James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

“Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it…you must’ve looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m’man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I’d killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.

“Because…and here’s the big difference ‘tween us, dummy:

“I unraveled what was going on…it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don’t.

“There’s an old Japanese saying—I got lots of these, Henry m’man—I read a whole lot—and what it says is, ‘Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty times.’” Then I grinned back at him.

“Fuck you, sucker,” I said, just as the Warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.

I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I’d done more than a jaunt…this was… shrike ; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal, Rudy Pairis, who was baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind…and then gone…and I came up from Ally’s shoulder, and I could barely speak.

“Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” I murmured. “He’s gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark.”

I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult—not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than anybody could imagine—I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.

And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.

Because—get on this now—all my wasted years didn’t have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my “gift” of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:

I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn’t get out of his own way .

Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.

Ed Gorman (1941-) was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated from Coe College in Iowa (1963). He worked in advertising as a copywriter and freelance writer for twenty years, then became a full-time writer, mainly of fiction. While most of his work has been in the mystery genre, he has also written many other types of fiction, including horror (he was nominated for Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association for his short story collections Cages [1995] and The Dark Fantastic [2001]) and westerns (he won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best Short Fiction, for “The Face” in 1992), under both his own name and the pen names E. J. Gorman and Daniel Ransom. He has been nominated for two Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Short Story, for “Prisoners” (1991), and (with others) Best Biographical/Critical Work, for The Fine Art of Murder (1994). He was also honored with MWAs Ellery Queen Award in 2003, given primarily for his numerous works of mystery fiction, his long editorship of Mystery Scene Magazine, a fanzine, and his many anthologies.

Among his many novels are the first in the six-volume Jack Dwyer series, Rough Cut (1985); The Day the Music Died (1999), the first of more than a half-dozen Sam McCain novels; and The Poker Club (1999), which was made into a feature film directed by Tim McCann in 2008. The Poker Club is an expansion of the short story “Out There in the Darkness,” which was first published in a limited-edition (five hundred copies) chapbook by Subterranean Press, in 1995.

The night it all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game — four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker. No wildcard games. We hate them.

This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house. Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wendy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too. With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier. With the wife and kids in the house, you’re always at least a little bit intimidated.

Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them. At least that’s what they say. I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.

We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee. The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders. Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.

All this, by the way, took place up in the attic. The four of us got to know one another when we all moved into what city planners called a “transitional neighborhood.” There were some grand old houses that could be renovated with enough money and real care. The city designated a ten-square-block area as one it wanted to restore to shiny new luster. Jan and I chose a crumbling Victorian. You wouldn’t recognize it today. And that includes the attic, which I’ve turned into a very nice den.

“Pisses me off,” Mike O’Brien said. “He’s always late.”

And that was true. Neil Solomon was always late. Never by that much but always late nonetheless.

“At least tonight he has a good excuse,” Bob Genter said.

“He does?” Mike said. “He’s probably swimming in his pool.” Neil recently got a bonus that made him the first owner of a full-size outdoor pool in our neighborhood.

“No, he’s got patrol. But he’s stopping at nine. He’s got somebody trading with him for next week.”

“Oh, hell,” Mike said, obviously sorry that he’d complained. “I didn’t know that.”

Bob Genter’s handsome black head nodded solemnly.

Patrol is something we all take very seriously in this newly restored “transitional neighborhood.” Eight months ago, the burglaries started, and they’ve gotten pretty bad. My house has been burglarized once and vandalized once. Bob and Mike have had curb-sitting cars stolen. Neil’s wife, Sarah, was surprised in her own kitchen by a burglar. And then there was the killing four months ago, man and wife who’d just moved into the neighborhood, savagely stabbed to death in their own bed. The police caught the guy a few days later trying to cash some of the traveler’s checks he’d stolen after killing his prey. He was typical of the kind of man who infested this neighborhood after sundown: a twentyish junkie stoned to the point of psychosis on various street drugs, and not at all averse to murdering people he envied and despised. He also knew a whole hell of a lot about fooling burglar alarms.