Clandestine

by James Ellroy

  I dog-nipped my way down her back, turning and looking every few seconds at her tear-stained face. I lifted the hem of her skirt and bit my way down her legs to her ankles, trying not to snag her nylons. Her hand was stroking and mussing my hair. I pulled off her shoes and bit her toes, one at a time, barking “Woof! Woof!” between each bite. Maggie was shrieking now, her whole body wracked with uncontrollable laughter.

  Now that I knew what I had come to give, I rolled her over onto her side and elbowed myself up until we were face to face. We had a long interim where Maggie held me tightly and I stroked her hair. Just as her laughter would subside, I would “woof, woof” tenderly into her ear and kiss her neck until she cracked up again.

  Finally Maggie took her head from my chest and looked at me. “Woof, Bill Thornhill,” she said.

  “Woof, fair Maggie Cadwallader,” I said.

  Maggie’s lipstick was gone, mashed into my lapels and shirtfront. Her mouth was completely guileless as I bent in slow motion to kiss it. Maggie’s lips parted and her eyes closed as she sensed my intention. Our lips and tongues met and played in perfect, experienced unison. We rolled together as we kissed, kicking over the coffee table, sending magazines and artificial flowers to the floor. We broke our long kiss, and Maggie made small noises as my hands fumbled at the clasp at the back of her dress.

  “The bathroom first, Bill, please.” As I released her, she leaped out of my embrace and stumbled to her feet, making more small noises as she moved to the bathroom.

  I got to my feet and took off my clothes, laying them neatly on the sofa. Wearing only undershorts, I walked softly to the bathroom. The door was slightly ajar and the light was on. I could hear Maggie rummaging in the medicine cabinet. There was a ritual going on that I had long wanted to observe.

  I pushed open the door. Maggie was starting to insert her diaphragm when she saw me. She jumped, startled and angry, into the bathtub, where she covered herself with the shower curtain.

  “Bill,” she said, flushed. “Please, goddamnit, I’ll just be a minute. Wait in the bedroom, honey. Please. I’ll be right there.”

  “I just wanted to watch you, sweetheart,” I said. “I wanted to help you with it.”

  Maggie said nervously, “It’s a private thing, Bill. A woman’s thing. If you don’t see me do it, then you don’t really know it’s there. It’s better for you. Believe me, honey.”

  “I believe you, but I want to see. Show me, please.”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  I lowered my head and nudged Maggie back against the shower wall. She started to giggle. I pulled her away from the bathtub, hoisted her into the air, spun her around and set her down in the same posture she had been in when I had pushed open the bathroom door.

  “Do you ever lose at anything, Bill?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’ll be twenty-seven next week.”

  “I’m thirty-six.”

  “You’re beautiful. I want to love you so much.”

  “You’re very handsome. You’ve never seen a woman put in her diaphragm?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll show you.”

  She did. “You’re a strange, curious young man, Bill.”

  “Intimate things like that mean a lot to me.”

  “I believe you. Now make love to me.”

  Maggie led me to her bedroom. She left the light off. She unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her bra and let the garments fall to the floor. I stepped out of my undershorts. We lay on the bed and held each other for a long time. I stroked Maggie’s hair. She cooed into my chest. I grew tired of it, and tried to bring her chin up so I could kiss her, but she resisted, pushing her head harder against me. After a while her grip loosened and I was able to cover her neck with kisses. Maggie sighed, and I began to suck her breasts. I felt her hand between my legs, urging me toward her. She positioned herself beneath me and guided me in. I began to move. Maggie didn’t respond. I tried slow, exploratory thrusts, then hard insistent ones. Maggie just lay there, motionless. I propped myself up on my hands, the better to look at her face. Maggie looked up at me, smiling. She reached up and framed my face with her hands, her smile more beatific as my thrusts multiplied in their urgency. I came very hard. I groaned, shuddered and collapsed on top of her. She never said a word. When I finally managed to look at her she was still smiling; and I realized I had been thinking of Lorna Weinberg.

