Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [31]
“You arrests that no good bum, officer!” she screamed. “That no good bum took off owing me two months’ rent, and threw all kind of filthy pictures on the grounds for all the little childrens to see. You arrests him! He called me a nigger bitch!”
I placed an arm on her quaking shoulder. “Hold on, ma’am,” I said. “Just let me ask a few questions, all right?”
“All right, Mr. Savage.”
“First of all, is this man who rents from you about forty years old, short, fat, with dirty golf clothes?”
“That’s the no-good bum!”
“Good. How long has he rented from you?”
“Goin’ on four years. He don’t live there, he just keep his Tijuana sin things there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dirty books! Dirty pictures! He tells me he the king of Tijuana. He tells me he gonna race dogs down there. He …”
I interrupted. “When did you see him last?”
“I sees him last night. He knocks on my door and says: ‘Bye-bye, nigger bitch. I’m goin’ to T.J. to claim my kingdom, but I’ll be back to throw you in the gas chamber.’ Then he points to the yard and says ‘I left plenty of reading material for the kiddies.’ Then he makes the devil’s sign at me and runs down the street! You arrests him, officer!”
I didn’t wait to find out what “the devil sign” was. I ran back to my car, leaving the woman standing on her porch, slamming her arms and demanding justice.
I took surface streets to Beverly Hills, to give me time to think. I put on KUSC. They were playing a symphonic piece that sounded like Haydn. I was exhilarated, so high that a cup of coffee might blow the top of my head off. I wondered what my elation stemmed from. My case had blown sky high, the two people I had vowed to protect were in grave danger, and Fat Dog Baker was almost certainly in Mexico.
Then it hit me. I was home. For the first time in my life I was on to something important, something vast and complex, and I was the sole arbiter of it. Before this, September 2,1967, had been the pivotal date of my life. I was twenty-one. On that date I had heard, really heard, music for the first time. It was Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Walter had been trying to get me to listen to classical music for years, to no avail. The First Movement of the Eroica went through me like a transfusion of hope and fortitude. I was off with German romanticism, listening to Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and Bruckner six, eight, ten hours a day. I had found truth, or so I thought, and a strange metamorphosis took place: infused with the romance of giants, I gave up my vague academic dream and became a cop. An uneasy, malcontented one at first, until the booze came along and made the low-level administration of power exciting beyond my wildest fantasies.
It worked for a while, but gradually I began fucking up. My performance on the streets deteriorated as my dependence on alcohol grew. I finally committed an irrevocable act, and my career was over. Fortunately I had done Cal Myers a big one during my days with the Vice Squad, and now I was the repo-prince of the new car king of the Valley.
I remembered what Stan The Man had said last night: that he didn’t have to be a caddy. My feeling three days ago as I was waiting for Irwin had been prophetic: my life was changing, my vistas were endless in this charisma fixated society—if I didn’t blow this case.
I parked and walked several blocks to the ruins of Solly K’s fur empire. From a block away I could see a crowd of spectators looking interestedly into a roped-off area. Two patrolmen were watching the crowd. There was one patrol car and two red fire-marshals’ cars parked on the sidewalk.
When I got to the site of the leveled building I saw men in business suits poking in the rubble, carrying evidence kits and talking guardedly among themselves. I waited for