My Dark Places - James Ellroy [72]
He didn’t hide behind the job or revel in a dark world-view. He knew that isolation spawned resentment and self-pity. Police work was inherently ambiguous. Cops developed simple codes to insure their moral grounding. The codes reduced complex issues to kick-ass epigrams. Every epigram boiled down to this: Cops know things that other people don’t. Every epigram obfuscated as much as it enlightened.
Homicide taught him that. He learned it gradually. He saw slam-dunk cases through to successful adjudication and did not understand why the murders occurred. He came to distrust simple answers and solutions and exulted in the few viable ones that he found. He learned to reserve judgment, shut his ego down and make people come to him. It was an inquisitor’s stance. It gave him some distance on himself. It helped him tone down his general temperament and rein in some shitty off-the-job behavior.
The first 17 years of his marriage were a brush war. He fought Ann. She fought him. It stayed verbal out of luck and a collective sense of boundary. They were equally voluble and profane and thus evenly matched. Their demands were equally selfish. They brought equal reserves of love to the war.
He grew up as a homicide detective. Ann grew up as a registered nurse. She entered her career late. Their marriage survived because they both grew up in the death business.
Ann retired early. She had high blood pressure and bad allergies. Their bad years put some bad mileage on her.
And him.
He was exhausted. Hundreds of murders and the rough stretch with Ann made for one big load. He wanted to drop the whole thing.
He knew how to let things go. The death business taught him that. He wanted to be a full-time husband and father. He wanted to see Ann and the boys up-close and permanent.
Bob was running an Ikea store. He was married to a solid woman and had a baby daughter. Bob toed the line. Bill Junior was more problematic. He was lifting weights, going to college and working as a bouncer. He had a son with his Japanese ex-girlfriend. Bill Junior was a brilliant kid and an inveterate fuck-head.
He loved his grandchildren to death. Life was a kick in the head.
He had a nice house in Orange County. He had his health and money socked away. He had a good marriage and a separate dialogue with dead women. It was his own take on the Laura Syndrome.
Homicide detectives loved the movie Laura. A cop gets obsessed with a murder victim and finds out she’s still alive. She’s beautiful and mysterious. She falls in love with the cop.
Most homicide cops were romantics. They blasted through lives devastated by murder and dispensed comfort and counsel. They nursed entire families. They met the sisters and female friends of their victims and succumbed to sexual tension hotwired to bereavement. They blew their marriages off behind situational drama.
He wasn’t that crazy or hooked on theatrics. The flip side of Laura was Double Indemnity: A man meets a woman and flushes his life down the toilet. Both scenarios were equally fatuous.
Dead women fired up his imagination. He honored them with tender thoughts. He didn’t let them run his life.
He was set to retire soon. Things were running through his head fast and bright.
He had to drive out to the Bureau. A man was meeting him at 9:00. His mother was murdered 30-some years back. The man wanted to see her file.
The January earthquake wrecked the Hall of Justice. Sheriff’s Homicide moved to the City of Commerce. It was an hour’s shot north of Orange County.
He took the 405 to the 710. Freeway runs were half of any given homicide job. Freeway runs exhausted him.
L.A. County was large, topographically diverse and traversable only by freeway. Freeways streamlined body-disposal problems. Killers could zip to remote canyons and dump their victims fast. Freeways and freeway embankments were four-star drop zones. He rated freeways by their body-dump past and body-dump potential. Every stretch of L.A. freeway marked a dump site or the