Джеймс Эллрой - Clandestine

Brubaker came back out the door five minutes later, dressed in slacks and a sport shirt. He jaywalked directly across the street to the post office while my body started to go alternately hot and cold all over.

I figured on another five minutes. I was wrong: three minutes later Brubaker was running back across the street, my carton in his arms, his face the picture of absolute panic. He didn’t run for his front door — he bypassed it and ran for the parking lot adjacent to his building. I was right behind him, and as he plopped the carton down on the trunk of a Pontiac roadster and groped in his pocket for the keys, I came up behind him and jammed my gun into his spine.

“No, Larry,” I said as he cut loose with a sound that was half wail and half shriek, “not now. You understand?” I cocked the hammer and dug the barrel into the fleshy part of his back. Brubaker nodded his head very slightly.

“Good,” I said. “Eddie is in hell, but I’m not, and if you play your cards right you won’t be either. Do you dig me, Larry?” Brubaker nodded again. “Good. Do you know who I am?”

Brubaker twisted slightly to see my face. When recognition flashed into his pale blue eyes he whimpered, then covered his mouth with his hands and bit at his knuckles.

I motioned him toward the back door of his cocktail lounge. “Pick up the box, Larry. We have some reading and talking to do.”

Brubaker complied, and in a few moments we were seated in his modest living quarters at the rear of the bar. Brubaker was quivering, but holding onto his dignity, much as he had on the day Smith and I had questioned him. I pointed with my gun barrel to the carton that lay between us.

“Open it up and read the first ten pages or so,” I said.

Brubaker hesitated, then tore into it, obviously anxious to get it over with. I watched as he hurriedly read through the sheets I had annotated, setting each one aside with trembling hands as he continued reading. After ten minutes or so he had gotten the picture and started to laugh hysterically, but with what seemed like an underlying sense of irony.

“Baby, baby, baby, baby,” he said. “Baby, baby, baby.”

“You ever kill anyone, Larry?” I asked.

“No,” Brubaker said.

“Do you have any idea how many people Doc Harris has killed?”

“Lots and lots,” Brubaker said.

“You’re a sarcastic bastard. You feel like surviving this thing, or going down with Doc?”

“I went down on Doc in 1944, baby. So did Eddie, so did Johnny DeVries. Just to seal our pact, you understand. I didn’t mind: Doc was a gorgeous hunk. Eddie didn’t mind, he was a switch-hitter. But it ate Johnny up, no pun intended. He liked it, and he hated himself for it till the day he died.”

“Who killed him?”

“Doc. Doc loved him, too. But Johnny was talking too much. He never turned his share of the stuff over. He was giving it away to all the hopheads on Milwaukee skid. Then he started talking about kicking. We were friends. He called me and told me he wanted me to hold his stuff until he got out of the hospital. He wanted to kick, but he didn’t want to lose the money he could get by pushing the stuff, you dig?”

“I dig. So you were afraid that if he got clean he’d blab and implicate you, and you told Doc.”

“That’s right, I told Big Daddy, and Big Daddy took care of it.”

Brubaker managed to keep his pride, though he was clearly accepting of his subservience and self-hatred. I honestly didn’t know if he wanted to go on living or die with his past. All I could do was go on asking my questions and hope that his detachment held.

“What happened to the rest of the dope, Larry?”

“Doc and I are turning it over, a little at a time. Have been, for years.”

“He’s blackmailing you?”

“He’s got pictures of me and a city councilman in what you might call a compromising position,” Brubaker laughed. “I fixed the councilman up with Eddie. Eddie was a status fiend, the guy was in love with status and horses, and that councilman had both. Doc took some pictures of them, too, but the councilman never knew it. Eddie did, though — that’s how Doc got him to take the fall for Maggie.”

I started to tremble. “Doc killed Maggie?”

“Yes, baby, he did. You got the wrong man when you popped Eddie. But you paid, baby. It’s funny, baby, you don’t look like a Commie.” Brubaker laughed, this time directly at me.

“Why?” I asked. “Why did he do it?”

“Why? Well, Maggie was living here in L.A., unknown to all us sailor-boys. Her mother wrote to her about Johnny being sliced in Milwaukee. She ran into Eddie, accidentally someplace, and started shooting off her mouth. Eddie told Doc, and Doc told him to sweet-talk her and fuck her and keep an eye on her. Then Doc started getting nervous. He borrowed Eddie’s car one night and went to Maggie’s apartment and choked her. It was a setup — Doc knew he could always trust me, but he wasn’t sure about Eddie. He knew Eddie was insane about anyone knowing he was gay; that he’d rather die than have his family find out, so he showed Eddie the pictures of him and the councilman and that sealed it. Either the cops would never find out who choked Maggie, which would be hunky-dory, or Eddie would buy the ticket. Which he did, baby, and you were the ticket taker.” I was jolted back to that night in ’51 when I had first tailed Engels — he had had a violent confrontation with an older man in a homosexual bar in West Hollywood. My faulty memory sprang back to life — that man had been Doc Harris. Feeling self-revulsion start to creep in like a cancer, I changed the subject. “Did Marcella Harris know Maggie? Know that Doc was going to kill her?”

“I think she knew. I think she guessed. She had always liked Maggie — and she knew that Maggie was really Michael’s mother. Doc told Marcella to stay away from Maggie. Doc and Marcella were divorced, but still friendly. Marcella took off on a trip somewhere; she left Michael with some boyfriends of hers. See, baby, she always knew Doc was a little cold. When she found out Maggie was dead, she knew how cold, but it wasn’t until later that year that she found out Doc was the night train to Cold City.”

“What are you talking about? Didn’t she know Doc killed Johnny?”

Brubaker shook his head and gave me an ironic hipster’s smile. “Negative, baby. If she’d known, she would have killed him or herself. That woman loved that crazy brother of hers, and did she have a will! I was Doc’s alibi, baby. He was with me on a three-day poker-drunk when he was really in Milwaukee slicing Big John.”

I shuddered because I already had an idea about the answer to my next question. “Then what did Marcella find out later that year?”

“Well, baby, to give old iceberg Doc his due, he does love his ‘moral heir,’ as he calls him. When Marcella went gallivanting all over hell in ’51 and left Michael with her partying pals, Doc was frantic, not knowing where his boy was. When he and Michael got together, and Michael told him he was with some nice fellas in Hollywood, Doc got real upset. He went up there with a butcher knife and did some cutting. He got three of them. It was in all the papers, but you probably didn’t read about it — you was recently on the headlines yourself and probably hiding out. What’s the matter, baby? You’re a little bit pale.”

Brubaker went to the sink and drew me a glass of water. He handed it to me and I sipped, then realized what I was doing and hurled it at the wall.

“Easy, baby,” Brubaker said. “You’re learning things you don’t want to?”

I almost choked on the words, but I got them out, in part: “Why did Doc...”

“Kill Marcella? For the boy, baby. He knew Marcella knew of all the shit that had hit the fan; maybe she even suspected he killed Johnny. But if she ever went to the cops she knew she’d never see her little boy. That ate at her. She started hitting the juice and popping pills harder than ever. She started sleeping around harder than ever. Doc had this sleazy private detective checking her out. He told Doc that Marcella had more rubber burned in her than the Pomona Freeway. That private eye disappeared shortly thereafter, baby. So did Marcella.”