by James Ellroy
“Fuck. Shit, fuck. Oh, God,” Beckworth was muttering. “Show me again, Freddy.”
I grabbed his three-iron and sailed off a smooth one. Twotwenty. Straight. “Shoulders back, Loot. Feet closer together. Don’t reach for the ball, meet it.”
He had it perfect until he swung his club. Then he did everything I had told him not to and shank-dribbled the ball about ten yards.
“Easy, Loot. Try it again.”
“Goddamnit, Freddy, I can’t think today. Golf is ninety percent concentration. I’ve got the coordination of a superb athlete, but I can’t keep my mind on the game.”
I played into it. “What’s on your mind, Loot?”
“Little things. Minor things. That shithead partner of yours—I’ve got a feeling about him. Medal of Honor winner, okay. High scores at the academy, okay. But he doesn’t look, or act, like a cop. He spouts poetry at roll call. I think he’s a homo.”
“Not Wacky, Loot. He loves dames.”
“I don’t believe it.”
I played into the lieutenant’s sub rosa but well-known love of Negro tail. All the Seventy-seventh Street harness bulls knew him to be a frequent visitor at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah—the swankiest colored whorehouse on the South Side.
“Well, Loot,” I said, keeping my voice at a whisper, “he loves dames, but he’s gotta have a certain kind of dame, if you follow my drift.”
Beckworth was getting titillated. He smiled, something he rarely did, and exposed the two snaggleteeth at the corners of his mouth. “Drift it my way, Freddy boy.”
I looked in all directions, broadly searching out eavesdroppers. “Korean women, Loot. He can’t get enough of them. Only he doesn’t like to talk about it, because we’re at war over there. Wacky goes goo-goo for gooks. There’s a cathouse on Slauson and Hoover that specializes in them. It’s right next to that dump with all the colored girls—what’s the name of the place?—Minnie’s Casbah. Wacky goes to this chink place. Sometimes he sits in his car and has a few belts before he goes in. He told me he’s seen a shitload of department brass go into the Casbah looking for poontang, but he won’t tell me who. Wacky’s a stand-up guy. He doesn’t hate the brass hats the way a lot of street cops do.”
Beckworth had gone pale, but came out of it fast. “Well, he may not be a queer, but he’s still a shithead. The bastard. I had to get my office fumigated. I’m a sensitive man, Freddy, and I had nightmares about that dead cat. And don’t tell me Walker didn’t do it—because I know.”
“I don’t deny it, Lieutenant. He did it. But you got to look at his motives.”
“What motives? He hates me. That’s his motive.”
“You’re wrong, Loot. Wacky respects you. He even envies you.”
“Respect! Envy! What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a fact. Wacky envies your golfing potential. He told me so.”
“Are you crazy? I’m a hacker. He’s a low handicapper.”
“You wanna know what he said, Loot? He said, ‘Beckworth has all the moves. It’s just his concentration that’s fucking up his game and keeping him from putting it all together. He’s got a lot on his mind. He’s a good cop. I’m glad I’m just a dumb harness bull on the street. At least I can break eighty. The lieutenant is too conscientious and it fucks up his game. If he weren’t such a good cop, he’d be a scratch player.’ That’s what he said.”
I gave it a minute to sink in. Beckworth was aglow. He put down the four-iron he was mauling and smiled at me beatifically. “You tell Walker to come and see me, Freddy. Tell him I’ve got some good Scotch for him. Korean pussy, Jesus! You don’t think he’s a red, do you, Freddy?”
“Wacky Walker? Staff sergeant, U.S. Marines? Bite your tongue, Lieutenant!”
“You’re right, Freddy. That was unworthy of me. Let’s go. I’ve had enough for today.”
I drove Beckworth back to his car, then went home to my apartment in Santa Monica. I showered and changed. Then I put my off-duty .38 snub-nose into a small hip holster and attached it to my belt next to my spine in case I went dancing and got romantic. Then I got into my car and went looking for women.
