by James Ellroy
He believed it; he had made it work for him. There were now twenty pieces of carefully folded paper attesting to the fact that it worked.
He had first played the tape fifteen years before, in 1967, and was impressed. But he didn’t know what he wanted. Three days later he saw her, and knew. Jane Wilhelm was her name. Grosse Point born and bred, she had fled Bennington in her senior year, hitching west in search of new values and friends. She had drifted, oxford shirt and penny loafer clad, to the dope scene on the Sunset Strip. He had first seen her outside the Whisky Au Go Go, talking to a bunch of hippie low lifers, obviously trying to downplay her intelligence and good breeding. He picked her up and told her of his tape and piece of paper. She was touched, but laughed aloud for several moments. If he wanted to ball, why didn’t he just ask? Romanticism was corny, and she was a liberated woman.
It was then, in his refusal, that he took his first moral stand. He now knew the exactitude of his immediate goal and all his future ones: the salvation of female innocence.
He kept Jane Wilhelm under loose surveillance until the end of the thirty-day period prescribed by the minister, watching her make the rounds of love-ins, crash pads and rock concerts. Shortly after midnight on the thirty-first day, Jane stumbled away alone from Gazzari’s Disco. From his car, parked just south of Sunset, he watched her weave across the street. He turned on his high beams, catching her full in the face, committing to memory her drug-puffed features and dilated eyes. It was her final debasement. He strangled her right there on the sidewalk, then threw her body into the trunk of his car.
Three nights later he drove north to the farmland outside of Oxnard. After a roadside prayer service that featured his salvation tape, he buried Jane in the soft earth adjoining a rock quarry. So far as he knew, her body was never found.
He turned onto Topanga Canyon Road, recalling the methodology that had allowed him to save twenty women without the excitable mass media or fuzz ever seizing on him. It was simple. He became his women, spending months assimilating the details of their lives, savoring every nuance, cataloguing every perfection and imperfection before deciding on the method of elimination, which was then tailored to fit the persona, indeed the very soul, of his intended. Thus the planning was the courtship, and the killing the betrothal.
The thought of courtship brought forth a huge rush of ardent imagery, all revolving around prosaic detail, the small intimacies that only a lover could appreciate.
Elaine from 1969, who had loved baroque music; who, although pretty, had spent virtually all her free time listening to Bach and Vivaldi with the windows of her garage apartment open, even in the coldest weather–wanting to share the beauty she felt with a world deadset on ignoring her. Night after night he had listened with a boom receiver from a nearby rooftop, picking up muttered declarations of loneliness beneath the music, almost weeping as their hearts fused in the strains of the Brandenburg Concerti.
Twice he walked through the apartment, collating directions that would indicate the proper way to salvage Elaine’s soul. He had decided to wait, to meditate on the end of this woman’s life, when he found underneath her sweaters an application for a computer dating service. That Elaine had succumbed to that vulgarity was the final indicator.
He spent a month studying her handwriting, and a week composing a suicide note in that hand. One cold night after Thanksgiving he climbed in through a window and opened three grain and a half Seconal capsules into the bottle of orange juice that he knew Elaine drank from every night before retiring. Later, he watched through a telescope as she took death’s communion, then gave her two hours of sleep before entering the apartment, leaving the note and turning on the gas. As a final act of love he put a Vivaldi flute concerto on the stereo to provide accompaniment to Elaine’s departure.
Blinding memories of other lovers caused his eyes to well with tears as he pictured their moments of culmination: Karen the horse lover, whose house was a virtual testament to her equine passion; Karen who rode bareback in the hills above Malibu and who died astride her strawberry roan as he ran from cover and bludgeoned the horse over the edge of a cliff; Monica, of the exquisite taste in small things, who clad the polio-riddled body she hated in the finest of silk and wool. As he continued to steal glimpses of her diary and watched her loathing of her body grow, he knew that dismemberment would be the ultimate mercy. After strangling Monica in her Marina Del Ray apartment, he rent her with a power saw and dumped her plastic encased parts into the ocean near Manhattan Beach. Police attributed the death to the “Trashbag Killer.”
He dashed tears from his eyes, feeling the memories snowball into yearning. It was time again.
He drove into Westwood Village, paid to park and went walking, deciding not to be hasty, yet also not unduly cautious. Late dusk was falling, bringing with it a corresponding drop in temperature, and the Village streets were bursting with female vitality: women everywhere; snuggling into sweaters, hugging close to storefronts as they waited to enter movie theatres, browsing through bookstores, walking around him, past him, almost through him, it seemed.
Late dusk became night, and with darkness the streets had thinned to the point where individual women stood out in all their uniqueness. It was then that he saw her, standing in front of Hunter’s Book Store, peering into the window as if in search of a vision. She was tall and slender, wearing a minimum of make-up on a soft face that tried hard to project a no-nonsense air. Late twenties–a seeker–a good-natured artificer with a sense of humor, he decided; she would enter the book store, check out the best sellers first, then the quality paperbacks, finally settling on a gothic romance or detective novel. She was lonely. She needed him.
