined his mother and lawyer on the Phil Donahue show. Donahue screened some lively footage. It was Daddy Beckett’s taped confession to the Fort Lauderdale cops.
There’s Daddy Beckett. He’s showing the cops how he strangled Sue Hamway. There’s Daddy Beckett—exempt from prosecution. Daddy walked on the Stewart caper. Daddy breezed on Sue Hamway and her baby.
Robbie Beckett saw the show in Folsom Prison. He saw Daddy Beckett stage the Hamway snuff with true brio. He saw Daddy’s eyes. He knew he was reliving the moment he killed Tracy.
Robbie called Bill Stoner and told him he wanted to talk. Stoner and Dale Davidson flew up to Folsom. Robbie gave them a formal statement and agreed to testify against his father. He told them he wouldn’t piss backwards this time. Stoner and Davidson believed him.
Davidson drew up a warrant. It charged Robert Wayne Beckett with the murder of Tracy Lea Stewart. Stoner located Daddy Beckett in Las Vegas. He called in a Vegas PD fugitive team and arrested him in his front yard.
Daddy wanted to cut a deal. Stoner told him to get fucked. Daddy saw a judge. The judge said no bail. The L.A. courts were brutally backlogged. The cocksucker wouldn’t get to trial before 1995. Stoner was daydreaming a lot. He was seeing things fast and bright. He was spending lots of time with his dead women.
He was exhausted. He was retiring next month. A funny little thought kept running through his head.
He wasn’t sure he could give up the chase completely.
IV
GENEVA HILLIKER
You’re poised to run. You’ve got time and stealth on your side. Time favors runners. Their tracks disappear. You can’t tell how they hid before they vanished.
You don ’t want me to know. Your secret life was designed to shut certain men out. You ran from men and to men and cut yourself down to nothing. You possessed runner’s guile and wore runner’s camouflage. Your runner’s passion killed you.
You can ’t run from me. I ran from you for too long. This is where I force a runner’s confrontation.
It’s our time now.
14
I flew out to L.A. to see my mother’s mur
der file. My motives were ambiguous at best.
It was March ’94. Jean Ellroy was 35 years and 9 months dead. I was 46 years old.
I was living in high-line Connecticut. I had a big house like the ones I used to break into. I flew out a day early and got a suite at the Mondrian Hotel. I wanted to hit the file with a clear head and a cold heart.
It started six weeks back. My friend Frank Girardot called me. He said he was writing a piece on old San Gabriel Valley murders. The piece would be published in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Pasadena Star-News. It would spotlight five unsolved killings—my mother’s included. It would spotlight the L.A. Sheriff’s Unsolved Unit.
Frank would view my mother’s file. He would read the reports and see the crime scene photos. He would see Jean Ellroy dead.
It hit me immediately. It hit me hard and fast and on two distinct levels.
I had to see the file. I had to write about the experience and publish the piece in a major magazine. It would stir up publicity for my next novel.
I called my editor at GQ and pitched him. He jumped on the idea and talked to his boss. The boss green-lighted me. I called Frank Girardot and asked him to brace his men at Sheriff’s Unsolved. Frank contacted Sergeant Bill McComas and Sergeant Bill Stoner. They said I could view the file.
I made travel arrangements. The big L.A. earthquake hit and diverted me for weeks. The Hall of Justice was condemned. Sheriff’s Homicide moved out. Their files were stuck in transit. The delay gave me some time to dance with the redhead.
I knew it was time to confront her. An old photograph told me why.
My wife found the picture in a newspaper archive. She bought a duplicate copy and framed it. I’m standing at George Krycki’s workbench. It’s 6/22/58.
You can’t discern my state of mind. I might be bored. I might be catatonic. I’m not giving anything up.
It’s my life at ground zero. I’m too stunned or relieved or lost in calculation to evince signs of simple grief.
That picture was 36 years old. It defined my mother as a body on a road and a fount of literary inspiration. I couldn’t separate the her from the me.
I like to hole up in hotel suites. I like to turn off the lights and crank the AC. I like temperature-controlled and contained environments. I like to sit in the dark and let my mind race. I was set to meet Bill Stoner the next morning. I ordered a room-service dinner and a big pot of coffee. I turned out the lights and let the redhead take me places.
I knew things about us. I sensed other things. Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts. She taught me self-sufficiency by negative example. I possessed a self-preserving streak at the height of my self-destruction. My mother gave me the gift and the curse of obsession. It began as curiosity in lieu of childish grief. It flourished as a quest for dark knowledge and mutated into a horrible thirst for sexual and mental stimulation. Obsessive drives almost killed me. A rage to turn my obsessions into something good and useful saved me. I outlived the curse. The gift assumed its final form in language.
She hot-wired me to sex and death. She was the first woman on my path to the brilliant and courageous woman I married. She gave me an enduring puzzle to ponder and learn from. She gave me the time and place of her death to extrapolate off. She was the hushed center of the fictional world I’d created and the joyful world I lived in—and to date I had acknowledged her in an altogether perfunctory manner.
I wrote my second novel—Clandestine—in ’8o. It was my first confrontational swipe at Jean Ellroy. I portrayed her as a tortured drunk with a hyperbolically tortured past in hick-town Wisconsin. I gave her a nine-year-old son and an evil ex-husband who physically resembled my father. I threw in autobiographical details and set the bulk of the book in the early ’50s to spotlight a Red Scare subplot. Clandestine superficially addressed Jean Ellroy. It was all about her son at age 32. The hero was an ambitious young cop. He was out to fuck women and ascend at all costs. I was an ambitious young writer. I was hot to ascend.
