Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [37]
“No.”
“But you’re certain?”
“Yes, I’m positive.”
“How did you find all this out?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You said someone hired you to investigate Sol and me. Who was it?”
“I can’t tell you that, either. I’m sorry.”
“Why can’t you?! You make all kinds of accusations against my brother, say that my best friend and I are in danger, and you won’t tell me a goddamn thing!”
I resisted the impulse to move to her bench and put my arm around her. “Do you believe what I’ve told you, Miss Baker?”
“Yes. Somehow I do.”
“Good. Will you help me then?”
She hesitated a moment. “I think so. How?”
“Tell me about your brother.”
“What about him?”
“A moment ago you said you always knew he was sick. You could start by elaborating on that.”
Jane Baker was silent for a long moment. When she finally spoke her voice was steady. “Freddy and I were orphans. Our parents died when we were children. An auto wreck. I was four, which would have made Freddy twelve. There were no relatives to take us in, so we were shuffled around to various foster homes, always together. I was too young to really remember my parents, but Freddy remembered them and was convinced they had been killed by some sort of monster. He had terrible nightmares about this monster. We used to share the same bedroom in most of the foster homes, and Freddy was always waking up screaming about the monster. Once I asked him what it looked like, and he showed me a giant octopus in a horror comic book. Another time he showed me a photograph of a wolf and said it looked like that.
“He was a frightened and hateful boy, from the beginning. A sadist. We lived together for six years, until Freddy turned eighteen. I saw him torture animals many times, and it frightened me, but I shrugged it off. Burning ants with a magnifying glass, things like that. He was a very sullen boy and very fat, with terrible oily skin and acne. None of the foster parents we had could get close to him. His ugliness and meanness alienated the nicest of them, until they wanted to get rid of him. The childcare people wanted to keep us together, so I had to go where Freddy did. When he turned eighteen, he went off and lived by himself. He got worse. He used to come and visit me and tell me ugly stories about killing dogs and cats. Once he told me he shoved a whole litter of live kittens down a garbage disposal. It was true, too; I found out later from someone who saw it.
“When I was about fifteen, I went through a wild period and ended up in a Catholic orphanage. As I got older, Freddy started acting strange, sexually. Asking me all sorts of intimate questions. He was caddying at Hillcrest then and he would pester me to come out and look around, telling me how beautiful it was. So I did. Freddy was right. It was beautiful, especially after St. Vibia-na’s. So I started hanging out there. Hiding out with a book in the trees while the people played golf and taking long walks around the course at sunset. I was kind of a crazy, lonely, searching young girl and I felt at peace there. I hated to have to go back to the orphanage. I loved the golf course and the dreams I dreamed there too much.
“So I ran away. Freddy got me a sleazy room in Culver City and I spent all my spare time at Hillcrest, working in the caddy shack and roaming the course. There I met Sol, who is the kindest, most decent and compassionate person I’ve ever met. Genuinely altruistic. He took an interest in me. I had recently become interested in music—I would take my little portable radio with me out on the course for long concerts at night. I told Sol that I was an orphan, that I lived in a crummy room and picked up