James Ellroy - Silent Terror

That makes thirty, and it’s now getting a little less tenuous. The sometime sex killings, the recurring “tall,” “large,” white man and the “Shifter” card seller point to one perpetrator. The “Shroud Shifter” stuff is dubious, but I’m going to query the Aspen cops on the comic-book freak who called in the info — maybe the guy has more salient stuff. All this data is going into Serial Sally, and the shrinks are reading my reports on the chain. They’ll be doing their own studies, going over prison and mental hospital records that immediately predate the first killings — “Shifter” may well have been just paroled or released. The pisser is that all of this is going to take time. Happily though, Shifter has been a good boy since late ’78. Jack Mulhearn has a chain of four killings that he thinks are transient-perpetrated, but chronologically and geographically they’re slightly out of Shifter’s kilter (Illinois 5/8/79; Nebraska 12/3/79; Michigan 9/80; Ohio 5/81). All four men were shot in the mouth with the same cheapo handgun, and Doc Seidman hypothesizes a homosexual killer, which doesn’t sound like my boy. Where are you, Shifter?

There’s Carol! I’m going to tell her I wrote fourteen pages today, and mentioned her at least that many times.

On June 5, 1983, a year to the day from my finest moment as a killer, I left Sharon and drove nonstop to Westchester County, New York. Crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, I hurled my overused and now dangerous Rheinhardt Wildebrand credit cards into the Hudson River below me; driving South on Route 22 to look for country clubs and boat clubs offering summer jobs, I felt like a teenager who left the party early to look cool without realising he had no place to go.

The “party” was my status as the biggest thing ever to hit Sharon, Pennsylvania, and the reason I had to leave it behind was a slow, steady ticking in my head. On the road or in my projected safe harbor of suburban New York the sound would have been just my old brain-clock; back in Sharon it was a fuse. Sooner or later I would have had to duplicate my transformation into Shroud Shifter there, not out of blood lust, but to hear the thunderclaps of the town’s awe go huge once more. And, given the vigilance I had created, the attempt might have been suicidal.

As in San Francisco after Eversall/Sifakis, I had listened. But in Sharon, one-tenth the size and one-fiftieth as sophisticated, the echoes had resounded ten thousand times as loud. The Kurzinskis were known, liked, envied and admired by the entire town; I had destroyed a part of the town along with them. My presence was the town, in much the manner that a powerful lover becomes every piece of space surrounding the one who loves him. I was everything Sharon, Pennsylvania, saw; for my post-killing year there, I was the regulator of its heartbeat.

I had been Billy Rohrsfield, library clerk and Co-ed Connection iron pumper by day, Shroud Shifter by night. For 365 straight dusks I performed ritual identity changes: slacks, shirt and jacket into the hamper; black jump suit on, hawk nose formed and applied out of putty. Cheekbones and eyebrows shaded, so that my whole face came to points. A police-band radio and my party-line hookup for listening to THEM talk about ME; wondering when they would drop their “mystery clue” pretense and speak my night name to the world. Getting hard when old biddies worshipped me with fearful voices; climaxing when men spoke of me in rage. It was paradise until something began going ssss/tick, ssss/tick, ssss/tick in my ears, and I started thinking about voiding the security patrols I had inspired, slipping through their neighborly nets to waste an entire family. Underneath ssss/tick ssss/tick, ssss/tick, I knew it was foolhardy, so discreetly I left the town, with regret and some gratitude for the return of plain old ticking.

I picked up a young man hitching just south of White Plains, and he told me I could caddy the season at any one of a half-dozen Westchester country clubs — all I had to do was look hearty and presentable. He also mentioned a rental bureau in Yonkers that matched up summer passers-through with the apartments of Sarah Lawrence College students on vacation. I took the kid’s advice on both counts, and by the end of the day Billy Rohrsfield was ensconsed in a small bachelor pad on the Yonkers edge of Bronxville and had caddied nine holes at Siwanoy Country Club.

And that night Billy became Shroud Shifter for the first time in New York.

With no local celebrity, no radio band or primitive party line, there was nothing to do but listen to the tick tick tick tick ticks grow louder and wonder who and when and where. So I did — Billy at the golf course days, my special self of hard facial edges at night. The ticking continued, and on a hot day in mid-July I stopped the clock right in the heart of midtown Manhattan, strangling a drunk passed out in a pew at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

Post and Daily News headlines turned the ticking to a whimper, and I went Billy/Shifter, Billy/Shifter, Billy/Shifter into the heat of August and another excursion into the Big Apple. This time the alarm went BLAAAAAAAR when I was strolling through Central Park and a bum asked me for change. Surrounded by other strollers, I motioned him behind a mound of bushes and slit his throat. The artist’s sketch of me that adorned page two of the Post the following day was a poor likeness, and as Shroud Shifter that night, I put my mind to the task of creating a prolonged reign of terror.

From Thomas Dusenberry’s Diary:

8/17/83

I’m back again, coming up for air after three straight months of paper prowling, helping Jim Schwartzwalder conduct field interviews in Minneapolis, conferences with the shrinks and what amount to conferences with Carol — she’s gotten that formal and severe. I come home late, exhausted and edgy from too much coffee, and she’s studying. I put on reruns of the Honeymooners or Sergeant Bilko — nice frivolous antidotes to coroners’ reports filled with disemboweling and severed penises — and she tells me that the frantic nature of ’50’s comedies created a whole generation of kids prone to quick laughs, quick gratification and violence. Since her diatribes sound preprogrammed, I figure she’s picked them up from one of her professors. It is getting undeniably bad with her; we will have to talk seriously soon. I hope the cause of all Carol’s anger at me is clinical — menopause sounds like a logical, methodical way to wrap it all up. I miss the old her.

Speaking of wrapping up, Jim Schwartzwalder’s vehicle cross-checks got him the name of a suspect he makes for thirteen child abduction/murders in the Midwest. Anthony Joseph Anzerhaus of Minneapolis, a traveling salesman for a stationery-supply company. I went with Jim to Minneapolis. We found out from Anzerhaus’s boss that he was on the road and probably hitting Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that night. We called the S.A.C. in Sioux Falls, gave him the name of the motel Anzerhaus usually stays at and told him to wait for him there. Then we checked out Anzerhaus’s apartment. We found the scalps of six children in an ice cooler. Jim completely blew it and trashed the place, throwing furniture, breaking bottles. I finally got him calmed down, but then the Sioux Falls S.A.C. called and said that Anzerhaus never showed up. I figured that his boss tipped him off, so I left Jim at a bar to chill out and confronted the guy. He admitted it, and then I completely blew it — busting the asshole for Impeding the Progress of a Federal Investigation and Aiding and Abetting the Escape of an Interstate Fugitive. I would have hit him with an Accessory charge if I thought I could make it stick.

When I got back to the bar, Jim was fried. He told me that if Anzerhaus killed another child before we got him, he was going to kill his boss. I’m 40 % sure he means it. Jim’s sticking in Minneapolis to supervise the investigation, and Anthony Joseph Anzerhaus, my professional advice is for you to commit suicide, because you will be caught, and between Jim Schwartzwalder and the moralistic organized-crime boys who rule the federal pens, you will be thrown into deep, deep shit.