James Ellroy_Underworld U.S.A. 03 (70 page)

Work was tense. The Operation sustained him ideologically. The Operation drove Joan in a wholly vindictive manner. She saw it as a vendetta. She would not reveal the origin of her journey of revenge. She was running haggard. Lionel Thornton's death disturbed her. He was a money washer at worst and a political bagman at best. Joan wouldn't talk about it. She always said what she always said: “I'm not going to.”

Joan slept with him in hotel suites and worked with him at the fallback. She stayed in safe houses the nights he slept with Karen. She was worried about Celia. She was making phone calls and trying to find Celia in the D.R. She refused all his offers to help.

She'd sit by herself on the terrace. She'd sip tea and take herbal capsules. He stole a few and had them analyzed. They were Haitian fertility potions. Joan was almost forty-five and was trying to get pregnant. Her child, his child—it astounded him. There was no chance of conception. He knew it. He never said it. He never mentioned the potions. He watched her face recast itself as she tried to will her body. He reveled in the mad task and in her obduracy.

Karen's house was down a steep hillside. He trained his binoculars and watched the girls play. Karen debriefed him on Media and told him no more. They formally terminated their snitch relationship. He accepted it. Karen described Media as a debt to Joan and him and respectfully asserted that she had paid it. He said she had. She never returned to the fallback. He carried the picture of her with the girls. She sent him coded night messages. She'd sense him on the terrace and blast Beethoven string quartets. She'd leave a kitchen light on to pinpoint the sound.

The music invaded his dreams. Wayne replaced Dr. King. Crocodiles and rivers in Haiti. Explosions in the D.R. and gaunt black men with wings.

The Operation proceeded. Convergence remained the one obstacle. He flew to Mississippi four times. Bob Relyea remained committed. Bob
was training. Bob would keep his mouth shut. Bob would not know the target until hit day.

He B&E'd Marsh Bowen's house six more times. He searched for a hidden diary and found none. Joan was certain that Marsh kept a candid daily journal. His actor's self-absorption fairly screamed it. Their fake diary was the deus ex machina of the Operation. They had to be certain that a real diary would not be found.

Marsh worked night-watch shifts and gave motivational speeches. Dwight black-bagged him and prowled. Trash runs, desk and drawer runs, fake-panel taps. Numerous art books and Haitian travel brochures. No diary yet.

The file section was now security-fitted. It was a post-Media precaution. It didn't matter. He was an FBI agent. He had file-shelf keys. Marsh Bowen was now deeply file-inserted. Sergeant Bowen was injudiciously promiscuous. Sergeant Bowen was politically unstable, going back years.

He spent late nights at the office. He chatted with the mordant Jack Leahy. Jack was fixed on the old girl in gasping decline. Media was a pisser. Jack considered it predictable. He was pension-secure and raucous by nature. He didn't seem to give a shit.

Dick Nixon got raucous behind two highballs. He called Dwight twice a month. Mr. Hoover called twice as much. Nixon was Hoover-tweaked. Hoover was Nixon-tweaked. The prez got half-gassed and vented his frustration. Hoover raged for reassurance amid mental gaffes. Both men found the Enforcer consoling. He was the gunslinger, back from a crack-up.

His
consolation? Marsh's diary.

He's creating a world of troubled men in extremis. He attributes his dreams to Marsh. Marsh's discourse is shaped by his discourse with Karen and Joan. Marsh's diary feels almost utopian. It rebuts the world that is and prophesies the world that could be. The entries cover the inception of BAAAAD BROTHER and run to the present. Marsh carries guilt for exploiting the “Black-Militant Blastout.” He is determined to kill J. Edgar Hoover. His cop-actor's role won him glory and spawned death. His moral confusion counterpoints his tortured inner life and day-to-day indulgence of perversion.

He's added details from his own breakdown. Marsh's crack-up is his crack-up, hyper-radicalized. He's created a Holly-Bowen bond that did not exist. The two men discuss crack-up as a call to violent arms and the means to transcend self-serving pathology. He portrays public policy as private nightmare and vehicle of atonement. What it's like to have to
do
something so you won't go insane. His story and Marsh's story regained.

He's come to care for Marsh. He won't regret killing him.

(Los Angeles, 3/15/71–11/18/71)

F
rustration. Fucking ceaseless, day by day.

