My Dark Places

by James Ellroy

  Lawton, Brooks and Jackson took a Harvey Glatman murder-site tour. Photographers, DAs and various deputy sheriffs went with them. Glatman led them straight to the bones of victim Bridgeford and victim Rojas.

  Judy Dull’s remains were found in December ’57. They were Jane Doe-tagged at the Riverside County Coroner’s Office.

  The tour ended at Glatman’s apartment. The cops examined his photograph collection.

  He had dozens of mail-order smut pictures. They all featured bound-and-gagged women. He had pictures of bound-and-gagged women shot off his own TV screen. Glatman said he always watched TV with his camera in his lap. You got some good bonus shots that way.

  He had pictures of girls he photographed in Denver. They were bound and gagged in their panties and bras. He said the girls were all alive and well.

  He kept his special pictures in a metal box. The cops went through them one by one.

  Judy Dull’s brassiere was stretched below her breasts. Her gag flattened out her cheeks and distorted her whole face. Her legs-apart poses were fatuous and obscene.

  She didn’t look scared. She looked like a jaded adolescent. Maybe she thought she could outsmart this nebbish. Maybe she thought compliance equaled poise. Maybe she possessed a skewed pinup-girl bravado: All men are weak and easily moved with the right combination of flattery and pussy.

  Angela Rojas looked dazed. Her desert backdrop was beautifully lit.

  Shirley Ann Bridgeford knew her life was over. Glatman’s camera caught her tears and contortions and the scream the gag in her mouth was holding mute.

  The pictures shocked Jack Lawton. Glatman sickened him. He knew he didn’t kill Jean Ellroy.

  Hallinen and Lawton caught a case together on November 8th. A man named Woodrow Harley raped his 13-year-old stepdaughter and smothered her with a chloroform-soaked pillow.

  They spent a week wrapping it up. They visited Armand Ellroy and his son right before Thanksgiving.

  The boy had grown a bit. He was very tall for a kid his age.

  Hallinen and Lawton took Ellroy and his son down to Tiny Naylor’s Drive-In. The kid ordered an ice cream concoction. Hallinen and Lawton ran their Mom’s-boyfriend riff by him again.

  He rehashed the stuff he already told them. He couldn’t dredge up any new studs.

  They went back to the apartment. Ellroy told the kid to go outside and play. He needed to talk to the gentlemen alone.

  The kid walked out and tiptoed back down the hallway. He heard his father and the cops talking in the kitchen.

  His father was calling his mother a promiscuous drunk. The cops were saying their case was dead. Jean was such a goddamn secretive woman. Her life just didn’t make sense.

  II

  THE KID IN THE PICTURE

  You fooled people. You gave yourself out in small increments and reinvented yourself at whim. Your secret ways nullified the means to mark your death with vengeance.

  I thought I knew you. I passed my childish hatred off as intimate knowledge. I never mourned you. I assailed your memory.

  You fronted a stern rectitude. You cut it loose on Saturday nights. Your brief reconciliations drove you chaotic.

  I won’t define you that way. I won’t give up your secrets so cheaply. I want to learn where you buried your love.

  6

  My father put me in a cab at the El Monte depot. He paid the driver and told him to drop me at Bryant and Maple.

  I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to leave my father. I wanted to blow off El Monte forever.

  It was hot—maybe ten degrees more than L.A. The driver took Tyler north to Bryant and cut east. He turned on Maple and stopped the cab.

  I saw police cars and official-type sedans parked at the curb. I saw uniformed men and men in suits standing in my front yard.

  I knew she was dead. This is not a revised memory or a retrospective hunch. I knew it in the moment—at age ten—on Sunday, June 22nd, 1958.

  I walked into the yard. Somebody said, “There’s the boy.” I saw Mr. and Mrs. Krycki standing by their back door.

  A man took me aside and kneeled down to my level. He said, “Son, your mother’s been killed.”

  I knew he meant “murdered.” I probably trembled or shuddered or weaved a little bit.

  The man asked me where my father was. I told him he was back at the bus station. A half-dozen men crowded around me. They leaned on their knees and checked me out up-close.

