The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  I pointed to Sid's office; Howard followed. We got there just as Gretchen Rae Shoftel/Glenda Jensen and Sid Weinberg went into a big open-mouthed clinch. I said, "I'll lean on Sid, boss. Kosher is kosher. He'll listen to reason. Trust me."

  Inside of six seconds I saw the fourth-richest man in America go from heartsick puppy dog to hard-case robber baron and back at least a dozen times. Finally he jammed his hands in his pockets, fished out a wad of C-notes, and handed them to me. He said, "Find me another one just like her," and walked back to his limo.

  I worked the door for the next few hours, chasing crashers and autograph hounds away, watching Gretchen/Glenda and Sid Weinberg work the crowd, instant velvet for the girl, youth recaptured for the sad old man. Gretchy laughed, and I could tell she did it to hold back tears; when she squeezed Sid's hand I knew she didn't know who it belonged to. I kept wishing I could be there when her tears broke for real, when she became a real little girl for a while, before going back to being a stock maven and a whore. Mickey showed up just as the movie was starting. Davey Goldman told me he was pissed: Mo Hornbeck got himself bumped off by a Kraut trigger from Milwaukee who later nosedived out a window; the Mariposa Street hideout had been burglarized, and Lavonne Cohen was back from Israel three days early and henpecking the shit out of the Mick. I barely heard the words. Gretchy and Sid were cooing at each other by the cold cuts table—and Mickey was headed straight toward them.

  I couldn't hear their words, but I could read the three faces. Mickey was taken aback, but paid gracious respect to his beaming host; Gretch was twitching with the aftershocks of her old man's death. L.A.'s number one hoodlum bowed away, walked up to me, and flicked my necktie in my face. "All you get is a grand, you hump. You shoulda found her quicker."

  So it worked out. Nobody made me for snuffing the Milwaukee shooter; Gretchy walked on the Steinkamp killing and her complicity in Voyteck Kirnipaski's demise—the chemical-sizzled stiffs, of course, were never discovered. Mo Hornbeck got a plot at Mount Sinai Cemetery, and Davey Goldman and I stuffed Janet into the casket with him at the mortuary—I gave the rabbi a hot tip on the trotters, and he left the room to call his bookie. I paid off Leotis Dineen and promptly went back into hock with him; Mickey took up with a stripper named Audrey Anders; Howard made a bundle off airplane parts for the Korean War and cavorted with the dozen or so Gretchen Rae Shoftel look-alikes I found him. Gretchy and Sid Weinberg fell in love, which just about broke the poor pilot-mogul's heart.

  Gretchen Rae and Sid.

  She did her light dusting—and must have thrown him a lot on the side. She also became Sid's personal investment banker, and made him a giant bundle, of which she took a substantial percentage cut, invested it in slum property, and watched it grow, grow, grow. Slumlord Gretch also starred in the only Sid Weinberg vehicle ever to lose money, a tearjerker called Glenda about a movie producer who falls in love with a starlet who disappears off the face of the earth. The critical consensus was that Gretchen Rae Shoftel was a lousy actress, but had great lungs. Howard Hughes was rumored to have seen the movie over a hundred times.

  In 1950 I got involved in a grand jury investigation that went bad in an enormous way, and I ended up taking it on the road permanently, Mr. Anonymous in a thousand small towns. Mickey Cohen did a couple of fed jolts for income tax evasion, got paroled as an old man, and settled back into L.A. as a much-appreciated local character, a reminder of the colorful old days. Howard Hughes ultimately went squirrelshit with drugs and religion, and a biography that I read said that he carried a torch for a blond whore straight off into the deep end. He'd spend hours at the Bel Air Hotel looking at her picture, playing a torchy rendition of "Since I Don't Have You" over and over. I know better: it was probably scads of different pictures, lung shots all, the music a lament for a time when love came cheap. Gretchy was special to him, though. I still believe that.

  I miss Howard and Mickey, and writing this story about them has only made it worse. It's tough being a dangerous old man by yourself—you've got nothing but memories and no one with the balls to understand them.

