James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

The inevitable happened on an otherwise dull, gray day. Late afternoon, just after sunset. The sky was like unpolished pewter, and late summer fog settled along the coast. I was down near my windmill, loitering at Gallagher’s not-great expense, with nothing going on and nothing promising that evening, either, except maybe the usual jog over to Penny’s to see what there was to see, when, without warning, I was caught by the collar of my shirt and thrown to the ground. I must have blurted some kind of shout or cry, but remember at first a deep exterior silence as I was dragged, my hands grasping at my throat, through a breach in the fence and out onto the sand. The pounding in my ears was deafening and I felt my face bloat. I tried kicking and twisting, but the hands that held me were much stronger than mine. I blanked out, then came to, soaked in salt water and sweat, and saw my brother’s face close to mine spitting out words I couldn’t hear through the tumultuous noise of crashing waves and throbbing blood. He slapped me. And slapped me backhanded again. Then pulled me up like a rough lover so that we faced each other lips-to-lips. I still couldn’t hear him, though I knew what he was cursing about. Bastard must have been following me, spying, and uncovered my hideout and stash.

What bothered me most was that Tom, not I, was destroying my collection. He had no right, no right. None of the photographs that swept helter-skelter into the surf, as we fought on that dismal evening, were his to destroy. Much as I’d like to sketch those minutes in such a way that my seizing the golf ball from my shirt pocket, cramming it into his mouth, and clamping his jaw shut with all the strength I had, was a gesture meant to silence not slay him, it would be a lie.

Lie or not, Tom went down hard, gasping for air, and I went down with him, my hands like a vise on his pop-eyed face. He grabbed at his neck now, just as I had moments before, the ball lodged in the back of his throat. A wave came up over us both in a sizzling splash, knocking us shoreward before pulling us back toward the black water and heavy rollers. Everywhere around us were Penny’s images, washing in and out with the tidal surges. Climbing to my feet, I watched the hungry waves carry my brother away. I looked up and down the coast and, seeing no one in the settling dark, walked in the surf a quarter mile northward, maybe farther, before crossing a grass strip which led, beneath some raddled palms, to solitary sidewalks that took me home, where I changed clothes. In no time I was at work again, my mind a stony blank.

Whether by instinct or dumb luck, my having suppressed the urge to salvage as many photos as I could that night, and carry them away with me when I left the scene where Tom and I had quarreled, stood me in good stead. Given that I had the presence of mind to polish the Argus and hide it under Tom’s bed, where it would be discovered the next day by the authorities when they rummaged through his room looking for evidence that might explain what happened, I think my abandonment of my cache of portraits was genius. Clever, at least.

Clever, too, if heartfelt, was my brave comforting of Molly, who cried her eyes out, on hearing the disastrous news. And I stuck close to our paralyzed father, who walked from room to room in the bungalow we called home, all but cataleptic, mumbling to himself about the curse that followed him wherever he went. Though they had not ruled out an accidental death — he disgorged the golf ball before drowning — our father was, I understand, their suspect for months. A walk on the beach, man-to-man, a parental confrontation accidentally gone too far. In fact, their instinct, backed by the circumstantial evidence of his having been troubled by his estranged wife’s demise, given to drinking too much, and his recent rage toward his eldest kid over having taken weird, even porno snapshots of his girlfriend, led them in the right direction. Just not quite. Molly and I had watertight alibis, so to speak, not that we needed them. She was with several friends watching television, and Gallagher signed an affidavit that I was working with him side by side during the time of the assault. Speculating about the gap in the fence and faint, windblown track marks in the sand, he said, “Always trespassers trying to get in for free,” and, not wanting to cast aspersion on the deceased, he nevertheless mentioned that he’d seen somebody sneaking in and out of that particular breach at odd hours, and that the person looked somewhat like Tom.

Our father was eventually cleared. Turned out Sad Sack was a covert Casanova with a lady friend in Ojai. This explained why our annual rousting had not taken place. He need not have been shy about it, as his children would prove to like her; Shannon is the name. Whether Gallagher’d been so used to me going through my paces — efficient, thorough, devoted — that he improved on an assumption by making it a sworn fact; or whether he really thought he saw me at work that night, ubiquitous ghost that I was; or whether he was covering for me, not wanting to lose the one sucker who understood Bayside and could keep it going when he no longer cared to, I will never know. Gallagher himself would perish a year later of a heart attack, in our small office, slumped in his cane chair beneath those pictures of stars who gazed down at him with ruthless benevolence.

The initial conclusions reached in Tom’s murder investigation proved much the same as the inconclusive final one. They had been thorough, questioned all of Tom’s friends. Certainly Penny might have wanted him dead given how humiliated, how mortified, she was by the photographs that had been recovered along the coast. Asked to look through them, she did the best she could. While she did seem to think Tom had been with her on some occasions when this or that shot was taken — they were all so awful, so invasive, so perverse — she couldn’t be sure. Given that he was present in none of the exposures, that the camera used was his, and so forth, there was no reason to look elsewhere for the photographer. Penny had a motive, but also an alibi, like everyone else.

None of it mattered, finally, because good came from the bad. Our family was closer than ever, and Dad seemed, after a few months of dazed mourning, to shake off his long slump. He brought his Ojai bartender girlfriend around sometimes, and Molly made dinner. Penny, too, was transformed by the tragedy. Before my watchful eyes she changed into an even gentler being, more withdrawn than before, yes, but composed and calm — some might say remote, but they’d be wrong, not knowing her like I did. It was as if she changed from a color photograph to black-and-white. I didn’t mind the shift. To the contrary.

The morning Penny came down to Bayside to speak with me was lit by the palest pink air and softest breeze of late autumn. I’d been the model of discretion in the several years that followed Tom’s passing, keeping tabs on Penny out of respect, really, making sure she was doing all right in the wake of what must have been quite a shock to her. Never overstepping my bounds — at least not in such a way as she could possibly know. Meantime, I had matured. Molly told me I’d become a handsome dog, as she put it. Her girlfriends had crushes on me, she said. I smiled and let them play the golf course gratis. Why not? Then Penny turned up, unexpected, wanting to give me something.

“For your birthday,” she said, handing me a small box tied with a white ribbon. There was quite a gale blowing off the ocean that day and her hair buffeted about her head. With her free hand she drew a long garland of it, fine as corn silk, away from her mouth and melancholy eyes. It was a gesture of absolute purity. Penny was a youthful twenty-one, and I an aged nineteen.