The county grand jury nailed the Bostitch boys posthumous. Scotty breathed easy then. The brothers snuffed Mr. Clean and formed a suicide pact. Nice, but the heist gig was stalled flat.

Who's the Woman
?

She was Thornton's emerald conduit and cutout. A
Woman
pervaded the Jomo offshoot. Marsh perks when he says
Woman
. Marsh comes on bifurcated. He's solid
and
untrustworthy.

Who's the Woman
? His notion: she was in with OPERATION BAAAAD BROTHER. Dandy, but:

He can't brace Dwight Holly. Dwight is dead smart and subtle and would brace him right back. He can't brace Jack Leahy. Jack knows about BAAAAD BROTHER. Jack is dead smart and subtle and would brace him right back.

Frustration. Mind-bending, night after night.

They stole the emerald-disbursement clip file and the coded ledger. He tried to crack the code. He spent months on it. He thought about hiring a cryptographer. A pro might crack the code. He finally nixed the idea. The code guy would
know
then. One more loose end would unfurl.

Federal bank examiners tossed the Peoples' Bank. Scotty went with them and Jack Leahy. They tore the walls, floors and roof to shreds. They found the vault from Mr. Clean's drawing. Inside: a dope stash and $89,000.

Cat's-paw. Long-term stopgap. A hedge against possible exposure.

The money and remaining emeralds were stashed elsewhere. Thornton
was smart. He didn't give up the vault. He played the “I don't know” card. He knew he was dead, anyway. Theory: the money and gems
were
in the vault. The heist guys knew it. They pulled them before the bank team went in.

Where's Reggie?
Who's the Woman
? Who'll disburse the emeralds with Mr. Clean dead?

Frustration. Night sweats.
Woooooo
, toss the sheets.

Marsh was frustrated. He's read all their files. He reads them and nit-picks the details. They're the world's greatest rogue cop salt-and-pepper team. They're years in and still short of the rainbow.

Frustration meant backlash. Scotty fucked his wife and girlfriends more and lived for stakeouts. He nailed two cholos outside a Boyle Heights bodega in May. Marsh loved it—at least they weren't black. He 86'd two neo-Nazis a week later. They robbed a black-owned market on Vermont. He blew one cracker's arm off. He pulled a black tot to safety. Marsh
loooooved
it. Marsh had clout with the NAACP. They might give him a medal.

Marsh let steam off
his
way. Do your own thing? Sure. Marsh vanished three times in eight months. He
said
he took car trips, to re-wire his head. It had to be fruit shit. Fruit junkets, fruit trysts, fruit excursions.

Frustration. You want
gooooood
booty? Let Pastor Bennett and Peeper Crutchfield pimp for you.

Sissy Sal crush-crawled all over Macho Marsh. Marsh won't jump his bones back. It was driving him
nuts
. Ditto Peeper, Fred T. and Fred O.

Frustration.
Who's the Woman
?

He's sniffed all over darktown. He's gotten nothing substantive. The description rings bells. Some geeks seem slightly spooked. One guy said she might be black militant–connected. He queried his Panther and US contacts and got shit. The BTA and MMLF geeks were all off in prison. He couldn't brace them there. His visits would be noted. Stray talk would disperse.

The case was all
Her
. The woman with the gray-streaked hair was
Everything
.

DOCUMENT INSERT
: 11/18/71. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,          
November 18, 1971

Media was eight months ago. My comrades and I have remained unapprehended; no one has broken ranks; the FBI's illegal surveillance of political organizations, civic groups and protest-inclined individuals has been revealed in a flurry of news reportage, angry editorials and television and radio airtime. The revelation has come and gone. The concept of the
COINTELPRO
has been introduced to the American people, who have largely chosen to ignore it. The FBI's more draconian undercover operations were not mentioned in any of the released files. Dwight and Joan seemed pleased by this. I am quite capable of discerning Dwight's unspoken thoughts. He's happy that the FBI's specific war on the civil rights movement and black-militant groups has not been preemptively placed under the
COINTELPRO
umbrella.

