James Ellroy - Silent Terror

“Did you pork Anderson or did he pork you?”

The swirls I was seeing were soft pink and beige.

“Probably the latter. They’re out to get you, boy. Ronnie’s got the Supreme Court packed with hardballs, Colorado’s got a whole team of legal hotshots looking into ways to fry your ass.”

Dark tan and red now, blending softly.

“If you fry, you’ll never get to write your book. You’ll be forgotten.”

Tan and red into blue, deepening.

“Look at me, you fuck!”

Still deepening, the colors slowly separating, returning to their original shades, only prettier.

“I’ll never let you make me like you!”

Deeper, softer, prettier.

“Never, never, you fuck! Never be shit like you!”

Softer, prettier still as I heard the guards come and take Dusenberry away.

From Thomas Dusenberry’s diary:

6/19/84

What happened with Plunkett got back to the Director. He sent a reprimand via Bucky Buckford — Don’t let it or anything like it happen again. Bucky advises a very low profile and some quick, spectacular results at the Task Force, even if I have to steal the credit from another agent. I can’t do that, of course; it’s too Plunkett-pragmatic.

I had it out with Carol last night. She admitted having an affair with one of her professors. I was calm until she started rationalizing why it happened. She had logical reasons for all of it, and when she started ticking them off, I hit her. She cried and I cried, and ten minutes later she’s logical and rational again, telling me, “Tom, we can’t go on like this.”

I knew it before she did.

Some good news, if you can call it that: Anthony Joseph Anzerhaus, the Minneapolis child scalper, was shot and killed crossing the Mexican border into Texas yesterday. A border patrolman recognized him and went for his gun, and Anzerhaus reached for something under the seat. Thinking it was a weapon, the officer shot him. It wasn’t a gun. It was a stuffed panda bear. Anzerhaus died cradling it like a baby.

I called Jim Schwartzwalder and gave him the news. He broke down, then his wife came to the phone and I repeated the story, asking her why Jim took it so hard. She said, “You don’t want to know.”

She’s right, I don’t.

What I do want to know is that someone decent can profit from my stalemate with Plunkett. Once I figure it out, and know it, I’ll cut the evil bastard loose forever.

From the New York Times, June 24, 1984:

Quantico, Virginia, June 23:

Thomas D. Dusenberry, 49, the F.B.I. inspector who served as head of the Bureau’s Serial Killer Task Force and the agent responsible for the captures of multiple murderers Martin Plunkett and Ross Anderson, was found dead in the woods near his Quantico home yesterday. A .38-caliber revolver with a crudely made silencer attached was in his right hand, and there was a single bullet wound in his head. Investigating officers found a suicide note in Dusenberry’s handwriting on his dining room table, and the death has been officially certified as “self-inflicted homicide.”

F.B.I. officials expressed shock at Dusenberry’s death, but offered no speculation as to why he took his own life. Quantico police revealed that along with the suicide note there were two checks for twenty-five thousand dollars each, made out by Dusenberry to his son and daughter. Dusenberry had told a colleague, Special Agent James Schwartzwalder, that he had sold a diary he had kept on the Plunkett case to a literary agent representing Martin Plunkett in the sale of his autobiography — for the amount of money he left his children.

“Tom told me about the deal three days ago,” Agent Schwartzwalder told the Times. “He seemed happy about it. I had no idea what he was planning.”

Dusenberry will be buried in a Dutch Reformed Church service next week. He is survived by his wife, Carol, 45; his son, Mark, 22; and his daughter, Susan, 23.

Save for this epilogue, my story is complete. I have been at Sing Sing for fourteen months; Dusenberry has been dead for nine. No extradition warrants have been filed on me, and there are sixty-two pins stuck in the map adorning my cell wall. I was thirty-seven yesterday.

Milton Alpert is reading the first pages of my manuscript in a cell directly across the catwalk from me. I have been observing him for an hour, and he looks frightened.

It’s over now. I’m as dead and inanimate as the red-topped pins in my map. Looking back over these four-hundred-odd pages, I see that I was, by turns, frightened and enraged, bold and cowardly, vicious and possessed of a warrior’s noblesse oblige. I fought and fled, and when I loved, my empathy was sparked by a will to power similar to my own. That he proved weak and traitorous is of no import; like all human beings, I cleaved to a comely lover who filled in my own blank spaces with grace, relinquishing parts of my will in sighs and embraces. Unlike most human beings, I did not let my desire destroy me. My last killings were for him, and I almost spared my final victim for him in a split-second’s clarity, but in the end my will remained intact. I possessed the experience, but did not pay the ultimate price.

Others paid that price for me

Taking their lives, I knew them in their most exquisite moments of existence. Cutting them down young, ardent and healthy, I assimilated brashness and sex that would have gone timid had I not usurped it for my own use. Part of it was to kill my nightmares and staunch my awful rage, and part of t was for the sheer thrill and high-voltage sense of power that murder gave me. I cannot summarize my drives in any greater perspective than that.

So you look for cause and effect; you partake of my brilliant memory and absolute candor and conclude what you will. Build mountains out of ellipses and bastions of logic from interpretations of the truth I have given you. And if I have gamed your credibility by portraying myself honestly, frailties and all, then believe me when I tell you this: I have been to points of power and lucidity that cannot be measured by anything logical or mystical or human. Such was the sanctity of my madness.

It’s over now. I will not submit to the duration of my sentence. With this valediction in blood completed, my transit in human form has peaked, and to subsist past it is unacceptable. Scientists say that all matter disperses into unrecognizable but pervasive energy. I intend to find out, by turning myself inward and shutting down my senses until I implode into a space beyond all laws, all roadways, all speed limits. In some dark form, I will continue.