  They saw one lucky kid.

  A cop split for the bus station. A man with a camera walked me back to Mr. Krycki’s toolshed.

  He put an awl in my hand and posed me at a workbench. I held on to a small block of wood and pretended to saw at it. I faced the camera—and did not blink or smile or cry or betray my internal equilibrium.

  The photographer stood in a doorway. The cops stood behind him. I had a rapt audience.

  The photographer shot some film and urged me to improvise. I hunched over the wood and sawed at it with a half-smile/half-grimace. The cops laughed. I laughed. Flashbulbs popped.

  The photographer said I was brave.

  Two cops led me to a patrol car and put me in the backseat. I scooted over to the left-hand window and looked out. We took Maple to a side street to Peck Road southbound. I stuck my head out the window and registered odd things.

  We turned west on Valley Boulevard and pulled up in front of the El Monte Police Station. The cops walked me inside and sat me down in a small room.

  I wanted to see my father. I didn’t want the cops to hurt him.

  Some uniformed men kept me company. They were gentle and deferred to my status as a now motherless child. They kept a line of friendly chatter going.

  My father picked me up Saturday morning. We took a bus to L.A. and went to see a movie called The Vikings. Tony Curtis got his hand chopped off and started wearing a black-leather stump guard. I had a nightmare about it.

  Cops drifted in and out of the room. They kept handing me cups of water. I drank it all. It gave me something to do with my hands.

  Two men walked into the room. The friendly cops walked out. One man was heavyset and almost bald. The other man had wavy white hair and light blue eyes. They were wearing sports jackets and slacks.

  They asked me questions and wrote down my answers in small pocket notebooks. They had me describe my weekend with my father and asked me to name my mother’s boyfriends.

  I mentioned Hank Hart and Peter Tubiolo. My mother went out with Hank back in Santa Monica. Tubiolo was a teacher at my school. He dated my mother at least a couple of times.

  I asked the men if my father was in trouble. They told me he wasn’t. They said I would be released to his custody.

  The white-haired cop gave me a candy bar and told me I could see my dad now. They let me out of that little square room.

  I saw my father standing in the hallway. He saw me and smiled.

  I ran straight to him. The impact knocked him back a little. He gave me his standard bear hug that showed off how strong he was.

  A cop drove us to the El Monte depot. We caught a late bus to Los Angeles.

  I sat next to the window. My father kept an arm around me. The San Berdoo Freeway was dark and full of glittery taillights.

  I knew I should cry. My mother’s death was a gift—and I knew I should pay for it. The cops probably judged me for not crying back at the house. If I didn’t cry, it meant I wasn’t normal. My thoughts were just that convoluted.

  I let my clenched-up nerves go. I let the pure fucking awe I’d been feeling for hours slip free.

  It worked.

  I cried. I cranked tears out all the way to L.A.

  I hated her. I hated El Monte. Some unknown killer just bought me a brand-new beautiful life.

  She was a farm girl from Tunnel City, Wisconsin. I cared for her solely in conjunction with my father. When she broke the marriage off she made me his son exclusively.

  I started hating her to prove my love for my father. I was afraid
to acknowledge the woman’s edgy will and courage.

  My father was mistakenly diagnosed with cancer in 1956. My mother broke the news to me—but withheld the he’ll-be-all-right punch line for dramatic effect. I wept and punched out our living-room sofa. My mother calmed me down and told me it was ulcers, not cancer—and I needed a little trip to get over the shock.

  We drove down to Mexico. We got a hotel room in Ensenada and ate a lobster dinner at a nice restaurant. My mother wore an off-one-shoulder dress. She looked startlingly fair-skinned and redheaded. I was aware that she was performing.

  I went swimming in the hotel pool the next morning. The water was visibly dirty. I came out with blocked ears and a throbbing headache.

  The headache worked its way down to my left ear. The pain grew more localized and more intense. My mother examined me and told me I had a severe ear infection.

  The pain was godawful. I cried and ground my teeth until my gums bled.

