Clandestine

by James Ellroy

  “Good,” I said. “Eddie is in hell, but I’m not, and if you play your cards right you won’t be either. Do you dig me, Larry?” Brubaker nodded again. “Good. Do you know who I am?”

  Brubaker twisted slightly to see my face. When recognition flashed into his pale blue eyes he whimpered, then covered his mouth with his hands and bit at his knuckles.

  I motioned him toward the back door of his cocktail lounge. “Pick up the box, Larry. We have some reading and talking to do.”

  Brubaker complied, and in a few moments we were seated in his modest living quarters at the rear of the bar. Brubaker was quivering, but holding on to his dignity, much as he had on the day Smith and I had questioned him. I pointed with my gun barrel to the carton that lay between us.

  “Open it up and read the first ten pages or so,” I said.

  Brubaker hesitated, then tore into it, obviously anxious to get it over with. I watched as he hurriedly read through the sheets I had annotated, setting each one aside with trembling hands as he continued reading. After ten minutes or so he had gotten the picture and started to laugh hysterically, but with what seemed like an underlying sense of irony.

  “Baby, baby, baby, baby,” he said. “Baby, baby, baby.”

  “You ever kill anyone, Larry?” I asked.

  “No,” Brubaker said.

  “Do you have any idea how many people Doc Harris has killed?”

  “Lots and lots,” Brubaker said.

  “You’re a sarcastic bastard. You feel like surviving this thing, or going down with Doc?”

  “I went down on Doc in 1944, baby. So did Eddie, so did Johnny DeVries. Just to seal our pact, you understand. I didn’t mind: Doc was a gorgeous hunk. Eddie didn’t mind, he was a switch-hitter. But it ate Johnny up, no pun intended. He liked it, and he hated himself for it till the day he died.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Doc. Doc loved him, too. But Johnny was talking too much. He never turned his share of the stuff over. He was giving it away to all the hopheads on Milwaukee skid. Then he started talking about kicking. We were friends. He called me and told me he wanted me to hold his stuff until he got out of the hospital. He wanted to kick, but he didn’t want to lose the money he could get by pushing the stuff, you dig?”

  “I dig. So you were afraid that if he got clean he’d blab and implicate you, and you told Doc.”

  “That’s right, I told Big Daddy, and Big Daddy took care of it.”

  Brubaker managed to keep his pride, though he was clearly accepting of his subservience and self-hatred. I honestly didn’t know if he wanted to go on living or die with his past. All I could do was go on asking my questions and hope that his detachment held.

  “What happened to the rest of the dope, Larry?”

  “Doc and I are turning it over, a little at a time. Have been, for years.”

  “He’s blackmailing you?”

  “He’s got pictures of me and a city councilman in what you might call a compromising position,” Brubaker laughed. “I fixed the councilman up with Eddie. Eddie was a status fiend, the guy was in love with status and horses, and that councilman had both. Doc took some pictures of them, too, but the councilman never knew it. Eddie did, though—that’s how Doc got him to take the fall for Maggie.”

  I started to tremble. “Doc killed Maggie?”

  “Yes, baby, he did. You got the wrong man when you popped Eddie. But you paid, baby. It’s funny, baby, you don’t look like a Commie.” Brubaker laughed, this time directly at me.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did he do it?”

  “Why? Well, Maggie was living here in L.A., unknown to all us sailor-boys. Her mother wrote to her about Johnny being sliced in Milwaukee. She ran into Eddie, accidentally someplace, and started shooting off her mouth. Eddie told Doc, and Doc told him to sweet-talk her and fuck her and keep an eye on her. Then Doc started getting nervous. He borrowed Eddie’s car one night and went to Maggie’s apartment and choked her. It was a setup—Doc knew he could always trust me, but he wasn’t sure about Eddie. He knew Eddie was insane about anyone knowing he was gay; that he’d rather die than have his family find out, so he showed Eddie the pictures of him and the councilman and that sealed it. Either the cops would never find out who choked Maggie, which would be hunky-dory, or Eddie would buy the ticket. Which he did, baby, and you were the ticket taker.” I was jolted back to that night in ’51 when I had first tailed Engels—he had had a violent confrontation with an older man in a homosexual bar in West Hollywood. My faulty memory sprung back to life—that man had been Doc Harris. Feeling self-revulsion start to creep in like a cancer, I changed the subject. “Did Marcella Harris know Maggie? Know that Doc was going to kill her?”

