Hollywood Nocturnes

by James Ellroy

  Whipcord shot Pat in the face—brains spattered the windshield.

  I tripped and fell out of the car. Whipcord kicked me—I rolled into a ball and dervish-spun toward Chris. Shots zinged the pavement—asphalt exploded shrapnel-like.

  Chrissy got to her feet.

  Whipcord grabbed her.

  I stood up, charged, and tripped over a pump hose. Whipcord pistol-whipped Chris into the Ford and peeled out eastbound.

  “I Want To Fuck You To—”

  DEATH.

  I pulled Pat out of the car and wiped his brains off the windshield with my sport coat. Keys in the ignition—I peeled eastbound.

  25, 40, 60, 70—double the speed limit. Blood streaks on my windshield—I hit the wipers and thinned it red to pink. No sight of the Ford; sirens behind me.

  Sticky hands—I wiped them on the seat to grip the wheel better. Sirens in front of me, sirens wailing from both sides, ear-splitter loud.

  Black & white police cars—a four-point press descending. Bullhorn roar—garbled—something like, “Buick Skylark pull over!”

  I obeyed—very very slow.

  I got out of the car and raised my brain-crusted hands.

  Cop cars fishtailed up and boxed me in. Somebody yelled, “That’s Contino, not the Whipcord!” Harness bull stampede—gun-wielding fuzz surrounded me.

  A plainclothesman got up in my face. “Your wife called us from the DMV. She got a make on that 1116 temp license and traced it to the Skylark, which just got a paint job and some permanent plates. She told us how the car was tailing your friend the Staples woman, and Sheriff’s Homicide just got a second eyewitness who tagged this as the West Hollywood Whipcord’s very own—”

  I cut in. “I’ll explain all this later, but right now you’ve got to be looking for a light-blue ’51 Ford. The Whipcord’s got Chris Staples, and he’s heading east with her in that car.”

  The cop shrieked orders; black & whites shrieked eastbound rapidamente. My brain shrieked—

  Spill on the kidnap caper?—no, don’t implicate Chrissy. Dead certain—the Whipcord killed Fritzie—don’t reveal that either. Would Whipcord take Chris to the Griffith Park shack—NO—he wouldn’t go near it.

  “Fuck You To Death” implied slow torture implied Chris with a chance to survive.

  The plainclothesman said, “The Whipcord’s got an apartment near here. Follow me in the Skylark, maybe you’ll see something that will help us.”

  * * *

  —

  I saw:

  Plastic dolls sash cord strangled, dripping nail polish blood.

  Stuffed dolls ripped open, spilling kapok.

  Polaroids of bumper-jack bludgeoned lovers.

  Thousands of silk scarves tossed helter-skelter.

  Chris Staples publicity pix, semen-crusted.

  Chrissy’s Nugget fold-out defaced with swastikas.

  Barbie and Ken dolls going 69. Crudely glued-on photograph faces: Chris Staples, Dick Contino.

  A photo-faced pincushion voodoo doll: Dick Contino with a hatpin stuck in his crotch.

  It hit me:

  He thinks Chris and I are lovers. He wants to kill us both. This fixation will make him indecisive—he’ll keep Chrissy alive for awhile.

  The plainclothesman said, “His name’s Duane Frank Yarnell, and I don’t think he takes too kindly to you and Miss Staples.”

  Those dolls—Jesus fuck. “Can I go now? Can I take the Skylark and drop it off later?”

  “Yeah, you can. I yanked the APB on it, but the Sheriff’s have a want on it, so you’ll have to get it back by tonight. And I want to see you downtown at LAPD Homicide tonight, no later than 6:00. There’s a dead man with a stocking on his face and a bullet in his head that you have to explain, and I’m just dying to hear your story.”

  I said, “Just find Chris and save her.”

  He said, “We will make every effort. Are you sure there’s nothing you can tell us now that will help us?”

  I lied: “No.”

  * * *

  —

  Tears in my eyes, a blood-smeared windshield—luck got me to Fritz Shoftel’s pad intact. I laid some jive and a tensky on his landlady—she unlocked his apartment and bugged out.

  The living room and kitchen—nothing amiss. The bedroom—

  Fritzie hung from a ceiling beam—cinched up by at least fifty neckties. Eviscerated: entrails oozing from deep torso rips. Viscera piles on the floor—shaped into a swastika.

