James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03

by Blood's a Rover

Dwight walked the shelf banks. The ladders ran on greased casters. Twelve-foot-high, floor-bolted structures. Twelve shelves per bank. Twenty-four banks total.

  “You’re early. Almost a month, in fact.”

  Dwight turned around. Jack Leahy leaned on a ladder.

  “You’ll hate the job. These files do not represent Mr. Hoover at his best.”

  “The Bureau’s most impolitic SAC. How have you lasted this long?”

  “Lawyer’s luck. And civil law compared to this? Come on.”

  They shook hands. Jack sat on a ladder rung.

  “I haven’t seen you since the Hiltz case and the start-up of BAAAAD BROTHER.”

  “Well, two times lucky, and two times unexposed.”

  “Yeah, but at some goddamn price.” Dwight shook his head. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “I don’t blame you. The old girl, third-rate militants and Scotty Bennett in one go? I’d have called in a rest break before you did.”

  “Can it, Jack. It’s old news now.”

  Jack coughed. “Well, shit, you know the drill. You monitor the general dirt files and supplant them with informant pieces. You’ve got cops, criminals who want favors, newsmen, bug men, waiters, doormen, wheelmen, repo men, hotel clerks, barflies and the aggrieved great unwashed of the universe. Try to underpay for your dirt. The old girl wants the shit, but she wants it at bargain-basement prices.”

  Dwight sneezed. The file room was overcooled. Dry air fought off paper rot.

  “Are you running standing bug posts?”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “We’ve got bugged fuck pads and hotel suites. Duke Wayne blows into Chicago. The doorman at the Drake calls the Chicago SAC. Before you know it, the Duke’s upgraded to the penthouse. Too bad it’s hot-wired. The Duke’s a cross-dresser, by the way. He wears a size-fifty-six extra-long muumuu.”

  Dwight laughed. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Half the fruit bathhouses in L.A. are wired. The old girl caught a city councilman at a joint on La Cienega once, so she’s running nine listening posts full-time.”

  Dwight plucked a file and skimmed it. Johnnie Ray sucks dick in Fern-dell Park. The suckee is an FBI informant. Lana Turner dives dark sisters, circa ’54. A snitch calls from Sultan Sam’s Sandbox.

  Jack said, “How’s the old girl’s health? I saw her in D.C. last month. She looked positively spectral. I had an informant once named ‘Jean the Mean Queen.’ She had to be the old girl’s long-lost sister.”

  Liberace’s all-boy cathouse. Scopophile Danny Thomas, nympho Peggy Lee. Muff-diver Sol Hurok. Masochist James Dean—the “Human Ashtray.”

  Dwight replaced the file. Margin notes lingered. Ava Gardner and Redd Foxx. Jean Seberg and half the Black Panthers.

  “Have fun, Dwight. I told the old girl it’s a swinging new world, but she didn’t believe me.”

  • • •

  He rented a fallback. It was a work space/crash pad. It was close to the drop-front and Karen’s place. He and Joan had keys. They kept their gear there. The bungalow overlooked Karen’s street. He could watch the girls play.

  Baxter and Cove was close. Two blocks and binocular range.

  Dwight parked and lugged in boxes. He had brooding time. He was meeting Joan at the Statler later. The fallback was a plotter’s den. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, mattress for naps.

  He pulled a chair out to the terrace. He pointed his Bausch & Lombs south. Karen walked across her yard. Dina and Ella chased cats.

  Karen looked haggard. His offer stunned her. She knows it’s an adjunct op. She knows the main op is big. He can’t tell her the gist. We’re going to kill Mr. Hoover and frame Marsh Bowen for it.

  They’ll manipulate a convergence. Marsh will be pre-indicted by forged document trails. They will lead back to the year zero and extend beyond 2000. They’ll recruit a pro shooter. Bob Relyea shot MLK. He should shoot again. The assassin is a homosexual black policeman. He kills the era’s prime symbol of white authority and ends his own life immediately. Planted paperwork reveals public policy gone bad. Marsh Bowen has been consumed by a politically incubated madness. The FBI suborns him and sends him undercover. He undergoes a radical transformation. He concurrently attempts to exploit his situation. He’s beset by sexual demons that induce a harrowing shame. The “Black-Militant Blastout” leaves two children dead. Marsh Bowen resumes his police career with honors derived from innocence slaughtered. Mr. Hoover created the overall context. Special Agent Dwight C. Holly implemented it.

