by James Ellroy
We were all wearing Smith and Wesson .38 police specials in shoulder holsters, which gave the proceedings a ritualistic air. I was nervous, high on adrenaline and phony righteous indignation. I was prepared for anything, including the end of my career, and that strengthened my resolve to defeat these two obdurate-looking policemen.
I pulled up a chair, propped up my feet on a ledge of recruiting posters, and smiled disarmingly while Quinn and Milner dug cigarettes and Zippo lighters out of their suit coats and lit up. Milner, who was the slightly taller and older of the two, offered the pack to me.
“I don’t smoke, Sergeant,” I said, keeping my voice clipped and severe, the voice of a man who takes trouble from no one.
“Good man,” Quinn said, smiling, “wish I didn’t.”
“I quit once, during the Depression,” Milner said. “I had a good-looking girlfriend who hated the smell of tobacco. My wife don’t like it either, but she ain’t so good looking.”
“Then why’d you marry her?” Quinn asked.
“ ’Cause she told me I looked like Clark Gable!” Milner snorted.
Quinn got a big bang out of that. “My wife told me I looked like Bela Lugosi and I slugged her,” he said.
“You should have bit her neck,” Milner cracked.
“I do, every night.” Quinn guffawed, blowing out a huge lungful of smoke and pulling up a chair facing me. Milner laughed along and opened a tiny window at the back of the room, letting in rays of hazy sunshine and a flood of traffic noise.
“Officer Underhill,” he said, “my partner and I are here today because doubts have been raised about your fitness to serve the department.” Milner’s voice had metamorphosed into a precise professorial tone. He started a dramatic pause, drawing on his cigarette, and I answered, mimicking his inflections:
“Sergeant, I have grave doubts about the brass hats who sent you here to question me. Has Internal Affairs questioned Dudley Smith?”
Milner and Quinn looked at each other. Their look was informed with the humorous secret knowledge of longtime partners.
“Officer,” Quinn said, “do you think we are here because a queer slashed his wrists in County Jail yesterday?” I didn’t answer. Quinn continued: “Do you think we’re here because you initiated, illegally, the arrest of an innocent man?”
Milner took over. “Officer, do you think we’re here because you have brought great disgrace on the department?”
He took a folded up newspaper out of his back pocket and read from it: “ ‘Hero cop quick on the trigger? L.A.P.D. in hot water? Thanks to crack legal beagle Walter Canfield and a courageous anonymous witness, Eddie Engels almost walked out the door of County Jail a free man. Instead, humiliated and tortured by his ordeal of false arrest, he left under a sheet. Canfield and the man with whom Engels spent the night of August 12—the night he was alleged to have murdered Margaret Cadwallader—tragically got to the authorities too late with their information. Eddie Engels slashed his wrists with a contraband razor blade in his cell on the eleventh floor of the Hall of Justice yesterday afternoon, the victim of gunslinger justice.
“ ‘Our Seattle correspondent contacted the victim’s father, Wilhelm Engels, a pharmacist in suburban Seattle. “I can’t believe that God would do such a thing,” the white-haired old gentleman said. “There must be an investigation into the policemen who arrested my Edward. Edward was a gentle, lovely boy who never hurt anyone. We must have justice.” Mr. Engels told our correspondent that Walter Canfield has offered his services, free of charge, in filing suit for false arrest against the Los Angeles Police Department. “Mr. Engels will have his justice,” Canfield told reporters shortly before he learned of Engels’s death, “the justice his son was denied. This is clearly a case of a quick-on-the-trigger young cop out to make a name for himself.” ’ ”
Milner paused. My vision was starting to darken at the edges, but I shook my head and it cleared.
“Go on,” I said.
