James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (39 page)

The desk clerk gave him a street map. Downtown Managua was small and walkable quicksville. It was peon-packed.
Mamacitas
cooked meat pies on bar-b-q's built from chain links and trash cans. It was pigeon meat. Pigeons perched everywhere. Kids shot them with BB guns and tossed them in paper sacks.

Some nice trees, a lake breeze, garish-colored buildings. Jackbooted cops with barbed wire–wrapped saps.

The grid made it easy. Crutch found four pharmacies fast. They looked innocuous: bright walls, narrow aisles, white-coat spics at back counters. Big cardboard ads for Listerine and Pepsodent. No rob-me vibes.

Crutch schlepped down Calle Central to Avenida Bolívar. Little spic-lets waved dead pigeons. Crutch tossed them American dimes and watched the brawls that ensued.

Número 5:
a joint with a big red cross and a jumbo Coke machine. No vibe. It was pushing 6:00, closing time—
trabajo, finito
.

Crutch turned down an alley. Eye magnet: Gonzalvo Farmacia. A quiet little place with a big, loud poster.

Diseased kids begging. Nixon with fangs. Bright red Commie slogans.
Mucho
exclamation points.

Four
cholos
across the street, in a '55 Merc. Yeah, they look
eeeevil
. Their sled looks
satanic
. Lake pipes, fender skirts, car-antenna scalps.

The
reeeeall
thing. Dark Latin hair, rawhide-cured, stitching on the skin flaps.

Crutch cut back to the main drag. He reconnoitered and found a walk path behind the building row. Four down to the pharmacy, maybe a side window loose.

He got low and crouch-walked. He hit the rear of the pharmacy and peeped windows. The back ones were barred. He saw the dope shelves and three pharmacists working. The side windows were un-barred. One was air-cracked. A big cardboard sign on an easel covered it.

Crawl space, hiding place.

Crutch cracked the window two more inches and vaulted in. His knees banged the sign. He grabbed the easel part and kept it upright.

He peered around it. The sign was for Noxzema skin cream. A good-looking chiquita salved her bare arms and went ooh-la-la. A boss type shooed out two customers. The three pharmacists stood at the counter and tallied receipts.

Prime view. There's the clock, it's 5:58, the four
bandidos
walk in.

The boss type looks pissed. The guys fan out. One guy scopes the Brylcreem, three guys walk to the rear. The boss type turns his back and tidies the candy shelf. The Brylcreem guy pulls a silencered revolver and walks straight up. The boss type turns around and goes “Oh.” The Brylcreem guy sticks the barrel in his mouth and blows off the top of his head. Silencer thud, brain and skull spray. No crash—the boss type just slides down the shelf row and dies.

The pharmacists keep working. One guy walks up with Ipana toothpaste. One guy walks up with Clearasil. One guy walks up with Vick's VapoRub. The pharmacists catch the drift. One man starts weeping. One man clutches his saint's medal. One man tries to run.

The Ipana guy pulled his piece and shot them all twice. They fell in a clump. Their shrieks and gurgles got jumbled up. The Clearasil guy jumped the counter and made for the heavy-dope vault.

Blood dripped off a shelf of asthma products. The VapoRub guy dipped his finger in. He found a white wall space. He wrote “
MATAR TODOS PUTOS ROJOS.
”

Crutch walked back to the Lido Palace. Wobble legs got him there. The heist guys were in and out quick. He left his hiding spot shaky and sobbing. He stole a Coke and some Bromo and chugged it to keep his bile down. He wobble-walked to the bar, had three scotches and weaved up to his room.

Someone had placed a brown-wrapped box on the bed. The postmark was Langley, Virginia. He unwrapped it. Froggy delivered—here's the code-breaking book.

He got out his pix of Gretchen/Celia's address book. He arrayed them on the desk. He skimmed the codebook and turned to the table of contents. He saw a “Symbol Index” listed. He turned to it. Lots of fucking symbols, alphabetically described. The geographic and political distinction in bracketed text.

Crutch scanned his Minox pix. Gretchen/Celia's symbols: stick figures circled with
X
marks and artful slashing backgrounds. He skimmed the codebook. No numbers or letters corresponded to Gretchen/Celia's numbers and letters. He went back to the “Symbol Index” and started at
A
.

He hit the
H
listings. He saw “Hexes” and “Haitian Voodoo.” He saw numbers linked to drawings linked to letters. A few of the numbers and letters matched Gretchen/Celia's shit. He saw variants of her stick figures
and
X
marks. He read the text: “The voodoo priest's depiction of spiritual chaos while a subject/victim is hexed.”

Horror House, last summer. The markings there, the symbols here, the derivation expressed.

Call it: Gretchen/Celia's pages were a paper curse and a voodoo book of the dead.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 1/29/69–2/8/69. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Los Angeles

It was a minor knife fight with major political implications for two extremely minor political groups. But, I facilitated it and it occurred on Wayne Tedrow's first day as my cutout.

Jomo suffered minor lacerations and Leander received chest bruises when Jomo's knife blade snapped off. Wayne got Jomo to Daniel Freeman Hospital; he was stitched up and released within a few hours. I got Leander to Morningside Hospital. He confounded the doctors by swallowing several Haitian herb pills in the emergency room. The placebos calmed him down somewhat. Jomo is MMLF; Leander is BTA. Which way do I jump? My personal dilemma, certainly. As always, I abut that maddening disjuncture: the viable construction of black identity and the dubious construction of revolution, as implemented by criminal scum seeking to cash in on legitimate social grievance and cultural trend.

