The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  The last chapter was titled "Why?" Larry had read that part all the way through. Every rumor and half-baked theory Patricia Pike had heard while in town, she'd included, worded to make it sound like she'd done thinking no one else ever had.

  Wayne was in debt. Wayne was jealous because maybe Jenny was sleeping around. Wayne had been seeing a doctor about migraines. Wayne was a man who had never matured past childhood. Wayne lived in a fantasy world inhabited by the perfect family he could never have. Once again the reluctance of the sheriff's department and the townspeople to discuss their nightmares freely hinders us from understanding a man like Wayne Sullivan, from preventing others from killing as he has killed, from beginning the healing and closure this community so badly needs.

  Larry had tossed his copy in a drawer and hoped everyone else would do the same.

  But then the book was a success—all Patricia Pike's books were. And not long after that, the lunatics had started to come out to the house. And then, today, Larry had gotten a call from the mayor.

  You're not going to like this, the mayor said.

  Larry hadn't. The mayor told him a cable channel wanted to film a documentary based on the book. They were sending out a camera crew at the end of the month, near Christmastime—for authenticity's sake. They wanted to film in the house, and of course they wanted to talk to everybody all over again, Larry first and foremost.

  Larry took a bottle of whiskey from underneath the front seat of the cruiser, and watching the Sullivan house through the windshield, he unscrewed the cap and drank a swallow. His eyes watered, but he got it down and drank another. The booze spread in his throat and belly, made him want to sit very still behind the wheel, to keep drinking. Most nights he would. But instead he opened the door and climbed out of the cruiser.

  The meadow and the house were mostly blocked from the wind, but the air had a bite to it all the same. He hunched his shoulders, then opened up the trunk and took out one of the gas cans he'd filled up at the station and a few rolls of newspaper. He walked up to the open doorway of the house, his head ducked, careful with his feet in the shadows and the grass.

  He smelled the house's insides even before he stepped onto the porch—a smell like the underside of a wet log. He clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the doorway, across the splotched and crumbling walls. He stepped inside. Something living scuttled immediately out of the way: a raccoon or a possum. Maybe even a fox. Wayne had once told him the woods were full of them, but in all the times Larry had been out here, he'd never seen any.

  He glanced over the walls. Some new graffiti had appeared: KILL 'EM ALL was spray-painted on the wall where, once, the Christmas tree had leaned. The older messages were still in place. One read, HEY WAYNE, DO MY HOUSE NEXT. Beside a ragged, spackled-over depression in the same wall, someone had painted an arrow and the word BRAINS. Smaller messages were written in marker—the sorts of things high school kids write: initials, graduation years, witless sex puns, pictures of genitalia. And —sitting right there in the corner—was a copy of All Through the House, its pages swollen with moisture.

  Larry rubbed his temple. The book was as good a place to start as any.

  He kicked the book to the center of the living room floor and then splashed it with gas. Nearby was a crevice where the carpet had torn and separated. He rolled the newspapers up and wedged them underneath the carpet, then doused them too. Then he drizzled gasoline in a line from both the book and the papers to the front door. From the edge of the stoop, he tossed arcs of gas onto the door and the jamb until the can was empty.

  He stood on the porch, smelling the gas and gasping —he was horribly out of shape. His head was throbbing. He squeezed the lighter in his hand until the pain subsided.

  Larry was not much for religion, but he tried a prayer anyway: Lord, keep them. I know you have been. And please let this work. But the prayer sounded pitiful in his head, so he stopped it.

  He flicked the lighter under a clump of newspaper and, once that had bloomed, touched it to the base of the door.

  The fire took the door right away and flickered in a curling line across the carpet to the book and the papers. He could see them burning through the doorway, before thick gray smoke obscured his view. After a few minutes the flames began to gutter. He wasn't much of an arsonist—it was wet in there. He retrieved the other gas can from the trunk and shoved a rolled-up cone of newspaper into the nozzle. He made sure he had a clear throw and then lit the paper and heaved the can inside the house. It exploded right away, with a thump, and orange light bloomed up one of the inside walls. Outside, the flames from the door flared, steadied, then began to climb upward to the siding.

