“My needle,” I say. “I forgot to clean it.”
“It’s hard to remember everything, Kristie,” the detective says. “I found it when I searched the house the first time, but I couldn’t take it with me for physical evidence because I didn’t have the proper papers. I waited a week until I had the search warrant in hand, then took it. We analyzed it, found traces of Seconal and heroin. People don’t normally shoot Seconal. You should have dumped all your evidence.”
“I never was too good at throwing things away. Mom used to yell at me for that. Called me a bag lady, always keeping everything.”
I sigh.
The detective says, “Also, we powdered your mom’s meds and found they had been wiped free of prints. If your mom had committed suicide, her prints would have been on the bottle.”
“I should have thought about that,” I admit.
“Well, you did okay for your first time out,” the detective says. “The marks on the wrist were a giveaway. Started me thinking in the right direction. You — or your dad — shouldn’t have squeezed her so hard. And you should have used a fresh needle. And gloves instead of wiping away the prints.”
He leans in so we’re almost nose-to-nose.
“Close but no cigar. You’re in hot shit, babe. Want to tell me about it?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why’d you do it, for starters,” he asks.
“ ’Cause I hated my mom.”
“And why did your dad help you?”
“What makes you think my dad helped me?”
“The bruises on your mother’s wrist were made by fingers bigger than yours, Kristie. It was your father who felt for the pulse, even though he emphatically denied touching her.”
“You can’t prove who made those bruises,” I say.
The detective doesn’t say anything. Then he sticks his hands in his pockets and says, “It’s your neck. You could probably save it by turning state’s evidence against your dad.”
I don’t say anything.
“Look,” he says. “I understand why you offed your mom. She treated you like shit. And your dad offed her so he could marry his girlfriend—”
“What girlfriend?” I say, almost jumping out of my seat.
“The cute little blond chickie that was on his arm last night.”
“You’re lying,” I say.
He looks genuinely puzzled. He says, “No, I’m not. What is it? Don’t you get along with her?”
I feel tears in my eyes. I stammer out, “I... I don’t even know her.”
“Don’t cotton to the idea of your dad making it with a young chick?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
I blurt out, “Because I’m his girlfriend. We’re lovers.”
I hear the detective cough. I see him cover his mouth. Then he says, “You want to talk about what happens when you turn state’s evidence?”
I shrug, but even as I try to be real cool, the tears come down my cheeks. I say, “Sure, why not?”
Old Paul is on death row, convicted of murder along with rape and sodomy of a minor.
Me? I’m in juvie hall and it ain’t any picnic. The food is lousy, I’m with a couple of bull dykes, and everybody steals. So I can’t make any headway in the money department. A couple of gals here say they were raped by their fathers, and they wanted to kill their mothers too. They talk like we have a lot in common. I tell them to leave me alone. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But it’s cool. I’m beyond caring what the hell happens to me. Just so long as I don’t die from boredom.
All that attention. It was really exciting.
I’ve got to get out of here.
They assigned me a real sucker for a shrink. An older man about my dad’s age who gives me the eye.
I mean, he really gives me the eye.
The other day he told me he was going to recommend my release to the assessment board. He says I have excellent insight and a fine prognosis.
The other day he also asked me why I became a hooker.
I mean, what’s on his mind? I wonder.
Yeah. I have insight.
And I know what’s on his mind. And I’ll do what I have to in order to get out of here.
I need freedom.
At least juvie hall was a new experience for a while.
Just like killing my mom and fucking Paul.
I hate to be bored.
1990s
James Ellroy
(b. 1948)
There are no heroes in the novels and stories of James Ellroy, nor are there any true villains. For the term “villain” still has a lingering aura of Victoriana about it, as if the vague possibility still floats in the air of ugliness somehow transformed at the end of the tale, redemption achieved. With Ellroy, ugliness merely gets uglier, no one is redeemed, and villainy simply doffs its hat in mocking salute. Ellroy’s is the darkest world possible in late-twentieth-century terms: a Boschean hell of violence and corruption and betrayal and dreadful night, the continuum of what might be termed the new nihilism and the new brutalism.
Yet Ellroy has a comic genius as well, a humor that is black as hag’s midnight but highly developed and splendidly anarchic. Only he would have the gall to feature a third-rate, real-life 1950s squeeze-box player as a hero in the novella Dick Contino’s Blues (1994). Rather than elicit disgust, his serious bad taste will often provoke helpless hilarity. This jaunty (on occasion, necrophiliac) black humor certainly helps keep the blues at bay.
At one stage, Ellroy’s life was as dark and seemingly doomed as the lives of any of the demonic characters about whom he writes. Yet he managed to survive great tragedies; indeed, they appear to have nourished his peculiar vision, causing him no regret. Much of his writing has been profoundly influenced by the murder of his mother in Los Angeles in June 1958. A cause célèbre at the time, the crime was never solved. Ellroy fictionalized the terrible incident in his second novel, Clandestine (1984).
His masterwork thus far is the Los Angeles Quartet, a series that comprises The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). This massive roman-fleuve is a brilliantly fictionalized account of crime and corruption in the City of the Angels from the end of World War II to the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. It is a vast, sprawling, and epic canvas, densely written in an increasingly frenetic, wired-out prose that reaches minimalist proportions toward the end, but is still a compulsive read. The one problem Ellroy seems to have in his larger works is character delineation: it seems that when he writes in shorthand, however electrifyingly, character is inevitably lost.
Ellroy’s shorter fiction often has the feel of something sliced from a longer work, a literary outtake that is readable but leads nowhere. On very rare occasions, however, he writes a little jewel of a tale, with a beginning, a middle, a fine twist, and a big finish. “Gravy Train,” the small saga of Stan “the Man” Klein and his love affair with Basko the pit bull, is rude, at times crude, nerve-gratingly and gratuitously vicious — and hilarious.
J. A.
Gravy Train
(1990)
Out of the Honor Farm and into the work force: managing the maintenance crew at a Toyota dealership in Koreatown. Jap run, a gook clientele, boogies for the shitwork and me, Stan “The Man” Klein, to crack the whip and keep on-duty loafing at a minimum. My probation officer got me the gig: Liz Trent, skinny and stacked, four useless master’s degrees, a bum marriage to a guy on methadone maintenance and the hots for yours truly. She knew I got off easy: three convictions resulting from the scams I worked with Phil Turkel — a phone sales racket that involved the deployment of hard core loops synced to rock songs and naugahyde Bibles embossed with glow-in-the-dark pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. — a hot item with the shvartzes. We ran a drug recovery crashpad as a front, suborned teenyboppers into prostitution, coerced male patients into phone sales duty and kept them motivated with Benzedrine-laced espresso — all of which peaked at twenty-four grand jury bills busted down to three indictments apiece. Phil had no prior record, was strung out on cocaine and got diverted to a drug rehab; I had two G.T.A. convictions and no chemical rationalizations bingo on a year County time, Wayside Honor Rancho, where my reputation as a lackluster heavyweight contender got me a dorm boss job. My attorney, Miller Waxman, assured me a sentence reduction was in the works; he was wrong-counting “good time” and “work time” I did the whole nine and a half months. My consolation prize: Lizzie Trent, Waxman’s ex-wife, for my P.O. — guaranteed to cut me a long leash, get me soft legitimate work and give me head before my probationary term was a month old. I took two out of three: Lizzie had sharp teeth and an overbite, so I didn’t trust her on the trifecta. I was at my desk, watching my slaves wash cars, when the phone rang.