by James Ellroy
A gourmet meal in Chinatown and a walk back to the hotel in the brisk night air put me in better spirits. But with sleep came more nightmares—without poetry this time, but just as vividly violent: monsters wielding golf clubs rising out of sand traps to attack me. On waking the next morning I hoped for a failure of memory, for if the dreams continued after the killing of Cathcart, I would surely go insane.
I had three things left to accomplish in San Francisco: scoring some dope, preferably heroin, acquiring a handgun, illegally, and formulating a plan for eliminating Cathcart. I started by buying some used counter-culture garb at a second-hand store in the Haight-Ashbury. Bell-bottom pants, sandals, a tank top bearing the likeness of a rock-and-roller named Neil Young, and an Army fatigue jacket. When I changed into my outfit back at the hotel, I knew it would never work. It was impossible. I had that outsized, moustached, arrogant-elitist look indigenous only to cops. Nobody on the street would sell me a firecracker, let alone a large quantity of heroin.
I approached the bellboy I had tipped so generously. The best he could come up with was cocaine or quaaludes. I decided to forego second-class drugs and to try instead to cop some smack in L.A., where I knew the territory and could probably shake down some connections.
Late in the afternoon I called Ralston at Hillcrest. The switchboard girl put me through to him at the first tee. When he said, “First tee, may I help you?” his voice sounded strained.
“This is Brown,” I said. “Are you busy?”
“Not really,” he replied.
“Good. How’s our buddy? Have you talked to him?”
“Yeah, today in fact. He thinks you’re in Mexico. He got word somehow that Cruz and Sandoval are dead. He thinks you did the job. He’s pissed and maybe even scared. He’s going down there himself this weekend to look for you.” It was almost too good to be true, but I believed him. My mind ran around in circles for long moments. Finally, Ralston broke in: “Brown? Are you still there?”
“Yeah. Look, when do you think he’ll split for Baja?”
“I don’t know. He usually leaves Friday nights, after he gets off duty. But maybe it’s different this time, because the trip is strictly business. Why?”
“Do you know his address in Del Mar?”
“No, I’ve never been down there. And I won’t ask him, in case you’re thinking of asking me to. I’m not fucking with you, I just don’t want to do anything suspicious. I’ve been staying away from him. When he called me today he said he wanted to see me, but I begged off. If he sees I’ve been beat up, he’ll know something’s wrong.”
“Listen, Daddy-O, don’t mess with the big fella. Are you afraid for your ass, Hot Rod?”
“Yeah. I am. Because I’m sane. Are you?”
“Yeah, but it’s almost over. I’ll call you when it is.”
Before he hung up, Ralston told me to be careful at least half a dozen times. In a cursory way I took each admonition to heart, but the wheels in my brain were already grinding out a plan.
I enlisted my bellboy buddy and we made a little recording on tape. My plan was starting to jell. I took a 7:15 flight from San Francisco International to San Diego Airport and rented a car from the Hertz office at the terminal.
The rest was simple. I called Del Mar Information and asked for the address and phone number of Haywood Cathcart. It took all of three seconds for them to give it to me: 8169 Camino De La Costa, 651–8291. Cathcart’s policeman-criminal mentality and sense of indentcy had dictated a phone listing (“I’m a police officer of high rank, and a solid American citizen. What have I got to hide?”).
I drove up the Coast Highway to Del Mar. Del Mar is a rich town, built upwards on rolling hills from the sea, but it does have a middle-class beachfront enclave and that’s where I found 8169 Camino De La Costa. It was so perfect that I almost collapsed in gratitude. Maybe there was a God.
A twisting road led me down to a giant parking lot. I parked and walked along the sand, checking out the house numbers. The houses, large bungalows really, were identical: white wood frame, obviously built as part of a development fifty or sixty years ago, and were spaced a solid fifty yards apart, separated by sand drifts. I found 8169. It was the most immaculately kept place on the beach front. I walked around the back. There was a chain-linked barbed-wire fence around a small back yard of some kind of synthetic grass. Old Haywood. Keep the property value up, and the niggers out. Through the fence I could see that the back door entered into some kind of service porch. It was a good setup and my mind clicked methodically with embellishments on my plan.
