by James Ellroy
They discuss defensive wounds and blood-spatter trajectories. Louie's got a spaced-out woman in tow--a psychic he consults every so often.
They call him "the Hat" because he always wears a Tyrolean porkpie with a feather in the band. If you fuck with Louie's hat, Louie will fuck with you. A few years ago, some LAPD clown snatched Louie's hat and goofed on Louie's shaved head. Louie unhesitatingly popped him in the chops.
Big Gil walks off. Louie hobnobs with his psychic. Don Garcia tacks a notice to the bulletin board: Bulldog wristwatches make wonderful Christmas gifts!
The computer women look pissed. All this holiday bonhomie is drowning out the volume on their soap opera.
The boss is teething on the Guevara case. His ceramic bulldog is teething at the fur ball on the tip of his Santa Claus cap--Dan Burt likes to dress the beast in seasonal headwear.
Ray Peavy's crew got the job--a double abduction/murder way the hell out in Lancaster. Deputy Liova Anderson and Sergeant Joe Guzman caught the first squeal--one baffling whodunit.
Peavy's laying out a chronology for Dan Burt. It's an informal captain's office confab--and the open door encourages kibitzers.
Anderson got the initial call on Wednesday, November 3o: a body dump out in the desert. Liova drives up to Palmdale/Lancaster and views the stiff: a male Latin with his hands, face, and crotch scorched.
The victim was wrapped in a baby blanket, doused with a flammable agent, and burned. Liova picks up a strong vibe: The genital scalding indicates some sort of sex murder.
Liova has to work solo for the first seventy-two hours--Joe Guzman, a nationally known expert on gang violence, is off giving a lecture in Texas. She knuckles down and hauls.
She attends the postmortem on Friday. The doctor pulls a bullet out of the dead man's head and tags the cause of death as a "gunshot wound." He cuts the dead man's fingers off, rehydrates them, and rolls a clean set of prints.
On Sunday, Liova hears a radio news broadcast. A Latin couple named Carlos and Delia Guevara have been reported missing in Lancaster. She gets another strong vibe: Her dead man is Carlos Guevara.
She calls the Antelope Valley Sheriff's Missing Persons unit. An officer tells her that Sergeant jim Sears and Deputy jerry Burks of Sheriff's Homicide have already been assigned to the case-- because a bullet hole was found in Carlos and Delia Guevara's living-room wall.
Joe Guzman returns from Texas. Liova drives him up to Lancaster and explains the case en route. The team meets up with Burks and Sears at the Guevara house. Sears drops a belated bomb: Delia Guevara's body was discovered in Yermo over the weekend.
The woman had been shot and similarly dumped--in San Bernardino County, sixty miles from the spot where Guzman and Anderson's body was found.
Liova checks the Guevaras' family records stash and finds a fingerprint ID card on Carlos. She takes itto the L.A. County crime lab and has a technician compare it to the rehydrated digits cut off her victim.
The prints match.
Burks and Sears work the Delia side of the case. Anderson and Guzman stick with Carlos.
Liova's original vibe simmers: This is a sex or sexual-revenge killing. She begins an extensive background check on the Guevaras.
She learns that Delia worked at a local Burger King 2nd Carlos worked at a local appliance store. She learns that the couple had emigrated from Mexico illegally and were living above their means. She learns that Delia had been receiving menacing phone calls at work and that Carlos loved to talk lewd in mixed company--even though it made his friends and neighbors uncomfortable. Carlos was also known for chasing women outright.
Joe Guzman finds numerous toys in a sealed-off bedroom at the Guevara house. It is a striking anomaly. The Guevaras were childless and had often told friends they did not intend to have children. The motive takes circumstantial shape.
Two killings. Vengeance perpetrated by a cuckolded lover or the parents of an abused child.
Ray Peavy wraps his account up. Anderson and Guzman, Burks and Sears are still on the case--which remains one baffling whodunit.
Sergeant Jacque Franco pokes her head in the door and eavesdrops. Deputy Rick Graves sidles by for a listen; Dan Burt shoots him an attaboy for his work on that drowning case off Catalina Island.
Ray Peavy says, "It never ends."
Jacque Franco says, "We're still six short of breaking the record."
Dan Burt pats his fat ceramic bulldog.