The woman pulled her hair into a bun and slid a barette over the loose ends. She sighed and pushed open the door of the bookstore, then strode purposefully to a display table covered with books on self-improvement. Everything from Creative Divorce to Winning Through Dynamic Yoga was represented, and the woman hesitated, then grabbed a copy of Force-Field Synergistics Can Save Your Life, and carried it back to the cashier.
He was a discreet distance behind her all the way, and when she pulled out a checkbook to pay for her purchase, he memorized the name and address printed on her checks:
Linda Deverson
3583 Mentone Avenue
Culver City, Calif. 90408
He didn’t wait to hear Linda Deverson converse with the cashier. He ran out of the store and all the way to his car, seized by love and the territorial imperative: the poet wanted to see the ground of his new courtship.
Linda Deverson was many things, he thought three weeks later as he developed the latest batch of photos. Pulling them out of the solution and hanging them up, he watched her spring to life in vivid black and white. There was Linda leaving the office where she worked as a real estate salesperson; Linda scowling as she attempted to pump her own gas; Linda jogging down San Vicente Boulevard; Linda staring out of her living room window, smoking a cigarette.
He locked the shop, took the photos and went upstairs to his apartment. As always when he walked through his darkened kingdom, he felt proud. Proud that he had had the patience to save and persevere and never relent in his determination to own this place that had given him the finest moments of his youth.
When his parents died and left him homeless at fourteen, the owner of Silverlake Camera had befriended him, giving him twenty dollars a week to sweep out the store at closing every night, and allowing him to sleep on the floor and study in the customers’ bathroom. He studied hard and made the owner proud of him. The owner was a horse lover and gambler, and used the store as a bookie drop. He had always thought that his benefactor, who suffered from congestive heart disease and was familyless, would leave the store to him; but he was wrong–when he died the shop was taken over by the bookies to whom he owed money. They promptly ran it to hell–hiring nothing but incompetents, turning the quiet little shop into a low-life hangout–running football pools, booking horses, and se
lling dope.
When he realized what had been done to his sanctuary, he knew that he had to act to save it, whatever the price.
He had been making a good living as a free-lance photographer, shooting weddings and banquets and communions, and he had saved more than enough money to buy the store should it go on the market. But he knew that the scum who owned it would never sell–it was turning too great an illicit profit. This vexed him so much that he completely forgot about his fourth courtship and threw all his energy toward permanent ownership of his despoiled safe harbor.
Batteries of anonymous phone calls to the police and district attorney did no good; they would not act on the malfeasance at Silverlake Camera. Desperate now, he searched out other means.
Through surveillance, he knew that the new owner got drunk every night at a bar on Sunset. He knew that the man had to be poured into a cab at closing time, and that the cabbie who met him at the door of the bar each night at two a.m. was a compulsive horse player who was heavily in his debt. With the same diligence that marked his courtships, he went to work, first acquiring an ounce of uncut heroin, then approaching the cab driver and making him an offer. The cabbie accepted the offer, and left Los Angeles the following day.
Two nights later, he was the one behind the wheel of the cab in front of the Short Stop Bar at closing time. At precisely two a.m., the owner of Silverlake Camera staggered outside and flopped into the back seat, promptly passing out. He drove the man to Sunset and Alvarado, and stuffed a plastic bag bursting with heroin into his coat pocket. He then hauled the unconscious drunk over to Silverlake Camera and placed him in a sitting position, half in and half out the front door, the key in his right hand.
He drove to a pay phone, called the Los Angeles Police Department and told them of a burglary in progress. They took care of the rest. Three patrol cars were dispatched to Sunset and Alvarado. As the first car screeched to a halt outside Silverlake Camera, the man in the doorway came awake, got to his feet and reached inside his coat pocket. Misinterpreting his gesture, the two patrolmen shot and killed him. Silverlake Camera went into receivership the following week and he picked it up for a song.
The camera shop and the three-room apartment above it became his song, and he renovated it into a symphony; a complete aesthetic statement of purpose, one steeped in his own past and the clandestine histories of the three people who had given him the terrible catharsis that set him free to salvage female innocence.
One whole wall was devoted to his attackers–a photographic collage that updated their warped progress in life: the musclebound one a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff, his sniveling lackey a male prostitute. Their brief, violent transit with him had shaped their lives for the negative–the acquisition of money and cheap one-on-one power the only balm for their spiritual emptiness. The candid snapshots on the wall spelled it out plainly: The Birdman, stationed at curbside on a “Boy’s Town” street, hip outthrust, hungry eyes trawling for wretched lonely men to bring him a few dollars and ten minutes of selfhood; and Muscles, overweight and florid-faced, staring out the window of his patrol car at his West Hollywood constituency–the hip gays that he was sworn to protect, but who disdained his “protection” and ridiculed him as “Officer Pig.”