* * *
—
I decided to follow the red trolley car. It ran from Long Beach all the way up into Hollywood. It was Friday night, and on weekend nights the red car carried groups of girls looking for an evening’s fun on the Strip that they probably couldn’t afford. The red car ran slightly elevated on a track in the middle of the street, so you could hardly see the passengers. Your best bet was to drive abreast of it and watch the girls as they boarded.
I liked L.A. girls the best, they were lonelier and more individual than girls from the “suburbs,” so I caught the red car at Jefferson and La Brea. I wanted to give myself five minutes or so of suspense before the Wilshire Boulevard bonanza: clusters of salesgirls from Ohrbach’s and the May Company, and secretaries from the insurance companies that lined L.A.’s busiest street. I kept my ’47 Buick ragtop with the gunsight hood ornament dead even with the red car and watched keenly as passengers boarded.
The parade up to Wilshire was predictable—old-timers, high school kids, some young couples. At Wilshire, a whole knot of high-voiced gigglers jumped on board, pushing and shoving good-naturedly. It was cold out; overcoats obscured their bodies. It didn’t matter; spirit is more important than flesh. They boarded fast, so I couldn’t discern faces. That put me at a disadvantage. If they got out at Fountain or Sunset en masse, I would have to park quick and chase them with no time to work on a line suited to one particular woman.
But it didn’t matter, not tonight, because on La Brea just short of Melrose I saw her, running out of a Chinese restaurant, handbag flying by its straps, framed for a few brief seconds in the neon glow of the Gordon Theater: an unusual-looking girl, identifiable not by type, but by an intensity of feeling. She seemed to have a harried, frightened nervousness that blasted open the L.A. night. She was dressed with style, but without regard for fashion: men’s baggy-cuffed slacks, sandals, and an Eisenhower jacket. Men’s garb, but her features were soft and feminine and her hair was long.
She barely made the red car, hopping aboard with a little antelope bound. Her destination eluded me—she had too much stuff to be running for the Strip. Maybe she was headed for a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, or a lover’s rendezvous that would ace me out. I was wrong; she got off at Fountain and started walking north.
I parked in a hurry, placed an “Official Police Vehicle” sign under my windshield wiper and followed her on foot. She turned east on De Longpre, a quiet residential street on the edge of the Hollywood business district. If she was going home I was out of luck for tonight—my methods required a crowded street or public place, and the best I could hope for was an address for future reference. But I could see that half a block up two black-and-whites were double-parked with their cherry lights on: a possible crime scene.
The girl noticed this, hesitated, and walked back in my direction. She was afraid of cops, and this compounded my interest. I decided to risk all on that fear, and intercepted her as she passed me. “Excuse me, miss,” I said, showing her my badge. “I’m a police officer, and this is an official crime scene. Please allow me to escort you to a safe place.”
The woman nodded, frightened, her face going pale and blank for a brief moment. She was very lovely, with that strength-vulnerability combo that is the essence of my love and respect for women. “All right,” she said, adding “Officer” with the thinnest edge of contempt. We walked back toward La Brea, not looking at each other. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sarah Kefalvian.”
“Where do you live, Miss Kefalvian?”
“Not far from here. But I wasn’t going home. I was going up to the boulevard.”
“Whereabouts?”
“To an art exhibit. Near Las Palmas.”
“Let me take you there.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
She was averting her eyes, but as we got to the corner of La Brea she gave me a spirited, defiant look that sent me. “You don’t like cops, do you, Miss Kefalvian?” I said.
“No. They hurt people.”
“We help more people than we hurt.”
“I don’t believe it. Thank you for escorting me. Good night.”
Sarah Kefalvian turned her back to me and started striding off briskly in the direction of the boulevard. I couldn’t let her go. I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She yanked it away. “Look,” I said, “I’m not your average cop. I’m a draft dodger. I know that there’s a Picasso exhibit at that bookstore on Las Palmas. I’m hot to learn culture and I need someone to show me around.” I gave Sarah Kefalvian the crinkly smile that made me look a bashful seventeen. She started to relent, very slightly. She smiled. I moved in. “Please?”
