The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  ***

  Three days later Mike Willard was buried with full military honors and a Marine Corps honor guard at Cavalry Hill Cemetery. I learned from his front-page obituary that his wife died five years earlier and he had a daughter who lived in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. I also learned that Mike had been in the Marines since he was seventeen, stationed in China in the 1930s and in the Pacific in the 1940s, island-hopping, fighting the Japanese. Then after occupation duty and a year in Korea, he pulled embassy duty until he retired. His nickname had been Golden Mike, for in all his years on active duty he'd never been wounded, never been shot or scratched by shrapnel. The newspaper said he'd come home early that day to dig out a magazine clipping to show some friends at the Legion Hall. To settle a bet.

  I kept the strongbox hidden in the attic. Despite the temptation and the worries and the urging, I didn't open it until that day in May after my college acceptance letter came, followed by a bill for the first year's tuition. Then I went up with a chisel and hammer and broke open the lock. The wads of money were in there, just as Brad had said, thick as my fist. They were buried under piles of fragile, yellowed letters, some newspaper and magazine clippings, and a few medals. The money was banded together by string, and in the dim light of the attic I wasn't sure of what I had. I bicycled over to Machias, to a coin shop, and the owner peered over his half-glasses and looked up at me, the money spread over his display case.

  "Interesting samples," he said. He wore a dark green sweater and his hair was white. "Where did you get them?"

  "From my uncle," I lied. "Can you tell me what they're worth?"

  "Hmm," he said, lifting the bills up to the light. "Nineteen thirties, it looks like. What you have here is Chinese money from that time, what old soldiers and sailors called LC, or local currency. It varied from province to province, and I'd say this is some of it."

  He put the bills back on the counter. "Practically worthless," he said. I thanked him and rode back to Boston Falls. That afternoon I burned some of the paper money along with my acceptance letter and tuition bill. I didn't go to college that fall and ended up never going at all.

  My ginger and Jameson is gone and I continue looking out at the stars, watching the moon rise over the hill, Cavalry Hill. And even though it's miles away, I imagine I can see the white stone markers up there, marking so many graves.

  In the end I stayed in Boston Falls and took a job at a bank. I worked a little and now I'm an assistant branch manager. Some years ago I married Carol, a teller I helped train, and now we're out of Boston Falls, in Machias. It's just over the line, but I get some satisfaction from getting that far.

  Upstairs I still have the old strongbox with some of the money, and though I don't look at it all that often I feel like I have to have something, something I can tell myself I got from that day we broke into Mike Willard's house. I have to have something to justify what we did, and what I did. Especially what I did.

  After running all that distance home, I stashed the strongbox in the attic, and as I came downstairs my parents came home. Dad patted me on the back and Mom started supper and I thought of the strongbox upstairs and the blood and the acrid smoke and Mike Willard on his back and Brad holding on to his neck like that. I knew no one had seen me. Mom offered me some lemonade and I took it and went to the living room and watched television with my dad, cheering on the Red Sox as they beat the Yankees—all the while waiting and waiting, until finally the sirens went by.

  Brad was buried about a hundred feet from Mike Willard a day later. On the day of his funeral, I said I was sick and stayed home, curled up in a ball on my bed, not thinking, not doing anything, just knowing that I had the box and the money.

  I put down my empty glass and open the back door, hoping the fresh air will clear my head so I can go back upstairs and try to sleep. Outside there's a slight breeze blowing in from Boston Falls, and like so many other nights I go down the porch steps and stand with my bare feet cool on the grass, the breeze on my face bringing with it the stench of the mills from Boston Falls. The smell always seems to stick in the back of my throat, and no matter how hard I try I can never get the taste of it out.

  SINCE I DON'T HAVE YOU

  1988: James Ellroy

  JAMES ELLROY (1948–) was born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles. When he was ten years old his mother was murdered; the killer was never apprehended. There were some similarities in the case to the famous murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, and both murders obsessed Ellroy for many years. He wrote a fictionalized version of the Betty Short murder, The Black Dahlia (1987), which became a New York Times bestseller, and a memoir of his fifteen-month search for his mother's killer, My Dark Places (1996). As a young man, Ellroy lived a life of petty crime, alcoholism, and drug use, cleaning up his act in the late 1970s to produce his first novel, Browns Requiem (1981); his second book, Clandestine (1982), was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. His first hardcover book, Blood on the Moon (1984), began the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy. The masterly Black Dahlia was the first novel in what Ellroy called the L.A. Quartet, which later included The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). Two of the books became big-budget movies. L.A. Confidential (1997), a critical and commercial success, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. The Black Dahlia (2006), on the other hand, was critically savaged, successfully warning potential audiences away.

