by James Ellroy
Before Joe could respond, a fat white woman in a rumpled housedress opened the door and stood on the porch in front of them. Grateful that she wasn’t Mexican, Bobby said, “I’m Father Gonzalez, and this is Father Hernandez. We’re the field priests from the Henderson Company. We brought you your siding sample and Bible. The workmen will be out to put up your patio next week.” He reached into his breast pocket for a blank contract.
“All we need is your signature. If you sign today, you get our November bonus, the Henderson Prayer Service: millions of Catholics worldwide will pray for you every day for the rest of your life.”
The woman reached into the pockets of her dress and pulled out rosary beads and a wad of one-dollar bills. She bit at her lip and said, “The phone man said I got to give to earthquake relief to get prayed for. He said to give you the money to give to him, and you’d pray for my husband, too. He’s got the cancer powerful bad.” Joe was reaching for the money when he saw Bobby smile; the slow smile he used to flash just before a fight he knew he was going to lose. He dropped his hand and stood off to one side as the veins in his brother’s forehead started to twitch and spit bubbles popped from his mouth. The woman stammered, “He-he’s sick powerful bad,” and Bobby ran back to the car and began hurling Bibles and siding samples out into the 460
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street, covering the pavement with pastel Naugahyde and aluminum. When there were no more phone scam products left to throw, he tore off his priest jacket and his cassock and dropped them into the gutter, followed by the money in his pants pockets. Joe stood on the porch beside the shockstilled woman, watching the last five years of his life go up in smoke, knowing that what made it so bad was that Bobby believed in God worse than any of the people he hurt.
3
Three weeks into his suspension from duty, Lloyd Hopkins flew to San Francisco and kept his family under a rolling stakeout. He rented a room at a Holiday Inn on the edge of Chinatown and a late-model Ford, and watched from a distance as his wife made her rounds of the city as an antique broker and met her lover for drinks, dinner and overnight visits at her Pacific Heights apartment; from a further distance he followed his daughters to school, on errands and out on dates. After a week of loose surveillance, he knew that he had gleaned no information and gained no special insights that would make his job easier. All he could do was let them find him, and see where it went from there.
He decided to let the girls make the discovery, and drove to their school and parked across the street. At 12:30, classes adjourned for an hour, and Anne and Caroline always ate with friends under the big oak tree in the school’s backyard, while Penny skipped lunch and brooded by herself on the steps. If he stood by the car, big and familiar in his favorite herringbone jacket, then sooner or later they would notice him, and he would be able to read their faces and know what to do.
At precisely 12:30, the school’s back door opened, and the first wave of students exited and jockeyed for positions under the oak tree. Lloyd got out and leaned against the hood of his car. Anne and Caroline appeared moments later, chattering and making faces as they examined the contents of their lunch sacks. They found spaces on the grass and began eating, Caroline making her usual liverwurst face as she unwrapped her first sandwich.
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Penny walked out then, peering around before disappearing into a swarm of children. Lloyd felt tears in his eyes, but kept them on his daughters anyway, waiting for the moment of recognition.
“Loitering in the vicinity of school yards, huh? Let’s see your I.D., pervert!”
Lloyd did a slow turn, savoring the sound of Penny’s voice and the anticipation of their identical gray eyes meeting. Penny foiled his plan by jumping into his arms and burying her head in his chest. Lloyd held his youngest daughter and dried his eyes on her Dodgers cap. When she started growling and nudging his shoulders like a cat, he growled back and said, “Who’s the pervert?
And what’s with this feline stuff? The last I heard you were a penguin.”
Penny stepped back. Lloyd saw that the color in her eyes had deepened, gaining a hint of Janice’s hazel. “Penguins are passé. You’ve lost weight, Daddy. What are you doing in Frisco? This skulking-around scene wasn’t too subtle, you know.”
Lloyd laughed. “Do the others know I’m here?”
