James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

“What’s this for?” I said.

Robert narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “Do you need it or not?” His voice was the hardest love I’d ever felt. I nodded. He turned around and started walking back to the shed. I watched him close the door. I climbed back in the Bronco and headed out onto the highway. I drove north, and crossed over into Vermont. There was still a huge black cloud in the sky over the oxbow. I drove up Route 5 and looked out over the burnt fields, still smoldering, scorched dead. Lord’s farm looked gray from the smoke. I drove up into the Northeast Kingdom. I never did find the courage to turn myself in, and things got worse. I spent the winter at a logging camp in Quebec.

I called once, when I hit a jam out in North Dakota. I called from a phone booth outside a diner. I recognized John’s voice the second he spoke. I hung up. Later, much later, in another life, with another name, we were driving and someone handed me a road atlas. I flipped through it and found Vermont and New Hampshire were together on the same page. I started tracing their shared border, the Connecticut River, north toward Canada. I dropped the atlas when my finger reached the oxbow. For just that split second, right on the tip of my finger, the surface of the map was scorching hot. I heard the roar of the fire, the little white house burning. The air rushing to be eaten by the flames. I smelled the gasoline. Riding across the top of the fire on a black horse was Bill Allen. Three dark shapes followed swiftly after him, the burning wasps in their long black hair, chasing him. Catching him and dragging him down into the fire, screaming.

Years later, on the security ward at Western State Hospital near Tacoma, I saw a man in a straitjacket, strapped to a gurney. I walked over to him and spoke.

“I didn’t know they used straitjackets anymore.”

He could barely move his head. “Well, they do.” The smell of ether was everywhere. He was quiet as a white-jacketed doctor walked by. “Say, Mac, scratch my shoulder, will you?”

I slowly reached down and began scratching the outside of the thick canvas that bound him. Solid steel mesh covered the ward windows.

“Harder,” he said. “I can barely feel it.” He looked up at me. “I think they’re trying to save on the heat. Aren’t you cold?” I shook my head. “I’m cold all the time,” he said.

I dug my nails into the canvas on his right shoulder. “My name is John Wilson,” I said.

He looked at me, his eyes wide. “That’s my name,” he said softly.

I stopped scratching the straitjacket. “What’s your middle name?” I asked.

He shook his head slightly and closed his eyes. “Same as yours,” he said. He shivered. It was cold. But my paper gown was soaked with dry sweat and my face was hot. I could smell smoke.

Thomas H(arper) Cook (1947-) was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, and received a BA from Georgia State College, a masters in American history from Hunter College in New York, and a masters in philosophy from Columbia University. He worked as a teacher and journalist, including four years as a book reviewer for Atlanta magazine, before becoming a full-time writer.

His first novel was a paperback original, Blood Innocents (1980), which received the first of his seven Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. He won the Best Novel Edgar in 1997 for The Chatham School Affair. He also was nominated by the MWA in 1989 for Best Novel ( Sacrificial Ground ), in 1993 for Best Fact Crime ( Blood Echoes), in 2005 for Best Paperback Original ( Into the Web), in 2006 for Best Novel (Red Leaves), and in 2007 for Best Short Story (“Rain”). Red Leaves was also nominated for an Anthony Award and the (British) Crime Writers’ Association’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger, and it won the Barry Award and Sweden’s Martin Beck Award. Noted for the poetic lyricism of his work, Cook has enjoyed greater success with critics, reviewers, and his fellow mystery writers, who admire the sensitive beauty of his prose, than he has with book buyers, who have thus far failed to place any of his books on the bestseller list. A film of one of his books, the highly suspenseful Evidence of Blood, was released in 1998; it was directed by Andrew Mondshein and starred David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell.

“What She Offered” was first published in the anthology Dangerous Women (New York: Mysterious Press, 2005).

Sounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.

I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Out­side, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.

“So what happened?” my friend asked.

This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The peo­ple around me were like tapes from Mission Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruction warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyield­ing as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.

Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week… and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul, numb with weariness as they fi­nally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than stand-ins for the rest of us.

I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. Peo­ple were lost and helpless, even the smart ones… especially the smart ones. Everything was vain and everything was fleet­ing. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mat­tered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever like to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.

And so I walked the streets and haunted the bars, and was, according to me, the only man on earth who had nothing to learn.

Then suddenly, she walked through the door.

To black, she offered one concession. A string of small white pearls. Everything else, the hat, the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the little purse… everything else was black. And so, what she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman, the broad-billed hat that discreetly covers one eye, high heels tapping on rain-slicked streets, foreign currency in the small black purse. She offered the spy, the murderess, the lure of a secret past, and, of course, that little hint of erotic peril.

She knows the way men think, I said to myself as she walked to the end of the bar and took her seat. She knows the way they think… and she’s using it.

“So you thought she was what?” my friend asked.

I shrugged. “Inconsequential.”

And so I watched without interest as the melodramatic touches accumulated. She lit a cigarette and smoked it pen­sively, her eyes opening and closing languidly, with the sort of world-weariness one sees in the heroines of old black-and-white movies.