by James Ellroy
More photographs. Constanza with Pierre Fournier and Alfred Cortot. Both men welcomed the Boche to France. Constanza wears a slit-legged gown. That’s Paris by night behind her.
We return to Deutschland now. Consider this photograph. Constanza warmly greets Adolf Hitler. Musik Maestra and furious Führer. Both evince delight.
Dudley stood by the desk. He noted the swastika paperweight. It was solid gold. He noted the blue leather diary.
It was locked. The clasp and keyhole were solid gold. The front cover was gold swastika–embossed.
Women as diarists. Intimate thoughts and deeds recorded. He recalled the late Joan Conville. She kept a diary.
He touched Constanza’s diary. He kissed the gold swastika and caught Constanza’s scent.
80
KAY LAKE’S DIARY
(LOS ANGELES, 9:00 A.M., 3/2/42)
“The rain, the gold, the fire. It’s all one story, you see.”
I knew Joan’s diary now. I had studied it to the point of memorization. She repeated that annunciatory phrase many times. She said the words to Dudley Smith on the first occasion. They had just made love, and Joan had settled in to tell her most complex and harrowing tale. She succumbed to evil in that moment. She recounted her rogue investigation with Hideo Ashida; she stitched the evidential links, from the discovery of Karl Tullock’s body up to a series of forensic crossovers to the Rice-Kapek murders. Her summary circumcribes a state of shock and awe, and depicts her immersion in the police world that has consumed me since 1939 and my collision with Lee Blanchard. Joan’s diary spotlights her analytic skills and her surpassing ability to plumb evidence and assess motive. Self-analysis eludes her. She cannot frame and assume a moral stance as to Dudley Smith. Her capitulation is wholly erotic and steeped in her overweening pride and ambition. Dudley Smith’s hold over women derives from the hold that women have over him. He projects a casual mastery over any and all perils. Joan found that irresistible. She was a woman determined to conquer a man’s world. She wanted Dudley Smith’s mastery more than she wanted the gold and a clean Rice-Kapek solve. Her efforts to countermand Dudley’s hold by the means of her concurrent affair with Bill Parker proved fruitless. She misjudged the two men as antagonists and failed to see them as complicitous and cravenly needy in all their strategic designs. I love Bill Parker unto the death and hate Dudley Smith just as passionately. I must take Joan’s account of her last six weeks and deploy it to a broad moral advantage. I must break the usurious bond between Bill Parker and Dudley Smith and see to Dudley’s most severe censure.
I’m writing these words on the upper-floor terrace of my house above the Sunset Strip. Yet more rain seems to be brewing. This house symbolizes my own capitulation to the police world that so consumed Joan. Lee Blanchard bought this house with bribe money. He tanked his boxing career because he knew he’d always be good and never great. Lee gave a wayward South Dakota girl a home; it’s a place where I muse, ponder, study, and cultivate opportunity with a ruthless will very much like Joan’s. I now possess the sum of Joan’s criminal knowledge. I have a grasp of Dudley’s racketeering plans. I know that Two-Gun Davis killed the Watanabe family and that he confessed to Bill Parker and Dudley Smith. Bill cut deals and saw to the dismissal of Werewolf Shudo’s death decree. I know all about Joan’s mission to avenge her father’s death and her suspicions of one Mitchell Kupp. I know that Dudley promised to look into him. I read yesterday’s Sunday Herald and spotted a page-eight piece. Mitch Kupp’s decomposed body was found at his house in San Bernardino. He had been shot dead at point-blank range. I sense a Dudley-and-Joan-at-their-most-crazed symbiosis here.
Hideo Ashida lives in Joan’s diary. He lives triangulated with Joan and Dudley, ever indebted to Dudley, ever corrupted, ever lustful and unfulfilled. Joan admired him, came to despise him, and developed a fond regard for him during the fevered merging of the gold quest and the klubhaus job. Hideo and Joan coveted the gold and coveted a clean murder-case solve just as furiously. Hideo’s desire to push through to a proper case solution jumped out at me. I had initially planned to meet Hideo and Elmer Jackson together. I put out feelers toward that end as soon as I’d read the diary. I reconsidered the approach almost immediately.
Joan’s diary was evidence. I trusted Elmer and did not trust Hideo. I wanted to present the evidence of Joan’s diary to them individually and gauge their individual reactions. I met them at Dave’s Blue Room yesterday. I reported the contents of Joan’s diary—but withheld a certain piece of information from both men.
