by James Ellroy
Marcella, moved to the core of her heart, set about pulling strings to be with the man she loved. She was a consummate string-puller, and within two weeks she brought Doc the happy news: she was to be transferred to the naval hospital at Long Beach, a half hour’s drive from Los Angeles. Her brother Johnny, now a master pharmacist’s mate, was to be a hospital liaison there, procuring drugs and other hospital supplies from wholesalers in the Los Angeles area.
She beamed at Doc, who marveled aloud for several minutes at Marcella’s gifts of manipulation. Finally he took her hand. “Will you marry me?” he asked. Marcella said yes.
* * *
—
They honeymooned in San Francisco, and moved to a spacious apartment in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Marcella, newly promoted to lieutenant commander, took over her duties at the naval hospital, as did Petty Officer John DeVries, who had rented an apartment near the newlyweds.
It went well for a while: the Allies had turned the tide, and it was now only a matter of time before Germany and Japan capitulated, Marcella was satisfied with her supervisory duties, and Johnny and Doc had become great friends.
Doc had become the father that Johnny had lost. The two would spin off together in Doc’s LaSalle convertible for long, aimless jaunts all over the L.A. basin. That was the trouble, Marcella decided. Doc was never around, and when he was he was deliberately mysterious and darkly elliptical.
It soon became obvious to her that her husband’s “opportunity of a lifetime” was the receiving of stolen goods from an L.A.-based robbery gang. Johnny, high on hop one night, had told her that Doc had garages filled with stolen merchandise all over the city. He fenced the contraband goods—furs, jewelry, and antiques—to army and navy high brass, hangers-on in the movie industry, and the gamblers and other assorted con artists who frequented Hollywood Park and Santa Anita racetracks.
Doc was a loving, solicitous husband when he was around, but Marcella started to worry. She began drinking to excess and corresponding voluminously with Will to assuage the fears that were building in her about the man she loved. He seemed to be laughing at her, thinking always two or even three steps ahead of her, and always, always smiling darkly with what she imagined to be an evil, absolutely cold light in his eyes.
Marcella decided she needed a vacation by herself. She needed to cut down her intake of alcohol and collect her thoughts. She told Doc this, and he readily agreed. She had a month’s accumulated leave time coming, and her superiors were more than willing to let their fiercely competent nurse take some time off to relax.
She drove to San Juan Capistrano and swam in the sea and wrote long letters to Will, who had—amazingly—resettled in Tunnel City. Astounded by this, Marcella telephoned him there. Will told her that he had found it necessary to confront his tragic past. He had become a seeker of the spiritual path. It worked, he told her; he was at peace here, running the town movie theater, going on book-buying missions to Chicago for the Tunnel City Public Library, and meditatively walking the cabbage fields he had once hated so terribly.
Marcella returned to Los Angeles to find she was pregnant and that Johnny was once again addicted to codeine. He had taken up with a young woman that Doc had considered unworthy and had decreed that he not see again. Cowed by his father-surrogate, Johnny had agreed, and the woman had left Los Angeles.
Marcella was angry at her husband’s hold over her brother, and hurt. She had exercised authority over Johnny much more benignly. Doc would coldly order Johnny about, tell him to drive him places, instruct him on what to wear and eat; and always, always with that cold smile on his face.
Marcella was troubled. But when she told Doc the news of her pregnancy, she was overjoyed to see the laughing, witty, and tender Doc of their courtship reemerge. He was solicitous, he was considerate, he anticipated her moods perfectly. She was never happier, she wrote to Will, not ever.
* * *
—
Michael was born in August of 1945, and Marcella’s letters to Will became less frequent. She never mentioned her new child and ignored Will’s written queries about him.
“Trouble, trouble,” she wrote Will in October of that year. “John and I are being questioned about a drug robbery on an aircraft carrier. We have been singled out because of Johnny’s addiction. It is a terrible, terrible thing.”
“Trouble, awful trouble from all quarters,” she wrote in November of ’45, three months after the end of the war. It was their last contact for almost six years.
