James Ellroy - Silent Terror

What if the dead man and his car are discovered in Wisconsin?

What if the troopers remember that you were detained at the same time that he disappeared?

What if the two facts are connected?

What if the spent shells that you discarded by the roadblock are found?

What if the Playboy Club management files on you for Defrauding an Innkeeper, and that fact gets connected to the others, resulting in a fugitive warrant?

Those questions gave me the courage to act independently of Ross the faceless counselor, and surprisingly, the beauty that I thought would descend on me didn’t.

But on my own, I failed.

I spent a week in Chicago, prowling lowlife dives, trying to buy a set of fake ID. No one would sell to me, and after a half-dozen attempts I knew my old criminal touch was fear-riddled — that I came across as a snitch and a fool. I drove out of the Windy City chased by Ross’s derisive laughter and “I told you so’s.”

I was skirting Lake Michigan when I snapped to a compromise plan: settle down for a month or so, alter the appearance of the Deathmobile, re-register it and get Illinois plates to replace my old Colorado ones. I searched out flaws to the plan, saw a huge major risk, and decided to go through with it anyway. The boldness of the measure seemed to please Ross; he said, “Do your own thing” and went faceless as I set to work.

First I pulled into Evanston, found a furnished room and paid two months’ rent in advance; then I drove to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office, boldly displayed my Colorado license and registration and told them I wanted Illinois license plates for my van. After filling out forms, the clerk did exactly what I knew he would — he went straight to a teletype machine and ran my name and vehicle nationwide for wants and warrants. While the man waited for the computer kick-out, I gripped the .38 snubnose in my pocket and watched his face. If I came up Wanted in Wisconsin or elsewhere, he would react, and I would shoot him and the other two clerks by the coffee machine, steal one of their cars and GO.

I did not have to revert to such melodrama; the man returned smiling, and I paid my fee and listened to him tell me my temporary license sticker would arrive in one week, my plates in six. I thanked him and went looking for an automobile paint shop.

I found one near the town dump on Kingsbury Road, and waited reading magazines while Deathmobile II was face-lifted from silver to metallic blue. When it rolled out of the paint barn looking brand-spanking different, a Latin youth sitting next to me said, “Sharp fucking sled, man. What you call it?”

“What?”

“You know, man. Its name. Like Dragon Wagon or Pussy Pit or Fuck Truck. A sled that cool’s gotta have a name.”

Still feeling bold from my DMV office showdown, I said, “I call it the Killer’s Kayak.”

The kid slapped his thighs. “Right on O-matic!”

I settled into Evanston. It was a wealthy town, a Chicago suburb more or less — and there was a profusion of small colleges to give me the protective coloration of the perpetual graduate student. With temporary roots laid down I thought of Ross less and less, and began to realize that his audial and physical presences were no more than mirror forms of self-love — I was infatuated with the man because we both excelled at the same profession and were, Spartan in other aspects of our lives — me always moving, him pursuing a career that obviously entailed long hours of boredom. He came to my aid in times of panic as Shroud Shifter used to, when my own reservoir of self-love was depleted by the exigencies of living on the road. If, symbiotically, I was serving him in the same capacity, fine; if not, I didn’t care. Also, there were other faces to look at; the Evanston campuses were crawling with them. With the Ross face/voice symbolism tagged, I slowly became convinced that giving up Martin Plunkett, transient convicted burglar, in favor of another identity was imperative — and I started looking for a twin brother to kill.

The quiet lucidity of the idea, conceived in terror but time-tested through various emotional states, allowed me to move methodically toward my first fratricide. I fashioned a silencer out of metal tubing and wire and test-fired the .38 at buoys on Lake Michigan; I prowled campuses after dark, the snubnose in my pocket, my game plan to shoot my quarry on a quiet walkway, steal his wallet and quietly walk away. I had four look-alikes spotted and was in the process of weeding them out when I first noticed the idiot.

I knew two things about him immediately: that he was mentally deficient and that his physical resemblance to me, although substantial, went deeper. I knew we were bonded hypothetically; that if I had grown up innocent instead of irredeemably jaded, this is what I would be.

With no intention of ever hurting the man, I watched him play in the garbage dump every day for a week running. The boardinghouse I lived in was on a hill three blocks from the dump, and with binoculars I could see my hybrid brother toss rocks at abandoned cars and rummage around for rusted auto parts to put to use as toys. Toward dusk, an attendant from the “Home” would lead him away from his playground, and it was she that I wanted to hurt.

I had narrowed down my hit list to two, and was heading toward the Evanston Junior College campus to make my final decision when I met the could-have-been Martin face-to-face. It was early evening, and only an hour earlier I had watched with amusement as the man hid in the weeds, foiling the nasty-looking spinster type who came to drag him away from his fun. Now, as I slowly cruised past the dump, he emerged from the shadows and flagged down the van.

I stopped, and flicked on the cab light. The man walked over and stuck his head in the passenger window; in extreme close-up I saw that his features were a hideously slack version of my own. “I’m Bobby,” he said in a squeaky tenor voice. “Wanna see my playhouse?”

I could not refuse; it would have been like denying my childhood. Nodding, I got out of the van and walked with Bobby through the dump site. His shoulder brushed mine, and it felt soft, weak. I found myself wishing that someone would make him build up his body, and was about to offer brotherly words of advice on the subject when Bobby pointed to a light flickering up ahead. “My house,” he said. “See?”

The house was two rotted car seats arranged facing each other, with a Coleman lamp in the middle. The light from it shot straight up, forming a tunnel that illuminated Bobby’s head hanging loosely out from his shoulders as if he couldn’t hold himself erect without help. “My house,” he said.

I put my hands on Bobby’s shoulders; he jerked into a military posture and said, “Yes, sir,” but his head still lolled off at an angle. I looked at the ground, then back at the askew idiot face bobbing now like a toy animal in a hotrod backseat. Tightening my grip, I said, “You don’t have to call me that. You don’t have to call anybody that.”

Bobby grinned, and I felt his spongy body quiver under my hands. His grin got bigger and more contorted, and I saw that he was in some kind of idiot ecstasy. Finally his tongue and palate and lips connected, and he got out, “You want be my friend?”

Now I started to quiver, and my hands on Bobby quivered, and the glow from the lantern burned the tears that were running down my cheeks. I turned my head away so my idiot brother wouldn’t think me weak, and I heard him making wet noises as though he was crying. I looked at him then, and saw that the sounds were coming from the obscenity of the big round O he was making with his mouth, and that he was waving a dollar bill, flaglike, in front of my chest.

I took my hands from his shoulders and started to walk away. Hearing contorted sobs and “Pl-pl-pl,” I turned back to see Bobby holding out the dollar, trying to beg for my friendship and make his hideous overture at the same time. I put my left hand back on his shoulder; I took the .38 from my windbreaker pocket. Bobby tried to smile as he wrapped his lips around the silencer. I pulled the trigger and my hybrid brother flew into the dirt, and I stole his wallet only to have it as a memento of my first mercy killing.