My Dark Places

by James Ellroy

  She had superb carriage. She seemed taller than the recorded height on her autopsy report. She had big hands and feet. She had delicate shoulders. I wanted to kiss her neck and smell her perfume and cup her breasts from behind. She wore Tweed perfume. She kept a bottle on her nightstand in El Monte. I poured some on a handkerchief once and took it to school with me.

  She had long legs. She had stretch marks across her stomach. The autopsy pictures were shocking and instructive. Her breasts were smaller than I remembered. She was slender throughout her upper body and thick from the hips down. I memorized her body early on. I reworked her dimensions. I altered her contours to match my taste for lustily built women. I grew up with that nude vision and accepted it as fact. My real mother was a much different flesh-and-bones woman.

  My parents got married. They moved to L.A. He said they had a pad at 8th and New Hampshire. She got a nurse gig. He went Hollywood. They moved to 459 North Doheny Drive. It was Beverly Hills. The address was ritzier than the pad. My mother said it was just a small apartment. My father snagged a job with Rita Hayworth. I was born in March ’48. My father handled Rita’s marriage to Aly Khan. The Hayworth stuff was true. I saw my father’s name in two Hayworth biographies.

  We moved to 9031 Alden Drive. It was over the West Hollywood line. We lived in a Spanish-style building. Eula Lee Lloyd and her husband lived there. A spinster lady lived there. She idolized my mother. My father said she was a dyke. He had dykes on the brain. He said there was a dyke bounty out on Rita Hayworth. I allegedly met Rita Hayworth at a hot dog stand. It was ’50 or ’51. I allegedly spilled a grape drink all over her. Rita was allegedly a nympho. My father had nymphos on the brain. He said all the big actors were fags. He had fags on the brain. Rita fired my father. He started sleeping all day. He slept on the couch like Dagwood Bumstead. My mother told him to get a job. He said he had pull. He was waiting for the right opportunity. My mother hailed from rural Wisconsin. She didn’t know from pull. She pulled the plug on her marriage.

  My memories were running in a straight chronological line. My fantasies were running as adjuncts and outtakes. I thought I’d be criss-crossing the memory map. I thought I’d be stumbling over real-life minutiae. I was on the road to recollection. I’d conjured up Tweed perfume and some period snapshots. I was running a linear flowchart I already knew.

  I downshifted. The redhead stripped. She had her real-life body and her 42-year-old face. I couldn’t take it any further.

  I wasn’t afraid to. I just didn’t want to. It seemed unnecessary.

  I let my mind wander. I thought of Tracy Stewart. I’d seen Daddy Beckett’s old apartment. I went out with Bill and Dale Davidson. I saw the key Beckett locations. I saw the living room and the bedroom and the steps down to the van. I walked Robbie and Tracy up those steps. I went from my mother nude to Robbie and Tracy within six heartbeats. Robbie walked Tracy into the bedroom. Robbie gave her to Daddy.

  I stopped there. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I could make it horrifying. I didn’t think I could learn anything from it.

  I let my mind wander. I went back to ’55. I had a time line going. I decided to let it ride.

  My father was gone. It was her and me and nobody else. I saw her in white seersucker. I saw her in a navy blue robe. I put her in bed with some assembly line studs. I gave the guys pompadours and knife scars. They looked like Steve Cochran in Private Hell 36. I was working for hyperbole. I thought ugly details might resurrect ugly memories. I wanted to chart the redhead’s sex roll from my father to the Swarthy Man. My father was weak. He had a tough guy’s body and a candy-ass soul. My mother kicked him out of her life and went minimalistic. All men were weak and some men were weak and attractive. You could not control their weakness. You could limit your awareness of it and euphemize it past recognition. You could let men into your life in limited dosages. I did not see a male stampede to my mother’s door. I caught her in flagrante twice. My father said she was a whore. I believed him. I sensed her sexual bent. I filtered my awareness through my own lust for her. She lived with my father for 15 years. She succumbed to an image. She wised up. Disillusionment was enlightenment. She went at men from a disillusioned and wholly male perspective. Men were containable. Sex and liquor was the way to contain them. She flushed 15 years down the toilet. She knew she was passively complicit. She despised her own stupidity and weakness. She saw cheap men as her consolation prize. She saw me as her redemption. She sent me to church and made me study. She preached diligence and discipline. She didn’t want me to turn into my father. She didn’t smother me with love and turn me into a ’50s textbook faggot. She lived in two worlds. I marked the dividing line. She thought her dual-world scheme was sustainable. She miscalculated. She didn’t know that suppression never works. She had liquor and men over here. She had her little boy over there. She spread herself thin. She saw her worlds blur together. My father rubbed her honky-tonk world in my face. He out-propagandized her. He taught me to hate her every weekend. She scorned him every weekday. She fed me scorn with less virulence than he fed me hatred. She preached hard work and determination. She was a drunk and a whore and thus a hypocrite. The world she built around me did not exist. I had x-ray-eye access to her hidden world.

