James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (34 page)

Chrissie walked through the living room. Dana followed her. Crutch choked tears back. Dana was wearing the sweater he bought her on the day he thought he would die.

Options: Trinity Lutheran Church or Marsh Bowen's new pad. Midnight services de-blued him sometimes. Nix that: the pastor knew his peeper rep and hated him. He was still wired. That meant Niggertown by default.

Marsh Bowen was racially regressing. His pad on Denker was jig-upscale. His pad on East 86th was a coon cave. Cinder-block struts, window bars, spookedelic paint.

Clock in: 12:51 a.m.

Crutch parked and waited. The radio supplied distraction. He got Christmas carols and Brother Bobby X, live at Rae's Rugburn Room. Brother Bobby ragged on the Jews and wished black folk an off-the-pigs New Year. Marsh Bowen walked out at 1:14 a.m. New vines: trim-cut and all
blaaaaack
.

Bowen walked past his car and schlepped it down to Imperial Highway. Bright lights there: all-night gas stations and coffee shops.

Cut him slack, he's too close, he'll see you.

Crutch waited two minutes and jammed southbound. He hit the corner and looked both ways. No pedestrians. He slow-cruised Goody-Goody's and the Carolina Pines, big windows at both locations. There's Bowen in the Pines, drinking coffee solo.

The place was semi-deserted. Crutch parked and ambled in slow. Fruit Alert: Bowen eyeball-trolled all the single men.

Walk in, get close, within eavesdrop range.

Crutch shagged a table two over. It provided a back view of Bowen. A waitress brought coffee.
Aaaahhh
, good—re-fuel those jets.

Bowen fidgeted and checked his watch. Fruit Alert: a fat Mex smirky-eyed him. Bowen shuddered and looked down.

Crutch checked the door. It popped open. He blinked. It can't be. He rubbed his eyes—yes, no,
yes
.

Joan Klein walked in and sat down with Bowen. She removed her overcoat. She smiled. She took off her beret and shook out her hair.

She cleaned her glasses on a napkin. She looked older without them. She wore a black knit dress. Her knife scar was covered. Crutch went hot/cold/hot/cold/hot/cold.

Joan and Bowen talked. It was sotto voce. Crutch peeled and re-peeled his ears and couldn't hear shit. Bowen sipped coffee. Joan sipped coffee and smoked. A white couple gave them a pissy mixed-couple look. Joan touched Bowen's arm—one time, two times, three. Bowen three-time flinched. Crutch picked up sound waves. He got Joan's husky voice. It burned straight through him.

He kept his head down. Their eyes never clicked. Joan's talking more, Joan's on the make, Bowen's homo-reluctant. Joan kissed Gretchen/Celia at the rental house that night.

Crutch leaned closer. His ears throbbed. He couldn't read Joan's lips. Bowen coughed and said, “Weird dream of you.” Joan spoke a little louder. She said, “Safe house.”

That's it, no more, back to soft talk and—

Crutch got
un
-wired and
re
-circuited and
re
-wired.

Safe house, rent house, fake stewardess Gretchen/Celia. Fake address: “
Some Commie safe house.
”

Crutch put a dollar down and walked out
sloooooow
.

Safe house, rent house, death house. Confluence, proximity
—

His tools got him in. Horror House: the third tour.

No hippies or winos residing. Unchanged since last time. More dampness, new winter stench, accelerating decay. The floorboards creaked louder, the cold air stung more.

His last tour. He had to do visible damage. He couldn't come back. Her presence here was a long shot. He had to try.

Lock picks, pry bar, crowbar, flashlight, penlight. Burglar's jerry-rigged stethoscope, three hours to dawn.

He walked the house top-to-bottom. He opened every drawer and scanned every shelf. He cut open every piece of upholstered furniture. He looked behind every framed picture and pulled up every rug.

The house was cold. Cold sweat drenched him. He dropped his tools, wiped his hands dry and kept going.

He climbed ladders and checked every wall and ceiling beam. He beat rats to death with a shovel in the attic and combed every inch. He pried off the downstairs floorboards and poked through cobwebs, insect nests and dirt.

It was raining. Dawn was breaking slow. That gave him more time. He was dirt-caked. His sweat turned it to a thin mud.

He tapped every wall panel. He put his ear to the stethoscope and listened for hollow thunks.