Sergeant Bob Perry and Deputy Ruben "Bj." Bejarano get called out on Christmas Eve. It's cold, dark, and rainy--good indoor mayhem conditions.
They roll to a video store near the Century Sheriff's Station. A Taiwanese woman named Li Mei Wu lies dead on the floor behind the counter.
The weather has kept rubberneckers to a minimum. Patrol deputies have rounded up eyewitnesses and sequestered them at the station. A sergeant lays things out for Bejarano and Perry.
Three black teenagers entered the store around closing time. They gave the victim some verbal grief, split, and returned a few minutes later. One of them shot Li Mei Wu with a rifle. They ran outside and disappeared on foot.
The victim is positioned faceup. There's a live .22-caliber round and a .22 ejected casing behind the counter. A coroner's assistant lifts the body, notes the exit wound, and points to a projectile tangled up in Li Mei Wu's clothes. He says the shot probably tore out the woman's aorta.
The assistant finds $300 in Li Mei Wu's pockets. Perry and Bejarano note the untouched money and the full cash register and tentatively scratch robbery as a motive. The patrol sergeant tells them what eyeball witnesses told him: The perpetrators bopped to a coin laundry a few doors down before they bopped back and bopped Li Mei Wu.
The body is hustled off to the county morgue. Bj. diagrams the video store in his notebook, zooms down to the laundry, and quick-sketches the floor plan. A deputy from the crime lab arrives. He begins snapping crime-scene shots and dusting both the video store and the coin laundry.
Bob and Bj. secure the location and drive to Century Station. Two witnesses are waiting; three have signed preliminary statements, left their phone numbers, and gone home.
Bj. and Bob conduct interviews. They go over minute points of perspective and indoor and outdoor lighting repeatedly. Questions are phrased and rephrased; answers are cross-checked against the three preliminary statements. A single short narrative emerges.
At 8:20 P.M., three black teenagers enter the video store. They behave in a raucous fashion; Li Mei Wu tells them to leave. The kids peruse the skin-flick section and touch numerous fingerp rintsustaining surfaces. They walk to the laundry, behave in a raucous fashion, return to the video store and approach Li Mei Wu. One boy says, "Give me your money, bitch!" One boy pulls a rifle from under his clothes and shoots Li Mei Wu--just like that.
It's Christmas morning now. Yuletide greetings, Bulldogs-- your new case is senseless blasphemy on this day of peace and joyous celebration.
Days pass. Bejarano and Perry work the Li Mci Wu snuff.
They interview four more witnesses and get their basic scenario confirmed. They run mug shots by the witnesses and come up empty. They run a previous-incident check on the video store-- and hit just a little bit lucky.
The place was robbed in November, while Li Mei Wu was working the counter. The perpetrators: three black teenagers.
The same kids robbed a nearby pizza joint that same November night. Li Mei Wu ID's one boy as the grandson of one of her customers. Deputies went by the family pad to grab him--butJunior was long gone.
Bj. and Bob think the December incident report through. One fact stands out: Li Mei Wu hit the silent alarm when she was robbed in November--but did not rush for it on the night of her death. She obviously did not recognize the kids as the kids who robbed her the previous month. Bejarano and Perry get their gut feeling confirmed: The murder was committed by local punks. The killers ran away on a rainy night--they didn't have a car and got soaked dispersing back to their pads. One robbery threesome; one trio of killers
. Word would be out in the neighborhood--and loose talk would give them a good shot at solving the case.
While other cases accumulate.
There's a big post-Christmas murder lull. Entire on-call shifts are rotating through sans killings. The lunchroom tree is wilting under the weight of decomposed fake snow.
Bulldog eyes are bloodshot. Bulldog waistlines have expanded. High-octane coffee can't jolt Bulldog talk out of a desultory ripple.
Rey Verdugo's recalling other murder lulls. A few years ago the County of Los Angeles went nine days without a single murder. One of Rey's buddies put a sign reading KILL! in the squad-room window. Sheriff's Homicide notched twelve righteous whack-outs over the next twenty-four hours.
Dave Dietrich's showing off some threads he got for Christmas. His wife reads men's fashion mags and shops for him accordingly. You'd call him "Dave the Dude"--if he didn't look so much like a college professor.