Ascension meant two things. I had to write a great crime novel. I had to attack the central story of my life.
I set out to do that. I implemented my conscious resolve in an unconscious fashion. Clandestine was richer and more complex than my first book. The mother and son were vividly etched. They failed only by real-life comparison. They were not my mother and I. They were surrogate fictions. I wanted to get them out of the way and move on. I thought I could paint my mother with cold details and banish her that way. I thought I could dump a few boyhood secrets and sign myself off. Jean Ellroy was not my preferred murder victim. Elizabeth Short was. I dumped the redhead for the Dahlia again.
I wasn’t ready for Elizabeth yet. I wanted to address her as a seasoned novelist. I wanted to extend my dialogue with women first.
I split L.A. in ’81. It was too familiar and too easy. AA was too easy. I wanted to ditch all the people hooked on therapy and 12-step religion. I knew I could stay sober anywhere. I wanted to blast out of L.A. and limit my L.A. intake to the fictional L.A. in my head. Brown’s Requiem was coming out in October. Clandestine was set to be published some time in ’82. I had a third book finished. I wanted to start over in a sexy new locale.
I moved to Eastchester, New York—20 miles north of the Apple. I got a basement apartment and a caddy gig at Wykagyl Country Club. I was 33. I thought I was extremely hot shit. I wanted to prove myself in New York. I wanted to get heavy with the Dahlia and find the transcendental real-life woman I knew I’d never find in L.A.
New York was pure crystal meth. It meshed with my dual-world lifestyle. I wrote in my pad and lugged golf bags for a maintenance bankroll. Manhattan was a heartbeat away. Manhattan was full of provocative women.
My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I dug stern character. I dug radical and nonprogrammatic world-views. I disdained dilettantes, wannabes, incompetents, rock & rollers, therapy freaks, weirdo ideologues and all women who did not exemplify a sane version of the midwestern-Protestant/profligate balance I inherited from Jean Ellroy. I dug handsome women more than women other men deemed beautiful. I dug punctuality and passion and considered the two equal virtues. I was a moralistic and judgmental zealot operating on a time-lost/life-regained dynamic. I expected my women to toe the hard-work line and submit to the charismatic force I thought I possessed and fuck me comatose and make me submit to their charisma and moral rectitude on an equitable basis.
That’s what I wanted. It’s not what I got. My standards were slightly unreasonable. I revised them every time I met a woman I wanted to sleep with.
I remade those women in the image of Jean Ellroy sans booze, promiscuity and murder. I was a tornado sweeping through their lives. I took sex and heard their stories. I told them my story. I tried to make a string of brief and more extended couplings work. I never tried as hard as the women I was with.
I learned things in the process. I never downscaled my romantic expectations. I was a chickenshit cut-and-run guy and a heartbreaker with a convincingly soft facade. I took the ax to most of my affairs. I dug it when women got my number and grabbed the ax first. I never axed my romantic expectations. I never took a soft line on love. I felt bad about the women I fucked over. I went at women less ferociously over time. I learned to disguise my hunger. That hunger went straight into my books. They got more and more obsessive.
I was burning a lifelong torch with three flames.
My mother. The Dahlia. The woman I knew God would give me.
I wrote four novels in four years. I kept my Eastchester and Manhattan worlds separate. I got better and better. I attracted a cult following and built up a four-star review scrapbook. My writing wages improved. I retired my caddy cleats. I locked myself up for a year and wrote The Black Dahlia.
The year flew by. I lived with one dead woman and a dozen bad men. Betty Short rule
d me. I built her character from diverse strains of male desire and tried to portray the male world that sanctioned her death. I wrote the last page and wept. I dedicated the book to my mother. I knew I could link Jean and Betty and strike 24-karat gold. I financed my own book tour. I took the link public. I made The Black Dahlia a national bestseller.
I told the Jean Ellroy-Dahlia story ten dozen times. I reduced it to sound bites and vulgarized it in the name of accessibility. I went at it with precise dispassion. I portrayed myself as a man formed by two murdered women and a man who now lived on a plane above such matters. My media performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. They exploited my mother’s desecration and allowed me to cut her memory down to manageable proportions.
The Black Dahlia was my breakthrough book. It was pure obsessive passion and a hometown elegy. I wanted to stay in the ’40s and ’50s. I wanted to write bigger novels. I felt the call of bad men doing bad things in the name of authority. I wanted to piss on the noble-loner myth and exalt shitbird cops out to fuck the disenfranchised. I wanted to canonize the secret L.A. I first glimpsed the day the redhead died.
The Black Dahlia was behind me. My tour closed out a 28-year transit. I knew I had to surpass that book. I knew that I could return to L.A. in the ’50s and rewrite that old nightmare to my own specifications. It was my first separate world. I knew I could extract its secrets and contextualize them. I could claim the time and place. I could close out that nightmare and will myself to find a new one.
I wrote three sequels to The Black Dahlia and called the collective work “The L.A. Quartet.” My critical reputation and public profile snowballed. I met a woman, married her and divorced her within three years. I rarely thought about my mother.
I closed out L.A. in the ’50s and traded up to America in Jack Kennedy’s era. The jump goosed my geographic and thematic scope and pushed me halfway though a wild new novel. L.A. in the ’50s was behind me. Jean Ellroy wasn’t. I met a woman. She pushed me toward my mother.
