by James Ellroy
The somber-voiced announcer called on all concerned citizens “who might be able to help the police” to call the detective bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. A phone number was flashed across the bottom of the screen for a few brief seconds, before the announcer started a used-car commercial. I turned the TV off.
I started collecting all the newspaper articles I could find about the murder. By Tuesday the Harris murder had been relegated to the third page. From the Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1955:
LAST HOURS OF DEAD NURSE RECONSTRUCTED
LOS ANGELES, June 24—Marcella Harris, who was found strangled in El Monte Sunday morning, was last seen alive in a cocktail lounge on nearby Valley Boulevard. Police revealed today that eyewitnesses placed the attractive redheaded nurse at Hank’s Hot Spot, a bar at 18391 Valley Boulevard in South El Monte, between the hours of 8:00 and 11:30 Saturday night. She left alone, but was seen huddling in conversation with a dark-haired man in his forties and a blond woman in her late twenties. Police artists are now at work assembling composite drawings of the pair, who at this time are the only suspects in the grisly strangulation murder.
Father and Son Together
“Michael will always bear the scars, of that I am sure,” William “Doc” Harris, a handsome man in his late fifties, said yesterday. “But I know that I can make up for the love he has lost in losing his mother.” Harris ruffled his nine-year-old son’s hair fondly. Michael, a tall, bespectacled youngster, said, “I just hope the police get the guy who killed my mom.”
It was a peaceful but sad scene at the Harris apartment on Beverly Boulevard. Sad because police are powerless in dealing with the grief of a motherless nine-year-old boy. El Monte police spokesman Sergeant A. O. Wisenhunt said, “We’re doing everything within our power to track down the killer. We have no idea where Mrs. Harris was killed, but we figure that it had to be in the El Monte area. The coroner places the time of her death at between 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., and the Scouts found her at 7:30 a.m. We have detectives and uniformed officers out circulating composite drawings of the two people Mrs. Harris was last seen talking to. We have to be patient—only diligent police work will crack this case.”
Half of me felt crazy for even following newspaper accounts of this “case,” but the other half of me screamed inside when the words “cocktail lounge” jumped out at me from the printed page. I hemmed and hawed, and pounded myself internally for several hours, until I realized there would never be a moment’s peace until I gave it a whirl. Then I picked up the phone and called Sergeant Reuben Ramos at Rampart Division.
“Reuben, this is Fred Underhill.”
“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, where the hell have you been?”
“Away.”
“That’s for sure, man. Jesus Christ, did you get fucked! What happened? I heard tons of rumors, but nothing that sounded like the straight dope.”
I sighed. I hadn’t counted on recalling the past to a former colleague. “I got the wrong man, Rube, and the department had to make me look bad to take the onus off them. That’s it.”
Reuben didn’t buy it. “I’ll settle for that, man,” he said skeptically, “but what’s up? You need a favor, right?”
“Right. I need you to run someone through R&I for me.”
Reuben sighed. “You got some amateur gig going?”
“Kind of. Are you ready?”
“Hit me.”
“Marcella Harris, white female, forty-three years old.”
“Isn’t she that dead dame from—”
“Yeah,” I cut in. “Can you run her and get back to me as soon as possible?”
“You crazy fuck,” Reuben said as he hung up.
* * *
—
The telephone rang forty-five minutes later, and I leaped at it, catching it on the first ring.
“Fred? Reuben. Grab a pencil.”
I had one ready. “Hit it, Rube.”
“Okay. Marcella Harris. Maiden name DeVries. Born Tunnel City, Wisconsin, April 15, 1912. Green and red, five feet seven inches, one hundred forty. Nurse, U.S. Navy 1941 to 1946, discharged as a Wave lieutenant commander. Pretty impressive, huh? Now dig this: arrested in ’48, possession of marijuana. Dismissed. Arrested in ’50 on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. Dismissed. Arrested for drunk twice in ’46, once in ’47, three times in ’48, once in ’49 and ’50. Nice, huh?”