  They will create a Marsh Bowen diary. It will detail a brilliant black man’s rising tide of conversation and psychic disjuncture. Entries will describe his odd friendship with Special Agent Holly. Agent Holly unburdened himself to Marsh Bowen. He laid out the FBI’s war on the civil rights movement and described Mr. Hoover’s rabid racial animus.

  The King hit plot would not be mentioned. It would eclipse the shock of Mr. Hoover’s death and spawn apocalypse. The fictional Holly-Bowen friendship would be deeply etched. It would encompass a world of guilt and hope. The diary would form a syllabus. It would bring readers to a copious glut of pre-existent FBI paper. The paper would form a narrative of banal minutae that would attenuate into horror. Grand juries would indict Marsh postmortem. Conspiracy talk would engulf the body politic. Every real and concocted trail would lead back to Mr. Hoover and his legacy of hate.

  Mr. Hoover was partially discredited now. His anti-King salvos had become public fare. They were negligible compared to this. They lacked hardcore shock value. This would be a huge event. It would spawn waves of disbelief and tragically resigned acceptance.

  He would be the trigger man. He would sit in committee rooms and grand-jury chambers. He would stand on the U.S. Senate floor. He would describe his exploitation of Marsh Bowen. He would detail his own lifetime of racial rancor, minutely outline his black-militant faux pas and chart the human cost. He would reveal his friendship with Marsh and paint a vivid picture of a white man and a black man as mirror-twinned souls in duress. He would embrace Marsh with forgiveness and the distanced love you feel for those you refract. He would tell the story of his crack-up. He would resign himself to an invasively scrutinized life.

  Karen’s house was a stone’s throw. Dwight trained his binoculars. Ella threw building blocks at Dina. Big sister laughed and ran.

  He told Joan the plan. They were in bed. They rented a guest house near Silver Hill. She trembled the way he trembled routinely. He struck the awe in her that she had always struck in him.

  He’d go to prison. Four to six felt right. Protective custody, tennis courts, Fed-informant perks. There might be some animals he could care for.

  Joan said, “Take these. They’ll help you sleep.” Two brown herb capsules.

  They didn’t put him out. They put him in between. Joan guided him places. She put her hands on his chest and made him breathe in sync. She started out in French and Spanish. He caught most of it. Cap-Haïtien, Cotuí, Pico Duarte. Puerto Plata, Saint-Raphaël, El Guyabo.

  Breathe through, I’m here, you’re safe now. I’ll tell you what we did with Wayne’s gifts.

  It was the Statler. He knew that. They had Bureau-vouchered digs. Joan covered his eyes and told him to go where she said.

  Every dime went to the struggle. We refurbished four safe houses and bought black-market medicine. Celia painted the walls. Balaguer planned to turn Tiger Klaw into a pleasure yacht. Four comrades dynamited the hull in dry dock.

  We airlifted food and medicinal herbs to the slums outside Dajabón. A small sect there has canonized Wayne Tedrow. They wear newspaper photos of him, attached to pointed hats. A dream myth exists about Wayne now. People believe that winged men murdered and martyred him.

  Be still now, I know you see it, I know you loved him. We honor the dead through imagery. Belief works that way.

  Celia ran an arms funnel. We purchased weapons in Cuba and shipped them to Port-au-Prince. I bought inmates out of La Victoria prison and got them forged ID
cards and guns. Money went to converts in La Banda. They left jail doors open and shredded documents. A young man whom Wayne rescued from harm repaid his debt in full. He killed six La Banda torturers at a whorehouse in Borojol. Celia blew up the torture chamber under El Presi-dente’s golf course.

  We lost some of ours. Random reprisals were inevitable and cost us dearly. El Jefe muzzled published and broadcast accounts of our actions. Word spread through printed leaflets and secret-band radio.

