James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Caution.

Ultra-caution.

Preparedness.

Those three watchwords combined to italicize, bracket and underline methodology. Within that word, conjugations of the first three combined to form rules:

Wipe all van surfaces victims might have touched.

Kill with the magnum only as a last resort, and try to retrieve the spent rounds.

Bury all victims as deep as the ten-minute stopwatch will allow.

Sex-kill only when the nightmares and fantasies start to hurt, and tear up the snapshots within four hours, after memorizing and mentally cataloguing the most minute details.

During ’74-’78, I was only to sex-kill/strip/position/photograph a total of four times. The first time, after leaving San Francisco, I acted out of a need to rectify the disarray of Eversall/Sifakis; the following instances were fueled by nightmares and impacted sexual longing. Still, I knew instinctively that what I was looking for was beyond relief and orgasm, and I had enough presence of mind to carefully choose my victims — their selection based on an instinct as to what their bodies would look like together.

The Keneallys nude in the Colorado snow killed my nightmares and made me come, but did not ease my curiosity, so eight days later I placed Gustavo Torres beside them, and felt an ancient third party knock at the door of my memory. Dimly afraid of what the knocker might say, I retreated until the nightmares got terrible and my groin felt like it was holding back bomb bursts; then I found the Kaltenborns hiking near Glenwood Springs and spent hours arranging them and snapping pictures, myself nude as the third party. Again there was instant release and weeks of comfort, but no penetration of the memory.

Sensing that the memory originated in my childhood and corresponded to my old demon of blondness, I waited for two years, until I found a pair of potential lovers who were perfect beyond perfect — the Muldowney siblings of Joplin, Missouri — blond, blue-eyed and lovely. Promising hashish, I lured them out to a deserted stretch of hills, strangled them and stripped them and took pictures of them and touched them and touched myself and even risked my own safety by staying past dark with their bodies.

The effort did not enlighten me.

The effort did not enlighten me because, at base, I was killing for monetary caprice, biological gratification and to make the hurt go away. The nine months after the Muldowneys went by in a blur, and then even my memory exploration was rendered capricious, for a nightmare materialized in live human form, and I had to kill for survival.

January 4, 1979.

I was driving north on U.S. 5 in a snowstorm, my destination the all-year resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. My traveling stake was low, due to winterizing Deathmobile II with top-of-the-line snow tires, goose-down sleeping quilts and expensive insulation paneling, and my nearest bank cache was in central Colorado. Crossing from Illinois into Wisconsin, I looked at the big snowdrifts forming and knew they would be a long, deep freeze for whoever was unlucky enough to cross my path.

The decision made, I brainstormed with caution and preparedness. I thought of highway patrolmen prowling for stranded motorists to help, and of old Aspen killings and how difficult it was to strangle or bludgeon with legs mired in snow. Massive walls of bare spruce trees flanking both sides of the road caught my peripheral vision, and I imagined them as receptacles for bloody hollow points. The answer of shoot/rob/retrieve/bury came to me, and I pulled over and took my magnum from its undercarriage hiding place.

The snowfall got steadily worse, and toward noon I started wondering whether I should find lodging or park and wait the storm out. I was in the process of deciding when I saw a Cadillac erratically positioned on the left-hand side of the highway, nose out, the car in imminent danger of getting sideswiped.

I pulled over and tucked the .357 into the back of my pants, making sure my down jacket covered the butt. The highway was traffic-free, and I ran across it to the Cadillac.

There was no one inside, and I saw a faint trail of single snow-dusted footprints leading over to the right shoulder and northward. Stalking now, I returned to the Deathmobile and drove slowly ahead, one eye on the space cleared by my left wiper blade, the other on the roadside.

Half an hour later, I saw him, trudging in ankle-deep drifts. He turned around when he heard my motor, and something about the snow on his head made me reach for the Polaroid.

I tooted the horn and braked; the man waved frantically at his presumed rescuer. Setting the hand brake and hitting the blinkers, I squeezed out the passenger door to confront my victim.

He was middle-aged and portly, and his aura of affluence in distress undercut the lovely crown of snow he was wearing. Panting, he said, “My wife’s been after me to get a C.B., now I see why.” He pointed to my Polaroid. “Shutterbug, huh? I heard you guys would go anywhere for a picture, now I believe it.”

I pulled out my .357 and placed the silencered snout on the man’s nose. He said, “Hey, what the—” And I smiled and said, “All I want is your money.”

Shaking more from fear than from the cold, he said, “Money I got,” and I heard his teeth clicking. Motioning him toward the spruce trees some thirty feet away, I let him walk ahead; then, when he was ten feet from a solid bank of wood, I shot him twice in the back.

The silencer went pffft-thud; the fat man flew forward; splintering wood echoed. I set my stopwatch at eight minutes for ultra-caution, then counted to twenty slowly, to give my victim time to die. When I was sure he would not disturb me with reflex jerks or blood sprays, I grabbed him by the heels and dragged him over to the set of trees most likely to have caught the death rounds. Seeing the ends of the hollow points imbedded side by side in a young sapling, I pried them out with my fingers and put them in my jacket pocket, then hauled the man through an open tree space and over to a snowdrift already three feet deep. Covering my gloveless hands with my sleeves, I took his billfold from his inside jacket pocket, extracted a wad of hundreds, twenties and tens and a collection of credit cards. Stuffing them into my rear pants pockets, I stood back, deep-breathed and unhitched the Polaroid from my shoulder.

4:16 elapsed.

I inventoried my person, touching magnum, spent rounds, stolen cash and plastic. The footprints and blood were fait accomplis; fresh snow would cover them soon. Looking down at the dead man, I saw that his crown of snow gave him an air of the Romantic era, as if he were a fop in Beethoven’s time disguising his ugliness with a powdered wig. That thought jarred me, and I leaned over and snapped a close-up of the back of his head. The camera ejected blank paper, and when the snow-crown image came through, I put the picture in my front pocket, flipped the man over and snapped his eyes-bulging, mouth-bloodied death mask. My memory was blipped again, and with six minutes down I scooped snow over the corpse until it was a pristine white mound. Finishing the job, I studied the face shot on my way back to the Deathmobile.

With the .357 back in its safety compartment, I continued my journey, the photos on the dashboard where I could view them against the powdered-wig snow. I drove on slowly, hugging the right lane, imagining Mother Nature covering my tracks back at the death site. The storm was reaching blizzard proportions, and I knew Lake Geneva before nightfall was impossible — I would have to seek shelter soon. My wiper blades were barely able to dent the powder hitting the windshield; after turning into a long S-shaped bend, I had to get out and clear it by hand.