Crime Wave: Reportage and Fiction From the Underside of L.A.

by James Ellroy

  The Sheriff sat him down in front of his TV set. He drilled me with Draculean eyes and hexed me from the heart. I knew he couldn't talk. I knew a catatonic cat captured his tongue.

  I shut the door. I said, "Nice pad, baby doll. Those plaid drapes and that wall flag are so you."

  Parker sputtered and spit split syllables. His tortured tongue and paralyzed palate could not connect.

  The Sheriff said, "This won't be fun, Bill. But I can promise you we won't prolong things."

  I grabbed a spot by the TV set. The Sheriff stood beside me. Parker sat two feet behind us.

  I checked my watch. I counted down. The TV blipped on, black-magic-style.

  Jack Webb in close-up. Duh-duh-duh-duh/duh-duh-duh-duhduuuuh--the Dragnet theme on the sound track. Jack's toking a big stick of tea. He's giggling and goofing on his craaaaazy existence.

  He says, "My name's Friday. I carry a badge. I use it to coerce hookers into blow jobs. My name used to be Webb, but I got lucky and met this tight-assed chump Bill Parker, who got laid once in 1924, decided he preferred power to pussy, and took over the Los Angeles Police Department. Duh-duh-duh-duh!"

  I turned around. I looked at Parker. I couldn't count the colors he turned.

  Jack says, "Bill hitched his badge to me, or maybe it's the other way around, but who gives a shit when you're making all this money? And if you think Dragnet is all that I'm talking about, you're wrong, 'cause we've got some biiiiiiiiig plans with a Cuban guy names Batista--off-the-record, on the q.t., and very hushhush, and Bill's the number one cop in America, not that faggot Gay Edgar Hoover, and boy do we have some dirt to fuck him with if he ever gets uppity! Duh-duh-duh-duh. Duh-duh-duhduh-duuuh!"

  I turned around. I looked at Parker. I couldn't peg all the pastel pallors he passed through.

  Jack Webb laughed. A man laughed offscreen. It sounded like Fred O. Jack Webb flipped out a fat middle finger.

  "Hey, Bill, fuck you! This is for that time you humiliated me at the Jonathan Club, you frigid cocksucker! Hey, Bill, your mother fucks the mule down in Tj.! Hey, Bill, you better be nice to me or I'll tell Mayor Bowron your boys set him up with that Filipino whore! Hey, Bill--"

  I heard a shot. The TV screen imploded. Glass blew out the back of the set and took out the window behind it.

  Diodes decomposed. Wires whipped and wiggled. The console cracked and popped into pieces.

  I turned around. I looked at Parker. I kicked the gun out of his hand.

  The Sheriff said, "No slaves. No work farms and no debtors' prisons. No reprisals on Contino, Levant, or their families. No shakedowns on my men and no more attempts to steal money off my budget."

  Parker couldn't talk. The catatonic cat had his tongue. The Sheriff said, "We're hooked into J. Edgar Hoover and Mayor Bowron's set, and 8,ooo random sets in Los Angeles. Nod to signal your compliance."

  Parker nervously-nellingly nodded and turned six sheets of seraphim white.

  The TV debris ignited. It sparked and sputtered and metamorphosed into a mushroom cloud.

  I drove back to Harvey's repair shop. I found the whole block leveled and torched to a trash-heap hell.

  Fire trucks. Rubberneckers. Cop cars.

  Soot. Smoke. Ash-afflicted air. A wiped-out wasteland with a single scorched skeleton standing.

  The gas-chamber chair.

  I saw Oscar and Joi. I ditched my car and ran up to them. They wore black executioner's robes. They lit cigarettes off a piece of red timber and looked at me.

  I said, "What the fuck happened?"

  Joi said, "Harvey tricked us. He crossed three or four wires and blew himself out a fake wall panel. One of the arson cops said he probably created a sonic boom and controlled the downdraft. The fire started about a minute later."

  I yelled, "He's gone?"

  Joi nodded. "We underestimated a genius."

  Oscar said, "And we overestimated you."

  I kicked a rubble pile. My tennis shoe ignited. I hopped on one foot and swatted out the flames.

  "What about the files? I've got plans. Those files can make me!"

  Joi said, "They burned up. Tough luck, Dick. I was hoping they could help you mount a comeback."

