James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (18 page)
Read James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 Online
Authors: Blood's a Rover
Tags: #General, #Los Angeles (Calif.), #Noir Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Political Fiction, #Nineteen Sixties, #Political, #Hard-Boiled, #Fiction, #Literary
The Reverend Cedric Douglass Hazzard: 1916â1968. Rest in peace.
DOCUMENT INSERT:
8/22/68.
Las Vegas Sun
headline and subhead:
HUGHES EYES STARDUST
W
ILL
A
NTI
-T
RUST
L
AWS
T
HWART THE
K
ING O' THE
S
TRIP?
DOCUMENT INSERT:
8/23/68.
Las Vegas Sun
headline and subhead:
BILLIONNAIRE RECLUSE TO CLARK COUNTY: “I WANT TO BUY YOU!”
H
UGHES
S
EEKS TO
C
ONTINUE
H
OTEL
-B
UYING
S
PREE
DOCUMENT INSERT:
8/23/68. Telex communiqué. From: Supervisory Unit, St. Louis Office, Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms. To: Field Unit #112, all personnel. Topic: Grapevine Tavern surveillance.
Gentlemen,
Continue 24-hour surveillance of location, per all precedingly filed directives.
Thomas T. Wiltsie, Agent-in-Charge.
DOCUMENT INSERT
: 8/24/68. Office-filed memorandum. From: Fred Turentine. To: Clyde Duber Associates (Attn: Clyde Duber, Buzz Duber, Don Crutchfield). Topic: Electronic surveillance of Suite 308, Golden Cavern Hotel-Casino, Las Vegas (Ref: Dr. F. HiltzâGretchen Farr investigation).
C.D., B.D., D.C.,
I got almost nil from yesterday's wire at the Cavern. I'll be frank: it was nothing but rich Mormons & hookers & chitchat about the Dem. conv. in Chicago. Farlan Brown was talking up his plans to be there (the Hughes org. is covering their pol. bets by sucking up to the Humphrey org). Nothing pert. to Dr. Hiltz & G Farr was discussed. I picked up a 1-way partial of Fred Otash talking on phone about a 8/30/68 meet with Wayne Tedrow & “perhaps others,” but that was it. All in all, a bust. D.C. will be in Chi. for conv., so he can follow up there. The bug is now deactivated, but is still in place. I'll pull it when I get a shot at the suite vacated.
Best,
F.T.
DOCUMENT INSERT
: 8/25/68. Verbatim FBI telephone call transcript. Marked: “
Recorded at the Director's Request/Classified Confidential 1-A: Director's Eyes Only.
” Speaking: Director Hoover, Special Agent Dwight C. Holly.
JEH: Good morning, Dwight.
DH: Good morning, Sir.
JEH: It's been too long.
DH: I agree, Sir.
JEH: Wayne Tedrow Jr. Give me the upshot of his latest Congolese misadventure.
DH: It's covered, Sir. The coroner's inquest ruled homicide-suicide, and the papers have reported it as such.
JEH: I'm gratified. And the Grapevine Tavern? Is it still a Pandora's box of anti-Bureau chatter?
DH: Yes, Sir.
JEH: And ATF? Are they still perching?
DH: For now, Sir.
JEH: They cannot perch forever.
DH: I'm aware of that, Sir.
JEH: Let's discuss
OPERATION BAAAAD BROTHER
. Wayne Junior's dead Negroes have whet my appetite.
DH: I've secured a copy of Fred Hiltz's subscriber lists. I'm looking through them for leads on possible infiltrators.
JEH: And you paid him out of the cold funds I supplied you with to rescue Junior.
DH: Yes, Sir. Ten thousand cold and a pound of cocaine.
JEH: His poor sinuses. I shudder to think.
DH: Yes, Sir.
JEH: And you're still looking for an informant? Preferably a woman?
DH: Yes, Sir.
JEH: And informant number 4361 is pondering referrals?
DH: She is, Sir.
JEH: Aaah, Dwight. Your wistful inflection on the word
she
speaks puerile volumes.
DH: Some things can't be disguised, Sir.
JEH: The Klansman's son and the Quaker pacifist. God himself must marvel at your pillow talk.
DH: It's lively, Sir.
JEH: Am I ever discussed?
DH: Contentiously, Sir.
JEH: Does it perturb you that she might record your dubious liaison for posterity? Her curriculum vitae lists her as a daily journal keeper. She may well have jotted notes on her suppression-minded lover.