  Maggie had seemed to change during our lovemaking. She had gotten what she wanted, and it wasn’t love, or sex. Her smile and post-lovemaking ritual of bringing in brandy and snifters on a tray seemed to be saying, “Now that we have gotten that over with, we can get down to the real business of our meeting.”

  We sat in bed and sipped brandy, both of us nude. I liked Maggie’s body: pale, freckled skin, gently rounded shoulders, soft stomach, and small soft breasts with large dark red nipples. I liked her openness in showing it to me even more, and had no desire to leave. The brandy was good, but I watched my intake. Maggie was sipping steadily, and would soon be pie-eyed. Maggie beamed at me as I shifted postures. I waggled my eyebrows a la Wacky Walker. Maggie beamed some more. I told her some lies about the insurance racket. She still beamed.

  Finally she said, “Bill, let’s go into the living room, okay?” She dug two terry cloth robes out of her bedroom closet, then led me into the living room, gave me a big kiss on the cheek, and sat me down on the couch like a loving mother or schoolteacher. She went back into the bedroom and returned with a large leather-bound scrapbook.

  She sat down between me and my piled-up clothes and poured herself more brandy. My robe was well worn and smelled fresh. As Maggie arranged the scrapbook on the coffee table I adjusted her robe to show off a fair amount of cleavage. She reacted with a prim kiss on my cheek. I disliked her for it. The ten-year gap in our ages was beginning to show.

  “Memory lane, Bill,” Maggie said. “Would you like to take a little trip down memory lane with old Maggie?”

  “You’re not old.”

  “In some ways I am.”

  “You’re in your prime.”

  “Flatterer.”

  She opened the scrapbook. On the first page were photographs of a tall, light-haired man in a World War I doughboy’s uniform. He stood alone in most of the sepia-tinted photos, and in a preeminent spot in the group shots.

  “That’s my daddy,” Maggie said. “Mama used to get exasperated with him sometimes, and say bad things about him. When I was a little girl I asked her once, ‘If Daddy was so mean, why did you marry him?’ and she said, ‘Because he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen.’ ”

  She turned the page. Wedding pictures and baby pictures.

  “That’s Mama and Daddy’s wedding—1910. And that’s me as a little baby, just before Daddy went into the army.”

  “Are you an only child, Maggie?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  She flipped the pages more rapidly. I watched time pass, seeing in minutes Maggie’s parents go from young to old and seeing Maggie go from infancy to lindy-hopping adolescent. Her face, as she danced at some long-gone high school sock-hop, was a heartbreakingly hopeful version of her current one.

  She drank brandy, talking on in a wistful monotone, barely heeding my presence. She seemed to be leading up to something, working slowly toward some goal that would explain why she wanted me here.

  “End of volume one, Bill,” Maggie said. She got up unsteadily from the sofa and knocked over my folded sport coat. When she picked it up, she noted its heaviness and started to fumble in the pocket where I had put my gun and handcuffs. Before I had a chance to stop her, she withdrew the .38, screamed, and backed away from me, holding the gun shakily, pointed to the floor.

  “No, no, no, no!” she gasped
. “Please, no! I won’t let you hurt me! No!”

  I got up and walked toward her, trying to remember if both safety locks were on. “I’m a policeman, Maggie,” I said softly, placatingly. “I don’t want to hurt you. Give me the gun, sweetheart.”

  “No! I know who sent you! I knew he would! No! No!”

  I picked up my trousers and pulled out my badge in its leather holder. I held it up. “See, Maggie? I’m a police officer. I didn’t want to tell you. A lot of people don’t like policemen. See? It’s a real badge, sweetheart.”

  Maggie dropped the gun, sobbing.

  I went over and held her tightly. “It’s all right. I’m sorry you were scared. I should have told you the truth. I’m sorry.”

