My Dark Places - James Ellroy [139]
I knew Bill was falling for her. It wasn’t a hard spill like the one he took for Phyllis “Bunny” Krauch. It wasn’t a resurrection fantasy. It didn’t play like his longing to see Tracy Stewart and Karen Reilly exhumed beyond victimhood. He was falling into the redhead’s blank spaces. He wanted to solve the riddle of her character as much as he wanted to find her killer.
We drove. We talked. We chased names. We went off on anthropological tangents. We hit the car lot across the street from the Desert Inn site. We took some names and traced the ownership back to ’58. The old owner’s son owned a Toyota franchise. He gave us four names. We traced two to the morgue and two to car lots in Azusa and Covina. Bill had a hunch that the Swarthy Man was a car salesman. We worked that hunch for ten days straight. We talked to a shitload of old car salesmen. They were all fossilized locals.
None of them remembered our case. None of them remembered the rockin’ Desert Inn. None of them ever noshed at Stan’s Drive-ln. They did not look like clean-living men. Most of them looked downright sodden. They all denied knowledge of the freewheeling El Monte bar scene.
We drove. We talked. We chased names. We rarely strayed out of the San Gabriel Valley. Every new lead and tangent brought us straight back. I learned all the freeway routes from Duarte to Rosemead to Covina and up to Glendora. I learned surface street routes in and out of El Monte. We always passed through El Monte. It was the shortest route to the 10 freeway east and the 605 freeway south. El Monte became dead familiar. The Desert Inn became Valenzuela’s. The food was bad. The service was indifferent. It was a slop chute with a mariachi band. Repetition killed the joint for me. It lost its shock value and charm. It did not exist to chaperone me on mental dates with my mother. There was only one magnetic force field left in El Monte. It was King’s Row by night.
They shut me out sometimes. I’d drive up around midnight and find the gate locked. King’s Row was a high-school access road. It did not exist to reinject me with horror.
I’d find the gate open sometimes. I’d drive in and park with my lights out. I’d sit there. I’d get scared. I’d imagine all sorts of 1995 horror and sit still waiting for it. I wanted to put myself at physical risk in her name. I wanted to feel her fear in this place. I wanted her fear to meld with mine and transmogrify. I wanted to scare myself into a heightened awareness and come away with lucid new perceptions.
My fear always peaked and diminished. I never quite scared myself all the way back to that night.
The L.A. Weekly came out. The Ellroy-Stoner piece was beautifully executed. It laid out the Ellroy and Long cases in significant detail. It emphasized the Blonde. It omitted the fact that my mother was strangled with two ligatures. It stated that she was strangled with a silk stocking only. The omission was crucial. It would help us eliminate false confessions and confirm legitimate ones. The true facts were already published in GQ and in old newspaper accounts. The LA. Weekly omission was a stopgap measure.
They printed our tip-line number in bold black type.
Calls came in. I kept my answering machine on 24 hours a day. I played my messages periodically and logged in the precise time that each call hit the line. Bill said 1-800 phone bills identified all incoming phone numbers. We could log in the time suspicious calls arrived and trace the callers through our monthly bills.
Forty-two people called and hung up the first day. Two psychics called