James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (65 page)

He spent hours in the file-storage unit. Jack Leahy found it odd. He found Jack odd. Jack was always cracking wise about the old girl's health. Jack didn't know that she was still more lucid than not.

Files:

Joan disdained the Records Center raid in Pennsylvania. She thought
it would exposit file mania too soon. She thought he was exploiting Karen. She was making a Quaker pacifist a death accessory.

They stopped discussing it. It just sat there, unsaid.

Dwight went through hall closets. He saw Marsh's pressed uniforms and a gun belt rolled up on a shelf.

Find some actors. Cop-dress one up. Grab a patrol car. Rig a Griffith Park backdrop. There's a fake Marsh in uniform. His head is averted. A handcuffed suspect is blowing him. Marsh has a gun to his head.

Age-fade the snapshot. Drop it in a frayed uniform. It's a forgotten knickknack.

Score some street uppers. Tuck them behind his underwear. Marsh is jacked-up on duty and cruising for sport.

Dwight walked out the back door. Marsh had a lovely view. The location was sweet. Marsh was twenty-six. He had a year to live, tops.

Room service brought New York steaks and a too-fat Bordeaux. He was drinking less. Joan was drinking more. Their sleep stints had reversed.

They ate in their robes. Fat rain drummed the windows. They burned a synthetic log in the fireplace.

Joan said, “I don't like the break-in. It's precipitous.”

“You're worried about the convergence.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It's the one thing we can't force.”

“They have to be voluntarily in the same place at the same time.”

Dwight slouched in his chair. “The same
city
, with the perch pre-established. It should be in L.A. He's stayed at the Beverly Wilshire the last six times he's been here. He always requests a suite with a north-window view. You've got seven two- and three-story buildings directly across the street. Two have office-rental signs up. The other buildings are boutiques and restaurants. They have second- and third-floor storage rooms facing the hotel.”

Joan lit a cigarette. “Keep going. Tell me what you're thinking.”

“I'm thinking we should find a black kid about Marsh's age. A close resemblance is crucial. He should rent an office and we should decorate it. It's where he goes to fuck boys, use drugs and hoard guns. I'll steal semen tubes from a hospital. We'll lay in the fluids gradually. Marsh is cracking up. His drug use is escalating. I'll have the shooter skin-pop him full of coke on his way out. I'll show him how to boot toxins into his liver to approximate long-term drug abuse.”

Joan blew a smoke ring. “You are so astonishingly gifted, comrade.”

Dwight took her hands. “You're worried about Celia.”

“I don't want to talk about it. She's always understood the risks.”

“I could make a few phone calls.”

“I don't want you to.”

Dwight smiled. “When I connected you to Tommy Narduno, I thought you were coming after me.”

Joan smiled. “I considered it. Tommy thought he could reveal the Grapevine aspect of your operation and create a media ruckus. He was always naïve that way. He was a muckraking journalist at heart. He was wearing a wire on the night you killed him.”

Dwight trembled. Joan pointed to the wine. Dwight shook his head.

“What convinced you to pass on it?”

“Karen convinced me. She implied that you were ready. She quoted Goethe at one point. The phrase she used was ‘the fall upward.' ”

Dwight opened a window. Hailstones brushed his face.

“Jomo and the thing with Marsh. What was your reasoning?”

A gust shook the panes. Joan turned her chair and let the wet hit her.

“There were your ends and my ends. They were both synchronous and inimical. I knew that Marsh had to be your plant. Your pathology showed itself in your choice. It was bold, grandiose and self-destructive. I spent time with Marsh and found him to be weak and almost fawningly self-serving. He cruised men when he thought I wasn't looking, which was true actor's faux pas, dramatically unsound and narcissistic. So, I called Scotty Bennett and revealed his inclination. So, I called Scotty again and mediated Marsh's betrayal of Jomo Clarkson. It was a two-fold strategy. I wanted to put Marsh in jeopardy and force him into allegiance with the BTA. I considered Jomo to be evil, and I was fairly sure that Scotty wouldn't be able to resist killing him.”

Wind tossed the tablecloth and dumped the Bordeaux. Dwight pulled Joan out of her chair.