I whistled. “Yeah. Interesting.”
“What are you planning on doing with this information, man?”
“I don’t know, Rube.”
“You be careful, Freddy. That’s all I’m gonna say. Some bimbo gets choked in El Monte, and well…Freddy, it’s got nothing to do with the other. That’s dead history, man.”
“Probably.”
“You be careful. You ain’t a cop no more.”
“Thanks, Rube,” I said, and hung up.
The following morning I got up early, put on a summer suit and drove out to El Monte, taking the Santa Monica Freeway to the Pomona, headed east.
I went from smog-shrouded L.A. past picturesque, seedy Boyle Heights and a succession of dreary semi-impoverished suburbs, growing more expectant as each new postwar boom community flew by. This was new territory for me, well within the confines of L.A. County, yet somehow otherworldly. The residential streets I glimpsed from my elevated vantage point seemed sullen in their sameness, the big boom in postwar disappointment and malaise.
El Monte was smack in the middle of the San Gabriel Valley, enclosed by freeways in all directions. The San Gabriel Mountains, awash in smog, bordered the northern perimeter.
I got off at the Valley Boulevard exit and cruised west until I found Hank’s Hot Spot, described by the papers as a “convivial watering hole.” It didn’t look like that; it looked like what it more probably was: a meeting place for lonely juiceheads.
I pulled up to the curb. The place was open at eight thirty in the morning. That was encouraging. It went along with the scenario I was composing in my mind: Maggie Cadwallader and Marcella Harris, lonely juiceheads. I kiboshed the thought: don’t think, Underhill, I said to myself as I locked the car, or this thing—which is probably only coincidence—will eat you up.
I hastily prepared a cover story as I took a seat at the narrow, imitation-wood bar. The place was deserted, and a lone bartender who was polishing glasses as I entered approached me guardedly. He nodded at me as he placed a napkin on the bar.
“Draft beer,” I said.
He nodded again and brought it to me. I sipped it. It tasted bitter; I wasn’t cut out to be a morning drinker.
I decided not to waste time with small talk. “I’m a reporter,” I said. “I write crime stuff laced with the human interest angle. There’s a double sawbuck in it for anybody who can give me some interesting lowdown on this Marcella Harris dame who got croaked last weekend.” I pulled out my billfold, packed with twenties, and fanned the cash in the bartender’s face. He looked impressed. “The real lowdown,” I added, waggling my eyebrows at him. “The barfly tidbits that make bartending such an interesting profession.”
The barman swallowed, his Adam’s apple rotating nervously in his wiry neck. “I already told the cops everything I know about that night,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said, taking a twenty out of my billfold and placing it under my cocktail napkin.
“Well,” the barman said, “the Harris dame came in around seven thirty that night. She ordered a double Early Times old-fashioned. She practically chugalugged it. She ordered another. She sat here at the bar by herself. She played some show tunes on the jukebox. Around eight thirty this greasy-lookin’ guy and this blond dame with a ponytail come in. They get in some kind of conversation with the Harris dame and they all go to a booth together. The guy drinks red wine and the ponytail drinks Seven-Up. The Harris dame left before them, around eleven.
The greasy guy and the ponytail left together around midnight. That’s it.”
I fingered an inch or so of the twenty out from its hiding place. “Do you think Marcella Harris already knew these people, or do you think they just met one another?”
The barman shook his head. “The cops asked me the same thing, buddy, and it beats me.”
I tried another tack: “Was Marcella Harris a regular here?”
“Not really. She came in once in a while.”
“Was she a pickup? Did she leave with a lot of different men?”
“Not that I ever noticed.”
“Okay. Was she a talker?”
“Not really.”
“Did you ever talk with her at length?”
“Sometimes. I don’t know, once or twice.”
“I see. What did you discuss?”
“Just small talk. You know…”
“Besides that.”
