by James Ellroy
“I got a lot of publicity out of my crusade, even though everyone thought I was a crank. I was almost a regular on the old Joe Pyne Show. I developed a theory—that the mastermind was only after one of the victims—and that he torched the bar to hide his motive. I checked out the backgrounds of all the victims—except for my brother Tony, they were dull. Working stiffs, juiceheads, that type. The Gaffany dame was a semipro b-girl. I checked out Edwards, the owner of the joint—a dope fiend. I checked him out real good. Nothing on any of them.
“For a while I hung out with a guy who wrote for True Detective magazine. He found out that the Utopia had a bookie wire going—small-time. So I checked out some bookies who operated in the Normandie-Slauson area. They told me, yeah, there was a wire going, but it was amateur. They said Edwards ran it. So I checked out Edwards again. Nothing but a smacked-back junkie, all fucked-up on stuff. I got a lead on a big spade who used to make collections and payoffs—and he turned out to be doing five to life in Quentin for armed robbery with violence. Another dead end.
“Anyway, gradually I got into some other gigs—heavy-weight scenes, the Chicano Movement, and this drug recovery program I work at—and I put my investigation on the back burner. I mean my hermano, Tony, was a righteous dude; I never loved anybody the way I loved him and I wanted to kill the puto who masterminded the torch, but I got my own life to think about, right? I’m twenty-seven years old. No fucking spring chicken. So anyway, I got involved in some other scenes and didn’t think about revenging Tony so much.
“Then I got this phone call. What’s the word? Anonymous. This dude asks me if I’m the Omar Gonzalez who used to be on the Joe Pyne Show. I say yes. Then he asks me if I’m still interested in the Utopia case. I say yes. Then he said ‘I got some information.’ And he tells me to get a pencil. So I do. He said: ‘Richard Ralston, 8173 Hildebrand Street, in Encino. He was one of the bookies at the Utopia around the time of the bombing. Check out his house, maybe you’ll find something to lead you to the fourth man.’ Then he hangs up. Man, did that call shake me up!
“So I burglarize this guy Ralston’s pad. At first, I find absolutely nothing suspicious. A bunch of old baseball souvenirs, photographs, T.V. set, records. A bag of weed. Nothing hot. Then I find this phone wall. I push it open and find these two boxes. I figure they got to be hot, so I rip them off. When I get home I check them out. Only the bookie ledgers make sense. The blank checks and the fuck pictures don’t mean nothing. So I lock the boxes up in my trunk. Then I start checking this guy Ralston out—I tail him to work one day. He works at this fancy golf club. I start thinking, holy shit, one of the bombers described the fourth man as wearing one of those golf shirts with the alligator on it! Maybe he plays golf at this club.
“I was about to check it out when I got shot. I was in Echo Park one night and I had this feeling I was being followed. I was driving to a friend’s place. All of a sudden this car pulls up. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Three of the shots missed, but one grazed my shoulder. Somehow I knew it was coming, so I ducked and punched the gas. I lost them. I hid out at a friend’s place. He drove my car to the station. I figured it would be safe there. But he forgot to take the boxes out of the trunk, like I told him to. Pinchey puto! The puto wouldn’t go back for them! So I laid up at another friend’s crib. My shoulder healed up good. I figured it was some punks I kicked out of the recovery house who shot at me, and that it was safe to come out of hiding, that they were probably fucked up on stuff somewhere.
“Then I went back to my apartment. It was destroyed. I went to get my car and the attendant tells me about this crazy repo-man who broke into my trunk. Then he gave me your card. I thought it was a trap. Somebody wants me dead. Maybe this cabron Ralston found out I’m onto him. That’s why I broke into your place, to check you out. Now you talk, repo-man.”
My mind was racing, divided between trying to place Ralston in the context of this new offshoot of the case and developing a cover story to keep Omar Gonzalez at bay while I nabbed Fat Dog. I gave Omar my most sincere look and lied big. Fuck him. He could read about the capture of his brother’s killer in the papers.
