James Ellroy - Silent Terror

The creaking drew nearer, and at the ninth footfall I flicked on the light switch and swung my ax blind into the hallway. Impact and blood spray told me I had hit on-target before I even saw the dead man. Stepping forward, I heard liquid gurgles and felt a strong hand yank the blade free. When I looked into the hall, George Kurzinski was up against the wall, trying to form a one-hand tourniquet to stop the gushing from his side-to-side neck wound. He was trying to shout at the same time, but his severed larynx made the task impossible.

Blood spattered off my black plastic jump suit; a little jet hit my face, and I licked at the trickle that reached my lips. George slid to the floor, raised his gun and shot me six times. At the click of the last misfire, I heard a faint, “Georgie? Georgie?” from Paula’s bedroom, then the sound of her groping through the dresser for her Beretta. Leaving George in the hallway to die, I walked toward the lovely metallic echo of a blank round being slid into a chamber, never to connect with a firing pin.

Paula greeted me from the bed, pride and fire in her eyes as she spat out a T.V.-movie warning: “Freeze, sucker.” Disobeying, I walked slowly toward her, baring my fangs like Shroud Shifter and Lucretia out for fuel. She pulled the trigger; nothing happened; she worked the slide and fired again, getting another click. Watching her throat muscles for the scream that had to be coming, I said, “I’m invulnerable,” and jumped on her.

She fought hard, all elbows and knees, but I got my hands around her throat just as she finally expelled the first syllable of “Mother.” Squeezing full force, I saw colors; biting full force at her neck, I came. When she went limp, I picked her up by one ankle and twirled her around and around and around the room in perfect circles, never letting her limbs touch the four walls. Arranging her limp form on the bed, I felt my indignities move to her body, one-two-three, as businesslike as a handshake.

Setting my brain watch at 3:00, I cook the airline and rock posters from the inner compartment of my jump suit and looked at myself in the wall mirror. Shroud Shifter’s stern, hawklike features stared back. My makeup artistry was superb, and accomplished without “Cougarman Comix” as a visual aid. Self-transformed, blood-validated, at last the only alter ego that counted, I found tacks in the kitchen and fixed the posters to the living room walls, then dipped my surgical-rubber hands in George Kurzinski’s blood and wrote “Shroud Shifter Prevails” on the wall above his body. Entering the apartment ten minutes before, I had been a thirty-four-year-old boy-man hoping to resolve an identity crisis; leaving it, I was a terrorist.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 7, 1982:

From the Sharon News-Register, June 7, 1982:

From the Philadelphia Post, June 10, 1982:

From the Sharon News-Register, June 13, 1982:

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 1982:

From the Philadelphia Post, June 19, 1982:

MOTIVE FOR KURZINSKI SLAYINGS BAFFLES POLICE; FALSE CONFESSORS POURING IN

From the Sharon News-Register, July 14, 1982:

VIGILANTE GROUPS FARMING TO HUNT FOR KURZINSKI KILLER

From the Sharon News-Register, August 1, 1982:

KURZINSKI MURDERS TRIGGER PANIC BACKLASH — WIFE SHOOTS HUSBAND BY MISTAKE

From the Sharon News-Register, December 8, 1982:

STILL NO CLUES IN KURZINSKI MURDERS

From the Sharon News-Register, January 6, 1983:

KURZINSKI CASE CONTINUES TO BAFFLE LOCAL POLICE

From the Sharon News-Register, March 11, 1983:

From the Sharon News-Register, May 14, 1983:

From the Sharon News-Register, May 20, 1983:

From the diary of Inspector Thomas Dusenberry, F.B.I. Serial Killer Task Force:

5/22/83

True to form, I’m running about a year behind in starting this diary. If Carol weren’t out studying those ornate Renaissance guys with college kids less than half her age, she’d be looking over my shoulder at what I’m writing. She’d note the statement that begins the diary, and she’d say, “As in all things in your personal life, dear.” True to form, I wouldn’t know if it was a dig or an expression of love, because Carol is a tad smarter than I am, and a big tad better than me at everything except chasing felony offenders and earning money. And if she’d ever get off her (still curvaceous at 44) ass and take the real estate brokers’ board, she’d beat me at the latter. And if Mark and Susan decided to quit school and become felons, forget it.

Backtracking, about ten years ago, right after Hoover died, every agent in captivity started writing his memoirs. Some actually got published. All were self-serving, full of fantasy and hearsay anecdotes about the Big Man. I was envious of the guys who got published, but enraged that they portrayed themselves as such sensitive liberals, when in fact most of them were to the right of your typical banana republic dictator shouting anti-commie slogans and pushing cocaine on the side. I looked at them ($10,000-$20,000 publishers’ advances, royalties, movie options and glory for doing something I always figured I’d be pretty good at), and I looked at me — living above my means as a sop to my family for always moving them around the country with my assignments, telling Carol “Don’t get a job, baby, I’ll teach another night-school class,” and I thought, “Shit, I’ve been taking out bank robbers for years; I’ll write a book, and I won’t even mention J. Edgar.”

But the truth is — bank robbery is a bore, unless you take personal satisfaction from removing bank robbers from the streets. I do, and that’s the rub. Either the bastards get caught right off the bat by municipal P.D.’s and we take over the legal end after they plead, or, predictable creatures with well-established criminal patterns that they are, they go where we know they will, and we find them. Personally satisfying, occasionally exciting, but most of the time my job was to read reports in my office and figure out where the dummies would go if they were suddenly rich. So scratch one best-seller about a hotshot Fed robbery investigator. Joe Blow over in Fraud Division — you deal with a higher class of criminal — you write the book.

I thought that working the Task Force would make this diary (book later?) easy. It hasn’t, and the Force is a year old already. I thought that Carol would be supportive and help me with editing, but she’s engrossed in her studies, and every time I mention possible chains of missing children, she freezes up and we don’t make love for a week. When I try to get intellectual and relate some of the monsters that come out of Serial Sally to van Gogh (poor bastard) or Hieronymous Bosch, she freezes me out with gooey landscapes from her texts. The hidden truth: she regrets never having a career, and envies my dedication to mine. She’s also pushed Susan and Mark in the direct ion of the arts, which should keep me on Broke Street and teaching classes until they’re 30 and Ph.D.’s. And that’s fine — although I suspect Mark would be happier as a carpenter or contractor and Susan happier as a wife and art-dabbler.