  I threw a tantrum. I stamped my feet and kicked at hot rubble. My shoes caught fire. I let them burn.

  Oscar said, "Dick, you're fucked."

  * * *

  43 years, 6 months, 26 days. A twisting twirl of time to now.

  Covert connections. Contaminations cataloged in conflagrated carbon paper. Secrets lost in smoke.

  The contamination that I witnessed. The collusion that I tried to contain. The rampaging ramifications that still ram L.A.

  History hidden and soooooooo hush-hushed.

  The Sheriff sheltered me for three years. I lived in exile on the Sunset Strip. Joi dumped me. I married an actress named Leigh Snowden.

  Parker kept his promise. He did not visit violence upon me or mine. He did not sell slaves to Bad-Boy Batista. He did not imprison the impecunious. He did not juke Jack Webb in any public manner and did not drag Dragnet into the dirt. He dramatically drove Fred Otash out of the LAPD. Dragnet dragged onforfive more seasons.

  Fred O became a private eye. He shagged shit and skimmed skinny from a thousand insider informants. He brokered abortions. He set up dry outs and dope cures. He sold pictures of Rock Hudson with a dick in his mouth. He doped a racehorse in '59 and almost did time. He died old and rich in 1992.

  Heart attack.

  Johnny Stompanato ran sex shakedowns and took up with Lana Turner. Lana's daughter shanked him in April '58. Fred 0 made a mint on morgue memorabilia. Slab shots sold for a C-note. Marilyn Monroe bought Johnny's hair. A pederast purchased his penis.

  The Schvantz died in '6g.

  On his yacht. Alone with five women.

  Heart attack.

  He lived fast, loved hard, died hung.

  Ida Lupino died in '95.

  Cigarettes and booze and attrition.

  Sheriff Biscailuz died in '69.

  Old age.

  I went to his wake. I got drunk with some robbery cops and joined them on a liquor-store stakeout. I told them the REAL Harvey Glatman story. They didn't believe me.

  Harvey disappeared for three years. He resurfaced in L.A. in '57. He snuffed three women and dumped them in the desert. A pinup model dumped Harvey. She disarmed him and dropped him with a flesh wound. The cops grabbed him. He copped out to his three recent killings and no more. He was tried and convicted. He sucked cyanide in September '59.

  The three women weigh on me. The unidentified dead undermine my sleep and own me at odd moments. Harvey escaped on my watch. He killed his last three victims and other women under my imprimatur I exploited his genius. It saved my life. I sold him a death-house reprieve. He exploited the time and bought himseiffive years and untold victims.

  Time.

  Oscar and Joi died in '72. They put in a million showbiz miles and burned out every part of their bodies.

  I miss them.

  Viv Woodard died in '61.

  Suicide.

  She never hatched her half-guinea love child.

  Jack Webb died in '82. Heart attack. He promulgated police propaganda with other tuna TVshows and tapped out to the tune of authority. His malevolent mentor William H. Parker died in '66.

  A heart attack hastened by his bri ef blast of me.

  He passed on as one pissed-off patriarch. I derailed his most demonic designs and forced him to settle for second-class methods of suppression. He stepped up his stern measures in indirect defiance of me. I destroyed his dystopia and devastated his most darkly held dreams. Ifragged his frazzled and fragile ego. He suppressed the suppressible underclass and dicked the disenfranchised as dickable Dick Contino surrogates.

  His boys kicked black ass and brown ass and poor-white ass. Parker paternalistically popped his rocks along with them. He left a lethal legacy. He left his suppression-minded successors the unlearned lesson that suppression has a price
.

  Rodney King. The '92 riots. The repellent and radically race-ratified O.J. Simpson verdict.

  The twisting twirl of time.

  Back to 1954.

  And me.

  I never resurrected my career. I banged my box and made maintenance money and raised three kids. My draft-dodger drama dogged me and diverted my audience. My wife died in '82.

  Cancer.

  I'm 67 now. I'm healthy. I live in Las Vegas and work lounge gigs. I chase women. Women chase me. I chase the twisting twirl back to THEN.

  My fear flared and flowed THEN to NOW My Patented PostPassive Rages popped once in a billion blue moons. I mainlined my way into madness and meandered out with more mini-myths.

  I've mentioned this aforetold myth to a million myth-hungry people. They don't accept my secret history. They tell me the players are dead and unable to confirm or refute. They point to my genetic link to Alzheimer's disease.

