American Tabloid

by James Ellroy

  The men pinned his arms back. Chick Leahy stepped out of a shadow and got right up in his face.

  Littell felt his knees go. The men propped him up on his toes.

  Leahy said, “Your message to Kemper Boyd was intercepted. You could have violated his cover on the incursion. Mr. Hoover does not want to see Robert Kennedy aided, and Peter Bondurant is a valued colleague of Howard Hughes, who is a great friend of Mr. Hoover and the Bureau. Do you know what fully coded messages are, Mr. Littell?”

  Littell blinked. His glasses fell off. Everything went blurry.

  Leahy jabbed his chest, hard. “You’re off the THP and back on the Red Squad as of now. And I strongly urge you not to protest.”

  One man grabbed his notebook. The other man said, “You reek of liquor.”

  They elbowed him aside and walked out. The whole thing took thirty seconds.

  His arms hurt. His glasses were scratched and dented. He couldn’t quite breathe or stay balanced on his feet.

  He swerved back to his table. He choked down rye and beer and leveled his shakes out.

  His glasses fit crooked. He checked out his new mirror image: the world’s most ineffectual workingman.

  An intercom boomed, “United flight 84 from New Orleans is now arriving.”

  Littell finished his drinks and chased them with two Clorets. He walked over to the gate and bucked passengers up to the jetway.

  Helen saw him and dropped her bags. Her hug almost knocked him down.

  People stepped around them. Littell said, “Hey, let me see you.”

  Helen looked up. Her head grazed his chin—she’d grown tail.

  “You look wonderful.”

  “It’s Max Factor number-four blush. It does wonders for my scars.”

  “What scars?”

  “Very funny. And what are you now, a lumberjack?”

  “I was. For a few days, at least.”

  “Susan says Mr. Hoover’s finally letting you chase gangsters.”

  A man kicked Helen’s garment bag and glared at them. Littell said, “Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”

  They had steaks at the Stockyard Inn. Helen talked a blue streak and got tipsy on red wine.

  She’d gone from coltish to rangy; her face had settled in strong. She’d quit smoking—she said she knew it was fake sophistication.

  She always wore her hair in a bun to flaunt her scars. She wore it down now—it rendered her disfigurement matter-of-fact.

  A waiter pushed the dessert cart by. Helen ordered pecan pie; Littell ordered brandy.

  “Ward, you’re letting me do all the talking.”

  “I was waiting to summarize.”

  “Summarize what?”

  “You at age twenty-one.”

  Helen groaned. “I was starting to feel mature.”

  Littell smiled. “I was going to say that you’ve become poised, but not at the expense of your exuberance. You used to trip over your words when you wanted to make a point, but now you think before you talk.”

  “Now people just trip over my luggage when I’m excited about meeting a man.”

  “A man? You mean a friend twenty-four years your senior who watched you grow up?”

  She touched his hands. “A man. I had a professor at Tulane who said that things change with old friends and students and teachers, so what’s a quarter of a century here and there?”

  “You’re saying he was twenty-five years older than you?”

  Helen laughed. “Twenty-six. He was trying to minimize things to make them seem less embarrassing.”

  “You’re saying you had an affair with him?”

  “Yes. And I’m saying it wasn’t lurid and pathetic, but going out with undergrad boys who thought I’d be easy because I was scarred up was.”

  Littell said, “Jesus Christ.”

  Helen waved her fork at him. “Now I know you’re upset, because some part of you is still a Jesuit seminarian, and you only invoke our Savior’s name when you’re flustered.”

  Littell sipped brandy. “I was going to say, ‘Jesus Christ, have Kemper and I ruined you for young men your own age?’ Are you going to spend your youth chasing middle-aged men?”

  “You should hear Susan and Claire and I talk.”

  “You mean my daughter and her best friends swear like longshoremen?”

  “No, but we’ve been discussing men in general and you and Kemper in specific for years, in case you’ve felt your ears burning.”

  “I can understand Kemper. He’s handsome and dangerous.”

  “Yes, and he’s heroic. But he’s a tomcat, and even Claire knows it.”

  Helen squeezed his hands. He felt his pulse racing. He got this Jesus Fucking Christ crazy idea.

  Littell took off his glasses. “I’m not so sure Kemper’s heroic. I think heroes are truly passionate and generous.”

