Clandestine

by James Ellroy

  “I listened more than you know,” I countered.

  “No, you didn’t. You just heard what you wanted to hear. And you convinced me you were listening. You were a good actor.”

  I couldn’t think of a retort, or a dig, or a plea, so I just said—moving a few steps backward to give myself objectivity—“It’s on again. I’ve connected Eddie Engels to a woman who was murdered recently. I’m going to see it through, wherever it takes me. Maybe when it’s all over we can be together.”

  Lorna was perfectly still. “You are insane,” she said.

  “It’s been hanging over us like a plague, Lor. Maybe we can have some peace when it’s over.”

  “You are insane.”

  “Lorna—”

  “No. We can never be together again; and not because of what happened four years ago. We can never be together because of what you are. No, don’t touch me and don’t try to charm me or sweet-talk me. I’m getting in my car and if you try to stop me I will make you regret we ever met.”

  I handed Lorna the keys to her car. Her hand shook as she took them from me. She fumbled her way into the car and drove away, spewing exhaust fumes on my trouser legs.

  “Nothing’s ever over, Lorna,” I said to the air. But I didn’t know if I believed it.

  * * *

  —

  We drove east on the San Bernardino Freeway with the top down, away from the stifling, sun-blinded L.A. streets, past successions of interconnected working-class communities spread through terrain ranging from desert sand flats to piny woods. I was at the wheel, Michael was beside me on the front seat, and Doc was sprawled in the back, his long legs propped up on the passenger-side doorjamb, where Michael wrapped a protective arm around his ankles and beat time to the big-band boogie-woogie coming from the radio.

  The air that whizzed past us got hotter and thinner as we climbed the winding roads of a fir-covered forest. Lake Arrowhead was nominally our destination, but none of us seemed to care if we ever got there; we were lost in games of silence—Doc and I each knowing that the other knew, but knew what? And unwilling, as yet, to push it any further. And Michael, craning his long neck above the windshield, getting full blasts of summer air, gulping it in as fuel for what I knew had to be a brilliant imagination.

  Lake Arrowhead came upon us abruptly at the end of a scrub-littered access road. It was shimmering light blue, mirage-like in the heat and dotted with rowboats and swimmers. I stopped the car at the side of the road and turned to face my companions.

  “Well,” I said, “here or beyond?”

  “Beyond!” they both exclaimed in unison, and I accelerated, skirting the blue oasis and driving a circuitous path through small mountain ranges piled up one on top of the other.

  But soon my mind clicked in. We were miles from Los Angeles and I had work to do. I started getting itchy, looking around for a quiet, shady place for us to stop and eat the picnic lunch I had made. Almost as if in answer to my anxiety, it shot up in the near distance: “Jumbo’s Animal Park and Rest Area.” It looked like a set from a western movie: a single street of battered one-story frame buildings, and behind that a small wooded area crowded with picnic tables. A weather-beaten sign at the entrance exclaimed: “Christmas in the Summertime! See Santa’s Reindeer at Jumbo’s.”

  I nudged Michael as I pulled into the parking area. “Do you believe in Santa Claus, Mike?”

  “He doesn’t like to be called Mike,” Doc said.

  “I don’t mind,” Michael retorted, “but Santa Claus sucks a big dick.” He giggled at his own wit. I laughed along with him.

  “A jaded lad,” Doc piped in wryly from the back seat.

  “Like his dad?”

  “Very much like his dad. In some respects. I take it this is our destination?”

  “Let’s vote. Mike?”

  “Yes!”

  “Doc?”

  “Why not?”

  I dug a big paper bag full of sandwiches and a large thermos of iced tea out of the trunk, and we strolled through the little town. I was right—the building facades were studio sets: Dodge City Jail, Miller’s General Store, Diamond Jim’s Saloon, Forty-niners Dance Hall. But only the roofs remained intact—the fronts had been ripped out and replaced with bars, behind which a scrawny assortment of wildlife reposed. The Dodge City Jail held two skinny lions.