  TEXAS CITY, 1947

  1991: James Lee Burke

  JAMES LEE BURKE (1936–) was born in Houston but grew up on the Texas-Louisiana coast, where so much of his fiction is based. After attending the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he received his BA and MA from the University of Missouri at Columbia. After three critically praised mainstream novels, his fourth received more than a hundred rejections over more than a decade, until the University of Louisiana Press published The Lost Get-Back Boogie in 1986; it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

  His first crime novel, The Neon Rain (1987), featured David Robicheaux, a Vietnam veteran and homicide detective in the New Orleans Police Department. He has been described by his creator as "Everyman from the morality plays of the Renaissance. He tries to give voice to those who have none." After stepping on too many toes in that first book, Robicheaux leaves to work on the police force in New Iberia Parish. Always present is a sidekick, Clete Purcel, also a former NOPD officer, who is now a private eye. The second novel in the series, Heaven's Prisoners (1988), was filmed in 1996, starring Eric Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Lynch, and Teri Hatcher. The third book, Black Cherry Blues (1989), won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best novel of the year. Burke won a second Edgar for Cimarron Rose (1997), which introduced Billy Bob Holland, a Texas Ranger turned lawyer in Missoula, Montana. MWA named Burke a Grand Master for lifetime achievement in 2009.

  "Texas City, 1947," often described as Burke's finest short work of fiction, is a dark coming-of-age story that was first published in the Southern Review in 1991. It's first book appearance was in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best (1992). It was later collected in the author's Jesus Out to Sea (2007).

  ***

  RIGHT AFTER World War II everybody in southern Louisiana thought he was going to get rich in the oil business. My father convinced himself that all his marginal jobs in the oil fields would one day give him the capital to become an independent wildcatter, perhaps even a legendary figure like Houston's Glenn McCarthy, and he would successfully hammer together a drilling operation out of wooden towers and rusted junk, punch through the top of a geological dome, and blow salt water, sand, chains, pipe casing, and oil into the next parish.

  So he worked on as a roughneck on drilling rigs and as a jug-hustler with a seismograph outfit, then began contracting to build board roads in the marsh for the Texaco company. By mid-1946, he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya Basin and over in East Texas. But that was also the year that I developed rheumatic fever and he drove my mother off and brought Mattie home to live with us.

  I remember the terrible fight they had the day she left. My mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on that burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink dress with the white piping on the collar and pockets, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard and shucking off their feathers in a big iron cauldron of scalding water. My father came home later than he should have, parked his pickup truck by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded-up shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi's. He was a dark Cajun, and his shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with black hair. He wore cowboy boots, a red sweat handkerchief tied around his neck, and a rakish straw hat that had an imitation snakeskin band around the crown.

  Headless chickens were flopping all over the grass, and my mother's forearms were covered with wet chicken feathers. "I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint," she said, without looking up from where she sat with her knees apart on a wood chair in front of the steaming cauldron.

  "I ain't been with nobody," he said, "except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh."

  "You said you'd leave her alone."

  "You children go inside," my father said.

  "That gonna make your conscience right
cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise."

  "I ain't seen her."

  "You son of a bitch, I smell her on you," my mother said, and she swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across my father's chest and Levi's.

  "You ain't gonna act like that in front of my children, you," he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. "Y'all get inside. You ain't got no business listening to this. This is between me and her."

  My two older brothers, Weldon and Lyle, were used to our parents' quarrels, and they went inside sullenly and let the back screen slam behind them. But my little sister, Drew, whom my mother nicknamed Little Britches, stood mute and fearful and alone under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.

  "Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We're gonna play with the Monopoly game," I said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.

  Then I saw my father's large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of my mother's face, heard the sound of her weeping, as I tried to step into Drew's line of vision and hold her and her cat against my body, hold the three of us tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of my mother's weeping.

  Three hours later, her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. I dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble rose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface, her drowned breath stuck against my face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.

  That fall I began to feel sick all the time, as though a gray cloud of mosquitoes were feeding at my heart. During recess at school I didn't play with the other children and instead hung about on the edges of the dusty playground or, when Brother Daniel wasn't looking, slipped around the side of the old red-brick cathedral and sat by myself on a stone bench in a bamboo-enclosed, oak-shaded garden where a statue of Mary rested in a grotto and camellia petals floated in a big goldfish pond. Sometimes Sister Roberta was there saying her rosary.

  She was built like a fire hydrant. Were it not for the additional size that the swirl of her black habit and the wings of her veil gave her, she would not have been much larger than the students in her fifth-grade class. She didn't yell at us or hit our knuckles with rulers like the other nuns did, and in fact she always called us "little people" rather than children. But sometimes her round face would flare with anger below her white, starched wimple at issues which to us, in our small parochial world, seemed of little importance. She told our class once that criminals and corrupt local politicians were responsible for the slot and racehorse machines that were in every drugstore, bar, and hotel lobby in New Iberia, and another time she flung an apple core at a carload of teenagers who were baiting the Negro janitor out by the school incinerator.