  I ran for the bathroom and hurled just short of the door. Towels atop a hamper—I soaked one in cold water, swabbed my face and got up the juice for a search.

  The bedroom, first glance:

  A bookshelf crammed with acting texts. Knife wounds on Fritzie’s arms—figure Whipcord tortured him for kidnap info. A dresser and closet—be thorough, now.

  Work clothes. Teamster t-shirts. A photo of Fritz and Jimmy Hoffa—someone drew devil’s horns on the big man. Rubbers, women’s undies—Fritz admitted he was a longtime panty sniffer. Rolls of dimes, Playboy magazines, a Playboy rabbit keychain. A group picture: Fritzie’s World War II outfit. More panties, more rubbers, more Playboys, an L.A. Parks and Recreation Field Guide dog-eared to a Griffith Park page.

  I examined it. The kidnap shack location was x-marked; pencil press indentation lines grew out of it. I found a magnifying glass and traced them to their terminus: a cave area a half mile southwest of the shack.

  I re-checked the map. Tilt—dirt roads marked off—Observatory to cave turf access.

  Somebody charted escape routes and other hide-outs on tracing paper. They weren’t part of the initial kidnap plan—I would have known. Double tilt: Whipcord gets us to the shack and kills Marichal there. It’s just a short hop to the caves—where he can kill Contino and Staples at leisure.

  Leisure = time = go NOW, don’t buzz the fuzz.

  I hauled up to Griffith Park. Danny Getchell lurked by the Greek Theatre, backstopped by some movie camera schmuck. Oblivious shitbird—he didn’t know the whole scheme had gone blooey.

  I ditched the Skylark in the Observatory lot. Access roads would take me straight to the caves—but I couldn’t risk car noise that close to Whipcord. Sprint time—I ran straight up to the kidnap shack.

  Empty—scalps on the table, biz as usual. I followed tracing paper lines southwest; adrenaline jacked my heart up to my pompadour.

  There—a clearing offset by cave-dotted hills. Tire marks on the road; a ’51 Ford covered with camouflage shrubs.

  Four cave openings.

  I crept up and re-conned, ears cocked for horror. One, two—silent. Three—squelched screams and insane ramblings.

  “I have worshipped the Great Fire God for lo these years, and I have heeded the teachings of His only son, Adolf Hitler. He has asked me for silk scarf sacrifices, and I have given them to Him. Now the Great Fire God wishes me to take a wife, and first consecrate her with the markings of His son.”

  I crept in. Pitch dark, twisty, damp—I hugged the cave wall. Motor hum, then light—Whipcord had an arclamp set up.

  Shadows, shapes half-visible. Shadow bounces, full light on pale skin: Chrissy’s back, marked with a red swastika.

  Trickling blood—not a gouge—still TIME.

  I tiptoed outside to the Ford. Adrenaline: one good yank ripped the back seat out clean. I found a siphon tube in the trunk, popped the gas cap and sucked.

  Lip traction caught—I soaked the seat cushion with ethyl. Springs and a baseboard to grip—I hoisted the hundred pounds of vinyl and foam up easy.

  Unwieldy—but I got a match lit. WHOOOOOOOOOSH—the Fire God stormed the cave.

  Smoke, screams up ahead. Flames snaking sideways—my arm hair sizzled. Godawful heat, shots—I felt foam rip close to my heart.

  Chris screamed.

  Whipcord scr
eamed gobbledygook. Bullets smashed my shield of fire and exploded.

  Heat, smoke, wind sucking flames away from me.

  Whipcord kept firing—two guns—very close range. The top of the seat cushion blew off—I held on to red-hot springs and kept coming.

  A blue halo behind Whipcord: clear sky.

  I piled into him.

  His hair caught fire.

  I kept pushing toward the blue.

  Whipcord ran backwards, screaming.

  I chased him.

  He hit thin air—I hurled the cushion at him.

  Flaming pinwheels off a hundred foot cliff.

  I grabbed Chris, ran her out to the Ford, tucked her low in the passenger seat. Fire God fast: down dirt roads, through the lot, Vermont south. Roadblocks by the Greek Theatre; Danny Getchell, camera ready. Cops yelled, “Stop!”—I got the notion this Fire God Buggy could fly. I worked the clutch/gas/shifter just right—the fucker went airborne. Shots behind me, residual shouts—magically audible. I heard “CONTINO,” but no one yelled, “COWARD.”

  * * *

  —

  That was thirty-five years ago.