  Larry went back to the cruiser and pulled the bottle of whiskey from beneath his seat. He drank from it and thought about Jenny, and then about camping in the meadow as a boy, with Wayne.

  Larry had seen this house being built; he'd seen it lived in and died in. He had guessed he might feel a certain joy watching it destroyed, but instead his throat caught. Somewhere down the line, this had gotten to be his house. He'd thought that for a while now: The township owned the Sullivan house, but really, Wayne had passed it on to him.

  An image of himself drifted into his head— it had come a few times tonight. He saw himself walking into the burning house, climbing up the stairs. In his head he did this without pain, even while fire found his clothing, the bullets in his gun. He would sit upstairs in Jenny's sewing room and close his eyes, and it wouldn't take long.

  He sniffled and pinched his nose. That was horseshit. He'd seen people who'd been burned to death. He'd die, all right, but he'd go screaming and flailing. At the thought of it, his arms and legs grew heavy; his skin prickled.

  Larry put the cruiser in reverse and backed it slowly away from the house, out of the drive, and onto the track. He watched for ten minutes as the fire grew and tried not to think about anything, to see only the flames. Then he got the call from dispatch.

  Sheriff?

  Copy, he said.

  Ned called in. He says it looks like there's a fire out at the Sullivan place.

  A fire?

  That's what he said. He sees a fire in the woods.

  My my my, Larry said. I'm on old 52 just past Mackey. I'll get out there quick as I can and take a look.

  He waited another ten minutes. Flames shot out around the boards on the windows. The downstairs ceiling caught. Long shadows shifted through the trees; the woods came alive, swaying and dancing. Something alive and aflame shot out the front door—a rabbit? It zigged and zagged across the turnaround and then headed toward him. For a moment Larry thought it had shot under his car, and he put his hand on the door handle—but whatever it was cut away for the woods to his right. He saw it come to rest in a patch of scrub; smoke rose from the bush in wisps.

  Dispatch? Larry said.

  Copy.

  I'm at the Sullivan house. It's on fire, all right. Better get the trucks out here.

  Twenty minutes later two fire trucks arrived, advancing carefully down the track. The men got out and stood beside Larry, looking over the house, now brightly ablaze from top to bottom. They rolled the trucks past Larry's cruiser and sprayed the grass around the house and the trees nearby. Then all of them watched the house burn and crumble into its foundation, and no one said much of anything.

  Larry left them to the rubble just before dawn. He went home and tried to wash the smell of smoke out of his hair and then lay down next to Emily, who didn't stir. He lay awake for a while, trying to convince himself he'd actually done it, and then trying to convince himself he hadn't.

  When he finally slept he saw the house on fire, except that in his dream there were people still in it: Jenny Sullivan in the upstairs window, holding her youngest boy to her and shouting Larry's name, screaming it, while Larry sat in his car, tugging at the handle, unable even to shout back to her, to tell her it was locked.

  1985

  Patricia Pike had known from the start that Sheriff
Thompkins was reluctant to work with her. Now, riding in his cruiser with him down empty back roads to the Sullivan house, she wondered if what she'd thought was reticence was actual anger. Thompkins had been civil enough when she spoke with him on the phone a month before, but since meeting him this morning in his small, cluttered office—she'd seen janitors with better quarters — he'd been scowling, sullen, rarely bothering to look her in the eye.

  She was used to this treatment from policemen. A lot of them had read her books, two of which had uncovered information the police hadn't found themselves. Her second book— On a Darkling Plain —had overturned a conviction. Policemen hated being shown up, even the best of them, and she suspected from the look of Thompkins's office that he didn't operate on the cutting edge of law enforcement.