“You were getting close, Omar,” I said. “The fourth man is a member at Hillcrest. He had it in for Wilson Edwards, the owner of the Utopia. His wife ran away with Edwards. He masterminded the killing of six people for nothing. Edwards wasn’t even at the bar that night. Ralston is blackmailing this guy. I’ve got an informant up near Santa Barbara who’s got some evidence for me. Some tapes. I’m going there tonight to pick them up. Want to come along?”
Omar thought about it. He was eyeing me suspiciously. “How did you get into this thing, anyway?” he asked.
“Good question. A car dealer I worked for hired me to repo a car off a woman named Sanders. She’s the fourth man’s ex-wife. When I came around to get the car, she invited me into the house to talk. She asked me if I had heard of the Club Utopia firebomb-ing. I said yes. Then she told me how her ex-husband planned the whole thing. I believed her. This guy I’m going to see tonight was in on the blackmail scheme with Ralston.” I could tell that he believed me. It was typical: members of minorities consider repossessors to be the scum of the earth—motivated by the basest of desires. The repo angle had convinced Gonzalez that I was telling the truth. He was no dummy, but he was easily manipulated through his prejudices.
“All right,” he said, “it’s crazy, but I believe you. All the fucking work I’ve done looking for this guy and you stumble onto him accidentally. Where do we go? Santa Barbara?”
“Right. South of there. Near Carpenteria, on the beach. There’s a deserted motel where we’re going to make the trade. He wants a thousand dollars, but he’s not getting it. I’m ripping him off. You can come along as back up. We leave now. What do you say?”
“I say you’re a nice guy. Repo ripoff in the night. You do much work in the Barrio?”
“Yeah. Taco wagons are my specialty. Also foxy Chicanas. Every time I do a repo in Hollenbeck, I stop for a jumbo burrito and a piece of Mexican tail. It’s charming talking to you, Omar, you’re a lovely conversationalist, but our rapport is getting a little strained. So let’s take care of business.”
I tucked my .38 into my waistband and got my newly purchased shotgun and tape recorder from the bedroom and threw four days worth of clean shirts and pants into a suitcase. I handed it to Omar. He didn’t say anything about it, his eyes were riveted to the shotgun. He was impressed. I was speaking his language now. As we walked out the door, he didn’t notice me jam a blackjack and a length of nylon cord into my windbreaker.
We drove north on 101. The suitcase, shotgun, and tape machine were nestled in the trunk, the other goodies on my person. Omar was quiet. I had been expecting a lot of militant jive talk and needling, but he was too sensitive for that; he was lost in contemplation, thinking he was approaching the culmination of a ten-year crusade. He was, but I would be the reaper of all glories to be had.
The Fourth of July weekend get-out-of-town traffic was heavy and we slowed to a crawl nearing Oxnard and Ventura. After that, it was smooth sailing and twenty minutes later I pulled off the highway near the Casitas Reservoir and took surface streets down to the long stretch of beach just south of Carpinteria. I was sure the Beach View Motel would still be there and would still be deserted. Walter and I had discovered the Beach View about five years ago. We were driving back from San Francisco, drunk, when a torrential rainstorm hit. Walter wanted to press on and catch The War of the Worlds on the Late Show, but I insisted we park on the beach and sleep it off. We found a beach access road, expecting to find a parking lot at the end of it, but we were wrong; what we found was the Beach View Motel, a squat, ugly, lime-green structure on a particularly barren stretch of oceanfront sand obscured from the highway. We spent the night there drinking and bullshitting. The dump had been born to lose and born for losers; but it would serve my purpose tonight.
The night was pitch black and it took me a while to find the sandy blacktop that
led down to our destination. When I did locate it, Omar came out of his trance and started jabbering: “Are we here, man? Is this it?”
“This is it,” I said, “we’re a little early. The guy said ten-thirty. It’s just after ten now. But that’s good. I want to make sure we see him coming, in case he brought friends.” Omar nodded staunchly. He was a courageous vato, but out of his league. To my chagrin, I was beginning to like him.
As we pulled up in front of the motel, my headlights caught litter-covered pavement, open doors, broken windows, and a profusion of empty beer cans, I killed the engine and said, “Take this flashlight and look around. I’ve got to get something out of the trunk.”
