James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (62 page)

We airlifted food and medicinal herbs to the slums outside Dajabón. A small sect there has canonized Wayne Tedrow. They wear newspaper photos of him, attached to pointed hats. A dream myth exists about Wayne now. People believe that winged men murdered and martyred him
.

Be still now, I know you see it, I know you loved him. We honor the dead through imagery. Belief works that way
.

Celia ran an arms funnel. We purchased weapons in Cuba and shipped them to Port-au-Prince. I bought inmates out of La Victoria prison and got
them forged ID cards and guns. Money went to converts in La Banda. They left jail doors open and shredded documents. A young man whom Wayne rescued from harm repaid his debt in full. He killed six La Banda torturers at a whorehouse in Borojol. Celia blew up the torture chamber under El Presi-dente's golf course
.

We lost some of ours. Random reprisals were inevitable and cost us dearly. El Jefe muzzled published and broadcast accounts of our actions. Word spread through printed leaflets and secret-band radio
.

Many of the slaves Wayne freed have joined us. Some of them wear his picture around their necks. There have been skirmishes on the north D.R. coastline. A 6/14 demolition team blew up Tiger Kove. Many voodoo sects hold the building sites to be sacred ground. Many people refuse to walk across them. We shotgunned two Tonton Macoute leaders and three vicious bokurs on a golf course near Ville-Bonheur. Celia is lost somewhere in the D.R. or Haiti. She has been unreachable for months. I cannot find her and cannot conscionably continue my search with our work still to do. If you have seen some of this or all of this and my pictures have guided you, you should now try to sleep
.

The Statler supplied guest robes. One size fits all. His fit too small, Joan's engulfed her.

She was up first. Room service had come and gone. Dwight poured coffee. Joan examined paper stock. The room-service cart was a workbench. The couch was a study perch.

“How do we age the documents?”

“Two runs in a convection oven. You chemically treat the paper and cook it. You add the ink or type the text on later.”

“How do we differentiate the printing and cursive styles?”

“We cut stencils and print or write longhand within the boundaries.”

Joan lit a cigarette. Her eyes were red—late nights and heavy smoking.

“The diary is the big thing. It's our basic text, so it has to be found.”

Dwight sat on the couch. “We have to be sure that he doesn't already have a diary. We've got to locate it, so that we can snatch it and replace it, right before the convergence.”

“Typed, right? We don't want to hand-forge a document of that length.”

Dwight sipped coffee. “Right. If he has a typewriter, we'll purchase an identical one and go from there. I'll get a typeface sample on my first B&E.”

Joan took his hands. “Scotty Bennett? He's tight with Marsh now.”

Dwight shrugged. “Scotty's a wild card. He's a decorated cop on the one hand, a brutal fuck on the other. The important thing is that he densifies the overall text. He's killed eighteen armed robbers and at least a dozen Panthers, and it will either come out or be stonewalled to the extent that it looks very goddamn bad for LAPD.”

Joan smiled. “How were your dreams?”

Dwight smiled. “Vivid, while you were talking. A little raw after that.”

Joan pointed to a matchbook pile. Fruit joints all. The Tradesman, the Jaguar, the Falcon's Lair. Marsh cruises Hollywood. Marsh keeps amyl-nitrate poppers in a hidey-hole.

“He might have a lover who would contradict our profile.”

Dwight shook his head. “He's a loner, he's discreet, he's especially circumspect now that he's celebrated. He's on the cover of
Ebony
magazine this month.”

Joan stubbed out her cigarette. “Who shoots?”

“A Klansman I've dealt with before.”

“Competent?”

“Yes.”

“The hard part will be putting them together.”

Dwight sipped coffee. It killed a headache tapping in.

“Marsh has to be secluded. It won't work unless he fires from a distance. The shooter can fire, kill Marsh and plant the throwdown. It's all about manipulating a proper convergence and rigging a workable line of sight.”

Joan nodded. “It's all pretext. It's giving Marsh a reason to be there.”

Dwight said, “Yes, and L.A. would be the best location. One, Marsh is here. Two, LAPD would be working the case full-tilt, as it tries to bury anything that might embarrass them. Jack Leahy would roll out for the Bureau, and Jack's a mordant piece of work with a weird take on Mr. Hoover.”

