Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [114]
I drove back to San Diego and spent the night in a Hyatt motel. The next morning, Thursday, I returned the car to the airport and flew to L.A., where my other loaner was waiting in the parking lot.
It took me all day to accomplish what I had to, but I was satisfied with the results. A shakedown at gunpoint of Larry Willis and two black drag queens had provided me with three ounces of heroin, a small bag of coke, and some assorted uppers and downers. A seven-hundred-fifty-dollar payoff to an old informant from my Wilshire Patrol days had got me a cold Iver-Johnson .38 revolver with a silencer.
After I had everything I needed, I started to get scared: there was nothing left to do but the act itself.
I dropped off the overdue loan car at the agency. They were pissed and about to call the fuzz. I gladly paid the extra money they wanted, took a cab to L.A.X. and hopped a plane for San Diego.
Once ensconced in a motel in nearby Escondido, I started to get scared for real. I wanted to drink, but didn’t dare. If I did I would die. Throughout the night I tried to sleep and comforted myself with the poem I seemed to have composed myself:
There’s an electric calm at the
heart of the storm,
Transcendentally alive and safe and warm.
So get out now
And search the muse,
The blight is real,
You have to choose.
The choice is yours,
Your mind demurs,
It’s yours, it’s his, it’s ours, it’s hers.
Moral stands will save us yet,
The alternative is certain death.
It helped. I slept. But the nightmares came again, all run together: Fat Dog in his patrolman’s uniform, exploding Chevys, golf course monsters. I woke up finally at two in the afternoon of the Big Day. I had been asleep for nine hours.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to calm the screaming in my mind. The poem helped some more. Gradually, tenuously, a semblance of electric calm emerged, and I ran with it.
The practicalities of my prelude to assassination came first, and taking care of them intensified my calm. I ditched the loaner car, bought a pair of surgical-thin rubber gloves at a hardware store, and changed into a T.V. repair jumpsuit I had bought on impulse at the thrift store in San Francisco. I took a commuter bus into Del Mar, where I killed time walking along the streets trying not to think. But at this I failed. I thought, frantically searching out my plan for hidden flaws and pumping myself up with logic. I was in danger of losing my electric calm.
Besides the basic assumption that Cathcart would spend the night at his house, I was counting on one other thing: that his intelligence, monomania and justified paranoia would preclude the keeping of any records detailing his malfeasance over the last ten years. Ralston and Kupferman were his executives, bonded to him by extortion and fear. Solly signed the documents, Hot Rod took care of his books. But now they were walking a duplici-tous tightrope of “which Cathcart knew nothing. They were my allies, victims of my own benign extortion.
Around dark I got rid of my jumpsuit, which made me feel better. It had been good cover—I looked the part of an outsized T.V. repairman—but the clothes I was wearing underneath were better for night work: Levi cords, desert boots, and a cotton sportshirt with the tail out. My .38 was well hidden. The battery operated tape machine I was carrying looked indent. I was white and all right.
I found a pay phone near the beach and delivered the password to Mark Swirkal’s service. At eight o’clock precisely, heart thumping, skidding, and lurching, I walked to my destiny. There was a cool breeze and a very dark sky that outlined the stars brilliantly. I made my way down to the beachfront parking lot. There was a Landcruiser parked there, identical to the one I had seen outside Cathcart’s pad in Baja. I squatted down, lit a match, and examined the license plate. It was Cathcart’s.
I walked along the sand, carefully counting the number of houses from the parking lot. Cathcart’s was the sixth, and his lights were on. I hunkered down and walked