  History in ellipses: the cops covered all of it up.

  I skated on kidnap plot charges—a police bullet meant for the Ford killed an old lady. Shoftel, Marichal and the Whipcord—stonewalled.

  Chris Staples healed up nicely—and avoids low-cut gowns that expose her faint scarring. She married a right-wing nut who digs swastikas—they’re big in born-again Christian TV fraud.

  Sol Slotnick has survived nineteen heart attacks on an all-junk food diet.

  Spade Cooley beat Ella Mae to death in 1961.

  Jane DePugh had an affair with President John F. Kennedy.

  Dave DePugh is a major JFK snuff suspect.

  Leigh died of cancer in ’82. Our three kids are grown up now.

  Daddy-O bombed critically and nosedived at the box-office. My career never regained its early momentum. Lounge gigs, Dago banquets—I earn a decent living playing music I love.

  “Draft Dodger,” “Coward”—every once in a while I still hear it.

  It’s only mildly annoying.

  LAPD goons muscled Danny Getchell for his flying car footage.

  He dumped it on the Daddy-O cinematographer. It was spliced into the movie—not too convincingly.

  People who’ve seen the raw film stock deem my driving feat miraculous. The word has spread in a limited fashion: one day in 1958 I touched God or something equally powerful. I believe it—but only to an ambiguous point. The truth is that at any given moment anything is possible.

  Every word of this memoir is true.

  HIGH DARKTOWN

  From my office windows I watched L.A. celebrate the end of World War II. Central Division Warrants took up the entire north side of City Hall’s eleventh floor, so my vantage point was high and wide. I saw clerks drinking straight from the bottle in the Hall of Records parking lot across the street and harness bulls forming a riot squad and heading for Little Tokyo a few blocks away, bent on holding back a conga line of youths with 2 by 4s who looked bent on going the atom bomb one better. Craning my neck, I glimpsed tall black plumes of smoke on Bunker Hill—a sure sign that patriotic Belmont High students were stripping cars and setting the tires on fire. Over on Sunset and Figueroa, knots of zooters were assembling in violation of the Zoot Suit Ordinance, no doubt figuring that today it was anything goes.

  The tiny window above my desk had an eastern exposure, and it offered up nothing but smog and a giant traffic jam inching toward Boyle Heights. I stared into the brown haze, imagining shitloads of code 2s and 3s thwarted by noxious fumes and bumper-to-bumper revelry. My daydreams got more and more vivid, and when I had a whole skyful of A-bombs descending on the offices of the L.A.P.D. Detective Bureau, I slammed my desk and picked up the two pieces of paper I had been avoiding all morning.

  The first sheet was a scrawled memo from the Daywatch Robbery boss down the hall: “Lee—Wallace Simpkins paroled from Quentin last week—to our jurisdiction. Thought you should know. Be careful. G.C.”

  Cheery V-J Day tidings.

  The second page was an interdepartmental teletype issued from University Division, and, when combined with Georgie Caulkins’s warning, it spelled out the beginning of a new one-front war.

  Over the past five days there had been four heavy-muscle stickups in the West Adams district, perpetrated by a two-man heist team, one white, one negro. The MO was identical in all four cases: liquor stores catering to upper-crust negroes were hit at night, half an hour before closing, when the cash registers were full. A well-dressed male Caucasian would walk in and beat the clerk to the floor with the barrel of a .45 automatic, while the negro heister stuffed the till cash into a paper bag. Twice customers had been present when the robberies occurred; they had also been beaten senseless—one elderly woman was still in critical condition at Queen of Angels.

  It was as simple and straightforward as a neon sign. I picked up the phone and called Al Van Patten’s personal number at the County Parole Bureau.

  “Speak, it’s your nickel.”

  “Lee Blanchard, Al.”

  “Big Lee! You working today? The war’s over!”

  “No, it’s not. Listen, I need the disposition on a parolee. Came out of Quentin last week. If he reported in, I need an address; if he hasn’t, just tell me.”

  “Name? Charge?”

  “Wallace Simpkins, 655 PC. I sent him up myself in ’39.”

  Al whistled. “Light jolt. He got juice?”

  “Probably kept his nose clean and worked a war industries job inside; his partner got released to the army after Pearl Harbor. Hurry it up, will you?”

  “Off and running.”