Bill Sieber's drinking Slim-Fast in anticipation of his New Year's diet. He's monologuing between sips--in an uncharacteristically subdued fashion. Ray Peavy and Derry Benedict are discussing the Christmas party at Stevens Steak House. Ray worked the bash as a disc jockey--between his regular off-duty deejay gigs.
Talk shifts to famous unsolved murders. Derry brings up his favorite: the 1944 Georgette Bauerdorf job. When he retires he's going to write a novel about the case.
Louie Danoff and Rey Verdugo compare shaved heads. Gary Miller pokes at a cookie like it's a hot turd.
The killers of Carlos and Delia Guevara, Donna Lee Meyers, and Li Mei Wu are still at large. Soon the year's murder tally will stop--and a new list will begin.
Nineteen ninety-four winds up three short of the all-time murder high. Gunfire rings in 1995--celebratory shots all over the county.
Gunshots and firecracker pops start to sound alike. The locals get used to the noise but expect it to diminish before January 2.
Five shots explode at 6:45 New Year's night. The location is California and Hill, in the city of Huntington Park.
The shots are very loud. The shots in no way, shape, matter, or form sound like anything short of heavy-duty gunfire.
The shots have a gang-killing timbre--maybe the H.P. Brats and H.P. Locos are at it again. A dozen people on Hill Street call the Huntington Park PD.
Huntington Park rolls a unit over. Patrolmen find the body of Joseph Romero, male Latin, DOB 5/1 1/69. He's dead behind the wheel of his car, ripped through the torso by five AK-47 rounds.
Spent shells rest near the curb. One round blew straight through Romero and out the driver's-side door.
Sheriff's Homicide is alerted. Lieutenant Peavy, Deputy Bob Carr, and Sergeant Stu Reed make the scene.
Carr and Reed are short, heavyset, and fiftyish. They joined the department back in the '6os. Reed's an expert wood-carver; Carr sports the world's coolest handlebar mustache. Both men talk as slow and flat as tombstones.
A crowd forms. Huntington Park cops seal the people out with yellow perimeter tape. Coroner's assistants remove the body; a sheriff's tow truck hauls Romero's car off to the crime lab.
Reed and Carr eyeball the scene. They hit on a hypothesis fast.
Romero was sitting in the car by himself. He was parked six doors down from his pad. He was waiting for somebody.
The passenger-side window was down. "Somebody" walked up, stuck the gun in, and vaporized him.
The crime vibes "gang vengeance" or "dope intrigue," or somebody flicking somebody's girlfriend or sister. The cops have got some wimesses on ice--just dying to offer their interpretations.
Reed and Carr interview them at the H.P. station. Three solidcitizen types tell similar stories: shots fired and two male Latins running off in divergent directions. One man was short; one man was tall--their descriptions match straight down the line. Reed and Carr go over their statements from every conceivable angle.
It's an exercise in spatial logic and a master's course in the plumbing of subjective viewpoints. It's the culling of minutiae as an art form--and Carr and Reed are brilliant cullers.
It's starting to look like another neighborhood crime. The shooter and his accomplice fled on foot and were probably safe at home within minutes.
Reed and Carr interview a Mexican kid named Paulino. Paulino denies being a gang member and states that he hasn't done dope since he got out of rehab. He says he saw the tall male Latin fifteen minutes after the shooting. The guy was waving to a babe leaning out a window in that beige apartment house on Salt Lake Avenue.
A fifth witness independently corroborates the story. He saw the tall man running toward that same building moments after the shooting.
It's coming together. Reed and Carr decide to wait and not hit the building tonight--too many things could go wrong. They agree: Let's check with the HPPD Gang Squad when they come on duty. We'll find out who lives in that building and move accordingly.
Three non-eyewitnesses remain: Joseph Romero's uncle, aunt, and brother. Carr and Reed talk to them gently, and phrase all intimate questions in a deferential tone. The family responds. They say Joe was a nice kid trying to put dope and gang life behind him. They supply names: Joe was tight with a dozen male Latins in the neighborhood.
Reed and Carr do not mention the beige apartment house. They do not know who the family knows and might feel compelled to protect.
The family leaves. Reed and Carr drive home to get a few hours' sleep. They look old and cumulatively exhausted--like they never had a chance to get caught up while murders accumulate.