  I caught her in bed with a man. She pulled a sheet up over her breasts. I caught her in bed with Hank Hart. They were naked. I saw a bottle and an ashtray on the nightstand. She moved us to El Monte. I saw a whore in flight. She might have fled to create a space between her two worlds. She said we were moving for my sake. I wrote it off as a lie. Say I was wrong. Say she ran for both of us. She ran too fast and misread El Monte. She saw it as a buffer zone. It looked like a good place for weekend revelry. It looked like a good place to raise a little boy.

  She tried to teach me things. I learned them belatedly. I became more disciplined and meticulous and diligent and determined than she ever could have hoped for. I surpassed all her dreams for my success. I couldn’t buy her a house and a Cadillac and express my gratitude in true nouveau riche fashion.

  We time-traveled. We covered our ten years together. We made irregular jumps back and forth. Old memories played out contrapuntally. Every Jean-the-profligate-redhead blip sparked a counterpoint image. There’s Jean drunk. There’s Jean with her ungrateful son. He fell out of a tree. She’s pulling splinters from his arms. She’s swabbing him with witch hazel. She’s holding a pair of tweezers under a magnifying glass.

  We time-traveled. I lost track of real time in the dark. That counterweighted balance held. I ran out of memories and opened my eyes.

  I saw my wall graph. I felt the sweat on my pillow.

  I turned off my time machine. I didn’t want to take her anywhere else. I didn’t want to place her in fictional settings or wrap my revelations up and call them her life summarized. I didn’t want to write her off as complex and ambiguous. I didn’t want to shortchange her.

  I was hungry and restless. I wanted to breathe fresh air and look at live people.

  I drove to a mall. I walked to a food court and got a sandwich. The place was jammed. I watched people. I watched men and women together. I looked for seductions. Robbie courted Tracy in public. The Swarthy Man took Jean to Stan’s Drive-in. Harvey knocked on Judy’s door and made her feel safe.

  I didn’t see anything suspicious.

  I quit surveilling. I sat still. People crossed my line of sight. I felt buoyant. I was on some kind of oxygen high.

  It hit me softly.

  The Swarthy Man was irrelevant. He was dead or he wasn’t. We’d find him or we wouldn’t. We’d never stop looking. He was only a directional sign. He forced me to extend myself and give my mother her full due.

  She was no less than my salvation.

  27

  The jury delivered. Daddy Beckett fell for Tracy Stewart. Bill said he’d get life without. Gloria Stewart confronted him. She pled for her daughter’s body and called Daddy terrible names. I said there was no body and no closure. Daddy got life. Gloria got life wi
th Daddy and Robbie.

  Bill threw a backyard party. He called it a pre-Labor Day bash. It was really a goodbye party aimed at Daddy Beckett.

  I attended. Dale Davidson and his wife attended. Vivian Davidson was a deputy DA. She knew the Beckett case intimately. Some other DAs came down. Gary White and his girlfriend came down. Bill’s father showed up. Bill’s neighbors walked over. Everybody ate hot dogs and burgers and talked murder. The cops and DAs were relieved that the Beckett mess was over. The non-cops and non-DAs thought that meant closure. I wanted to find the fool who invented closure and shove a big closure plaque up his ass. Everybody talked about OJ. Everybody riffed on the potential verdict and its potential ramifications. I didn’t talk much. I was at my own party with the redhead. She was playful. She was snagging potato chips off my plate. We were sharing our own private jokes.

