My Dark Places - James Ellroy [117]
He aged. His sex drive abated. He quit chasing, fucking and beating up women. He thought about that nurse he killed way back when. He felt no remorse. He never killed another woman. He wasn’t a raging psycho. Things never spun out of control like they did that night with the nurse.
Or:
He picked up Bobbie Long at Santa Anita. The nurse was seven months dead. He picked up a few women in the meantime. He didn’t hurt them. He figured the nurse was some freak accident.
He screwed Bobbie Long. She said something or did something. He throttled her and dumped her body. He lived scared for a long fucking time. He was afraid of the cops and the gas chamber and afraid of himself. He lived with the fear. He grew old with it. He never killed another woman.
I called Stoner and pitched my reconstructions. He found the first one plausible and dismissed the second one. He said you don’t kill two women and just stop there. I disagreed. I told Bill he was unduly tied to cop empiricism. I said the San Gabriel Valley was this deus ex machina. The people who flocked there flocked there for unconscious reasons that superseded the conscious application of logic and made anything possible. The region defined the crime. The region was the crime. You had two sex killings and one or two sex killers eschewing standard sex-killer behavior. The region explained it all. The unconscious San Gabriel Valley migration explained every absurd and murderous act that went down there. Our job was to pinpoint three people within that migration.
Bill listened to my pitch and got specific. He said we needed to comb my mother’s file and start looking for old witnesses. We had to run DMV checks and criminal records checks. We had to evaluate the 1958 investigation. We had to trace my mother’s steps from her cradle to her grave. Homicide jobs veered off in weird directions most of the time. We had to stay on top of our information and always stand ready to jump.
I said I was ready now.
Bill told me to turn off the lights and go back to work.
21
Ward Hallinen was 83. I saw him and remembered him immediately.
He gave me a candy bar at the El Monte Station. He always sat to the left of his partner. My father admired his suits.
His blue eyes took me back. I remembered his eyes and nothing else about him. He was frail now. His skin was covered with red-and-pink lesions. He was 46 or 47 in 1958.
He met us outside his house. It was a faux-ranch job enclosed by shade trees. A nice stretch of land adjoined it. I saw a barn and two horses grazing.
Stoner introduced me. We shook hands. I said something like, “How are you, Mr. Hallinen?” My memory was running at warp speed. I wanted to ignite his memory. Stoner said he might be senile. He might not remember the Jean Ellroy case.
We walked inside and sat down in the kitchen. Stoner placed our file on a free chair. I looked at Hallinen. He looked at me. I mentioned the candy bar moment. He said he didn’t recall it.
He apologized for his bad memory. Stoner made a crack about his own advanced age and failing faculties. Hallinen asked him how old he was. Bill said, “Fifty-four.” Hallinen laughed and slapped his knees.
Stoner mentioned some old Sheriff’s Homicide men. Hallinen said Jack Lawton, Harry Andre and Claude Everley were dead. Blackie McGowan was dead. Captain Etzel and Ray Hopkinson were dead. Ned Lovretovich was still up and about. He retired a long time ago himself. He wasn’t sure of the date. He did some private security work and started breeding race horses. He’d notched a lot of pension time. He’d milked LA. County for a nice piece of change.
Stoner laughed. I laughed. Hallinen’s wife walked in. Stoner and I stood up. Frances Traeger Hallinen told us to sit down.
She looked fit and alert. She was old Sheriff Traeger’s daughter. She sat down and tossed out some names.
Stoner tossed out some names. Hallinen tossed out a few. The names sparked little stories. I took a little cop nostalgia tour.
I recognized