by James Ellroy
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hat. Rice asked him why. “The nightwatch ding jailer just retired,” he said.
“The watch commander threw him a party.”
Rice nodded. It couldn’t have happened. Vandy would never let a wimp like Gordon Meyers touch her. But when the jailer walked away, the doubts came back. He tried to force sleep, but it wouldn’t come. The edge of his vision started to go red. Hours of push-ups and leg lifts produced an exhaustion that felt pure and nonchemical. Rice drifted off again, then awakened to muffled voices coming from somewhere outside his cell. He followed the sound to a grated ventilator shaft next to the toilet. Peering through the grates, he saw two pairs of denim-clad legs facing each other. The white stripes along the pants seams were a dead giveaway—he was looking into a High-Power Tank cell.
Laughter; then a deep voice taking over, his words echoing clearly through the shaft.
“I heard a dream score the other day, from this black guy on the Folsom chain. He and his partner were gonna do it, then he got violated on a liquor store heist. He was one smart nigger. He had it documented, the whole shot.”
A different, softer voice: “Smart nigger is a contradiction in terms.”
“Bullshit. Dig this: three-man stick-up gang, a bonaroo kidnap angle, an ace fucking safeguard.
“Here’s the play: two guys hold the girlfriend of a married bank manager, at her pad, while the outside man calls the manager at his crib and has him call his chick, who of course is scared fucking shitless. The outside man calls back and gives him the drill: ‘Meet me a half block from the bank an hour before opening, or your bitch gets killed and everyone knows you’ve been cheating on your wife.’
“Now, dig: the phone booth the outside man’s been calling from is down the street from the manager’s pad, so he can make sure the fuzz ain’t been called. He trails the manager to the bank—still no fuzz—walks in with him, hits only the cashboxes, because the vault has gotta be time-locked, walks out, takes the manager out to his car, slugs him and ties him up, calls the inside men at the chick’s pad, they tie her up, split, then meet later and divvy up the bread. Is that not fucking brilliant?”
The soft-voiced man snorted: “Yeah, but how the fuck are you supposed to find happily married bank managers with girlfriends on the side? You gonna put an ad in the paper: ‘Armed robber seeks cooperative pussy-hound
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bank managers to aid him in career advancement? Send résumé to blah, blah, blah?’ Typical nigger bullshit and jive.”
“Wrong, bro,” the deep-voiced man said. “I don’t know how he got the info, but the black guy had two jobs cased—righteous rogue bank managers, girlfriends, the whole shot.”
“And I suppose he gave you the skinny?”
“Yeah, he did, and I believe him. He got ten to life as a habitual offender, why not share the wealth, he’s looking at a dime minimum. One chick lives in Encino, on the corner of Kling and Valley View, in a pink apartment house; the other, Christine something, lives in Studio City, a house on the corner of Hildebrand and Gage. I told you: one smart fucking nigger.”
“I still don’t believe it.”
“If Bo Derek offered you a headjob, you’d think she was a drag queen. You’re just a terminal fucking skeptic.”
Rice listened as the conversation deteriorated into the usual jailhouse shtick of sports and sex. When the talk died altogether, he lay down with his head next to the ventilator shaft and once more fell asleep. Vandy took over his dreams, short-take images of her laughing, moving around in bed. Then she was there with the Vandals, vibrato growling their closing number: “Gotta get down in the prison of your love. Get down, get down, gonna drown, gonna come so good, so hard, burn my body in your prison yard, prison of your love!”
Rice awakened for the final time in L.A. County Jail stint just as Vandy and the Vandals brought “Prison of Your Love” to its off-key crescendo. Coward, he said to himself. Coward. Using sleep the way a junkie uses smack. Maybe she fucked him and maybe she didn’t; when you look into her eyes, you’ll know. So stay awake and fight. He stood up and looked around the cell, his eyes catching a wad of newspaper beside the toilet and a book of matches on top of the sink. Thinking, let them know, he struck a match on the ventilator grate, then lit the newspaper and watched it fireball. When it started to burn his hand, he dropped it into the toilet and listened to the sizzle and hiss of newsprint. Satisfied with the way the ink was running, he turned his attention to the floor-towall-to-ceiling padding. Gouging was the only way.