  I watched Bill toss burgers and talk to his friends. I knew he was relieved. I knew his relief dated back to Daddy Beckett’s arrest. He circumvented Daddy’s shot at killing other women. That was a hypothetically sound resolution. The guilty verdict was more ambiguous. Daddy was old and infirm. His rape-and-kill days were gone. Robbie was still in his rape-and-kill and beat-up-women prime. He just turned in a stunning performance. It facilitated justice in the matter of L.A. County vs. Robert Wayne Beckett Sr. It made him friends in law enforcement. He committed patricide in their name. It looked good on his prison record. It might serve to influence a premature parole.

  Bill was still on the Drop Zone Expressway. He was serving out his own life sentence. He chose murder. Murder chose me. He came to murder as a moral duty. I came to murder as a voyeur. He became a voyeur. He had to look. He had to know. He succumbed to repeated seductions. My seductions started and stopped with my mother. Bill and I were indictable co-defendants. We were on trial in the Court of Murder Victim Preference. We favored female victims. Why sublimate your lust when you can use it as a tool of perception? Most women were killed for sex. That was our voyeuristic justification. Bill was a professional detective. He knew how to look and sift and stand back from his findings and retain his professional composure. I could eschew those restraints. I did not have to build courtroom evidence. I did not have to establish coherent and explainable motives. I could wallow in my mother’s sex and the sex of other dead women. I could categorize them and revere them as sisters in horror. I could look and sift and compare and analyze and build my own set of sexual and nonsexual links. I could call them valid on a gender-wide basis and attribute a broad range of detail to my mother’s life and death. I wasn’t chasing active suspects. I wasn’t chasing facts to conform to any prestructured thesis. I was chasing knowledge. I was chasing my mother as truth. She taught me some truths in a dark bedroom. I wanted to reciprocate. I wanted to honor murdered women in her name. It sounded wholly grandiose and egotistical. It said I was looking at life on the Drop Zone Expressway. It brought that moment at the food court back in perfect reprise. It pointed me one way right now.

  I had to know her life the way I knew her death.

  I held the notion. I harbored it privately. We went back to work.

  We met the reporters from La Opinión, Orange Coast and the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. We showed them around El Monte. The L.A. Times came out. We got 60 calls total. We got hang-ups and psychic calls and O.J. gag calls and good-luck calls. Two women called and said their fathers could have killed my mother. We answered those calls. We heard more child-abuse stories. We cleared the two fathers.

  A young woman called. She snitched off an old woman. She said the old woman lived in El Monte. The old woman worked at Packard-Bell circa 1950. She was blond. She wore a ponytail.

  We found the old woman. She did not act suspicious. She did not remember my mother. She could not place my mother at Packard-Bell Electronics.

  La Opinión came out. We got zero calls. La Opinión was printed in Spanish. La Opinión was a long shot.

  The San Gabriel Valley Tribune came out. We got 41 calls total. We got hang-ups and psychic calls. We got OJ. gag calls. A man called. He said he was an old El Monte cat. He knew a swarthy cat back in the late ’50s. The swarthy cat hung out at a gas station on Peck Road. He didn’t remember the swarthy cat’s name. The gas station was long gone. He knew lots of cats from ’58 El Monte.

  We met the cat. He gave us some names. We ran them by Dave Wire and Chief Clayton. They remembered a few of the cats. They did not look like the Swarthy Cat. We ran the cats through our three computers. We got no statewide or nationwide hits.

  An Associated Press reporter called me. He wanted to write a piece on the Ellroy-Stoner quest. It would run nationwide. He’d include our 1-800 number. I said, Let’s do it.

  We took him to El Monte. He wrote his piece. It appeared in numerous newspapers. Editors butchered it. Most of them cut the 1-800 number. We got very few calls.

  Three psychics called. The Black Dahlia lady called. Nobody called and said they knew the Blonde. Nobody called and said they knew my mother.

