My Dark Places - James Ellroy [102]
A clerk took us back to the warehouse. It was wicked hot and roughly the size of two football fields placed sideways. It was lined with heavy-duty steel shelving.
The ceiling was 30 feet high. The shelves ran all the way up. I saw 20 or 30 rows packed with plastic bundles.
Bill drifted off. I stood by a desk near the door. The clerk brought me a bundle. It was marked Z-483-362.
It was transparent plastic. I saw four small plastic bags inside. I opened the outer bag and placed the smaller bags on the desk.
The smallest bag contained minute dust and fiber samples. A tag listed their origin: “1955 Oldsmobile / MMT-879 / 6/ 26/58.” The second bag held three small envelopes. They were sealed. They were marked with my mother’s name and Z-file number. The contents were listed separately below:
“Vic’s fingernails (sample).”
“Vic’s hair (sample).”
“Vic’s pubic hair (sample).”
I didn’t open them. I opened the third bag and saw the dress and brassiere my mother wore to her death.
The dress was light and dark blue. The brassiere was white with a lace bodice. I held them and put them to my face.
I couldn’t smell her. I couldn’t feel her body in them. I wanted to. I wanted to recognize her scent and touch her contours.
I ran the dress over my face. The heat was making me sweat. I got the lining a little bit wet.
I put the dress and brassiere down. I opened the fourth bag. I saw the cord and nylon stocking.
They were twisted up together. I saw the point where the cord frayed and snapped around my mother’s neck. The two nooses were intact. They formed perfect circles no more than three inches across. My mother’s throat was constricted to just that dimension. She was asphyxiated with just that much force.
I held the ligatures. I looked at them and turned them around in my hands. I held the stocking to my face and tried to smell my mother.
18
I drove out to El Monte that night. It was soaringly hot and humid.
The San Gabriel Valley always ran hot. My mother died in an early-summer heat wave. It was just that hot now.
I followed an old homing instinct. I kept my windows down and let hot air in the car. I passed the El Monte Police Station. It was right there in its 1958 location. The building looked different. It might have had a face-lift. My car felt like a fucking time machine.
I turned north on Peck Road. I remembered a long walk back from a movie. I sat through The Ten Commandments. I got home and found my mother blitzed to the gills.
I turned west at Peck and Bryant. I saw a 7-Eleven store on the southwest corner. The customers were Latin. The counterman was Asian. White El Monte was long gone. I turned on Maple and parked across the street from my old house.
It was my third visit in 36 years. Media people accompanied me the first two times. I was glib on both occasions. I pointed out anachronisms and riffed on what subsequent tenants did to the property. This was my first nighttime visit. Darkness covered the alterations and returned the house to me as it was then. I remembered the night I watched a rainstorm from my mother’s bedroom window. I stretched out on her bed and turned the lights off to see the colors better. My mother was out somewhere. She caught me in her bedroom once before and reprimanded me. I snuck around her bedroom and checked out her lingerie drawer every time she split for the evening.
I swung back to Peck Road and drove down to Medina Court. It was exponentially more run-down than it was in ’58. I saw four sidewalk dope buys in the course of three blocks. My mother drove me down Medina Court a few weeks before she died. I was a lazy little boy. She wanted to show me my future as an Anglo-Saxon wetback.
El Monte was a shit town now. El Monte was a shit town in 1958. It was a genteel shit town indigenous to its era. Dope was clandestine. Guns were scarce. El Monte was running at 10% of its current population and 1/30th