Джеймс Эллрой - Clandestine

I cleared my throat. “Sir, I do believe I acted rashly, and I apologize to you — and to the department — for that. But I think my motives were sound. I wanted justice.”

Jurgensen snorted and shook his head. “No, Underhill, you didn’t. I would accept that from many young officers, but not from you. Beyond self-aggrandizement, I’m not sure that even you know what you want, but it certainly isn’t justice. You laugh at the penal code of this state, and tell me you want justice? Don’t insult my intelligence.”

Jurgensen’s anger was winding down. I tried to deflect his attack. “Sir, with all due respect, what do you think of my case?”

“Your ‘case’? I think that as of this moment you have nothing but a strong suspect and an incredible gift of intuition. This man Engels is so far nothing but a gambler and a womanizer, neither of which is criminal behavior. He’s also probably a homo, which doesn’t make him a murderer. You have no hard evidence. I don’t think much of your ‘case.’”

“And my intuition, Captain?”

“I trust your intuition, Underhill, or I would have suspended you from duty half an hour ago.”

“And, sir?”

“And... what do you want, Underhill?”

“I want to be part of the investigation, and I want to go to the Detective Bureau when I pass the sergeant’s exam later this year.”

Jurgensen laughed bitterly. He reached into his desk, pulled out a scratch pad, and wrote something on it, ripping the page free and handing it to me. “This is my home address, in Glendale. Be there tonight at eight-thirty. I want you to tell your story to Dudley Smith. He’ll decide the course of this investigation. Now leave me alone.”

When he said the words “Dudley Smith,” Jurgensen’s cold blue eyes had bored into me like poison darts, waiting for me to show fear or apprehension. I didn’t.

“Yes, sir,” I said, then got up and walked out the door without saluting.

Dudley Smith was a lieutenant in the homicide bureau, a fearsome personage and legendary cop who had killed five men in the line of duty. Irish-born and Los Angeles-raised, he still clung tenaciously to his high-pitched, musical brogue, which was as finely tuned as a Stradivarius. He often lectured at the academy on interrogation techniques, and I remembered how that brogue could be alternately soothing or brutal, inquisitive or dumbfounded, sympathetic or filled with pious rage.

He was over six feet tall and broad as a ceiling beam. He was an immense brownness — brown hair cut close, small brown eyes, and always dressed in a baggy brown vested suit. There was a frightening set to his face, regardless of the interrogation technique he was explaining. He was a master actor with a huge ego who was adept at changing roles at the drop of a hat, yet who always managed to impart purity of personality to the part he was currently playing.

I was at the academy when the Black Dahlia investigation was going on. Smith was in charge of rounding up all known sex criminals in Los Angeles. After finishing his lecture, applause-loving actor that he was, he told us about the kind of “human scum” with which he was dealing. He told us that he had heard things and seen things and done things in his search for the killer “of that tragic, thrill-seeking colleen, Elizabeth Short” that he hoped we, the “cream of Los Angeles manhood,” about to enter “the grandest calling on God’s earth” would never have to hear or see or do. It was brilliantly elliptical. Speculation on the sternness of Smith’s measures was the number one topic of conversation at the academy for weeks. I asked one of my instructors, Sergeant Clark, about him.

“He’s a brutal son of a bitch who gets the job done,” he said.

Elizabeth Short’s killer was never found — which meant that Dudley Smith was human, and fallible. I pumped myself up with logic as I drove out Los Feliz to Glendale that evening. I went over my story from all possible angles, knowing I could not betray any personal knowledge of Maggie Cadwallader. I was prepared for a master performance myself, prepared to kiss the big Irishman’s ass, to butt heads with him, to run profane, run subservient, run any way but stupid with him in my effort to be part of the investigation that brought down Eddie Engels.

Captain Jurgensen lived in a small wood-framed house on a treeless side street off of Brand Avenue near downtown Glendale. As I walked up the steps a dog started barking and I heard Jurgensen shush him: “Friend, Colonel, friend. Now, hush.” The dog whimpered and trotted over to greet me, going straight for my crotch.

Jurgensen was sitting inside the screened porch on a lawn chair. “Hello, Underhill,” he said, “sit down.” He pointed to the wicker armchair next to him. I sat down.

“About this afternoon, Captain—” I started to say.

Jurgensen shushed me as he had the dog. “Forget it, Fred. Enough said. As of now you are temporarily attached to the detective bureau. Lieutenant Smith will tell you about it. He’ll be here in a few minutes. Would you like iced tea? Or a beer?”

“Beer would be fine, sir.”

The captain brought it, in a coffee cup, just as I saw an old prewar Dodge pull up to the curb. I watched as Dudley Smith carefully locked the car, hitched up his trousers and walked across the front lawn toward us.

“Don’t be scared, Fred,” Jurgensen said, “he’s only human.”

I laughed and sipped my beer as Dudley Smith knocked loudly on the flimsy wooden frame of the porch. “Knock, knock,” he said broadly in his musical, high-pitched brogue. “Who’s there? Dudley Smith, so crooks beware.” He laughed at his own poetry, then walked in and stuck out a huge hand to Captain Jurgensen. “Hello, John. How are you?”

“Dudley,” the captain said.

Smith nodded in my direction. “And this is our brilliant young colleague, Officer Frederick Underhill?”

I got up to shake the big cop’s hand, noting with satisfaction that I was two inches taller than he. “Hello, Lieutenant,” I said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure is entirely mine, lad. Why don’t we all sit down? We have grave matters to discuss, and we should relax our bodies while we tax our brains.”

Smith folded himself into the only padded chair on the porch. He stretched out his long legs and smiled charmingly at Jurgensen. “Beer, please, John, in a bottle, and please take your time getting it.”

The ranking officer walked dutifully away while the big Irishman stared at me with beady brown eyes, hugely offset by his blunt red face. After a moment, he spoke.

“Officer Frederick U. Underhill, twenty-seven years old, college graduate, not a veteran. Exceedingly high marks at the academy, excellent fitness reports at Wilshire and Seventy-seventh Street. Killed two men in the line of duty. I am suitably impressed, and I don’t give a damn what vigilante actions you have taken lately. John is an excitable, traditional cop. I am not. I applaud you for your actions and congratulate you on your intelligence in taking your investigation to a superior officer. Enough horseshit. Talk to me of dead women and killers. Take your time, I’m a good listener.”

The little brown eyes had never left my own, and they remained on target while Dudley Smith fished in his trouser pockets for cigarettes and matches, then lit up and blew smoke at me.

I cleared my throat. “Thank you, sir. In February, I was working Wilshire Patrol. My partner and I were summoned by a distraught woman to a murder scene. The victim was a young woman named Leona Jensen. She had been strangled and stabbed to death in her apartment; the place had been ransacked. I called the dicks. They came and said it looked as if the woman had interrupted a burglar. I noticed a book of matches from the Silver Star bar on a table, but didn’t think anything about it.