  “That sounds like an epigram.”

  “It is. Senator John F. Kennedy said it.”

  “Are you enamored of him? Isn’t he some terrible liberal?”

  “I’m enamored of his brother Robert, who is truly heroic.”

  Helen pinched herself. “This is the strangest conversation to be having with an old family friend who’s known me since before my father died.”

  That Idea—Jesus Christ.

  Littell said, “I’ll be heroic for you.”

  Helen said, “We can’t let this be pathetic.”

  He drove her to her hotel and carried her bags upstairs. Helen kissed him goodbye on the lips. His glasses snagged in her hair and fell to the floor.

  Littell drove back to Midway and caught a 2:00 a.m. flight to Los Angeles. A stewardess gawked at his ticket: his return flight left an hour after they landed.

  One last brandy let him sleep. He woke up woozy just as the plane touched down.

  He made it with fourteen minutes to spare. Flight 55 from Miami was landing at gate 9, on time.

  Littell badged a guard and got permission to walk out on the tarmac. A wicked hangover headache started kicking in.

  Baggage men cruised by and checked him out. He looked like a middle-aged bum who’d slept in his clothes.

  The airplane landed. A ground crew pushed passenger steps out.

  Bondurant exited up front. Jimmy Hoffa flew his killers first-class.

  Littell walked up to him. His chest hammered and his legs went numb. His voice fluttered and broke.

  “Someday I’m going to punish you. For Kirpaski and everything else.”

  10

  (Los Angeles, 12/14/58)

  Freddy left a note under the wiper blades:

  “I’m getting some lunch. Wait for me.”

  Pete climbed in the back of the van. Freddy had a cooling system rigged: a fan aimed at a big bowl of ice cubes.

  Tape spun. Lights flashed. Graph needles twitched. The place was like the cockpit of a low-rent spaceship.

  Pete cracked a side window for some air. A Fed type walked by—probably listening-post personnel.

  Air blew in—Santa Ana hot.

  Pete dropped an ice cube down his pants and laughed falsetto. He sounded just like SA Ward J. Littell.

  Littell squeaked his warning. Littell smelled like stale booze and sweat. Littell had jackshit for evidence.

  He could have told him:

  I whacked Anton Gretzler, but Hoffa killed Kirpaski. I stuffed shotgun shells in his mouth and glued his lips shut. We torched Roland and his car at a refuse dump. Double-aught buckshot blew his head up—you’ll never get a dental-work ID.

  Littell doesn’t know that Jack’s big mouth killed Roland Kirpaski. The listening-post Fed might be sending him tapes—but Littell hasn’t put the scenario together.

  Freddy climbed in the van. He adjusted some graph gizmo and spritzed grief straight off.

  “That Fed that just walked by keeps checking out the van. I’m parked here at all fucking hours, and all he needs to do is sweep me with a fucking Geiger counter to figure out I’m doing the same fucking thing h
e is. I can’t park around the fucking block ’cause I’ll lose the fucking signal. I need a fucking house around here to work from, ’cause then I can set up some equipment that’s fucking powerful enough to pick up from the Shoftel babe’s pad, but that fucking Fed bagged the last fucking For Rent sign in the fucking neighborhood, and the fucking two hundred a day you and Jimmy are paying me ain’t enough to make up for the fucking risks I’m taking.”

  Pete snagged an ice cube and squeezed it into shards. “Are you finished?”

  “No. I’ve also got a fucking boil on my fucking ass from sleeping on the fucking floor here.”

  Pete popped a few knuckles. “Wrap it up.”

  “I need some good money. I need it for fucking hazardous-duty pay, and to upgrade this operation with. Get me some good money and I’ll kick a nice piece of it back to you.”

  “I’ll talk to Mr. Hughes and see what I can do.”

  Howard Hughes got his dope from a nigger drag queen named Peaches. Pete found the drop pad cleaned out—the queen next door said Peaches went up on a sodomy bounce.

  Pete improvised.

  He drove to a supermarket, bought a box of Rice Krispies and pinned the toy badge inside to his shirt front. He called Karen Hiltscher at R&I and glommed some prime information: the fry cook at Scrivner’s Drive-In sold goofballs and might be extortable. She described him: white, skinny, acne scars and Nazi tattoos.