I handed Omar the large five-cell, got out of the car, and walked around to open the trunk. Omar left the car and began flashing his light into the broken windows and battered doors. I counted to twenty, then walked over to him, and sapped him from behind with a blackjack. He crumpled in a heap, dropping the flashlight. I checked his pulse, which was steady, then bound his wrists and ankles with the nylon cord.
I dragged him into the room farthest from the access road and laid him down on a smelly sand-covered mattress. I wrapped my hand in my windbreaker and punched out the side and front windows. Omar would have plenty of air. Next I located half a dozen good-sized rocks and laid them outside of Omar’s room. I went inside and checked his pulse again. It was still steady. I closed the door on Omar and barricaded it with my rock collection. Pleasant dreams, Omar. In the morning, I would call the Carpinteria fuzz and clue them into the overnight guest at the Beach View.
I pulled the car around, almost getting stuck in the sand, and drove away, the sea making eerie noises in the background. I took 101 southbound to its juncture with Interstate 5 near Nixon’s pad at San Clemente. When I pulled into San Diego just after midnight I heard firecrackers going off all over the city. Happy birthday, America.
III
Lower California
The following morning, rested yet apprehensive, I crossed the border.
Tijuana is situated on a plain nestled among shallow brown foothills. Even with the ocean just a few miles to the north it swelters, and the sun reflecting off the iron roofs of the hundreds of shacks that cover those foothills gave my entrance to Mexico the surreal look of a bad hangover morning.
Coming into T. J. proper, past scores of giant liquor stores, auto upholstery dumps, and body shops, I ran through my itinerary: low-life bars, betting palaces, and the dog track. If they didn’t pan out, I would try to run down a lead from the porno photos I had in my trunk: they were a more than coincidental link between Fat Dog and Richard Ralston.
Tijuana was teeming with activity as I turned onto Revalucion, its main drag. It was hot and noisy, the streets jammed with cars and the sidewalks packed with tourists and Mexican Nationals bartering in front of the profusion of curio stores that lined both sides of the street.
T.J. had changed since my first visit in 1962. I was still in high school then and had driven down with a group of buddies, bent on getting laid, getting drunk, and viewing the famous mule act. Except for our getting drunk, it was not to be. We did, however, get rolled by a Mexican tough who promised to fix us up with his sister, for free, because we were “cool dudes.” My most overpowering impression of T.J. then was the poverty. There were endless streams of children hawking cheap blankets and religious medals by throwing them up at your face and screaming at you, hands outstretched, bodies planted firmly in front of you to block your progress, and hungry dogs, and comatose old beggars, too near starvation to give you a hard time. The poverty was still here—Tijuana eighteen years later was redolent of poverty—but it was poverty with hustle. The child beggars looked healthier and less desperate, and the streets looked like they were swept at least once a week.
I decided not to waste time and inquired after what used to be the heart of T.J. low-life, the Chicago Club. The on-leave marine I talked to leered at me and gave me directions. I walked south of Revalucion, where the sidewalks were slightly less crowded. It was broiling now and my shirt, which I wore out to conceal my gun, was soaked and stuck to my back. After about four blocks I hit the real poverty. Victim land. Streets populated by people—Mexican and turista—with the predator look. A skinny white youth brushed by me. “Reds, whites, three dollars a roll,” he said. I told him to fuck off.
I hit my first in a long series of cheap bars. They were interchangeable; the people looked and smelled the same, the same fat Mexican girls danced nude on stage to bored catcalls. I described Fat Dog in detail to over fifty people, slipping out over two hundred dollars to bilingual Mexicans to translate for me. Nothing. Just a massive headache from over four hours of maudlin, saccharine Mexican music.
I walked back to Revalucion, deciding to hit a few nicer-looking joints before trying the dog track. I walked through three off-track betting palaces on my way over. No Fat Dog and no one willing to take time off from placing bets to talk to me.
