by James Ellroy
This got a big laugh all around. I dug into my coat pocket and brought out a handful of my business cards, giving one to each man. “Fred Underhill,” I said, “Amalgamated Insurance, Los Angeles.” When the stolid-looking farmers didn’t seem impressed, I dropped my bomb: “You men ever read the L.A. papers?”
“No reason to,” the big man said.
“Why?” the beetle-browed man asked.
“What’s it got to do with the price of cheese in Wisconsin?” another asked.
I took that as my cue: “A Tunnel City girl was murdered in Los Angeles last month. Marcella DeVries. Married name Harris. The killer hasn’t been found. I’m investigating a claim and working with the L.A. police. Marcella was here four years ago, and she may have been back even later than that. I need to talk to people who knew her. I want the son of a bitch who killed her. I…” I let my voice trail off.
The men were staring at me blankly. Their lack of expression told me they knew Marcella DeVries and weren’t surprised about her murder. Their immobile faces also told me that Marcella DeVries was an anomaly to them, far beyond the limits of their small-town bailiwick.
No one said a word. The other group of tractor worshipers had halted their conversation and were staring at me. I pointed across the street to a white three-story building that bore a sign reading “Badger Hotel—Always Clean Rooms.”
“Are the rooms there really always clean?” I asked my rapt audience.
No one answered.
“I’ll be staying there,” I said. “If any of you want to talk to me, or know anyone who might, that’s where I’ll be.”
I locked my car, got my suitcase out of the trunk, and walked to the Badger Hotel.
* * *
—
I lay on my clean bed for four hours, in my skivvies, waiting for an onslaught of farmers bent on detailing every aspect of the life of Marcella DeVries Harris. No one called or knocked on my door. I felt like the marshal summoned to clean up the rowdy town who finds that the townsfolk are unaccountably afraid of him.
I checked my watch: five thirty. The heat and smothering humidity were starting to abate, so I decided to go for a walk. I dressed in slacks and sport shirt and strolled through the clean lobby of the Badger Hotel, getting a suspicious look from the clean desk clerk before entering the clean streets of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.
Tunnel City had one business thoroughfare, named, appropriately, Main Street. Every bit of Tunnel City commerce existed on that one street. The town’s residential streets spread out from this commercial hub, pointing outward to the bordering farmland.
I walked south, toward the cabbage fields, feeling out of place. Every house I passed was white, with a perfectly tended front lawn bearing well-pruned trees and shrubs. Every automobile parked in every driveway was clean and glistening. The people who sat on the porches looked resolute and strong.
I walked all the way to where Tunnel City proper ended and Tunnel City’s nourishing farmland began. Walking back to my hotel I knew why Marcella DeVries had had to get out—and why she had had to return.
I was strolling down Main Street looking for a place to eat when a man crossed the street toward me, coming from the direction of the hotel. He was a tall man in his forties, dressed in blue jeans and a checked sport shirt. There was something different about him, and when his gaze zeroed in on me I knew he wanted to talk.
When he hit the sidewalk he planted himself firmly in my path and stuck out a large bony hand for me to shake. I took it.
“I’m Will Berglund, Officer,” the man said.
“Fred Underhill, Mr. Berglund, and I’m not a policeman, I’m an insurance investigator.”
“I don’t care. I knew Marcy DeVries better than anyone. I—” The man was obviously very moved.
“Where can we go to talk, Mr. Berglund?”
“I run the movie theater here in town.” He pointed down Main Street. “The last show is over at nine forty-five. Meet me there then. We can talk in my office.”
* * *
—
When I walked into the lobby of the Badger Theater Will Berglund shooed the few remaining moviegoers out the door, locked it, and wordlessly led me to an upstairs office crowded with beat-up theater seats and inoperative movie projectors. “I like to tinker,” he said by way of explanation.
I took a seat without being asked, and he took one across from me. My mind was jumping with questions that I never got the chance to ask—I didn’t need to. Berglund opened all the windows in the room for air and began to talk.
