James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (82 page)

A lab and a file trove. Bottle rows and stacked folders. Chem texts, beakers, burners and pots. Some nifty molecular charts.

His fingers stung. He scanned shelves and played a hunch. There's
ocimum basilicum
. Sure, why not?

He dipped his left-hand fingers in the bottle. They re-tingled and un-stung. He pulled them out. The cuts disappeared as the skin puckered up.

“Do you believe in Haitian chemistry?”

He turned around. Nix on Chubby Checker. Reggie looked like Harry Belafonte with white splotches and a Fu Manchu stash.

Crutch said, “I believe in everything.”

Sleep found him and won. He wanted to see it all one more time and say good-bye to Wayne. He got a blackout curtain and cigarette backdraft.

He smelled the airport. Jet fuel and scorched rubber. He heard chants right after that.

“
Muerto
,” La Banda, “Raids”
en español
.

He opened his eyes. He saw kids with black-bordered placards. A photo of a swarthy guy.
ESTEBAN JORGE SÁNCHEZ, 1929–1972
.

He shut his eyes again. Reggie said, “Don't go to sleep. We're here.”

The Midget flew them first-class. Reggie was tall. The legroom jazzed him. Crutch tried to conjure Joan and got Esteban Sánchez non-stop.

Reggie was Mr. Quiet. It all oozed fait accompli. He didn't niggle, question, protest. Reggie, the doofus genius with the hellbent past.

Crutch stayed awake. The nightmare potential re-vitalized him and kept him up. Reggie read chemistry books and over-ate. His burn scars looked exotic. The stewardess dug on him. Reggie, the socially unkempt and angelic savant.

Crutch got mad out of nowhere. The jet engine throb got lodged in him somehow. He got dizzy. Sleep fought him and won.

“Sir, we've arrived.”

The stewardess jostled him. First class had filed out. Reggie was gone.
No, not yet. Please, God—let me see
—

He jumped up. He grabbed his bag and shoved people out of the way. His coat flapped. People saw his gun and got panicked. He shoved his way down the ramp. He elbowed some hippie fools and a nun. He made the runway. He saw Reggie and Mary Beth lock in an embrace.

The kid was sobbing. Mary Beth held his head down. She looked up and saw Crutch. She gave him her green-flecked eyes for a moment and walked her son off.

(Los Angeles, 4/13/72)

J
oan built identities.

She worked at Dwight's desk. Klein and Sifakis were verboten now. Too much had happened. She'd overused Williamson, Goldenson, Broward and Faust.

They needed birth certificates. Forest Lawn sent her a plot list. It included names, dates of birth and dates of death. She thumbed through it. The decedents were alphabetized. They needed two women. 1920s DOBs, one ethnic/one not. She was Jewish and looked it. Karen was Greek and did not.

She scanned columns. The correct-age name selection was scant. They needed solitary women. Scant family or none. That required backup research. From there: driver's licenses, Social Security cards, official file plants.

The names bored her. She sipped tea and lit a cigarette. Her wrist scars itched. She glanced around the fallback.

An envelope by the door. Expensive paper. It barely fit under the crack.

She got up and reached for it. She saw the set of initials on the back. She slit the top and read the note attached.

She'd kissed the page below her signature. Her lips had left an imprint bright red.

(Los Angeles, 4/14/72)

R
oll it.

Clyde and Buzz were out. Crutch worked the briefing-room projector. He spooled in the film and matched the sprocket holes. He killed the lights and pulled down the wall screen. He centered the beam and got
Action
.

Color footage, grainy stock. He jiggled dials. Better now—a clear image.

Fade in. There's a panning shot. There's a living room. The camera catches a window. It's light outside. The room is small and cheaply furnished. It's not Horror House.

A shot holds: the living room, close in. Five people walk into the frame. There's three women, two men. They're all naked and body-painted. Voodoo symbols, head to foot. The two men are black. Two women are white. They all wear wooden masks. The other woman is unmasked and wildly tattooed. She's María Rodríguez Fontonette.

Crutch straddled a chair. The camera swerved through the living room. There's the window again. The street is visible, it's Beachwood Canyon, we're
near
Horror House.

