James Ellroy - Silent Terror

That night I panicked.

Sister Laurie was starting to slip into blankness, and I loaded all my belongings into Deathmobile II and headed out of Lincoln on the Cornhusker Highway. Recalling a newspaper article on the local crime scene and its meeting places, I stopped at a roadhouse called Henderson’s Hot Spot and tried to sell Russell Luxxlor’s credit cards to two men playing pool. Nervous and twitchy, I said all the wrong things and spooked them. When their hardboiled fish eyes zoomed in on me, I ran to the Deathmobile and sped out of Nebraska at ten miles over the speed limit.

The incident sent me into a tailspin, and where before I would have killed boldly to counteract my feelings of powerlessness, now I sought solace, creature comforts, the quenching of an extraordinary curiosity as to how other people lived.

For eight months I traveled slowly northeast, staying for weeks at a time at expensive motor inns, exploring the local terrain. I slept in big soft beds and watched cable T.V.; I ate expensive meals that devoured my bankroll. The remaining members of my adopted family dropped from my mind, one at a time, as I notched eastbound miles; to replace them I picked up hitchhikers, plied them with marijuana and got them to talk about themselves and their families. Letting them out unharmed, their past mine in 80 %/20 % fashion, I always felt just a little bit more secure, more safe. Ross began to seem like a distant apparition.

Then 80/20 revolted against me, becoming 100 % nightmare.

It happened suddenly. I was asleep in a big, soft Howard Johnson’s bed in Clear Lake, Iowa. Recent hitchhikers were walking through my slumber, their faces getting more and more distinct. My anticipation grew as I sensed all of them were blond; I moved in their direction. Then I saw that they were wearing powder-white wigs; then I saw that they were all child versions of people I had killed; then they all bared long, sharp fangs and went for my genitals.

I woke up screaming, and was on the road inside of two minutes,

Frightened out of another city, again I fought the fear out of character.

I stayed awake for 106 straight hours; I let my beard grow; I changed my hairstyle. I smoked big pipefuls of my own marijuana, experiencing its effects for the second time; I laughed giddily and ate like a pig under its spell. When I finally knew I could no longer remain conscious, I pulled off the roadside, only to have Ross Anderson snuggle up next to me in my dreams.

“You’re getting soft, soft, softer”;

“You’re getting soft on people”;

“You’re getting soft on people so you won’t have to kill them”;

“If you quit killing you’ll die.”

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME”;

“KILL SOMEONE NICE FOR ME.”

A nightmarish week later I met Rheinhardt Wildebrand, and in the end, superbly refortified, I killed him without hesitation — despite admiring his superb lack of niceness. The prologue to my symbolic grandfather was seven days of fitful sleep filled with victim-faced animals snapping at me and constant kill-urgings from Ross. My tailspin was moving into its nadir — I was running out of money; my beard was growing out patchy and incongruously light; and Deathmobile II was coming down with engine trouble, pings and rattles that reflected my own inside/outside deluge. Pulling into Benton Heights, Michigan, it threw a piston, and I pushed it to a nearby repair shop and placed half of my remaining cash down as a deposit on a ring job and a complete engine overhaul. Handing me an itemized list of the van’s maladies, the head mechanic said, “You been drivin’ mean, boyo. You ever hear about, oil changes and transmission fluid? You’re lucky the fucker didn’t blow up on you.”

If only he knew.

It was now a question of finding a place to stay and a job for money to restore the Deathmobile. With my .38 in my pocket, I walked around Benton Heights. It stood on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, and the constant view of sludgy dark water reminded me of Bobby Borgie, dead in Evanston some hundreds of miles across it. Knowing his presence would haunt me in the place, I hopped a bus to the nearest large city — Kalamazoo.

Where, walking aimlessly through its environs, I met Rheinhardt. I was coming out of a convenience store with a container of milk when he spotted me and dropped the first of his many memorable one-liners: “What’s a subversive like you doing in a dull neighborhood like mine?”

Warming to the flattery and the geezer’s crusty style, I said, “Looking for victims.”

Laughing, the old man said, “You’ll find them. Is that a Colt or a Smith and Wesson in your pants?”

I looked at my waistband and saw that the grip of my .38 was exposed. Correcting the matter, I said, “S. and W. Detective’s Special.”

“With a long barrel like that?”

I hesitated, then said, “Silencer.”

“You make it yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You a tool and die man?”

“No.”

“Traveling man?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a tool and die man. Come to my house, we’ll drink and talk.”

I hesitated again. But when the old man said, “I’m not afraid of you, so don’t be afraid of me,” I followed him down the block to his musty old house of memories.

And I stayed.

Years before, “Uncle” Walt Borchard had bored me with his stories. Now, “Grandpa” Rheinhardt Wildebrand enthralled me with his, and the telling/listening hinged on a simple dynamic: Borchard’s need for an audience was indiscriminate, Rheinhardt’s specific — he was slowly dying of congestive heart disease, and he wanted someone as solitary and idiosyncratic as himself to know what he had done.

So I became his nephew, allegedly motivated by Rheinhardt’s oblique references to leaving me his wealth. In reality, that dynamic was shelter. As long as I slept in the gingerbread house and listened, I endured no nightmares.

Rheinhardt Wildebrand had been a Prohibition bootlegger, hauling whiskey down the Great Lakes on a barge; he had sold die-making devices to Canada-based agents of Hitler’s regime, pocketing the payment, then selling the same equipment to the U.S. Army. He had harbored Dillinger in the gingerbread house after the public enemy’s shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Minnesota, and the mint-condition 1953 Packard Caribbean sitting chaste in his driveway was a present from the late Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, given in appreciation of Rheinhardt’s blueprints for jail-bar construction and placement, the car driven up from Miami by Meyer Lansky himself.

I believed the stories absolutely, and Rheinhardt believed mine — that I was an armed robber on the run from a parole violation and a botched payroll job in Wisconsin. That was why I shared his hermit life-style so willingly; that was why I endured my patchy beard and kept my face averted from prying neighbor eyes when we talked on the front porch. My only other lie was in response to a direct question, Rheinhardt knocking back a shot of Canadian Club and asking, “Have you ever killed a man?”

“No,” I answered.

After two weeks in the gingerbread house, I knew the old man’s habits and that I was going to murder him for the advantage I could gain by exploiting them. He kept a cache of several thousand dollars in his basement — I would steal it. He purchased all his clothing, household utensils and books from mail-order catalogs, paying for them with high-limit Visa, American Express Gold and Diner’s Club cards, sending in one check a year, with the 19.80 % annual interest the credit-card companies loved. Since those companies were used to his eccentricities, I would destroy his checking account by sending in big forged checks for a year of future card transactions, accompanied by forged notes stating in Rheinhardt’s inimitable style that he was “Taking my act on the road until I kick the bucket, and this check is to cover all my possible charges, so you won’t have to dun me.” I would wipe the house free of my fingerprints, slip Rheinhardt a sedative, drive him out to Lake Michigan, shoot him and dump him in the water, appropriately weighted down. He would not be missed for weeks, and by then I would be long gone.