  “I think she knew. I think she guessed. She had always liked Maggie—and she knew that Maggie was really Michael’s mother. Doc told Marcella to stay away from Maggie. Doc and Marcella were divorced, but still friendly. Marcella took off on a trip somewhere; she left Michael with some boyfriends of hers. See, baby, she always knew Doc was a little cold. When she found out Maggie was dead, she knew how cold, but it wasn’t until later that year that she found out Doc was the night train to Cold City.”

  “What are you talking about? Didn’t she know Doc killed Johnny?”

  Brubaker shook his head and gave me an ironic hipster’s smile. “Negative, baby. If she’d known, she would have killed him or herself. That woman loved that crazy brother of hers, and did she have a will! I was Doc’s alibi, baby. He was with me on a three-day poker-drunk when he was really in Milwaukee slicing Big John.”

  I shuddered because I already had an idea about the answer to my next question. “Then what did Marcella find out later that year?”

  “Well, baby, to give old iceberg Doc his due, he does love his ‘moral heir,’ as he calls him. When Marcella went gallivanting all over hell in ’51 and left Michael with her partying pals, Doc was frantic, not knowing where his boy was. When he and Michael got together, and Michael told him he was with some nice fellas in Hollywood, Doc got real upset. He went up there with a butcher knife and did some cutting. He got three of them. It was in all the papers, but you probably didn’t read about it—you was recently on the headlines yourself and probably hiding out. What’s the matter, baby? You’re a little bit pale.”

  Brubaker went to the sink and drew me a glass of water. He handed it to me and I sipped, then realized what I was doing and hurled it at the wall.

  “Easy, baby,” Brubaker said. “You’re learning things you don’t want to?”

  I almost choked on the words, but I got them out, in part: “Why did Doc…”

  “Kill Marcella? For the boy, baby. He knew Marcella knew of all the shit that had hit the fan; maybe she even suspected he killed Johnny. But if she ever went to the cops she knew she’d never see her little boy. That ate at her. She started hitting the juice and popping pills harder than ever. She started sleeping around harder than ever. Doc had this sleazy private detective checking her out. He told Doc that Marcella had more rubber burned in her than the Pomona Freeway. That private eye disappeared shortly thereafter, baby. So did Marcella.”

  Brubaker drew a silent finger across his throat, indicating the end of Marcella’s potentially splendid life. I was outraged beyond outrage, but not at Brubaker.

  “But Michael was with Doc when Marcella was strangled,” I said calmly.

  “That’s correct,” Brubaker said, equally calmly. “He was. Doc drove out to El Monte. He knew that Marcella usually stumbled home from Hank’s Hot Spot down Peck Road by the high school. He knew she never took her car. He was parked by the school. He picked her up and talked to her for a couple of hours, then strangled her. Michael was asleep in the back seat. Doc had fed him three Seconals. When he woke up at home the next day he never knew where he spent the night. Ain’t parental love a kick, baby?”

&nb
sp; I jumped up, and with a trembling hand held my gun inches from Brubaker’s smiling face, the hammer cocked, my finger on the trigger.

  “Shoot me, man,” Brubaker said. “I don’t care, it ain’t gonna hurt for long. Shoot me.”

  I held my ground.

  “Shoot me, goddamnit! Ain’t you got the guts? You afraid of a n——— queer? Shoot me!”

  I raised the gun barrel into the air and brought it down full force onto Brubaker’s head. He screamed, and blood burst from a vein over his nose. I raised my gun again, then screamed myself and threw it against the wall. I stared at Brubaker, who wiped his bloody face with his sleeve and returned my stare.

  “Are you with me or with Doc?” I said finally.

  “I’m with you, baby,” Brubaker said. “You’ve got all the aces in this hand. In fact, you’re the only game in town.”

  24

  It was the only game in town, I knew that, but I didn’t feel I’d been dealt aces. I felt like I was holding a dead man’s hand, and that even after it was over Doc Harris would be laughing at me from wherever he went, secure in the knowledge that I could never again lead a normal life, if indeed I ever had.

