Джеймс Эллрой - Brown's Requiem

“Did he supply Henry Cruz and Reyes Sandoval with heroin as payment for killing Fat Dog?”

“How did you know about that? They’re dead.”

“I know. I killed them.”

Ralston reacted with a contorting of his whole face. “Are you going to hit Cathcart?” he asked incredulously.

“Hit Cathcart? Hit?” I answered, equally incredulous. “Who do you think I am? Marlon Brando in The Godfather? I don’t want to hit Cathcart, I want to become his buddy. I’m a nigger trainee with aspirations. All I want is a million-dollar Welfare check and a lifetime supply of soul food. Then I’ll convert to Judaism and join Hillcrest. You can fix me up with a good caddy when I learn to play golf.”

“You are crazy.”

“Shut up. Tell me more about Cathcart. What does he do for kicks?”

“He goes marlin fishing in Baja. He listens to this really serious music. He talks about the cops being the front line of containment against the niggers. That’s about it. He’s got no family. He doesn’t go for women, so far as I know.”

“Where does he live?”

“He’s got an apartment in Van Nuys. He tries to live cheap so that it looks like all he’s got is his cop’s salary.”

“How often does he go down to Baja?”

“Every few weeks, I think.”

“How does he get down there?”

“He drives. he’s got kind of a cover-up going. He owns a little house outside of Del Mar. He tells the people he works with he’s going there. He says it’s part of the picture he’s painting: he makes good dough as a Captain and he can afford a small place down there.”

“Does he spend any time at the place in Del Mar?”

“I think he stops overnight, to make it look good. Then he drives to Baja. The guys he works with know he’s a fishing fanatic. He’s got it all figured out.”

“He sure talks a lot, for a careful man.”

“He trusts me. He knows I’m scared shitless of him.”

I let the remark hang in the air, dead weight between us. Then I harpooned Ralston with my coldest hardest look. When he started to avert my gaze, I said: “Stay scared of me and you’ll survive. You’ll have your hotel, your bar, your job, your health, seventy grand plus whatever else you’ve got going. Now drive me back to my car.”

We drove silently back over Coldwater to the Valley, a fortune wedged between us on the front seat. When we pulled up to the bank in North Hollywood, I said: “Stay loose, Hot Rod. I’m blowing town for a while. I’ll call you when I get back.”

He stuck out his hand, which surprised me, and we shook. “I still think you’re crazy,” he said.

I laughed. “Sometimes I wonder myself.”

I disengaged my hand, grabbed my suitcase and Ralston took off.

I left that night, leaving my loaner car in the lot at L.A.X. and catching the 8:00 P.S.A. flight to San Francisco. I insisted on taking my Mark Cross suitcase on the plane with me. The baggage people and the stewardess on board told me they understood. It was a work of art and too beautiful to be buffeted around in the plane’s luggage compartment. If only they knew.

The coffee the stewardess brought me was good and strong, but I felt vaguely uneasy. I was unarmed for the first time in years. I had had to check my gun into a locker in the terminal, since pre-flight metal detectors would have given its presence away. But the uneasiness left as I sipped the coffee and enjoyed the lights of Los Angeles from my window seat.

When the plane landed at San Francisco International some ninety minutes later, I was on pins and needles of anticipation. It never failed: the San Francisco Rush. Just approaching my favorite adopted city was cutting through all the trauma arid fatigue of the past month. Frisco! Only this time the Frisco of my new life: sober, rich, and possessed of a mission.

Getting into a cab outside the airport felt like four martinis kicking in while listening to Beethoven’s Fifth, only this time it was Brown’s Fifth. The Fifth “B” — Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Brown — all Germanic, all possessed of a mission, theirs musical, mine the destruction of evil. Suddenly I wanted a woman, and voiced this almost immediately to the cabbie. A last fling before a life of blissful fidelity. He understood. I even described what I wanted. Three hundred and fifty scoots for an all-nighter, I volunteered, plus a C-note for the person who set it up.

The cabbie, who was old and probably Greek or Italian, turned around to face me in the back seat, practically salivating. Where are you staying? he asked. I told him the Mark Hopkins. I told him to send the girl to Mr. Bruckner’s suite. He knew just the one. She would be knocking on my door within the hour. The cabbie almost fainted when I handed him a crisp C-note upon leaving.

I booked a suite for one week, at ninety-seven dollars a night, paying cash, of course. A bellboy appeared out of nowhere to grab my suitcase. I kept a close eye on him as we took the elevator up to my suite on the eleventh floor, a spacious, old-fashioned, two-room job with expensive pseudo-antique furniture and large French windows opening on an incredible view of Nob Hill.

I whipped a fifty on the bellboy and he almost fainted. I told him to let the bummer roll and buy himself a bag of good shit, that for the next few days I could afford to be generous. I also told him to send up champagne for one and a pot of coffee. After thanking me effusively, he ran out the door, still scrutinizing the bill to see if it was real.

The hooker was a disappointment. Not tall, not particularly large breasted, with rather muscular legs and sort of a cheap face. We talked for the better part of a half hour as I savored the prelude to sex. With me, part of the thrill with prostitutes is the certainty of fucking, followed by the anticipation, followed by the ultimate thrill: watching them undress. So when Danielle (obviously a business alias) did a slow, seductive strip, I was more than ready. But it was a quick, violent, disappointing coupling, tinged with guilt and a rambling mind: I thought of Jane and Cathcart throughout. When I finished, I paid her and told her to take off. She was thrilled with a three-hundred-dollar quickie and kissed me and skipped out the door.

After she left I couldn’t sleep, so I buzzed Walter in L.A. He answered on the first ring, dead drunk. I could hear the blasting away of a T.V. crime program through his slurred voice. I tried for twenty minutes to engage him in conversation, but it was no use, he wanted to talk about Jimmy Carter and the anti-matter credit card. Finally I despaired, told him I loved him, and gently hung up.

Next I called Mark Swirkal’s exchange and gave the password, then laid down on the bed and passed out.

During my sleep that night, a strange dream sequence began. It was Fat Dog and me, in a complete reversal of roles: Fat Dog, wearing a blue uniform and a gun stopping jaywalkers on Hollywood Boulevard, and me carrying golf bags that seemed to tear at my muscles through my sleep. Just before I awoke, a poem, or fragment of one, ripped through my dream:

My dream world went up in an inferno of fire and screaming: a 1957 Chevy had just exploded on the freeway. The tall spire of the Los Angeles City Hall collapsed in a heap of rubble and severed limbs flew toward me. I woke up drenched in sweat, straining to remember the words of the poem. I found a pen and some hotel stationery in the nightstand. Gradually the words came back and I wrote them down. Obviously, they were a resurgence of some long-buried, long-forgotten poem discovered during my high school poetry reading days. But who was the author? A memory as fine as mine should be able to recall that, too.