DH: I've black-bagged her, Sir. Her notes to date have been laudatory.
JEH: And rightly so, I'm sure.
DH: Thank you, Sir.
JEH: I'm slipping, Dwight. I know it, and I know that you know it. I am a boxer who has been in the ring for a very long time, but I remain dangerous because of and not in spite of it.
DH: I understand that fully, Sir.
JEH: Good day, Dwight.
DH: Good day, Sir.
DOCUMENT INSERT
: 8/25/68. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.
Los Angeles,
August 25, 1968
I should be in Chicago. What's-His-Name is passing through en route to Philadelphia and will be calling me with reports. It's going to be bad; everyone knows it; everyone knows that Nixon v. Humphrey is no choice at all and that the war will continue regardless of the outcome in November. This entry and any other entries I may write during the convention will be ascribed here in my second journal, the one I hide at school and that Dwight must never see. It's the names I might record. Mr. Hoover (and Dwight by extension) is file-happy and thinks that everyone in the movement knows everyone else and has thus colluded across a wide spectrum of political activity. Of course, that's not true. Love affairsâusually brief and passionate and doomed by factional issuesâmay occur that pervasively, but not prosecutable political conspiracy. Paranoia defines the Right (although Dwight tends to eschew it and occasionally critiques it with sardonic humor) and the Left as well. Everyone knows everyone else and suspects everyone else and
needs
everyone else as well. Political agendas and personal agendas shift along those lines, which certainly defines the inimical worldviews, collusive agendas and deep comradeship of Dwight and me.
God, Dwight Chalfont Holly and “comrade” in a single sentence!
Chicago is going to be bad. Danny T. and Sid F. have called with advance news. They are Marxist Nixonites in their determination to fuck up Hubert Humphrey and elect the man who will instill greater repression and provide a clearer shot at revolution at some ambiguously perceived later point. Of course, lives will be shattered and lost in the process and only utilitarians like me (and dare I say it, D.H.) understand that purely destructive folly.
Dwight can talk me into almost anything if he can convince me that it will divert destruction and death in the moment. Chicago feels like a widely willed moment of sincere outrage and horrible hatred that is politically and spiritually mandated beyond all utilitarian considerations, which is what scares me.
The convention-hall fence is topped with barbed wire and 5,000 riot troops have been flown in, with 5,000 more on call. W.H.N. (who secretly and ghoulishly loves weaponry) said that Maury W. saw boxes of rocket launchers being unloaded at O'Hare. There's a taxi-cab strike in progress; a large bus drivers' local stands ready to strike; the IBEW began striking on May 8 and thus telephone service within the city and environs is a complete mess. W.H.N. predicts a radical or radical-aligned (largely fool mischief-makers of the counterculture and fatuous Left) presence of 100,000 people. It is going to be bad because it's overdue to be bad and the statement needs to be made at a horrible and horribly attention-getting cost, which makes the whole thing all the more complexly deplorable to me.
So I will pray for peace and feel Eleanora grow within me and make love with Dwight, who knows many of the things I do but cannot confront them because the moment of moral explication would drive him insane.
As always, I will marvel in the aftermath of my prayers and ponder how much or how little quantifiable good our odd comradeship of conflicting ideology gives to the world. Mutual benefit. It sounds viciously capitalistic, but it is wholly egalitarian within that compromised context.
Dwight needs an informant to work the BTA and MMLF. He's got me half-convinced that both groups are viciously self-serving, ideologically unsound and destructive. Should I introduce him to Joan?
DOCUMENT INSERT
: 8/25/68.
Los Angeles Times
headline and subhead:
DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION SET TO CONVENE
P
ROTEST
T
ROUBLE
L
OOMS IN
W
INDY
C
ITY
DOCUMENT INSERT
: 8/25/68.
San Francisco Examiner
headline and subhead:
TROOPS ARRIVE IN CHITOWN
T
ENSION
S
IMMERS AS
P
ROTEST
Y
OUTH
M
OBILIZES
DOCUMENT INSERT
: 8/25/68. Telex communiqué. From: Supervisory Unit, St. Louis Office, Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. To: Field Unit #112, all personnel. Topic: Grapevine Tavern surveillance.
Gentlemen,
Grapevine investigation to terminate 9/1/68. Discontinue all surveillance on that date. The U.S. attorney has deemed insufficient grounds to prosecute.
Thomas T. Wiltsie, Agent-in-Charge
(Los Angeles, 8/25/68)
L
ists:
Hate-mail subscribers, hate-meeting attendees, hate-cartoon devotees.