Milner coughed and continued. “ ‘Officer Frederick U. Underhill, canonized within the L.A.P.D. and by Los Angeles newspapers earlier this year for killing two holdup men, brought the same rash justice to his investigation of Eddie Engels. Veteran L.A.P.D. Detective Lieutenant Dudley Smith told our reporter: “Fred Underhill is an ambitious young man out to make chief of police in record time. He caught myself and several others up in his crusade to get Eddie Engels. I admit I went along with it. I admit I was at fault. Last night I lit a candle for poor Eddie’s family. I also lit one for Fred Underhill and prayed that he learns a lesson from this tragedy he perpetrated.” ’ ”
I started to laugh. My laughter sounded hysterical to my own ears. Milner and Quinn didn’t think it was funny. Quinn snapped: “This article, which was in the L.A. Daily News, goes on to call for your resignation and an investigation into the entire department. What do you think about that, Underhill?”
I calmed myself and stared at my inquisitors. “I feel that that article was written in a very poor prose style. Convoluted, hysterical, hyperbolic. Hemingway would disapprove of it. F. Scott Fitzgerald would turn over in his grave. Shakespeare would be dismayed. That’s what I think.”
“Underhill,” Milner said, “you know the department takes care of its own, don’t you?”
“Sure. Witness that lunatic Dudley Smith. He’ll come out of this thing smelling like a rose and probably make Captain. Ahhh, yes. Grand!”
“Underhill, the department was prepared to stand by you until we did a little checking up on you.”
I started to go cold in the hot, smoky room. The traffic noise on Los Angeles Street sounded alternately very loud and very soft.
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Come up with anything interesting?”
“Yes,” Quinn said, “we did. Let me quote. ‘Sarah had high full breasts with cone-shaped dark brown nipples. Coarse hairs surrounded them. She was an experienced lover. We moved well together. She anticipated my motions and accommodated them with fluid grace.’ Want some more, Underhill?”
“You filthy bastards,” I said.
“Did you know that Sarah Kefalvian is a Communist, Underhill? She’s listed in the rolls of five organizations that have been classified as Commie fronts. Did you know that?” Milner leaned over me, his knuckles white from grasping the table. “Do you fuck a lot of Commies, Underhill?” he hissed.
“Are you a Communist, Freddy?” Quinn asked.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
Milner leaned over further; I could smell his tobacco breath. “I think you are a Communist. And a filthy pervert. Decent men don’t write about the women they fuck. Decent men don’t fuck Commies.”
I stuck my hands under my thighs to control their shaking and to keep myself from hitting someone. My head was pounding and my vision blurred from the blackness throbbing behind my eyes. “You forgot to mention I’ve got red upholstery on my car. You forgot to mention I also fuck Koreans, Republicans, and Democrats. When I was in high school I had a redheaded girlfriend. I’ve got a red cashmere sweater, you forgot to mention that.”
“There’s one thing you didn’t forget to mention,” Quinn said. “Listen: ‘I told Sarah about dodging the draft in ’42. She is the only person besides Wacky to know that. Telling her made me feel strangely free.’ ”
Quinn spat on the floor. “I served in the war, Underhill. I lost a brother at Guadalcanal. All good Americans served. Anyone who dodged the draft is a no-good Commie traitor and not worthy to carry a badge. You have brought disgrace to the department. The chief himself has been told of what we found in your diary. He ordered this investigation. We only had a little time to search your apartment. God knows what other Commie degeneracy we would have found, if we had had more time. You have two choices: resign, or face departmental trial on charges of moral turpitude. If you don’t resign, we will take your diary to the feds. Draft-
dodging is a federal offense.”
Milner took a typed form out of his suit coat pocket. He placed it on the table along with a pen; then he and his partner walked out of the room.
I stared at the resignation form. The print blurred before my eyes. Tears welled in them, and I willed the effort to stanch their flow. It took a minute, but they stopped before they could burst out of me. I walked to the window and looked out. I marked the time and committed the scene to memory, then took off my shoulder holster and laid it on the table. I placed my badge next to it and signed away my access to the wonder.