The camera re-centered. The actors swallowed brown capsules. Haitian herbs, yes. Cut to a close-up. There's Maria. There's the tattoo on her arm. The severing bisected the artwork soon after. She had lovely hands. They'd be severed. She moved gracefully. The killer cut inside of her. All that lithe movement, quashed.

Crutch watched. He felt compressed. Summer '68. Tattoo crashes in Horror House, Tattoo dies there. Arnie Moffett's rental houses. Joan and
Celia rent one. The rental-house screenings. It's all compressed. He was close at the start of it and never since. Warning click: there's something you missed.

Jump cut: we're in a bedroom now. There's an uncovered water bed, jiggling. The actors mill around. They talk to someone offscreen. Their lips move soundless.

Crutch stared at Tattoo. She's beautiful, she's alive. She betrayed 6/14 in '59 and reconciled later. “It was a wild time.” Celia said that. He couldn't reconcile the Cause with a fuck flick. It offended him.

The men trembled and shook. They fell on the bed. Their backs arched. Their legs spasmed. The potions took hold. They were early-stage zombified. They dumped their masks and gasped for air. They sweated the voodoo paint off their bodies.

Tattoo whipped them. Soft shots, for show. The two white girls started trembling. Their movements were puppet-string jerky. They got on the bed and stroked the guys hard. They all seized and thrashed. They all did grand mal shit, out of body. The men thrashed prone. Their movements slowed. The white girls straddled them and pulled them inside. The camera got insertion-close.

Different herbs. The women contorted at a hyper-pace. They pinned down the men. Their hips and arms moved in counterpoint. Their heads moved on some spazzy axis. The camera caught the men close. Their eyes were open and dead. Tattoo soft-whipped the women. Their contortions accelerated.

Tattoo stepped out of sight and stepped back in the frame. She held a fireplace tool, shaped like a phallus. The cock tip glowed. It was near white-hot. She touched the carpet with it and got combustion. The women thrashed and opened their mouths. She fed them the cock head. They sucked it and displayed no pain. They removed their mouths and pressed the cock head to the bedstead. The fabric sizzled and burned down to the springs.

The men were zombified. The women voodoo-fucked them. Tattoo grabbed the burning cock and burn-carved the wall. Crutch
got it
. He
knew
the markings. Tattoo drew them at Horror House. Tattoo drew them in fire on a fuck film–set wall.

The sprocket holes jammed. The screen went all white. The film died at just that spot.

Convergence. Connection. Confluence. Clyde's line:
It's who you know and who you blow and how you're all linked
.

Warning click: something's missing. You don't know who killed Tattoo. You don't know who glued all this up.

Crutch drove up Beachwood Canyon. It was all tight. There's Horror House. There's the house Joan and Celia rented. There's Arnie Moffett's other pads. Your four-years-back memory holds.

He zigzagged side streets. He calibrated the view out the fuck-film window. There it is, intact. The same palm trees and driveway across the street. A Moffett Realty sign.

Still all tight. Stone's throw here, stone's dribble there. Who/what started it and made it all cohere?

Celia said Arnie Moffett ran an import-export biz. Click—we're back
there
again.

Confluence. It's who you know and who you
—

Crutch drove downtown. Clyde had pull at the L.A. License Bureau. File access cost you fifty clams and a wink.

The duty clerk recognized him. Import-export from a while back? The boxes in Room 12.

The room was a musty paper swamp. The boxes were marked by years. No pull tabs, no alphabetizing. Real paper digs.

He started at '66 and worked backward. He hit at '63.

Arnie had a low-rent biz going. “Arnie's Island Exotics, Limited.” Curios, knickknacks,
connection
. Imports from: Jamaica, Haiti, the D.R. closer now. Where's that little link-it-all click?

The same office. The same next-door deli. “The Home of the Hebrew Hero.”

He brought a pint of Jim Beam. Arnie was a lush. The booze softened the beating then. It might work now.

Crutch walked in. A bell jingled. Arnie sat at the same desk. His bowling shirt was green today. He picked his nose and read
Car Craft
.

Crutch took the client's chair. Arnie ignored him. Crutch placed the jug on his blotter.

Arnie glanced at it. Crutch said, “Summer '68. What's the first thing you think of?”