  Many of the slaves Wayne freed have joined us. Some of them wear his picture around their necks. There have been skirmishes on the north D.R. coastline. A 6/14 demolition team blew up Tiger Kove. Many voodoo sects hold the building sites to be sacred ground. Many people refuse to walk across them. We shotgunned two Tonton Macoute leaders and three vicious bokurs on a golf course near Ville-Bonheur. Celia is lost somewhere in the D.R. or Haiti. She has been unreachable for months. I cannot find her and cannot conscionably continue my search with our work still to do. If you have seen some of this or all of this and my pictures have guided you, you should now try to sleep.

  The Statler supplied guest robes. One size fits all. His fit too small, Joan’s engulfed her.

  She was up first. Room service had come and gone. Dwight poured coffee. Joan examined paper stock. The room-service cart was a workbench. The couch was a study perch.

  “How do we age the documents?”

  “Two runs in a convection oven. You chemically treat the paper and cook it. You add the ink or type the text on later.”

  “How do we differentiate the printing and cursive styles?”

  “We cut stencils and print or write longhand within the boundaries.”

  Joan lit a cigarette. Her eyes were red—late nights and heavy smoking.

  “The diary is the big thing. It’s our basic text, so it has to be found.”

  Dwight sat on the couch. “We have to be sure that he doesn’t already have a diary. We’ve got to locate it, so that we can snatch it and replace it, right before the convergence.”

  “Typed, right? We don’t want to hand-forge a document of that length.”

  Dwight sipped coffee. “Right. If he has a typewriter, we’ll purchase an identical one and go from there. I’ll get a typeface sample on my first B&E.”

  Joan took his hands. “Scotty Bennett? He’s tight with Marsh now.”

  Dwight shrugged. “Scotty’s a wild card. He’s a decorated cop on the one hand, a brutal fuck on the other. The important thing is that he densifies the overall text. He’s killed eighteen armed robbers and at least a dozen Panthers, and it will either come out or be stonewalled to the extent that it looks very goddamn bad for LAPD.”

  Joan smiled. “How were your dreams?”

  Dwight smiled. “Vivid, while you were talking. A little raw after that.”

  Joan pointed to a matchbook pile. Fruit joints all. The Tradesman, the Jaguar, the Falcon’s Lair. Marsh cruises Hollywood. Marsh keeps amyl-nitrate poppers in a hidey-hole.

  “He might have a lover who would contradict our profile.”

  Dwight shook his head. “He’s a loner, he’s discreet, he’s especially circumspect now that he’s celebrated. He’s on the cover of Ebony magazine this month.”

  Joan stubbed out her cigarette. “Who shoots?”

  “A Klansman I’ve dealt with before.”

  “Competent?”

  “Yes.”

  “The hard part will be putting them together.”

  Dwight sipped coffee. It killed a headache tapping in.

  “Marsh has to be secluded. It won’t work unless he fires from a distance. The shooter can fire, kill Marsh and plant the throwdown. It’s all about manipulating a proper convergence and rigging a workable line of sight.”

  Joan nodded. “It’s all pretext. It’s giving Marsh a reason to be there.”

  Dwight said, “Yes, and L.A. would be the best location. One, Marsh is here. Two, LAPD would be working the case full-tilt, as it tries to bury anything that might embarrass them. Jack Leahy would roll out for the Bureau, and Jack’s a mordant piece of work with a weird take on Mr. Hoover.”

  Joan rubbed his temples. She kneaded a bulging vein flat.

  “It’s going to take months.”

  “It’s all about creating the levels of subtext. We have to layer in misinformation at the start.”

  “Incoherence will inspire a more rigorous scrutiny.”

  “And a greater degree of paranoia and a more desperate mass desire to make it all fit.”

  Joan said, “That precipitating event. Have you thought about it?”

  Dwight cracked his knuckles. “I’ve gone ahead. The Bureau has a Records Center in Media, Pennsylvania. There’s 10,000 surveillance files stored there. It’s an easy black-bagger.”

  Joan smiled. “A publicized B&E?”

  “Yes, a pre-announcement. Hopefully, it creates a public expression of outrage and becomes a primer on file work that will serve to make our event that much more accessible.”

  “The more people go to the files, the more they’ll see and won’t see. They won’t really know what they’re looking for, so they’ll study harder and the process will fracture and attenuate.”