  Thompkins was tall and hunched, perhaps muscular once but going now to fat, with a gray cop's mustache and a single thick fold under his chin. He was only forty—two years younger than she was—but he looked much older. He kept a wedding photo on his desk; in it he had the broad-shouldered, thick-necked look of an offensive lineman. Unsurprising, this; a lot of country cops she spoke to had played football. His wife was a little ghost of a woman, dark-eyed, smiling what Patricia suspected was one of her last big smiles.

  Patricia had asked Thompkins a few questions in his office, chatty ones designed to put him at ease. She'd also flirted a little; she was good-looking, and sometimes that worked. But even then Thompkins answered in clipped sentences, in the sort of language police fell back on in their reports. He looked often at his watch, but she wasn't fooled. Kinslow, Indiana, had only six hundred residents, and Thompkins wasn't about to convince her he was a busy man.

  Thompkins drove along the interminable gravel roads to the Sullivan woods with one hand on the wheel and the other brushing the corners of his mustache. Finally she couldn't stand it.

  Do I make you uncomfortable, Sheriff?

  He widened his eyes, and he shifted his shoulders then coughed. He said, Well, I'll be honest. I guess I'd rather not do this.

  I can't imagine you would, she said. Best to give him the sympathy he so desperately wanted.

  If the mayor wasn't such a fan of yours, I wouldn't be out here.

  She smiled at him, just a little. She said, I've talked to Wayne's parents; I know you were close to Wayne and Jenny. It can't be easy to do this.

  No, ma'am. That it is not.

  Thompkins turned the cruiser onto a smaller paved road. On either side of them was nothing but fields, empty and stubbled with old broken cornstalks and blocky stands of woods so monochrome they could be pencil drawings.

  Patricia asked, You all went to high school together, didn't you?

  Abington, Class of '64. Jenny was a year behind me and Wayne.

  Did you become friends in high school?

  That's when I got to know Jenny. Wayne and I knew each other since we were little. Our mothers taught together at the middle school.

  Thompkins glanced at Patricia. You know all this already. You drawing out the witness?

  She smiled, genuinely grateful. So he had a brain in there after all. It seems I have to, she said.

  He sighed— a big man's sigh, long and weary—and said, I have nothing against you personally, Ms. Pike. But I don't like the kind of books you write, and I don't like coming out here.

  I do appreciate your help. I know it's hard.

  Why this case? he asked her. Why us?

  She tried to think of the right words, nothing that would offend him.

  Well, I suppose I was just drawn to it. My agent sends me clippings about cases, things she thinks I might want to write about. The murders were so ... brutal, and they happened on Christmas Eve. And since it happened in the country, it never made the news much; people don't know about it—not in the big cities, anyway. There's also kind of a—a fairy-tale quality to it, the house out in the middle of the forest—you know?

  Uh-huh, Thompkins said.

  And then there's the mystery of why. There's a certain type of case I specialize in—crimes with a component of unsolved mystery. I'm intrigued that Wayne didn't leave any notes. You're the only person he gave any information to, and even then—

  —He didn't say much.

  No. I know, I've read the transcript already. But that's my answer, I suppose: There's a lot to write about.

  Thompkins stroked his mustache and turned at a stop sign.

  They were to the right of an enormous tract of woods, much larger than the other stands nearby. Patricia had seen it growing on the horizon, almost like a rain cloud, and now, close up, she saw it was at least a mile square. The sheriff slowed and turned off the road, stopping in front of a low metal gate blocking a gravel track that dipped away from the road and into the bare trees. A NO TRESPASSING sign hung from the gate's center. It had been fired upon a number of times; some of the bullet holes had yet to rust. Thompkins said, Excuse me, and got out. He bent over a giant padlock and then swung the gate inward. He got back behind the wheel, drove the cruiser through without shutting his door, then clambered out again and locked the gate behind them.

  Keeps the kids out, he told her, shifting the cruiser into gear. Means the only way in is on foot. A lot of them won't walk it, least when it's cold like this.

  This is a big woods.

