Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [19]
I decided to do a little breaking and entering. I checked out the front house first, knocking at the front door, then the back. No one home. I walked into the back yard. Broken toys lay strewn among the weeds. Luckily, the door to the shack was hidden from the street, and the lock was a joke: a simple hinge with two screws bolted into the door jamb and a carry over metal strip attached to a cheap padlock. I found a curtain rod in the yard among the broken toys. It had bent edges that looked thin enough to use as a screwdriver. I tried it. No go. My impatience got the best of me, and I wedged the rod inside the metal strip and snapped the whole mechanism off. The wood splintered, leaving craters where the screws had gone in. There was no way to cover my tracks.
I opened the door and fumbled for a light switch. I flipped it on, and an overhead bulb on a cord illuminated the dark corners of a man’s mind. It took minutes for the full import of the room to hit me, the photographs that covered the four walls were too staggering: women, mostly Mexican, in every conceivable posture of debasement with donkeys, horses, dogs, and pigs. Interspersed with them were photos of Hitler and his henchmen in various stern poses. Goering, Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, the whole sick crew. There was a workbench running along the back wall and above it was a collage of concentration camp atrocity photos: mounds of corpses hanging out of ovens and piles of skeletons lying in a mass grave.
When I checked out the contents of the workbench, I started to tremble. There were a half-dozen gallon cans of gasoline, empty bottles, stacks of asbestos padding, and a pile of safety gloves, all neatly stacked. In a cardboard box underneath the bench were dozens of celluloid strips and cord fuses arranged according to size. It was an arsonist’s workshop, and when the full implication of that hit me I started to tremble even harder: Kupferman. The Utopia. Fat Dog’s insane hatred of Solly K. Jesus. My head was pounding, beginning to ache, so I ransacked the place. Expecting to find money, I found nothing but porno books, cans of white paint, and historical tomes on Nazi Germany. I banged all along the rough wood walls, looking for places to hide small objects. Nothing. I got down on my hands and knees and checked the flooring all around. Nothing. I checked the photos on the wall a second time. The horror pictures were ripped out of the history books stored under the bench. The porno pics I judged to be recent and shot in Mexico: the actresses were Latinas and were sporting 70’s style hairdos and the furnishings of the apartment used as a shooting stage were up to date. In over half of the photographs a black naugahyde couch was in evidence, and it was covered with cheap bordertown souvenirs: bull banks, piñatas, handbags, and blankets.
The women in the photographs were uniformly ugly and pathetic looking, except one. She was an Anglo, about 17 or 18, with high firm breasts and a red natural. She was performing with men, not animals, indicating a higher status.
I tore half a dozen of the pictures from the walls and stuffed them into my jacket pocket. It was broiling in the room, and I suddenly realized I was drenched in sweat. Before I left I tried a con job. Since there was no way to cover my tracks, I tried to put the blame on some local punks. Maybe Fat Dog would fall for it. I pried open a can of paint, found a brush and painted “Death to honkys,” “Crips Rule,” and “Criplets Venice” on the outside wall near the door. Then I ripped more photos off the walls, threw them on the floor and dumped the can of paint on top of them. I left the door open and split for the car, hoping no one would see me. I had myself a real case now.
I went looking for a telephone. In Venice that takes some doing. Pay phones are easy prey for