Will and Johnny had run into each other in Chicago late in ’49. Johnny had looked terrible: emaciated, his skin a ghastly gray. Will had sought to comfort him, had told him about the “Order of the Clandestine Heart” to which he belonged. Johnny seemed interested, but became nervous when Will pushed the point.
John DeVries was murdered in Milwaukee in 1950. His killer was never found. When Will read of Johnny’s murder in the Milwaukee newspapers, he tried to contact Marcella. It was no use—he sent telegrams to her last known address only to have them returned stamped “Gone, No Forwarding Address.” He called every William Harris in the Los Angeles directories, to no avail. Finally, he drove to Milwaukee and talked to the two detectives assigned to investigate the killing.
Johnny had been found at dawn on the grass at a park a few blocks off Milwaukee’s skid row. He had been stabbed repeatedly with a butcher knife. He was a known morphine addict and sometime dealer. His death was obviously tied in to the drug underworld. The detectives, Kraus and Lutz, were considerate and kind to Will, but closed-minded about broadening their investigation. Although they told Will they would keep him informed, he drove back to Tunnel City troubled and feeling powerless.
He was to see Marcella one last time. She knocked on his door in the summer of 1951. It was the most startling event of his life. Marcella had lost weight and was close to hysteria. They talked of John’s death and she sobbed in Will’s arms. Will told Marcella of the Clandestine Heart monastery, and she seemed to listen and gain brief solace.
Marcella drank herself to sleep that night, passing out on Will’s living room sofa. When Will awoke early the next morning she was gone. She had left a note: “Thank you. I will consider what you have said. I will seek what I have to seek. I envy your peace. I will try to gain what peace I can.”
* * *
—
Will Berglund anticipated my one question: “I’ll call those policemen in Milwaukee. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
I nodded at the farmer-lover-spiritual seeker. He seemed to take my brief turn of the head as absolution, and a slow trickle of tears ran from his eyes.
* * *
—
It was 5:00 a.m. I walked back to the Badger Hotel. My room had been gone through—magazines had been turned over and the bed had been tousled. I checked the contents of my suitcase. Everything was there, but my gun had been unloaded. I packed and walked downstairs and through the lobby, getting curious and hostile looks from some early-rising townspeople. I walked down Main Street feeling awed and humbled—and also powerful; I had been handed the wonder on a platter, and now it was up to me to put it in order.
20
It took me two hours to get to Milwaukee. The Wisconsin Dell Highway was deserted as I drove past small towns and through deep green grazing land. I had been awake for more than twenty-four hours, had traversed fifty years of history and was now nowhere near tired. All I could think of was the history lying in wait for me in Milwaukee, and how to synthesize all the knowledge that only I could tie together.
I thought of pharmacist’s mates John DeVries and Eddie Engels. Had they known each other at the Long Beach Naval Hospital? Was Eddie connected to Marcella there? Was that the genesis of the train of deadly events that erupted in 1950 and continued through this summer?
Coming into Milwaukee on Blue Mound Road—an incongruously named, smog-ch
oked four-lane highway—I said to myself: don’t think.
* * *
—
Milwaukee was red brick, gray brick, white brick, factory smoke, and rows and rows of small white houses with small Wisconsin green front lawns, all modulated by the breeze wafting from Lake Michigan. I parked in the basement of the Greyhound Bus Depot on Wells Street, then shaved and changed clothes in the huge lavatory.
I checked my image in the mirror above the basin. I decided I was an anthropologist, well suited to dig into the ruins of blasted lives. This conclusion reached, I threaded my way down a corridor laced with sleeping winos to a pay phone, where I dialed the Operator and said, “Police Department, please.”
* * *
—
Detectives Kraus and Lutz were still partners and were working the Eighth Precinct, located on Farwell Avenue, a few blocks from the sludgy, waste-carrying Milwaukee River. The old three-story police station was red brick, sandwiched between a sausage factory and a parochial school. I parked in front and walked inside, feeling nostalgia grip me in a bear hug: this had been my life once.