Cross-referenced to:
Rap-sheet lists, DMV lists, subversive-group lists.
Cross-referenced to:
The hate lit itself. Sample copies. All hate-the-white-man shit. Negro mailees cross-referenced back to all the fucking lists.
Dwight worked in the drop-front. He built paper piles from Dr. Fred's stash and carbons from LAPD and the California DMV. Hate, hate, hate. Big paper pilesâthe Himalayas of Hate.
He'd been at it since his Vegas jaunt. He started with municipal PD intelligence files. He looked for male Negro cops with infiltration experience. He got no names. He went back to the subscriber lists then. He secured paper and culled paper and built shelves to rein paper in. It was a Negro name hunt. Find a male Negro hate bunny. Recruit him, coerce him, or entrap himâand teach him how to
re
-hate.
The glut of names was engulfing. The hate lit and hate pix supplied yuks. White men had small dicks, black men had big dicks, the dick-size diaspora defined black history. Jew doctors spread sickle-cell anemia. Audrey Hepburn had Jim Brown's black baby. Lawrence Welk was really black. Count Basie was really white. John Glenn was the world's first nigger astronaut.
Dwight name-hunted.
A
to
Z
and back again. Pebble-in-an-avalanche dreck.
U, V, W, X, Y, Z
and back to
A
.
Arthur Atkinson was a black Nazi. Willis Barrett subscribed to
Honky
Hunter
magazine. Ricky Tom Belforth subscribed to
Beg for It Black: White Wenches Wail for Real Men!
Bistrip, Blair, Blake, Bledsoeâstop, what's this?
Marshall E. Bowen/5652 South Denker, Los Angeles. Anti-Jew hate-tract subscriber, '65â'66.
The name hit familiar. Dwight hit the DMV lists and flipped to the B's. There: Marshall
Edward
Bowen/male Negro/5â²11â³, 175, DOB 5/18/44. CDL# 08466. Former address: 8418 South Budlong. DMV file note: background check for admittance to the LAPD Academy, 3/11/67. Current address, bingo: 5652 South Denker again.
Anomaly. Incongruity. Anti-white hate-tract subscriber, potential L.A. cop.
Yes, and the name re-hit familiar.
Dwight hit the subversive-group list. Bingo #2: There's Marshall E. Bowen again.
At Black Muslim meetings. At Black Snake Bund powwows.
Oooooh, Baaaaad Brother!
Dwight called LAPD. He knew a guy in the Personnel Office. The guy kicked loose confidential stats on the QT. Dwight got him on the line and laid out Marshall Bowen. He applied to the Department in 3/67. Did he get on?
The guy said he'd check. Dwight held the line for six minutes. The guy came back on, all excited. Bingo #3: Marshall E. Bowen made it on LAPD.
Academy graduate, 6/67. Assigned to Wilshire Patrol. Still at Wilshire. Class-A fitness reports.
Marshall, you
baaad
.
Because:
You
subscribed to hate lit.
You
went to Commie meetings. Brother, this be
baaad
behavior. They could kick yo black ass off LAPD.
Because:
Your background checkers fucked up and missed your hate history. Left-wing honky-haters are summarily excluded from LAPD.
You
baaaaaaad
. You exploitable, coercible and lose-yo-jobable. Yo black ass belongs to me.
Dwight called Freddy Otash in Vegas. Freddy was ex-LAPD. Freddy knew his LAPD shit.
The phone rang nine times. Otash picked up, brusque. “Who's this?”
“It's Dwight, Freddy.”
Otash said, “Oh, shit. Don't tell me. The Grapevine.”
Dwight laughed. “ATF's pulling out on the first. I think we'll have to go in then.”
“And we're meeting with Wayne on the thirtieth?”
“Right, and I think you and I should get together before then.”
Otash sighed. “Is Wayne ready for this?”
Dwight said, “I think so.”
“Jesus, Wayne Junior. You can't count him in, you should
never
count him out.”
Dwight lit a cigarette. “I had a question about LAPD.”
“I'm listening.”
“The background-check process. I'm looking at a colored kid named Marshall Bowen. He went to Commie meetings and got on LAPD last year. Tell me how that Commie shit could fall between the cracks.”
Otash yawned. “I
know
the Bowen kid. He was a plant for Clyde Duber. Clyde sheep-dipped him and put him in with some Red groups.”
Dwight said, “Freddy, you're a white man.”
Otash said, “No, I'm not. I'm a fucking Lebanese.”
