by James Ellroy
I tried to lighten things up. “A couple of years from now, we’ll be laughing about this. Jane will wonder at our secret rapport, but she’ll never know. I’ll be your unannounced goy son-in-law.”
Sol didn’t even hear me. “I have to go,” he said, moving toward the downhill path.
We walked down to the parking lot in silence. When we got there, I said, “Tell Jane I’ll call her after this is all over, which should be soon. Tell her we spoke on the phone. I don’t want anyone to know I’m in L.A. And of course don’t tell her what we discussed.” Sol nodded, funereally pale. “Cheer up,” I continued, “soon this thing will be nothing but a giant evil memory, like a cancer successfully removed. Try to think of it that way.”
Sol said, “I will” and forced the beginning of a weak smile, but I didn’t believe him. He got into his Cadillac and drove away, his whole spirit conveying centuries of Jewish pessimism.
I drove back to my seaside motel and checked out, taking my traveling roadshow—tape deck, bankbooks, clothes, and hardware—north to Ventura, where I found another beachfront hideaway, a slightly nicer, more modern motel room.
I called Ralston at his house in Encino and told him our plans had been changed: he was to meet me at the Bank of America branch on Van Nuys and Tujunga in North Hollywood at ten o’clock Monday morning, and was to bring a list of all his D.P.S.S. contacts. I asked him if Cathcart had been in touch with him, and he said yes, that he had told Cathcart I was spotted, drunk, asking questions in Palm Springs. Cathcart had seemed to like that. Ralston was being a good scout, so I threw him a bone of encouragement, saying that he’d be in for a nice financial surprise on Monday, then hung up.
I killed the rest of the weekend fantasizing myself as a rich man. A quarter of a million in cold cash, carefully invested, would keep me off the streets for the rest of my life. I thought of possible investments, creative ones, and came up with a great idea: a classical music store. Records and tapes from the most prosaic to the most esoteric. A music book store second to none: biographies of composers, pictorial histories and sheet music. A Hollywood Boulevard cultural oasis. Rock-and-roll morons would be politely but firmly sent away. I would manage the store and Walter would be my aide-de-camp. I would retain my P.I.’s license and the office as a tax dodge. I would search out moderately good string players to join Jane in playing chamber pieces. Jamming with musicians of similar ability would have a salutary effect on her …
I would buy a big rambling house in the hills and several friendly dogs. Jane and I would have our separate lives, each revolving around music—Jane’s cello lessons and constant practice, my taking care of the store. At night we would sit in our living room and listen to music, then go upstairs and make love. Eventually, we would have children, preferably daughters. It would be a good life. It was possible now.
I left Ventura at seven-thirty Monday morning. Nine forty-five found me stationed across the street from the B. of A. at Van Nuys and Tujunga in North Hollywood. I was nervous, but felt safe: there was nothing transpiring outside the bank that resembled a setup. Ralston was securely under my thumb.
He showed up a few minutes later. He pulled into the bank parking lot, got out, and stood nervously by his car. He was wearing sunglasses, presumably to hide his battered face. I walked across the street and joined him. He didn’t say anything, just stared at me through his dark glasses. “Good morning, Ralston,” I said.
He cocked his head. “Good morning,” he replied.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked. He nodded again. “Good,” I said. “Take off your glasses. We’re going to be making some heavy withdrawals and I don’t want you looking like a gangster about to split the country.”
He did it and I was amazed: his nose was hardly swollen, although it was purple-tinged, and his eyes were barely blackened.
“Let me outline my plan,” I said. “I want you to drive your car. We will hit every bank I have passbooks to. You will withdraw all but five hundred dollars from each account. In hundreds and fifties. Twenties are okay, too, if it’s all they have. Try to be inconspicuous. Tellers are required to report large deposits, but not withdrawals. You deposited the money, right?”
“Right.”
“Good. Then some of the tellers will remember you. I’ve got our itinerary all mapped out. We’ve got a long day ahead. Did you bring the information I asked for?”