  They tell me I'm lying. They say I'm wrong. They say it's a fever dream. They get frenetically frustrated and say no no no.

  I get righteously righteous and smilingly smug. I point to L.A. and claim credit for the nightmare.

  November, December 1997

  SEX, GLITZ, AND GREED

  THE SEDUCTION OF O. J. SIMPSON

  [This piece was written before the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial.]

  The Simpson-Goldman snuffs are recognizably prosaic. Subtract the accused killer's celebrity and showbiz milieu and you've got a spur-of-the-moment whack-out equally indigenous to Watts, Pacoima and Dogdick, Delaware. The intersection' of fame, extreme good looks, and pervasive media coverage has blasted a common double slash-job to the top of the pantheonic police blotter of our minds. The Leopold-Loeb, Wylie-Hoffert, and Manson Family cases--replete with complex investigations and psychological underpinnings emblematic of their time--cannot compete with the Simpson Trinity. A botched hack-and-run caper has become the Crime of the Century.

  On Sunday, June 12, 1994, Oj. Simpson did or did not drive to his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson's pad and slaughter her and a young man named Ronald Goldman. He did or did not wear gloves and a ski mask; he did or did not butcher his victims with a bone-handled knife, a bayonet, or an entrenching tool. He did or did not split the scene and drive to his own home, a few minutes away.

  Nicole Brown Simpson was or was not a devoted mother, a cocaine addict, and an airheaded party girl. She was or was not an anorexic, a bulimic, or a nymphomaniac given to picking up men at a Brentwood espresso pit. The minutiae of her life can be compiled and collated to conform to almost any sleazy thesis. She is most unambiguously defined by this heavily documented fact: Oj. Simpson beat the shit out of her over the last five years of her life.

  Ron Goldman was either a waiter who wanted to be an actor or an actor working as a waiter--a very common L.A. job euphemism. He was or was not Nicole Simpson's lover. He did or did not borrow Nicole's Ferrari on occasion--which did or did not piss off Oj. no end. Forensic evidence indicates that Goldman fought very hard for his life.

  Forensic evidence is utilized to supersede interpretation and conjecture through the application of impartial, empirically valid scientific methods. Forensic evidence is used to place suspected felons at crime scenes. Forensic evidence is a counterweight to gooey pleas for mitigation.

  The gathering of forensic evidence is a conscious search for the truth. So are legitimate attempts to debunk scientific fallacies and sloppy applications of long-established forensic procedures. The analysis of forensic evidence may prove to be the adjudicating bottom line in the Oj. Simpson case. The flip side might be logical chaos--a verdict or the absence of a verdict spawned by the numbingly protracted cross-media extravaganza that has deluged all would-be jurors and indeed the entire American public with an accretion of contradictory details both densely pertinent and superfluous--a huge shitstorm of information, misinformation, innuendo, and disingenuously reported rebop that backs you into a corner like a date rapist you can never escape until you shut down your electronic and printed-page access to the world, move to the South Pole, and start flicking penguins.

  Oj. did or did not shed his own blood outside Nicole's pad. He returned from an overnight trip to Chicago sporting a fresh cut-- which might have been caused by his slamming down a glass upon hearing the news of his ex-wife's death or might have been caused by his slashing at the woman a bit too close to his free hand. Blood trajectories are primarily matters of forensic and hard legal concern. They lack the mass-market appeal inherent to hearsay accounts of an attractive woman's sex life and attempts to portray a career misogynist as a lost brother to the Scottsboro Boys, and until the blood-oozing interactive Oj. CD-ROM hits stores, we just might have to view where that blood was spilled as a literal indication of Mr. Simpson's guilt or innocence--a niggling restriction to keep us tenuously open-minded as data rains down and inundates us.

  The Oj. Simpson case is a gigantic Russian novel set in L.A. The extravaganza occurred in L.A. because the major characters wanted to suck the giant poison cock off the Entertainment Industry. It's a novel of metamorphoses--because L.A. is where you go when you want to be somebody else. It happened in L.A. because it's the best place on earth to get breast and penis enlargements. It happened in the Brentwood part of L.A. because homelessness, crack addiction, and other outward signs of despair appear at a minimum there.

  O.J. Simpson wanted to be White. Ron Goldman wanted to be an actor--an equally ridiculous ambition. Nicole wanted a groovy fast lane and the secondhand celebrity that comes with flicking famous men.