Puckett, Mississippi. Six trailer parks and nine Klan kampgrounds.

Bob Relyea ran the Exalted Knights Klavern. He pandered to the local cops and snitched to ATF. He sold magic mushrooms and hate tracts. He robbed gas stations. Bob was ex–Tiger Krew. He pushed heroin in Saigon and worked with Wayne Tedrow. He shot Martin Luther King.

It was kool and klear. The kampground konsisted of a korrugated bunkhouse and a K-9 kennel. Four fucks stood around the shooting range. The targets were department-store dummies. They wore Eldridge Cleaver masks.

Bob saw the car pull up. Dwight braked and stopped short of the kampground. Bob jogged the rest of the way.

Dwight popped the passenger door and the glove box. A C-note roll rolled out. Bob caught it and tucked it under his sheet.

“And that's just for talking?”

“That's right.”

“Don't tell me. If I shoot somebody, there's lots more where that came from.”

Dwight said, “That's right.”

Bob said, “Wooo, boy.”

Dwight lit a cigarette. “You get fifty thousand. You take out the target and the fall guy right there. It's two easy shots. That part doesn't worry me at all. It's bringing the two together. I'll abduct the fall guy and position him if I have to, but I'd rather not.”

Bob picked his nose. “The target guy's a big deal?”

Dwight winked. Bob said, “Talk's gonna bubble.”

“I want it to. There's a subtext here.”

“Who's the target?”

Dwight laughed. “You'll know him when you see him.”

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 2/6/71. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,      
February 6, 1971

I'm going through with it, whatever it abuts, facilitates or foreshadows on Joan's and Dwight's end. I am taking the risk of implementing violence. I feel loyal to Joan and am grateful to her for the change she has created in Dwight. We have traveled a long road together. It would not be bragging for me to assert that my pacifism has mitigated Joan's violent actions over the years. It is surely true that her brash being has sporadically brought me closer to God and non-violent confrontation. She is
of
me and I am
of
her and Dwight is
of
both of us. There is deep alchemy in where we connect and where we diverge. I continue to trust in our dialogue as much as I fear potential outcomes. My horrible fight with Dwight has forced me to admit the arrogance and speciousness at the core of my moral logic. The fire of his conversion has convinced me of the necessity of this risk.

Dwight now knows the length and breadth of my relationship with Joan, if not the specific details. Joan has laid hints, or has revealed the friendship in looks and asides that the brilliant and brilliantly paranoic Dwight has seized upon and brought to mental certainty. I have lied to Dwight by omission; I am now certain that Joan used me in order to get to him; now Dwight and Joan lie to me by withholding the details of their “Operation.” I am fully culpable for the creation of the Dwight-Joan bond. I should have told Dwight that Joan has deployed fake identities and that they have cloaked much of her subversion. I should have told Dwight that Joan had planned a series of armed robberies back east. I should have told him that we were in Algeria together and that I held a prayer vigil for the French paratroopers that Joan and her comrades ambushed outside Béchar. I should have told him that I was part of the 6/14 invasion, in a non-violent planning role. I did not tell him these things, because I ghoulishly desired the conflagration of
Them
, because I wanted to unleash
Them
to fulfill some buried rage in
Me
, to inflict
Them
on the circumspect, ideologically
compromised, radically chic and ever-so-careful world I live in with the unique fury I knew
They
would evolve.

Now I must live out my creator's role in this, play my supporting part, damn the vicissitudes of radical lifestyle as I pray for peace. I will break and enter, steal files, explicate the file-hoarding practices of an oppressive bureaucracy and hope that a much-anticipated boxing match between two gifted black fighters does not push my actions to back-page status. Irony: Dwight has called the break-in a “media event.” The Records Center is in Media, Pennsylvania.

The fight with Dwight took place here in my home; Dina and Ella heard the flare-up and storming-out conclusion. It was an altercation I spawned from my own hubris. I overestimated my influence on Dwight and belittled Joan's influence. I was shrill, petty, jealous and philosophically unsound. Dwight came at me with a convert's and converted lover's fury. “You blow up things, you destroy symbols, you attack sympathetic portrayals of institutions forty fucking times removed,” he said to me. “It allows you to feel smug while people suffer and die, you'll continue to do it until a chunk of exploding plaster from a Confederate monument puts out a black kid's eye, then you'll come back here and mope and pray and figure out something spectacular and Quaker-correct to do to put yourself back in the game you so dearly love, which is violent by its own basic nature.”

