by James Ellroy
Lorna Underhill undressed, lay down on the bed and fell asleep immediately. I sat in a chair and watched my wife sleep, believing that the steadfastness of my love for her would cover all the contingencies of life without the wonder.
III
TIME, OUT OF TIME
15
Years passed. Years of regret and introspection; years of hitting hundreds of thousands of golf balls, of reading, of long walks along the beach with Night Train; years of trying to live like other people. Years of looking for something to which I could commit my life. Years of learning what works and what doesn’t. But mostly, years of Lorna.
Lorna. Lorna Weinberg Underhill. My wife, my lover, my confidante, my anodyne, my substitute for the wonder. Actually, my definition of the wonder—the synthesis of absolute knowledge and continual surprise. My tender, mercurial, brittle Lorna. The very prototype of love’s efficacy: if it doesn’t work, try something else. If that doesn’t work, try something else again. If that fails, review your options and search out your errors. Just keep going, Freddy; sooner or later, by choice or chance or rote, you will find something that will move you as much as being a policeman did.
Did? From late 1951 through late 1954 there was virtually not one moment when I wouldn’t have rather been cruising Central Avenue, or Western or Wilshire or Pico or any L.A. street in a black-and-white, armed for bear and high on illusion.
* * *
—
When we returned from our three-day Mexican honeymoon, Korea had once again taken over as front page news, and Lorna and I moved into a big rambling house in Laurel Canyon. There was a yard for Night Train, a big bedroom with a balcony and a rustic view, and a sunken living room with French windows that would have done a chateau in Burgundy proud.
We played house for a month, reading poetry aloud and playing Scrabble and making love and dancing to “The Tennessee Waltz.” But Lorna tired of it before I did and took the first law job she could get her hands on: legal counsel for Weinberg Productions, Inc. She didn’t last long; she was constantly at loggerheads with her father on matters of money, morality, and the administration of movie “justice.”
In May of ’52 she quit and went to work for the Adlai Stevenson campaign. She was afire with the spirit of the intellectual Illinois governor, and even managed to wrangle a paying job as the campaign’s legal adviser. The job lasted until it came to light that she was married to a “Communist” ex-cop. Saddened, but no less justice-minded, she joined a Beverly Hills law firm that specialized in personal injury cases. My Lorna, champion of the poor bastard who got his thumb caught in the drill press.
Those first months of our marriage were very good. Big Sid accepted his goy son-in-law with a surprising magnanimity. He showed moral courage in bringing me out to Hillcrest to play golf at a time when I was still notorious. We played for money, and I made more than enough to hold up my half of the expenses of the Laurel Canyon love nest.
Lorna and I never discussed the Eddie Engels case. It was the pivotal event in both our lives, always hanging over us, but we never talked about it.
On our first night in the new house I broached the subject, in the interest of clearing the air. “We paid for it, Lor. We paid for what we did.”
“No,” Lorna said. “I was just an infatuated pencil-pusher. I got off easy. You paid, and it’s a life sentence. I never want to discuss it again.”
Mercifully for me, Canfield and the Engels family never sued either the L.A.P.D. or me for false arrest or anything else. I waited for months, fearfully expecting a summons that would result in the opening of the whole filthy can of worms to public scrutiny, but it never came.
In February of 1955 I found out why, from a drunken, resentful Mike Breuning. I ran into him in the bar of a restaurant in Hollywood. Passed over again for lieutenant, he was waxing profane about the department and his mentor, Dudley Smith. He told me, between effusive apologies, that Dudley was the one who snatched my diary, and who put Internal Affairs onto Sarah Kefalvian the very day that Eddie Engels “confessed.” Dudley was also the one who flew up to Seattle and dug through local police files and came up with a rap sheet on Lillian Engels that showed a dozen drunk arrests at lesbian bars in the Seattle area. He went straight to Wilhelm Engels with this and coerced him into dropping his lawsuit. The elder Engels had died of a heart attack sometime the following year.
From time to time I would suddenly realize that I was terrified, and that I had no control over my terror. Blinding memories of the bloody face of Eddie Engels would take me over and would not let me go, even as I rambled on about the weather to Lorna. Gradually the image would shift, and Engels’s face would change into my own, and then it would be Dudley Smith and Dick Carlisle hitting me, while I myself watched sipping coffee in room number 6 of the Victory Motel. I wouldn’t cry or talk or move; just tremble as Smith and Carlisle bludgeoned me. Sometimes Lorna would hold me, and I would dig myself deeper into her as each blow crashed into my mind.
* * *
—
So the dead hovered over my wife and me, solidifying their presence as Lorna and I lived on. For years we loved, and it was worth the price in sorrow that my blind ambition had exacted from me and so many others. For a long while I wanted nothing that I didn’t have, and I was moved beyond movement by Lorna’s willingness to give it to me. When I thought and thought and thought about it, and tried to reduce it to words, Lorna would read my mind and place fingertips to my lips and whisper softly the words I had once told her: “Don’t think, darling, please don’t try to hurt it.” She always knew when the wonder was creeping into my consciousness, and she always circumvented it with love tinged with the slightest bit of fear.