  Maggie shook her head against me. “I’m sorry, too. I was a ninny. You’re just a man. You wanted to get laid, and you lied. I was a ninny. I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “Don’t say that. I care about you.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I do.” I kissed the part in her hair and pushed her gently away. “You were going to show me volume two, remember?”

  Maggie smiled. “All right. You sit down and pour me a brandy. I feel funny.”

  While Maggie got her other scrapbook I put my gun back in my coat pocket. She came back hugging a slender black leather album. She beamed as if the gun episode had never happened.

  We took up where we left off. She opened the album. It contained a dozen snapshots of a little baby, probably only a few weeks old, still bald, peering curiously up toward some fascinating object. Maggie touched her fingers to her lips and pressed them to the photos.

  “Your baby?” I asked.

  “Mine. My baby. My love.”

  “Where is he?”

  “His father took him.”

  “Are you divorced?”

  “He wasn’t my husband, Bill. He was my lover. My true love. He’s dead now. He died of his love for me.”

  “How, Maggie?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “He’s in an orphanage, back east.”

  “Why, Maggie? Orphanages are terrible places. Why don’t you keep him? Children need parents, not institutions.”

  “Don’t say that! I can’t! I can’t keep him! I’m sorry I showed you, I thought you’d understand!”

  I took her hand. “I do, sweetheart, more than you know. Let’s go back to bed, all right?”

  “All right. But I want to show you one more thing. You’re a policeman. You know a lot about crime, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then come here. I’ll show you where I keep my buried treasure.”

  We went back into the bedroom. As I sat on the bed, Maggie unscrewed the left front bedpost. She pulled off the top part and reached down into the hollowed-out bottom piece. She extracted a red velvet bag, its end held together by a drawstring.

  “Would a burglar look in a place like that, Bill?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  Maggie opened the velvet bag and drew out an antique diamond brooch. I almost gasped: the rocks looked real, perfectly cut, and there were at least a dozen of them, interspersed with larger blue stones, all mounted on heavy strands of real gold. The thing must have been worth a small fortune.

  “It’s beautiful, Maggie.”

  “Thank you. I don’t show it to many people. Only the nice ones.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “It’s a love gift.”

  “From your true love?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want some advice? Put it in a safe-deposit box. And don’t tell people about it. You never know the kind of person you might meet.”

  “I know who I can trust and who I can’t.”

  “All right. Put it away, will you?”

  “Why? I thought you liked it.”

  “I do, but it makes me sad.”

  Maggie replaced the brooch in its hiding place. I lifted her and set her down on the bed.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “I want to talk and drink some more brandy.”

  “Later, sweetheart.”

  Maggie slipped off her robe reluctantly. I tried to be passionate, but my kisses were perfunctory, and I was filled with a sense of loss that not even lovemaking could surmount.

  When it was over Maggie smiled and kissed my cheek absently, then threw on her robe and went to the kitchen. I could hear her digging around for bottles and glasses. It was my cue. I padded softly into the living room and dressed in the semidarkness.

  Maggie came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with a liqueur bottle and shot glasses on it. Her face crashed for an instant when she saw I was leaving, but she recovered quickly, like the veteran she was.

  “I have to go, Maggie,” I said. She did not put down the tray, so I leaned over it, bumping it slightly, and brushed my lips against her cheek. “Goodbye, Maggie.” She didn’t answer, just stood there holding the tray.

  I walked to my car. The cold air felt good, and dawn was just starting to break.

  I knew that this Saturday, February 6, 1951, had been a red-letter day for me. When I got home I wrote in my diary only what I knew: Maggie Cadwallader and Lorna Weinberg. I would not realize until later that this had been the pivotal date of my life.

  4

  Beckworth called me into his office on Monday morning. I had expected him to be angry with me for standing him up, but he was surprisingly magnanimous. He told me flat out what I had already heard from several other less reliable sources: come June he would be the new commander of Wilshire Station, and would initiate a purging of “shithead deadwood” sending a half dozen “fuck-up bluesuits” to Seventy-seventh Street Division, “N———land, U.S.A.,” where they could learn “the real meaning of police work.” He never mentioned names—he didn’t have to. Wacky Walker would obviously be on the first stage to Watts, and I gravely accepted the fact that there was nothing I could do about it.