Rice dug his fingernails into a seam of wall padding and pulled outward. Naugahyde, foam and a layer of webbed cotton were revealed. He poked a finger into the hole and felt metal in back of the webbing. Spring rein-454
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forcement. He gouged his way to it, then twisted the nearest piece of metal back and forth until it broke off in his hand.
It took him hours to hone his tool on the ventilator shaft grates. When the spring was razor sharp, he pressed it into a sodden ball of newspaper and darkened the tip. Flexing his left biceps into a hard surface, he thought of Hawaiian Gardens and Vandy. Then he marked himself with his past and future, so the whole world would know. The words were Death Before Dishonor. 2
Bobby “Boogaloo” Garcia watched his kid brother Joe loosen his clerical collar and do air guitar riffs in front of the bedroom mirror. He felt his own priest outfit constrict his body and said, “I can’t take none of your rock and roll rap today, pendejo. I quit fighting ’cause niggers kept knocking me out in the third round, and you’ll never make it as a musician ’cause you got no drive and no talent. But we both got a job to do, and we’re behind for the month. So let’s do it.”
Joe cut off the music in his head; his lyrics put to an old Fats Domino tune, “Suicide Hill” substituted for “Blueberry Hill.” Leave it to Bobby to puncture both their balloons with one shot, so he wouldn’t have a good comeback. “Tomorrow’s December first. The Christmas rush and the rainy season. We’ll double up on Bibles and prayer kits, and siding jobs.” Bobby’s jaw clenched at the last words, and Joe added, “And we’ll give some money to Saint Sebastian’s. A tithe. We’ll find some suckers with bucks, and rip them off and give the dinero to earthquake re—”
Bobby stopped him with a slow finger across the throat. “Not earthquake relief, puto! It’s a scam! You don’t do penance for one scam by giving bucks to another one!”
“But Henderson gave two grand to that priest from the archdiocese for earthquake relief. He—”
Bobby shook his head. “A scam within a scam within a scam, pendejo. He gave the priest a check for two K and got a receipt for three. That priest has
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got a brother in the D.A.’s office. The Fraud Division. Need I say fucking more?”
Joe tightened his collar, feeling his nice guy/musician self slip back into Father Hernandez, the phone scam padre. He grabbed a stack of Naugahydebound Bibles off the floor and carried them out to the car, wondering for the ten millionth time how Bobby could love hating his brother and his job and his life as much as he did.
Bobby and Joe worked for Henderson Enterprises, Inc., purveyors of aluminum siding and Bibles in Spanish. The scam originated in a phone room, where salesmen pitched rustproof patios and eternal salvation through Jesus to unsophisticated and semi-impoverished Angelenos, offering them free gas coupons as a come-on to get the “field representative” out to their homes, where he signed them up for “lifetime protection guarantees,”
which in reality meant a new siding job or Bible on a “regular installation basis”—meaning debilitating permanent monthly payments to whoever was gullible enough to sign on the dotted line.
Which was where Bobby and Joe, as Father Gonzalez and Father Hernandez, L.A.-based “free-lance” priests, came in. They were the “heavy closers”—psychological intimidation specialists who sized up weaknesses on the follow-up calls
and made the sucker sign, setting in motion a string of kickbacks originating in the main office of U.S. Aluminum, Inc., and its subsidiary company, the Truth and Light Publishing House. With the trunk of their ’77 Camaro stuffed with Bibles, siding samples and wall hangings of Jesus, the Garcias drove to a “close” in El Monte on the Pomona Freeway. Joe was at the wheel, humming Springsteen under his breath so his brother wouldn’t hear; Bobby threw short punches toward the windshield and stared out at the dark clouds that were forming, hoping for thundershowers to spook their closees into buying. When raindrops spattered the glass in front of him, he closed his eyes and thought of how everything important in his life happened when it was raining. Like the time he sparred with Little Red Lopez and knocked him through the ropes with a perfect right cross. Red said his timing was off because bad weather made his old knife scars ache.
