Джеймс Эллрой - Clandestine

“If the girls were referred to me by a lover or a pimp then, of course, they had to be allowed to live. If they were bright and charming then I performed the job with all my considerable skill and acumen. If the girls were ugly or whining or slatternly or proud of their promiscuity, then the world was of course better off without them and their offspring. Such creatures I would smother with chloroform and abort after their death — perfecting my craft to save the lives of the unfortunate young women who deserved to live. I would then drive out into the country with dead mother and unborn child and bury them, late at night, in some kind of fertile ground. I would feel very close to these young women and secure in my knowledge that they had died so that others could live.”

Doc Harris went on to describe his abortion techniques, but I couldn’t go on. I began to weep uncontrollably and cry for Lorna. Someone rapped at my door, and I grabbed the pillow off the bed, smothered my cries and fell onto the floor thrashing and kicking convulsively. I must have fallen asleep that way, because when I awoke it was dark. The only light in the room came from a desk lamp. It took me a few seconds to recall where I was and what had happened. A scream rose up in my throat and I stifled it by holding my breath until I almost passed out.

I knew I would have to read the rest of the journal. Gradually I got to my feet and steeled myself for the task. Fearful and angry tears covered the remaining pages as I read the horrifying accounts of life and death and blood and pus and excrement, and life and death and death and death and death.

Johnny DeVries had finally become as sickened as I was, and had run to Milwaukee’s skid row with a private supply of morphine. His prose style by this time had degenerated into incoherent rambling interspersed with chemical formulas and symbols I was incapable of understanding. Fear of Doc — “The slicer! The slicer! No one is safe from the slicer!” — covered the last pages.

Shaken, I locked my room and went for a walk. I needed to be with people who bore a semblance of health. I found a noisy cock tail bar and entered. The room was bathed in an amber light that softened the patrons’ faces — to the good, I thought.

I ordered a double bourbon, then another — and another; a very heavy load for a nondrinker. I ordered yet another double and discovered I was weeping, and that the people at the bar were looking at me in embarrassed silence. I finished my drink and decided I didn’t care. I signaled the bartender for a refill and he shook his head and looked the other way. I threaded my way through a maze of dancing couples toward a pay phone at the back of the room. I gave the operator Lorna’s number in Los Angeles, then started feeding the machine dimes and quarters until the operator cut in and told me I had deposited three times the necessary amount.

When Lorna came on the line I just stammered drunkenly until she said, “Freddy, goddamnit, is that you?”

“Lor-Lorna. Lorna!”

“Are you crying, Freddy? Are you drunk? Where the hell are you?”

I brought myself under control enough to talk: “I’m in Wisconsin, Lor. I know a lot of things I have to tell you about. There’s this great big little boy that might get hurt like Maggie Cadwallader... Lorna, please, Lor, I need to see you...”

“I didn’t know you got drunk, Freddy. It’s not like you. And I’ve never heard you cry.” Lorna’s voice was very soft, and amazed.

“I don’t, goddamnit. You don’t understand, Lor.”

“Yes, I do. I always have. Are you coming back to L.A.?”

“Yes.”

“Then call me then. Don’t tell me anything about great big little boys or the past. Just go to sleep. All right?”

“All right.”

“Good night, Freddy.”

“Good night.” I hung up before Lorna could hear me start to weep again.

Somehow I slept that night. In the morning I put Johnny’s history of terror into the trunk of my car and drove to Chicago.

I stopped at a hardware store in the Loop and bought a reinforced cardboard packing crate, then spent an hour in the parking lot sifting through and annotating the memoirs. From a pay phone I called L.A. Information, and learned that Lawrence Brubaker’s residence address and the address of Larry’s Little Log Cabin were the same. This gave me pause, especially when I recalled that there was a post office directly across the street from the bar when Dudley Smith and I had braced him in ’51.

Before transferring the mass of paper from the musty carton to the new one I checked my work: all references to Brubaker and the drug robbery were underlined. I dug some fresh sheets of stationery out of the glove compartment and wrote a cover letter:

Dear Larry —

It is time to pay your dues. You belong to me now, not Doc Harris. I will be in touch.

Officer Frederick U. Underhill

1647

Next I drove to a post office, where I borrowed masking tape and sealed up the carton tight as a drum. I addressed it to:

Lawrence Brubaker

Larry’s Little Log Cabin Bar

58 Windward Avenue

Venice, California

For a return address I wrote:

Edward Engels

U.S.S. Appomattox

1 Fire Street, Hades

A nice touch. A just touch, one that would appeal to Lorna and other lovers of justice.

I explained several times what I wanted to the patient postal clerk: insured delivery, to the post office across the street, where the recipient would be required to produce identification and sign a receipt before getting his hands on the package. And I wanted the carton to arrive in three days’ time; no sooner. The clerk understood; he was used to eccentrics.

I left the post office feeling light as air and solid as granite. I drove to O’Hare Field and left off the rented car, then caught an afternoon flight home to Los Angeles and my destiny.

Three days later at seven in the morning I was stationed on Windward Avenue in front of a liquor store that afforded me a view of both the Venice Post Office and Larry’s Little Log Cabin.

I waited nervously for the post office to open its doors at seven-thirty, fully aware that my plan would work to psychological perfection only if the postal messenger roused Brubaker early enough so that he was alone at his bar. His joint was no longer open the maximum hours — the current hours posted on the door were a more demure 10:00 A.M. to midnight. It could work only to my benefit — I would come down on Brubaker under any conditions, but I wanted him and his Little Log Cabin to myself if possible. So I lounged in front of the liquor store, knowing I might be in for a long day.

I thought mostly of Lorna. I hadn’t phoned her when I returned to Los Angeles. I wanted to recapture a parity I thought I had lost on the night I called her, sobbing. The two days I had spent at my apartment trying not to think about her had been days of complete defeat; I thought of little else, and pictured every possible resolution between us in the light of what I knew had to happen before we could be together again. I had to will myself, there on seedy “Wineward” Avenue, wearing a seedy windbreaker to cover my gun, not to think about what I wanted most, and not to think about dead women, dead unborn children and my own past that wouldn’t die.

My trying not to think was interrupted at eight-twenty, when a postal clerk in uniform trotted across the street toward Larry’s Little Log Cabin. I watched as the man consulted a slip of paper in his hand and knocked loudly on the front door. A moment later the door opened and a pale-skinned Negro in a silk robe was standing there, blinking against the brightness of the day. Brubaker and the postman talked, and from half a block away I could tell that old Larry’s curiosity was whetted.