Eyes on the jug. He considers,
re
-considers and
re
-cogitates. Aaah, he gets it.

“The first thing I think of is all that political
tsuris
. The second thing I think of is you.”

Crutch cracked the jug and passed it over. Arnie chugalugged.

“The third thing I'm thinking is that you look a lot older. The fourth is
that I hope you ain't still on that crusade. If it pertains to my houses, Gretchen Farr, Farlan Brown or Howard Hughes, you heard everything I got.”

Crutch said, “Leander James Jackson.”

Arnie re-chugged. “Say what?”

“The other guy who came around asking questions. That woman ‘Tattoo,' your fuck-film set, the house you rented out for the screenings.”

Arnie picked his snout. “We got two different agendas here. Where they connect, I don't know. You had your Gretchie crusade, he had his thing for Tattoo. He's dead, by the way. He got offed in that ‘Black-Militant Blastout.' And, by the way, I didn't hold nothing back from you. I told you I rented my cribs as porno-film sets, but you didn't ask me no questions about Tattoo.”

Re-convergence,
de
-convergence. So far, Arnie played kosher. Shit hovered close.

“Tell me about Tattoo.”

“What's to tell? I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew her. I heard she was on the skids. She heard I used to run an import biz out of her shitty country. She wanted to make some
farkakte
voodoo-smut film, and she needed a place to screen it. We talked on the phone. I gave her some leads. They were all pervy-type guys off my old import-customer list. She cold-called them, which ended our brief and borderline profitable encounter.”

Crutch rubbed his eyes. “Were you there for the film shoot?”

“No.”

“Did you meet the camera crew or the other actors?”

“No.”

“Have you seen the film?”

“
Nyet
. Porno ain't my bag. I like the real thing there in the sack with me. I'm an in-and-out kind of guy. Ten minutes of bliss and I'm back watching
Bowling for Dollars
on Channel 13.”

Crutch rubbed his neck. He was all knots and kinks.

“Who went to the screenings? Give me some names.”

Arnie sucked on the jug. “I don't know. I sent Tattoo a mimeograph copy of my list.”

“She was murdered that summer. How does that sit with you?”

Arnie made the jackoff sign. “It don't sit with me one way or the other. That Haitian guy thought she'd been clipped, so I'll tell you the same thing I told him. Bobby the K. and that civil rights
macher
just bought it, so it's not like some stray piece of island gash carries all that much weight with me.”

Crutch saw
RED
. Just like
then
. No, don't do it.

“Where's the fucking customer list?”

Arnie popped a zit on his neck. “It's in my garage, if it's anywhere. The key's on the hook by the john. Have fun, but don't come back in another four years and put me through this shit again.”

Dust, mildew, cobwebs, spiders' nests, mice. Oil cans, dead batteries, a cracked engine block.
Car Craft
back to '52. Forty forged Sandy Koufax baseballs.

Arnie Moffett's garage, Mar Vista.

Stolen prescription pads. The full run of
Food Service Monthly
. A photo of Marlon Brando with a dick in his mouth. Four BB guns, two defunct lawn mowers, the skeletal remains of a cat.

Crutch worked. He dug through pack-rat shit to get at a pile of boxes. He hit the first box row. Arnie's résumé expanded. He sold French ticklers, he sold rosaries, he sold the Donkey Dan Dong Extender. He sold counterfeit football tix. He ran the Debra Paget Fan Club. He mail-ordered JFK and Jackie K. dolls. He drop-shipped amyl-nitrate poppers to fag bars. He owned an employment agency for wetback kitchen help.

There—“Arnie's Island Exotics.”

He ripped the box open. An invoice stack popped out. He dumped the box on the floor. Gotcha—“Customers/'59–'63.”

Four stapled pages. A fuckload of names.

Crutch scanned alphabetic. The names and addresses meant greek. He got to the last page. He scanned the
Ts
to Zs. He stopped dead at:

“Weiss, Charles. 1482 North Roxbury, Beverly Hills.”

Chick: divorce lawyer. Chick: wheelman consort. Chick: Phil Irwin's best pal. Phil: hired and fired by Dr. Fred Hiltz—find me Gretchen Farr. Chick: dope fiend and mud shark.

And …