  Her second-tier status extended to her death. She became the blank page that pundits used to explicate her husband's long journey of suppression.

  Nicole bought a ticket to ride. The price was nakedly apparent long before she died. Her face was pinched and crimped at the edges--too-pert features held too taut and compressed by too many bouts with cocaine, too many compulsive gym workouts, and too much time given over to maintaining a cosmetic front. Her beauty was not the beach-bunny perfection revered by stupid young men and the man who may or may not have murdered her. The physical force of Nicole Brown Simpson is the glaze of desiccation writ large on her face. The lines starting to form might have been caused by inchoate inner struggles, or the simple process of aging, or a growingly articulate sense that she had boxed herself into an inescapable corner of obsessive male desire, random male desire, and a life of indebtedness to things meretricious and shallow.

  Nicole's relationship with Oj. was deceptive and collusive from the start. He bought the hot blonde that fifty years of pop culture told him he should groove on, and an unformed psyche that adapted to his policy of one-way monogamy. She bought a rich, handsome, famous man possessed of infantile characteristics, which led her to believe that she could control him.

  He bought a trip through his unconscious and a preordained mandate for horror. She abdicated to an inner drama that would ultimately destroy her.

  They both bought a trip to Hollywood. O.J.'s athletic career was phasing out at the time they met; he sensed that he could continue his nice-guy impersonation and ease himself into plum acting roles with his long-perfected chameleon aplomb. He had made a second career out of disarming people with smiles and self-effacing gestures, and if he failed to hit the level of transposition that quality acting required, he could always play his familiar old ingratiating self, lower his cloning-sights from Laurence Olivier to Sly Stallone, get a mojo going as an action-flick hero, make big bucks, and score beaucoup poontang in the process. He knew a shitload of wimps and tough-guy wanna-bes in the Biz--geeks who subscribed to the ruthlessness-as-strength-ofcharacter ethic that pervades Hollywood but had never been in a fistfight and loved to tell jokes about their wives leaving them for well-endowed shvartzes. He knew these guys; they knew him; he got a symbiotic groove going with guys like that. Guys like that could make him a biiiiiig movie star.

  Oj. miscalculated. His powers of sociopathic seduction were best exposited in
five-second sound bites and best received by callow young women. It should be noted that Oj. Simpson is not the smartest motherfucker ever to walk the earth. He is a man of great physical gifts, superficial charm, and limited cunning, who segued from football to Hollywood with an impressionable girl in tow. He nested in a place where marriage is a shuck and a smoke screen for hidden sexual agendas; he brought a woman into the Inside World that the Outside World has been brainwashed into believing is the World Most to Be Coveted. He got her hooked on celebrity the way pimps get whores hooked on dope.

  Oj. brought Nicole into a world where he was a second-class citizen. He got small roles in doofus comedies--but the toughguy wanna-bes had no serious use for him. He would never be a movie star because he possessed the expressive range of a turtle. He'd transformed himself into a confirmed ass-kisser who could never appear truly heroic or dangerous onscreen.

  Nicole witnessed O.J.'s long downward slide. She saw the essential bifurcation of his fame: He was a big cheese to the outside world and small potatoes to the world he sucked up to. She came of age in lavish surroundings and reveled in insider perks. She had a front-row view of her husband cracking under the weight of his emptiness.

  Oj. got his racial-identity wires crossed up a long time ago. He must have figured his choices narrowed down to White man's shill or glowering rape-o. He never figured out that the vast majority of Black men do not fall into either camp. His appeal transcended race because he was an equal-opportunity con artist capable of snow-jobbing Blacks and Whites alike. He fit into Hollywood because he had looks and name value, fawned and joked to the correct degree, and zinged some pseudo-egalitarian heartstrings. If his trial becomes a referendum on African-American rage and its inevitable consequences, a minute cause-and-effect examination of his life will reveal no overt instances of personalityforming trauma directly attributable to specific acts of White racism. To offer the historic oppression of Blacks as a salient factor of mitigation in an adrenaline-fueled double lust homicide is preposterous. Oj. Simpson will have truly transcended race at that moment when Blacks and Whites get together and recognize him as a cowardly piece of shit who may or may not have murdered two innocent people and left two Black and White children devastated for the rest of their lives.