Джеймс Эллрой - This Storm

I sat on a walkway bench near Claire’s bungalow. I was within view of Dudley’s locked domicile. Extensive records checks and cross-checks brought me here. I began pulling paper in the wake of the Niteclub Blastout. The Blastout was a local sensation. Elmer Jackson was its most auspicious surviving casualty. His stray shots killed Hideo Ashida. He aimed at Dudley Smith, fully intending to kill him. He told me this and told no one else. The papers pinned the blame on the conveniently dead Big Daddy Gordean and Johnny Shinura. My dear Elmer. Volatile and impetuous. Sweet-natured and tolerant for a cop. Guilt-racked now. Done in by internal sabotage and Hideo Ashida’s death. The man who reminded me that Hideo had sussed it all out. A woman attended the klub haus deaths and may have helped commit them. We owed Hideo his clean solve. Elmer said, “Maybe there’s some records checks you can run.”

I was at loose ends; Elmer was at loose ends, verging on shell shock. He was estranged from Ruth; Annie was visiting her ailing dad in rural Idaho. Ellen was off with her husband and son; Brenda was tending to their call-service business. The Blastout remained hot news. Loretta McKee replaced Lena Horne as Charlie Barnet’s colored canary. Mrs. Big Daddy sued Los Angeles County. Duke Ellington was busy composing his “Niteclub Blastout Suite.” A land baron purchased the Taj Mahal, with plans to refurbish and reopen it as the Klub Blastout. Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers will play the gala opening.

This blithe exploitation enraged Elmer. He raged against himself and the Kameraden and his long-gone brother, who started the whole thing. He told me to run directory and phone-call checks on Chuckie Duquesne. “You might turn something there.”

Bill swore me in as a PD clerk-typist. He assigned me a cubicle with a desk and a telephone. I ran jail checks first. I learned that Johnny Shinura was in Lincoln Heights on the night of the murders. Chuckie Duquesne had never been arrested. Johnny and Chuckie were bunked in at the East 2nd Street warehouse then. That was their collective last known address. They squatted there after the Federal seizure and Johnny’s formal eviction. Chuckie lived somewhere before that. He had to have had a formal address. I ran DMV checks and turned up an address in Echo Park.

Chuckie rented a house there, and had a telephone installed. I called PC Bell and secured his phone bills from October ’39 up through last year. One suggestive female name repeatedly popped up.

I recalled Hideo’s theory. The case was definitively homosexual. It derived from two-person animus. The foot scuffs on the upstairs hallway wall had been made by a woman.

I ran DMV checks. I learned that Chuckie did not own a registered automobile. I secured car stats for Chuckie’s female friend. I spent many hours in the former Crash Squad command post. I studied the master file; I studied the initial canvassing sheets in particular. I noted the north/south/east/west canvassing perimeters. The crime occurred on a Wednesday night into Thursday morning. The proximity of the jazz strip troubled me. I walked the strip and saw that most of the clubs possessed no parking lots or assigned parking spaces. The strip hopped on weeknights; patrons had to park their cars somewhere; the somewhere within the canvass perimeters would be packed with club hoppers’ cars. The klub haus killer or killers would have had to park outside those perimeters and walk to the haus.

I drove to 46th and Central and walked my own expanded perimeter. I noted NO NIGHTTIME PARKING signs in all directions. That’s when I knew I had a chance to solve it; that’s when I knew that the debt to Hideo might be repaid.

It took one more phone call. I buzzed the PD’s Traffic Bureau and requested a list of parking tickets issued on the night in question. Her name was on it. She had parked on 41st Street, east of Hooper. It was three blocks past the northeast perimeter.

I placed my cigarettes and matches on the bench beside me. I’d met the woman twice before; she bummed out of my pack on both occasions. She smoked too much and talked too much and divulged inappropriately. I beckoned her here. I wrote to her and told her I knew. She had my full consent to divulge inappropriately.

Andrea Lesnick walked up. She sat down and went straight for the cigarettes. Her fingers were nicotine-stained; her nails were bitten down to the quick.

She said, “Miss Lake knows my secret. She figured out what the dumb cops couldn’t.”

“You parked in a red zone. They missed the citation you were issued.”

“They raped me.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been to Tehachapi. San Quentin can’t be any worse. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ I’ll enter the green room with my head held high. I’ve groveled enough in my lifetime. Chuckie convinced me of that.”

I lit a cigarette. “I was wondering how you met him.”

Andrea said, “I met him at a party at Otto’s place. Everybody who was anybody was there, but we all wore masks. Chuckie was gigging there. Wendell and George were there, but they were chauffeuring some America Firsters, so they had to stay outside. Archie stayed outside, too. The car-park boys were Mex, so Archie spoke Mex to them, and Jewed them for half of their tips.”

“I’ve heard of this party, Andrea. People wore Nazi costumes. Orson Welles screened a pornographic movie.”

Andrea shook her head. No, no, no. Let me tell it my way.

“Miss Lake’s a C.T., and a provocateur. She’s a snitch, and she’s in with the cops. It’s my story, and I don’t have to let her prompt me or tell me how I should confess.”

I touched Andrea’s arm. She pulled away and chained cigarettes.

“Wendell and I got stoked on each other, and we necked in this limousine he was driving. We petted, but he wanted more than I wanted to give him, so I said, ‘Whoa, son.’ Wendell got ticked off, because the party was very libertine, and he told me I should give him what everybody else was getting, but I left him high and dry instead. Chuckie and a boy Robby Staley set him up with were necking, outside by a pergola. They witnessed some horrible thing that gave Chuckie nightmares for the rest of his life, but he never told me what it was.”

I glanced out at Dudley’s jail suite. Andrea poked me and brought my gaze back to her. Look at me, look at me. It’s my story I’m telling you.

“Wendell was hateful and spiteful. He started sending me letters and snapshots of him and his wife, doing you know what in the you know where. It went on for a year and a half or so, then it stopped, and some time passed. Then my daddy sent me to the klub haus to pick up a eugenics book he’d lent this boy Link Rockwell. Wendell, Georgie, and Archie were there, alone. That was when they raped me.”

She’d dribbled ash on her blouse and sweater. Both garments were burn-marked already. Her fingers were gnawed. She gnashed her hands when she wasn’t smoking. She was unbearable to behold. She condemned me as glib. She commanded my prayers for the rest of my life.

“ ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith You Know Who. Which is just what Chuckie and I started planning. It was a double-dip. I got keestered, and he got nightmares from that party. We started frequenting the klub haus, and Chuckie poked boys upstairs. I told Wendell, Georgie, and Archie that I wanted to do it again with them, while Chuckie watched. That’s how we got them alone at the haus. ”

Her hair. She curled strands around her fingers and twisted them taut. She maimed herself. She left bald spots. Self-inflicted stigmata. Collaborator women shaved bald.

“We lured them upstairs. Chuckie gave them terp cigarettes laced with poison. They smoked them and became woozy, and we led them back downstairs. Chuckie sat them down on the couch. He was left-handed, so I had to scooch around him just so. He held an ice pick to their necks, and I put on these strangling gloves that Johnny Shinura gave me, and I strangled them right there.”