by James Ellroy
Lorna was standing me up. I jogged over to the parking lot on Temple. Her car was in its space. Angry, I walked back to city hall and entered. I checked out the directory in the vestibule: the office of the district attorney occupied two whole floors. Nervously, I took the elevator, although I wanted to run the nine flights of stairs. I walked down the deserted ninth-floor corridors, poking my head in open doorways, checking empty conference rooms. I even ducked my head into the ladies’ can. Nothing.
I heard the clack-clacking of a typewriter in the distance. I walked down the hallway to a glass door with “Grand Jury Investigations” lettered on it in flat black paint. I knocked softly.
“Who is it?” Lorna’s voice called testily.
I disguised my voice: “Telegram, ma’am.”
“Shit,” I heard her mutter. “It’s open.”
I pushed in the door. Lorna looked up from her typewriter, noticed me and jumped toward the door in an attempt to block my entrance. I sidestepped her, and she crashed to the floor.
“Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, God!” she said, pushing herself up into a sitting position against the wall. “What the hell are you doing with me?”
“Stalking your heart,” I said, tossing the roses onto her desk. “Here, let me help you up.”
I squatted down and grabbed Lorna under her arms and gently lifted her to her feet. She made feeble motions toward pushing me away, but her heart wasn’t in it. I embraced her tightly and she didn’t resist.
“We had a date, remember?” I whispered into her soft brown hair.
“I remember.”
“Are you ready to go?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I told you last night, don’t think.”
Lorna disengaged herself. “Don’t patronize me, Underhill,” she hissed. “I don’t know what you want, but I know you underestimate me. I’ve been around. I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve tried promiscuity and I’ve tried true love, and they’re like my dead leg: they don’t work. I don’t need a charity lover. I don’t need a deformity-lover. I don’t need compassion—and above all, I don’t need a cop.”
“But you need me.”
“No, I don’t!” She raised her hand to slap me.
“Do it, counselor,” I said. “Then I’ll file on you for a 647-f, assault on a police officer. You’ll have to investigate it yourself and then be in the incongruous position of being defendant, investigator, and defense attorney all at once. So go ahead.”
Lorna lowered her hand and started to laugh.
“Good,” I said. “I drop all charges and grant parole.”
“In whose custody?”
“In mine.”
“Under what conditions?”
“For starters, that you accept my flowers and have dinner with me tonight.”
“And then?”
“That will depend on your probation reports.”
Lorna laughed again. “Will I get time off for good behavior?”
“No,” I said, “I think it’s going to be a life sentence.”
“You’re out of your bailiwick, Officer, as you once said to me.”
“I’m above the law, counselor, as you once said to me.”
“Touché, Freddy.”
“A standstill, Lorna. Dinner?”
“All right. The flowers are lovely. Let me put them in water, then we can go.”
We headed for the beach and the Malibu Rendezvous, a classy seaside eatery I had catalogued in my mind since the “old days” when I dreamed of the “ultimate” woman. Now, years later, I was driving there, an adult, a policeman, with a crippled Jewish attorney sitting beside me blowing smoke rings and casting furtive glances at me as I drove.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“You told me not to think, remember?”
“I retract it.”
“All right. I was thinking that you’re too good looking. It’s disarming and it probably makes people underestimate you. There’s a side to you that could take advantage of that underestimation very easily.”
“That’s very perceptive. What else were you thinking?”
“That you’re too good to be a cop. No—don’t interrupt, I didn’t mean it quite that way; I’m glad you’re a cop. Eddie Engels would be free to kill with impunity if you weren’t. It’s just that you could be anything you want, literally. I was also thinking that I don’t want to be fawned over in a fancy restaurant; I don’t want to go clumping through there getting a lot of pitying looks.”
“Then why don’t we eat on the beach? I’ll have the restaurant fix us up with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine.”
Lorna smiled and blew a smoke ring at me, then tossed her cigarette out the window. “That’s a good idea,” she said.
I parked in the blacktopped area adjoining the restaurant, about a hundred yards away from the beach. Lorna waited in the car while I went to fetch our feast. I ordered three orders of cracked crab and a bottle of Chablis. The waiter was hesitant about boxing an order “to go,” but changed his tune when I whipped a five-spot on him, even popping the cork on the wine bottle and throwing in two glasses.
Lorna was standing outside the car, smoking, when I returned. When she saw me she stared up at the warm summer sky and pointed her cane heavenward. I looked up, too, and committed the twilight sky and a low-hanging cloud formation to memory.
There was a flight of rickety wooden steps leading down to the sand. I carried our picnic and Lorna limped by my side. The stairs were barely wide enough for the two of us, so I threw an arm around Lorna and she huddled into my chest and hopped on her good leg all the way down, laughing, out of breath when we reached the bottom.
We found a nice spot to sit on a rise. The sun was a departing orange ball, and it lovingly caught strands of Lorna’s light brown hair and burnished them into gold.
We sat on the sand, and I laid out our food on top of the brown paper bag it had come in. Not standing on ceremony, we polished off all three crustaceans in short order without saying a word. The sun had gone down while we ate, but the light from the big picture window of the restaurant cast an amber glow that allowed us a muted view of each other.