I don't want to know what Joan and Dwight are planning; I suspect that I will learn of it in the public arena and am beginning to nurture a sense of it as a grandiosely large event. Media was a diversionary tactic and/or a setup. The ramifications of my one proactive salvo for Dwight and Joan will become apparent over time. I don't want to know. They know that and withhold their plans from me. I have prayed over this and have made a vow to continue to love them, regardless of any horror and chaos they may perpetrate.

We never meet as a group of three. Joan has resurfaced in my life; we meet for coffee or lunch two or three times a week, always here in Silver Lake or Echo Park. We discuss politics incessantly. Nixon, Vietnam, labor issues and the black-militant movement in decline can engross us for hours. Joan is gaunt and speaks in nervous, yet fully coherent bomb bursts of invective, with perceptive flows of political monologue mixed in. The lovely and defining gray patches in her hair are turning white and are streaking through the overall black. I'm afraid she's becoming paranoid—she says she's had an intermittent sense of being followed—and she often speaks of her lover/comrade Celia, out of touch in Haiti
or the Dominican Republic. Celia once told Joan not to try to find her should she go missing. How many times has Joan told lovers or lover/comrades the same thing? Now, Joan is the one bereft, and it is her bond with Dwight Chalfont Holly that has taken her to this point where she cannot suppress grief.

Joan smokes constantly and drinks pots of self-brewed Haitian herb tea. She swallows Haitian herb capsules with all her meals, at precisely timed moments of the day. I asked her about it. She said she was trying to get pregnant. She wanted to have a child.

I didn't question her motive. I knew not to ask “Why?” Joan would simply say, “I'm not telling you.” A woman her age cannot will a child. Joan doesn't seem to know how improbable it is. It continues to remain unspoken, albeit ineluctably true. She wants to have this child with Dwight.

Joan and I have always withheld from each other. We are individually compromised and duplicitous; we live in a mendacious world we have been morally charged to undermine and subvert. I could tell Joan the one thing I have never told Dwight. It might or might not hurt her. I know what it would do to Dwight. I fear the further breakdown that it might engender and the deep resolve it would certainly create.

DOCUMENT INSERT
. 11/18/71. Extract from the journal of Marshall E. Bowen.

Baldwin Hills,
11/18/71       

I thought the murder would hurt me more and would more hurtfully invade my body and mind. It hasn't. I assumed the role of murderer and behaved in the manner of a first-time killer determined to survive. It took a few days for my mental equilibrium to adjust. I mindscaped the possible upshot of my actions as Scotty took care of business. I met him for a series of late-night dinners at Ollie Hammond's. We boozed a bit and ate steak sandwiches. Scotty preached. In the end, you'll survive. You did what was necessary; you'll do it again if you have to. Feel better now?

I did then, I do now. I have the upper hand in the partnership. I know two things that Scotty doesn't: Reginald Hazzard and the emeralds are in Haiti. The woman is Joan Rosen Klein.

My life is a series of shadow plays and non sequiturs. I work
the detective bureau at Hollywood Station. I go to movie-biz cocktail parties and enjoy the ambivalent responses that my presence there provokes. Three years ago, I was a policeman who had been beaten, ostracized and converted to the black-militant faith.
That
inspired film-biz cachet. Now, I am a policeman revealed to have been a planted informant; a policeman who extolls authoritarian values in prestigious speaking engagements and stands tall in LAPD dress blues. The film-biz folks would love to hate me as a sellout, but they can't. I won the game and I look too good.

I've been party-hopping and meeting people, including the very attractive actor Sal Mineo, who starred in several notable angry teenager films in the '50s. Sal has the Bent and has determined that I share it. Sal's tweaked on me; we run into each other; we talk on the phone, flirt, go out for coffee, but don't
do
it. Sal's very persistent,
and
he's a sweetheart, but my plate is too full to accommodate a part-time or full-time squeeze. It's funny. It's mindscape. I talk to Sal and hang up; Scotty calls five minutes later. Scotty took care of the Thornton/Bostitch brothers business with great panache and leaked a series of Intelligence Division files showing Mr. Clean to be, in fact, a mob stooge. Crusading journalists picked the story up; articles have appeared in Los Angeles and have gotten prominent nationwide ink. Scotty slanders our dead as we grasp for leads on our living. We've considered making an attempt to grab Thornton's Fed-snitch file, but Scotty thinks it's too risky.
I've
thought about trying for an independent look, but haven't figured out how.