Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [119]
I jammed for an elevator and ran wildly down the corridors until I saw Jane sitting on a chair outside the room that had to be Sol’s. “Darling,” I called as I ran toward her, “is Sol all right?!”
Jane rushed toward me, screaming “Killer, killer, rapist, dissension center! Murderer, killer!”
We collided and she flung her fists and arms out at me with hysterical fury, scratching, clawing at my face, her eyes full of tears. I tried to control her, but it was no use. I had no will to be assertive, so I just let myself be pummelled. But she didn’t stop, and her screaming “killer, killer, killer!” was drawing a crowd of hospital people.
“I hate you, I hate the day I let you fuck me!” she screamed, then lunged inside my sportcoat and grabbed my gun out of its holster and leveled it at me. We both froze, and for long seconds there was silence in the corridor. Then she screamed “Murderer!” one last time, threw my gun against the corridor wall and ran away from me.
I retrieved the gun and made for the elevator, thinking—Oh God, oh God, oh God, was it all for nothing? Was Sol dead?
A large young doctor caught up with me outside the elevator. He was scared, but he wanted to know what was going on. I showed him my P.I.’s photostat and told him I was on a case and was licensed to carry a gun. He seemed satisfied. Then I asked him, “Is Sol Kupferman dead?”
“No,” he said, “he’s going to make it.”
I don’t remember what I felt as I left the hospital, except that there was nothing left for me in Los Angeles. Even though Sol was going to live, Jane’s hatred of me held a brutal finality. Our last moments together had been so ugly that I could never surmount them. I got in my car and drove to San Francisco.
I spent a week in San Francisco, waiting for my passport to come through, getting immunized and buying clothes and other provisions for a trip to Europe. I left the night of August 10, flying to New York with two suitcases and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and traveler’s checks. Before I left, I sent Mark Swirkal five thousand dollars in traveler’s checks and told him to destroy the tapes.
I got moderately drunk on the plane and full-out drunk in my hotel room near Kennedy International.
The following day I caught a Lufthansa flight to Munich. I was in Germany for two months, drunk and sober. I took a steamer up the Rhine. I caught the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan. They were magnificent, but only part of me was there for the performance. I visited Beethoven House in Bonn and Beethoven’s grave. I didn’t feel what I thought I would. I made love to a lot of very beautiful, high-priced German prostitutes. At the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth I got drunk and beat up two British students who seemed to be bothering a young Fraulein. In Stuttgart I broke down sobbing in a beer garden and was hospitalized with incipient d.t.’s.
At the end of October I flew back to America and settled in San Francisco. I rented an apartment in Pacific Heights and looked around for investments, something creative. I couldn’t find anything, and Frisco began to pall. It was too beautiful, too ethnic, too counter-culture. The people I passed on the street seemed to be congratulating themselves on their good taste in living there.
In May of the following year I returned to L.A. Repatriated to my smogbound hometown, I started to get on with the business of my life. I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, near the Yamashiro Skyroom. I invested badly. First I set myself up as a sandwich entrepreneur with a small restaurant near the Music Center. It was a lunch and after-concert place that featured jumbo sandwiches named after composers. I was hoping the place would turn into a hangout for musicians from the Philharmonic, but it never happened. Finally, after an investment of eleven months and eighty grand, the joint folded. My next investment was safer and turned into a resounding success: I bought a liquor store on 3rd and Western in the heart of the old neighborhood.