He talked without interruption for seven hours, his manner by turns plaintive, morose, but above all else tragically accepting. It was an intimate story, a panorama of small-town life, small-town talk, small-town hope, and small-town retribution. It was the story of Marcella DeVries.
* * *
—
They had been lovers from the very beginning, first in spirit, then in flesh.
The Berglund family had emigrated from Norway the same year as the DeVries family had left Holland. A network of Old Country friends and cousins secured work for the two families in the stockyards of Chicago.
It was 1906, and work was plentiful. The hardy Berglund men became foremen, the quicker-witted DeVries men became master bookkeepers. The three Berglund brothers and Piet and Karl DeVries shared a dream common to immigrants—the dream of Old Country power, the dream of land.
All five men, then in their thirties, were impatient. They knew that the feudal power they so desperately desired could not be achieved by the attrition of begging, borrowing, scrimping, and slaughtering cattle with ten-pound sledgehammers. Time was not on their side, and history was not on their side. But brains and ruthlessness were, compounded by their Calvinist religious fervor, and the five men embarked on a career of crime, with only one goal in mind: the acquisition of twenty-five thousand dollars.
It took three years, and cost two lives, one from each family. The Berglunds and DeVrieses became burglars and armed robbers. Piet DeVries was the acknowledged leader and treasurer, Willem Berglund his adjutant. They were the planners, the shrewd overseers of impetuous Karl DeVries and the outright violent Hasse and Lars Berglund.
Piet was a romantic intellectual, and an ardent lover of Beethoven. He loved jewelry, and converted the cash gleaned from the gang’s burglaries into diamonds and rubies that he sold in turn for a small profit on the commodities exchange, always keeping a few small gems for himself. He longed to be a jewel thief—for the romance of it as well as for the profit—and he planned the strong-arm theft of an elderly, jewel-bedecked Chicago matron known to attend the opera unescorted. His brother Karl and Lars Berglund were to do the job. It was 1909, and the money from the robbery would put them well over their twenty-five-thousand mark.
The woman traveled to and from her home on the near north side in a horse-drawn carriage. The men waited under the steps of her brownstone, armed with revolvers. When she pulled to the curb and her driver helped her up the stairs, Karl and Lars sprang from their hiding place, expecting to easily overpower their prey. The driver shot them both in the face at point-blank range with a custom-made six-shot Derringer.
The three surviving members of the Bergland-DeVries combine fled to St. Paul, Minnesota, with eighteen thousand dollars in cash and jewelry. Hasse Berglund wanted to kill Piet DeVries. One night, drunk, he tried. Willem Berglund interceded, beating Hasse senseless with a lead-filled cane. Hasse was irreparably brain damaged, and Willem was distraught with guilt. To assuage Willem’s guilt, Piet placed the now childlike Hasse in an asylum, paying the director of the institution two thousand dollars to keep him there in perpetuity.
Where were two immigrants, one Norwegian, one Dutch, with sixteen thousand dollars, without wives or children, and above all else, without land, to go? Their dream was dairy farming, but now that was impossible. Sixte
en thousand dollars would not purchase two dairy farms, and co-ownership was out of the question—the two men were bound by spilled blood, but hatred lay in abeyance beneath that bondage. So they traveled, living frugally, drifting through Minnesota and Wisconsin until they ended up, in 1910, thirty miles east of Lake Geneva in a little town in the middle of a giant cabbage field.
They married the first girls from their home countries who were nice to them: Willem Berglund wed Anna Nyborg, seventeen, Oslo-born, tall and blond, with a frail body and a face of cameo-like loveliness. Piet DeVries wed Mai Hendenfelder, the daughter of a ruined Rotterdam shipping magnate, because she loved Brahms and Beethoven, had a beautiful thick body, and could cook.