It was Christmas morning, he heard church bells, he almost cried.

Clouds passed outside. Some daylight streaked in. He saw a loose step near the top of the staircase.

He walked over. It was the upper part of the step. The nails were loose. The two pieces wobbled.

A one-inch gap showed. He pried the piece of wood off and saw a hidey-hole. It was two feet long and half a foot high. Inside it:

A rusted-out .38 snubnose. Rusty pistol ammo. Four mildewed pro-Castro pamphlets. Nine pro-wetback flyers. A
U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM
poster. A small notebook—stapled pages, smudged ink and eroded text throughout. One visible date: 12/6/62.

Crutch held his penlight up to the pages and squinted. He couldn't discern words. He saw numbers and got an instinct: foreign cash-exchange rates. He got the general format: meeting minutes for some Commie powwow.

The page-by-page text devolved into blurs. The last page held three clear signatures at the bottom.

Terry Bergeron, Thomas F. Narduno, Joan R. Klein.

HER
.

Crutch touched her name. He was sweating and dripping mud. The page fell apart in his hand.

Something else tweaked him. “Thomas F. Narduno,” brain tease.

It took some time just standing there. It came in a burst.

The St. Louis papers. The piece on the Grapevine killings. The odd left-wing victim: Thomas F. Narduno.

He cleaned out the hidey-hole. He put everything in his toolbox. He heard the church bells again. He walked outside and stood gasping in the rain.

(Los Angeles, 12/26/68)

W
ayne said, “You have options within the ultimatum, sir. We're allotting you considerable autonomy.”

Dwight rolled his eyes. “You're a stalwart of the local Negro community and a Democratic Party bagman, I'll grant you that.
Beyond that
? You're a mobbed-up money washer in hock to the Boys, and all we're asking you for is more of the same.”

The office was oak-paneled. The chairs were green leather. The MLK oil portrait overruled the room. Wayne willed his eyes away.

Dwight said, “The brothers around here call you ‘Lionel the Laundryman.' You're like that guy on the detergent box. They call you ‘Mr. Clean.' ”

Lionel Thornton smirked. He was five-three. His desk was seven-three. Wayne and Dwight had small chairs. He had a throne. Wayne and Dwight were big white men. He was a small black man. He wore the world's sharpest chalk-stripe suit.

Wayne said, “You wash some foreign-bound construction money and casino skim. You stay on as the bank's president. You help Mr. Hoover and Agent Holly out with information as requested, which allows you to personally keep 3% of every dime you wash.”

Thornton smiled. Dwight hummed the Mr. Clean jingle. Wayne peeled his eyes off Dr. King.

Dwight pulled out his cigarettes. Thornton shook his head. Dwight started to light up. Wayne stopped him.

“I'll go to 3½%, a 5% pay raise for your employees and a 15% salary raise for you. There's twenty thousand dollars in my briefcase. That's your bonus for cooperating.”

Thornton lit a cigarette and blew smoke Dwight's way. Dwight stood up. Wayne nudged his foot. Dwight sat back and folded his hands.

Dr. King in burnished oils—more handsome than in real life.

Thornton said, “Give me the briefcase, too.”

Wayne bowed. Dwight smiled. A gunshot popped outside. Dwight jerked and touched his belt gun. That goddamn portrait. Oak panels in a black slum.

Thornton said, “Mr. Hoover has an operation going. Mr. Holly's presence today attests to that. My guess is that you're hassling some deluded black militants. I'll wish you well and leave you to it, but I cannot inform for you or offer you on-premises oversight, or keep separate books for you.”

Wayne nodded. Dwight's chest was pounding—Wayne saw his shirt move. Thornton stood up and teetered on platform shoes.

“One last favor. For Mr. Holly, I think. I noticed the sap in his waistband.”

Gunshots overlapped—closer this time.

“My wife's ex-husband is bothering her. I'd like him to desist.”

An intercom buzzed. Wayne and Dwight stood up. Thornton pointed to the portrait.

“Vicious white motherfuckers like you killed him, but his voice will prevail in the end.”

Wayne said, “Sir, I hope so.”

He refurbished the lab. He dumped the heroin makings and added a collage. Reginald Hazzard photos four-walled him.

Partitions set off a file space. He brought in file boxes and reams of paper. He'd worked LVPD Intelligence. He knew how to build case files and log information. Mary Beth bought him a cashmere sweater for Christmas. He told her he
really
wanted a Teletype machine.