  Pete drove to Scrivner’s. The kitchen door was open; the geek was at the deep fryer, dipping spuds.

  The geek saw him.

  The geek said, “That badge is a fake.”

  The geek looked at the freezer—a sure sign that he stored his shit there.

  Pete said, “How do you want to do this?”

  The geek pulled a knife. Pete kicked him in the balls and deep-fried his knife hand. Six seconds only—pill heists didn’t rate total mayhem.

  The geek screamed. Street noise leveled out the sound. Pete shoved a sandwich in his mouth to muzzle him.

  His dope stash was in the freezer next to the ice cream.

  • • •

  The hotel manager gave Mr. Hughes a Christmas tree. It was fully flocked and decorated—a bellboy left it outside the bungalow.

  Pete carried it into the bedroom and plugged it in. Sparkly lights blinked and twinkled.

  Hughes blipped off a Webster Webfoot cartoon. “What is this? And why are you carrying a tape recorder?”

  Pete dug through his pockets and tossed pill vials under the tree. “Ho, ho, fucking ho. It’s Christmas ten days early. Codeine and Dilaudid, ho, ho.”

  Hughes scrunched himself up on his pillows. “Well … I’m delighted. But aren’t you supposed to be auditioning stringers for Hush-Hush?”

  Pete yanked the tree cord and plugged in the tape rig. “Do you still hate Senator John F. Kennedy, Boss?”

  “I certainly do. His father screwed me on business deals going back to 1927.”

  Pete brushed pine needles off his shirt. “I think we’ve got the means to juke him pretty good in Hush-Hush, if you’ve got the money to keep a certain operation going.”

  “I’ve got the money to buy the North American continent, and if you don’t quit leading me on I’ll put you on a slow boat to the Belgian Congo!”

  Pete pressed the Play button. Senator Jack and Darleen Shoftel boned and groaned. Howard Hughes clutched his bedsheets, dead ecstatic.

  The fuck crescendoed and diminuendoed. Jack K. said, “My god-damn back gave out.”

  Darleen said, “It was goooood. Short and sweet’s the best.”

  Pete pressed Stop. Howard Hughes twitched and trembled.

  “We can have Hush-Hush print this up if we’re careful, Boss. But we’ve got to watch the wording real close.”

  “Where … did … you … get that?”

  “The girl’s a prostitute. The FBI had her place wired, and Freddy Turentine hooked up on top of it. So we can’t print anything that would tip the Feds off. We can’t print anything that only could have come from the bug.”

  Hughes plucked at his sheets. “Yes, I’ll finance your ‘operation.’ Have Gail Hendee write the story up—something like ‘Priapic Senator Dallies with Hollywood Playgirl.’ We’ve got an issue coming out the day after tomorrow, so if Gail writes it today and gets it to the office by this evening, it can make that next issue. Have Gail write it today. The Kennedy family will ignore it, but the legitimate newspapers and wire services might come to us asking for details to enlarge the story, which of course we will give them.”

  Big Howard beamed kid-at-Christmas-like. Pete plugged his tree back in.

  Gail needed convincing. Pete sat her down on the watchdog-house veranda and laid out a line of sweet talk.

  “Kennedy’s a geek. He had you meet him on his goddamned honeymoon. He dropped you two weeks later, and kissed you off with a god-damn mink coat.”

  Gail smiled. “He was nice, though. He never said, ‘Honey, let’s get a divorce racket going.’ ”

  “When your old man’s worth a hundred million dollars, you don’t have to do things like that.”

  Gail sighed. “You win, like always. And you know why I haven’t been wearing that mink lately?”

  “No.”

  “I gave it to Mrs. Walter P. Kinnard. You took a big cut of her alimony, and I figured she could use some cheering up.”

  Twenty-four hours zipped by.

  Hughes kicked loose thirty grand. Pete pocketed fifteen. If the Hush-Hush smear exposed the bug, he’d be covered financially.

  Freddy bought a long-range transceiver and started looking for a house.

  That Fed kept eyeballing his van. Jack K. didn’t call or drop by. Freddy figured Darleen was only worth one poke.

  Pete stuck by the watchdog-house phone. Geeks kept interrupting his daydreams.