“Are you really a draft dodger?”
“Kind of.”
“I’ll go with you to the exhibit if you don’t touch me or tell anyone that you’re a policeman.”
“It’s a deal.”
We walked back to my illegally parked car, me elated, and Sarah Kefalvian interested, against her will.
The exhibit was at Stanley Rose’s Bookshop, a longtime hot spot for the L.A. intelligentsia. Sarah Kefalvian walked slightly ahead of me, offering awed comments. The pictures were prints, not actual paintings, but this didn’t faze her. It was obvious she was warming to the idea of having a date. I told her my name was Joe Thornhill. We stopped in front of “Guernica,” the one picture I felt confident enough to comment on.
“That’s a terrific picture,” I said. “I saw a bunch of photographs on that city when I was a kid. This brings it all back. Especially that cow with the spear sticking out of him. War must be tough.”
“It’s the cruelest, most terrible thing on earth, Joe,” Sarah Kefalvian said. “I’m devoting my life to ending it.”
“How?”
“By spreading the words of great men who have seen war and what it does.”
“Are you against the war in Korea?”
“Yes. All wars.”
“Don’t you want to stop the Communists?”
“Tyranny can only be stopped through love, not war.”
That interested me. Sarah’s eyes were getting moist. “Let’s go talk,” I said, “I’ll buy you dinner. We’ll swap life stories. What do you say?” I waggled my eyebrows a la Wacky Walker.
Sarah Kefalvian smiled and laughed, and it transformed her. “I’ve already eaten, but I’ll go with you if you’ll tell me why you dodged the draft.”
“It’s a deal.” As we walked out of the bookstore I took her arm and steered her. She buckled, but didn’t resist.
We drove to a dago joint on Sunset and Normandie. En route I learned that Sarah was twenty-four, a graduate student in History at U.C.L.A. and a first-generation Armenian-American. Her grandparents had been wiped out by the Turks, and the horror stories her parents had told her about life in Armenia had shaped her life: she wanted to end war, outlaw the atom bomb, end racial discrimination, and redistribute the wealth. She deferred to me slightly, saying that she thought cops were necessary, but should carry liberal arts educations and high ideals instead of guns. She was starting to like me, so I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she was nuts. I was starting to like her, too, and my blood was roiling at the thought of the lovemaking that we would share in a few hours’ time.
I appreciated her honesty and decided that candor would be the only decent kind of barter. I decided not to bullshit her: maybe our encounter would leave her more of a realist.
The restaurant was a one-armed Italian place, strictly family, with faded travel posters of Rome, Naples, Parma, and Capri interspersed with empty Chianti bottles hanging from a phony grape arbor. I decided to forgo chow, and ordered a big jug of dago red. We raised our glasses in a toast.
“To the end of war,” I said.
“Do you really believe that?”
“Sure. Just because I don’t carry placards or make a big deal out of it doesn’t mean I don’t hate it.”
“Tell me why you dodged the draft,” Sarah said softly.
I drained my glass and poured another. Sarah was sipping hers slowly.
“I’m an orphan. I grew up in an orphanage in Hollywood. It was lousy. It was Catholic, and run by a bunch of sadistic nuns. The food stank. During the Depression we ate nothing but potatoes, watery vegetable stews, and powdered milk, with meat maybe once a week. All the kids were skinny and anemic, with bad complexions. It wasn’t good enough for me. I couldn’t eat it. It made me so angry my skin stung. We got sent out to a Catholic school over on Western Avenue. They fed us the same slop for lunch. When I was about eight, I knew that if I continued to eat that garbage I would forfeit my claim to manhood. So I started to steal. I hit every market in Hollywood. I stole canned sardines, cheeses, fruit, cookies, pies, milk—you name it. On weekends the older kids used to get farmed out to wealthy Catholic families, to show us a bit of the good life. I got sent regularly to this family in Beverly Hills. They were loaded. They had a son about my age. He was a wild kid, and an accomplished shoplifter. His specialty was steaks. I joined him and we hit every butcher shop on the West Side. He was as fat as a pig. He couldn’t stop eating. A regular Goodyear blimp.