“Well…once she asks me if I’ve got kids. I say yes. She asks me if I ever have trouble with ’em, and I say yeah, the usual stuff. Then she starts tellin’ me about this wild kid she’s got, how she don’t know how to handle him, that she’s read all these books and still don’t know what to do.”
“What was the problem with the kid?” I asked.
The bartender swallowed and shuffled his feet in a little dance of embarrassment. “Aw, come on, mister,” he said.
“No, you come on.” I stuffed the twenty into his shirt pocket.
“Well,” he said, “she said the kid was gettin’ into fights, and talkin’ dirty…and…exposing himself to all the other little kids.”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell the police about this?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because they never asked me.”
“That’s a good reason,” I said, then thanked the man and walked back outside to my car.
I looked through the L.A. papers I had been collecting and found Marcella Harris’s home address in Monday’s Mirror: 467 Maple Avenue, El Monte. It took me only five minutes to get there.
I surveyed El Monte as I drove. The residential streets were unpaved, and the residences that fronted them were ugly cube-like apartment buildings interspersed with subdivided farmhouses and auto courts held over from the not too distant time when this was open country.
I parked on the dirt shoulder at the corner of Claymore and Maple. Number 467 was right there on the corner, directly across from my parking spot. Two small frame houses stood in a large front yard encircled by a shoulder-high stone wall. Both houses looked well cared for, and a beagle puppy cavorted in the yard.
I didn’t want to attempt the landlady—she had probably been frequently questioned by the police on her former tenant—so I just sat in the car and thought. Finally it hit me, and I dug a briefcase out of my trunk and went walking. School had recently let out for the summer, and the kids playing in their dirt front yards looked happy to be free. I waved to them as I walked down Maple, getting slightly suspicious looks in return. My crisp summer suit was obviously not standard El Monte garb.
Maple Avenue dead-ended a hundred yards or so in front of me, where a kids’ softball game was in progress. The kids probably knew the Harris boy, so I decided to brace them.
“Hi, fellows,” I said.
The game stopped abruptly as I walked through their makeshift infield. I got suspicious looks, hostile looks, and curious looks. There were six boys, all of them wearing white T-shirts and blue jeans. One of the boys, standing by home plate, threw the ball to first base. I dropped my briefcase, ran and made a daring leaping catch. I fumbled the ball on purpose and crashed to the pavement. I made a big show of getting to my feet. The kids surrounded me as I brushed off my trousers.
“I guess I’m not Ted Williams, fellows,” I said. “I must be getting old. I used to be a hotshot fielder.”
One of the boys grinned at me. “That was still a pretty swell try, mister,” he said.
“Thanks,” I returned. “Geeze, it’s hot out here. Dusty, too. You guys ever get the chance to go to the beach?”
The boys started jabbering all together: “Naw, but we got the municipal pool.” “The beach is too far and it’s full of beer cans. My dad took us once.” “We play baseball!” “I’m gonna pitch like Bob Lemon.” “Wanna see my fastball?”
“Whoa, whoa! Hold on there,” I said. “What about the Scouts? Don’t any of you guys go on field trips with them?” Quiet greeted my question. There was a general reacting of down-turned faces. I had hit a nerve.
“What’s the matter, fellows?”
“Aw, nothin’ really,” the tall first baseman said, “but my mom got real down on our troop for somethin’ that wasn’t even our fault.”
“Yeah.” “Yeah.” “What a crummy deal!” the other boys chimed in.
“What happened?” I asked innocently.
“Well,” a tall boy said, “it was our troop that found the dead lady.”
I tossed the battered softball into the air and caught it. “That’s a shame. You mean Mrs. Harris?”
“Yeah,” they all said practically at once.
I waded in cautiously, although I knew that the boys wanted to talk. “She lived here on this street, didn’t she?”
This brought forth a huge response: “Ooh! Yeah, you shoulda seen her, mister. All naked. Ooh!” “Yeachh, really sickening.” “Yeah, ugh.”
I tossed the ball to the quietest of the boys. “Did any of you boys know Mrs. Harris?” There was an embarrassed silence.