I showed my phony insurance business card to the desk sergeant, who didn’t seem impressed, and asked for the detective division. Nonplussed, he said, “Third floor” and pointed me in the direction of the Lysol-smelling muster room.
I took the stairs two at a time in almost total darkness, and came out into a corridor painted a bright school-bus yellow. There was a long arrow painted along the wall underlining “Detective Division: The Finest of Milwaukee’s Finest.” I followed the arrow to a squad room crammed with desks and mismatched chairs. Nostalgia gripped me even harder: this was what I had once aspired to.
Two men occupied the room, conferring over a desk underneath a large ceiling fan. The men were blond, portly, and wearing identical gaudy hand-tooled shoulder holsters encasing .45 automatics with mother-of-pearl grips. They looked up when they heard my footsteps and smiled identically.
I knew I was going to be the audience for a cop comedy act, so I raised my arms in mock surrender and said, “Whoa, pardner, I’m a friend.”
“Never thought that you weren’t,” the more red-faced of the two men said. “But how’d you get past the desk? You one of Milwaukee’s finest?”
I laughed. “No, but I represent one of the finest insurance companies in Los Angeles.” I fished two business cards out of my coat pocket and handed one to each cop. They responded with identical half nods and shakes of the head.
“Floyd Lutz,” the red-faced man said, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.
“Walt Kraus,” his partner said, extending his hand. I shook it.
“Fred Underhill,” I returned.
We looked at one another. By way of amenities I said, “I take it Will Berglund called you about me?”
By way of amenities, Floyd Lutz said, “Yeah, he did. Who choked Johnny DeVries’s sister, Underhill?”
“I don’t know. Neither do the L.A cops. Who sliced Johnny DeVries?”
Walt Kraus pointed to a chair. “We don’t know,” he said. “We’d like to. Floyd and I were on the case from the beginning. Johnny was a beast, a nice-guy beast, don’t get me wrong, but seven feet tall? Three hundred pounds? That’s a beast. The guy who cut him had to be a worse beast. Johnny’s stomach was torn open from rib cage to belly button. Jesus!”
“Suspects?” I asked.
Floyd Lutz answered me: “DeVries pushed morphine. More correctly, he gave it away. He was a soft touch. He could never stay in business for long. He’d always wind up on skid row, sleeping in the park, passing out handbills and selling his blood like the other derelicts. He was a nice, passive guy most of the time, used to hand out free morph to the poor bastards on skid who had got hooked during the war. Floyd and me and most of the other cops did our best not to roust him, but sometimes we had to: when he got mad he was the meanest animal I’ve ever seen. He’d wreck bars and overturn cars, bust heads and fill skid row with dread. He was a terror. Walt and I figure his killer was either some bimbo on the row he beat up or some dope pusher who didn’t like a soft touch on his turf. We checked out every major and minor known heroin and morph pusher from Milwaukee to Chi. Nada. We went back over Johnny’s rap sheet and checked out the victims in every assault beef he ever had—over thirty guys. Most of them were transients. We ran makes on them all over the Midwest. Eight of them were in jail—Kentucky to Michigan. We talked to all of them—nothing. We talked to every skid row deadbeat who wasn’t too fucked up on Sweet Lucy to talk. We sobered up the ones who were too fucked up. Nothing. Nothing all the way down the line.”
“Physical evidence?” I asked. “ME’s report?”
Lutz sighed. “Nothing. Cause of death a severed spinal cord or shock or massive loss of blood, take your pick. The coroner said that Big John wasn’t fucked-up on morph when he was sliced—that was surprising. That was why Walt and I figured the guy who sliced him had to be a beast or a friend of Johnny’s—someone who knew him. Anyone who could slice a guy like that when he was sober had to be a monster.”
“Did Johnny have any friends?” I asked.
“Only one,” Lutz said. “A chemistry teacher at Marquette. Was. He’s a wino now. He and Johnny used to get drunk together on the row. The guy was nutso. Used to teach a semester, then take off a semester and go on a bender. The priests at Marquette finally got sick of it and gave him the heave-ho. He’s probably still on skid; the last time I saw him he was sniffing gasoline in front of the Jesus Saves Mission.” Lutz shook his head.