  She heard my feet on the dead oak leaves when I walked through the opening in the bamboo into the garden. She was seated on the stone bench, her back absolutely erect, the scarlet beads of her rosary stretched across the back of her pale hand like drops of blood. She stopped her prayer and turned her head toward me. Fine white hair grew on her upper lip.

  "Do you feel sick again, Billy Bob?" she asked.

  "Yes, Sister."

  "Come here."

  "What?"

  "I said come here." Her hand reached out and held my forehead. Then she wiped the moisture off her palm with her fingers. "Have you been playing or running?"

  "No, Sister."

  "Has your father taken you to a doctor?"

  I didn't answer.

  "Look at me and answer my question," she said.

  "He don't—he doesn't have money right now. He says it's because I had the flu. He boiled some honey and onions for me to eat. It made me feel better. It's true, Sister."

  "I need to talk to your father."

  She saw me swallow.

  "Would he mind my calling him?" she asked.

  "He's not home now. He works all the time."

  "Will he be home tonight?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "Who takes care of you at night when he's not home?"

  "A lady, a friend of his."

  "I see. Come back to the classroom with me. It's too windy out here for you," she said.

  "Sister, you don't need to call, do you? I feel OK now. My father's got a lot on his mind now. He works real hard."

  "What's wrong in your house, Billy Bob?"

  "Nothing. I promise, Sister." I tried to smile. I could taste bile in my throat.

  "Don't lie."

  "I'm not. I promise I'm not."

  "Yes, I can see that clearly. Come with me."

  The rest of the recess period she and I sharpened crayons in the empty room with tiny pencil sharpeners, stringing long curlicues of colored wax into the wastebasket. She was as silent and as seemingly self-absorbed as a statue. Just before the bell rang she walked down to the convent and came back with a tube of toothpaste.

  "Your breath is bad. Go down to the lavatory and wash your mouth out with this," she said.

  Mattie wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room she carried an ashtray with her into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn't close the bathroom door all the way when she bathed, and once I saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines from which dropped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on mine; I thought she was about to reprimand me for staring at her, but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at me with a vacuous indifference that made me feel obscene.

  If my father was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed our supper (sometimes meat on Friday, the fear in our eyes not worthy of her recognition), put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with dry-cleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. I don't know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told me that Mattie used to work in Broussard's Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.

  Then one morning when my father was in Morgan City, a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on our grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her, he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, "You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain't given you no wedding ring, has he? You don't buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence."

  "I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about," she said.

  He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door. "It's always trick, trade, or travel, darlin'," he said. "Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie."

  "Are you calling me a nigra?" she said quietly.

  "No, I'm calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain't calling you nothing. I ain't got to, cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back, put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain't nobody else do that for you, huh?"

  When she came back into the house, she made us take all the dishes out of the cabi
nets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.

  It was the following Friday that Sister Roberta called. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn't bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley's voice, she had to almost shout into the receiver.

  "Mr. Sonnier is not here," she said. "Mr. Sonnier is away on business in Texas City ... No, ma'am, I'm not the housekeeper. I'm a friend of the family who is caring for these children ... There's nothing wrong with that boy that I can see ... Are you calling to tell me that there's something wrong, that I'm doing something wrong? What is it that I'm doing wrong? I would like to know that. What is your name?"

  I stood transfixed with terror in the hall as she bent angrily into the mouthpiece and her knuckles ridged on the receiver. A storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the air smelled of ozone, and the southern horizon was black with thunderclouds that pulsated with white veins of lightning. I heard the wind ripping through the trees in the yard and pecans rattling down on the gallery roof like grapeshot.

  When Mattie hung up the phone, the skin of her face was stretched as tight as a lampshade and one liquid eye was narrowed at me like someone aiming down a rifle barrel.

  The next week, when I was cutting through the neighbor's sugarcane field on the way home from school, my heart started to race for no reason, my spit tasted like pecans, and my face filmed with perspiration even though the wind was cool through the stalks of cane; then I saw the oaks and cypress trees along Bayou Teche tilt at an angle, and I dropped my books and fell forward in the dirt as though someone had wrapped a chain around my chest and snapped my breastbone.