  Probably the biggest between Indy and Lafayette. Course no one's ever measured, but that's—that's what Wayne always told me.

  Patricia watched his mouth droop when he said this, caught his drop in volume.

  The car curved right, then left. The world they were in was almost a sepia-toned old film: bare winter branches, patches of old snow on the ground, pools of black muck. Patricia had grown up in Chicago, had relatives on a farm downstate. She knew what a tangle those woods would be. What a curious place for a house. She opened her notebook and wrote in shorthand.

  This land belongs to Wayne's family? she asked.

  It used to. Township owns it now. Wayne had put the land up as collateral for the house, and then when he died, his folks didn't pay on the loan. I don't blame them for that. The town might sell it someday, but no one really wants farmland anymore. None of the farmers around here can afford to develop it. An ag company would have to buy it. In the meantime I keep an eye on the place.

  Thompkins slowed and the car jounced into and out of a deep rut. He said, Me, I'd like to see the whole thing plowed under. But I don't make those choices.

  She wrote his words down.

  They rounded a last bend in the track, and there in front of them was a meadow, and in the center of it the Sullivan house. Patricia had seen pictures of it, but here in person it was much smaller than she'd imagined. She pulled her camera out of her bag.

  It's ugly, she said.

  That's the truth, Thompkins said, and put the car into park.

  The house was a two-story of some indeterminate style—closer to a Cape Cod than anything else. The roof was pitched but seemed ...too small, too flat for the rest of the house. The face suggested by its windows and front door— flanked by faux half-columns—was that of a mongoloid: all chin and mouth, and no forehead. Or like a baby crying. It had been painted an olive color, and now the paint was flaking. The windows had been boarded over with sheets of plywood. The track continued around behind the house, where a two-car garage jutted off at right angles, too big in proportion to the house proper.

  Wayne drew up the plans, Thompkins said. He wanted to do it himself.

  What did Jenny think of it? Do you know?

  She joked about it. Not so Wayne could hear.

  Would he have been angry?

  No. Sad. He'd wanted a house out here since we were kids. He loved these woods.

  Thompkins undid his seatbelt. Then he said, I guess he knew the house was a mess, but he ... it's hard to say. We all pretended it was fine.

  Why?

  Some folks, you just want to protect their feelings. He wanted us all to be as excited as he was. It just wouldn't
have occurred to us to be ... blunt with him. You know that type of person? Kind of like a puppy?

  Yes.

  Well, Thompkins said, that was Wayne. You want to go in?

  The interior of the house was dark. Thompkins had brought two electric lanterns; he set one just inside the door and held the other in his hand. He walked inside and then motioned for Patricia to follow.

  The inside of the house stank—an old, abandoned smell of mildew and rot. The carpeting —what was left of it, anyway—seemed to be on the verge of becoming mud, or a kind of algae, and held the stink. Patricia had been in morgues and, for one of her books, had accompanied a homicide detective in Detroit to murder sites. She knew what death —dead human beings—smelled like. That smell might have been in the Sullivan house, underneath everything else, but she couldn't be sure. It ought to have been.

  Patricia could see no furniture. Ragged holes gaped in the ceilings where light fixtures might have been. Behind the sheriff was a staircase, rising up into darkness, and to the right of it an entrance into what seemed to be the kitchen.

  Shit, Thompkins said.

  What?

  He held the lantern close to a wall in the room to the right of the foyer. There was a spot on the wall, a ragged, spackled patch. Someone had spray-painted an arrow pointing at it, and the word BRAINS.

  Thompkins turned a circle with the lantern held out. He was looking down, and she followed his gaze. She saw cigarette butts, beer cans.

  Kids come in here from Abington, Thompkins said. I run them off every now and then. Sometimes it's adults, even. Have to come out and see for themselves, I guess. Already the kids say it's haunted.

  That happens in a lot of places, Patricia said.

  Huh, Thompkins said.

  She took photos of the rooms, the flashbulb's light dazzling in the dark.