“Yes.” Ralston fished in his coat pocket and handed me a neatly printed list of names. I winked at him and gave him a blue cardboard passbòok, pointing to the front door of the bank.
“Do your stuff, Daddy-O,” I said.
While he took care of business, I scanned the list of names, which were set up in columns, as in the manner of bookie ledgers I had seen. The names, all men’s, in one column followed by phone numbers in the other. Since several of the numbers were identical, I concluded they were office phones.
Ralston returned after a few minutes and motioned nervously for me to get into the car. Once inside, he reached into his pocket and handed me a roll of crisp new bills. I counted them, then broke out laughing: ninety-three C-notes. He started up the car. “Onward, Hot Rod,” I said.
We drove from one end of the Valley to the other, then over Coldwater Canyon to Beverly Hills and from there to the Miracle Mile, becoming richer and richer in the process. Before we left the Valley, I stopped at a supermarket and grabbed a large brown shopping bag. Soon it was jammed with cash.
While Hot Rod was making a withdrawal on Wilshire in Beverly Hills, I stashed the bag under my suitcoat and walked across the street to the Mark Cross Leather Goods Shop and bought a huge leather suitcase, paying for it with four crisp, brand-new C-notes. Back in the car, I lovingly transferred the bills from paper bag to suitcase. I felt very high, much like I did the first few times I got drunk.
Hot Rod returned, dumped $7,400 in centuries and fifties in my lap and gave me a pained look. We had been conversing very little. He had confirmed what I thought about the phone numbers—miracle of brevity, they were the actual at work phone numbers of the Welfare contacts—but all my other attempts at conversation went sullenly ignored. I had emasculated this man and he would not kiss my ass or give me the satisfaction of compounding his capitulation.
It gave me pause. I would need him to get at Cathcart. If he fingered me to old Haywood, it would be ink on my death warrant.
I checked my watch and counted the remaining bankbooks. It was 2:10 P.M. and there were nine remaining, containing a total of over $70,000. I estimated we had at least $265,000 in my suitcase. I looked at Ralston and slapped his shoulder, then tossed the passbooks into his lap. “For you, Hot Rod,” I said. “Over seventy thou. Spend it in good health.”
Ralston smiled briefly, then shook his head. “You’re out of your fucking mind to think you can get away with this,” he said. “You don’t know Cathcart. He’s out of his mind, too, but in a different way. You better blow the country now, while you’ve got a chance, because sooner or later he’ll find you. Then it’s all over.”
“No, you’ve got that wrong. Let’s reverse it. Sooner or later I’ll find him. Then it’ll be all over.”
“You’re crazy, Brown.”
“Not really. Tell me about Cathcart. I know he’s brilliant and I know he’s an iceberg. Big fucking deal. But I’m curious about one thing: with all his money, why does he continue to be a cop?”
Ralston didn’t even have to ponder this question. “Because he loves it. All the good guys versus the bad guys shit. He eats it up. He hates niggers. He’s always talking about keeping the niggers under control so they won’t revolt. He says he loves doing his part to keep the Welfare State solvent, that it’s a counterrevolutionary broadside. He says sooner or later the niggers will breed to the point that they’ll have to be dealt with violently, but in the meantime they provide a scapegoat for the poor white moron to hate, and it’s important to keep them strung out on dope, in jail, and on Welfare. It’s spooky. I don’t parti
cularly like niggers, but I don’t want to hurt them. Cathcart’s cuckoo on the subject.”
“Did he supply Henry Cruz and Reyes Sandoval with heroin as payment for killing Fat Dog?”
“How did you know about that? They’re dead.”
“I know. I killed them.”
Ralston reacted with a contorting of his whole face. “Are you going to hit Cathcart?” he asked incredulously.
“Hit Cathcart? Hit?” I answered, equally incredulous. “Who do you think I am? Marlon Brando in The Godfather? I don’t want to hit Cathcart, I want to become his buddy. I’m a nigger trainee with aspirations. All I want is a million-dollar Welfare check and a lifetime supply of soul food. Then I’ll convert to Judaism and join Hillcrest. You can fix me up with a good caddy when I learn to play golf.”
