Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [94]
I couldn’t resist a parting salute to the assembled loopers, so I yelled, “Loop on, you heroic motherfuckers! You have achieved a place in my heart rivaled only by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra! Long live the fine amenities of a well-hit chip shot! Long live Stan The Man, Burger Hansen, and Bobby Marchion! Let the bummer roll! Looping U.S.A.!” I didn’t wait around for their response. I tore out of the caddy shack, my arms tightly encircling what I knew would be a priceless piece of L.A. history.
I couldn’t go home to read it. I couldn’t go home at all, not with Ralston and Cathcart knowing what they did about me, so I drove back over the Cahuenga Pass to the little park across Highland from the Bowl. I found a place on the grass in the shade, took a deep breath, and dug in. The notebook seemed to be in three orderly sections. I could tell even before I opened it: there were three colors of paper—white, yellow, and blue. The white section was in the style of a ledger and I immediately recognized the printing as Fat Dog’s; much neater than in his letter to Jane. The ledger obviously noted racetrack winnings: the first column contained dates going back to ’62, the second the names of the horses, the third the odds, and the fourth the amount of money won. It had to be money won, since each amount was followed by several happy-looking exclamation marks. I drew in a sharp breath as I riffled through the white pages: Fat Dog had won a fortune in the past seventeen years.
I dropped the notebook, reached in the bag, pulled out a handful of bankbooks and gasped: $11,000 in deposits in one bank, $9,600 in another, $8,000 in another, $12,300 in another, $6,000, $14,000, $8,000, $9,900, $13,000, $4,500, $17,000, $11,250 and on and on and on. There were thirty-four bankbooks in all, all to branches in the Greater L.A. area. I did some quick figuring and came up with a rough total of at least three hundred grand. Over a quarter of a million dollars. I checked the signature on each passbook: Frederick R. Baker. But the words were too well-formed to have been written by Fat Dog. Someone else had made the deposits. But who?
I wiped sweat from my face, rolled up my sleeves and went back to the notebook. I felt suddenly nauseated, but I clenched my teeth and started on the second section, which contained newspaper clippings of fires in the Los Angeles area followed by humorous comments in Fat Dog’s inimitable printing. It was the most ghastly reading I have ever done. The clippings were carefully taped to the yellow paper, which was encased in thin plastic to protect it from aging. It took me only a few minutes to conclude that Fat Dog was a lifelong arsonist and a mass murderer unparalleled in modern times:
From the Los Angeles Mirror, April 2, 1961:
FAMILY OF THREE DIES IN GARAGE BLAZE
A family of three met a blazing death yesterday when their garage-playroom burst into flames. Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Capt. CD. Finan said that Howard Rosenthal, 37, his wife Mona, 34, and their daughter Eleanor, 11, of 9683 Sandhaven, Westchester, were playing ping-pong when their playroom caught fire. They suffocated almost instantly. The cause of the fire was traced to internal combustion, a deadly combination of heat and gas-soaked rags found In the garage. Funeral services for the Rosenthal family are pending at Mali-now Silverman Mortuary, Hollywood.
From the Herald Express, September 10, 1963:
SUPERMARKET FIRE CLAIMS LIVES OF TWO
Two heroic supermarket cashiers died last night as they went back into the blazing inferno that was Ralph’s Market on Third and San Vincente in West Los Angeles. The two men, Donald Bedell, 26, and William Jones, 31, were trying to rescue the market’s payroll and were consumed by flames. Cause of the blaze is as yet undetermined and property damage is estimated at close to a half million dollars. There were several shoppers inside the store when the fire broke out, and Bedell and Jones moved them