Джеймс Эллрой - Brown's Requiem

Fat Dog recovered his breath and muttered, “I apologize.”

“Good,” I said. “You’ve got one week of my time. I’ll leave a message at the bar if I need to get in touch with you. You’ll get my best job. At the end of the week I’ll submit a written report.” I gave him a boost and he managed to make it over the fence. I watched him walk into the darkness of his sanctuary, then drove away, my revulsion cut through with the strangest, sickest sense of fascination.

There was no place to go but Walter’s. I drove out Wilshire feeling numbed physically and caught on the horns of a moral dilemma: I had been hired by a vindictive lunatic to disrupt the lives of two decent people. I had the chance to bail out of my case but I didn’t. I couldn’t ; I was spellbound by a madman. It seemed an insoluble problem, so I willed myself not to think, which only compounded my numbness.

I couldn’t find a parking space on Walter’s block, so I parked on his front lawn. If his mother saw my tire marks, she would resign me to Christian Science hell, but I decided to risk it. I walked into the back yard. The light in Walter’s bedroom was on, and through it I could see him passed out in his chair in front of the T. V. On the screen a giant reptile was attacking a Japanese metropolis, knocking over skyscrapers with his tail. I toyed with the idea of shooting Godzilla and watching the T.V. implode, but Walter would never forgive me. There were two empty pint bottles of Scotch on the floor beside his chair. That was ominous. Walter was a winehead, and when he couldn’t threaten or cajole his mother into wine money, he would rip off flat pint bottles from the Thrifty Drug Store on Wilshire and Western. Hard liquor was an oblivion trip for my beloved friend, and he was an inept shoplifter. I was afraid that if he were busted, the arresting officers would recognize his lunacy and railroad him to Department 95 and Camarillo.

I pried off the windowscreen and climbed into his room. I lifted Walter onto his bed and stuffed two fifties into his shirt pocket. As I shut off the T.V., Godzilla was getting blasted by some sort of atomic death-ray. “I love you, you crazy bastard, but you break my heart,” I said, turning off the lights, and going out the window. It was getting chilly. I drove home and fell asleep on the couch with my clothes on.

The moral imperative of my case hit me when I woke up the next morning. Was Fat Dog Baker dangerous? Was he a physical threat to Sol Kupferman and Jane Baker? Exhibitionists are the most docile of sex deviates, but Fat Dog had shown a volatile streak. If he were planning to harm either his sister or Kupferman, it was my duty to stop him. Investigating Fat Dog with his own money struck me as wildly ironic, absurdist theatre in L.A. I decided to start in Venice.

I drove down LaBrea and caught the Santa Monica Freeway westbound. It was ten o’clock and the smog was starting to roll in. Maybe soon the environmentalists would outlaw cars, and I would have to find work repossessing horses. Fortunately for me, Cal Myers would see it coming and corner the market on beasts of burden. I could see it now: Cal’s Casa De Caballo, Cal’s Imports (Arabian horses, naturally) and Cal’s Palomino. Cal would be cutting his T.V. commercials knee deep in horseshit.

When I arrived in Venice, I parked in the exact spot where Fat had got out last night. I had a simple plan: Check out every vacant house, lot, and garage for four blocks south, and question whomever I ran into. Fat Dog was hard to miss, and someone in the area might be able to give me a lead. I walked. It was getting hot, and the coat and tie I was wearing didn’t help. I was getting wary looks from people sitting on their porches, taking the air. I looked like a cop. In Venice, no one but the fuzz wears a coat and tie.

The first two blocks were fruitless. On the third block I saw a wino wandering down the street, drinking from a brown paper bag. He had a wily, lucid look about him, so I gave him a toss. Whipping out my phony badge, I committed a misdemeanor: “Police officer,” I said. “Maybe you can help me.”

The wino gave me a frightened nod. When I finished describing Fat Dog, he practically screamed at me: “I seen that shitbird! Does he wear a shirt with a little crocodile on it? And a baseball cap?”

“That’s the guy.”

“What are you after him for?”

I made it good: “Molesting little boys.”

“I knew it! Once I was sittin’ on this driveway and the shitbird tells me to move my ass. He said it was his property. He looked like a crazy, so I moved. Shitbird.”

“Do you remember where you were?” I asked.

“Sure. The place is around the corner.”

“Take me there. Now.” We turned the corner and the wino led me to a small wood frame house. There was a dirt driveway that ran back into a yard overrun with weeds and high grass. In the rear of the yard was a tar-papered shack with no windows, standing awry atop a weed patch. It was a perfect visual representation of Fat Dog’s paranoia. I thanked the wino and told him to take off. He trotted away, giving me a funny look over his shoulder.

I decided to do a little breaking and entering. I checked out the front house first, knocking at the front door, then the back. No one home. I walked into the back yard. Broken toys lay strewn among the weeds. Luckily, the door to the shack was hidden from the street, and the lock was a joke: a simple hinge with two screws bolted into the door jamb and a carry over metal strip attached to a cheap padlock. I found a curtain rod in the yard among the broken toys. It had bent edges that looked thin enough to use as a screwdriver. I tried it. No go. My impatience got the best of me, and I wedged the rod inside the metal strip and snapped the whole mechanism off. The wood splintered, leaving craters where the screws had gone in. There was no way to cover my tracks.

I opened the door and fumbled for a light switch. I flipped it on, and an overhead bulb on a cord illuminated the dark corners of a man’s mind. It took minutes for the full import of the room to hit me, the photographs that covered the four walls were too staggering: women, mostly Mexican, in every conceivable posture of debasement with donkeys, horses, dogs, and pigs. Interspersed with them were photos of Hitler and his henchmen in various stern poses. Goering, Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, the whole sick crew. There was a workbench running along the back wall and above it was a collage of concentration camp atrocity photos: mounds of corpses hanging out of ovens and piles of skeletons lying in a mass grave.

When I checked out the contents of the workbench, I started to tremble. There were a half-dozen gallon cans of gasoline, empty bottles, stacks of asbestos padding, and a pile of safety gloves, all neatly stacked. In a cardboard box underneath the bench were dozens of celluloid strips and cord fuses arranged according to size. It was an arsonist’s workshop, and when the full implication of that hit me I started to tremble even harder: Kupferman. The Utopia. Fat Dog’s insane hatred of Solly K. Jesus. My head was pounding, beginning to ache, so I ransacked the place. Expecting to find money, I found nothing but porno books, cans of white paint, and historical tomes on Nazi Germany. I banged all along the rough wood walls, looking for places to hide small objects. Nothing. I got down on my hands and knees and checked the flooring all around. Nothing. I checked the photos on the wall a second time. The horror pictures were ripped out of the history books stored under the bench. The porno pics I judged to be recent and shot in Mexico: the actresses were Latinas and were sporting 70’s style hairdos and the furnishings of the apartment used as a shooting stage were up to date. In over half of the photographs a black naugahyde couch was in evidence, and it was covered with cheap bordertown souvenirs: bull banks, piñatas, handbags, and blankets.