by James Ellroy
Rhonda quit squirming and biting. Lloyd released her, and she twisted around and stood with her back to him, fluffing out her Afro. Turning back, she said in a perfectly composed voice, “He owes me a lot of money. If you arrest him, he won’t be able to pay me.”
Lloyd blurted, “Jesus,” then mustered his thoughts and said, “There’s a lot of reward money being offered for his capture. You talk to me, fast, and I’ll see that you get it.”
Rhonda smiled. “How much money?”
“Over seventy thousand,” Lloyd said, stealing a glance at his watch. “Tim told me you’re helping Rice look for his girlfriend. Tell me about that, and tell me about Stan Klein.”
“You know a lot about it already.”
“I don’t know a fucking thing! Tell me, goddammit!”
Rhonda looked at the clock and said, “I guess this is trading up. Rice has a coke-whore girlfriend. I’ve been helping him look for her. I found out that she’s been living with a sleazy entrepreneurial type, Stan Klein. I got—”
“What’s the girlfriend’s name?”
“Anne Vanderlinden. Duane called me Monday night, and we made a date to meet here at midnight. He said he and Vandy were flying to New York in a few days, and he needed the names of some music people. Apparently Vandy is a singer, and he wants to help her career. He promised me a bonus for that, and—”
“That was the last time you spoke to him?”
“No! He called me this afternoon, at home, to confirm our date. He sounded spacey, and he said that Vandy had left Stan Klein’s place last night, with a puto Mexican, whatever that is. Now he’s promising me the moon if I help him find her again. He also said we have to pick up some money.”
Lloyd stared at the clock, his mind suddenly blank. Rhonda fidgeted,
SUICIDE HILL
591
plucking at her hair. Finally she pointed to the gun in Lloyd’s hand. “Why have you got that out? Is Duane dangerous?”
Lloyd laughed. “Yeah, he’s dangerous.”
“I think he’s basically sweet, with some rough edges. If he’s so dangerous, where are all the other cops?”
“Never mind. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“Wait. I read the papers today. They said there’s seventy-five K in reward money out for the person who killed those people at the bank. You don’t think Duane did that? He might be a thief, but he’s not vicious.”
Lloyd grabbed Rhonda’s arm and pulled her toward the door. “Go home,”
he hissed. “Get out of here now. ”
“What about my money? How do I know I’ll get it?” She paused, then looked in Lloyd’s eyes and gasped, “You’re going to kill him because he’s a cop killer. I’ve read about that kind of thing. You can’t fool me.”
“Get the fuck out now, goddamn you. ”
There were footsteps on the walkway outside. Rhonda screamed, “Duane, run!” Lloyd froze, then threw himself prone when three shots blew the front picture window to bits. He grabbed Rhonda’s legs and yanked her to the floor, then rolled to the demolished window and fired twice blindly, hoping to draw a return volley.
Two muzzle bursts lit up the lawn; the shots ricocheted around the white walls, ripping out jagged crisscrosses of wood. Lloyd aimed at the flashes of red and squeezed off five rounds, then ejected the spent clip and slipped in a fresh one. He took a deep breath of cordite, chambered the top round and charged out the window.
No dead man on the grass; Rhonda’s screams echoing behind him. Lloyd ran up Gardner to Sunset. Rounding the corner, he heard a shot, and a plateglass window two doors down exploded. Then he saw a crowd of people on the sidewalk scatter into doorways and out on the street. And there he was. Lloyd watched the man weave through shrieking pedestrians, then dart past parked cars and start sprinting east on Sunset, out of his firing range. He sprinted full-out himself, closing the gap until he saw Rice stick his gun in the passenger window of a car stopped for the light at the next intersection. Then he ran and aimed at the same time, knots of late-night strollers making scared and startled sounds as they got out of his way. The running posture was awkward and cut down his speed, but he almost had a clear shot when Rice got in the car, and it took off against the light. Then he heard approaching sirens, and it jolted him away from the escap-592
L.A. NOIR
ing car and back to his own jeopardy. Rice would probably ditch the escape vehicle within blocks. “Shots fired” and the location would hit the air huge and goose Jesus Fred and his hot dogs into the area in force. Lloyd ran back to Silver Foxes and found Rhonda on the front lawn. He forced her into his car, but when he pulled out, he didn’t know where they were going. He only knew he was terrified.