Penny shook her head. “No, they’re not too subtle either. I figured it out two days ago. This friend of mine said there was this big man in a tweed jacket checking out the school yard. He said the guy looked like a nark or a perv. I said, ‘That sounds like my dad.’ I kept peeking outside during classes until I saw you.” She stood on her tiptoes and poked Lloyd’s necktie. “Speaking of which, my dummy sisters just figured it out.”
Looking over his shoulder, Lloyd saw Caroline and Anne staring at him. Even from a distance he could see shock and anger on their faces. He waved, and Anne dropped her lunch sack and grabbed her sister’s arm. Together they ran toward the school’s back door. Lloyd looked at Penny. “They’re pissed. Why? The last time I came up we got along great.”
Penny leaned against the car. “It’s cumulative, Daddy. We’re the geniuses, they’re the plodders. They resent me because I’m the youngest, the smartest, and have the biggest breasts. They—”
“No, goddammit! What really?”
“Don’t yell. I’m serious, Annie and Liney have gone très Frisco. They want Mom to divorce you and marry Roger. Mom and Roger are on the rocks, so they’re scared. Daddy, are you in trouble in the Department?”
Realizing that his two older daughters weren’t going to join him, Lloyd put an arm around his youngest and drew her close. “Yeah. I blew an extradition bust and fucked up at the guy’s arraignment. I’ve been suspended 462
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from duty until the first of the year. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I’m sure I’m finished in Robbery/Homicide. I might get transferred to a uniformed division until my twenty years come up, I might get my choice of flake assignments. I just don’t fucking know.”
Penny burrowed deeper into her father. “And you’re scared?”
“Yeah, I’m scared.”
“And you still want all of us back?”
“More than ever.”
“Want some advice?”
“Yeah.”
“Exploit this rocky period Mom and Roger are going through. Work fast, because they’re going away this weekend, and they have this tendency to patch things up during long motel idylls.”
Lloyd laughed. “I’ve been observing you lately. Don’t you ever eat lunch?”
Penny laughed back. “The school serves nothing but health food, and Mom’s sandwiches suck. I hit a burger joint on the way home.”
“Come on, we’ll get a pizza and conspire against your mother.”
*
*
*
After a long lunch, Lloyd dropped Penny back at school and drove to Janice’s apartment. There was a note on the door: “Roger—running late, make yourself at home. Should ret. around 3:30.” He checked his watch—
3:10—and picked the lock with a credit card and let himself in. When he saw the state of the living room, he realized Janice’s success, not her lover, was his chief competition.
Every piece of furniture was a frail-looking antique, the type he had told her never to buy for the house because he was afraid it wouldn’t support his 225 pounds; every framed painting was the German Expressionist stuff he despised. The rugs were light blue Persian, the kind Janice had always wanted, but was certain he’d ruin with coffee stains. Everything was tasteful, expensive, and a testament to her freedom as a single woman. Lloyd sat down carefully in a cherrywood armchair and stretched his legs so that his feet rested on polished hardwood, not pale carpeting. He tried to kill time imagining what Janice would be wearing, but kept picturing her nude. When that led to thoughts of Roger, he let his eyes scan the room for something of or by himself. Seeing nothing, h
e fought an impulse to check out Janice’s bedroom. Then he heard a key in the lock and felt himself start to shiver.
Janice saw him immediately and didn’t register an ounce of surprise.
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“Hello, Lloyd,” she said. “Liney called me at the office and told me you were in town. I expected you to come by, but I didn’t expect you to break in.”
Lloyd stood up. A red wool suit and a new shorter hairdo. He hadn’t been close. “Cops have criminal tendencies. You look wonderful, Jan.”
Janice sighed and let her purse drop to the floor. “No, I don’t. I’m fortytwo, and I’m putting on weight.”
“I’m forty-two and losing weight.”
“So I can see. So much for the amen—”
Lloyd took two steps forward; Janice one. They embraced hands to shoulders, keeping a space between them. Lloyd broke it off first, so the contact wouldn’t make him want more. He took a step backward and said, “You know why I’m here.”
