James Ellroy - Silent Terror

I leaned against a grease-spattered wall and pretended to sip my beer. Shroud Shifter teletyped BE SMART BE SMART BE SMART across Steve’s face, and I said, “I was Four-F. An old football injury.”

Steve belched. “You didn’t miss much. You play End?”

“What?”

“What do you mean, what? You’re tall, you masta at least tried out for End.”

“Third-string quarterback,” I said self-effacingly.

Steve smiled at my calculated commiseration. “Third string, the story of my life. I wonder what Jill’s doing. She usually loves to bullshit with visitors.”

“Did somebody mention my name?”

I turned my head in the direction of the words. Jill was standing in the kitchen doorway wearing a robe, with a towel wrapped around her head like a turban. She said, “Remember those old Clairol ads? ‘If I’ve got only one life, let me live it as a blonde’? Well, watch.”

With a flourish she pulled off the towel and shock her head. Her lovely black hair was now peroxide yellow, and Shroud Shifter flashed DON’T LET HER DON’T LET HER DON’T LET HER DON T LET—

I unclipped my self-sharpening, Teflon-coated, brushed-steel ax and swung it at her neck. Her head was sheared cleanly off; blood burst from the cavity; her arms and legs twitched spastically; then her whole body crumpled to the floor. The force of my swing spun me around, and for one second my vision eclipsed the entire scene — blood-spattered walls; the body shooting an arterial geyser out the neck, the heart still pumping in reflex; Steve, frozen on his feet, turning a catatonic blue.

I reversed my stance, flipped the handle so that I had the blade side out, and roundhoused my return shot left-handed. The blow caught Steve in the side of the head, and there was a sound like cracking eggs amplified ten million times. The blade stuck, and for long seconds I was holding the already dead man up on his feet. Then I yanked, and the body pitched forward while my ax flew in the opposite direction, brains and blood lubricating its flight.

Then Steve fell and began making gurgling sounds;

Then his limbs did their death dance;

Then a jet of blood burst from his skull into my eyes.

Then I came, and all the colors I had seen on the job combined, and hurled me to the floor to form a triad.

I awakened hours later. A telephone was ringing, and I could taste linoleum and blood. Opening my eyes, I saw a section of floor and two beer cans lying on their sides. I began to sense what had happened and held back sobs, then sent brain messages to my arms and legs to see if I had been given amputation as punishment for my crimes. My fingers scratched a cold surface and my legs jerked, and I felt grateful. The phone stopped ringing, and I wondered whom to be grateful for. Then the piece of floor and the beer cans were gone, replaced by red print on blank paper: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

On blank brain film, I typed YES YES YES YES YES. TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

Shroud Shifter said, Open your eyes. I obeyed, and he and Lucretia were there nude. I was memorizing their bodies when S.S. rebuked me in the harshest voice he had ever used: We are fantasy parents you have utilized since childhood. We give you what you need so that you may do what you have to do. You have experienced what some people would call a psychotic episode. In point of fact, sooner or later, premeditatedly, you would have done what you did.

Pausing, Shroud Shifter allowed me a moment to respond. I typed why?

He said, you are a murderer, Martin.

It was the first time he had ever addressed me by name.

I begged him to say it again, so that I would know what to do. He consented.

You are a murderer, Martin.

You are a murderer, Martin.

You are a murderer, Martin.

With my destiny ringing in my ears and my self-admitted fantasy father leading me step by step, I earned the title. First I thoroughly wiped every surface I might have touched, then I negated the forensic evidence of my ax blows by desecrating the two corpses at the places where I cut them down, using a kitchen knife and meat mallet to subterfuge blade marks and impact points. The work was messy, but I willed my brain to consider it tedious. When I was finished, I washed my hands, took off my bloodsoaked khakis, put on a jump suit from Steve’s closet and wrapped up my clothes and boots in seven layers of trash-bag plastic. With my bare feet free of foreign matter, I picked up my ax and webbed belt and checked my watch. It was 3:16 A.M. Turning off the lights, I left the apartment. There was no one on the street. I walked home and fell asleep seeing colors.

From the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, September 4, 1974:

The hideously butchered bodies of a young man and woman were discovered last night at the man’s apartment. Police were called to the scene when neighbors reported “strange odors” coming from a downstairs unit at 911 26th St.

“I knew there was something dead in there,” Thomas Frischer of 914 26th St. said to paramedics. “This heat we’ve been having made the stink stand out real good.” Breaking down the door, the officers found the bodies of the apartment’s tenant, Steven Sifakis, 31, a mechanic at the Pan-American Airways terminal at San Francisco International Airport, and his girl friend, Jill Eversall, 29, an employment counselor at the “Mighty-Man” employment agency. In a statement made exclusively to Examiner reporters, S.F.P.D. Sergeant W. D. Sternthall, senior officer of the unit that responded to the “unknown trouble” call, said, “I knew there were dead people in there, so I held a handkerchief over my nose coming in. When I saw the bodies, the first thing I thought about was the Sharon Tate killings from four or five years ago. The scene was unbelievable. The kitchen was covered with dried blood, and there was a dead man on the floor with his skull crushed in. That wasn’t the worst. There was a dead woman in the kitchen doorway. She’d been decapitated, and her head was lying on the living-room carpet. I saw the murder weapon — a kitchen knife — on the kitchen floor near the man’s body, and sent my partner back to our prowler to radio for detectives and the medical examiner.”

Soon the quiet Richmond District was ablaze with the flashing lights of police vehicles. Eight teams of patrolmen began house-to-house canvassing, and Deputy Coroner Willard Willarsohn examined the bodies and attributed the cause of death to “massive trauma caused by repeated knife thrusts and loss of blood,” adding that the couple had been dead for “at least 48 hours, maybe up to 52.” While comprehensive questioning of neighbors was being conducted, friends, relatives and the employers of the deceased were contacted. When expressions of shock, outrage and grief were set aside, the investigating officers knew this:

One — Sifakis and Miss Eversall were longtime lovers, and were last seen together dining at the Molinari Delicatessen in North Beach on Monday night, September 2, at 7:30, fifty-one hours before their bodies were discovered; and, two — both victims were known for frequent unexplained work absences. Thus, no one at their places of employment thought to report them missing. An anonymous acquaintance of the couple told our reporters: “Stevie and Jill were party people. They liked to get high and boogie, and they were careless about the company they kept. They picked up hitchhikers, and, well, Jill liked to swing. Stevie liked to drink with the bikers over in Oakland, and I think this is going to be tough to solve because they both knew so many transient-type people.”

Meanwhile, with no clues, police are broadening their efforts, and an S.F.P.D. spokesman has announced: “This is a major crime, and it will get major attention. We are appealing to the citizens of San Francisco for information to aid us in our investigation, and we will not cease in our efforts until the killer or killers is caught.”