James Ellroy - Silent Terror

But I’m rambling from the point, which is that the Task Force is the big assignment of my life, the most satisfying and troubling, and it’s still hard to write about it. To be honest, it’s Carol’s freeze that’s allowed me to get this far. I come home late, still pumped up, still hot to work, and the snowy art woman (unfair, darling, but allow me temporary license) piles on a few more snowdrifts. The Task Force has got me thinking family, so I’ll use Susan to switch from one subject to the other.

Susie called long-distance (requesting money) last night. We bat the breeze, and I ask her if she’s dating anyone, what her general philosophy regarding marriage is. She says, “Well, Dad, I believe in serial monogamy, and I imagine I’ll keep practicing it.”

I hit the fucking ceiling and yelled at Susie, something I rarely do. It was the word “serial” and its connotations, of course. I wasn’t too coherent while Susie and I were arguing, and we said good-bye a few minutes later, but this morning I put it all in place. It was her absence of romantic illusion. She’s 22, she sleeps with her boyfriends, it doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s just that she knows that sooner or later it will end; she doesn’t have that youthful feeling of “forever” that you lose soon enough anyway. I would rather wish her the way of Gretchen, the Force’s exec, secretary, than the way of that awful word. Gretch is 31, two kids from a bum marriage that she thought would last forever, has affairs with the wrong guys, who ultimately split because the kids scare the shit out of them. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s a great mother, she’s got some gay men friends who’re funnier than Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor put together, and she’s still got hope. We hug every once in a while, and if I weren’t such a loyal dog, I’d go where Gretch seems to wish the hugs would go.

With “serial” you just go on to the next one. Lover or murder victim, you just go. This morning, getting up the guts to start this diary, I wanted to see my name in print, so I looked at a copy of Law Enforcement Journal from last year. There I was, Inspector Thomas Dusenberry, using my Bureau-learned verbal style, all “perpetrator,” “apprehend” and “circumstantial.” I also used “staggering” a lot, and with that I’ll jump to the real purpose of this diary:

It’s more than staggering. I’m a veteran criminal investigator, and for the sake of reality I wish there were adjectives to top “staggering,” “mind-boggling,” “incredible,” etc. Sixteen months ago I would have told you that the only thing deserving of the above hype was my wife’s hauteur at a Bureau cocktail party. Today I would beg Carol’s pardon and say, “Sorry, baby, there are human beings out there, college-educated, with executive-level jobs, who beat people to death, steal their cufflinks as souvenirs, then go home and round up the kids, take them to Little League practice and foot the bill for the whole team at Haagen Dazs on the way back to the wife and tender sex.” If Carol balked, I would point out one of the three serial killers our Task Force has thus far taken out in its year of existence: Federal case file 086-83 — Whalen, William Edmund, aka the “Chappaqua Chopper.”

Willy, an upper-level executive at a New York advertising agency, beat a total of fourteen people to death in suburban New York and New Jersey during the years 1976–1982. He used to prowl the park areas along the Hudson River, find solitary nature lovers (old, young, male, female, black, white — Willy was an Equal Opportunity killer), beat them to death with a rock, steal some kind of keepsake from them, then toss them in the river. I got him on a fluke. I found out all the side streets leading to the parks he used to prowl had one-side-of-the-street-only parking, so I ran computer checks on parking tickets issued near the days the coroner tagged the victims’ D.O.D. Bingo! Old Willy was careless three times out of fourteen.

He had a nice three-story colonial in Chappaqua, and his gross income for the previous year was $275,000 and stock options. When I knocked on his door I wasn’t 100 % sure of his guilt, so I asked him flat out, ‘“Mr. Whalen, are you the Chappaqua Chopper?”

His reply: “Yes, I am. I’ll come along peacefully, Officer, but will you have a martini with me first? My wife and children are soon to leave for the theatre, and I wouldn’t want to spoil their fun. I’ll tell them you’re with the agency.”

Willy’s in Lewisburg now, wearing federal denims instead of Paul Stuart suits. I got a lot of awed laughs when I told people about belting a few Beefeaters with him, and I actually sort of liked the crazy cocksucker. Then, pissed at myself for it, I dug up the coroner’s photos of his victims. I don’t like Willy anymore.

Nor do I understand him.

The other two take-outs belong to my colleague Jim Schwartzwalder, formerly a S.A.C. in Houston. He’s a forensics whiz, and he asked to work the stats on missing children (no one else wanted the job). Jim got ahold of some figures on missing kids in Northern Louisiana, and two dead kids (raped and covered with bite marks) down near Baton Rouge. Hypothesizing a transient killer, possibly a car thief, Jim ran auto-theft reports from the Shreveport area, got one that felt “panicky,” then ran the forensic dental report made from the teeth marks on the dead kids, along with queries on repeating felons popped for Grand Theft Auto. Double bingo from the Texas State Prison in Brownsville, The teeth marks exactly matched dentures fashioned for former inmate Leonard Carl Strohner there at the pen, back when he was serving 3–5 for G.T.A. in the late ’70’s. An A.P.B. bagged Strohner in New Mexico a few months later. He confessed biting, raping and killing twenty-two children throughout the South and Southwest, aided by his sometime sidekick Charles Sidney Hoyt. A routine roundup of vagrants got Hoyt in Tucson, Arizona, the following week. He laughed when he confessed his crimes, and when one of the arresting officers asked him why he liked to bite children, Hoyt said, “The closer the bone, the sweeter the meat.”

I’m rambling again, so I’ll give myself a little more slack, then get back to the point. Digression one — for a cop, I’m sort of a liberal. Poverty is your number-one cause of crime, period. All that stuff about moral breakdowns and the breakdown of the family unit is bullshit. Aside from poverty and its direct correlative of hard narcotics use, we have individual psychological motivation, which is pretty much unfathomable, although the forensic psychologists attached to the Force are pretty good at extrapolating from workups and physical evidence. As a cop, psychological motivation has always been my chief professional interest. Willie Roosevelt Washington, black heroin addict from Philly’s South Side, became a bank robber. Willie’s dad and mom were good people who never hit him. Willie’s next-door neighbor growing up, Robert Dewey Brown, got the shit kicked out of him regularly by his sadistic boozehound parents, and he is now a brilliant young forensic chemist with the Bureau. What happened?

City cops often have a stock answer. Working liaison with them over the years, I’ve heard it often: Evil. Cause and effect and traumatic episodes mean zilch, what is is; look for the cause and effect, and what you’ll get is what is is and good and evil mitigated by shades of gray. I’m a logical, methodical man with only a nominal belief in God, and that answer has always offended me.

Digression two — aside from marrying Carol against my parents’ wishes, the chief act of rebellion in my life has been disavowing the faith I was reared in. I was seventeen when I ceased to believe in the tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church. The sanctity of Jesus Christ, shadeless good and evil, and God the puppet master in the sky doing his predestination number at the birth of members of his flock, was too ugly, mean-spirited and stupid for a logical, methodical kid who wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop. So I enrolled at a Jesuit college and went to Notre Dame Law and became both a cop and a lawyer, and I’m still logical and methodical and obsessed with knowing why at close to fifty. And, punch line — maybe what is is, and good and evil are the real stuff, with the serial killer stats I’ve been working on as unimpeachable proof of it.