*
*
*
Rice knew that he had to ditch the car, or keep the car and kill the driver. Digging the barrel of his .45 harder into the old man’s neck, he said,
“Hang a left at the next corner and park.”
The man obeyed, turning onto Formosa, double-parking. Grasping the wheel, he shut his eyes and began weeping. Rice snapped to a new plan: tie Pops up and leave him somewhere, take his money and roll. “You got rope in the trunk, motherfucker?”
The man nodded yes, and Rice grabbed the key from the ignition and walked back to the trunk. He was about to open it when the driver bolted and started running toward Sunset. He was almost there when a black-and-white pulled to the curb on the opposite side of the street two doors up from the car. Pops down from him; the fuzz thirty yards up. Rice got back in the car, this time behind the wheel. His head throbbed, burned and crackled, but he got a message through all of it: be calm. He turned on the engine and put the Fairlane in drive, then started to accelerate. Then he heard the old man screaming, “Police! Police!” behind him; then the cop car in front of him turned on its cherry lights.
Time stood still, then zoomed back to Doheny Drive and the first time he had dope in his veins. Rice punched the gas just as the driver of the patrol car got out with his gun drawn. Caught in blinding headlight glare, he stood transfixed. Rice smashed the nose of his three-hundred horsepower battering ram into him at thirty-six miles per hour, catching him flush. The impact ripped off the grille and a chunk of the fender; the windshield went red, just like before. Rice drove blind, his foot held to the floor until wind whipped the crimson curtain from in front of his eyes, and real vision made him stop the car and get out and run.
25
Bobby heard the radio voices stop screeching about the ’81 Chevy and the house-to-house searches that were zeroing in on him, and start barking,
“Man down, Sunset and Formosa, man down! Man down!” Within seconds sirens were wailing away from him, and the choppers took off, leaving the Bowl Motel in darkness and silence. Knowing it was a stay of execution straight from God, he packed all the money into a supermarket bag and walked out the door, leaving the .45s and Bible behind on the chair. Outside, the street was deserted and still, with no cars moving either way on Highland. Walking south, Bobby saw why: sawhorse roadblocks hung with flashing lights were stationed at all intersections, shutting off northbound traffic. Turning around, he could pick out other lighted blockades a block up, just past the motel. As he stared at the cordon, a group of plainclothes cops with shotguns entered the courtyard. God had shot him a splitsecond salvation. Stepping over the sawhorse at the corner of Franklin, Bobby saw the church and sent up a prayer for it to be Catholic. His prayer was answered when the white adobe building was caught by headlights coming off a side street: “Saint Anselm’s Catholic Church” in large black letters. A light was burning in the window of the white adobe bungalow adjoining the church. Bobby ran to the beacon and rang the bell. The man who opened the door was young, dressed in black clerical trousers and a polo shirt. Bobby grimaced when he saw the alligator on his chest and his new-wave haircut. Not Mexican and not Irish-looking; probably a social activist type. “Are you a priest?” he asked. The man looked Bobby up and down. He stuck h
is hands in his pockets, and Bobby knew he was digging for chump change. “I don’t want no handout,” he said. “Money’s the one thing I got big. I want to make a confession. You hear confessions?”
594
L.A. NOIR
“Yes, weekday afternoons,” the priest said. He reached into his front pocket, pulled out a pair of glasses and put them on. Bobby stood under his gaze, watching him pick up on his ink-stained arms and face and Duane Rice’s shirt that hung on him like a tent. “Please, Father. Please.”
