James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (57 page)

Dwight coughed. The line fritzed and died. He cracked the shades and got sight back. His eyes swirled. He called his L.A. patch-call guy. A recorded message rolled. He asked for a callback: one minute with The Man.

The light hurt. He pulled the shades back tight. Blackout curtains and time travel: Wayne with his first chemistry set and his Scottish immigrant grandfather.

Peru, Indiana. Spring '48. Wayne mixes powders and builds a rainbow.

The phone rang. He grabbed the receiver. A flunky said something. Dwight wiped his eyes. The line clicked. Richard Nixon said, “You've got balls to call me out of the blue.”

“Wayne Tedrow's dead. Balaguer's going nuts and rounding up people for some shit that Wayne pulled. We all go back with Wayne, Sir. With all due respect, this has to stop now.”

Nixon whistled. “Sure, Dwight. I'll call the little prick. Jesus, those fucking Nevada Mormons are crazy.”

(Santo Domingo, 3/26/70)

S
treet view, mirror view. He couldn't stop looking.

His suite was penthouse-high. The vista was wide. The fuzz kicked Red ass across a
biiiiiig
plane. The show was a week running. Roundups, hassles, brawls. Skirmishes up the ying-yang.

The window show got to him. His carved-up back, ditto. The 6/14 brand was a keeper. The scar was permanent. He
sort of
dug it. It astonished him and made him
look
.

Crutch walked mirror to window. He was shirtless, he was sweaty. Heart pings—
bip, bip, bip
.

Ivar Smith just called him. The Crutchfield hex worked. Some voodoo niggers whacked Wayne Tedrow's nigger-lover ass.

His head hurt. His vessels vibrated. It was a top-ten Richter-scale migraine. L.A. scared him back here. L.A. was
worse
. He read the signs: Dwight Holly and Marsh Bowen had some fucked-up dope thing going.

Tiger Krew dope.
His
dope. One fucking obvious conclusion.

Crutch stared out the window. Shit perked far and near. It was an ant show. The street was an ant farm. Cops and Commies skittered.

Sirens blared. It was earache-loud and stereophonic. The sound felt citywide. Spic ant groups froze.

He walked to the mirror. His scar was pink and creased. 6/14,
por vida
.

That heist lead torqued him: Leander James Jackson as Laurent-Jean Jacqueau. He located Jackson in coontown and spot-tailed him. He learned
buppkes
. He spot-tailed Marsh Bowen. Paydirt: Marsh meets Scotty Bennett at Tommy Tucker's Playroom.

Hated rivals—
très
chummy.
Say what
?

Crutch walked to the window. His head hurt. He sweated. He panted and fogged up the glass.

He wiped it clear. He blinked and squinted. The ant show was gone.

Coffee sounded good. Bop to Gazcue and slurp java. Re-calibrate and re-cogitate. Groove on the hex. Recap and reconsider the case.

Crutch strolled. He cut across the polo field. He scoped women at the paddock. He hit Calle Bolívar and made for the Malecón.

No fuzz, no ant farm. That siren blare was some kind of all-clear.

His head still hurt. The pain re-circulated and stung. He heard a car idling behind him. He heard foot slaps on pavement. He saw shadows up ahead.

Pile drive:

Two guys behind him, two guys up front. They've got bandanna masks, one's slipping off, it's Felipe Gómez-Sloan.

They slammed him. He flailed. He got clotheslined, he got rabbit-punched, he got tape slapped on his mouth. He got an arm free and ripped Canestel's mask off. The street flipped, the sky hit him, he saw Tiger Kar.

They dumped him in the trunk and threw the lid down. He pulled the tape off. He kicked at the latch point and gagged on stale air. Tiger Kar peeled out. He heard backseat banging. The trunk lining ripped and let air and light in. A knife blade stabbed and carved space.

There's more light. There's a hand. There's Froggy's pit-bull tattoos.

Froggy yelled. It was word bouillabaisse.
Cochon, pédé, putain Rouge. “L'héroïne” en français
, “cocksucker” in English.

The blade kept stabbing. Crutch squirmed away from it and kicked out. He hit Froggy's hand. The blade ripped his tennis shoe. He contorted and pulled his feet back.

Fumes filled the trunk—five fuckers smoking. Crutch saw Froggy's eyes in the trunk hole.

“It was not 6/14. It was Dwight Holly. There was a security camera in the lobby at the hotel. The camera was equipped with a timer. It cannot be anything else.”