That fear ran concurrent with our love; an undertow of guilt, a clandestine transit of many restive dead souls that seemed to give an almost spiritual weight to our lives—as though our joy were a communion for Eddie and Maggie and a vast constituency of the dead. We both felt this, but we never talked about it. We were both afraid that it would kill the joy for which we had worked so hard.
For a long time our destiny was manifest joy—joy in each other, in the sharing of our separate solitudes, in the spirit of loving contention that would end our arguments with us laughing in bed, Lorna’s hands clamped over my mouth while she shrieked, “No, no, tell me a story instead!”
I told her stories and she told me stories, and gradually the distinctions between my stories and Lorna’s receded until they became one vast panorama of experience and more than a little fantasy.
Because somehow, in our fusion, we lost sight of ourselves as the separate entities that we were, and somehow, very strangely, that made us easy prey for the long unmentioned dead.
16
It started getting bad with Lorna gradually, so that there was no place to look for causes and no one to blame. It was just a series of smoldering resentments. Too much giving and too much taking; too much time spent away from each other; too much investing of fantasy qualities in each other. Too much hope and too much pride and too little willingness to change.
And too much thinking on my part. Early in ’54 I told Lorna that. “Our brains are a curse, Lor. I want to use my muscles and not my brain.” Lorna looked up from her breakfast coffee and scratched my arm distractedly. “Then go ahead. You used to tell me ‘Don’t think,’ remember?”
Construction work and later brick-laying was mindless and exhilarating. The men I worked with and drank beer with were vital and raw. But Lorna was aghast when I stuck to this kind of work for eight months, liking it more each day. She thought I was wasting the overactive brain that I was trying so hard to quiet. And her resentment grew. She couldn’t stand the anomaly of a successful attorney married to a laborer husband. An ex-cop accused Communist, yes; a working stiff, no. I noted the contradiction of a champion of the “working man” disdaining the very same in her own household.
&n
bsp; “I didn’t marry a hod carrier,” Lorna said coldly.
* * *
—
I was beginning to wonder who she did marry. I began to wonder who I married. I started to feel a hollowness, a depression that was fifty times worse than fear. But I held on: rigorously continuing to earn through construction work and golf hustling at least as much as Lorna did as an attorney.
We split the household expenses fifty-fifty, and each contributed monthly stipends to our joint savings and checking accounts. At the end of each month when we did our bookkeeping, Lorna would shake her head at the sad equity of it. We had a running gag at these sessions. We would split the expenses fifty-fifty, but I would pay for everything connected with Night Train. Lorna was mildly amused by him, but considered my noble link to Wacky and the past an obscene object. She thought dogs belonged on farms. “And the beast is your burden,” she would say as we concluded our paperwork.
One day early in ’55, she didn’t crack her usual jokes. She was drawn and cross that day. When I looked to her to deliver her line she flung a sheaf of papers at me and screamed, “It’s so goddamned easy for you! Goddamnit, how can you live with yourself? Do you know how hard I work to make the money I do? Do you, Freddy, goddamnit? Don’t you think it’s sad that I went to school for eight years to become a lawyer and help people, while all you do is swing a hammer and hit golf balls? Goddamn you, you Renaissance bum!”
For the first time I felt my marriage vows begin to impinge me. I began to feel that I couldn’t ever be the man Lorna wanted me to be. And for the first time I didn’t care, because the Lorna of 1955 was not the Lorna I married in 1951. I started to get itchy to break the whole thing up, to blow it all sky high.
As my love for Lorna entered this awful, angry stasis, I felt stirrings of what I could only call the wonder. Wonder.
Years had passed. With the end of the Korean War and the discrediting of Joe McCarthy, a slightly more sane political climate was emerging. Time seemed to be opening new wounds in my present and healing the old ones in my past. If Lorna was the replacement for the wonder, maybe now it was time to reverse the situation.
Knowing I could never be hired as a police officer, I applied for a state of California private investigator’s license, and was refused. I applied for positions as insurance investigator with over thirty insurance companies, and was rejected by each one.
So I hit more thousands of golf balls, recalling the trinity of my youth: police work, golf, and women. Women. The very word bit at me like a jungle carnivore, filling me with a venomous guilt and excitement.
One night I went to a bar in Ocean Park and picked up a woman. The old small talk and moves were still there. I took her to a motel near my old apartment in Santa Monica. We coupled and talked. I told her my marriage was shot. She commiserated; it had happened to her, too, and now she was “playing the field.”
In the morning I drove her back to where her car was parked, then drove home to Laurel Canyon and my wife, who didn’t ask me where I had spent the night. She didn’t have to.
I did it again and again, savoring the mechanics, the art of briefly touching another lonely life. Lorna knew, of course, and we settled down to a quiet war of attrition: conversations of exaggerated politeness, awkward attempts at lovemaking, silent recriminations.
Inexplicably, my womanizing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I was sitting in a bar in the Valley nursing a beer and eyeing the cocktail waitresses, when I was hit by the same eerie stillness that had come over me in the irrigation field on the day I had quit the cops. I didn’t break down this time, I just became flooded with some incredible nonverbal feeling of what I can only think of as vastness.