  Larry Brubaker and I drove north, toward the farm country east of Ventura. I was armed with a 10-gauge shotgun, a .38, and a hypodermic syringe; Brubaker with a masochistic delight at the predicament he was in. He knew I was armed for bear—he had supplied me with the syringe and he knew what I had to do. Brubaker was driving, but he knew only the barest outline of my plan; he knew only the territory where the game was to be played.

  I stared at him out of the corner of my eye. He was a skillful driver, deftly weaving through traffic like a rider jockeying for post position, and even with his head bandaged from the result of my outrage he maintained an icy calm.

  He had supplied the details, and he had agreed to sign a confession to all his knowledge of Doc Harris’s malfeasance and his own part in the drug robbery. He was an accessory to murder and much more. That confession was now, four days later, lying in my Bank of America safe-deposit box. After signing his name with a flourish to the twenty-three-page indictment I had drawn up in his cluttered back room, Brubaker had said: “There’s only one way to play this game and win. Doc owns a plot of land east of Ventura. Just a nasty little good-for-nothing pile of dirt. It’s his tax sting; he’s got no visible means of support, being a respectable middle-class dope pusher like he is. So he writes off his rockpile and pays a C-note a year in income tax. That’s where he hides his stuff. He gives it to me and I turn it over for him. We meet there once a month, on the fifteenth, to make the trade: I give Doc the month’s take, he gives me the stuff. That’s the place to take him. You dig, baby?”

  I dug, and I wanted to make sure Brubaker reciprocated. “Yeah, I dig. You dig that if this thing doesn’t come off, I’m going to kill you right there?”

  “Of course, baby. It’s the only game in town.”

  * * *

  —

  I saw a clock as we passed Oxnard—8:42 a.m., and I noted the time and place—Saturday, July 15, 1955, and I thought of what I wanted from Doc Harris on the biggest day of my life and the last day of his: I wanted a dialogue before the strychnine-laced morphine entered his veins. Remorse was beyond his capability, but I wanted a crumbling, or at least an expression of grief, as my personal revenge. And more importantly, I wanted information on the state of mind of his “moral heir.” How far had he gone in perverting Michael’s mind? How conscious and subtle were his methods of brainwashing? And I wanted him to die knowing that Michael would live free and sane because of his death.

  We passed the Ventura County line and headed east. I felt like I was going to vomit, and reflexively looked at the cold mien of Larry Brubaker for signs of stress. I was rewarded: he had tightened his hands on the steering wheel until his pale brown knuckles had turned a throbbing white.

  “You want to hear a joke, Larry?” I said.

  “Sure, baby.”

  “It’s my definition of a sadist. Are you ready? Someone who’s kind to a masochist.”

  Brubaker laughed, first uproariously, then obscenely. “That’s the story of my life, baby! Only I was playing both parts. It’s too bad you ain’t gonna get the chance to know Doc. He would have dug your act.”

  “Tell me about the setup. How do you and Doc work it?”

  “He drives up alone; I do likewise. He’s got the stuff buried in a watertight chest in this little grove of trees next to this little shed. We make the trade and we have a drink or two and talk politics or sports or old times, and that’s it.”

  “Would Doc’s car fit in this shed?”

  “Probably. How do you expect to get Doc to sit still while you hot-shot him? That’s what you’re planning to do, ain’t it, baby?”

  “Don’t you worry about it. And your meeting time is always ten, and Doc is never early?”

  “Right, baby. Now you don’t worry. You can see Doc coming from half a mile away. I always come early, to observe nature. You dig?”

  “I dig.”

  * * *

  —

  Ten minutes later we were there.

  We turned off the shoulder and drove for a quarter mile over a dusty road. When we came up to the site it was just as Brubaker described it: soft brown dirt strewn with rocks, dust, and a white clapboard shack on the edge of an expanse of dead-looking eucalyptus trees.

  We parked next to the shack. Brubaker set the brake and smiled at me. I didn’t know what the smile meant, and suddenly I was terrified.

