My Dark Places - James Ellroy [71]
I got laid. I went through one-, two- and three-night stands and wrenching stabs at hard-line monogamy. I let detoxing smack addicts crash on my floor while I boogied to late dates at Hot Tub Fever. I made 300 a week at the golf course and spent most of it on women. I picked up junkie prostitutes, took them to AA meetings and fed them the Black Dahlia story to scare them out of hooking. It was a frenetic, often joyous profligacy.
I lived out most of my dope-fueled sex dreams sober.
The real world eclipsed my fantasy world. My one persistent fantasy was that story I knew was a novel.
It haunted me. It invaded my thoughts at strange times. I didn’t know if I had the stones to write it. I was enjoying a season of comfort. I didn’t know that I was running from old things.
My mother was 20 years dead. My father was dead 13. I dreamed about him. I never dreamed about her.
My new life was long on fervor and short on retrospection. I knew I abandoned my father and hastened his death and paid the debt off in increments. My mother was something else.
I knew her only in shame and loathing. I plundered her in a fever dream and denied my own message of yearning. I was afraid to resurrect her and love her body-and-soul.
I wrote my novel and sold it. It was all about LA. crime and me. I was afraid to stalk the redhead and give her secrets up. I hadn’t met the man who’d bring her home to me.
III
STONER
You were a ghost. I found you in shadows and reached out to you in terrible ways. You didn’t censure me. You withstood my assaults and let me punish myself.
You made me. You formed me. You gave me a ghostly presence to brutalize. I never wondered how you haunted other people. I never questioned my sole ownership of your spirit.
I wouldn’t share my claim. I remade you perversely and sealed you off where others couldn’t touch you. I didn’t know that simple selfishness rendered all my claims invalid.
You live outside of me. You live in the buried thoughts of strangers. You live through your will to hide and dissemble. You live through your will to elude me.
I am determined to find you. I know I can’t do it alone.
12
His ghosts were all women. They ran through his dreams interchangeably.
The decomp off Route 126. The waitress in the Marina. The teenager stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.
Dream logic distorted the details. Victims moved between crime scenes and displayed conflicting signs of death. They came to life sometimes. They looked older or younger or just like they did when they fell.
Daisie Mae was sodomized like Bunny. Karen took the sap shots that knocked Tracy to her knees. The sap was homemade. The killers stuffed ball bearings into a length of garden hose and taped the ends shut.
The instant resurrections were unnerving. The women were supposed to stay dead. Murder brought them to him. His love began the moment they died.
He was dreaming a lot. He was giving up the chase and going through some kind of early withdrawal. It was time to get out. He gave it all he had. He wanted out unequivocally.
He was leaving debts unpaid. Karen would be sending him reminders. He failed her because the connections weren’t there and other murders scattered his obligations. He was a victim of confusion and chance—just as she was.
He’d try to pay her off with the love he still carried.
His name was Bill Stoner. He was 53 years old and a homicide detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was married and had twenty-eight-year-old twin sons.
It was late March ’94. He was leaving the job in mid-April. He’d served 32 years and worked Homicide for the past 14. He was retiring as a sergeant with 25 years in grade. His pension would sustain him nicely.
He was leaving the job intact. He wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t obese from liquor and junk food. He stayed with the same woman for 30-plus years and rode out the rough times with her. He didn’t go the bifurcated route so many cops did. He wasn’t juggling a family and