“My mom told me not to talk to strangers,” the quiet boy said.
“My dad told me not to say bad things about people,” the first baseman said.
I yawned, and feigned exasperation. “Well, I was just curious,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to you guys later. I’m the new baseball coach at Arroyo High. You guys look pretty good to me. In a few years you’ll probably be my starting lineup.” I pretended to leave.
It was the perfect thing to say, and it was followed by a big volley of excited “oohs” and “aahs.”
“What’s so bad about Mrs. Harris?” I asked the first baseman.
He stared at his feet, then looked up at me with confused blue eyes. “My dad says he saw her a whole bunch of times down at Medina Court. He said no good woman would have anything to do with a place like that. He said that she was an unfit mother, that that was why Michael acted so strange.” The boy backed away from me, as if the specter of his father was right there with us.
“Hold on, partner,” I said, “I’m new in this territory. What’s so bad about Medina Court? And what’s wrong with Michael? He sounded like a pretty good kid from what I read in the papers.”
A redheaded boy clutching a catcher’s mitt answered me frankly. “Medina Court is Mex Town. Wetbacks—mean ones. My dad says never, ever, ever go there, that they hate white people. It’s dangerous there.”
“My dad delivers the mail on Medina,” the first baseman said. “He said he’s seen Mrs. Harris do nasty things there.”
A chill went over me. “What about Michael?” I asked.
No one answered. My expression and manner must have changed somehow, alerting some sixth sense in the youthful ballplayers.
“I gotta go,” the quiet boy said.
“Me, too,” another one piped in.
Before I knew it they were all running off down Maple Avenue, casting furtive glances at me over their shoulders. They all seemed to disappear into dusty front yards just moments later, leaving me standing in the street wondering what the hell had happened.
* * *
—
Medina Court was only one block long.
A tarnished brass plaque inlaid in the cracked sidewalk at the e
ntrance to it said why: the street and the four-story tenements that dominated it had been constructed for the housing of Chinese railroad workers in 1885.
I parked my car on the dirt shoulder of Peck Road—the only access lane to Medina Court—and looked around. The buildings, obviously once painted white, were now as grayish-brown as the plague of smog that stifled the summer air. A half dozen had burned down, and the charred detritus of the fires had never been removed. Mexican women and children sat on the front steps of their peeling, sunbaked dwellings, seeking respite from what must have been oven-like interiors.
Garbage covered the dusty street through Medina Court and prewar jalopies lay dead along both sides of it. Mariachi music poured forth from inside some of the tenements, competing with high-pitched Spanish voices. An emaciated dog hobbled by me, giving me a cursory growl and a hungry look. The poverty and meanness of Medina Court was overpowering.
I needed to find the mailman-father of the first baseman, so I started by checking out the entranceways of the tenements to see if the mail had been delivered. The mailbox layout was identical in all of the buildings—banks of metal mail slots, rows and rows of them, bearing poorly printed Spanish surnames and apartment numbers. I checked out three buildings on each side of the street, getting a lot of dirty looks in the process. The mailboxes were empty. I was in luck.
Medina Court dead-ended at a combination weed patch–auto graveyard where a throng of tattered but happy-looking Mexican kids were playing tag. I walked back to Peck Road feeling grateful that I didn’t live here.
* * *
—
I waited for three hours, watching the passing scene: old winos poking about in the rubble of the burned-out buildings, looking for shade to drink their short-dogs in; fat Mexican women chasing their screaming children down the street; a profusion of squabbles between men in T-shirts, filled with obscenities in English and Spanish; two fistfights; and a steady parade of pachucos tooling down the street in their hot rods.
At one o’clock, as the sun reached its stifling zenith and the temperature started to close in on one hundred degrees, a tired and dejected-looking mailman walked into Medina Court. My heart gave a little leap of joy—he was the very image of the blond first baseman. He walked into the “foyer” of the first tenement on the south side of the street, and I was waiting for him on the sidewalk when he walked back out.