The Cubans tiger-hissed. Saldívar blew smoke in the trunk. Crutch gagged and kicked at his face.

Froggy laughed. Crutch squirmed against the truck latch. Cigarettes bombarded him. He swatted out the coals.

He prayed. His headache lodged behind his eyes and white-bordered things. Froggy said, “The bombings have greatly upset Sam and Carlos. Sam and Carlos do not know of your part in this, although I have told them you may well be soft on Communists. I doubt that President Balaguer will
risk another round of construction and potential sabotage. Sam and Carlos think you should embellish your anti-Communist credentials.”

Tiger Kar zoomed. It felt like the full-bore Autopista. Crutch prayed. He zoomed through the psalms and the Gloria Patria. His head pounded. His eyes burned. He saw Jesus and Martin Luther at Wittenberg. Smoke filled the trunk. Cigarette butts followed. Tiger hisses, tiger growls, mugging faces at the hole.

Pariguayo, pariguayo, pariguayo
.

Crutch vomited and gasped. Road bumps sent Tiger Kar swerving. Crutch pressed his face to the trunk hole and sucked air in. Gómez-Sloan jabbed a cigarette at his nose.

He screamed and rolled away from the hole. He heard
pariguayo, pariguayo, pariguayo
. Tiger Kar braked and brodied. The doors slammed. The trunk lid popped and let I-see-Jesus light in. Hands grabbed him and placed his feet on the ground.

It's a shit-ass place. It's a garbage dump with six shacks adjacent.

Paper refuse and mulch. Fifty tons of ground
something
. Bones poking out of an ash mound. Wiggles inside it—gator tails snapping through.

Pariguayo, pariguayo, pariguayo
.

The sun burned his headache out through his eyes. The grabbing hands held him and walked him. Somebody strapped a big weighty thing on his back. The thing had a hose, a nozzle and a trigger. Somebody put a spout thing in his hands.

Pariguayo, pariguayo, pariguayo
.

It was L.A. or the D.R. It was the Boyle Heights dump or Watts swampland or some 6/14 deal. The sun melted the spout thing into his hands. Other hands pushed him to an open-front shack. Two dozen people were bound and tape-gagged.

Black people. Men, women and kids—bone-thin and squirming. Pus-packed sores. Yellow eyes jumping and glazing.

The spout thing smelled like gasoline. The yellow eyes talked to him. It was L.A. or Haiti. The people were darktown riffraff or voodoo lords. The psalms kept replaying.

Hands steadied him. Hands flexed his hands on the spout thing. Clouds doused the sun for a moment.

He stepped forward and turned around. He saw all five of them and got their names straight for the first time. The sun re-eclipsed and winked at him. He tapped the trigger.

The flame tore up and out. They screamed and went spastic on fire.

The ammo on their belts blew up. Pieces of them exploded.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 3/30/70. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles,
3/30/70       

“Black-militant summit”: savor the concept.

I was to be the facilitating agent. Leander James Jackson would represent the BTA and Joseph Tidwell McCarver and Claude Cantrell Torrance would negotiate on the MMFL's behalf. This august event was couched as an afternoon bar-b-q at Joe McCarver's crib. There would be ribs, chicken, greens, booze, reefer and sweet-potato pie. Joe's backyard would be festively decorated. His four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son would provide diversion and perhaps serve to squelch overuse of the word
motherfucker
.

I had possession of the dope. I would be in charge of negotiating the BTA/MMLF percentage cut and the ultimate splitting of profits. Most importantly, this was where I would shift my allegiance from Mr. Holly to Scotty.

The plan resulted from Bowen-Bennett summitry at Tommy Tucker's Playroom. We determined that immediate action would be required. The dope split would be accomplished; the BTA and MMLF fools would leave the pad holding big poundage; Scotty would swoop down for the bust. It meant betraying my FBI-infiltrator status prematurely, thus shafting Mr. Holly and Mr. Hoover, with hopes of getting back on LAPD in a flash. If the plan meshed, both the BTA and MMLF would be fully discredited, the Feds would get their indictments and I would be reinstated to LAPD. Mr. Hoover and Mr. Holly would be furious. I had unilaterally terminated the operation, with Scotty's assistance. Resentment would simmer and then dissipate. Scotty and I would then be free to pool our information on the heist. We would form a powerful two-man team to go after the money and emeralds;
OPERATION BAAAAAD BROTHER
would be considered a success. This wild swath of my young life, with all its attendant mindscapes, would assume an entirely new dimension.