The priest nodded and moved past Bobby onto the sidewalk, making beckoning motions. Bobby followed him over to the church. Unlocking the door, the priest turned on a light and walked inside. Bobby waited by the door and murmured Hail Marys, then bolted up the steps and anointed himself with holy water from the font by the back pew. As he genuflected toward the altar and made the sign of the Cross, the shopping bag slipped out of his arms. A wad of twenties dropped to the floor, and he stuffed them into his pockets and walked to the scrim of velvet curtains that separated the confessional booths from the church proper.
The priest was in the first booth. Bobby pulled the drapes aside, dropped the bag and knelt in front of the partition that shielded him from his confessor. The screen was slid open, and Bobby could see the priest’s lips move as he said, “Are you ready to make your confession?”
Bobby cleared his throat and said, “Bless me, Father. My last confession was about five or six years ago, except I heard some confessions when I worked this religious scam. I faked being a priest, but I always tried to be fair with the suck—I mean the people I scammed. What I mean—”
Bobby leaned his head against the partition. When he saw that his lips were almost touching the lips of his confessor, he gasped and brought himself back into a ramrod-straight posture. Muttering Hail Marys under his breath, he got down what he wanted to say in the right order. When he heard the priest cough, he pressed his palms together and lowered his head, then began.
“I am guilty of many mortal sins. I worked this phone scam where I impersonated priests and ripped off money in God’s name, and I pulled burglaries, and I fired off lots of low blows when I was a fighter. Sometimes I rubbed resin on my gloves between rounds, so I could fuck—so I would waste the guy’s eyes when I went head-hunting. I robbed a bank, and I raped a woman, and I pulled evil sex shit on another woman, and I shot a woman and killed her, and—”
Bobby stopped when he heard the priest chanting Hail Marys. Slamming the partition with his palms, he shouted, “You listen to me, motherfucker!
This is my fucking confession, not yours!”
Silence answered the outburst. Then the priest said, “Finish your confession and I’ll tell you your penance.”
SUICIDE HILL
595
The sternness in the kiddie-confessor’s voice gave Bobby the juice to say it, the big stuff he finally figured out. “I got a brother,” he said. “Younger than me. He’s weak ’cause I made him weak. I committed a heinous mortal sin with him when we was kids, and I been trying to atone for it by looking after him ever since, when what I should have done was cut him loose years ago, so he could get balls on his own. I always felt guilty about hating him,
’cause I knew that riding herd on his ass was killin’ me, too. See, I always figured that he knew what I did, but he was afraid to say it, ’cause of what it would make us. Then, dig, tonight I figured out that he just didn’t remember, ’cause it was so long ago, which means that all this time I sp—”
The priest interrupted, his voice impatient and severe, like a confessor’s voice should be. “Don’t interpret. Tell me the sin.”
Bobby said it, sounding to himself like an old TV judge handing down a life sentence. “When we was kids, I used to tie Little Bro up so I could go out and play. I came back one day and saw that he’d wet himself ’cause he couldn’t get up. The whole bed was wet, and I got righteously turned on and pulled down his pants and touched him.”
“And that is your heinous mortal sin? After all the other acts you confessed?”
Now Bobby heard disgust. “Don’t you interpret, Father. They’re my sins. Mine. ”
“Say the act of contrition and I’ll give you your penance,” the priest whispered. Bobby bowed his head and forced the second part of his sentence out in an Anglo accent, like the old Irish sisters had taught him. “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee. I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pain of hell. But most of all because I have offended thee, O God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of thy grace to confess my sins, do penance and amend my life. Amen. Well, Father?”
“I grant you absolution,” the priest said. “Your penance is good deeds for the rest of your life. Begin soon, you have much to atone for. Go and sin no more.”
Bobby heard his confessor slide through the curtains and walk out of the church. He gave him enough time to make it back to the rectory, then got to his feet and picked up the shopping bag, smiling at the weight. “Begin soon” rang in his ears. On wobbly legs, he obeyed. The poor box was on the side wall near the rear pews, ironclad, but too small to hold sixteen K in penance bucks. Bobby started shoving cash in the 596
L.A. NOIR
slot anyway, big fistfuls of c-notes and twenties. Bills slipped out of his hands as he worked, and he was wondering whether to leave the whole bag by the altar when he heard strained breathing behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Duane Rice standing just outside the door. His high school yearbook prophecy crossed his mind: “Most likely not to survive, ” and suddenly Duane-o looked more like a priest than the puto with the alligator fag shirt. Bobby dropped the bag and fell to his knees; Rice screwed the silencer onto his .45 and walked over. He picked up the bag and placed the gun to the Sharkman’s temple; Bobby knew that defiant was the way to go splitsville. He got in a righteous giggle and “Duhn-duhn-duhn-duhn” before Rice blew his brains out.
26
Joe sat in a booth in Ben Frank’s Coffee Shop, forcing himself to eat a cheeseburger platter. Through the tinted plate-glass window he watched Anne talk into a pay phone in the parking lot. He tried to read her lips, but she was too far away, and distant siren blare from the east kept distracting him. The food that he figured would calm him down didn’t; the ’Vette, ditched on a side street two blocks away, had his prints all over the wheel and dashboard. The copter lights and sirens made the Hollywood/Strip border area feel like a war zone. The thrill of mastering the stick shift in a stolen car was dead, and Anne had now fed a dozen quarters to the phone, trying to connect with her “good music friends” who would “help them out.” The black pimps at the next table were talking about a shootout on Gardner and barricades and cops with shotguns up by the Hollywood Bowl. One of them kept repeating, “Righteous fucking heat,” and Joe knew he was digging it because the heat wasn’t directed at him. Every word, every bit of noise, from the war sounds to waitresses clanking dishes, brought back Stan Klein’s face just as he stuck in the knife. That was bad, but he knew it was only a delayed reaction, something like shock. What made it terrible was his music turning on him, “And death was a thrill on Suicide Hill” bopping in his brain along with pictures of the man he killed.
SUICIDE HILL
597
Joe felt his insides start to turn over. He jumped up, bumping the table, knocking his food on the floor. The pimps laughed when french fries flew onto a passing customer’s legs, and Joe ran to the bathroom and vomited his meal into the sink. Holding the wall with one hand, he turned on the faucet and doused his head with cold water. His stomach heaved, and his chest expanded and contracted with short blasts of breath. He looked at himself in the mirror, then turned away when he saw Bobby just like he always looked after getting his ass kicked at the Olympic. Standing upright, he gave himself another dousing, then wiped his face with a paper towel and walked back into the restaurant.
A busboy was cleaning up the
spillage by his table; the pimps snickered at him. Joe sidestepped the mess and ran out the door, the cashier yelling,
“What about your check!” On the sidewalk, he looked for Anne. She wasn’t by the pay phone, and she wasn’t in the parking lot. Then he saw her across the street, upstaging a group of hookers with a pelvis-grinding boogie aimed at passing cars.
Joe started to jaywalk across Sunset; a Mercedes stretch limo pulled up in front of Anne, and she got in. The stretch hung an immediate right turn, and Joe ran, rounding the corner just in time to see it park halfway down the block. Walking over, he heard male sex grunts shooting out of the backseat. Then a disco tune smothered the groans, and the chauffeur got out and stood by the car, trying to look cool about the whole thing. With anger blotting out all traces of Stan Klein’s death mask, Joe retreated to a dark front lawn to play watchdog.
The limo wobbled on its suspension for half an hour, the musical accompaniment going from disco to reggae. Joe moved back and forth between pins-and-needles alertness and nodding-out sleepiness. Total exhaustion was dropping over him when a door slammed, and Anne began skipping up to the Strip. When she passed him, Joe said, “You really rocked that stretch. Any bitch that can rock a Benz fender to fender has got to be a pro.”
Anne squinted into the darkness. When Joe walked up to her, she said,