Joan rubbed his temples. She kneaded a bulging vein flat.

“It's going to take months.”

“It's all about creating the levels of subtext. We have to layer in misinformation at the start.”

“Incoherence will inspire a more rigorous scrutiny.”

“And a greater degree of paranoia and a more desperate mass desire to make it all fit.”

Joan said, “That precipitating event. Have you thought about it?”

Dwight cracked his knuckles. “I've gone ahead. The Bureau has a Records Center in Media, Pennsylvania. There's 10,000 surveillance files stored there. It's an easy black-bagger.”

Joan smiled. “A publicized B&E?”

“Yes, a pre-announcement. Hopefully, it creates a public expression of outrage and becomes a primer on file work that will serve to make our event that much more accessible.”

“The more people go to the files, the more they'll see and won't see. They won't really know what they're looking for, so they'll study harder and the process will fracture and attenuate.”

Dwight stretched. His neck hurt. He'd slept curled into Joan.

“Karen.”

Dwight said, “Yes. She's taking the team in.”

Joan pulled her hair back. “Well, she's very good.”

“Yes.”

“You cannot tell her what we're doing.”

“I know that.”

“There's two sets of ethics at work here.”

“I know.”

Joan lit a cigarette. Dwight studied her face. More stress lines. More gray hair than dark now.

“Who redacted your file?”

“I'm not telling you.”

“Tell me how things have gone wrong for you. Tell me how you got through it and how you got it up for all this.”

“I'm not telling you.”

Dwight cracked his thumbs. “You knew Tommy Narduno. He was killed at the Grapevine Tavern.”

Joan stared at him. “Yes, he was. I'm sure that you and your colleagues killed him, just as he was sure that you ran the King operation.”

Dwight stared back. “Tell me how he knew.”

“He saw you in Memphis two days before. He knew what you were to Mr. Hoover. He saw you distributing envelopes to some Memphis cops.”

Dwight blinked. Smitty's Bar-B-Q. A cop spits tobacco juice, a cop fans C-notes, a cop wolfs burnt ends.

“What else?”

“Karen said you were in bad shape that whole spring.”

“The ‘Freedom School.' You and Karen go back.”

Joan leaned into him. He was sweating. His robe was full wet.

“Karen and I go back further than you know.”

“And you manipulated her in order to meet me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I just knew.”

“That's not an answer.”

“Because I sensed a shared agenda. Because I thought you might help me kill Mr. Hoover.”

Dwight stared at her. She touched his leg. Wayne smiled from somewhere.
Look, Ma. No fear
.

Joan said, “We came up with the same idea independently. I've wanted to kill him since I was a child, and I won't tell you why.”

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 12/16/70. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,          
December 16, 1970

Of course, I'm going to do it. I'll entrust the job to my closest and most prudent comrades; no one will be hurt in the performance of the act. Dwight has gotten me a schematic drawing of the Records Center and has convinced me that the building will be unguarded. The alarm system is outmoded and the building itself is fairly secluded. Bill K., Saul M. and Anna B.-W. have agreed to take part. Dwight calls it a “feat of explication, in and of itself.” Of course he's being disingenuous; of course, he knows that an opportunity to fully expose the FBI's illegal surveillance practices is too great for me to resist. He's set the date of March 8. The Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier boxing match takes place that night. Dwight thinks the local cops will be popping into taverns to listen to it on the radio and watch it on bootleg TV, so their powers of concentration and will to proactively seek out unusual occurrences will be diverted.

My comrades are committedly non-violent. I cannot say that wholeheartedly about Dwight. He suffered a nervous collapse in the wake of the black-militant madness and feels complicit. I see it in his ever-more-tender regard for my children. Should I reveal a certain secret there? Two children died in the course of that drug deal. That particular shock seems to drive him. I see him doing what I do. I compartmentalize my children and work assiduously to assure their safety as I comport myself with considerable recklessness in the world. I exemplify hubris in a manner that Dwight does not; his recklessness is traumatically defined, while mine is cloaked in spiritual trappings and may even be considered a puerile lifestyle choice.