Lorna lit a cigarette as I poured us each a glass of wine. “To September 2, 1951,” I said.
“And to beginnings.” Lorna smiled and we clinked glasses. I didn’t quite know what to say. Lorna did. “Who are you?” she asked.
I gulped my wine and felt it go to my head almost immediately. “I’m Frederick Upton Underhill,” I said. “I’m twenty-seven years old, I’m an orphan, a college graduate and a cop. I know that. And I know that you’ve caught me at the most exciting time of my life.”
“Caught you?” Lorna laughed.
“No, more correctly, I caught you.”
“You haven’t caught me.”
“Yet.”
“You probably never will.”
“ ‘Probably’ is an equivocation, Lorna.”
“Look, Freddy, you don’t know me.”
“Yet.”
“All right, yet.”
“But in a sense, I do. I went over to your dad’s house last winter. I saw some photographs of you. I talked to Siddell about you, and she told me about the accident and your mother’s death, and I felt I knew you then, and I still feel it.”
Lorna’s eyes glittered with anger and she spoke very coldly: “You had no right to pry into my life. And if you pity me, I will never see you again. I will walk up to that restaurant and call a cab and ride out of your life. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand. I understand that I don’t know what pity is, never having felt it for myself. I pity some of the people I meet on the job, but that’s easy; I know I’m never going to see them again. No, for what it’s worth I don’t give a damn if yo
u’ve got a bad leg, or two, or three. When I met you in February I knew, and I still know.”
“Know what?”
“Don’t make me say it, Lorna. It’s too early.”
“All right. Will you hold me for a while, please?”
I moved to Lorna and we embraced clumsily. She held me around the small of my back and nuzzled her head into my chest. I rested my hand on the knee of her bad leg until she took it and cupped it to her breast, holding it tightly there. We stayed that way for some time, until Lorna said in a very small voice, “Will you drive me back to my car, please?”
* * *
—
An hour later we were embracing again, this time standing in the parking lot on Temple Street. We kissed, alternately soft and hard. A patrol car cruised by, shined its light on us and departed, the cop shaking his head. Lorna and I laughed.
“Do you know him?” she asked.
“No, but I know you.”
“All right, you know me, and I’m starting to know you.”
“Dinner tomorrow night?” I asked.
“Yes, Fred. Only I don’t want to go out, I want to cook for you myself.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“My address is 8987 Charleville, in Beverly Hills. Can you remember that?”
“Yes. What time?”
“Seven thirty?”
“I’ll be there. Now kiss me so I can let you go.”
We kissed again, this time quickly.
“No protracted farewells,” Lorna muttered as she broke from my arms and limped over to her car.
11
We assembled at the Havana Hotel at 8:00 a.m., Wednesday, September 3. Dudley Smith was stern-faced and businesslike as he called for our reports and our conclusions.
Dudley reported first, telling of our questioning of Lawrence Brubaker and Janet Valupeyk. He volunteered his information on the three unsolved strangulation homicides in the West L.A.–Venice area, with special emphasis on the woman found in the alley near the Venice canals in March of ’48.
Breuning and Carlisle whistled in awe at these new offshoots of the case. Mike raised his hand and interjected, “Dud, Dick’s got absolutely nothing to tie our boy to the Leona Jensen homicide. I’ve got a pal on the Venice dicks who could give me access to their files. If Engels was living two blocks away at the time of the killing, there could well be something in their files that points to him.”
Dudley shook his head patiently. “Mike, lad, we have this fiend cold for the Cadwallader snuff. Cold, lad. I’m thinking now that the Jensen killing was unrelated. Freddy, you discovered the stiff, what do you think?”
“I don’t know, Dudley,” I said, measuring my words carefully. “Of course, if I hadn’t discovered those matches at the death scene we wouldn’t be here today. But I’m beginning to think it was just an incredible coincidence, and that Engels didn’t snuff Leona Jensen. Engels is a strangler, and although the Jensen woman was strangled, she was also stabbed all over. I’ve got a picture of Engels as a very competent, fastidious homosexual. Someone who hates women, but abhors blood. I agree with Dudley—forget the Jensen killing; it’s the wrong M.O.”
Dudley laughed. “There’s a college boy for you—brains all the way. Mike, you’ve been tailing handsome Eddie. What have you got?”
Stolid Mike Breuning cleared his throat and gave Dudley Smith a toadying look. “Skipper, I agree with Underhill. Engels is too immaculate. But he’s been chasing skirts and taking home a different tomato every night for three nights running. I’ve been hiding out in the carport next to his bungalow listening for signs of violence. No such luck. The dames all left in the morning, without a mark on them. I tailed all three of them back to their cars. Engels gives them cab fare to get back to their cars, which were all parked next to cocktail bars. I tailed them all to juke joints in Hollywood. I got the license numbers of the cars the dames got into, in case we need them as witnesses.”
“Fine work, Mike,” Dudley said, reaching over from his straight-backed chair to give Breuning a fatherly pat on the shoulder. “Dick, lad, what have you to say?”
