by James Ellroy
I gave Cathcart one last look before I left. His face was obliterated, a gaping hole on top of his neck. Skull and brain fragments were stuck to the wall. His body and the chair he was sprawled in were a mass of drying blood. Rigor mortis was setting in and his arms were stuck in their last pose of reaching out to me.
I took the pictures of lonely Anton and put them in my paper bag, too. I left the death house, locking the door behind me, then drove to the motel and got my suitcase.
It was dawn when I got back to L.A. I was woozy from shock and lack of blood. I left Cathcart’s car on a side street in Santa Monica, then took a bus all the way out Wilshire to the Ambassador Hotel, which was within walking distance of Walter’s. My shoulder was numb, but aside from that and shock-induced fatigue, I felt all right.
After I ditched the rubber gloves, circulation slowly returned to my hands. It was a symbolic, life-enhancing feeling. Five seconds after croaking “Crazy, Daddy-O” to the girl at Mark Swirkal’s service I passed out on my freshly made-up hotel bed.
The next several days run together in my mind. I know that when I woke up at the Ambassador, I was in great pain from my shoulder wound and knew I had to do something about it. I remember taking a taxi to Irwin’s apartment off Melrose and Fairfax. He had a doctor brother I had been hearing about for years and now was the time to summon him. I remember that he came, along with Irwin’s nephew Uri, and that he immediately gave me a shot of something that sent me into the Twilight Zone. I remember Uri embracing me, delighted with his new position as Cal Myers’s repo man, waving his master keys in front of my face and calling me the “only good German in history.”
“I’m an American, you stupid fuck,” I retorted. “Brown is an American name.”
Irwin’s brother poked around and cleansed my wound, bandaged it and gave me some pain pills. They had a subtle effect. I thought my continued disorientation was due to shock and the trauma of murder, but I was wrong. It was due to a system full of codeine. I discontinued their use after two days. I couldn’t afford to be zoned out. I still had things to do before I could officially say “it’s over.”
Feeling returned to my shoulder. By Monday I could move it without too much pain. That morning I started to sweat out news of Cathcart’s death, buying all the local papers and hanging out in front of Walter’s newly-purchased T.V. set. There was nothing, just the usual rebop—Jimmy Carter had announced that he planned to campaign on “his record,” Reagan announced that he would run on “the issues,” and Walter offered a running commentary that kept me laughing until my shoulder ached.
I called Ralston Tuesday morning and gave him the good news.
“Cathcart’s dead,” I said into the phone, “it’s over.”
Ralston just said, “Thank God.” And let the line go dead.
On Tuesday night I dumped all the evidence of the killing into the Pacific Ocean: the gun, my bloody clothes, Cathcart’s clothes I had stolen, the tape deck, and the portraits of Anton Bruckner. I felt an impulse to keep the likenesses of lonely Anton, to give them a good, sane home, but they had become ghastly objects. I tore them into small pieces and fed them to the sea.
The next day, armed with a pocketful of dimes, I called the Welfare contacts on the list Ralston had given me. At the first sound of a voice on the other end of the line, I said “Cathcart is dead. The scam is dead. I have evidence linking you to fraud and extortion. Stop all payments now.” Before the listener could respond, I hung up. I connected with all but three of the people on the list. It was good enough. Ralston would take the brunt of their fear and grief, as well he should. He had gotten off easy.
News of Cathcart’s death hit the media Wednesday night. It was attributed to suicide. I was watching T.V. with Walter when I got the word: Haywood Cathcart, 56, Captain, Los Angeles Police Department, had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound sometime over the weekend at his “fishing retreat” in Del Mar. He had been a twenty-eight-year veteran of the L.A.P.D., was considered an exemplary officer, and was famous for “single-handedly cracking the famous Club Utopia firebombing case in 1968 that sent the slayers of six bar patrons to the gas chamber.” His superiors said that he had left no suicide note, but had been distraught recently over family matters.
As the somber-voiced newsman concluded his report, I started to weep. The fix was in. The L.A.P.D. had some inkling of what was up and had stonewalled it. If Cathcart had left no records. I was free.
Walter was dumbfounded at my tears. He had never seen me cry and had no idea of their origin. But he did his best to comfort me, embracing me and clumsily pawing my head. “What is it, Fritz?” he asked. “Did you know that cop who shot himself? Was he your buddy?”