“During the depression there was a kind of floating hobo jungle in Griffith Park. The cops rousted the bums out of there regularly, but they would recongregate in another place. A priest from Immaculate Heart College told me about it. I went looking for them. I was a curious, lonely kind of kid, and thought bums were romantic. I brought a big load of steaks with me, which made me a big hit. I was big enough so that no one messed with me. I listened to the stories the old bums would tell—cops and robbers, railroads and Pinkerton men, darkness. Strange things that most people had no inkling of. Perversions. Unspeakable things. I wanted to know those things—but remain safe from them.
“One night we were roasting steaks and drinking some whiskey I had stolen when the cops raided the jungle. I scampered off and got away. I could hear the cops rousting out the bums. They were firm, but humorous about the whole thing; and I knew that if l became a cop I could have the darkness along with some kind of precarious impunity. I would know, yet be safe.
“Then the war came along. I was seventeen when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And I knew again, though this time in a different way. I knew that if I fought in that war I would die. I also knew that I needed an honorable out to insure getting on the police department.
“I never knew my parents. My first adopted parents gave me my name before they turned me over to the orphanage. I devised a plan. I read the draft laws, and learned that the sole surviving son of a man killed in a foreign war is draft exempt. I also knew I had a punctured eardrum that was a possible out, but I wanted to cover my bets. So I tried to enlist in ’42, right after I graduated from high school. The eardrum came through and they turned me down.
“Then I found an old wino woman, a down-and-out actress. She came with me when I made my appeal to the draft board. She yelled and screamed that she needed me to work and give her money. She said her husband, my dad, was killed in the Chinese campaign of ’26, which was why I was sent to the orphanage. It was a stellar performance. I gave her fifty bucks. The draft board believed her and told me never to try to enlist again. I pleaded, periodically, but they were firm. They admired my patriotism—but a law was a law, and ironically the punctured eardrum never kept me from becoming a cop.”
Sarah loved it, and sighed when I finished. I loved it, too; I was saving the story for a special woman, one who could appreciate it. Aside from Wacky, she was the only person to know of that part of my life.
She put her hand on mine. I ra
ised it to my lips and kissed it. She looked wistful and sad. “Have you found what you’re looking for?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you take me by that hobo jungle? Tonight?”
“Let’s go now. They close the park road at ten o’clock.”
* * *
—
It was a cold night and very clear. January is the coldest, most beautiful month in L.A. The colors of the city, permeated by chill air, seem to come into their own and reflect a tradition of warmth and insularity.
We drove up Vermont and parked in the observatory parking lot. We walked north, uphill, holding hands. We talked easily, and I laid on the more gentle, picaresque side of police work: the friendly drunks, the colorful jazz musicians in their zoot suits, the lost puppies Wacky and I repatriated to their youthful owners. I didn’t tell her about the rape-o’s, the abused kids, the stiffs at accident scenes or the felony suspects who got worked over regularly in the back rooms at Wilshire Station. She didn’t need to hear it. Idealists like Sarah, despite their naiveté, thought that the world was basically a shit place. I needed to temper her sense of reality with some of the joy and mystery. There was no way she could accept that the darkness was part of the joy. I had to do my tempering Hollywood-style.
I showed her the site of the old jungle. I hadn’t been here since 1938, thirteen years, and now it was just a clearing overgrown with weeds and littered with empty wine bottles.
“It all started here for you?” Sarah asked.
“Yes.”
“Time and place awes me.”
“Me, too. This is January 30, 1951. It’s now and it won’t ever be again.”
“That scares me.”
“Don’t be scared. It’s just the wonder. It’s very dark here. Are you afraid of the dark?”
Sarah Kefalvian raised her beautiful head and laughed in the moonlight. Big, hearty laughter worthy of her Armenian ancestors. “I’m sorry, Joe. It’s just that we’re speaking so somberly, so symbolically that it’s kind of funny.”