Janice pointed to a Louis XIV sofa. “Yes, of course.” When Lloyd sat down, she took a chair across from him and said, “I know what you want, and I’m glad that you want it, but I don’t know what I want. And I may never know. That’s as honest an answer as I can give you.”
Lloyd felt threads of their past unraveling. Not knowing whether to press or retreat, he said, “You’ve made a good life for yourself here. This pad, your business, the life you’ve set up for the girls.”
“I also have a lover, Lloyd.”
“Yeah, Roger the on-and-off lodger. How’s that going?”
Janice laughed. “You’re such a riot when you try to act civilized. I read about you in the L.A. papers a couple of weeks ago. Some man you captured in New Orleans.”
“Some man whose capture I fucked up in New Orleans, some man whose arraignment I almost blew in L.A.”
Janice smoothed the hem of her skirt and leaned forward. “I’ve never heard you admit to making mistakes before. As a cop, I mean.”
Lloyd leaned back. The sofa creaked against his weight and combined with Janice’s words to form an accusation. “I never made them before!”
“Don’t shout, I wasn’t accusing you of anything. What did the man do?”
The creaking grew; for a split second Lloyd thought he could feel the floor start to tremble. “The man? He beat a woman to death during a snuff film. Roger ever take out any scumbags like that?”
Janice started to flush at the cheeks; Lloyd grabbed the arms of the sofa to keep from going to her. “Roger doesn’t take out scumbags,” she said. “He doesn’t break into my apartment or carry a gun or beat up on people. Lloyd, I’m a middle-aged woman. I was in love with your intensity for a long, long 464
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time, but I can’t handle it anymore. Maybe it isn’t a nice thing to say, but Roger is a comfortable, no-fireworks lover for a middle-aged antique broker who put in nineteen years as wife to a hot-dog cop. Lloyd, do you know what I’m saying?”
The perfect softness of the indictment rang in Lloyd’s ears. “I’ve made amends as best I could,” he said, consciously holding his voice at a whisper.
“I’ve tried to admit the things I did wrong with you and the girls.”
Janice’s whisper was softer. “And your admissions were excessive and hurt me. You told me things that you shouldn’t ever, ever tell any woman that you claim to love.”
“I do love you, goddammit!”
“I know. And I love you, and even if I stay with Roger and divorce you and marry him, I’ll always love you, and Roger will never own me the way you have. But I’m too tired for the kind of love you have to give.”
Lloyd stood up and walked to the door, averting his eyes from Janice and groping for threads of hope. “The girls? Would you consider how they feel about me?”
“If they were younger, yes. But now they’re practically grown up, and I can’t let them influence me.”
Lloyd turned around and looked at his wife. “You’re not yielding on this an inch, are you?”
“I yielded too long and too much.”
“And you still don’t know what you want?”
Janice stared at the light blue Persian carpet she had coveted since the day of her wedding. “Yes . . . I . . . still don’t know.”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to outyield you,” Lloyd said. 4
She was gone, and she’d taken everything that could be converted into quick cash with her.
Duane Rice walked through the condo he’d shared with Vandy, keeping a running tab on the missing items and the risks he’d taken to earn them.
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TV console, state-of-the-art stereo system and four rooms’ worth of expensive high-tech furniture—gone. Four walk-in closets full of clothes, three for her, one for him—gone. Paintings that Vandy insisted gave the pad class—gone. The down payment and maintenance costs on a flop that he now couldn’t live in—adios, motherfucker. Add on the empty carport in back of the building and total it up: two hundred Class A felonies committed in the jurisdictions of the most trigger-happy police departments in the country. Sold down the river by a worthless—
When he couldn’t finish the thought, Rice knew that the game wasn’t over. He pissed on the living room carpet and kicked the front door off its hinges. Then he went looking for felony number 201 and the means to get back his woman.