Tunnel City in 1910 had cabbage, but it also had aspirations to the ultimate Wisconsin trade: cheese. Piet DeVries, thirty-seven-year-old Dutch dairy farmhand, and Willem Berglund, thirty-nine-year-old Norwegian bank teller and part-time milkman, wanted to settle for nothing less than a dairy dukedom, but with their depleted funds they found themselves reluctantly looking for other options.
The land had the last laugh—huge lots of it were bought by wealthy cheese farmers, acreage stretching all the way to Lake Geneva, acreage whose soil temperature and consistency soon proved to be almost totally unsuitable for grazing large numbers of milk cows. But it was wonderful soil for growing cabbage.
So Piet DeVries and Willem Berglund reluctantly joined the crowd, plopped down their sixteen thousand dollars and bought cabbage acreage, two adjoining parcels of land separated by nothing but a dusty country road.
Cabbage brought them moderate prosperity, and family life—at first—brought them moderate happiness. Willem and Anna soon had twin sons, Will and George; while Piet and Mai produced Marcella and John, two years apart.
Willem played solitaire chess and went for long exhausting runs down country roads. Piet taught himself to play the violin, and listened to scratchy Beethoven on his newly purchased Victrola. The two men formed a truce, at once bitter and steeped in mutual respect. Though not of the same blood, their ties went deep. Despite the close proximity of their property, they seldom socialized; when they did, they treated each other with the exaggerated deference of the mutually fearful.
Both men were considered anomalies by their fellow townspeople. They held a separate designation, based, people said, not on their aloofness but on something in their eyes, some fascinating secret knowledge.
It was a knowledge passed on to the second generation. The people of Tunnel City discerned that, too, as soon as little Will and Marcella were old enough to walk and talk and react to the environment that they knew wasn’t good enough for them.
Marcella DeVries and the twins Will and George Berglund were born three months apart, in 1912. Marcella was born first. Piet was ecstatic. He had wanted a girl and he got one—chubby and pink and redheaded like him. Willem Berglund wanted a male heir, and got what he wanted—twice over. But George was a sickly infant, born at half the weight of his healthy twin brother, and was quickly diagnosed as hopelessly backward. At the age of three, when Will was well on his way to speaking in the precisely modulated tones of an educated adult, George was unable to stand, drooled like an idiot, and flapped his arms like a chicken.
Willem hated the child. He considered him a hideous punishment, perpetrated by a hateful God for whom he no longer had any use. He hated his wife, he hated God, he hated cabbage, and he hated Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But most of all he now truly hated Piet DeVries.
Piet seemed to be flourishing. He loved his wife, he loved his violin, he loved his Victrola, and he loved his children: precocious Marcella of the red hair and translucent green eyes, whose dark freckles seemed to float in clusters all about her pretty face, who, although willful and spoiled to the point of becoming tyrannical when she didn’t get her way, was nonetheless the fiercely loving daughter he had always dreamed of; and little Johnny—thirteen pounds at birth—laughing, happy, bungling in his hugeness, adoring of his family. Always, always laughing. “My little dinosaur,” Piet would call him, then pull a nonexistent tail on the boy’s rump until father and son collapsed in tears of joyous laughter.
George Berglund, who never walked or spoke a human sound, died of scarlet fever in 1919. He was seven years old. Willem buried him in a burlap bag in a shallow grave next to the toolshed adjoining his house.
Piet crossed the road to offer condolences to the man to whom he hadn’t spoken in over a year. Willem slapped him before he could say a word.
Hasse Berglund died the following year. Sodomized repeatedly by his fellow inmates at the asylum, he could stand the abuse no longer and threw himself off a high ledge into a granite quarry that the inmates were forced to work in.
The director of the asylum wrote Willem a letter demanding two hundred dollars for a “decent Christian burial” for the “boy.” He never got his money. Willem simply forgot to send it; he had other things on his mind. He had to destroy Piet DeVries. He talked about it to Anna, late at night. Young Will listened at the bedroom door: Piet had been responsible for the deaths of Lars and Hasse—and even little idiot Georgie. That was the past, and it was enough. But now Piet and his little redheaded vixen daughter were trying to destroy Willem’s golden Will, his only remaining true blood, with poetry and music and God knew what else. God! Willem would then exclaim hysterically to the sobbing Anna that there was no God beyond his land and his family, and that, by God, he would teach Piet that.