Elmer evinced shocked outrage. He had brushed up against the events that Joan had described since New Year’s. His brother died in the Griffith Park fire and was surely involved with Karl Tullock and the summer ’33 robbery spree. Elmer had been cuckolded. His friends Hideo and Joan told him nothing. They ran their rogue investigation and brought in Dudley Smith. Elmer was enraged. Two purported friends had betrayed him. Elmer feared and hated Dudley Smith. Dudley had facilitated Joan Conville’s and Hideo Ashida’s lies and omissions. Elmer’s hatred now burned that much more fearfully and recklessly bright. Sweet Elmer, combustible Elmer. Now dangerously close with Buzz Meeks—who hated Dudley and did not fear him at all.
Elmer guzzled gin fizzes and chain-smoked cigars. I watched him flail at all of it as he fought back tears. I had omitted that key diary thread. It was a soundly reasoned omission.
Hideo, Joan, and Dudley had formed a pact to get the gold. I withheld that fact from Elmer. I withheld my perception that they were every bit as gold-crazed as Karl Tullock and Wayne Frank Jackson. I withheld this fact because I had to withhold it from Hideo Ashida. Elmer was volatile. He might go for Hideo’s throat—with Hideo’s gold greed as the spark that lit his fuse.
My dear friend Elmer. Pie-eyed from six gin fizzes. A silent moment passed between us. Telepathic sparks flew. We had engaged a deadly and foolhardy agenda. We will take down Dudley Smith.
Elmer weaved out of Dave’s Blue Room; Hideo Ashida timorously walked in. He wore his Army uniform, replete with sidearm, and caused jaded heads to turn. He sipped coffee in lieu of gin fizzes and heard me out impassively.
I presented Joan’s diary as evidence and cited my purely academic interest. I knew that Hideo underestimated women and saw me as an idiot child. Hideo held Joan in the same low regard, until she became his gold-quest accomplice. I excised Joan’s gold-quest narrative; I worked around it in the same manner as I had with Elmer. I further omitted Joan’s withering critique of Ashida’s homosexuality and fawning allegiance to Dudley Smith. I wanted to stun Hideo with what I knew and sustain his idiot-child assessment. This idiot child was now armed with damning facts but possessed no formal agenda. Hideo sat through my recitation, implacably. His eyes flickered when I told him that Jim Davis killed the four Watanabes. It was his only notable reaction.
I want Hideo to seize on Joan’s reluctance to describe and analyze the gold quest. I want Hideo to feel safe here. I’m banking on the threads of reluctant decency that Joan and I have both glimpsed in him. What will you do now, Hideo? Which way will your tortured conscience lead you? Will you tell Dudley that I’ve seen the diary or will you omit?
Bill Parker’s tortured conscience rivals Hideo’s. Joan watched him falter and ascend in near-direct proportion. Bill keeps mum on Two-Gun Davis and the Watanabe frame; Bill diverts the Werewolf’s gas-chamber trek. Bill cosigns an expedient solution to the klubhaus job and boldly sells the PD out to the Federal grand jury. Bill falters and ascends; Bill pratfalls, dusts himself off, and stumbles toward his next moral encounter. He caroms between God and Old Crow bonded bourbon in the hope that the former will obviate the need for the latter. He fears the loss of Dudley Smith more than he fears Dudley Smith himself, and clings to the bereft notion that Dudley Smith’s brutal élan facilitates the fortunes of his beloved police department. He stops short of condemning Dudley Smith as monstrous—because to do so would reduce
him to the role of most meek collaborator.
I had to bank on Hideo Ashida’s few decent instincts. I had to hope that Bill Parker would pray or drink himself through to the truth of Dudley Smith’s malevolence.
Joan excelled at portraiture. She nailed William H. Parker and went on to nail the Dudley–Claire De Haven misalliance. Dudley and Claire exemplify a barely contained madness. Dudley hoards Nazi regalia and hints at a fascist conversion. Claire defends the Moscow show trials and waves the Red flag with aplomb. Dudley dallies with opium and Benzedrine. Claire boots morphine. A U.S. Army posting buttresses Dudley’s Baja racket schemes. They adopt a fifteen-year-old red diaper baby. Dudley brutally beats Orson Welles and suborns him as an informant. Claire fellates Welles in Otto Klemperer’s steam room.