Like the time Joe and his garage band won the “Battle of the Bands” at El Monte Legion Stadium. He played adoring older brother and glommed a groupie who gave him head in his car while he smoked weed and kept the wipers going so he could eyeball prowling fuzz.
Like the righteous burglaries he and Joe pulled in West L.A. during the 456
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’77–’78 floods, when the L.A.P.D. and C.H.P. were all evacuating hillsides and mopping blood off the freeways.
Like the time he felt guilty about treating Joe like dirt, and agreed to rip off the guitars and amplifiers from the J. Geils bass player’s pad in Benedict Canyon. Halfway down to Sunset with the loot, the car fishtails and sideswipes a sheriff’s nark ark. Joe freaks at the badge and cocked magnum in his face and starts blabbing how a hitchhiker left the stuff in the trunk. No way, Jose, the cop said. Bingo: nine months in the laundry at Wayside. Like the times when they were kids, and Joe got terrified of thunder and woke him up and made him promise always to protect him. Bobby switched to left jabs aimed at the wiper blades, pulling his fist back a split second before it hit the glass, watching Joe flinch out of the corner of his eye. “I always carried you, ain’t I? Like I promised to when we were kids?”
Joe kept his eyes on the road, but clenched his elbows to his side, like he always did when Bobby started talking scary. “Sure, Bobby, that’s true.”
“And you’ve always watchdogged me when I got off too deep into my weird shit. Ain’t that true?”
Joe saw what was coming and swallowed so his voice would be steady.
“That’s true.”
“You’ve got to say it.”
Tightening his hands on the wheel, Joe fought an image of their last B&E, of the woman with her skirt up over her head, Bobby with his knife at her throat as he raped her. “Y-you’d be . . . you’d hurt people.”
“What kind of people?”
Joe stared straight ahead. The sky was getting darker and taillights began flashing on. Concentrating on their reflections off the wet pavement gave him a moment to think up a new answer that would satisfy Bobby’s weirdness and let him keep a piece of his pride. He was about to speak when a station wagon swerved in front of them.
Joe flinched backward and Bobby grabbed the wheel out of his hands and yanked it hard right. The car lurched forward, missing the station wagon’s rear bumper by inches. Bobby jammed his foot onto the accelerator, looked over his shoulder, saw a tight passing space and jerked the car across four lanes and down a darkened off-ramp. He slowly applied the brake, and when they came to a stop at the flooded intersection, Joe was brushing tears from his eyes.
“Say it,” Bobby said.
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Joe screamed the words, his voice breaking: “You’re a rape-o! You’re a mind fuck! You’re on a wacko guilt trip, and I’m not kicking out any more of my money for your penance!” He swung the car out into the stream of traffic, punching the gas, doing a deft brody that set off a chain of honks from cut-off motorists. Bobby cracked the passenger window for air, then said softly, “I just want you to know how things are. How they’re always gonna be. I owe you for getting us out of burglary. Too many women out there; too many chances to pull weird shit. But you owe me your guts, ’cause without me you ain’t got any. We gotta remember that stuff.”
Knowing Bobby was trying to get at something, Joe pressed the edge that his tears always gave him. “You sent that woman five K, right? The money orders were cashed, so you know she got them. You sent her a note, so even though the signatures on the checks were false, she knew it was you. You haven’t done it again, so why are you rehashing all this old stuff? We’ve got a good deal with Hendy, but you keep talking it down like it’s nothing.”
Bobby popped short left-right combos until his arms ached and his tunic was soaked with sweat. “I’m just getting itchy, little brother,” he said at last.
“Like something has gotta happen real soon. Take surface streets, I gotta cool out before the close.”
They cruised east on Valley Boulevard, Joe driving slowly in the middle lane, so he could scope out the scene on both sides of the street. The rain died to a drizzle, and Bobby took a hand squeeze from the glove compartment and started a long set of grip builders, dangling his right arm out the window to get a good extension. When Joe saw that the streets were nothing but used-car lots, liquor stores, burrito stands and boredom, he tried to think up some more lyrics to “Suicide Hill.” When words wouldn’t come, he slumped down in his seat and let the story take over. Suicide Hill was a long cement embankment that led down to a deep sewage sluice in back of the Sepulveda V.A. Hospital. The hill and the scrubland that surrounded it were encircled by high barbed-wire fencing that was cut through in dozens of places by the gang members who used it as a meeting place and fuck turf.