I tried to explain it to Lorna: “I can’t explain it, Lor. It’s just a feeling of, well, mystery, of truth and illusion, of something much bigger than us or anything else. It’s a feeling of commitment to something very vague, but decent and good. And it’s not the wonder.”
Lorna snorted. “Oh, God, Freddy. Are you getting religious on me?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s entirely different.”
I searched for words and gestures, but none came. I looked at Lorna, who shrugged, with some contempt.
* * *
—
The following week I found out that Lorna had a lover. He was an older man, a senior partner in her law firm. I saw them holding hands and cooing at each other in a Beverly Hills restaurant. My peripheral vision blackened as I strode toward their booth. Unreasonable as it was, I pulled the man to the floor by his necktie, dumped a pitcher of water on his face and followed it with a plate of lobster thermidor.
“Sue me, counselor,” I said to the shocked Lorna.
I moved my dog, my golf clubs and my few belongings to an apartment in West L.A. I paid for three months’ rent in advance, and wondered what the hell I was going to do.
Lorna ferreted out my address and sent me a petition for divorce. I tore it up in the presence of the process server who had handed it to me. “Tell Mrs. Underhill never,” I told him.
Lorna discovered my phone number and called me, threatening, then begging for release from our marriage.
“Never,” I told her. “Tijuana marriages are lifetime contracts.”
“Goddamn you, Freddy, it’s over! Can’t you see that?”
“Nothing’s ever over,” I screamed back, then threw the phone out my living room window.
* * *
—
I wasn’t entirely under control, but I was right. It was a prophetic remark. Three days later was June 23, 1955. That was the day I heard about the dead nurse.
IV
THE CRIME AGAINST MARCELLA
17
The initial newspaper accounts were both lurid and disinterested. Just another murder, the reports seemed to be saying.
From the Los Angeles Herald Express, June 23, 1955:
NURSE FOUND MURDERED IN EL MONTE
Strangulation Death for Attractive Divorced Mother
Scouts and Their Leader Make Grisly Discovery
EL MONTE, June 22—A Boy Scout troop and their leader made a grisly discovery early Sunday morning when returning from an overnight camping trip in the San Gabriel Mountains. When passing Arroyo High School on South Peck Road, one of the Scouts, Danny Johnson, age 12, thought he saw an arm poking out of a line of scrub that runs along the fence on the school’s south side. He called this to the attention of his troop leader, James Pleshette, 28, of Sierra Madre. Pleshette went to investigate and discovered the nude body of a woman. He called El Monte police immediately.
Description Broadcast
Police went to the scene and immediately sent out a description of the woman to all Los Angeles TV and radio stations. Response to the broadcast was gratifyingly quick. Mrs. Gaylord Wilder, an El Monte resident, thought the description fit her tenant, Mrs. Marcella Harris, who had been gone since Friday night. Mrs. Wilder was brought to the morgue, where she positively identified the dead woman as Mrs. Harris.
Good Mother
Mrs. Wilder started to sob upon viewing the body. “Oh, God, what a tragedy!” she said. “Marcella was such a good woman. A good mother, devoted to her son.” Mrs. Harris, 43, was divorced from her husband, William “Doc” Harris, several years ago. They have a nine-year-old son, who was spending the weekend with his father. When notified of the death, Harris (who has been eliminated as a suspect) said, “I have every hope the police will quickly catch my wife’s killer.” Nine-year-old Michael, distraught, is now living with his father in Los Angeles. Mrs. Harris worked as head nurse at the Packard-Bell Electronics plant in Santa Monica. Both the El Monte Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have mounted a full-scale investigation.
I sat and thought, feeling strangely calm, yet engulfed by a prickly sensation when I put down the newspaper. It was too long af
ter the facts, I told myself, too far away, too prosaic a form of murder. Strictly a non sequitur. I didn’t want to catch myself up in another logical fallacy.
I needed statistics, and the only person I knew who could furnish them was a crime-buff law clerk in Lorna’s firm. I called the office and got him. The receptionist recognized my voice and gave me the cold shoulder, but put me through anyway. After several minutes of amenities, I popped my question: “Bob, what are the statistics on strangulation murders of women, where the killer is not a known intimate of the victim?”
Bob didn’t have to think: “Commonplace, but they usually catch the killer fast. Barroom jobs, drunks strangling prostitutes, that kind of thing. Very often the killer is remorseful, confesses, and cops a plea. Is this an academic question, Fred?”
“Yeah, strictly. How about premeditated strangulation murders of women?”
“Including psychopaths?”
“No, presupposing relative sanity on the part of the killer.”
“Relative sanity, that’s a hot one. Very rare, kid, very rare indeed. What’s this all about?”
“It’s about an ex-cop with time on his hands. Thanks a lot, Bob. Goodbye.”
I watched TV that night, but television coverage of the murder was scant. The dead woman’s face was flashed on the screen, a photograph taken some twenty years before upon her graduation from nursing school. Marcella Harris had been a very handsome woman: high, strong cheekbones, large widely spaced eyes, and a determined mouth.