I didn’t answer him, I just let myself be comforted. It was over. That night I went home to my pad, expecting to find it ransacked. It wasn’t. It was intact, waiting for me like an old friend. I looked at the calendar above my desk. On the space for June 30, I had marked, “Fred Baker—one week at one hundred twenty-five dollars per day.” It was now August 1. I had been in limbo for five weeks, had killed three men, had learned truths that few would know. I had been correct on the morning it all started. My life had been about to change, irrevocably.
The next morning I took a cab to the storage garage and got my old Camaro. I was reunited with another old friend, who had been washed and polished during my absence.
I called the Kupferman residence. It was time for the only reunion that mattered. The maid answered, distraught. “Mr. Kupferman had a heart attack last night. He’s in the hospital. He be real sick maybe gonna die.”
She started to ramble, but I cut her off: “What hospital?” I yelled.
“Cedars Sinai,” she said.
I hung up and tore out. The hospital was in West Hollywood, on Beverly near La Cienega, and by running lights and taking side streets I was there in fifteen minutes. I parked illegally and ran inside, flashing some absurd piece of fake I.D. at the reception lady and demanding to know where Sol Kupferman was. Cowed, she told me room 583, West Wing.
I jammed for an elevator and ran wildly down the corridors until I saw Jane sitting on a chair outside the room that had to be Sol’s. “Darling,” I called as I ran toward her, “is Sol all right?!”
Jane rushed toward me, screaming “Killer, killer, rapist, dissension center! Murderer, killer!”
We collided and she flung her fists and arms out at me with hysterical fury, scratching, clawing at my face, her eyes full of tears. I tried to control her, but it was no use. I had no will to be assertive, so I just let myself be pummelled. But she didn’t stop, and her screaming “killer, killer, killer!” was drawing a crowd of hospital people.
“I hate you, I hate the day I let you fuck me!” she screamed, then lunged inside my sportcoat and grabbed my gun out of its holster and leveled it at me. We both froze, and for long seconds there was silence in the corridor. Then she screamed “Murderer!” one last time, threw my gun against the corridor wall and ran away from me.
I retrieved the gun and made for the elevator, thinking—Oh God, oh God, oh God, was it all for nothing? Was Sol dead?
A large young doctor caught up with me outside the elevator. He was scared, but he wanted to know what was going on. I showed him my P.I.’s photostat and told him I was on a case and was licensed to carry a gun. He seemed satisfied. Then I asked him, “Is Sol Kupferman dead?”
“No,” he said, “he’s going to make it.”
I don’t remember what I felt as I left the hospital, except that there was nothing left for me in Los Angeles. Even though Sol was going to live, Jane’s hatred of me held a brutal finality. Our last moments together had been so ugly that I could never surmount them. I got in my car and drove to San Francisco.
I spent a week in San Francisco, waiting for my passport to come through, getting immunized and buying clothes and other provisions for a trip to Europe. I left the night of August 10, flying to New York with two suitcases and twenty-five thousand dollars
in cash and traveler’s checks. Before I left, I sent Mark Swirkal five thousand dollars in traveler’s checks and told him to destroy the tapes.
I got moderately drunk on the plane and full-out drunk in my hotel room near Kennedy International.
The following day I caught a Lufthansa flight to Munich. I was in Germany for two months, drunk and sober. I took a steamer up the Rhine. I caught the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan. They were magnificent, but only part of me was there for the performance. I visited Beethoven House in Bonn and Beethoven’s grave. I didn’t feel what I thought I would. I made love to a lot of very beautiful, high-priced German prostitutes. At the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth I got drunk and beat up two British students who seemed to be bothering a young Fraulein. In Stuttgart I broke down sobbing in a beer garden and was hospitalized with incipient d.t.’s.
At the end of October I flew back to America and settled in San Francisco. I rented an apartment in Pacific Heights and looked around for investments, something creative. I couldn’t find anything, and Frisco began to pall. It was too beautiful, too ethnic, too counter-culture. The people I passed on the street seemed to be congratulating themselves on their good taste in living there.