Ella is almost two now. She carries the stuffed animals that Dwight bought her everywhere she goes. Like Dina, she now knows that she has two part-time fathers and has hit the jackpot in the delighted dad department. When they're older, they'll ask me to explain it. I'll say, “It was a wild time,” and feel like a fool.

This is my first journal entry since last March. In it, I described
my lunch with Joan and her gift of the beautiful emerald. I've been more and more frequently recalling our conversation of that day. Joan spoke of dreams as an interconnected state of consciousness, a virus that passes between like-minded people who cannot concede their like-mindedness for fear of the forfeiture of self. It made sense to me, although the mystical aspects seemed very un-Joan. Many strange and strangely surreal things make sense these days, because “It's a wild time.” In that regard, both Joan and I are Dwight's dream guides. I attempt to bring him the dream of peace and I am jealous that Joan may have brought him the dream of a fiery conversion of thought.

And thought to Dwight always results in action.

My husband left town four days ago. Dwight has been coming over on alternating nights. I'm sure he's sleeping with Joan on the nights we're not together. And he's calling up to talk politics at least once a day. He tries to sound utilitarian, but idealistic perceptions keep creeping in.

I've been noticing binocular glint at all hours, coming from a high summit on Baxter Street. I back-tailed it to a small bungalow and snuck in. I recognized the clothing in the closet. It was Dwight's and Joan's, of course.

I noticed document-forging tools on a table and boxes full of chemicals and paper. I pray that my dreams of peace may intersect with their dreams and keep them from creating more harm.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 12/18/70. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles,          
December 18, 1970

I rousted a black street fool for vagrancy last week. He had misdemeanor warrants in the system and possessed no visible means of support. I was about to arrest him, when he screwed his face up in recognition. He smiled and stated quite flatly: “You The Man.”

He was right: I
am
The Man. I am a highly decorated ranking officer on LAPD; I am, according to
Ebony
magazine, “an icon of the new black masculinity,” and “odds-on for chief of police one day.” Political office should not be ruled out, nor should a career in television journalism. I am a magazine cover boy;
Ebony
and
Jet
, with
Sepia
soon to follow. I am permitted to be magnanimous, given the new bounty of my life. So I told that street fool, “You're right, brother. I
am
The Man,” and cut him loose.

I'm working the Hollywood Division Detective Bureau. I drive a nightwatch K-car and coordinate felony-level investigations at their inception. I get awed looks and resentful looks from criminals of all stripes and awed and resentful looks from my brother officers. I'm twenty-six years old, with three years on LAPD. I'm a sergeant working a prestigious detective-division assignment. I'm the heroic black man who went undercover and broke the backs of two vicious, dope-dealing black-militant groups who were really
anti
-black at their core. I am no longer a downscale brother slumming for cosmetic effect. I've moved from a dingy crib in Watts to a nice house in Baldwin Hills. Allow me to say it again: I am most assuredly THE MAN.

I cashed in on the black-militant zeitgeist, the biggest and the best. The black-nationalist movement is in disarray. It's a nationwide cavalcade of indictments, trials, convictions and sundry legal hassles, the result of years of police infiltration and inter-group squabbles. Eldridge Cleaver is hiding in Algeria. The Panthers and US have exploded behind petty turf wars, general ineptitude and native fractiousness. The BTA and MMLF are kaput. My testimony put my dope-smoking, booze-guzzling, whore-chasing comrades in prison. Wayne Tedrow sought death by grandiose gesture and found it in Haiti. Mr. Holly had a nervous breakdown. I'm
feared
in the ghetto now. I'm a known snitch, a celebrated turncoat and a hard-charging cop.

“You The Man.” Yes, I certainly am.

I've been hanging out at Tiger Kab. The new owner is a man named Fred Otash. “Freddy O.” is ex-LAPD, an ex–private eye, a mobbed-up soldier of fortune and a magnet for unsubstantiated rumors. Freddy pulls shakedowns, Freddy dopes racehorses, Freddy was in on the MLK and RFK hits. I believe none of it and all of it. I'm
The Man
. I've got the recent verifiable history and much more current cachet.