The hill itself was used to test courage. Steep, and slick from spilled oil, it served as the ultimate motorcycle gauntlet. Riders would start at the top and try to coast down, slowly picking up speed, then popping the bike into first and hurdling the sewage sluice, which was thirteen feet across and rife with garbage, industrial chemicals and a thirty-year accumulation of sharp objects thrown in to inflict pain. Gang rivalries were settled by two riders starting 458
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off on top of the hill at the same time, each armed with a bicycle chain, the object to knock the opponent into the muck while hurdling it himself. Scores of bodies were rumored to be decomposing in the sluice. Suicide Hill was considered a bad motherfucker and a destroyer of good men. So was the man it was named after.
Fritz “Suicide” Hill and the V.A. Hospital dated back to the days immediately following World War II, when scores of returning G.I.s necessitated the creation of veterans’ domiciles. Rumor had it that Fritz was housed at the brand-new institution for shell shock, and after his recovery was assigned to a domicile ward to ease his emotional readjustment. Fritz had other ideas. He pitched a tent in the scrubland by the embankment and started an L.A. chapter of the Hell’s Angels, then embarked on a career as a motorcycle highwayman, shaking down motorists all over Southern California, always returning to his encampment by the Sepulveda Wash. That part of the legend Joe accepted as fact.
The rest was a mixture of bullshit and tall tales, and the part that Joe wanted to put into his song. Suicide Hill sliced the guy who sliced the Black Dahlia; he masterminded a plot to break Caryl Chessman out of death row; he tommy-gunned niggers from a freeway overpass during the Watts Riot. He turned Leary on to acid and kicked Charlie Manson’s ass. The cops wouldn’t fuck with him because he knew where the bodies were buried. Even legendary hot dogs like John St. John, Colin Forbes and Crazy Lloyd Hopkins shit shotgun shells when Suicide Hill made the scene. The most popular ending of the legend had Fritz Hill dying of cancer from all the chemicals he’d sucked in during his many dunks in the Sepulveda Wash. When he saw the end coming, he hauled his 1800 C.C. Vincent Black Shadow up to the roof of the hospital and popped a wheelie over the edge in second gear, flying some five hundred yards before he crashed into the scrubland, igniting a funeral pyre that could be see
n all over L.A. Joe knew that the whole story, rebop, truth and all, was the story of everything he and Bobby had ever done, but all he had so far was “and death was a thrill on Suicide Hill”—and those ten bars were enough for a plagiarism beef. Bobby nudged him out of his reverie. “Hang a right. The pad should be on the next block.”
Joe complied, pulling onto a street of identical tract houses, all of them painted pink, peach or electric blue. Bobby scanned addresses, then pointed to the curb and shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Father Hernandez. Another stone wacko.”
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“Qué, Father Gonzalez?”
Joe set the brake and got out of the car, then looked over at the front lawn of the closee’s pad and answered his own question. “Wacko’s not the word, Padre.”
The walkway of the peach-colored house was lined with Day-Glo plaster statues of Jesus and his disciples. On one side of the lawn a plastic Saint Francis stood guard over a flock of Walt Disney squeeze toys. On the other side, stuffed teddy bears and pandas were arranged around a papier-mâché
nativity scene. Joe walked over and checked out the manger. A Donald Duck doll was wrapped in swaddling clothes. Minnie Mouse and Snoopy leaned against the crib, sheepherder staffs pinned to their sides. The whole collage was sopping wet from the rain. “Holy fuck,” he whispered. Bobby cuffed him on the back of the head. “This is too fucking sad. Anybody this fucking crazy has gotta be a rollover. Let’s just get a signature and split.” He shoved a turquoise Bible and matching siding sample at Joe, then stared at the opposite side of the lawn. His eyes caught a toppled Jesus statue and a Kermit the Frog puppet going sixty-nine. He grabbed Joe’s arm and pushed him up the walkway. “Five minutes in and out. No rosaries, no bullshit.”