“What was the guy’s name?” I asked.
Lutz looked to Kraus and shrugged. Kraus screwed his face into a memory search. “Melveny? Yeah, that’s it—George ‘The Professor’ Melveny, George ‘The Gluebird’ Melveny. He’s got a dozen skid row monikers.”
“Last known address?” I queried.
Kraus and Lutz laughed in unison.
“Park bench,” Kraus said.
“Slit trench,” Lutz rhymed.
“No dough.”
“Skid row.” This sent the two detectives into gales of laughter.
“I get the picture,” I said. “Let me ask you something: where did a skid row bum like Johnny DeVries get morphine?”
“Well,” Floyd Lutz said, “he was a pharmacist by trade, before the dope got him. I always figured he was using George ‘The Gluebird’s’ lab to make the shit. We checked it out once; no go. Beats me where he got the stuff; Johnny was kind of formidable in a lot of ways; you got the impression that maybe he was hot stuff once.” Lutz shook his head again, and looked at Kraus, who shook his, too.
I sighed. “I need a favor,” I said.
“Name it,” Kraus said. “Any pal of Will Berglund’s is a friend of mine.”
“Thanks, Walt. Look, Will told me that maybe Johnny DeVries and his sister were involved in a drug robbery at the naval hospital in Long Beach, California, during the war. They were both stationed there. Could you call the provost marshal’s office there at the hospital? A request from an official police agency might carry some weight. I’m just an insurance investigator—they won’t give me the time of day. I—”
Lutz interrupted me. “Are you fishing in the same stream as us, Underhill?”
“All the way. A big load of morph was stolen, I know that, and that would explain where Johnny got the stuff he was pushing.”
Kraus and Lutz looked at each other. “Use the phone in the skipper’s office,” Lutz said.
Kraus jumped up from his desk and walked to a cubicle partitioned off and festooned with Milwaukee Braves’ pennants.
“All the particulars, Walt,” Lutz called after him.
“Gotcha!” Kraus returned.
I looked at Lutz and popped my next request: “Could I see DeVries’s rap sheet?”
He nodded and went to a bank of filing cabinets at the
far end of the squad room. He fumbled around in them for five minutes, finally extracting a file and returning to me.
I was getting nervous. Kraus had been on the telephone a long time, and it was only 6:00 a.m. in L.A. His protracted conversation at that hour struck me as ominous.
The manila folder had “DeVries, John Piet; 6–11–14” typed on the front. I opened it. When I saw the series of mug shots clipped to the first page my hands started to shake and my mind recoiled and leaped forward at the same time. I was looking at the face of Michael Harris. Every curve, plane and angle was identical. It was more than a basic familial resemblance; it was purely parental. Johnny was Michael’s father, but who was his mother? It couldn’t have been Marcella. With shaking hands I turned the first page and went into double shock: John DeVries had listed Margaret Cadwallader of Waukesha, Wisconsin, as next of kin when he was arrested for assault and battery in 1946.
I put down the folder and suddenly realized I was gasping for air. Floyd Lutz had rushed to the water cooler and was now shoving a paper cup of water at me.
“Underhill,” he was saying. “Underhill? What the hell is the matter with you? Underhill?”
I came out of it. I felt like a madman restored to sanity by a divine visitation; someone viewing reality for the first time.
I made my voice sound calm: “I’m all right. This guy DeVries reminded me of someone I knew as a kid. That’s all.”
“You holding out on me? Man, you look like you just got back from Mars.”
“Ha-ha!” My laughter sounded phony even to my own ears, so to forestall any more questions, I read through John DeVries’s rap sheet; scores and scores of arrests for drunkenness, assault and battery, petty theft, and trespassing; a dozen thirty- and forty-five-day incarcerations in the Milwaukee County Jail; but nothing else related to blood. No further mention of Maggie Cadwallader, no mention of Marcella, no mention of children.