  Brubaker looked at his watch. “It’s nine fifteen,” he said. “We’ve got forty-five minutes, but you better get out of sight to be safe. I’ll stand outside my car like I usually do. Hot, ain’t it? But pretty. God, do I love the country!”

  I got my shotgun out of the back seat, wishing it were an automatic, and walked into the grove of trees. I placed it at the back of the tree closest to Brubaker’s car, where it could be grabbed quickly when Doc Harris arrived. I got out my .38 and checked the safety, then stuck it back in my waistband and walked toward a dark patch of shade at the middle of the little forest.

  “I’ll whistle once when he shows,” Brubaker called to me. For the first time I noticed tension in his voice.

  “Right,” I called back, noting my own voice was stretched thin.

  I leaned up against a tree trunk that afforded me a view of Brubaker and his car as well as the road. I was so light-headed from nervous tension that it was easy not to think. My mind was totally blank, and I caught myself slipping into a state of complete nervous exhaustion. I cleared my throat repeatedly and started to scratch and pick at myself, almost as if to prove that I was still there.

  I heard a rustle of dried leaves in back of me, and whirled around, my hand on the butt of my gun. It was nothing—probably just a scurrying rodent. I heard the rustle again and didn’t turn around, and then suddenly I heard the ka-raack! of a shot and the tree trunk splintered above my head. I pitched to the ground and rolled in the direction of a large mound of fallen branches. I pulled my .38 from my waistband and flipped off the safety and held my breath. I dug in behind the branches, burrowing through dried leaves for a place to aim. Finding a small spot of daylight that provided aiming room and protection, I dug deeper and scanned the direction from which the shot had come.

  There was nothing: no movement of any kind, no noise but the frantic slamming of my own heart and the sharp wheeze of my breath. I risked sticking my head above the mound of branches and quickly scanned the grove of trees. Still nothing. Was the sniper Brubaker?

  “Brubaker,” I called. There was no response.

  I glanced over to my left. The shotgun was still resting against the tree trunk. I crawled over to where I could see Brubaker’s car and the little shack. No Brubaker and no movement. I was starting to calm down a little, and starting
to get angry. As I crawled back toward my hiding place I caught a glimpse of trouser legs off to my left near the far edge of my vision. Three shots rang out, and the dirt in front of me blew up in my face. I started rolling toward the shotgun when I saw a man charging me. Dimly I knew it was Doc Harris. I was within inches of my shotgun and still rolling when he fired two shots at me from within ten yards. The first shot narrowly missed; the second grazed the side of my head. I flailed my .38 in front of me, wasting precious seconds. Doc Harris saw what I was doing and aimed dead at me. He pulled the trigger, and got an empty click. Livid, he was on top of me, and he kicked me in the face just as I got my gun free, causing me to fire three quick shots in the wrong direction.

  He flung himself on my gun arm and grabbed my wrist with both hands. As a precaution I fired the remaining three rounds into the dirt. This infuriated him and he brought his knee into my groin. I screamed, and vomited onto his shirtfront. He reached up reflexively to fend it off, thereby easing some of the pressure on my chest. I squirmed partially free and twisted myself in the direction of the shotgun. Just as I got my hands on the butt, Harris renewed his attack. I feebly swiped at him with the gun butt, grazing him in the chin. He grabbed for the trigger, hoping to force a shot in my direction, but my right hand was securely clamped around the trigger guard. We rolled into a tree trunk, and I tried to squash Harris into it, banging him at chest level with the gun barrel that was between us like a wedge. It was no use; he was too strong. I wrapped my middle finger around the trigger and squeezed. The shotgun exploded and the barrel buckled, hitting Harris in the face. He panicked for just an instant, withdrawing his hand slightly and looking startled.

  We both drew ourselves to our feet. Harris had retightened his grip on the gun, then realized it was useless and let go, causing me to fall to the ground. He smiled down at me through clenched teeth and pulled a switchblade knife from his back pocket. He pressed a button on the handle and a gleaming, razor-sharp blade popped out. He advanced toward me. I was trying to get to my feet when I saw Larry Brubaker inching up in back of him, wielding a tire iron. Harris was within three feet of me when Brubaker brought it down with a roundhouse swing onto his shoulders. Harris collapsed to the ground at my feet and was silent.