The cold-eyed, bespectacled Carlisle said resolutely, “All I know is that Engels is a cold-blooded killer and a smart son of a bitch. I say we grab him before he gets smart and knocks off another dame.”
Dudley surveyed all of us in the tiny hotel room. “I think we all concur on that, don’t you, men?” he said. We all nodded. “Are there any questions then, lads?”
“When do we file our reports with the D.A.?” I asked.
Breuning and Carlisle laughed.
“When Eddie Engels confesses, lad,” Dudley said.
“What jail are we booking him into, then?”
Dudley looked to his more experienced underlings for support. They looked at me and shook their heads, then looked back to Dudley in awe.
“Lad, there will be no official police sanctions or paper work until Eddie Engels confesses. Tomorrow morning at five forty-five a.m., we will rendezvous in front of handsome Eddie’s courtyard. I will drive my car. Mike, you will pick up Dick and Freddy. Mike and Dick, you will carry shotguns. Freddy, bring your service revolver. At five minutes of six we will kick in Eddie’s door. We will subdue him, and put the fear of God into any colleen or homo who might be sharing his bed, then send them on their way. I have an interrogation place set up, an abandoned motel in Gardena. Freddy, Dick, Engels, and I will travel in my car. Mike will follow in his. This is apt to be a long interrogation, lads, so spend some time with your loved ones tonight and tell them you may not be seeing them for a while. Now, stand up, lads.”
We did, in a little semicircle.
“Now all put your hands on top of mine.”
We did.
“Now, lads, say a little silent prayer for our clandestine operation.”
Breuning and Carlisle closed their eyes reverently. I did, too, for a brief moment. When I opened them I saw Dudley staring straight ahead past all of us to some distant termination point.
“Amen,” he said finally, and winked at me.
* * *
—
Lorna’s apartment was a block south of Wilshire near the Beverly Hills business district, and it was a perfect testament to her pride and competence; a neat, one-bedroom affair with subdued, expensive furnishings that reflected the things she held close—a sense of order and propriety, and a nonhysterical concern for the great unwashed. The place was a clearinghouse for her professional interests: the shelves were crammed with law texts and volumes and volumes of statute books for both California and the rest of the nation. There was a big cherry-wood desk placed diagonally into the corner of the living room that held her giant dictionary as well as scores of official-looking papers separated neatly into four piles.
The apartment was also a clearinghouse for wonder, and I tingled with pride as Lorna took me on a guided tour and gave me rundowns on the wonder-filled framed prints that hung on her walls. There was a Hieronymus Bosch painting that represented insanity—hysterical grotesque creatures in an undersea environment importuning God—or someone—for release from their madness. There was a Van Gogh job that featured flowery fields juxtaposed against brown grass and a somber sky. There was Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”—three lonely people sitting in an all-night diner, not talking. It was awesome and filled with lonely wonder.
I took Lorna’s hand and kissed it. “You know the wonder, Lorna,” I said.
“What’s the wonder?”
“I don’t know, just the wonderful elliptical, mysterious stuff that we’re never going to know completely.”
Lorna nodded. She knew. “And that’s why you’re a cop?”
“Exactly.”
“But I want justice. The wonder is for artists and writers and other creative people. Their vision gives us the compassion to face our own l
ives and treat other people decently, because we know how imperfect the world is. But I want justice. I want specifics. I want to be able to look at the people I send to court and say, ‘He’s guilty, let the will of the people reflect that guilt’ or ‘He’s guilty with mitigating circumstances, let the will of the people reflect the mercy I recommend’ or ‘He’s innocent, no grand jury trial for him.’ I want to be able to see the results, not wonder.”
We moved to a large, floral-print couch and sat down. Lorna stroked my hair tentatively. “Do you understand, Fred?”
“Yes, I do. Especially now. I want justice for Eddie Engels. He’ll get it. But the grand jury system is predicated on people, and people are imperfect and wonder-driven; so justice is no kind of absolute—it’s subservient to wonder.”
“Which is why I work so hard. Nothing is perfect, even the law.”
“Yeah, I know.” I paused and fished in my coat pocket for a large manila envelope. “We’re arresting Eddie Engels tomorrow, Lorna.” I handed her the sealed envelope. “This is my report as the arresting officer.”
She looked into my eyes and squeezed my hand. “You look worried,” she said.
“I’m not, really. But I need a favor.”
“What?”
“Don’t open that envelope until I call you. Just forget about this case until I call you. And when Dudley Smith files with you, know this: my report is the truth. If there are discrepancies, see me. We’ll build the case for the grand jury. All right?”
Lorna hesitated. “All right. You’re putting yourself out on a big limb, Freddy.”
“I know.”
“And you want Engels more for your career than for justice.”
“Yes.” I said it almost apologetically.
“I don’t care. I care about you, and Engels is guilty. You see to your career and I’ll see to justice and we’ll both get what we want.”
I laughed nervously at the imperfect logic of it. Lorna took my hand. “And you’re afraid of Dudley Smith.”
“He’s out of his mind. He’s got no business being a policeman.”