Mary Beth said, “You've got all these pictures of my son but no pictures of me.” He told her he wanted to find her son because he'd already found her. She told him to keep going. He said she looked different every time he saw her, so pictures would spoil the surprise. She told him to keep going. He said they never met outside his hotel suite. He enjoyed imagining the ways she looked in the world.

The file space had potential. The lab was small and well equipped. He had a spectroscope, a fluoroscope and the proper chemicals to work on Dwight's pages.

Wayne unplugged the telephone and sat down to work. He talked to Carlos and Farlan Brown earlier. His news: Lionel Thornton folded. Farlan's
news: the prez-elect was sending permission letters for the casino-site team. Also included: passes to the inaugural hoo-haw. Funny, but: Mesplede wanted Dipshit Crutchfield on the team. Wayne relented. Dipshit worked cheap and might mandate a nuisance hit at some point. Keep the punk short-leased.

Dwight's chem job was improbable and exacting. The file pages were carbon acid–based and burned under caustic applications. He'd been at it part-time for two months. He'd destroyed two-thirds of the Joan Rosen Klein file and failed to peel through a single line of redaction. A notion hit him this morning. Throw spectroscope and fluoroscope light on the typewriter marks. Bombard the ink lines with contrasting rays. Dab high-pH hydroxic acid on the perceived letter shapes and see what forms and what erodes.

He rigged his light bars, documents, acid base and swabs. He wore tinted magnifying goggles. He slid a redacted sheet on an absorbent blotter. He let the lights fly. He squinted and
thought
he saw a capital
S, J, R
and
K
near-microscopically outlined. He realized that he'd extrapolated. He knew FBI file parlance. He'd
thought
his way through to “
SUBJECT JOAN ROSEN KLEIN
” and no more.

BUT:

He could sacrifice that ink line. He could look for the other logically following boldface letters. He could refine his light and application technique that way.

More light now. Different angles. More hydroxic acid, more/less/more/less—

He burned through the possible “
JOAN ROSEN KL
”—fizz straight onto the blotter.

The acid pooled and bubbled.

An ink line blurred and faded.

The typewriter marks for “
EIN
” showed up faint on the page.

Wayne trembled. He pulled out the test page and slid in the page marked “Known Associates.” He counted fourteen black-inked lines and brought down the lights. He dabbed hydroxic acid. He burned ink lines, he faded ink lines, he blurred ink lines and got typewriter marks pure unreadable. He squinted. He refocused his lights and singed paper. He refocused and got blots. He refocused and redabbed and got the visible numbers “7412.” More burns, more blurs, a
U
, an
L
, a
T
. He refocused and dabbed again. He got the blur-faded, typewritten-marked “Thomas Frank Narduno.”

(Los Angeles, 12/27/68)

S
ap gloves broke bones and spared your hands. They maximized hurt and minimized self-damage.

Dwight beat on a bantamweight Negro named Durward Johnson. Lionel Thornton watched. Johnson looked like Billy Eckstine, minus the mustache. The gig went down behind Johnson's house. Baldwin Hills was high-end colored. The alley was paved. Christmas lights lined the fence tops.

Dwight pulled his punches, went in light and broke bones regardless. Thornton stipulated face work. Johnson grasped a fence link and kept himself upright. Thornton stood out of spray range.

Jabs and right crosses. The cheeks and the jaw—don't fuck with his eyes or his brain.

His nose broke audibly. His teeth dribbled off his split tongue. Dwight's glove seams popped and leaked ball bearings. Johnson's toupee flew off his head.

He stayed upright. He spit out cracked bridgework and hit Thornton's shoes. Thornton smirked. Johnson said, “I fucked your wife, nigger.”

Dwight threw a big right. Johnson grasped the fence two-handed. Dwight stumbled and fell into the punch. It landed full force. It took Johnson and a stretch of fence links down. Dwight fell along with them.

The world went upended. Christmas lights blinked
above
him. He got up and helped Johnson up. Thornton was gone. Johnson weaved into a neighbor's backyard and crashed in a pool chair.

Dwight pulled the gloves off and walked back to his car. A business card was stuck under the wiper blades.

Sergeant Robert S. Bennett/Robbery Division/LAPD. Below that: “Vince & Paul's, 1 hour.”