  My mother bundled me up in the backseat of her car and drove us north to Tijuana. The pharmacies there sold medicine and hard narcotics over-the-counter. My mother found a place and purchased a bottle of pills, a vial of dope and a hypodermic syringe.

  She fed me water and pills. She prepped a spike and shot me up right there in the car. My pain died instantaneously.

  We drove straight back to L.A. The dope warmed me and lulled me to sleep. I woke up in my bedroom and saw strange new colors drifting out of the wallpaper.

  I withheld the incident from my father. The omission was instinctive and precociously derived. I’ll ascribe motive 40 years after the fact.

  My mother protected me with decisively great style. I knew my father wouldn’t want to hear her praised. I played to his fear. I didn’t tell him she looked good in that dress. I didn’t tell him how good that dope felt. I didn’t tell him she owned my heart for a little while.

  My parents excelled at appearances. They were a great-looking cheap couple, along the lines of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in Macao. They stayed together for 15 years. It had to be sex.

  He was 17 years her senior. He was tall and built like a light heavyweight. He was drop-dead handsome and possessed a massive wang.

  He was an ineffectual man who came off dangerous at first reading. She bought the physical package and the charm that went with it. I don’t know how long the honeymoon lasted. I don’t know how long it took them to get disillusioned and cede their marriage to dry rot.

  They both moved west in the late ’30s. They met, sizzled, wed and settled in L.A. She was a registered nurse. He was a noncertified accountant. He inventoried drugstore stock and prepared income tax returns for Hollywood people. He had a three- or four-year run as Rita Hayworth’s business manager and arranged her wedding to Aly Khan in 1949. Redhaired women ruled his postwar years.

  I made the scene in ’48. The novelty of a kid sent them gaga for a while. They moved out of their place in Beverly Hills and found a larger apartment in West Hollywood. It was a Spanish-style pad with brushed-stucco walls and arched doorways. I grew into a warped state of cognizance there.

  Rita Hayworth fired my father, circa ’52. He took occasional drugstore jobs and hogged the living-room couch most standard workdays. He loved to read and sleep. He loved to smoke cigarettes and watch sporting events on our bubble-screen TV. The couch was his all-purpose forum.

  My mother hustled to and from work. She had a full-time gig at St. John’s Hospital and wet-nursed a dipsomaniacal actress named ZaSu Pitts on the side. She brought home the bulk of the money and bugged my father to get a permanent job.

  He put her off with vague vows and cited his Hollywood connections. He was pals with Mickey Rooney and a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. He knew people with pull. He could parlay his friendships into something sweet.

  I spent a lot of time on the couch with my father. He drew pictures for me and taught me to read when I was three and a half years old. We sat side by side and read separate books.

  My father favored historical novels. I dug kid’s animal stories. My father knew that I couldn’t stand to see animals mistreated or killed. He skimmed the books he bought for me and shitcanned the ones he knew I’d find disturbing.

  My father grew up in an orphanage and had no blood family. My mother had a younger sister in Wisconsin. My father hated his sister-in-law and her husband, a Buick dealer named Ed Wagner. My father said Uncle Ed was a draft dodger and a kraut. He killed lots of krauts in the First World War and had no use for them.

  The Wagners thought my father was a bum. My father told me my cousin Jeannie tried to scratch my eyes out once. I don’t recall any such incident.

  My parents’ friends conformed to a type: older people naively impressed with them. My parents looked good and hobnobbed with Hollywood swingers. They dazzled in the short run and only fought, carped and bickered in the privacy of their own home. They kept up a united front and limited their offensive broadsides to one witness—me.

  Their life together was one long skirmish. She attacked his sloth; he attacked her nightly booze intake. Their squabbles were strictly verbal—and the absence of physical violence made them that much more protracted. They argued in measured tones, rarely yelled and never screamed. They did not break flowerpots or hurl dishes. Their lack of overt theatrics cloaked the fact that their collective will to reason and reconcile did not exist. They fought a self-suppressed war. They worked themselves into the picayune state of the perpetually aggrieved. Their hatred escalated over years and peaked at a level of low fury.

