Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [102]
I found a towel on the nightstand and handed it to Ralston, who wiped his face. I gathered up my tape deck, turned off the light in the little room and we left, walking all the way to my car on Century Park East. I dropped Ralston at the L.A. New Hospital on Pico and Beverly Drive. He didn’t say a word the whole time. I didn’t blame him. He was in the deadliest of limbos.
As I pulled up at the emergency entrance, I said: “You call Cathcart tomorrow. Tell him what I told you to. Make it convincing. I’ll be by your place at ten Monday. Be ready.”
He just nodded as he got out of the car. He was very pale.
I spent the next morning engaged in some soul searching. I did it during a long walk on the beach, the ideal, most cinematic locale for soul searchers. The beast kept rearing its ugly head, but I fought it off. I was entirely justified in what I did to Ralston; he wouldn’t have broken otherwise and I needed him to get at Cathcart. Still, it was my most vicious episode of violence since breaking Blow Job Anderson’s legs, and unsettling because Richard Ralston would never be the same. The hard-voiced manipulator who had seemed so formidable during his interrogation of Augie Dougall had broken fast under physical duress. If he had a well-developed image of himself as a stoic pragmatist, it was now leaking water.
But these things were secondary to the crucial point: in order to survive, Richard Ralston was now going to be my ally, not Haywood Cathcart’s. He would help me bring down Cathcart’s well-constructed house of Welfare checks forgery, extortion, and murder, and that was all that mattered.
While on my journey of soul searching, I decided to quit working for Cal Myers. I bore him no rancor for his low opinion of me, which, expressed to Fat Dog, had set the incredible events of the past month into motion. In a strange sense, I was grateful: he had been the catalyst that put Jane Baker in my life and awakened in me a power to deal with horrendous happenings that I didn’t know I possessed. The knowledge of that power and the viability of the moral decisions I had recently been forced to make convinced me of one thing: I was too good to be a repo rip-off man. Besides, I would soon be rich from Fat Dog’s ill-gotten gains, which I deserved as a tribute to my good work that would regretfully have to remain anonymous.
So I dug the loaner out of the motel lot, found a pay phone on P.C.H. and gave old Cal a buzz. His secretary told me he was out on the lot and had him paged. He was very anxious and bluff-hearty when he picked up the phone. He always expected in the back of his mind a blackmail attempt by me, based on the events I witnessed in January of ’71. That was when I was working Hollywood Vice, drinking heavily, and taking uppers to cut the edge off the booze. A call came in to the desk one night from an outraged landlady who was convinced that an “evil man” was using an apartment he had recently rented, but didn’t live in, as a love nest to seduce little girls. She wanted us to check it out.
It was a typical, busy Hollywood Saturday night, so the desk officer routed the call to Vice, rather than to patrol, who indently would have handled it; and the Vice Sergeant, who thought the call was a waste of time, and who thought I was a shithead, handed it to his most expendable officer: Officer Brown. I thought it sounded like a fluke, too, so I checked out an unmarked car, drove to the apartment of an informant and got blown away on hash before driving to the address on Sycamore near Fountain.
The landlady was suspicious of me at first, since I wasn’t in uniform and was slightly tottering from the dope I had smoked, but the sight of my badge calmed her down. She told me the “evil man” was in apartment 12, with two young girls. I told her to go back to the Lawrence Welk Show, that I would take care of it.
As I approached the door of number 12, I heard the giggling of a young girl and a man’s sexual grunting. The door looked flimsy, so I drew my gun and kicked it in. I recognized