  Although he later claimed a career change from crime novels to big, ambitious political books, his Underworld trilogy, which he described as "a secret history of America in the mid-to-late twentieth century"—American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood's a Rover (2009)—is heavily spiked with dark crimes and violence. Described as "the American Dostoevsky" by Joyce Carol Oates, Ellroy is arguably the most influential American crime writer of the late twentieth century; his powerful, relentlessly dark prose style of staccato sentences, infused with uniquely American slang that hammers the senses, has been emulated by any number of tough-writing young crime writers.

  "Since I Don't Have You" was first published in A Matter of Crime, volume 4 (1988). It served as the basis for an episode of Showtime's series Fallen Angels, airing on September 26, 1993.

  ***

  DURING THE POSTWAR years I served two masters—running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined L.A. at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures—the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen—rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster—I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off niggertown dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff's bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen Jr.—a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick's stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn't drag on the ground.

  Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me—Turner "Buzz" Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer; and keeper of the secret key to his masters' psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens—while I would go anywhere, anyplace—gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business—a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I'd pull a smart segue to keep kicking—and I write this memoir as
an old, old man—while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.

  Howard. Mickey. Me.

  Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call "conflict of interest." Of course, it was over a woman—and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I'm writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind—that I loved them—even though they were both world-class shitheels.

  ***

  January 15, 1949.

  It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case—still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman's death—he French-kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator—and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I'd been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Year's. The Mick's signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who'd fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I'd been having a good run: a half-dozen Midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard's fuck pads—strategically located apartments tucked all over L.A. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my Quonset-hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.

  "That you, Howard?"

  Howard Hughes sighed. "What happened to 'Security, may I help you?"

  "You're the only one calls this early, Boss."

  "And you're alone?"

  "Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What's up?"

  "Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour."

  "Right, Boss."

  "Two or three, Buzz? I'm hungry and having four."

  Howard was on his all-chilidog diet; Pink's Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse meat air-freighted up daily from Tijuana. "One kraut, no chili."

  "Heathen. Pink's chili is better than Chasen's."

  "I had a pony when I was a boy."

  "So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn't eat—"

  I said, "Half an hour," and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn't have to watch the fourth-richest man in America eat.

  ***

  Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the back seat of his limousine. He said, "You didn't really want it, did you?"

  I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. "No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style."

  Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing—a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. "Do you need money, Buzz?"

  I thought of Leotis Dineen. "Can niggers dance?"

  "They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening."

  Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard's comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. "Getting any, Boss?"

  Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the back seat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him—blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blond girl naked from the waist up. He handed it to me and said, "Gretchen Rae Shoftel, age nineteen. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, July 26, 1929. She was staying at the place on South Lucerne—the screening house. This is the woman, Buzz. I think I want to marry her. And she's gone—she flew the coop on the contract, me, all of it."

  I examined the picture. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was prodigiously lunged—no surprise—with a blond pageboy and smarts in her eyes, like she knew Mr. Hughes's two-second screen test was strictly an audition for the sack and an occasional one-liner in some RKO turkey. "Who found her for you, Boss? It wasn't me—I'd have remembered."

  Howard belched again—my hijacked sauerkraut this time. "I got the picture in the mail at the studio, along with an offer—a thousand dollars cash to a PO box in exchange for the girl's address. I did it, and met Gretchen Rae at her hotel downtown. She told me she posed for some dirty old man back in Milwaukee, that he must have pulled the routine for the thousand. Gretchen Rae and I got to be friends, and, well..."

  "And you'll give me a bonus to find her?"

  "A thousand, Buzz. Cash, off the payroll."

  My debt to Leotis Dineen was eight hundred and change; I could get clean and get even on minor-league baseball—the San Diego Seals were starting their preseason games next week. "It's a deal. What else have you got on the girl?"

  "She was carhopping at Scrivner's Drive-in. I know that."

  "Friends, known associates, relatives here in L.A.?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  I took a deep breath to let Howard know a tricky question was coming. "Boss, you think maybe this girl is working an angle on you? I mean, the picture out of nowhere, the thousand to a PO box?"