The opposite wall held blown-up yearbook photographs of his original beloved; her innocence preserved forever by the extraordinary clarity of his art. He had clipped the photographs on graduation day 1964, and it wasn’t until over a decade later, when he was a master photographer, that he felt confident enough to embark on a complex blow-up and reproduction process in an attempt to make them larger than life. Taped next to the blow-ups were gnarled, shriveled and twisted rose branches–twenty of them–the detritus of the floral tributes that he sent to his beloved after claiming a woman in her name.
He had set out to turn his sanctuary into a total sensory testament to the three, but for years the methodology had eluded him. He had claimed his visual access, but he wanted to hear these people breathe.
The solution came to him in a dream. Young women were tied to the spindle of a giant recording turntable. He sat at the control board of an elaborate electrical system, pushing buttons and flipping levers in a futile effort to make the women scream. Himself near the point of screaming, he had somehow willed the ability to quash his frustration by waving his arms in the simulation of flight. As his limbs treaded air, he ran out of breath and was close to suffocating when his hands touched free floating streams of magnetic tape. He grabbed the tape and used it as ballast to return to the control board. All the lights on the panel had gone off during his flight, and when he began pushing buttons the lights switched on, then short-circuited and burst with blood. He began to stuff the bloody holes with tape. The tape slithered through the apertures, onto the turntable and around the spindle, crushing the young women who were held captive there. Their screams awoke him from his dream, dissolving into his own scream when he discovered that his groin had exploded into his clenched hands.
That morning he purchased two state-of-the-art transistorized tape recorders, two condensor microphones, three hundred feet of wire, and a transistor power pack. Within a week the apartments of both Officer Pig and his original beloved had been outfitted with brilliantly concealed listening devices; and his access to their lives was complete. He would make weekly runs to change the tapes, almost exploding as he returned home and looked at the pictures on the wall and listened to their breathing compliment, learning intimacies that not even the dearest of lovers would know.
Those intimacies validated his judgment straight down the line: His first beloved took her flesh lovers with caution–they were sensitive-sounding men who loved her and capitulated to her subtle will absolutely. He could tell that she was lonely beneath her sometimes strident Feminist facade, but that was natural: she was a poet, one of growing local renown, and loneliness was the bane of all creative people. Officer Pig was, of course, corruption incarnate–an up-for-grabs cop who took bribes from the male prostitutes of Boy’s Town, allowing them to ply their wicked craft while he and his sleazy cop buddies looked the other way. The Birdman was his liaison, and hours of listening to the two old high school buddies gloat over their picayune crime scams had convinced him that the wretchedness of their lives was his revenge.
His years of listening passed, long evenings where he would touch himself in total darkness as the tapes unfurled into his headphones. He grew even bolder in his desire to be in total sync with those who had brought about his rebirth, and on the anniversary of the beginning that he rarely thought of anymore, he staged betrothals artificed as suicides to celebrate his own act of submission in a sawdust covered high school corridor. Four times; twice in Officer Pig’s veritable backyard, once in his own apartment building. The love he had felt in those moments of symbiotic reverie had made his clenched hand explosions magnify tenfold, and he knew that every gauntlet of camera art and breath and blood that he ran would only serve to make his song more inviolate.
Back in the present, he thought again of the many things Linda Deverson was, then felt his mind go blank as he tried to find a narrative line to impose on the welter of images that constituted his new love.
He sighed and locked the door of his apartment behind him, then took the photographs of Linda and taped them to the Tiffany glass window that fronted his writing desk. Sighing again, he wrote:
5–17–82
Three weeks into the courtship and as yet no access to her apartment, much less her heart–triple locks on the one door, it will take a bold gambit to get inside–I will have to risk it soon–Linda remains so elusive. Or maybe not; what has caught me so far is her sense of humor–the rueful smile that lights up her face as she pulls a cigarette out of her sweatsuit after jogging three miles down San Vicente; her firm but humorous refusals to go out with the obdurate young salesman who shares a cubicle with her at the real estate office; the way she talks to herself when she thinks no one is looking and the broad way she covers he
r mouth when a passerby catches her in the act. Two nights ago I followed her to the Force Field Synergistics seminar. That same rueful smile when she wrote the check for registration and again at the first “grouping” when they told her she couldn’t smoke. I think that Linda possess the same detachment I have noticed in writers–the desire to commune with humanity, to have a common ground or dream–yet the concurrent need to remain aloof, to hold her intrinsic truths (however universal) above those of the collective. Linda is a subtle woman. While the first grouping (ambiguous jive talk about unity and energy) was going on, I snuck back to the registration office and stole her application. I now know this about my beloved:
1. Name: Linda Holly Deverson
2. Birthdate: 4/29/52
3. Birthplace: Goleta, California
4. Education: High school 1 2 3
College 1 3 4
Advanced degrees? No.
5. How did you find out about F.F.S.?—I read your book.
6. Which four of these words best describe you?
1. Ambitious
2. Athletic
3. Aggressive
Enlightened
Tuned In
6. Befuddled