I drove back to San Diego and spent the night in a Hyatt motel. The next morning, Thursday, I returned the car to the airport and flew to L.A., where my other loaner was waiting in the parking lot.
It took me all day to accomplish what I had to, but I was satisfied with the results. A shakedown at gunpoint of Larry Willis and two black drag queens had provided me with three ounces of heroin, a small bag of coke, and some assorted uppers and downers. A seven-hundred-fifty-dollar payoff to an old informant from my Wilshire Patrol days had got me a cold Iver-Johnson .38 revolver with a silencer.
After I had everything I needed, I started to get scared: there was nothing left to do but the act itself.
I dropped off the overdue loan car at the agency. They were pissed and about to call the fuzz. I gladly paid the extra money they wanted, took a cab to L.A.X. and hopped a plane for San Diego.
Once ensconced in a motel in nearby Escondido, I started to get scared for real. I wanted to drink, but didn’t dare. If I did I would die. Throughout the night I tried to sleep and comforted myself with the poem I seemed to have composed myself:
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.
It helped. I slept. But the nightmares came again, all run together: Fat Dog in his patrolman’s uniform, exploding Chevys, golf course monsters. I woke up finally at two in the afternoon of the Big Day. I had been asleep for nine hours.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to calm the screaming in my mind. The poem helped some more. Gradually, tenuously, a semblance of electric calm emerged, and I ran with it.
The practicalities of my prelude to assassination came first, and taking care of them intensified my calm. I ditched the loaner car, bought a pair of surgical-thin rubber gloves at a hardware store, and changed into a T.V. repair jumpsuit I had bought on impulse at the thrift store in San Francisco. I took a commuter bus into Del Mar, where I killed time walking along the streets trying not to think. But at this I failed. I thought, frantically searching out my plan for hidden flaws and pumping myself up with logic. I was in danger of losing my electric calm.
Besides the basic assumption that Cathcart would spend the night at his house, I was counting on one other thing: that his intelligence, monomania and justified paranoia would preclude the keeping of any records detailing his malfeasance over the last ten years. Ralston and Kupferman were his executives, bonded to him by extortion and fear. Solly signed the documents, Hot Rod took care of his books. But now they were walking a duplici-tous tightrope of “which Cathcart knew nothing. They were my allies, victims of my own benign extortion.
Around dark I got rid of my jumpsuit, which made me feel better. It had been good cover—I looked the part of an outsized T.V. repairman—but the clothes I was wearing underneath were better for night work: Levi cords, desert boots, and a cotton sportshirt with the tail out. My .38 was well hidden. The battery operated tape machine I was carrying looked indent. I was white and all right.
I found a pay pho
ne near the beach and delivered the password to Mark Swirkal’s service. At eight o’clock precisely, heart thumping, skidding, and lurching, I walked to my destiny. There was a cool breeze and a very dark sky that outlined the stars brilliantly. I made my way down to the beachfront parking lot. There was a Landcruiser parked there, identical to the one I had seen outside Cathcart’s pad in Baja. I squatted down, lit a match, and examined the license plate. It was Cathcart’s.
I walked along the sand, carefully counting the number of houses from the parking lot. Cathcart’s was the sixth, and his lights were on. I hunkered down and walked around to his back yard, then hopped the fence. I tore my shirt and cut my hands on the barbed-wire, but my tension overrode the pain.
There was absolute silence in the little yard. I got out my gun and switched off the safety. I counted to one hundred, then placed the tape deck on the ground in the middle of the yard and pushed the “play” button. During the six second pause before the action started I ducked up against the wall next to the back door. Then it started. First the loud noise of glass breaking, then the bellboy’s voice screaming, “I told you to have my dinner ready, you stupid bitch! How many times have I told you that?!” More breaking glass—my falsetto screams—more breaking glass—the bellboy again—“Cook my dinner now, you fucking bitch! Or I’ll kill you.”