The Pico bus dropped him on Lincoln Avenue, a stone’s throw from Venice Ghosttown and the likelihood of a shitload of customized taco wagons without alarm systems. On Lincoln and Ocean Park he spotted a hardware store and went in and boosted a large chisel, rattail file and pair of pliers. Exiting the store, he smiled and looked at his watch: two hours and ten minutes out of the rock and back on the roll.
Rice waited for dusk at a burrito stand on the edge of Ghosttown, drinking coffee and eyeballing the East Venice spectacle of overage hippies, overage hookers, overage lowriders and underage cops trying to look cool. He watched horny businessmen in company cars prowl for poontang, tried to guess which hooker they’d hit on and wondered why he had to love a woman before he could fuck her; he watched an aged love child with an amplifier strapped to his back strum a guitar for chump change and suck on a short dog of T-bird. The scene filled him with disgust, and when twilight hit, he felt his disgust turn to high-octane fuel and walked into Ghosttown. Stucco walk-back apartment buildings, white wood-frame houses spraypainted with gang graffiti, vacant lots covered with garbage. Emaciated dogs looking for someone to bite. The cars either abandoned jig rigs or welfare wagons in mint condition, but nothing exceptional. Rice walked west toward the beach, grateful that the cold weather had the locals indoors, seeing nothing that Louie Calderon would pay more than five bills for out of friendship. He kept walking, and was almost out of Ghosttown when automotive perfection hit him right between the eyes. It was a ’54 Chevy convertible, candy-apple sapphire blue with a canary yellow top, smoked windshield and full continental kit. If the interior was cherry and the engine was in good shape, he was home. 466
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Rice walked up to the driver’s-side door and pretended to admire the car while he got out his chisel and pliers. He counted slowly to ten, and when he could feel no suspicion coming down on him, jammed the chisel into the space between the door-lock and chassis and yanked outward. The door snapped open, no alarm went off. Rice saw that the dash was a restored ’54
original and felt underneath it for the ignition wires. Pay dirt! He took his pliers and twisted the two wires together. The engine came to life, and he drove the car away.
*
*
*
Two hours later, with the Chevy safely stashed, Rice walked in the door of Louie Calderon’s auto body shop and tapped Louie on the shoulder. Louie looked up from the tool kit he was digging through and said, “Duane the Brain! When’d you get out?” Rice ignored the oil-covered hand he offered and placed an arm over Louie’s
shoulders. “Today.” He looked around and saw two mechanics staring at them. “Let’s go up to your office.”
“Business?”
“Business.”
They walked through the shop and up to the office that adjoined the second story of Louie’s house. When they were seated across the papercluttered desk from each other, Rice said, “Now resting in your hot roller garage out by Suicide Hill is a mint ’54 Chevy ragtop. Continental kit, 326
supercharged, full leather tuck and roll, hand-rubbed sapphire blue metal flake paint job. Intact, I’d say it’s worth twelve K. Parts, close to ten. The upholstery is worth at least two.”
Louie opened the refrigerator next to his desk and pulled out a can of Coors. He popped the top and said, “You’re crazy. With your record, you have got to be the primo auto theft suspect in L.A. County. You bought your way out of what? A hundred counts? That kind of shit only happens once. Next time, they fuck you for the ones they got you on and the ones you got away with. How’d you get in my garage?”
Rice cracked his knuckles. “I cut a hole in the door with a chisel and unlocked it from the inside. Nobody saw me, and I covered up the hole with some wood I found. And I’m not planning on making a career of it. I just did it for a quick stake.”
“Nice sled, huh?”
“Primo. If you weren’t a Mexican, I’d call it a bonaroo taco wagon.”
Louie laughed. “All Chicanos with ambition are honorary Anglos. How much you want?”
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“Two grand and a couple of favors.”
“What kind of favors?”
“When I was at fire camp, I heard you had a message service. You know, twenty-four-hour, bootleg number, tap proof. That true?”
“Es la verdad. Two hundred scoots a month, but be cool who you give the number to, I don’t want no shitbirds giving me grief at four in the morning. What else you want? Let me guess . . . Let’s see . . . A car!”
