My Dark Places - James Ellroy [164]
We drove into Tunnel City. I saw the railroad tracks and the railroad tunnel. Tunnel City was four streets wide and a third of a mile long. It was built along one hillside. The houses were brick and old clapboard. Some were nicely maintained. Some were not. Some people mowed their lawns. Some people dumped junk cars and speedboats on their lawns. There was no town center. There was a post office and a Methodist church. My mother went to that church. It was boarded up now. The railroad station was padlocked. Janet showed us the old Hilliker house. It looked like a raised bomb shelter. It was red brick and 25 feet square.
I looked at the town. I looked at the pictures.
We drove to Tomah. We passed a sign for Hilliker’s Tree Farm. Janet said Leigh’s kids owned it. We pulled into Tomah. Janet said the sisters moved here in ’30. Tomah was a time-warp town. It was a prewar movie set. The Pizza Hut and Kinko’s signs gave away the era. The main drag was called Superior Avenue. Residential streets cut across it. The lots were big. The houses were all white clapboard. The Hilliker house was two blocks off the avenue. It was adorned and refurbished and rendered anachronistic. My mother lived in that house. She grew into her stern beauty in this pretty little town.
We parked and looked at the house. I looked at the pictures. Bill looked at them. He said Geneva was the best-looking girl in Tomah, Wisconsin. I said she couldn’t wait to get out forever.
We drove back to Avalanche. We had dinner at Jeannie’s house. I met Jeannie’s husband, Terry, and her two sons. Her daughter was away at college.
Terry had long hair and a beard. He looked like the Unabomber. The boys were 17 and 12. They wanted to hear some cop stories. Bill riffed and riffed and took the social heat off of me. I lapsed into a spectator mode. The pictures were back in the van. I resisted an urge to blow off the party and hole up with them.
Jeannie thawed out some more. Bill and I crashed her life. We distracted her. We jelled with her husband and kids. We gained credibility.
The party broke up at 11:00. I was dead-ass tired and speeding. Bill was fried. I knew he was running at a high RPM.
The Klocks drove us back to the Holiday Inn. We drank some late-night coffee and flew. I said we had to hit Chicago and Wisconsin again. We had to hit Geneva’s nursing school and Tomah. We had to find old classmates and old friends and surviving Hillikers. Bill agreed. He said he should make the trip solo. People might freeze up around Geneva’s son. He wanted them to talk with total candor.
I agreed. Bill said he’d set things up and fly east again.
I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I had the pictures upstairs. My mind wandered. Bill asked me what I was thinking.
I said, I hate the Swarthy Man now.
I went home. Bill went home. He set up interviews in Tomah and Chicago. Joe Walker found my parents’ divorce file. He found their marriage license and some old directory listings. He came up with some big surprises. Bill flew east. He checked newspaper files. He talked to Leigh Hilliker and his wife and three 80-year-old women. He talked to the superintendent of the West Suburban College of Nursing. He took rigorous notes. He flew home. He found Geneva’s nursing school roommate. He sent me his paperwork. Joe Walker sent me his. I read it. I read it with the pictures in front of me. Janet found more pictures. I saw Geneva in sunglasses and a shirt-and-slacks ensemble. I saw her in boots and jodhpurs again. The investigation cohered. The paperwork and the pictures formed a life in ellipsis.
30
Gibb Hilliker was a farmer and a stone mason. He married Ida Linscott and had four sons and two daughters. They named their sons Vernon, Earle, Hugh and Belden. They named their daughters Blanche and Norma. Ida bore children from 1888 to 1905.
They lived