The back door slammed open. Cathcart was there, peering out into the night. I crouched and fired into his chest. The gun jammed with a loud click. Cathcart swiveled toward me and pointed his arm in my direction. I tried to move, but it was too late. There was a burst of noise, a flash of red and a slamming into my upper chest. I fell over and began to roll, still clutching my gun. Cathcart stood on his porch, turning his head, trying to adjust his eyes to the dark. I aimed and fired. This time it worked. Cathcart ducked, but not in time. I caught him somewhere in the torso, for he grabbed his chest as he flew backward into the service porch.
I got up and ran toward him, heedless of the possible consequences. As I got to him, he was lying on the floor. I was a perfect target framed in the doorway. Cathcart raised his arm to fire, but I threw myself on top of him before he could squeeze the trigger. I pinned his arm down with both my hands and brought my right knee into his groin, full force. Once. Then twice. Then again. Finally, he went limp and relinquished the grip on his weapon.
Panting, sweating, bleeding, and hysterical, I flung his gun back into the darkness of the house. Outside it was quiet. The tape had run out. In the darkness I started to babble. It was all over. I had blown it. I had won, and lost. There was just too much noise. The fuzz would come. So I waited, on the bloody floor, my body strewn across Cathcart’s.
I listened to his breathing through the overflow of my own. I tried to recite my poem, but I couldn’t remember the words. Once I thought I heard Cathcart stirring, so I clubbed him in the head with my gun butt. I started to shiver, drenched in sweat. Suddenly, I remembered my wound. It wasn’t sweat I was bathed in, it was blood. I felt for the wound. It was next to my shoulder blade, above my heart. Above my heart. Something dim resounded in my mind. I tore open my shirt and ran a hand over my back. When I found it I started to laugh. It was funnier than Walter at his best or the roasted dog. It was an exit wound and the blood that covered it was starting to congeal. I laughed until I passed out from shock.
When I awoke I checked the luminous dial on my watch. It was ten-fourteen. I flashed and did a double-take, then started to blubber. I had entered Cathcart’s driveway at nine-twenty. It was almost an hour later and no cops were on the scene. I listened to Cathcart’s uneven breathing for a second, recited jumbled fragments of my poem to myself, then gathered my strength and stood up. I staggered, my head reeled but I remained upright. I took a deep breath and it gave me confidence. I was certain none of my vital organs had been hit.
With a gigantic effort, I grabbed Cathcart’s arms and pulled him back into his house. It was slow going; he was a large man. I dragged him through the kitchen into a large carpeted area. I risked switching on a light. A modest living room, couch, coffee table and chairs were illuminated. I walked back and collected both our guns. Cathcart’s was a snub-nosed detective’s special.
I sat in a chair and stared at his inert body. He was a formidable-looking man. Iron gray-blond hair, sharp features. The body of an athlete at fifty-five. I knelt over him and opened his shirt. I had hit him in the left side of the chest. Almost as if in answer to my probings, Cathcart awakened and spat out a stream of blood. He looked at me. I looked back. I discerned immediately that he knew who I was. That was good. I wanted him to be lucid when I killed him. “Hi, Haywood,” I said in a hoarse voice, “you want some water?”
He stared some more, then finally nodded. I brought him two glasses of sink water. The first I threw in his face. It served its purpose. He yelled, spit out some more blood, and raised himself to his elbows, gritting his teeth against the pain. Crouching beside him, I placed a hand in back of his head and raised the glass to his lips. He took a tentative sip, then spit the water out, with a blood chaser, and gulped the rest of it down, regaining a degree of what I took to be his former malevolence. When he spoke the voice was rich, cold, and almost stentorian: “You realize that you are in way above your head, don’t you, Brown?”
“No, Captain, I don’t. I’d say you are.”
“I checked your personnel file, Brown. You were the worst scumbag ever to con his way into the department.”
“I’d say that’s relative, Captain. I’d say I was a bush league pinch hitter compared to you.”
“Comparing low-life scumbags doesn’t concern me. What exactly do you want?”
“You mean as the price for my silence?”
“Yes.”
“A million-dollar Welfare check. To be presented to me by you on national T.V. After the ceremony, you can make a little speech on your theory of nigger containment. You can retire from the department and begin a new career in politics.”