  It was ’54. I was six years old and in the first grade at West Hollywood Elementary School. My mother sat me down on our living-room couch and told me she was divorcing my father.

  I took it hard. I threw tantrums for weeks running. My histrionics were fevered and a cumulative response to years of chickenshit parental battling. TV had taught me that divorce was permanent and binding. Divorce stigmatized little kids and fucked them up for life. The mother got custody of all minor children.

  My mother kicked my father out of the apartment. She tolerated my hurt-child routine for a few weeks, gave me a concise whack in the head and told me to stop it.

  I stopped it. I got a crazy little-kid notion to forge an all-powerful separate thing with my father.

  My mother hired a lawyer and filed for divorce. A judge granted her temporary custody and allowed me to spend weekends with my father. He rented a bachelor pad a few blocks from his old apartment.

  I holed up with him for a string of Fridays-to-Sundays. We cooked burgers on a hot plate and made meals out of Cheez Whiz and crackers. We read books side by side and watched TV fight cards. My father began to systematically poison my mind against my mother.

  He told me she was a drunk and a whore. He told me she was fucking her divorce lawyer. He said he had a shot at gaining custody of me—if he could prove my mother morally deficient. He urged me to spy on her. I agreed to snoop out my mother’s indiscretions.

  My father got a job in downtown L.A. I snuck out and met him on his way home from work every chance I got. We rendezvoused at a drugstore on Burton Way and Doheny. We ate ice cream and talked a little bit.

  My mother discovered this treachery. She called my father and threatened him with custody injunctions. She hired a baby-sitter to watchdog me after school.

  I ditched my school bus the next morning. I hid out in the courtyard by my father’s apartment. I wanted to see my father wicked bad. I was afraid of the Salk vaccine shots scheduled at school that day.

  My mother found me. She drove me to school and arranged to inject me with the Salk vaccine herself.

  She shot me up in her nurse’s uniform. She was skilled with a needle—it didn’t hurt at all. She looked good in white seersucker. It offset her red hair alluringly.

  The divorce case went to court. I had to testify in closed session. I hadn’t seen my father in a while. I spotted him outside the courtroom and ran to him.

  My mother tried to intercede.<
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  My father whisked me into a men’s room and hunkered down to talk to me. My mother stormed in and dragged me out. My father let it happen. A man standing at a urinal with his dick in his hand observed the whole transaction.

  I testified. I told a kindly judge that I wanted to live with my father. He ruled otherwise. His decree stipulated a weekday/ weekend split: five days with her, two days with him. He sentenced me to a bifurcated life divvied up between two people locked in an intractable mutual hatred.

  I caught both sides of that hatred. It was resolutely scornful and eloquently expressed. My mother portrayed my father as weak, slovenly, lazy, fanciful and duplicitous in small ways. My father had my mother categorized more concisely: She was a Lush and a Whore.

  I lived by the divorce decree. Weekdays meant restricted drudgery. Weekends meant freedom.

  My father fed me tasty food and took me to cowboy movies. He told me World War I stories and let me leaf through his girlie magazines. He said he had several sweet deals cooking. He convinced me we were just moments shy of great wealth. Big money meant big-time lawyers and big-time legal pull. Those lawyers had detectives who could dig up dirt on the Lush and the Whore. They could get him full-time custody of me.

  My mother moved us to a smaller apartment in Santa Monica. She quit St. John’s and got an industrial nurse job at Packard-Bell Electronics. My father moved to a one-bedroom pad on the Hollywood-Wilshire District border. He didn’t own a car and transported me by bus. He was well into his fifties and starting to look like a gigolo past his prime. People probably thought he was my granddad.

  I transferred to a private school called Children’s Paradise. It was unaccredited and set my mother back 50 bucks a month. The place was a dump site for kids from broken homes. Passing grades were guaranteed—but the hours of confinement stretched from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily. The teachers were shrill or beaten-down passive. My father had a theory about the long school hours. He said they were calculated to give single moms time to fuck their boyfriends after work. He said this was not all bad.