  Al dropped the receiver to his desk, and I suffered through long minutes of static-filtered party noise—male and female giggles, bottles clinking together, happy county flunkies turning radio dials trying to find dance music but getting only jubilant accounts of the big news. Through Edward R. Murrow’s uncharacteristically cheerful drone I pictured Wild Wally Simpkins, flush with cash and armed for bear, looking for me. I was shivering when Al came back on the line and said, “He’s hot, Lee.”

  “Bench warrant issued?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then don’t waste your time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Small potatoes. Call Lieutenant Holland at University dicks and tell him Simpkins is half of the heist team he’s looking for. Tell him to put out an APB and add, ‘armed and extremely dangerous’ and ‘apprehend with all force deemed necessary.’ ”

  Al whistled again. “That bad?”

  I said, “Yeah,” and hung up. “Apprehend with all force deemed necessary” was the L.A.P.D. euphemism for “shoot on sight.” I felt my fear decelerate just a notch. Finding fugitive felons was my job. Slipping an extra piece into my back waistband, I set out to find the man who had vowed to kill me.

  After picking up standing mugs of Simpkins and a carbon of the robbery report from Georgie Caulkins, I drove toward the West Adams district. The day was hot and humid, and sidewalk mobs spilled into the street, passing victory bottles to horn-honking motorists. Traffic was bottlenecked at every stoplight, and paper debris floated down from office windows—a makeshift ticker-tape parade. The scene made me itchy, so I attached the roof light and hit my siren, weaving around stalled cars until downtown was a blur in my rearview mirror. When I slowed, I was all the way to Alvarado and the city I had sworn to protect looked normal again. Slowing to a crawl in the right-hand lane, I thought of Wallace Simpkins and knew the itch wouldn’t stop until the bastard was bought and paid for.

  We went back six years, to the fall of ’39, when I was a vice officer in University Division and a regular light-heavyweight attraction at the Hollywood-Legion Stadium.
A black-white stick-up gang had been clouting markets and juke joints on West Adams, the white guy passing himself off as a member of Mickey Cohen’s mob, coercing the proprietor into opening up the safe for the monthly protection payment while the negro guy looked around innocently, then hit the cash registers. When the white guy got to the safe, he took all the money, then pistol-whipped the proprietor senseless. The heisters would then drive slowly north into the respectable Wilshire district, the white guy at the wheel, the negro guy huddled down in the back seat.

  I got involved in the investigation on a fluke.

  After the fifth job, the gang stopped cold. A stoolie of mine told me that Mickey Cohen found out that the white muscle was an ex-enforcer of his and had him snuffed. Rumor had it that the colored guy—a cowboy known only as Wild Wallace—was looking for a new partner and a new territory. I passed the information along to the dicks and thought nothing more of it. Then, a week later, it all hit the fan.

  As a reward for my tip, I got a choice moonlight assignment: bodyguarding a high-stakes poker game frequented by L.A.P.D. brass and navy bigwigs up from San Diego. The game was held in the back room at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah, the swankiest police-sanctioned whorehouse on the south side. All I had to do was look big, mean, and servile and be willing to share boxing anecdotes. It was a major step toward sergeant’s stripes and a transfer to the Detective Division.

  It went well—all smiles and backslaps and recountings of my split-decision loss to Jimmy Bivins—until a negro guy in a chauffeur’s outfit and an olive-skinned youth in a navy officer’s uniform walked in the door. I saw a gun bulge under the chauffeur’s left arm, and chandelier light fluttering over the navy man’s face revealed pale negro skin and processed hair.

  And I knew.

  I walked up to Wallace Simpkins, my right hand extended. When he grasped it, I sent a knee into his balls and a hard left hook at his neck. When he hit the floor, I pinned him there with a foot on his gun bulge, drew my own piece, and leveled it at his partner. “Bon voyage, Admiral,” I said.

  The admiral was named William Boyle, an apprentice armed robber from a black bourgeois family fallen on hard times. He turned state’s evidence on Wild Wallace, drew a reduced three-to-five jolt at Chino as part of the deal, and was paroled to the war effort early in ’42. Simpkins was convicted of five counts of robbery one with aggravated assault, got five-to-life at Big Q, and voodoo-hexed Billy Boyle and me at his trial, vowing on the soul of Baron Samedi to kill both of us, chop us into stew meat, and feed it to his dog. I more than half believed his vow, and for the first few years he was away, every time I got an unexplainable ache or pain I thought of him in his cell, sticking pins into a blue-suited Lee Blanchard voodoo doll.