* * *
—
Camera-wielding reporters were stationed in front of my apartment as I turned onto my block. I couldn’t face them, so I drove around the corner and cut through the alley, then parked and hopped fences, entering my apartment through the back door. I filled a suitcase with clean clothes, hitched Night Train to his leash and walked back out to the alley and around the block to my car.
I drove north, with no destination in mind. Night Train chewed golf balls in the back seat. It was easy not to think of my future; I didn’t have one.
Hugging the coast road reminded me of my recent jaunt with Lorna, which suddenly brought the future back to me in a blinding rush of schemes and contingencies.
I looked at the telephone poles lining the Pacific Coast Highway and contemplated sweet, instant oblivion. When the tall wooden spires began to look like the ultimate scheme, I let out a muffled, dry sob and swung my Buick inland through some insignificant dirt canyon trail, moving upward through green scrub country until I came down forty-five minutes later in the San Fernando Valley.
I headed north again, catching the ridge route in Chatsworth and moving up it toward the Grapevine and Bakersfield. I wanted to find someplace barren and bereft of beauty, a good flat place to walk my dog and arrive at decisions without the distractions of picturesque surroundings.
* * *
—
Bakersfield wasn’t the place. At three thirty p.m., the temperature was still close to one hundred degrees. I stopped at a diner and ordered a Coke. The Coke cost a nickel and the ice that accompanied it a quarter. The counterman was giving me the fisheye. He handed me my Coke in a paper cup and opened his mouth to speak. I didn’t let him; I slammed some change on the counter top and walked quickly back to my car.
Some hundred and fifty miles north of Bakersfield, I realized I was entering Steinbeck country, and I almost sighed with relief. Here was a place to light, filled with the nuances and epiphanies of my carefree college reading days.
But it didn’t happen. My mind took over and I knew that being surrounded by verdant farmland and picaresque, hard-drinking Mexicans would bring back the wonder full force, along with a barrage of guilt, shame, self-loathing, and fear that spelled only one thing: it is over.
I pulled to the edge of the roadside. I let Night Train out and he ran ahead of me into a seemingly endless sea of furrowed irrigation trenches. I walked behind him, listening to his happy bays. We walked and walked and walked, kicking up dust clouds that soon covered my trouser legs with a rich, dark brown soil. I walked all the way into a spot where the world seemed eclipsed in all directions. All my horizons were a deep dark brownness.
I sat down in the dirt. Night Train barked at me. I scooped up a handful of soil and let it slip through my fingers. I smelled my hands. They smelt of feces and infinity.
Suddenly the irrigation pipes that surrounded me broke into life, spraying me with water. I got up reflexively and started running in the direction of my car. Night Train did too, quickly passing me. Some unseen timing device was at work, and the sprinklers kept popping on in perfect succession, right behind me. I ran and I ran and I ran, barely staying ahead of the ten-foot-high geysers of water. Exhausted, I came to a halt at the edge of the blacktop, trying to catch my breath. Night Train barked happily, his chest heaving also. My shoes, socks, and trouser legs were soaking wet and smelled of manure. I got clean clothes out of the suitcase in the back seat, and changed right there on the roadway.
By the time I had finished dressing and had regained my breath, an eerie stillness had come over me. It held me there and wouldn’t let me move or think. After a few moments I started to weep. I wept and I wept and I wept, standing there on the dusty roadside, my hands braced against the hood of my car. Finally my sobbing stopped, as abruptly as the stillness had begun. I took my hands from the car and stood upright as tenuously as a baby taking his first steps.
* * *
—
It took me a solid four hours of lead-footed driving to make it back to Los Angeles. After dropping Night Train with my mystified landlady, I drove to Lorna’s apartment.
I could hear her radio blaring from the living room window as I pulled to the curb. Her electrically operated front door was propped open with a stack of telephone books. She had left the light on in the stairway, and I could see the glow of candlelight illuminating her living room at the top of the stairs.