Claire is a man-trap woman. She holds sway over men in the manner that Dudley holds sway over women. Claire is horrified at the power she’s granted him and aghast at the erosion of her so-precious self. Claire fears that Dudley killed her lover, José Vasquez-Cruz. Vasquez-Cruz was really Jorge Villareal-Caiz. Villareal-Caiz stood foursquare in Meyer Gelb’s Red cell. As Joan Conville said, “It’s all one story, you see.”
And it’s my story now. I’m a bit-player-in-waiting. Claire suspects that a “South Dakota slattern” shanked Dudley last December. Dudley pooh-poohed the assertion and passed it along to Joan. Claire added this: “Maybe I’ll confront the slattern at one of Otto Klemperer’s parties. She’s like the bad penny, always showing up at them.”
Claire, I’d love to gab. I know we’d have things to discuss.
Those looming storm clouds burst; I gathered up my diary pages and carried them inside. I placed Joan’s diary pages in a good-sized cardboard box and addressed it to William H. Parker. It was 11:25 now. The postman always arrives around noon.
81
(LOS ANGELES, 11:30 A.M., 3/2/42)
He lied to Dudley. He omitted and withheld. It was split-second instinctive.
Ashida drove through Bunker Hill. He replayed the phone call. The Biltmore switchboard had patched him through to La Paz. Dudley issued klubhaus directives. His chance to rat Kay fizzled out.
They met at Dave’s Blue Room, yesterday. Kay described the contents of Joan Conville’s diary. Joan willed her the pages. Joan candidly described her post–New Year’s life and spilled leads on their intertwined cases. Joan laid out her liaisons with Dudley and Bill Parker. Kay talked for two hours straight.
He braced himself for The Bomb. The Bomb did not exist—or Kay declined to drop it.
Joan detailed the gold heist and its current reemergence. Joan omitted the subsequent gold quest altogether.
Or Kay abridged her account. She played editor and expurgated at will. She excised Joan’s pages and recounted only what she wanted him to know.
Rain clouds unzipped. Ashida ran his wiper blades. He crossed Loma and looked north to Belmont High. He replayed Kay’s key remarks.
“Here’s something you should know, Hideo. Jim Davis killed the Watanabes. He initially confessed to Bill Parker, and to Dudley more recently. From the look on your face, I can tell that Dudley failed to inform you.”
Kay provoked him. Kay taunted him and scolded him. “You should have told Elmer everything. His brother died in that fire.” Kay provokes, Kay scolds, Kay taunts and dares.
“I know everything that I’ve told you. I will leave you guessing as to what I might have withheld. You will tell Dudley whatever you decide to tell him. I will seek to expose any and all false solutions to the klubhaus case.”
Kay closed with that. The moment felt telepathic. Kay wanted a clean solve. He wanted a clean solve. Joan might have expressed his desire. Kay might have read him just right.
Telepathy begets telepathy. He talked to Dudley a second time this morning. Dudley said, “Our late friend Joan kept a diary, lad. She’d mentioned it to me several times. Will you go by her bungalow and do a toss and forensic? She may have tattled a few of our secrets that we don’t want commonly known.”
Ashida cut west on 1st Street and north on Carondelet. Central Property kicked loose the door key. The idea came to him then.
He parked beside the courtyard and walked back. He lugged his evidence kit. Nobody saw him or stopped him. Nobody slack-jawed the Army-togged Jap.
He unlocked the door and locked himself back in. He turned on all the room lights. Joan’s bungalow remained unrented and appeared to be intact. It was a suicide scene. The PD and morgue men had come and gone last week.
Ashida checked the kitchen. He looked under the sink and saw a wastebasket. It contained booze empties and coffee grounds. They were piled halfway up. He checked the sink drain and ran some cold water. The drain trap worked well. That was good. It enhanced forensic detail.
He tossed the bungalow.
He went through the closets, the one dresser, the front-room shelves. He went through Joan’s desk drawers. There was no typewriter. That was good. He found pens and writing paper in the bottom-left drawer.
A soft blotter covered the desktop. Ashida popped his evidence kit and filled an atomizer. He utilized deionized water and liquid dioxide. He sprayed the blotter and watched pen indentations rise.