  “The king of beasts,” Doc muttered as we passed by. “I’m king of the beasts,” Michael countered, walking next to me ahead of his father.

  Diamond Jim’s Saloon held a bloated elephant. It lay comatose on a cement floor covered with feces.

  “Looks like a certain Republican I could name,” I said.

  “Watch out!” Michael squealed. “Dad’s a Republican, and he can’t take a joke!” Michael started to giggle and leaned into me. I put my arm around him and held him tightly.

  Our last stop before the picnic area was “Diamond Lil’s Carny House and Social Hall,” no doubt a B-movie euphemism for “whorehouse.” Diamond Lil and her girls were not in residence. Ugly, chattering, pink-faced baboons were there instead.

  Michael tore free from my arm. He started to tremble as he had in the drive-in two days before. He pulled large hunks of dirt from the ground and hurled them full force at the baboons.

  “Dirty fucking drunks!” he screamed. “Dirty, filthy, goddamned, fucking drunks!” He let loose another barrage of dirt and started to scream again, but no words came out, and the jabbering of the creatures in the cage rose to a shrieking cacophony.

  Michael was bending down to pick up more ammunition when I grabbed him around the shoulders. As he squirmed to free himself, I heard Doc say soothingly, “Easy, fellow. Easy, Michael boy, it’s going to be okay, easy…”

  Michael slammed a bony elbow into my stomach. I let go of him and he tore off like an antelope in the direction of the rest area. I let him get a good lead, then followed. He was fast, and sprinting full out, and I knew in his condition he would run until he collapsed.

  We ran through the wooded area into a miniature box canyon laced with scrub pines. Suddenly there was no place left to run. Michael fell down at the base of a large pine tree and encircled it fiercely with his skinny arms, rocking on his knees. As I came up to him, I could hear a hoarse wail rise from his throat. I knelt beside him and placed a tentative hand on his shoulder and let him cry until he gradually surrendered his grip on the tree and placed his arms around me.

  “What is it, Michael?” I asked softly, ruffling his hair. “What is it?”

  “Call me Mike,” he sobbed. “I don’t want to be called Michael anymore.”

  “Mike, who killed your mother?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Have you ever heard of anyone named Eddie Engels?”

  Mike shook his head and buried it deeper into my chest.

  “Margaret Cadwallader?”

  “No,” he sobbed.

  “Mike, do you remember living on Hibiscus Canyon when you were five?”

  Mike looked up at me. “Y-yes,” he said.

  “Do you remember the trip your mother took while you were living there?”

  “Yes!”

  “Ssssh. Where did she go?”

  “I don’t…”

  I helped the boy to his feet and put my arm around him. “Did she go to Wisconsin?”

  “I think so. She brought back all this gooey cheese and this smelly sauerkraut. Fucking German squarehead bastards.”

  I lifted the boy’s chin off his chest. “Who did you stay with while she was gone?”

  Mike twisted away from me, looking at the ground at his feet.

  “Tell me, Mike.”

  “I stayed with these fly-by-night guys my mom was seeing.”

  “Did they treat you all right?”

  “Yeah. They were drunks and gamblers
. They were nice to me, but…”

  “But what, Mike?”

  Mike screamed, “They were nice to me because they wanted to fuck Marcella!” His tears had stopped and the hatred in his young face aged him by ten years.

  “What were their names?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle Claude, Uncle Schmo, Uncle Fucko, I don’t know!”

  “Do you remember the place where you stayed?”

  “Yeah, I remember; 6481 Scenic Avenue. Near Franklin and Gower. Dad said…”

  “Said what, Mike?”

  “That…that he was going to fuck up Marcella’s boyfriends. I told him they were nice, but he still said it. Fred?”

  “Yes?”

  “Dad was telling stories last night. He told me this story about this guy who used to be a cop. Did you used to be a cop?”