“You are crazy.”
“Shut up. Tell me more about Cathcart. What does he do for kicks?”
“He goes marlin fishing in Baja. He listens to this really serious music. He talks about the cops being the front line of containment against the niggers. That’s about it. He’s got no family. He doesn’t go for women, so far as I know.”
“Where does he live?”
“He’s got an apartment in Van Nuys. He tries to live cheap so that it looks like all he’s got is his cop’s salary.”
“How often does he go down to Baja?”
“Every few weeks, I think.”
“How does he get down there?”
“He drives. he’s got kind of a cover-up going. He owns a little house outside of Del Mar. He tells the people he works with he’s going there. He says it’s part of the picture he’s painting: he makes good dough as a Captain and he can afford a small place down there.”
“Does he spend any time at the place in Del Mar?”
“I think he stops overnight, to make it look good. Then he drives to Baja. The guys he works with know he’s a fishing fanatic. He’s got it all figured out.”
“He sure talks a lot, for a careful man.”
“He trusts me. He knows I’m scared shitless of him.”
I let the remark hang in the air, dead weight between us. Then I harpooned Ralston with my coldest hardest look. When he started to avert my gaze, I said: “Stay scared of me and you’ll survive. You’ll have your hotel, your bar, your job, your health, seventy grand plus whatever else you’ve got going. Now drive me back to my car.”
We drove silently back over Coldwater to the Valley, a fortune wedged between us on the front seat. When we pulled up to the bank in North Hollywood, I said: “Stay loose, Hot Rod. I’m blowing town for a while. I’ll call you when I get back.”
He stuck out his hand, which surprised me, and we shook. “I still think you’re crazy,” he said.
I laughed. “Sometimes I wonder myself.”
I disengaged my hand, grabbed my suitcase and Ralston took off.
I left that night, leaving my loaner car in the lot at L.A.X. and catching the 8:00 P.S.A. flight to San Francisco. I insisted on taking my Mark Cross suitcase on the plane with me. The baggage people and the stewardess on board told me they understood. It was a work of art and too beautiful to be buffeted around in the plane’s luggage compartment. If only they knew.
The coffee the stewardess brought me was good and strong, but I felt vaguely uneasy. I was unarmed for the first time in years. I had had to check my gun into a locker in the terminal, since pre-flight metal detectors would have given its presence away. But the uneasiness left as I sipped the coffee and enjoyed the lights of Los Angeles from my window seat.
When the plane landed at San Francisco International some ninety minutes later, I was on pins and needles of anticipation. It never failed: the San Francisco Rush. Just approaching my favorite adopted city was cutting through all the trauma arid fatigue of the past month. Frisco! Only this time the Frisco of my new life: sober, rich, and possessed of a mission.
Getting into a cab outside the airport felt like four martinis kicking in while listening to Beethoven’s Fifth, only this time it was Brown’s Fifth. The Fifth “B”—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Brown—all Germanic, all possessed of a mission, theirs musical, mine the destruction of evil. Suddenly I wanted a woman, and voiced this almost immediately to the cabbie. A last fling before a life of blissful fidelity. He understood. I even described what I wanted. Three hundred and fifty scoots for an all-nighter, I volunteered, plus a C-note for the person who set it up.
The cabbie, who was old and probably Greek or Italian, turned around to face me in the back seat, practically salivating. Where are you staying? he asked. I told him the Mark Hopkins. I told him to send the girl to Mr. Bruckner’s suite. He knew just the one. She would be knocking on my door within the hour. The cabbie almost fainted when I handed him a crisp C-note upon leaving.
I booked a suite for one week, at ninety-seven dollars a night, paying cash, of course. A bellboy appeared out of nowhere to grab my suitcase. I kept a close eye on him as we took the elevator up to my suite on the eleventh floor, a spacious, old-fashioned, two-room job with expensive pseudo-antique furniture and large French windows opening on an incredible view of Nob Hill.