  We ran our key names again. We wanted to cover our bets. We thought we might hit some new data-bank listings. We didn’t. Ruth Schienle and Stubby Greene were dead or effectively elusive. Salvador Quiroz Serena might be back in Mexico. We couldn’t find Grant Surface. He took two lie detector tests in 1959. He didn’t pass them or fail them. We wanted to challenge the inconclusive results.

  Bill played a hunch and called Duane Rasure. Rasure found his Will Lenard Miller notes and FedExed them down. We read the notes. We found six Airtek names. We found two of the people alive. They remembered my mother. They said she worked at Packard-Bell before she came to Airtek. They didn’t know the name Nikola Zaha. They couldn’t ID my mother’s old boyfriends. They gave us more Airtek names. They said Ruth Schienle divorced her husband and married a man named Rolf Wire. Rolf Wire was allegedly dead. We ran Rolf and Ruth Wire through our three computers and got no hits. We ran the new Airtek names. We got no hits. We drove out to the Pachmyer Group’s corporate office. Bill said they wouldn’t let us see their personnel files. I said, Let’s ask. I wasn’t chasing leads on the Swarthy Man. I was chasing leads on my mother.

  The Pachmyer people were gracious. They said the Airtek division bellied up in ’59 or ’60. All the Airtek files were destroyed.

  I took the loss unprofessionally hard. My mother worked at Airtek from 9/56 on. I wanted to know her then.

  The Jean Ellroy reinvestigation was 13 months old.

  O. J. Simpson was acquitted. L.A. waxed apocalyptic. The media went nuts behind the words “potential ramifications.” All murders ramified. Ask Gloria Stewart or Irv Kupcinet. The Simpson case would cripple the immediate survivors. L.A. would get over it. A more celebrated man would snuff a more beautiful woman sooner or later. The case would microcosmically expose an even sexier and more ludicrous lifestyle. The media would build off O.J. and make the case an even bigger event.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Helen. I wanted to write this memoir. Dead women were holding me back. They died in L.A. and told me to stick around for a while. I was burned out on detective work. I was fried to the eyeballs on negative computer runs and misinformation. I had the redhead inside me. I could carry her away. Bill could chase leads and stalk the facts of her life in my absence. I stuck around for a shot at some brand-new ghosts.

  I made four solo trips to the Bureau. I pulled old Blue Books. I read adjudicated cases cover to cover. I had no crime scene photos. I brain-cammed my own. I read dead body reports and autopsy reports and background reports and brain-screened my own history of vivisected women. I looked. I sifted. I wallowed. I didn’t compare and analyze the way I thought I would. The women stood out as individuals. They didn’t bring me back to my mother. They didn’t teach me. I couldn’t protect them. I couldn’t avenge their deaths. I couldn’t honor them in my mother’s name because I didn’t really know who they were. I didn’t know who she was. I had inklings and a big fucking hunger to know more.

  I started to feel like
a grave robber. I knew I was burned out on death altogether. I wanted to score some leads on the redhead. I wanted to snag more information and hoard it and take it home with me. I thought up some last-ditch measures to keep me in L.A. I thought up newspaper ads and infomercials and on-line computer broadsides. Bill said it was all crazy shit. He said we should brace the Wagners in Wisconsin. He said I was scared. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. He knew my mother made me unique. He knew I embraced her selfishly. The Wagners had their own claim. They might dispute mine. They might welcome me back and try to turn me into a docile stiff with an extended family. They had a claim on my mother. I didn’t want to share my claim. I didn’t want to break the spell of her and me and what she made me.

  Bill was right. I knew it was time to go home.

  I packed up my corkboards and graphs and shipped them east. Bill transferred our tip-line number to an answering service. I took the file home with me.

  Bill stayed on the case. He lost a partner and gained one back. Joe Walker was a crime analyst. He was on the L.A. Sheriff’s Department. He knew the law enforcement computer network intimately. He was hopped up on the Karen Reilly case. He thought a black serial killer snuffed Karen Reilly. He wanted to work the Jean Ellroy case. Bill told him he could.