  Wacky and I had resolved our differences that weekend through booze and poetry. I had gone over to his apartment Sunday bearing gifts—a crisp C-note as payment for his green-reading duties, handcuffs and gun, a bottle of Old Grand Dad and a limited edition volume of the early poetry of W. H. Auden. Wacky was delighted and almost wept in his gratitude, causing me to feel the strangest detachment; love mixed with pity and bitter resentment at his dependence on me. It was a feeling I would carry with me until the end of the last season of my youth.

  I walked into the muster room for the immortal police ritual of Monday morning roll call. The room was noisy, and filled with cigarette smoke. Gately, the muster sergeant, needed a shave as usual.

  I found a seat next to Wacky. He was staring into his lap, pretending to read traffic reports. As I sat down, I glanced at his real reading material: enclosed in the traffic holder was a copy of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot.

  Gately made it brief. No drunk arrests—the Lincoln Heights drunk tank had flooded during the recent heavy rains—and lots of traffic summonses; the city attorney wanted shitloads of them—the heavy implication being that the city needed moola. We were told to lay off the streetwalkers on West Adams, and to look out for a stickup team: two Mexican gunsels had hit a liquor store and a couple of markets on the Southern border of the division, near the Coliseum. The dicks had learned from eyewitnesses that they drove a souped-up white Ford pickup. They were packing .45 automatics. When Gately mentioned this there was an immediate reaction in the room—this is why we are all here, every cop in the room seemed to be thinking. Even Wacky stirred and looked up from his Eliot. He pointed his right index finger at me and cocked his thumb. I nodded; it was why I was there, too.

  We got our black-and-white from the lot and cruised east on Pico to Hoover, then south toward the
Coliseum. Wacky wanted to spend some time warning local merchants about the Mexican heisters. He was in an effusive mood and wanted to gab with his “constituents.”

  We parked, and Wacky insisted that I accompany him to talk to Jack Chew. Jack Chew was a Chinaman with a Texas drawl. He owned a little market-butcher shop at Twenty-eighth and Hoover and said things like, “Ah, sooo, pardner.” Wacky loved him, but he hated Wacky because he helped himself to the canned litchi nuts that Jack kept behind the counter for the cops on the beat. Jack was very courtly and Old World: he liked to offer or be asked, and he thought that Wacky was a pig for grabbing.

  He was behind the meat counter when we walked into his open-air store, wrapping up some kind of candied duck for an old Chinese lady.

  “Hey there, Jack,” Wacky called, “where’d you get that quacker? I thought the guys at Rampart told you to quit raiding Westlake Park. Don’t you know all those used rubbers they got floating round in the lake spoil the flavor? The guys at Rampart told me the ducks wear the rubbers at night to keep their beaks warm. Whither thou, O quacker beak; Peter juice and soon you’ll peak; O noble duck, Such bad, bad luck; To end at Jack’s you’re really fucked.”

  Jack groaned and the old woman giggled as Wacky did his Frankenstein imitation, walking toward her slowly, arms extended, groaning deeply.

  “Fuck you, Walker,” Jack said. To me he said, “Ah, sooo, Officer Freddy,” then handed me an open can of litchi nuts. Jack spoke a few words to the woman in Chinese. She left, giggling and waving at Wacky.

  “They all love me, Jack. What is it about me?” Wacky said. “But this isn’t a social call.”

  “Good,” Jack said.

  Wacky laughed and went on, “Jack, we got some bad hombres operating on this side of the range, carrying hardware. They like little markets like yours, and being greasers they probably don’t know that Chinamen are tough giver-uppers. They’re in their mid twen—”

  Wacky didn’t get to finish. A young woman ran into the market. She was opening her mouth to scream, but no sound was coming out. She grabbed at Wacky’s arm.