And he was right.

And then he said, “And do not ever patronize Joan Rosen Klein, because you gave her to me.”

And he was right. And so I will go forth with the task that he and Joan have assigned.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 2/21/71. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

En route to Boston,
2/21/71                 

I have been traveling and tracking potential leads since my last meeting with Scotty. My accumulated work-leave time has served as a cover. I have allegedly been on a cross-country auto trip. I have now laboriously hand-checked the passport acceptance files and reject files in New Orleans, St. Petersburg and Milwaukee,
with Lynn, Massachusetts, upcoming. These are the cities that Scotty has deemed to be the most lax, permissive and incompetent in their passport-issuing practices. I have indulged the Bent in those cities and have reveled in the freedom of cavorting in nonlocal-celeb locales. Reginald Hazzard was not issued a passport in those cities and was not to be found in the reject files. His photograph—with and without medically addressed burn scars—was not attached to any of the thousands of application cards I have scanned.

So, I've been traveling and enjoying my time outside of L.A. I've been calling Scotty every few days, to report “no luck.” I've been mindscaping, having very vivid dreams and pondering Scotty's “
Cherchez la femme
” remark a great deal.

It was a woman who ratted me out to Scotty. Dwight Holly reacted strangely when Scotty mentioned that fact to him. I'm becoming convinced that the woman is Joan Rosen Klein.

Joan cultivated me in late '68 and early '69. I was Dwight Holly's infiltrator, and I knew that Mr. Holly had an informant in play. Joan was very worldly and seemed overqualified for the low-rent black-militant world. She was very persistent in her approach of me, she may have been trying to seduce me, but her finely tuned predator's sense told her she'd have no luck there. It all felt mindscapingly right to me, up until the moment I ran into Junior Jefferson, shortly before I left on this trip.

Junior was gobbling chicken and waffles at Tommy Tucker's Playroom and was grousing about the fate of Tiger Kab. First, the Boys buy Black Cat Cab away from him and rename it after that faggoty animal. Then the late Wayne Tedrow embezzled all the Tiger Kab cash and the Boys sold the biz to Freddy Otash. So, Freddy fires him and 86's him from the premises. Now, Tiger Kab is the swingingest place on Planet Earth, they're showing the Ali-Frazier fight on closed-circuit TV—and he can't come.

We continued to commiserate. We talked up the “Blastout” with a certain wonderment. Junior said, “You was a fuckin' FBI pig-snitch the whole time.” I admitted that was true. Junior said he was cool with it and very casually mentioned that he saw Dwight Holly and that “Joan Jew-Commie babe” holding hands at a chink joint on Pico last week.

Cherchez la femme
.

Lynn is a dingy shoe-factory town amid scores of dingy towns of the same size, and I found the customs office to be dingy as I walked in. A florid Irishman was working the desk. He almost shit
when a well-dressed black man flashed an LAPD sergeant's badge. I'll credit him with wit, though. After I explained the purpose of my visit, he said, “You don't look like Jack Webb, Sergeant,” and led me back to the file stacks.

It was the sixth card in the fourth box I went through. The photo was of Reginald Hazzard, with a severely burn-scarred face. The name beside it was ink-smudged and unreadable. The routing stamp on the back was crystal-clear.

Reginald was granted a visa to travel to Haiti, 6/11/64.

It came to me instantly: I will not tell Scotty this.

(Los Angeles, 3/1/71)

S
cotty said, “I got the bread.”

Fred O. said, “He robbed a liquor store. He's got expertise in that regard.”

Fred Turentine said, “I hate fruit bugs. The audio tracks are unsavory.”

Barone's Pizza on Ventura. A noted Valley grease spill. They had a private room. It featured photos of notable wops.

The beer was scald-your-teeth cold. The pizza was burn-your-mouth hot. Scotty tossed the envelope on the table. The Crutchfield kid had ants in his pants. He kept scratching his balls.