  Two Hush-Hush stringer prospects called: ex-vice cops hipped on Hollywood lowdown. They flunked his impromptu pop quiz: Who’s Ava Gardner fucking?

  He made some calls out—and planted a new Hughes double at the Beverly Hilton. Karen Hiltscher recommended the man: her scabby wino father-in-law. Pops said he’d work for three hots and a cot. Pete booked the Presidential Suite and placed a standing room-service order: T-bird and cheeseburgers for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

  Jimmy Hoffa called. He said, The Hush-Hush thing sounds good, but I want MORE! Pete neglected to share his basic opinion: Jack and Darleen were just a two-minute mattress ride.

  He kept thinking about Miami. The cabstand, colorful spics, tropical sunshine.

  Miami felt like adventure. Miami felt like money.

  He woke up early publication morning. Gail was gone—she’d taken to avoiding him with aimless drives to the beach.

  Pete walked outside. His first-press-run copy was stuffed in the mailbox, per instructions.

  Dig the cover lines: “Tomcat Senator Likes Catnip! Ask Nipped-At L.A. Kittens!” Dig the illustration: John Kennedy’s face on a cartoon cat’s body, the tail wrapped around a blonde in a bikini.

  He flipped to the piece. Gail used the pen name Peerless Politicopundit.

  U.S. Senate cloakroom wags say he’s far from being the most dedicatedly demonic Democrat dallier. No, Senator L.B. (Lover Boy?) Johnson probably tops political polis in that department, with Florida’s George F. ‘Pass the Smackeroos’ Smathers coming in second. No, Senator John F. Kennedy is rather a tenuously tumescent tomcat, with a tantalizingly trenchant taste for those finely-furred and felicitous felines who find him fantastically fetching themselves!

  Pete skimmed the rest. Gail played it half-assed—the smear wasn’t vicious enough. Jack Kennedy ogled women and “bewitched, bothered and bewildered” them with “baubles, bangles, beads” and “brilliant Boston beatitudes.” No heavy-duty skank; no implied fucking; no snide jabs at Two-Minute-Man Jack.

  Perk, perk, perk—his all-star feelers started twitching—

  Pete drove downtown and cruised by the Hush-Hush warehouse. Things looked absolutely first-gla
nce SOP.

  Men were wheeling bound stacks out on dollies. Men were loading pallets. A line of newsstand trucks were backed up to the dock.

  SOP, but:

  Two unmarked prowl cars were parked down the street. That ice cream wagon idling by looked dicey—the driver was talking into a hand mike.

  Pete circled the block. The fuzz multiplied: four unmarkeds at the curb and two black & whites around the corner.

  He circled again. The shit hit the fan and sprayed out in all directions.

  Four units were jammed up to the loading dock—running full lights and siren.

  Plainclothesmen piled out. A bluesuit cordon hit the warehouse with cargo hooks.

  An LAPD van blocked the distribution trucks off. Swampers dropped their loads and threw their hands up.

  It was fucking scandal-rag chaos. It was fucking skank-sheet Armaggedon—

  Pete drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel. A Big Ugly Picture formed: somebody ratted off the Kennedy issue.

  He parked and ran by the pool. He saw a big crowd outside the Hughes bungalow.

  They were peeping in Big Howard’s bedroom window. They looked like fucking ghouls at an accident scene.

  He ran up and pushed to the front. Billy Eckstine nudged him. “Hey, check this out.”

  The window was open. Two men were jacking up Mr. Hughes—double-teaming him with Big Verbal Grief.

  Robert Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

  Hughes was swaddled in bed quilts. Bobby was waving a hypo. Old Joe was raging.

  “… You’re a pathetic lecher and a narcotics addict. I am two seconds away from exposing you to the whole wide world, and if you think I’m bluffing please note that I opened the window to let your hotel neighbors have a sneak preview of what the whole world will know if you ever allow your filthy scandal rag to write another word about my family.”

  Hughes cringed. His head banged the wall and sent a picture frame toppling.

  Some all-star voyeurs dug the show: Billy, Mickey Cohen, some faggot Mouseketeer sporting a jumbo mouse-ear beanie.

  Howard Hughes whimpered. Howard Hughes said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  • • •

  Pete drove to the Shoftel pad. The Big Ugly Picture expanded: either Gail snitched or the Feds exposed the piggyback.