  Howard Hughes harrumphed. "It had to be that piece in Confidential, the one that alleged my talent scouts take topless photographs and that I like my women endowed."

  "Alleged, Boss?"

  "I'm practicing coming off as irate in case I sue Confidential somewhere down the line. You'll get on this right away?"

  "Rápidamente."

  "Outstanding. And don't forget Sid Weinberg's party tomorrow night. He's got a new horror picture coming out from the studio, and I need you there to keep the autograph hounds from going crazy. Eight, Sid's house."

  "I'll be there."

  "Find Gretchen Rae, Buzz. She's special."

  Howard's one saving grace with females is that he keeps falling in love with them—albeit only after viewing Brownie snaps of their lungs. It more or less keeps him busy between crashing airplanes and designing airplanes that don't fly.

  "Right, Boss."

  The limousine's phone rang. Howard picked it up, listened, and murmured, "Yes. Yes, I'll tell him." Hanging up, he said, "The switchboard at the plant. Mickey Cohen wants to see you. Make it brief, you're on my time now."

  "Yes, sir."

  It was Howard who introduced me to Mickey, right before I got wounded in a dope shootout and took my LAPD pension. I still give him a hand with his drug dealings—unofficial liaison to Narcotics Division, point man for the Narco dicks who skim x number of grams off every ounce of junk confiscated. The LAPD has got an unofficial heroin policy: it is to be sold only to coloreds, only east of Alvarado and south of Jefferson. I don't think it should be sold anywhere, but as long as it is, I want the 5 percent. I test the shit with a chem kit I stole from the crime lab—no poor hophead is going to croak from a Mickey Cohen bindle bootjacked by Turner "Buzz" Meeks. Dubious morality: I sleep well 90 percent of the time and lay my bet action off with shine bookies, the old exploiter washing the hand that feeds him. Money was right at the top of my brain as I drove to Mickey's haberdashery on the Strip. I always need cash, and the Mick never calls unless it is in the offing.

  I found the man in his back room, surrounded by sycophants and muscle: Johnny Stompanato, guinea spit curl dangling over his handsome face—he of the long-term crush on Lana Turner; Davey Gold-man, Mickey's chief yes-m an and the author of his nightclub shticks; and a diffident-looking little guy I recognized as Morris Hornbeck—an accountant and former trigger for Jerry Katzenbach's mob in Milwaukee. Shaking hands and pulling up a chair, I got ready to make my pitch: You pay me now; I do my job a
fter I run a hot little errand for Howard. I opened my mouth to speak, but Mickey beat me to it. "I want you to find a woman for me."

  I was about to say "What a coincidence," when Johnny Stomp handed me a snapshot. "Nice gash. Not Lana Turner quality, but USDA choice tail nonetheless."

  Of course, you see it coming. The photo was a nightspot job: compliments of Preston Sturges's Players Club, Gretchen Rae Shoftel blinking against flashbulb glare, dairy-state pulchritude in a tight black dress. Mickey Cohen was draping an arm around her shoulders, aglow with love. I swallowed to keep my voice steady. "Where was the wife, Mick? Off on one of her Hadassah junkets?"

  Mickey grunted. "'Israel, the New Homeland' Ten-day tour with her mahjong club. While the cat is away, the mice will play. Va-va-va-voom. Find her, Buzzchik. A grand."

  I got obstreperous, my usual reaction to being scared. "Two grand, or go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut."

  Mickey scowled and went into a slow burn; I watched Johnny Stomp savor my bravado, Davey Goldman write down the line for his boss's shticks, and Morris Hornbeck do queasy double takes like he wasn't copacetic with the play. When the Mick's burn stretched to close to a minute, I said, "Silence implies consent. Tell me all you know about the girl, and I'll take it from there."

  Mickey Cohen smiled at me—his coming-from-hunger minion. "Goyische shitheel. For a twosky I want satisfaction guaranteed within forty-eight hours."

  I already had the money laid off on baseball, the fights, and three-horse parlays. "Forty-seven and change. Go."

  Mickey eyed his boys as he spoke—probably because he was pissed at me and needed a quick intimidation fix. Davey and Johnny Stomp looked away; Morris Hornbeck just twitched, like he was trying to quash a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. "Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I met her at Scrivner's Drive-in two weeks ago. She told me she's fresh out of the Minnesota sticks, someplace like that. She—"