Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [92]
“God bless you,” she called out after me.
I didn’t take the blessing to heart. I couldn’t. I was flying high on my own omnipotence. I got a cheap motel room in Indio. It was dirty, but air-conditioned, and in the morning I got up and drove back to L.A.
V
Concerto for Orchestra
Back in L.A., ray first stop was the Hall of Records on North Broadway. I was armed with two dates of birth and was hunting for big game: birth certificates to prove a theory that was forming in a dark corner of my brain. I explained to the harried, underpaid black woman working the records counter that I was Frederick Baker, born in L.A. on 7–14–43 and I needed my birth certificate because all my I.D. had been ripped off. While I was here, I said, I wanted to get a copy of my sister’s birth certificate also. She was going to Europe soon and needed the copy to get a passport. Would it be possible? I asked. It would be.
I gave the girl Jane Baker’s D.O.B., 3–11–52, and sat down to wait. The expected results came fifteen minutes later. No Frederick Bakers or Jane Bakers were born in Los Angeles on the dates I had given. So far, my theory was bearing out. I trusted that the birthdates given to me by Jensen at L.A.P.D. R&I were accurate. If my next gambit didn’t pay off I would have to make a computer check of all births on those dates, which might prove difficult and futile; for if Jane and Fat Dog were born outside L.A. County, I was screwed.
I pulled off my next ploy. I found another busy clerk and told him the same story, this time substituting the name Kupferman for Baker. I hung out nervously for twenty minutes in the crowded waiting room until the clerk called out “Kupferman!” Though I was expecting it, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I paid the man his Xeroxing fee with shaking hands, then took the copies to a corner of the room and read them, suppressing shivers all the while.
Frederick Richard Kupferman was born in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on July 14, 1943. He. weighed nine pounds six ounces. A Fat Dog from the start. His parents were listed as Solomon Kupferman of Los Angeles and Louisa Jane Hall of Pasadena. Jane Elizabeth Kupferman was born in the same hospital, of the same parents, on March 11, 1952. Everything is connected. The anti-Semite is a Jew. The beloved cellist is a daughter. Which explained Kupferman’s interest from the start in the Baker siblings, which explained his overpowering fatherly love for Jane and his reluctance to deal with Fat Dog’s psychoses. And they were born out of wedlock, by the same woman, nine years apart. Unmarried parents were frowned upon in those days. Why no marriage? And the nine-year gap between births. Who did little Freddy live with during those years?
Marguerita Hansen had said that Sol Kupferman’s long-time paramour had committed suicide. Why? She had also told me the first foster parents were killed in a fire. Started by Freddy? Was he psychotic that young? Only Kupferman could answer those questions, and I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet.
I found a pay phone down the corridor from the records storage room and called the Los Angeles County Bureau of Adoptions. Impersonating a police officer—again—I demanded information on Frederick and Jane Kupferman. It was going well until I told the clerk their dates of birth. “I’m sorry, officer,” I was told, “our records only go back to 1956.” I hung up, stuffed the two birth certificates into my pocket, retrieved my car from the lot on Temple and headed for the harbor freeway and the Hotel Westwood.
The Westwood was a solidly built, tan concrete building on Westwood Boulevard about a mile south of the Village. It was a one-story walk up, L-shaped, situated above a dry cleaner’s and photography shop.
There was a small parking lot in back of the building. I ditched the car and walked up the rickety back steps. Walking into the hotel was like walking into another era. The flat finished white stucco walls, ratty Persian carpets in the hallway and mahogany doors almost