I was getting hungry and decided to chance the food in the first halfway decent-looking juke joint I came to, which was La Carabelle. I knew right off the bat that this was a class place by T.J. standards: it was clean, the bar was well-stocked, the patrons looked a cut above the ones I had been questioning and the girls who danced on stage were pretty and slender and wore bikinis. I took a table near the edge of the dance runway. A waiter materialized and I ordered huevos rancheros and coffee.
The table adjoining mine was occupied by outsized, red-faced American men doing some hard drinking. From their short hair and the peremptory way they treated their waiter, I judged them to be Marine Corps brass, not likely to have information on my quarry. Still, they were talking loudly and when their conversation turned to golf, I listened.
“I was fucking surprised,” one of them said, “a shit-ass town like this having a championship course. Par seventy-two! Greens like lightning. I was lucky to get away with an eighty-seven! Jesus, all those years at Pendleton and I didn’t even know it existed!”
I leaned over and asked him where this golf course bonanza was.
The man started to get annoyed, then smiled broadly. His companions joined him and they all started jabbering drunkenly: “T.J. Country Club,” “Are you from Pendleton, fella?” “Just south of town,” “Near the dog track, greatest fucking Margaritas this side of La Paz,” “Watch out for that trap on the fourth hole, it …”
I didn’t wait for them to finish. I jammed out of the bar and maneuvered my way through the crowds on Revalucion to the lot where my car was parked. I couldn’t believe it: the Tijuana Country Club? But the parking attendant told me it was true and gave me specific instructions on how to get there.
I drove south to the edge of town. The T.J. Country Club course was hard to miss: it was a giant patch of light green in an otherwise brown landscape. Signs directed me to the clubhouse, which looked like a miniature of the Alamo, with a poorly printed, peeling sign announcing “Club Social Y Deportivo De Tijuana.”
I pushed my way through knots of golfers drinking beer and hoisting golf bags, looking for someone in charge. The room was dingy, the walls the same sandblasted adobe as outside. And the golfers looked crazed, not unlike some junkies I had seen, lining up in queues to buy golf provisions, pushing and shoving in their anxiousness to get to the first hole. It would be futile to attempt questioning here. I followed a group of prosperous-looking Mexicans outside, where the course opened up before me like a breath of clean air: rolling, strangely soft-looking green hills only slightly tainted by the omnipresent Tijuana brownness. The only thing to ruin it were the golf maniacs, dozens of them, milling around on the large patio, waiting to load their bags onto the scores of dilapidated golf carts parked in a blacktop loading area adjacent to the first tee. The whole scene had the air of an ancient ritual, completely American, prosaic and profound at the same time.
I walked over to a Mexican youth pulling beer bottles out of a large plastic trash can and handing them to golfers who gr
abbed them hungrily. When the trash can was empty, he took it back to a service shed to reload. I followed. “Habla Ingles?” I said, as he dipped his hands into a large ice machine.
“Yeah, I speak English,” he replied, with a purely American-Chicano accent, “but it won’t do you no good. You get one beer in the package deal and that’s it. Two Margaritas and a golf cart. Todos. Comprende?”
“I dig you. What I’m looking for is the caddy master.”
He stopped and stared at me as if I were an idiot child. “Caddy master? Are you jiving me? This dump don’t have no caddies. Only class clubs have caddies.”
“I should have known. Listen, I’m looking for a caddy. I know he’s somewhere near Tijuana. He’s hard to miss: an Anglo, about forty, short, sunburned, and very fat. He always wears dirty golf clothes. Have you seen him?”
“I ain’t seen him. But we get lots of golf course bums around here. Ask Ernie in the pro shop.” He pointed to a white one-man cubicle, where a fat Chicano was handing out golf balls. I walked over and got in line. All the golfers seemed to be high on some new drug I knew nothing about, chattering in English and Spanish about incomprehensible matters. I felt as out of place as Beethoven at a rock concert.
The tournament, or whatever it was, was starting and interest shifted to the first tee. The beer line had petered out and the golf ball line I was in had ended. Ernie gave me a harsh look that softened somewhat when he saw the twenty dollar bill I waved flag-like in front of him. “I don’t want golf balls, I want information,” I said, as he nodded, his eyes fixed on my money. I described Fat Dog.