“Brown, literal-minded people like you often make good policemen, but you weren’t even that. How does it feel to know that what you’ve done with me will ultimately be judged as the biggest fuck-up of your fucked-up life?”
“I’d say that’s relative too, Captain, I’d say what I’ve done with you is the one saving grace of my fucked-up life. I’d say I’ve fucked over a lot of people in my life. Hurt a lot of people. Caused a lot of pain. But compared to you? Unleashing Fat Dog Baker on the world? That you can even compare the two of us is beyond comprehension. Can’t you see what you are?”
Cathcart smiled and spit out some more blood. “We all have saving graces, Fritz,” he said, “even you. I was struck by one of your fitness reports. One of your superiors wrote: ‘This officer seems to be interested in only two things: getting drunk and listening to classical music.’ I felt a strange affection for you when I read that. I love great music, too.”
“So did Hitler,” I said.
Cathcart nodded. “What exactly do you want, Brown? Revenge for your life?”
“I want to wipe you off the face of the earth.”
“I see. Will you take me into my den? There’s something I want to show you.”
I considered it for a second, then decided to do it. One final act of mercy. I helped him to his feet, my gun in his side. He reeled, but managed to limp the twenty feet or so to the den. I went in first, keeping him covered, and flicked on the light. It was a wood-paneled room, with an ornate walnut desk and two overstuffed leather chairs. I shoved Cathcart into one of them. He winced. I looked around the room. The walls were covered with framed photographs of police groups: groups of smiling patrolmen in uniform standing next to early 50’s vintage black-and-whites, groups of stern-looking plain-clothesmen in front of station houses, candid shots of cops at their desks writing reports. A wave of nostalgia hit me. This had been my life once. I pointed to the walls. “Is this what you wanted to show me?” I asked.
“No,” Cathcart said.
“That’s goo
d,” I said, “because I’ve been there. Although there is one photograph I’d love to see.”
“What’s that?”
“You and Fat Dog with your arms around each other outside of a burning house. You and your ‘genius little boy.’ Tell me one thing: how did you nail him for the Utopia torch?”
“Very easy. I am a good police officer, unlike you. I had been seeing Freddy in the neighborhood for weeks. From his garb I knew he had to be a caddy. When the three men I caught described the ‘fourth man,’ I knew immediately who it had to be. I hung out at the various country clubs in L.A. until I found him. Then I extricated a confession, and that got me to thinking.”
“You filthy cocksucker,” I said.
Cathcart smiled. “Open the top drawer of my desk, will you, Brown?”
I opened it gingerly and found a velveteen book-style photo holder, the kind that wedding pictures are kept in. I opened it and gasped. Inside were two lovingly mounted likenesses of Anton Bruckner. “Do you know who that man is?” Cathcart asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“And of mine. But he’s more than that. Do you like his music?”
“I love it.”
“Good. You love Bruckner. But you don’t understand him. What his music meant. It’s about containment. Refined emotions. Sacrifice. Purity. Control. Duty. The muted melancholy throughout his symphonies! A call to arms. A policeman who loves Bruckner and you can’t feel his essence. He never wed, Brown. He never fucked women. He wouldn’t expend one ounce of his creative energy on anything but his vision. I have been Anton Bruckner, Brown. You can be, too. You come from good stock, you’re a big strong man. You can be of service, it’s just a question of reeducation. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll …”
I had had enough. The blood was pounding in my head so hard that I felt about to explode. I aimed my gun at Cathcart and shot him four times in the face.
I went into the living room and lay down on the couch. I fell asleep. I woke up four hours later, feeling hallucinogenic. A shower helped. I put on a pair of Cathcart’s pants and one of his shirts. I combed my hair. I collected my tape deck from the back yard and put it in a paper bag I found in the kitchen, along with my silencer fitted .38. I dumped the dope I had ripped off of Larry Willis all over Cathcart’s living room. I found the keys to the Landcruiser on the coffee table. I put them in my pocket. My hands were going numb from hours of wearing rubber gloves, but I kept them on.