I asked Scotty how he knew of my fixation with the heist, enough so to brace me on it. Scotty told me he had picked up tips
that I had been making subtle queries, going back months. On instinct, he did a background check on me. Bingo: my 84th and Budlong address showed up on an old driver's license.

Joe McCarver owned a small stucco house off 68th and Slauson. The day was warm. The backyard was comfortably strewn with lounge chairs; the kids splashed around in a wading pool. Scotty was parked in an unmarked unit, two blocks away. He had a two-way radio with dial-in capacity. All I needed was four seconds with Joe's bedroom phone.

“This be good like a
motherfuuuuucker
,“Claude Torrance said as we sat down. The dope sat in the middle of a long picnic table, as if it were an altarpiece. Intergroup tension needed to be brooked before we began the negotiation, so 151 rum and spike-laced grass was served. I partook sparingly. The other three men consumed a full bottle of the rum and smoked several reefers. Joe attacked the food; I prepared the opening remarks of my mediation. Then Claude started fucking with my head.

“Brother, an' I calls you ‘brother' with a big muthafuckin' grain of salt, let me ask you,
brother
, why'd you rat out Brother Jomo Kenyatta Clarkson to the muthafuckin' pigs last year?”

I said something neutral. I did my conciliatory “Hey, brother, be cool” thing.

Leander stepped in; I'm sure he considered my response sissified. He said, “Listen to me, baby boy. I put a knife in Jomo and saw him bleed weak blood. He was anemic from weak thoughts and a strong appetite for evil. I put a hex on his nigger soul, and he die the next day. I have connections to Bizango-sect
bokurs
and the ghost of Baron Samedi. They
make
Jomo off himself. They send legions of red ants up the hole in his dick to eat out his eyes and his brain. That is the pure truth, baby boy.”

I held my breath.

Joe put down a chicken wing and cracked his knuckles.

Claude said, “Baron Samedi sucked my big black dick,” and spit on Leander's shoes.

Then:

Leander pulled a gun. Joe pulled a gun. Claude pulled a gun. There was the briefest of pauses where they might have stepped back. A strong wind whipped through the backyard. A bottle toppled. The noise rang loud. That did it.

All three men had fat-clip automatics. They all fired at once, as I ducked under the table.

It was very close range. The noise was horrible. Leander shot
and killed Claude. Joe shot and killed Leander. Leander shot and killed Joe as he was going down. The three men were on the ground by the table. They were technically dead, but still twitching. They kept firing and sending shots out. The children screamed and tried to run. Stray shots and ricochets hit them. I saw the little girl's brains blow back into the wading pool.

I curled up, covered my head and waited for more shots or death-throe noise. There was none. I looked around and saw the three dead men and two dead children. It was over in less than ten seconds. I had an epiphany. It was instantaneously realized mindscaping. I immediately prepared a tableau for my heroic, trial-by-fire redemption.

The house and backyard were flanked by vacant lots on three sides, which gave me both privacy and time to work. Calmly, I pulled my gun and shot the dead Claude Cantrell Torrance in the head. Just as calmly, I shot the late Joseph Tidwell McCarver and Leander James Jackson. Finishing up, I took the three guns out of their hands and fired off random shots. I smudged the grips, then calmly placed the guns back in their hands.

Sure—they fired on each other. But I assumed control and took them all out. Too bad about the kids. I tried to sweep them to safety, but ricochets caught them first
.

I walked through the yard and stretched the bodies out in convincing cross-fire positions. I wiped up the drag marks with paper towels and checked out the scene. I ran into the house and stiffed a faux-panicked call to Scotty.

His siren kicked on instantly; I heard it from two blocks away. I walked slowly back to the yard.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 4/1/70. Los Angeles
Herald Express
article.

Two days ago, a backyard barbecue in South Los Angeles erupted into violence and three men and two children lay dead. Initial news reports attributed the killings to a high-stakes narcotics deal gone bad. It now appears to be much more than that.

The three adult victims—Leander James Jackson, age 31, Joseph Tidwell McCarver, age 32, and Claude Cantrell Torrance, age 23—were rabid black-militant activists, LAPD Sergeant Robert S. Bennett told reporters at a press conference. The two murdered
children—Theodore and Darleen McCarver, ages six and four, were McCarver's two offspring with his common-law wife. Sergeant Bennett went on to reveal that there was a sixth person in Joe McCarver's backyard: former LAPD Officer Marshall E. Bowen.