I whipped a fifty on the bellboy and he almost fainted. I told him to let the bummer roll and buy himself a bag of good shit, that for the next few days I could afford to be generous. I also told him to send up champagne for one and a pot of coffee. After thanking me effusively, he ran out the door, still scrutinizing the bill to see if it was real.
The hooker was a disappointment. Not tall, not particularly large breasted, with rather muscular legs and sort of a cheap face. We talked for the better part of a half hour as I savored the prelude to sex. With me, part of the thrill with prostitutes is the certainty of fucking, followed by the anticipation, followed by the ultimate thrill: watching them undress. So when Danielle (obviously a business alias) did a slow, seductive strip, I was more than ready. But it was a quick, violent, disappointing coupling, tinged with guilt and a rambling mind: I thought of Jane and Cathcart throughout. When I finished, I paid her and told her to take off. She was thrilled with a three-hundred-dollar quickie and kissed me and skipped out the door.
After she left I couldn’t sleep, so I buzzed Walter in L.A. He answered on the first ring, dead drunk. I could hear the blasting away of a T.V. crime program through his slurred voice. I tried for twenty minutes to engage him in conversation, but it was no use, he wanted to talk about Jimmy Carter and the anti-matter credit card. Finally I despaired, told him I loved him, and gently hung up.
Next I called Mark Swirkal’s exchange and gave the password, then laid down on the bed and passed out.
During my sleep that night, a strange dream sequence began. It was Fat Dog and me, in a complete reversal of roles: Fat Dog, wearing a blue uniform and a gun stopping jaywalkers on Hollywood Boulevard, and me carrying golf bags that seemed to tear at my muscles through my sleep. Just before I awoke, a poem, or fragment of one, ripped through my dream:
There’s an electric calm at the
heart of the storm,
Transcendentally alive and safe and warm.
So get out now
And search the muse,
The blight is real,
You have to choose,
The choice is yours,
Your mind demurs,
It’s yours, it’s his, it’s ours, it’s hers.
Moral stands will save us yet,
The alternative is certain death.
My dream world went up in an inferno of fire and screaming: a 1957 Chevy had just exploded on the freeway. The tall spire of the Los Angeles City Hall collapsed in a heap of rubble and severed limbs flew toward me. I woke up drenched in sweat, straining to remember the words of the poem. I found a pen and some hotel stationery in the nightstand. Gradually the words came back and I wrote them down. Obviously, they were a resurgence of some long-buried, long-forgotten poem discovered during my high school poetry reading days. But who was the author? A memory as fine as m
ine should be able to recall that, too.
I stared at the words on the paper: storms, muses, and moral stands. The very history of my thirty-third summer.
I showered, put on clean clothes, and went looking for a safe place to put my new fortune. I selected a somber, formidable old B. of A. on Market and Kearney, walked in and inquired about safe deposit boxes. The branch manager was most helpful, took my payment for a five-year rental fee on three boxes, handed me my keys and left me in privacy to stuff the square metal boxes full of money. I retained ten thousand dollars for operating expenses, which left me with an incredibly stuffed wallet and billfold.
Next I went looking for the U.S. Passport Office. I found it on Montgomery Street, within walking distance. The clerk took my application and told me that indently a birth certificate was required as I.D., but since I was a licensed private investigator he could overlook it. He kept glancing furtively at my left armpit, no doubt trying to determine whether or not I was carrying a heater. He referred me to a photographer down the street and told me to bring a photograph back later today. My passport should be ready in ten days.
I made a fast circuit: photographer’s shop, quick photo session, back to the Passport office with the photo, all within one hour. Which left me at a strange juncture: alone in San Francisco with ten thousand dollars in my pocket, an empty Mark Cross suitcase, no desire to get drunk or laid and suddenly bored with my beloved city.
Not knowing what to do, I walked northwest. When I passed the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin and McAllister, I knew I had found my destination. I headed straight for the poetry section on the second floor. For the next six hours I pored through hundreds of volumes, looking for my dream poem. It was nowhere, either as a complete poem or as a fragment of one. I gave up when nervous hunger and eyestrain combined to give me a colossal headache.