  Dwight stretched. His neck hurt. He’d slept curled into Joan.

  “Karen.”

  Dwight said, “Yes. She’s taking the team in.”

  Joan pulled her hair back. “Well, she’s very good.”

  “Yes.”

  “You cannot tell her what we’re doing.”

  “I know that.”

  “There’s two sets of ethics at work here.”

  “I know.”

  Joan lit a cigarette. Dwight studied her face. More stress lines. More gray hair than dark now.

  “Who redacted your file?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “Tell me how things have gone wrong for you. Tell me how you got through it and how you got it up for all this.”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  Dwight cracked his thumbs. “You knew Tommy Narduno. He was killed at the Grapevine Tavern.”

  Joan stared at him. “Yes, he was. I’m sure that you and your colleagues killed him, just as he was sure that you ran the King operation.”

  Dwight stared back. “Tell me how he knew.”

  “He saw you in Memphis two days before. He knew what you were to Mr. Hoover. He saw you distributing envelopes to some Memphis cops.”

  Dwight blinked. Smitty’s Bar-B-Q. A cop spits tobacco juice, a cop fans C-notes, a cop wolfs burnt ends.

  “What else?”

  “Karen said you were in bad shape that whole spring.”

  “The ‘Freedom School.’ You and Karen go back.”

  Joan leaned into him. He was sweating. His robe was full wet.

  “Karen and I go back further than you know.”

  “And you manipulated her in order to meet me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I just knew.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Because I sensed a shared agenda. Because I thought you might help me kill Mr. Hoover.”

  Dwight stared at her. She touched his leg. Wayne smiled from somewhere. Look, Ma. No fear.

  Joan said, “We came up with the same idea independently. I’ve wanted to kill him since I was a child, and I won’t tell you why.”

  DOCUMENT INSERT: 12/16/70. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

  Los Angeles,

  December 16, 1970

  Of course, I’m going to do it. I’ll entrust the job to my closest and most prudent comrades; no one will be hurt in the performance of the act. Dwight has gotten me a schematic drawing of the Records Center and has convinced me that the building will be unguarded. The alarm system is outmoded and the building itself is fairly secluded. Bill K., Saul M. and Anna B.-W. have agreed to take part. Dwight calls it a “feat of explication, in and of itself.” Of course he’s being disingenuous
; of course, he knows that an opportunity to fully expose the FBI’s illegal surveillance practices is too great for me to resist. He’s set the date of March 8. The Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier boxing match takes place that night. Dwight thinks the local cops will be popping into taverns to listen to it on the radio and watch it on bootleg TV, so their powers of concentration and will to proactively seek out unusual occurrences will be diverted.

  My comrades are committedly non-violent. I cannot say that wholeheartedly about Dwight. He suffered a nervous collapse in the wake of the black-militant madness and feels complicit. I see it in his ever-more-tender regard for my children. Should I reveal a certain secret there? Two children died in the course of that drug deal. That particular shock seems to drive him. I see him doing what I do. I compartmentalize my children and work assiduously to assure their safety as I comport myself with considerable recklessness in the world. I exemplify hubris in a manner that Dwight does not; his recklessness is traumatically defined, while mine is cloaked in spiritual trappings and may even be considered a puerile lifestyle choice.

  Ella is almost two now. She carries the stuffed animals that Dwight bought her everywhere she goes. Like Dina, she now knows that she has two part-time fathers and has hit the jackpot in the delighted dad department. When they’re older, they’ll ask me to explain it. I’ll say, “It was a wild time,” and feel like a fool.

  This is my first journal entry since last March. In it, I described my lunch with Joan and her gift of the beautiful emerald. I’ve been more and more frequently recalling our conversation of that day. Joan spoke of dreams as an interconnected state of consciousness, a virus that passes between like-minded people who cannot concede their like-mindedness for fear of the forfeiture of self. It made sense to me, although the mystical aspects seemed very un-Joan. Many strange and strangely surreal things make sense these days, because “It’s a wild time.” In that regard, both Joan and I are Dwight’s dream guides. I attempt to bring him the dream of peace and I am jealous that Joan may have brought him the dream of a fiery conversion of thought.

  And thought to Dwight always results in action.