I now sense this: Mr. Holly knew I would succeed as his infiltrator because I am too smart to accede to the rhetoric of revolution and too hip to buy the simpleminded reactionary response. Mr. Holly understands that ambivalence shapes performance and that actors are, in the end, self-centered and solely concerned with their performing context. He'll let me walk a thin ideological line and actually risk a black-militant conversion, because he knows how selfishly motivated I am. Brilliant Mr. Holly. A nonpareil talent scout with a superb eye for acting ensembles. Casting Wayne Tedrow as my cutout plays to my strengths and Wayne's strengths and has paid off immediately. An ex-cop with enormous racial baggage is overseeing Tiger Kab; the brothers think he's rogue and rather dig him. And nobody suspects that he's FBI-adjunct.

Both men are pressuring me: Wayne wants me to align myself unilaterally with either the BTA or the MMLF; Mr. Holly wants me to somehow facilitate the dope-pushing arm of
OPERATION BAAAAAD BROTHER
, an aspect of my duties that Wayne disapproves of with almost Calvinistic fervor. Heroin is scarce around here; I credit some form of black consciousness for its relative
scarcity, if not black militancy itself. Thus, I cannot rat out BTA or MMLF members for the procurement or sale of it anytime soon. There have been more southside liquor-store robberies, replete with rumors of black-militant suspects, but my subtle queries on that topic have yet to turn up names. I'm hoping the Jomo-Leander fracas will fester among the BTA/MMLF leadership and produce some exploitable discontent. In the meantime, I'm making the scene.

I have party-crashed a mélange of political poseurs. They are recreating a dank form of New York café society, circa 1930. El Morocco, the Stork Club and ‘21' then; Sultan Sam's Sandbox, the Scorpio Lounge and Rae's Rugburn Room now. The skin tone has darkened, the fashions have changed, the cultural bar has been vulgarized and revitalized. These people love to see and be seen. Ezzard Donnell Jones, Joan Klein, Benny Boles, Joe McCarver and Claude Torrance club-hop most evenings. I always rate a “Right on” or “Hey, brother,” because I am a celebrity, martyr and prized commodity in one package. They sense that I want to be one of them, and I think they see my lack of one-group allegiance as a sign of coyness and of understandable reluctance.
We gots to let the brother choose. Sheeeeit, brother was a motherfuckin' pig just a few months ago
.

There has been an unsettling barrage of hate cartoons flooding the southside for the past several weeks. The chief targets have been the Panthers and US, along with street-art salvos directed at BTA and MMLF. My cartoonist and hate-tract writing friend Jomo ridicules the artistry and has convinced me it did not spring from his hand—“Not my style, brother. This is Mr. Hoover's work for goddamn sure.” Mr. Holly disputes that—convincingly—because he's given to blunt confirmations or denials, sees me as a brother cop on his side and would not try to disingenuously assert that the Bureau is above such tactics. Dwight Chalfont Holly, social realist, a man who calls a spade a spade and sometimes a spook, shine, dinge, coon, jungle bunny or smoke. The master of the mixed message. A critic of the LAPD's vilely abusive conduct on the southside. A man who sadly admits that suppression never works, expresses a rather haunted respect for Martin Luther King and enjoys making me the straight man in impromptu
Amos 'n Andy
routines. I despise the hackneyed expression “a piece of work,” but that is Mr. Holly defined. The same phrase applies to his tortured aide-de-camp and quasi–kid brother, Wayne Tedrow—perhaps even more so. How odd that Wayne is the true killer of
the two; how odd that he seems to be much less driven by racial animus and appears to be more capable of sustaining equitable relationships with blacks. I like Wayne; I've enjoyed the several cutout/operatee meetings that we've had. I've spread the word on how he killed the three black junkies and psycho rapist Wendell Durfee. Of course, the brothers
loved
it. Wayne has become the stuff of ambiguous ghetto lore already. Ooooh, that Wayne T.—he
baaaaad
.

And something else.

I arrived early for one of our meetings. Wayne was caught unprepared. I saw him looking at a photograph of a black woman. Wayne was quite obviously embarrassed. He put the photo down and gave me a look that brusquely stated
Don't Ask
. I didn't ask Wayne; I asked Mr. Holly, who replied, “Wayne goes deep with you dark motherfuckers,” and cut the topic off there.

I did some Las Vegas newspaper research and identified the woman as a union steward named Mary Beth Hazzard. She's a decade older than Wayne and is the mother of a long-missing son named Reginald. Reginald Hazzard is the young man in the photograph that Wayne showed me on the day we met; Wayne has been showing the photograph to almost everyone he encounters on the southside and seems determined to find the young man, come hell or high water. My newspaper research also revealed this: a West Las Vegas dope addict killed Mrs. Hazzard's minister husband last year, then killed himself. Astonishingly, the dope addict was posthumously indicted for the murder of Wayne's father in June of '68. More astonishingly: the Vegas rumor is that Wayne and his late stepmother/lover killed Wayne Senior themselves.

Wayne and Mr. Holly absorb me on several levels. They are not rogue cops à la Scotty Bennett—they are rogue authoritarians. And Wayne miraculously entered my life just as all my subtle queries on the armored-car heist had panned out fruitlessly and I found myself once again at the start-over point. In that moment, I meet Wayne. He casually asks me if I've heard stories of black folks receiving emeralds anonymously. He shows me a photograph of the young black man he's looking for. The young man vaguely resembles the burned-faced man I met on 2/24/64. I feel like I'm entering a serendipitous dream state. What does all of this mean?

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 2/11/69. Verbatim FBI telephone call transcript. Marked:
“Recorded at the Director's Request”/”Classified Confidential 1-A: Director's Eyes Only.
”
Speaking: Director Hoover, Special Agent Dwight C. Holly.