In May of the following year I returned to L.A. Repatriated to my smogbound hometown, I started to get on with the business of my life. I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, near the Yamashiro Skyroom. I invested badly. First I set myself up as a sandwich entrepreneur with a small restaurant near the Music Center. It was a lunch and after-concert place that featured jumbo sandwiches named after composers. I was hoping the place would turn into a hangout for musicians from the Philharmonic, but it never happened. Finally, after an investment of eleven months and eighty grand, the joint folded. My next investment was safer and turned into a resounding success: I bought a liquor store on 3rd and Western in the heart of the old neighborhood. I’ve got a smart black guy who runs it for a grand a month and ten percent of the action, and a smart tax lawyer to help me hold onto my money. All I do is sit back and rake it in. As of this writing, I am worth seven hundred fifty-six thousand.
Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, I got a letter, postmarked New York from Jane Baker:
Dear Fritz:
It has taken me a long time getting around to writing this letter, because it has taken me a long time to resolve my feelings about you. I apologize for my actions on the day of August 2. It was absurd to call you a killer. At the time I blamed you for Sol’s heart attack, which was ridiculous, but understandable. To me you were the catalyst of all those terrible events that awful summer. Later I learned that they had been set in motion many years before, and all you did was stumble into them and try to help the victims as best you could. Thank you for that. Sol has told me that you acted courageously and were responsible for lifting a terrible yoke off his back.
Sol is doing very well, by the way, and so am I. I am attending Milliard and getting good! Some day I will be a good cellist, worthy of the Strad I play with and the love Sol has given me. Sol is here in New York, too, and is enjoying his retirement and nurturing a new fondness for modem art.
I feel strange about you, Fritz, and somehow guilty that I couldn’t love you. I know you had put great hopes on our being together. I sensed in you a desperate loneliness and a great thwarted love of beauty that contradicted the violence that seemed to define your character. Try to pursue that love of beauty, Fritz, try.
Maybe if you listened to less violent music, it would help. Beethoven and the romantics sometimes tend to create violent emotions in people already prone to violence. Listen to some baroque, enjoy the delicacy of it. Listen to the impressionists, they have a great statement to make, one I know you could appreciate.
I have to go now. Thank you for all the help you gave Sol and me. Sol won’t tell me the whole story, but I know you acted bravely, and with great concern for us. Try to love. I will always remember you fondly.
Sincerely,
Jane Baker
I do try to love. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes I’m drunk, sometimes I’m sober. Sometimes I think of Fat Dog and his “plan” for me and wake up shaking. Sometimes I forget completely about his malevolent genius. Why me? Since that summer I have interviewed at least a hundred people who knew Fat Dog, and I still have no inkling.
Walter died last year of cirrhosis of the liver. He was thirty-four. His mother had him buried with a Christian Science service. I got drunk and disrupted it. The fuzz came and busted me, but all it cost me was a hundred dollar fine. I miss him terribly. Some night I’m going to steal his coffin and transport it to the beach, where a big raft will be waiting. I’ll put Walter on the raft, ignite it, and send it out to sea. I’ll have speakers hooked up all along the beach to blast out Wagner as my beloved comrade floats to a fiery Valhalla.
I get restless sometimes at night and go for long walks on golf courses. While walking the fairways I feel very much in touch with some kind of transient spirit world, a world in constant ellipsis.
When I think of what happened that summer I think not of myself, but of the other people involved. Nothing that went before or will happen after can touch that summer when I was part of the insane, tragic music of so many people’s lives. That summer was my concerto for orchestra—each instrument in the orchestra having a voice equal, yet distinct from all the others.
So I go on, heeding Jane’s advice. I have not performed violence on a human being since hurting the two boys in Bayreuth. I try to appreciate beauty. Most of the time I’m equal to the task, but sometimes my mind turns to wild flights of fantasy, envisioning other electric calms and moral stands that might bring me permanent salvation. When I think of these things, my reason and love of beauty desert me and I hang suspended like a bizarre hovercraft in a holding pattern over Los Angeles. But I hold.
I listen to a lot of music.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1981 by James Ellroy
cover design by Thomas Ng
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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Table of Contents
I, PRIVATE EYE
LOOPERS AND CELLISTS
LOWER CALIFORNIA
SHOTGUN
CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA