About the Book
About the Author
Also by James Ellroy
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue
I: Last Season
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
II: Death by Strangulation
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
III: Time, Out of Time
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
IV: The Crime Against Marcella
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
V: Wisconsin Dutch
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
VI: The Game for Shelter
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Copyright
Los Angeles 1951 – Frederick Underhill, an ambitious rookie of the Los Angeles Police Department, wants to become the most celebrated detective of his time. He is also sexually promiscuous. His two drives are brought together by the slaying of Maggie Cadwallader, a lonely woman whom Underhill slept with shortly before her death.
Using his inside knowledge, Underhill gets himself on the case, which is being handled by LA’s most fearsome investigator: Lieutenant Dudley Smith. But instead of the celebrity status he was hoping for, Underhill finds himself on the edge of the abyss, his whole life and future about to take a fall.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed ‘LA Quartet’: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. His most recent novel, Blood’s a Rover, completes the magisterial ‘Underworld USA Trilogy’ – the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers.
ALSO BY JAMES ELLROY
THE UNDERWORLD U.S.A. TRILOGY
American Tabloid
The Cold Six Thousand
Blood’s a Rover
THE L.A. QUARTET
The Black Dahlia
The Big Nowhere
L.A. Confidential
White Jazz
MEMOIR
My Dark Places
The Hilliker Curse
SHORT STORIES
Hollywood Nocturnes
JOURNALISM/SHORT FICTION
Crime Wave
Destination: Morgue!
EARLY NOVELS
Brown’s Requiem
Blood on the Moon
Because the Night
Suicide Hill
Killer on the Road
TO
Penny Nagler
I wrote Clandestine in 1980. I was working as a caddy at Bel-Air Country Club in LA and chasing a woman attending law school. It was my second novel. My first novel had just sold as a paperback original in America. I got paid chump change for it. I was a hard-working motherfucker back in 1980. I packed golf bags six days a week and wrote all seven nights. I wrote Clandestine in eight months. I think it’s a wild ride of a book.
It’s got golf, police corruption, good sex and some raunchy laughs. It’s built around a tender and volatile love story. It’s my first attempt to fictionally address the murder of my own mother. It’s a wildly personal novel and very much the period forerunner of my LA Quartet.
I had a blast writing Clandestine. I think it shows. I hope it transports you back to 1951. I hope some part of you stays there.
James Ellroy
27 June, 1996
During the dark, cold winter of 1951 I worked Wilshire Patrol, played a lot of golf, and sought out the company of lonely women for one-night stands.
Nostalgia victimizes the unknowing by instilling in them a desire for a simplicity and innocence they can never achieve. The fifties weren’t a more innocent time. The dark salients that govern life today were there then, only they were harder to find. That was why I was a cop, and why I chased women. Golf was no more than an island of purity, something I did exceedingly well. I could drive a golf ball three hundred yards. Golf was breathtaking cleanliness and simplicity.
My patrol partner was Wacky Walker. He was five years my senior, with the same amount of time in the department. We first bumped into each other in the muster room of Wilshire Station, each of us lugging a golf bag. We both broke into huge grins and knew each other instantly—and completely.
With Wacky it was poetry, wonder, and golf; with me it was women, wonder, and golf. “Wonder” meant the same thing to both of us: the job, the streets, the people, and the mutable ethos of we who had to deal daily with drunks, hopheads, gunsels, wienie-waggers, hookers, reefer smokers, burglars, and the unnamed lonely detritus of the human race. We became the closest of friends, and later partners on day watch.
The day watch commander, Lieutenant William Beckworth, was a golf fanatic and hopeless ball beater. When he heard I shot scratch he had me put on day watch in exchange for lessons. It was a fair trade, but Beckworth was unteachable. I could wrap the lieutenant around my little finger—I even had him caddying for me on Saturday mornings, when I hustled games at country clubs and municipal courses—so it was easy to get Wacky bumped off night watch and assigned to days with the two of us as partners. Which took us deeper.
Herbert Lawton Walker was thirty-two years old, death-obsessed, and an alcoholic. He was a genuine hero—a World War II recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, which he was awarded for wiping out two machine gun nests full of Japs on Saipan. He could have gotten any job he wanted. Insurance companies were deluging him with offers when he went touring for war bonds, but he opted for the Los Angeles Police Department, a blue suit, a gun, and the wonder.
Of course, as a juicehead his perception of the wonder was somewhat predicated on the amount of booze he consumed. I was his watchdog, denying the sauce to him in the mornings and regulating his intake until our tour ended and we returned to the station.
In the early evenings, before I went out looking for women, Wacky and I would belt a few at his apartment and discuss the wonder or talk about the war I had avoided and he made his name in. Wacky was convinced that killing the fifteen Japs on Saipan had made him a wonder addict, and that the key to wonder was in death. I disagreed. We argued. I told him life was good. We agreed. “We are the sworn protectors of life,” I said. “But the key is in death, Freddy,” he said. “Can’t you see that? If you ever have to kill you’ll know.” We always came to that stalemate. When that happened Wacky would lead me to the door, shake my hand warmly, and retire back to his living room to drink and write poetry. Leaving me, Frederick Upton Underhill, twenty-six-year-old outsized crew-cut cop, on his doorstep contemplating nightfall and neon and what I could do about it in what I would later know to be the last season of my youth.
That season was to become a rite of passage composed of many false starts and erroneous conclusions. I was to blunder love and call it many different things; I was to savor the amenities of life on the make and feel last surges of callow power. I was finally to kill—and conclusively disprove Wacky’s thesis, for even with hero’s blood on my hands and laurels at my feet, the wonder in its ultimate state eluded me like a beacon whose light remained fixed while the turbulent waters around it constantly shifted in death and self-renewal.
It was those waters that grabbed me and gave me, many years later, my salvation. If you trace every link in the Eddie Engels case backward and forward in time you will find no beginning and no end. When my rapacious ambition thrust me into a brutal labyrinth of death and shame and betrayal in 1951, it was only my beginning. At the final unraveling in 1955 I knew that my willingness to move with and be part of a score of hellishly driven lives in clandestine transit was the wonder – as well as my ultimate redemption.
I
LAST SEASON
WACKY AND I had been partners for three months when Night Train entered our lives. The roll call sergeant told us about him as we were getting into our ’48 Ford black-and-white in the parking lot at Wilshire Station.
“Walker. Underhill. Come here a second,” he called at us. We walked over. His name was Gately; he needed a shave and he was smiling. “The loot’s got a good one for you guys. You golfers get all the breaks. You like dogs? I hate dogs. We got a dog who’s terrorizing little kiddies. Stealing their lunches over at the elementary school off Orange and Olympic. Mean old trash can dog, used to belong to a wino. The janitor at the school’s got him. Says he’s going to kill him, or cut his balls off. The Animal Regulation guys don’t want the squeal, ’cause they think the janitor’s crazy. You guys go take the mean old dog to the pound. Don’t shoot it, ’cause there’s all kinds of little kiddies might get upset. You golf guys get all the breaks.”
Wacky pulled the black-and-white out onto Pico, laughing and talking in verse, which he sometimes did when coffee reactivated the previous night’s booze still in his system.
“Whither thou, o noble beast, the most we do is ne’er our least, o noble hound, soon to be found, awaits the pound thence gas and ground.”
I laughed on while Wacky continued, driving his poetry into the pavement.
The janitor at Wilshire Crest School was a fat Japanese guy of about fifty. Wacky waggled his eyebrows at him, which broke the ice and got a laugh. He led us to the dog, who was locked up inside a portable construction toilet. As we approached I could hear a keening wail arise from the flimsy structure.
At the prearranged signal from Wacky, I kicked a hole in the side of the outhouse and shoved in our combined lunches—two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a sardine sandwich, one roast beef on rye, and two apples. There was the sound of furious masticating. I threw open the door, glimpsed a dark furry shape with glittering sharp teeth, and slugged it full force, right in the chops. It collapsed, spitting out some ham sandwich in the process. Wacky dragged the dog out.
He was a nice-looking black Labrador—but very fat. He had a gigantic whanger that must have dragged the ground when he walked. Wacky was in love. “Aww, Freddy, look at my poor baby. Awww.” He picked the unconscious dog up and cradled him in his arms. “Awww. Uncle Wacky and Uncle Freddy will take you back to the station and find a nice home for you. Awww.”
The janitor was eyeing us suspiciously. “You killee dog?” he asked, drawing a finger across his throat and looking at Wacky, who was already carrying his newfound friend lovingly back to the patrol car.
I got in the driver’s side. “We can’t take this mutt back to the station,” I said.
“The hell you say. We’ll stash him in the locker room. When we get off duty I’m taking him home. This dog is gonna be my caddy. I’m gonna fix him up with a harness so he can pack my bag.”
“Beckworth will have your ass.”
“Beckworth can kiss my ass. You take care of Beckworth.”
The dog came awake as we pulled into the parking lot of the station. He started barking furiously. I turned around in my seat to slug him again, but Wacky deflected my arm. “Awww,” he said to the beast, “Awww, Awww!” And the dog shut up.
I led the dog around to the locker room from the back entrance. Wacky made the run to the hot dog stand next to Sears, and came back with six cheeseburgers. I was petting the hound in front of my locker when Wacky came back and dumped the greasy mess on the floor in front of me. The dog tore into it, and Wacky and I shot out the door and resumed patrol. So began the odyssey of Night Train, as the dog came to be known.
When we returned from our tour of duty that night we heard Reuben Ramos’s saxophone honking from the locker room. Reuben is a motorcycle officer who picked up a love of jazz from working Seventy-seventh Street Vice, where he raided the bop joints of Central Avenue regularly, looking for hookers, bookies, and hopheads. He had taught himself to play the sax by ear—mostly honks and flub notes, but sometimes he gets going on some simple tune like “Green Dolphin Street.” Tonight he was really cooking—the main theme from “Night Train” over and over.
When Wacky and I entered the locker room we couldn’t believe our eyes. Reuben, in his Jockey shorts, was twisting all around, blasting out the wild first notes of “Night Train” while the fat black Lab writhed on his back on the concrete floor, yipping, yowling, and shooting a tremendous stream of urine straight up into the air. Groups of off-duty patrolmen walked in and walked out, disgusted. Reuben got tired of the action and went home to his wife and kids, leaving Wacky to yell and scream of the dog’s “genius potential.”
Wacky named the dog “Night Train” and took him home with him. He serenaded the dog for weeks with saxophone music on his phonograph and fed him steak, all in the fruitless hope of turning him into a caddy. Finally Wacky gave up, decided that Night Train was a free spirit, and cut him loose. We thought we had seen the last of the beast—but we hadn’t. He was to go on to assume legendary status in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Two days after his release, Night Train showed up at Wilshire Station with a dead cat in his jaws. He was chased out by the desk sergeant, who threw the cat in a trash can. Night Train showed up the following day with another dead cat. This time he was chased out with the cat still in his mouth. He came back later that day with the same cat, somewhat the worse for wear. He came back at the right time, for Wacky and I were just getting off duty. When Night Train saw Wacky he swooned with joy, dropped the battered feline gift of love, ran to Wacky’s outstretched arms, and urinated all over his uniform. Wacky carried Night Train to my car and locked him in. But Wacky was pissed at Lieutenant Beckworth. Beckworth was supposed to have come across with two cases of Cutty Sark at 75 percent off from a fence he knew, but he had reneged.
Wacky wanted revenge, so he retrieved the mangled dead cat and attached a note with a straight pin to the cat’s hide. The note read: “This is all the pussy you’re ever going to get, you cheap cocksucker.” He then placed the cat on the lieutenant’s desk.
Beckworth found it the next morning and went insane. He ordered an all-points bulletin for the dog. He didn’t have to look far. Night Train was discovered where he had been placed the previous night—in the back seat of my car. Beckworth couldn’t mess with me because he knew I could stop his golf lessons, but he could fuck over Night Train for dead sure. He had the dog arrested and placed in the drunk tank. It was the wrong thing to do. Night Train attacked and almost killed three winos. When the jailer was aroused by their screams and rushed to open the tank door, Night Train ran straight past him, out the door of Wilshire Station, across Pico Boulevard and all the way home to Wacky’s apartment, where the two of them lived happily—listening to saxophone music—until the end of the last season of my youth.
A week after the dead cat episode, Beckworth was still pissed.
We were at the driving range at Rancho Park, where I was trying, unsuccessfully, to correct his chronic slice. It was hopeless. The price of working day watch was high.
“Fuck. Shit, fuck. Oh, God,” Beckworth was muttering. “Show me again, Freddy.”
I grabbed his 3 iron and sailed off a smooth one. Two-twenty. Straight. “Shoulders back, Loot. Feet closer together. Don’t reach for the ball, meet it.”
He had it perfect until he swung his club. Then he did everything I had told him not to and shank-dribbled the ball about ten yards.
“Easy, Loot. Try it again.”
“Goddamnit, Freddy, I can’t think today. Golf is ninety percent concentration. I’ve got the coordination of a superb athlete, but I can’t keep my mind on the game.”
I played into it. “What’s on your mind, Loot?”
“Little things. Minor things. That shithead partner of yours—I’ve got a feeling about him. Medal of Honor winner, okay. High scores at the academy, okay. But he doesn’t look, or act, like a cop. He spouts poetry at roll call. I think he’s a homo.”
“Not Wacky, Loot. He loves dames.”
“I don’t believe it.”
I played into the lieutenant’s sub rosa but well-known love of Negro tail. All the Seventy-seventh Street harness bulls knew him to be a frequent visitor at Minnie Roberts’s Casbah—the swankiest colored whorehouse on the South Side.
“Well, Loot,” I said, keeping my voice at a whisper, “he loves dames, but he’s gotta have a certain kind of dame, if you follow my drift.”
Beckworth was getting titillated. He smiled, something he rarely did, and exposed the two snaggle teeth at the corners of his mouth. “Drift it my way, Freddy boy.”
I looked in all directions, broadly searching out eavesdroppers. “Korean women, Loot. He can’t get enough of them. Only he doesn’t like to talk about it, because we’re at war over there. Wacky goes goo-goo for gooks. There’s a cathouse on Slauson and Hoover that specializes in them. It’s right next to that dump with all the colored girls—what’s the name of the place?—Minnie’s Casbah. Wacky goes to this chink place. Sometimes he sits in his car and has a few belts before he goes in. He told me he’s seen a shitload of department brass go into the Casbah looking for poontang, but he won’t tell me who. Wacky’s a stand-up guy. He doesn’t hate the brass hats the way a lot of street cops do.”
Beckworth had gone pale, but came out of it fast. “Well, he may not be a queer, but he’s still a shithead. The bastard. I had to get my office fumigated. I’m a sensitive man, Freddy, and I had nightmares about that dead cat. And don’t tell me Walker didn’t do it—because I know.”
“I don’t deny it, Lieutenant. He did it. But you got to look at his motives.”
“What motives? He hates me. That’s his motive.”
“You’re wrong, Loot. Wacky respects you. He even envies you.”
“Respect! Envy! What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a fact. Wacky envies your golfing potential. He told me so.”
“Are you crazy? I’m a hacker. He’s a low handicapper.”
“You wanna know what he said, Loot? He said, ‘Beckworth has all the moves. It’s just his concentration that’s fucking up his game and keeping him from putting it all together. He’s got a lot on his mind. He’s a good cop. I’m glad I’m just a dumb harness bull on the street. At least I can break eighty. The lieutenant is too conscientious and it fucks up his game. If he weren’t such a good cop, he’d be a scratch player.’ That’s what he said.”
I gave it a minute to sink in. Beckworth was aglow. He put down the 4 iron he was mauling and smiled at me beatifically. “You tell Walker to come and see me, Freddy. Tell him I’ve got some good Scotch for him. Korean pussy, Jesus! You don’t think he’s a red, do you, Freddy?”
“Wacky Walker? Staff sergeant, U.S. Marines? Bite your tongue, Lieutenant!”
“You’re right, Freddy. That was unworthy of me. Let’s go. I’ve had enough for today.”
I drove Beckworth back to his car, then went home to my apartment in Santa Monica. I showered and changed. Then I put my off-duty .38 snub-nose into a small hip holster and attached it to my belt next to my spine in case I went dancing and got romantic. Then I got into my car and went looking for women.
I decided to follow the red trolley car. It ran from Long Beach all the way up into Hollywood. It was Friday night, and on weekend nights the red car carried groups of girls looking for an evening’s fun on the Strip that they probably couldn’t afford. The red car ran slightly elevated on a track in the middle of the street, so you could hardly see the passengers. Your best bet was to drive abreast of it and watch the girls as they boarded.
I liked L.A. girls the best, they were lonelier and more individual than girls from the “suburbs,” so I caught the red car at Jefferson and La Brea. I wanted to give myself five minutes or so of suspense before the Wilshire Boulevard bonanza: clusters of salesgirls from Ohrbach’s and the May Company, and secretaries from the insurance companies that lined L.A.’s busiest street. I kept my ’47 Buick ragtop with the gunsight hood ornament dead even with the red car and watched keenly as passengers boarded.
The parade up to Wilshire was predictable—old-timers, high school kids, some young couples. At Wilshire, a whole knot of high-voiced gigglers jumped on board, pushing and shoving good-naturedly. It was cold out; overcoats obscured their bodies. It didn’t matter; spirit is more important than flesh. They boarded fast, so I couldn’t discern faces. That put me at a disadvantage. If they got out at Fountain or Sunset en masse, I would have to park quick and chase them with no time to work on a line suited to one particular woman.
But it didn’t matter, not tonight, because on La Brea just short of Melrose I saw her, running out of a Chinese restaurant, handbag flying by its straps, framed for a few brief seconds in the neon glow of the Gordon Theater: an unusual-looking girl, identifiable not by type, but by an intensity of feeling. She seemed to have a harried, frightened nervousness that blasted open the L.A. night. She was dressed with style, but without regard for fashion: men’s baggy-cuffed slacks, sandals, and an Eisenhower jacket. Men’s garb, but her features were soft and feminine and her hair was long.
She barely made the red car, hopping aboard with a little antelope bound. Her destination eluded me—she had too much stuff to be running for the Strip. Maybe she was headed for a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, or a lover’s rendezvous that would ace me out. I was wrong; she got off at Fountain and started walking north.
I parked in a hurry, placed an “Official Police Vehicle” sign under my windshield wiper and followed her on foot. She turned east on De Longpre, a quiet residential street on the edge of the Hollywood business district. If she was going home I was out of luck for tonight—my methods required a crowded street or public place, and the best I could hope for was an address for future reference. But I could see that half a block up two black-and-whites were double-parked with their cherry lights on: a possible crime scene.
The girl noticed this, hesitated, and walked back in my direction. She was afraid of cops, and this compounded my interest. I decided to risk all on that fear, and intercepted her as she passed me. “Excuse me, miss,” I said, showing her my badge. “I’m a police officer, and this is an official crime scene. Please allow me to escort you to a safe place.”
The woman nodded, frightened, her face going pale and blank for a brief moment. She was very lovely, with that strength-vulnerability combo that is the essence of my love and respect for women. “All right,” she said, adding “Officer” with the thinnest edge of contempt. We walked back towards La Brea, not looking at each other.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sarah Kefalvian.”
“Where do you live, Miss Kefalvian?”
“Not far from here. But I wasn’t going home. I was going up to the boulevard.”
“Whereabouts?”
“To an art exhibit. Near Las Palmas.”
“Let me take you there.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
She was averting her eyes, but as we got to the corner of La Brea she gave me a spirited, defiant look that sent me. “You don’t like cops, do you, Miss Kefalvian?” I said.
“No. They hurt people.”
“We help more people than we hurt.”
“I don’t believe it. Thank you for escorting me. Good night.”
Sarah Kefalvian turned her back to me and started striding off briskly in the direction of the boulevard. I couldn’t let her go. I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She yanked it away. “Look,” I said, “I’m not your average cop. I’m a draft dodger. I know that there’s a Picasso exhibit at that bookstore on Las Palmas. I’m hot to learn culture and I need someone to show me around.” I gave Sarah Kefalvian the crinkly smile that made me look a bashful seventeen. She started to relent, very slightly. She smiled. I moved in. “Please?”
“Are you really a draft dodger?”
“Kind of.”
“I’ll go with you to the exhibit if you don’t touch me or tell anyone that you’re a policeman.”
“It’s a deal.”
We walked back to my illegally parked car, me elated, and Sarah Kefalvian interested, against her will.
The exhibit was at Stanley Rose’s Bookshop, a longtime hot spot for the L.A. intelligentsia. Sarah Kefalvian walked slightly ahead of me, offering awed comments. The pictures were prints, not actual paintings, but this didn’t faze her. It was obvious she was warming to the idea of having a date. I told her my name was Joe Thornhill. We stopped in front of “Guernica,” the one picture I felt confident enough to comment on.
“That’s a terrific picture,” I said. “I saw a bunch of photographs on that city when I was a kid. This brings it all back. Especially that cow with the spear sticking out of him. War must be tough.”
“It’s the cruelest, most terrible thing on earth, Joe,” Sarah Kefalvian said. “I’m devoting my life to ending it.”
“How?”
“By spreading the words of great men who have seen war and what it does.”
“Are you against the war in Korea?”
“Yes. All wars.”
“Don’t you want to stop the Communists?”
“Tyranny can only be stopped through love, not war.”
That interested me. Sarah’s eyes were getting moist. “Let’s go talk,” I said, “I’ll buy you dinner. We’ll swap life stories. What do you say?” I waggled my eyebrows a la Wacky Walker.
Sarah Kefalvian smiled and laughed, and it transformed her. “I’ve already eaten, but I’ll go with you if you’ll tell me why you dodged the draft.”
“It’s a deal.” As we walked out of the bookstore I took her arm and steered her. She buckled, but didn’t resist.
We drove to a dago joint on Sunset and Normandie. En route I learned that Sarah was twenty-four, a graduate student in History at U.C.L.A. and a first-generation Armenian-American. Her grandparents had been wiped out by the Turks, and the horror stories her parents had told her about life in Armenia had shaped her life: she wanted to end war, outlaw the atom bomb, end racial discrimination, and redistribute the wealth. She deferred to me slightly, saying that she thought cops were necessary, but should carry liberal arts educations and high ideals instead of guns. She was starting to like me, so I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she was nuts. I was starting to like her, too, and my blood was roiling at the thought of the lovemaking that we would share in a few hours’ time.
I appreciated her honesty and decided that candor would be the only decent kind of barter. I decided not to bullshit her: maybe our encounter would leave her more of a realist.
The restaurant was a one-armed Italian place, strictly family, with faded travel posters of Rome, Naples, Parma, and Capri interspersed with empty Chianti bottles hanging from a phony grape arbor. I decided to forgo chow, and ordered a big jug of dago red. We raised our glasses in a toast.
“To the end of war,” I said.
“Do you really believe that?”
“Sure. Just because I don’t carry placards or make a big deal out of it doesn’t mean I don’t hate it.”
“Tell me why you dodged the draft,” Sarah said softly.
I drained my glass and poured another. Sarah was sipping hers slowly.
“I’m an orphan. I grew up in an orphanage in Hollywood. It was lousy. It was Catholic, and run by a bunch of sadistic nuns. The food stank. During the Depression we ate nothing but potatoes, watery vegetable stews, and powdered milk, with meat maybe once a week. All the kids were skinny and anemic, with bad complexions. It wasn’t good enough for me. I couldn’t eat it. It made me so angry my skin stung. We got sent out to a Catholic school over on Western Avenue. They fed us the same slop for lunch. When I was about eight, I knew that if I continued to eat that garbage I would forfeit my claim to manhood. So I started to steal. I hit every market in Hollywood. I stole canned sardines, cheeses, fruit, cookies, pies, milk—you name it. On weekends the older kids used to get farmed out to wealthy Catholic families, to show us a bit of the good life. I got sent regularly to this family in Beverly Hills. They were loaded. They had a son about my age. He was a wild kid, and an accomplished shoplifter. His specialty was steaks. I joined him and we hit every butcher shop on the West Side. He was as fat as a pig. He couldn’t stop eating. A regular Goodyear blimp.
“During the depression there was a kind of floating hobo jungle in Griffith Park. The cops rousted the bums out of there regularly, but they would recongregate in another place. A priest from Immaculate Heart College told me about it. I went looking for them. I was a curious, lonely kind of kid, and thought bums were romantic. I brought a big load of steaks with me, which made me a big hit. I was big enough so that no one messed with me. I listened to the stories the old bums would tell—cops and robbers, railroads and Pinkerton men, darkness. Strange things that most people had no inkling of. Perversions. Unspeakable things. I wanted to know those things—but remain safe from them.
“One night we were roasting steaks and drinking some whiskey I had stolen when the cops raided the jungle. I scampered off and got away. I could hear the cops rousting out the bums. They were firm, but humorous about the whole thing; and I knew that if I became a cop I could have the darkness along with some kind of precarious impunity. I would know, yet be safe.
“Then the war came along. I was seventeen when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And I knew again, though this time in a different way. I knew that if I fought in that war I would die. I also knew that I needed an honorable out to insure getting on the police department.
“I never knew my parents. My first adopted parents gave me my name before they turned me over to the orphanage. I devised a plan. I read the draft laws, and learned that the sole surviving son of a man killed in a foreign war is draft exempt. I also knew I had a punctured eardrum that was a possible out, but I wanted to cover my bets. So I tried to enlist in ’42, right after I graduated from high school. The eardrum came through and they turned me down.
“Then I found an old wino woman, a down-and-out actress. She came with me when I made my appeal to the draft board. She yelled and screamed that she needed me to work and give her money. She said her husband, my dad, was killed in the Chinese campaign of ’26, which was why I was sent to the orphanage. It was a stellar performance. I gave her fifty bucks. The draft board believed her and told me never to try to enlist again. I pleaded, periodically, but they were firm. They admired my patriotism—but a law was a law, and ironically the punctured eardrum never kept me from becoming a cop.”
Sarah loved it, and sighed when I finished. I loved it, too; I was saving the story for a special woman, one who could appreciate it. Aside from Wacky, she was the only person to know of that part of my life.
She put her hand on mine. I raised it to my lips and kissed it. She looked wistful and sad. “Have you found what you’re looking for?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you take me by that hobo jungle? Tonight?”
“Let’s go now. They close the park road at ten o’clock.”
It was a cold night and very clear. January is the coldest, most beautiful month in L.A. The colors of the city, permeated by chill air, seem to come into their own and reflect a tradition of warmth and insularity.
We drove up Vermont and parked in the observatory parking lot. We walked north, uphill, holding hands. We talked easily, and I laid on the more gentle, picaresque side of police work: the friendly drunks, the colorful jazz musicians in their zoot suits, the lost puppies Wacky and I repatriated to their youthful owners. I didn’t tell her about the rape-o’s, the abused kids, the stiffs at accident scenes or the felony suspects who got worked over regularly in the back rooms at Wilshire Station. She didn’t need to hear it. Idealists like Sarah, despite their naiveté, thought that the world was basically a shit place. I needed to temper her sense of reality with some of the joy and mystery. There was no way she could accept that the darkness was part of the joy. I had to do my tempering Hollywood-style.
I showed her the site of the old jungle. I hadn’t been here since 1938, thirteen years, and now it was just a clearing overgrown with weeds and littered with empty wine bottles.
“It all started here for you?” Sarah asked.
“Yes.”
“Time and place awes me.”
“Me, too. This is January 30, 1951. It’s now and it won’t ever be again.”
“That scares me.”
“Don’t be scared. It’s just the wonder. It’s very dark here. Are you afraid of the dark?”
Sarah Kefalvian raised her beautiful head and laughed in the moonlight. Big, hearty laughter worthy of her Armenian ancestors. “I’m sorry, Joe. It’s just that we’re speaking so somberly, so symbolically that it’s kind of funny.”
“Then let’s get literal. I’ve confided in you. You confide in me. Tell me something about yourself. Something dark and secretive that you’ve never told anyone.”
She considered this and said, “It’ll shock you. I like you and I don’t want to offend you.”
“You can’t shock me. I’m immune to shock. Tell me.”
“All right. When I was an undergrad in San Francisco I had an affair—with a married man. It ended. I was hurt and I started hating men. I was going to Cal Berkeley. I had a teacher, a woman. She was very beautiful. She took an interest in me. We became lovers and did things—sexual things that most people don’t even guess about. This woman also liked young boys. Young boys. She seduced her twelve-year-old nephew. We shared him.”
Sarah backed away from where we stood together, almost as if fearing a blow.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“All of it?”
“Yes! I won’t get graphic with you. I loved that woman. She helped through a difficult time. Isn’t that dark enough for you?”
Her anger and indignation had peaked and brought forth in me a warm rush of pure stuff. “It’s enough. Come here, Sarah.” She did and we held each other, her head pressed hard into my shoulder. When we disengaged, she looked up at me. She was smiling, and her cheeks were wet with tears. I wiped them away with my thumbs. “Let me take you home,” I said.
We undressed wordlessly, in the dark front room of Sarah Kefalvian’s garage apartment on Sycamore Street. Sarah was trembling and breathing shallowly in the cold room, and when we were naked I smothered her with my body to stanch her tremors, then lifted her and carried her in the direction of where the bedroom had to be.
There was no bed; just a mattress on a pallet covered with quilts. I laid her down and sat on the edge of the mattress, my long legs jammed up awkwardly. Á shaft of light from a streetlamp cast a diffuse glow over the room and let me pick out shelves overflowing with books and walls adorned with Picasso prints and labor activist posters from the Depression.
Sarah looked up at me, her hand resting on my knee. I stroked her hair, then bent over and placed short dry kisses on her neck and shoulders. She sighed. I told her she was very beautiful, and she giggled. I looked for imperfections, the little body flaws that speak volumes. I found them: a small growth of dark hairs above her nipples, an acne cluster on her right shoulder blade. I kissed these places until Sarah grabbed my head and pulled my mouth to hers.
We kissed hard and long, then Sarah opened up yawningly and arched to receive me. We joined and coupled violently, strongly, muscles straining in our efforts to stay interlocked as we changed positions and thrashed the quilts off the mattress. We peaked together, Sarah sobbing as I mashed my face into her neck, rubbing my mouth and nose in the little rivulets of our combined sweat.
We lay still for a long time, gently stroking odd parts of each other. To talk would have been to betray the moment; I knew this from experience, and Sarah from instinct. After a while she pretended to sleep, a silent, loving way to ease the awkwardness of my departure.
I dressed in the dark, then reached over and brushed back her long dark hair and kissed the nape of her neck, thinking as I left that maybe this time I had given as much as I had taken.
I drove home and got out my diary. I wrote of the circumstances of my meeting Sarah, what we had talked about, and what I learned. I described her body and our lovemaking. Then I went to bed and slept long into the afternoon.
“GETTING LAID, FREDDY?”
Wacky and I were pulling into the parking lot at Rancho Park Municipal Golf Course very early the following Saturday morning. I was hungry for golf, not masculine banter, and Wacky’s question felt like a knife in the side. I ignored it until Wacky cleared his throat and started to speak in verse:
“Whither thou, O pussy-hound, O tireless fiend for Venus Mounds, O noble cop, you’ll never stop …”
I set the hand brake and stared at Wacky.
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said.
I sighed: “The answer is yes.”
“Great. What’s it costing you?”
“Very little. I go to bars only as a last resort.” I hauled my clubs out of the back seat and motioned Wacky to follow me. As I slung my golf bag over my shoulder and locked the car, Wacky gave me one of his rare cold sober looks.
“That wasn’t what I meant, Fred.”
“What did you mean, Wacky? I came here to hit golf balls, not write my sexual memoirs.”
Wacky clapped me on the back and waggled his eyebrows. “Are you still planning on being chief of police someday?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Then I hope you realize that the commission will never appoint a bachelor pussy-fiend as chief. You know that they’re going to get to you, don’t you?”
I sighed again, this time angrily. “Exactly what are you talking about?”
“Price, Freddy. The dames are going to start to get to you. You’re going to get tired of one-nighters and go loony romantic and start searching for some tomato you screwed back in ’48. The woman, who’ll never be able to compete with the thrill of one-nighters. You’ll be screwed both ways. You make me damn glad I’m not big and handsome and charming. You make me damn glad I’m just a poet and a cop.”
“And a drunk.” I regretted saying it immediately and fished around for something to make it right.
Wacky preempted me: “Yeah, and a drunk.”
“Then you watch the price, Wack. When I’m chief of police and you’re my chief of detectives I don’t want you croaking of cirrhosis of the liver.”
“I’ll never make it, Fred.”
“You’ll make it.”
“Shit. Haven’t you heard the rumors? Captain Larson is retiring in June. Beckworth is going to be the new top dog at Wilshire, and I’m going to Seventy-seventh Street—Niggerland, U.S.A. And you, Beckworth’s golf avatar and fair-haired boy, are going to Vice, a nice assignment for a cunt-hound. I have this on very good authority, Freddy.”
I couldn’t meet Wacky’s eyes. I had heard the rumors, and credited them. I started thinking of stratagems I could use to keep Beckworth from transferring Wacky, then suddenly realized I was supposed to meet Beckworth at seven o’clock that morning at Fox Hills for a lesson. I dropped my bag to the ground in disgust. “Wacky?” I said.
“Yes, Fred?”
“Sometimes you make me wish that I were the drunk and the fuck-up in this partnership.”
“Will you elaborate on that?”
“No.”
The driving range was deserted. Wacky and I dug our stash of shag balls out of their hiding place in a hollowed-out tree trunk and settled in to practice. Wacky warmed up by chugalugging a half pint of bourbon, while I did deep knee bends and jumping jacks. I started out hitting 7 irons—one seventy with a slight fade. Not good. I shifted my stance, corrected the fade and gained an additional ten yards in the process. I was working toward my optimum when Wacky grabbed my elbow and hissed at me: “Freddy, psst, Freddy!”
I slammed the head of my club into the dirt at my feet and pulled loose from Wacky. “What the fuck is wrong now?”
Wacky pointed to a man and woman arguing nearby on the putting green. The man was tall and fat, with a stomach like an avocado. He had wild reddish-brown hair and a nose as long as my arm. There was an appealing ethnic roguishness to him, broad laughter lines around his mouth, his whole face spelling out fifty-five years of good-natured conniving. The woman was about thirty, and obese—probably close to two-seventy-five. She bore the man’s long nose and reddish hair, then did him one better by sporting a distinct downy mustache. I groaned. Wacky was only nominally interested in women, and fat ones were the only kind that aroused him. He pulled a fresh half pint from his back pocket and took a long pull, then pointed to the couple and said, “Do you know who that is, Freddy?”
“Yeah. It’s a fat woman.”
“Not the tomato, Freddy. The old guy. It’s Big Sid Weinberg. He’s the guy who produced Bride of the Sea Monster, remember? We saw it at the Westlake. You went bananas for that blond with the big tits?”
“Yeah. And?”
“And I’m gonna get his autograph, then I’m gonna sell him ‘Constituency of the Dead’ for his next picture.”
I groaned again. Wacky was a horror-movie fanatic, and “Constituency of the Dead” was his attempt to capture Hollywood’s monster madness in prose. In his poem, there was a world of the dead, existing concurrent with the real world, but invisible to us. The inhabitants of this world were all wonder addicts, because they had all been murdered. I considered it one of his poorer efforts.
Wacky waggled his eyebrows at me. “One thing, partner,” he said, “one thing I promise.”
“What’s that?”
“When I’m a big-time Hollywood screenwriter I’ll never high-hat you.”
I laughed: “Watch out, Wack. Hollywood producers are notorious shit-heels. Go for the daughter instead. Maybe you can marry into the family.” Wacky laughed, and trotted away, while I returned to the blessed solitude of golf.
I was at it for over an hour, savoring the mystical union that takes place when you know that you’re a gifted practitioner of something much greater than yourself. I was crunching three-hundred-yard drives with fluid regularity when I gradually became aware of eyes boring into my back. I stopped in mid-swing and turned around to face my intruder. It was Big Sid Weinberg. He was lumbering toward me almost feverishly, right hand extended. Taken aback, I extended mine reflexively, and we exchanged names in a mutual bone-crusher. “Sid Weinberg,” he said.
“Fred Underhill,” I said.
Still grasping my hand, Weinberg eyed me up and down like a choice piece of meat. “You’re a six, but you can’t putt, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Okay, you’re a four, and you can hit the shit out of the ball, but your short game stinks. Right?”
“Wrong.”
Weinberg dropped my hand. “So you’re—”
I interrupted: “I’m a hard scratch, I can drive three hundred yards, I’ve got a demon short game, I can putt better than Ben Hogan and I’m handsome, charming, and intelligent. What do you want, Mr. Weinberg?”
Weinberg looked surprised when I mentioned his name. “So that lunatic was right,” he said.
“You mean my partner?”
“Yeah. He told me you two guys were cops together, then he tells me some lunatic story about a city of stiffs. How the hell did he ever make the force?”
“We’ve got lots of crazy guys, only most of them hold it better.”
“Jesus. He’s reading his stuff to my daughter now. They’re soul mates; she’s as crazy as he is.”
“What do you want, Mr. Weinberg?”
“How much do you make with the cops?”
“Two hundred ninety-two a month.”
Weinberg snorted. “Spinach. Peanuts. Worse than that, popcorn. The ducks in the lake at Echo Park make more moolah than that.”
“I’m not in it for the money.”
“No? But you like money?”
“Yeah, I like it.”
“Good, it ain’t a crime. You wanna walk across the street to Hillcrest and play a class-A kosher course? Scramble? The two of us versus these two ganefs I know? We’ll slaughter ’em. C-note Nassau? What do you say?”
“I say you put up the money, and my partner comes with us to read our greens. He gets twenty percent of our action. What do you say, Mr. Weinberg?”
“I say you musta been Jewish in a previous life.”
“Maybe in this one.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I never knew my parents.”
Big Sid raised his head and roared: “Ha-ha-ha! That’s par for the course, kid. I got two daughters and I don’t know them from a hill of beans. You got yourself a deal.”
We shook hands on it, sealing the last carefree alliance of my youth.
Hillcrest was only a block away geographically, but it was light-years away from Rancho in every other respect: lush, manicured fairways, well-tended, strategically placed bunkers and sloping greens that ran like lightning. There were eight of us in the group: Big Sid and I, our opponents, two caddies, and our giggling, moonstruck gallery—Wacky and Big Sid’s gargantuan daughter, Siddell. Those two seemed to be rapidly falling into lust, swaying into each other as they trudged fairway and rough, holding hands surreptitiously when Big Sid had his back to them.
And Sid was right; it was a slaughter. Our opponents—a Hollywood agent and a young doctor—were pitifully mismatched; shanking, hooking, slicing into the trees and blowing their only decent approach shots. Big Sid and I played steadily, conservatively, and sunk putts. We were well-aided by Wacky’s superb green reads and the club selections and yardage calls of our short-dog–sucking wino caddy, “Dirt Road” Dave.
“Hey, hey, shit, shit,” Dave would say. “Play a soft seven and knock it down short of the green. It breaks left to right off the mound. Hey, hey, shit, shit.”
Dave fascinated me: he was both sullen and colloquial, dirty and proud, with an air of supreme nonchalance undercut by terrified blue eyes. Somehow, I wanted his knowledge.
The match ended on the fourteenth hole, Big Sid and I closing our opponents out 5–4. Nine hundred dollars changed hands, four hundred and fifty for Big Sid, four hundred and fifty for me. I felt rich and effusive.
Big Sid clapped me on the back. “It’s just the beginning, doll! You stick with Big Sid and the sky’s the limit! Va-va-va-voom!”
“Thanks, Sid. I appreciate it.”
“Va-va-va-voom, kiddo!”
I looked around. Wacky and Siddell had disappeared into the woods. Our opponents were heading back to the clubhouse dejected, their heads down. I told Big Sid I would meet him at the clubhouse, then went looking for Dirt Road Dave. I found him walking across the rough toward the eighteenth hole with Big Sid’s bag as well as mine slung across his bony right shoulder. I tapped him on that shoulder and when he turned around stuck a fifty-dollar bill into his callused, outstretched palm. “Thanks, Dave,” I said. Dirt Road Dave unhitched the bags, put the money into his pocket and stared at me. “Talk to me,” I said.
“About what, sonny boy?”
“About what you’ve seen. About what you know.”
Dirt Road Dave let my bag fall to the grass at my feet, then he spat. “I know you’re a smart-mouth young cop. I know that’s a roscoe and handcuffs under your sweater. I know the kind of things you guys do that you think people don’t know about. I know guys like you die hungry.” His finality was awesome. I picked up my bag and walked to the clubhouse—only to be ambushed by another madman en route.
It was Wacky, materializing out of a grove of trees, scaring the shit out of me. “Jesus!” I exclaimed.
“Sorry, partner,” Wacky whispered, “but I had to catch you out of earshot of Big Sid. I need a favor, a big-orooney.”
I sighed: “Name it.”
“The car—for an hour or so. I’ve got a hot date that won’t wait, passion pie in the great by-and-by. I’m eating kosher, partner. You can’t deny me.”
I decided to do it, but with a stipulation: “Not in the car, Wack. Rent a room. You got that?”
“Of course, I’m a cop. Would I break the law?”
“Yes.”
“Ha-ha-ha! One hour, Fred.”
“Yeah.”
Wacky disappeared into the trees, where his high-pitched laughter was joined by Siddell Weinberg’s baritone sighs. I walked to the clubhouse feeling sad, and weighted down by strangers.
I FIGURED THAT Wacky would be at least two hours late returning my car, and moreover that good taste dictated I remain to drink and shoot the shit with Big Sid. I wanted to take a run to Santa Barbara and look for women, but I needed my car for that.
I showered in the men’s locker room. It was a far cry from the dungeonlike locker room at Wilshire Station. This facility had wall-to-wall deep-pile carpets and oak walls hung with portraits of Hillcrest notables. The locker room talk was about movie deals and business mergers with golf a distant third. Somehow it made me uneasy, so I showered fast, changed clothes, and went looking for Big Sid.
I found him in the dining room, sitting at a table near the large picture window overlooking the eighteenth hole. He was talking with a woman; she had her back to me as I approached the table. Somehow I sensed she was class, so I smoothed my hair and adjusted my pocket handkerchief as I walked toward them.