My Dark Places - James Ellroy [126]
El Monte was becoming benignly familiar. The metamorphosis was predictable and altogether disturbing. I wanted El Monte to stay elliptical. I wanted it to hide from me and teach me how she hid. I wanted to reclaim my old fear and learn from it. I wanted to strand myself in the few square miles of El Monte. I wanted to build a manhunting instinct from that isolation.
Bill and I finished our first media run. We found Peter Tubiolo, Roy Dunn and Ellis Outlaw’s daughter Jana. They ran us back to El Monte in 1958.
Tubiolo was 72 now. He was exactly half his current age then. He remembered me. He remembered my mother. He was heavyset and friendly then and now. I could have picked him out of a 50-man lineup. He’d aged in an absolutely recognizable fashion.
He was warm. He was gracious. He said he never went out with my mother. He never knew how the cops got that crazy idea.
I told them. It was true. I saw him pick my mother up in his blue-and-white Nash. I mentioned the Nash. Tubiolo said he loved that car. I didn’t dispute his claim about my mother. The cops cleared him then. His appearance and his guileless manner cleared him now. He was a widower. He was childless. He looked prosperous and seemed happy. He left Anne LeGore School in ’59. He became a big wheel in the L.A. County system. He lived a good life. He probably had some good years left.
He said he never went to the Desert Inn or Stan’s Drive-in. He said I was a high-strung kid. He said the Mexican kids from Medina Court had a dodge back then. They ditched their shoes and came to school barefoot. Kids had to wear shoes to school. It was a heavyweight rule. Tubiolo sent barefoot kids home all the time. My friends Reyes and Danny worked that dodge. I smoked a reefer with them. It was craaaaazy, daddy-o. I saw The Ten Commandments with them. I laughed at all the sacred hoo-ha. Reyes and Danny made me shut up. They were Catholic. My mother hated Catholics. She said they took their orders from Rome. The Swarthy Man was a Latin-type Caucasian. He was probably Catholic. All my mental circuits returned to that night.
Roy Dunn and Jana Outlaw took us back to the Desert Inn.
We interviewed them at home. Dunn lived in Duarte. Jana Outlaw lived in El Monte. They were San Gabriel Valley lifers.
Dunn remembered the murder. Jana didn’t. She was nine years old then. Dunn used to drink with Harry Andre. Harry drank at the Playroom Bar. Dunn worked at the Playroom and the Desert Inn. Ellis Outlaw paid good wages. Ellis choked to death on a piece of food in 1969. He was half-dead from booze already. Myrtle Mawby was dead. Ellis’ wife was dead. The Desert Inn enjoyed a ten-year run. The joint fucking rocked. Spade Cooley played there—years before he beat his wife to death. Ellis brought in colored entertainers. Joe Liggins and some Ink Spot clones played the Desert Inn. The Desert Inn was a bookie front. Ellis ran card games and served liquor after-hours. Hookers worked the bar. The food was good. Ellis fed the El Monte cops at a sizable discount. He sold the Desert Inn to a guy named Doug Schoenberger. Doug renamed it The Place. He let gambling and bookmaking and prostitution flourish. Doug was tight with an ex-El Monte cop named Keith Tedrow. Keith saw the Jean Ellroy crime scene. He spread a stupid rumor about Jean Ellroy’s body. He said the killer bit one nipple off. Keith quit the El Monte PD. He joined the Baldwin Park PD. He got murdered in ’71. He was parked in his car. A woman shot him. She pled insanity and beat the rap. It looked like Keith was trying to shake her down for