American Tabloid
Page 56
He heard children squealing. He identified the noise as a TV kiddie show.
He followed the squeals down a hallway. A wall clock read 8:09—10:09 Dallas time.
The squeals turned into a dog food commercial. Littell pressed up to the wall and looked through the doorway.
An IV bag was feeding the man blood. He was feeding himself with a hypodermic needle. He was lying buck cadaverous naked on a crank-up hospital bed.
He missed a hip vein. He jabbed his penis and hit the plunger.
His hair touched his back. His fingernails curled over halfway to his palms.
The room smelled like urine. Bugs were floating in a bucket filled with piss.
Hughes pulled the needle out. His bed sagged under the weight of a dozen disassembled slot machines.
100
(Dallas, 11/22/63)
The dope hit home. Heshie unclenched and eked out a smile.
Pete wiped off the needle. “It’s happening about six blocks from here. Wheel yourself to the window about 12:15. You’ll be able to see the cars go by.”
Heshie coughed into a Kleenex. Blood dripped down his chin.
Pete dropped the TV gizmo in his lap. “Turn it on then. They’ll interrupt whatever they’re showing for a news bulletin.”
Heshie tried to talk. Pete fed him some water.
“Don’t nod out, Hesh. You don’t get a show like this every day.”
Crowds packed Commerce Street from curb to storefront. Homemade signs bobbed ten feet high.
Pete walked down to the club. He had to buck entrenched spectators every inch of the way.
Jack’s fans held their ground. Cops kept herding avid types out of the street and back onto the sidewalk.
Little kids rode their dads’ shoulders. A million tiny flags on sticks fluttered.
He made the club. Barb saved him a table near the bandstand. A lackluster crowd was watching the show—maybe a dozen lunchtime Juicers total.
The combo mauled an uptempo number. Barb blew him a kiss. Pete sat down and smiled his “Sing me a soft one” smile.
A roar ripped through the place—HE’S COMING HE’S COMING HE’S COMING!
The combo ripped an off-key crescendo. Joey and the boys looked half-blitzed.
Barb went straight into “Unchained Melody.” Every patron and barmaid and kitchen geek ran for the door.
The roar grew. Engine noise built off of it—limousines and full-dress Harley-Davidsons.
They left the door open. He had Barb to himself and couldn’t hear a word she was singing.
He watched her. He made up his own words. She held him with her eyes and her mouth.
The roar did a long slow fade. He braced himself for this big fucking scream.
ALSO BY JAMES ELLROY
CRIME WAVE
Los Angeles: in no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. With this collection of reportage and short fiction, Ellroy portrays his native habitat as a smog-shrouded netherworld. From his mother’s unsolved murder to the slaying of Nicole Brown Simpson, Ellroy investigates true crimes and restores humanity to their victims. He also enlists the forgotten luminaries of a vanished Hollywood in two baroquely twisted novellas of slaughter, smut-mongering, and corruption.
True Crime/Crime Fiction/0-375-70471-X
MY DARK PLACES
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in an L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost, attempting to exorcise it through crime fiction. In 1994, he went back to L.A. to find the truth about his mother—and himself. What ensues is an epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Time Magazine Best Book of the Year
Memoir/True Crime/0-679-76205-1
WHITE JAZZ
It is 1958 and the heat is on LAPD lieutenant Dave Klein. He not only works the mean streets, he helped make them that way. Murder, bribery, scams, shakedowns—he’s done it all in the line of duty. But now, with the Feds on the tail of blue corruption, Klein is hung out to dry as a bad example. So it’s pay-up time for him. He plunges into a nightmare world of greed, blood, and twisted sin—a monstrous world he created. But now the monster has turned on its creator.
Crime Fiction/0-375-72736-1
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
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New from
James Ellroy
Blood’s a Rover
The conclusion to the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy
The incendiary sequel to American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand opens in June of ’68, while the nation convulses in the reverberations of two assassinations, and closes in May of ’72, with the gathering of Nixon’s “plumbers.” Blood’s a Rover is a razor-sharp novel that takes us inside the labyrinth of corruption and lies, retribution and revenge, conspiracy and cover-up that has twisted the American dream in our time.
Available September 2009 in hardcover from Knopf
$28.95 • 656 pages • 978-0-679-40393-7
Please visit www.aaknopf.com