Joan had block-printed and applied hard strokes. “Dudley” and “Bill” crisscrossed the blotter. He saw “despite his best intentions” and “confiscated gun lists.”
The “Dudley” and “Bill” impressions were instructive. They sparked a secondary notion. It would tweak Dudley’s vanity and densify this construction.
He took a hundred sheets of writing paper and dumped them in the kitchen sink. He spritzed them with diluted kerosene and dropped a match. The pages burned. He counted off ten seconds. He doused the flames with tap water and created a wet mess.
He turned off the water and cleaned up the mess. He dumped the bulk of the wet paper in a grocery bag. He placed the bag in his evidence kit and performed his obfuscation tasks.
They were extra precautionary. Dudley trusted him. He relied on that fact.
Ashida unscrewed the sink drain. He smeared sodden paper to the inside walls of the pipe. He tweezed paper fragments and affixed them to the drain holes. He screwed the drain trap back on.
He scooped wet paper and smeared the inside of the wastebasket. He covered all contingencies. The ruse stood complete.
Joan’s telephone worked. The landlord forgot to kill her service. Ashida roused a local operator and placed a long-distance call. Person-to-person. La Paz, Baja. Hotel Los Pescados/Captain Dudley Smith.
The operator said she’d place the call and ring him back. Ashida hung up and prowled the bungalow. He caught Joan’s tobacco and lilac soap scent. He examined her Navy uniforms. He saw red hairs caught in a fine-bristled brush.
The phone rang. Ashida grabbed it.
Dudley said, “Hello, lad. You’re calling from Joan’s apartment, I take it.”
Ashida coughed. He white-knuckled the receiver. The phone cord went taut.
“There’s no diary. She burned the pages in the kitchen sink, and left unmistakable traces. The cops who came through missed them. I raised a few indentations off her desk blotter. I saw partial sentences, along with your name and Captain Parker’s.”
Dudley laughed. “I’m sure she wrote my name a great many more times than his, and wrote it with far greater passion.”
Ashida forced a laugh. “I’m sure she did. And I’m sure a trained graphologist would confirm it.”
“Lad, you delight me. Such wit on such short notice. Go forth and do your duty now. Put your grand mind to work on the klubhaus mess, before Major Melnick calls you back.”
Ashida forced a joke. “I’ll call you if I find the gold.”
Dudley said, “Yes, lad—you do that.”
The line went dead. Ashida replaced the receiver. He’d committed treason. His motive revealed itself.
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br /> You’ll never love me as I love you. I cannot place Kay Lake in jeopardy. This ruse punishes you.
82
(LOS ANGELES, 3:30 P.M., 3/2/42)
WAYNE FRANK JACKSON. 1907–1933. BELOVED BROTHER AND SON.
The headstone read thus. No 211 Man. No Gold-Heist Goon. No Embroiled with Communists. No Fifth Column–Adjunct.
Elmer stood graveside. He was half-tanked. He flagellated his dumb cracker ass and hexed Hideo Ashida.
Ashida broke his heart. Ashida should have told him the whole story. Joan wrote it all out. Kay regurgitated it. The bad news hurtled, here to Hell.
The Dudster, Joan, and Hideo. They harbored leads. They knew he planted the address book at the klubhaus. Two-Gun Davis iced the Watanabes. Joan writes it out. Kay regurgitates it. Here’s the part he don’t get:
Kay says Joan told all. Thus, Kay told all. But—one thing don’t conform to type.
Dud, Joan, and Hideo. Three covetous cookies. Wouldn’t they go for the gold? Where’s their big fat doughnut? Did Joan fail to write that down or did Kay fail to mention it?
Inglewood Cemetery. Wayne Frank’s wobbly stone. It didn’t read Klan Klown. It didn’t read Kid Brother Elmer’s Got de Hellhound on His Trail.
The furry fucker’s name is Fear. Buzz and him thumped Huey C. Did Dud find out? Dud snuffed a fruit at a Nazi bash and waltzed on it. Does Dud know that he knows?
Nobody knows de trouble I’se seen, nobody knows my redneck sorrow—
Elmer scrammed. He sprinkled flask booze on Wayne Frank’s grave and hit the road. Three bennies detoured his hooch load. He drove home and fed his tropical fish.
The mailman was due. Jean Staley owes him a nice postcard. Elmer J. digs Jean S. Sister, why’d you run out on me?