  “Yes. What—”

  “Michael, Fred, where the hell are you?” It was Doc’s voice, and it was nearby. A second later we saw him. Michael moved away from me when Doc came into view.

  He walked toward us. When I saw his face up close I knew that all pretense was gone. His expression was a mask of hatred; the hard, handsome features were drawn inward to the point where each plane melded perfectly in a picture of absolute coldness.

  “I think we should go back to L.A.,” Doc said.

  * * *

  —

  No one said a word as we made our way back to Los Angeles via a labyrinthine network of freeways and surface streets. Mike sat in back, and Doc sat up front with me, his eyes glued straight ahead for the entire two hours.

  When we finally pulled up to the house all three of us seemed to breathe for the first time. It was then that I smelled it, a musky, sweaty pungency that permeated the car even with the top down: the smell of fear.

  Michael vaulted out of the back seat and ran without a word into his concrete back yard. Doc turned to face me. “What now, Underhill?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I’m blowing town for a while.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’ll be back.”

  Harris got out of the car. He looked down at me. He started to smile, but I didn’t let his cold face get that far.

  “Harris, if you harm that boy, I’ll kill you,” I said, then drove off in the direction of Hollywood.

  * * *

  —

  Scenic Avenue was a side street about a mile north of Hollywood Boulevard. Number 6481 was a small stone cottage on the south side. There was a small yard of weeds encircled by a white picket fence. It was deserted, as I knew it would be; all the front windows were broken and the flimsy wooden front door was half caved in.

  I walked around the corner of the house. The back yard was the same as the front—same fencing, same high weeds. I found a circuit box next to the fence, attached to a phone pole, and wedged a long piece of scrap wood under the hinge, snapping the box open. I toyed with the switches for five minutes until the dusk shrouded inside of 6481 was illuminated as bright as day.

  I brazenly walked across the wooden service porch and through the back door. Then I walked quietly through the entire house, savoring each nuance of the evil I felt there.

  It was just an ordinary one-family dwelling, bereft of furniture, bereft of all signs of habitation, bereft even of the winos who usually inhabited such places; but it was alive with an unspeakable aura of sickness and terror that permeated every wall, floorboard, and cobweb-knitted corner.

  On the oak floor of the bedroom near an overturned mattress I found a large splotch of dried blood. It could have been something else, but I knew what it was. I upended the mattress; the bottom of it was soaked through with brownish matter.

  I found what I knew to be old blood in the bathtub, in the living room closet, and on the dining room walls. Somehow each new sign of carnage brought forth in me a deeper and deeper sense of calm. Until I walked into the den that adjoined the kitchen and saw the crib, its railings splattered with blood, the matting that lined the inside caked thick with blood, and the teddy bear who lay dead atop it, his cotton guts spilling out and soaked with blood from another time that was reaching out to hold me.

  Then I got out, knowing that this was the constituency of the dead that Wacky Walker had written about so many years before.

  V

  WISCONSIN DUTCH

  19

  I watched from my window as the propellers churned their way through a billowy cloud bank over the Pacific. The plane then arced left and headed inland for the long trip to a middle America I had never seen: first Chicago, then a connecting flight to southern Wisconsin, birthplace of Margaret Cadwallader and Marcella DeVries Harris.

  As California, Arizona, and Nevada passed below me, I shifted my gaze from that arid landscape to the whirring propellers and became hypnotized by their circuitous motion. After a while a process of synchronization took over: my mind started to run in perfect circles, logically, chronologically, and in thematic unison: Marcella DeVries was born in Tunnel City, Wisconsin, in 1912. Tunnel City was eighty-five miles from Waukesha, where Maggie Cadwallader was born in 1914. Two years and eighty-five miles apart.

  “I’m just a Wisconsin farm girl,” Maggie had told me. She had also gotten hysterical when she’d seen my off-duty revolver. “No, no, no, no!” she had screamed. “I won’t let you hurt me! I know who sent you!”