I cleared my throat repeatedly to prepare her for my coming as I took the stairs slowly, one at a time. Lorna was lying on her floral-patterned couch, with one arm dangling over the side holding a wineglass. The light from candles placed strategically throughout the room on lamp tables, bookshelves, and windowsills encased her in an amber glow.
“Hello, Freddy,” she said as I entered the room.
“Hello, Lor,” I returned. I pulled an ottoman up alongside the sofa.
Lorna sipped her wine. “What will you do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Who told you?”
“The four-star edition of the L.A. Examiner. ‘Underhill Resigns in Wake of False Arrests Suits. Communist Ties Cited.’ Do you want me to read you the whole thing?”
I reached for her arm, but she pulled it away. “I’m sorry for yesterday, Lorna, really.”
“For my office door?”
“No, for what I said to you.”
“Was it the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t apologize for it.”
Lorna’s face was an iron mask in the candlelight. Her expression was expressionless, and I couldn’t decipher her feelings. “What are you going to do, Freddy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll paint my car red. Maybe I’ll dye my hair red, too. Maybe I’ll enlist in the North Korean Army. I’ve never done anything half-assed in my life, so why be a half-assed Commie?”
Lorna lit a cigarette. The smoke she exhaled cast her in a second halo within the amber light. Her mask was starting to drop. She was starting to get angry, and that gave me heart. I threw out a line calculated to compound that anger. “The wonder got me, I guess.”
“No!” Lorna spat out. “No, you bastard. The wonder didn’t get you; you got you! Don’t you know that?”
“Yes, I do. And do you know the only thing I’m sorry for?”
“Eddie Engels and Margaret Cadwallader?”
“The hell with them. They’re dead. I’m only sorry I took you with me.”
Lorna laughed. “Don’t be sorry. I fell for circumstantial evidence and the brightest, brashest, handsomest man I’d ever met. What will you do now, Freddy?”
I took Lorna’s hand, holding it tightly so she couldn’t withdraw it. “I don’t know. What will you do?”
Lorna wrenched her hand free and began twisting her head sideways, banging it back and forth violently on the couch. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, for Christ’s fucking sake, I don’t know!”
“Will you stay with the D.A.’s office?”
Lorna shook her head again. “No. I can’t. I mean, I could if I wanted to, but I can’t. I can’t go on with justice and cops and criminal law. When you called me and told me Engels confessed, I went straight to the D.A. Maybe I gushed about you, I don’t know, but he had my number, and when Canf
ield brought Winton to see him and we talked afterward, I knew that I was through in the office. With Engels dead, it’s final. I don’t even want to be there now. Freddy, will you try to get another policeman’s job?”
The naive question was a challenge. I shook my head. “Not unless it’s in Russia. Maybe I could be a deputy commissar in Leningrad, something like that. Write parking tickets for bobsleds in Siberia.”
Lorna stroked my hair: “What do you want, Freddy?”
“I want you. That’s all I know. Will you marry me?”
Lorna smiled in the candlelight. “Yes,” she said.
* * *
—
We decided not to lose our momentum. Lorna hurriedly packed a suitcase while I put the top up on the car. We left immediately for the border, cracking jokes and singing along with the radio and playing grab-ass as we highballed it south on Route 5.
Coming into San Diego, Lorna started to cry as the realization hit her that she had lost her secure old life and had gained an uncertain new one. I held her tightly with one arm and continued driving. We crossed the border into Mexico at three in the morning.
We found an all-night wedding chapel on Revolución, the main drag of Tijuana. A fat, smiling Mexican priest married us, took the ten-dollar wedding fee and typed our marriage license, assuring us all the while that it was lawful and binding before man and God.
We drove through the impoverished Tijuana streets until we spotted a hotel that looked clean enough to spend our wedding night in.
I paid for three days in advance and carried our bags to a rickety elevator that took us up to the top floor. Our room was simple: clean, polished wood floors; clean, threadbare carpeting; a clean bathroom; and a big clean double bed.