* * *
—
Marcella and Will knew each other by instinct, by mind, and by rote. With the discernment of highly attuned animals they found each other across the dusty country road that separated the two farms, across the legacy of ambition and violence that bound their fathers. The inevitability of the two was so correct that Willem Berglund and Piet DeVries just sat back and let it happen.
It happened. When the children were four they would toddle into the cabbage field together and construct mansions out of the brown soil that ran through the irrigation furrows. Often after a day of play in the fields they would return to the DeVries farmhouse and pick out tunes on Mai’s piano.
When they were seven, the year of George’s death, they discovered the town, and would walk hand in hand down Main Street to the public library and read together for hours, lugging huge armfuls of books out to the pergola that stood behind the white brick building. In the wintertime they would hide in the wooden feed bin at the edge of the Berglund property, make a fire out of twigs, and tell stories until they fell asleep.
No one—not Willem, nor Piet, nor their wives, nor the neighbors—took exception to this arrangement. Somehow, it was implicitly understood that these two children were the uneasy truce between the families, and if they remained free to be together there would be no more tragedy.
But the twenties came, and Willem took to drink, and his nighttime rantings against Piet took on a renewed vehemence. Will, now ten, had long ceased to believe that his father would ever carry out his threats, but things were changing. He and Marcella were changing. Their conversations were more and more frequently being interrupted by roughhouse horseplay that inevitably led to touching and kissing and probing. Soon they were lovers in the flesh, and soon it seemed that everyone knew and loathed and feared it.
Marcella at twelve was taller than Will, already full breasted with smooth freckled skin stretched taut over wide hipbones. Men from the town looked at her and felt immediately guilty for their thoughts. The same men looked at Will and hated him for what they knew he had.
The poetry-reading, nature-loving golden children who strolled down Main Street, lost in each other, drew much attention in the staid little farming community. Small-town talk—compounded by the strangeness of Piet and Willem—made resentment and curiosity fester, and the two lovers began to take their love clandestinely to wherever they could find a knoll or a mantle of grass or a field overgrown with fol
iage where they could lie together.
* * *
—
In 1926 Willem made his first overt move against Piet, dumping large piles of compost into his irrigation sluices. Piet knew about it and did nothing to retaliate. A week later Piet’s collie dog was found bludgeoned to death. Still Piet did nothing.
Late at night Will would hear his father cackle drunkenly to the wife who had come to hate him. Piet was a coward, he said, gone soft from his sissy music. A man who won’t avenge his land is less than a dead dog, Willem shrieked, and by God, a coward had no right to own land.
Will was watching and listening through a spy hole in the ceiling that Piet had long ago told him to construct. Will knew that it was different this time, that his father’s timidity, so long held in check by his fear of Piet, was waning. Willem was awestruck at Piet’s reluctance to retaliate, and young Will knew that his father would take his revenge as far as he could.
Will loved Piet, and told him what he knew. Piet shook his head and told Will two things: “Don’t tell Marcella, and tell your mother to go and stay with her family in Green Bay.”
Anna Berglund left for upstate Wisconsin the following day, and Marcella already knew, informed by the almost telepathic rapport between herself and Will.
And she retaliated. Marcella knew that Willem spent his Thursday mornings in town, withdrawing money from the bank to pay his farmhands and buying provisions. She waited for him there, in the lobby of the Badger Hotel, armed with hatred for her lover’s father and fierce love and contempt for her own.
Townspeople sensed that something was about to happen: Marcella DeVries, straight-A student, was not in school, was instead sitting in an overstuffed chair fuming silently, her normally pale skin as florid as her bright red hair, twisting her hands into knots and staring straight through the plate glass window, watching the National Bank. A crowd formed outside the hotel.