  Six months later she was dead, strangled in the very bedroom where we had made love. The time of her death coincided with Marcella Harris’s abrupt journey to parts unknown.

  “You can’t go home again,” Marcella had told her neighbor, Mrs. Groberg.

  “Gooey cheese and smelly sauerkraut” her son had remembered—ethnic foods from the German/Dutch/Polish-dominated state of Wisconsin.

  A comely stewardess brought me coffee but got only a distracted grunt of thanks. I stared at the propeller closest to me, watching it cut the air, feeling a deepening symbiosis of past and present, and a further unfolding of logic. Eddie Engels and Janet Valupeyk had been lovers. Eddie had been intimate with Maggie Cadwallader. Eddie had told Janet in the early summer of ’51 to rent Marcella Harris the apartment on Hibiscus Canyon. It had to be related, all of it. It was too perfect not to be.

  * * *

  —

  When the plane landed in Chicago and I hit terra firma again, I decided to change my plans and rent a car to drive the hundred miles or so into Wisconsin. I picked up an efficient-looking Ford at a rental agency and set off. It was near dusk and still very hot. There was a breeze coming from Lake Michigan that did its best to cool things off, but failed.

  I drove into the heart of the city, watching the early evening tourists and window shoppers, not knowing what I was looking for. When I passed a printer’s shop on the near north side I knew that it was my destination. I went in and purchased five dollars’ worth of protective coloration; two hundred phony insurance investigator business cards, these bearing my real name and a ritzy-sounding Beverly Hills address and phone number.

  At a nearby novelty store I purchased three reasonably realistic-looking badges designating me “Deputy Sheriff,” “Official Police Stenographer,” and “International Investigator.” When I scrutinized that last one more closely, I threw it out the window of my car—it had the distinct look of a kiddies’ cereal box giveaway. But the others looked real, my business cards looked real, and the .38 automatic in my suitcase was real. I found a hotel room on the north side and went to bed early; I had a hot date with history, and I wanted to be rested for it.

  Southern Wisconsin was colored every conceivable shade of green. I crossed the Illinois-Wisconsin border at eight o’clock in the morning and left the wide eight-lane interstate, pushing my ’52 Ford sedan north on a narrow strip of blacktop through a succession of dairy farms interrupted every few miles or so by small lakes.

  * * *


  —

  I almost missed Tunnel City, spotting the turn-off sign at the last moment. I swung a sharp right-hand turn and entered a two-lane road that ran straight through the middle of a giant cabbage field. After half a mile a sign announced “Tunnel City, Wis. Pop. 9,818.” I looked in vain for a tunnel, then realized as I dropped down into a shallow valley that the town was probably named for some kind of underground irrigation system that fed water to the endless fields of cabbage that surrounded it.

  The town itself was intact in every respect from fifty years ago: red brick courthouse, red brick grain and feed stores, red brick general store; white brick drugstore, grocery store, and public library. The focal point for the little community seemed to be the two tractor supply stores, glass-fronted, situated directly across the street from each other, their crystal-clear windows jammed with spanking-new farm machinery.

  A few sunburned men in coveralls stood in front of each store, talking good-naturedly. I parked my car and joined one group on the sidewalk. It was very hot and very humid, and I immediately shed my suit coat. They spotted me for a city slicker right away, and I saw subtle signals pass between them. I knew I was going to be the butt of some jokes, so I resigned myself to it.

  I was about to say “Good morning” when the largest of the three men immediately in front of me shook his head sadly and said, “Not a very good morning, young fellow.”

  “It is a bit muggy,” I said.

  “You from Chicago?” a small beetle-browed man asked. His small blue eyes danced with the knowledge that he had a live one.

  I didn’t want to disappoint him. “I’m from Hollywood. You can get anything you want in Hollywood except good sauerkraut juice, so I came to Wisconsin because I couldn’t afford a trip to Germany. Take me to your wisest cabbage.”