James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Polaroid prints were spread on the white chenille, three rows of four color snapshots laid out evenly sc that they covered the whole bed. I bent to look at them, and saw vivisection progressions: four nude teenage girls — all brunette and pretty — intact in the top photographs, gradually dismembered as the pictures worked toward the footrail.

The vents shook with another heat blast, and I flailed with my eyes for a sink. Seeing one next to a connecting side door, I ran to it and vomited my meal. I was splashing cold water on my face when I heard a click and saw Anderson walk through the door.

Grabbing a towel from the rack beside the sink, I wiped my face. Anderson leaned into the wall sideways, accomplishing the pose with the grace of a gifted male model. It struck me then that every small moment of the man’s life was infused with eloquence. “Don’t tell me you didn’t already know,” he said.

I held down an urge to rip the pose to pieces with my hands. “I knew. Why?”

Anderson smoothed his mustache and gave me a grin that made him look a guileless seventeen. “Why? Because I knew. There’s a two-lane that parallels the throughway south to the Illinois line, and back near Beloit it’s elevated. I saw you check out the Cadillac, and I saw you cruise for the driver, and sweetie, I knew you didn’t have good deeds on your mind. I gave you a lead, then I tracked you by radar. When you stopped, I waited five minutes, then idled up to about six hundred yards in back of you and parked. I had my binoculars on your van, and I saw you put the magnum back in its hidey-hole. That’s when I knew I really liked your style.”

Nineteen sixty-nine took over 1979, and I thought, “Lock, load and fire.” I centered in on Anderson’s neck, and I almost had up the guts to do it when he smiled and said, “Bad idea, Martin.” Knowing it was full lips and a crinkling mustache that stopped me — not the warning — I made a full-body eye circuit, and something external forced me to say, “Dye your hair blond.”

Anderson snorted and pointed to the bed. “Blonds are for sissies. Brunettes are my meat.”

I saw a gilt-framed picture of my father and a nude woman, both of them wearing powder-white wigs. Shocked that I could still recall the man’s features, and fearful of where the picture frame was taking me, I shut down the image by thinking of my snow-haired victim seventy miles south. Anderson’s perfect stylishness was fixed directly in front of me, forcing me to keep my eyes open and constraining my brain work, and I finally got up the courage to fire, roundhousing a right hand at his perfect nose.

He slipped the punch perfectly, grabbing my wrist, twisting it behind my hack and holding me still with a firm arm around the chest. Enveloped by perfect strongness, a perfect voice eased my fear: “Whoa, sweetie, whoa. You’re bigger and stronger than me, but I’m trained. I don’t blame you for being mad, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. Here, I’ll prove it.”

Anderson’s grip loosened, and he turned me around so that I was facing him. The absence of pressure left me feeling hollow, and I concentrated on the trooper’s regrouping movements to cut the edge off the vacuum. His hands went to his front and back pockets and came out with wads of cash, and he said, “See? Your money. When I searched your van I saw that the glove compartment had been pried open. There was no money in your hidey-holes, and I knew a bright boy like you wouldn’t travel without a nice roll, so I figured one of Wisconsin State’s finest ripped you off. Since I know my fellow officers, I knew exactly who to look for. I let him off with a reprimand — more than you’re getting, and for a whole lot fucking less.”

I took the money and stuffed it into my pockets. “Why?”

Anderson smiled. “Because I like your style.”

“Then what do you want?”

“The Python and the suppressor, you know, mementos. Some conversation, the answers to a few questions.”

“Such as?”

“Such as ‘How many people have you killed?’ ”

I looked around the room, knowing there had to be a catch, that, the cracked vase on the dresser had to be a listening device, or the curtain-covered window a sighting point for snipers with x-ray scopes on their rifles — hick-town killers who would fire on me at my first admission of murder. After a moment I knew I was thinking Shroud Shifter childishly, and I turned my gaze back to Anderson, roaming the tight contours of his uniform for concealed recorders. The trooper laughed at this, and said, “I get the distinct impression that you’re looking for more than a body wire, but anyway, let me cool out your paranoia, okay? For starters, I’ll state that I am Sergeant Ross Anderson of the Wisconsin State Police, and also the killer referred to n the Milwaukee papers as the ‘Wisconsin Whipsaw.’ There. That make you feel better?”

It did, for despite his stylishness and aura of danger, I knew that he was not in my league in what mattered most to both of us. Getting a bold sense of having achieved parity with perfection, I said, “About forty. You?”

Anderson’s jaw dropped; I had eclipsed his perfection. “Jesus Christ. Five. You want to tell me about it?”

I remembered his words when I pleaded for my magnum. “No. Don’t ask me again.”

“Touché. Why?”

“Because they’re mine.”

Ross Anderson stretched and said, “Then I guess we’ve reached an impasse.” He moved to the bed and scooped up his death photos, and when he walked to the connecting door I was blocking his path. “Tell me about yours.”

Smiling, Anderson slipped the pictures into his shirt pockets, buttoning the flaps over them. Raising his eyebrows in a parody of a come-hither look, he moved back to the bed and sat on the edge of it. I looked around the room and saw that there were no chairs. Knowing that Ross had designed it that way, I played along and sat down beside him. With our eyes averted from each ether but our knees touching, he said, “No pun intended, but I’ve been dying to tell someone, someone special and safe, so I guess unilateral is better than nothing.

“When I was in my late teens I had a buddy, and we used to go pheasant hunting over near Prairie Du Chien. He was a doper and kind of a sleaze, but he let me call the shots, and he was up for just about anything. We spent a lot of time talking about the Nazis and the concentration camps, and he had a collection of daggers and arm bands. He actually took all that stuff seriously — the master race and the Jews and the commies, the whole shot. I was fascinated by it — but he believed in it.

“We were up near P.D. one day, right after Thanksgiving in ’70. Gunning for ringnecks with twelve-gauges, double-aught buck, which if you know wing shooting, is much too big a load for birds. You see, we weren’t sportsmen or game-cuisine lovers — we just liked to shoot things.

“It was about zero, and there were no other hunters around. We didn’t have a dog to flush the birds, and essentially we were just looking for something to do. We were carrying pumps instead of double-barreleds, so we were glad there was no one around — we were kids, and any real sportsmen would have been able to tell by our weapons that we weren’t serious hunters.

“About dusk we start heading back to the car, and this old fart materializes out of nowhere. Big old red-faced guy with a thousand-dollar Browning over and under, and about another grand in L.L. Bean threads on his back. He starts giving us shit about our guns, and didn’t we respect hunting traditions and where were our hunting licenses — and then — zap! I look at my buddy, we have this moment of telepathy and blow the old fart to kingdom come, blam blam blam blam blam — five rounds apiece — we vaporize the cocksucker.”