The holidays are over. Bob Perry and Jacque Franco are bulishitting at their desks.
Bob says he just notched a score on the Li Mei Wu case. The kids arrested turn out to be the punks who robbed the video store a month before the murder. The suspects are 13, 13, and 16.
Stu Reed sidles by. Jacque asks him how the Romero job is going. Stu says they've got one shooter ID'd but can't find him. J acque says, "Don't worry--he'll come back to the neighborhood to brag."
Gil Carrillo sits down. He straightens a mimeographed sheet of paper he keeps pressed to his desk blotter.
"The Homicide Investigator" jumps out in bold black print. A single paragraph is inscribed below it:
"No greater honor will ever be bestowed on an officer or a more profound duty imposed on him than when he is entrusted with the investigation of the death of a human being. It is his duty to find the facts, regardless of color or creed, without prejudice, and to let no power on earth deter him from presenting these facts to the court without regard to personality."
Gil blows the motto a kiss. His eyes take on that "Don't mess with me, I'm deep in a reverie" look. You see why people voted for the man. He cares way past the official boundaries of the job. Jacque says, "This job is still Disneyland to you, isn't it?"
Gil tilts his chair back. "It's not Disneyland when you get called out at 3 A.M., but when you get to the murder scene it's like you're coming up on Disneyland and you can see the Matterhorn ride in the distance. It's not Disneyland when you see all the ugliness, but it's Disneyland at the trial when the jury foreman says 'Guilty' and you break down crying just like the victim's family."
The holidays are long gone.
Dan Burt's bulldog has gone back to his baseball cap.
Burt tosses a gun catalogue in his wastebasket. He's a lifelong gun fancier pushed to the point of apostasy.
"My gun collection sickens me now," he says. "It makes me feel like I'm part of some mass illness."
Ray Peavy coughs. "We found Carlos Guevara's car at the Greyhound Terminal downtown. The crime lab's got it."
Burt points to a sheet of paper on his desk blotter--a mock-up of the condolence letter the bureau sends to murder victims' families.
"We can't send that to Guevara's wife, because she's dead too. I guess all we can do is pray and work the case."
While other cases accumulate.
July 1995
BAD BOYS IN TINSELTOWN
"L.A. Come on vacation;
go home on probation."
Somebody dropped that line on me twenty-five years ago. The line dropper was not an academic or a media pundit. A street freak or a honor-farm bunkmate probably shot me those words. He probably heard them on an old Mort Sahl or Lenny Bruce record and passed them off as original wisdom. It's a throwaway line with a rich historical subtext and snappy implications. It's a travelogue ad for the hip, the hung, and the damned.
That line implies that L.A. is a magnetic field and that all L.A. migrations are suspect. That line indicts your desire to come to L.A. and categorizes you as an opportunist with a hidden sexual agenda. That line is a cliché and a prophecy. It foretells your brief sensual riches and your grindingly protracted fall and retreat.
You can reinvent yourself en route. You can assume your desired identity and make attitude count for a thousand times its hometown value. You can live in a community of people who came to L.A. to be somebody else and envy the few who make money at it and blow you off as a loser. You can blame your fall and retreat on the city that magnetized you and duck the issue of your own failure.
People will understand and empathize. They know that L.A. is big, bad, and beautiful and full of the power to mortify. That power carries a built-in escape clause. L.A. rejects can cite it without the appearance of unseemly self-pity. The clause grants forgiveness through mitigation and holds L.A. up as a city beyond any individual's control. There's enough truth in the clause to keep anyone from questioning his desire to come to L.A. in the first place.
I'm from L.A. My parents made the migration and spared me the grief of making the jaunt on my own. I possess certain L.A. migrator tendencies. I migrated east to enact them. I'm sure that my parents would have understood the move.
My father arrived in the mid-'3os. He was a tall, handsome guy with a gigantic schvantz and an inspired line of bullshit. He had won a few medals during World War I and hyperbolically embellished his exploits. He jumped on every woman who'd let him and firmly believed that every woman who didn't let him was a lesbian. He landed in L.A. with a flash roll and some snazzy threads and gravitated toward the movie biz. His career as a Hollywood bottom feeder topped out in the late '40s. He got a gig as Rita Hayworth's business manager and allegedly poured the pork to Rita on many auspicious occasions.