My Dark Places - James Ellroy [77]
His marriage was dead stalled. He wanted out. Ann wanted out. They kept waiting for the other one to get up some guts and end it. They bought a house and sunk their hooks in each other deeper. He fought a persistent urge to chase women.
He left IA in ’73. He went to the Lakewood Station squad and worked auto theft and auto burg for two years. He went to Metro in ’75.
Metro worked county-wide. He ran a five-man surveillance team all over the county map. LA. County expanded for him. He saw crime booming in poverty pockets where people had just enough coin for drugs and cheap pads. The landscapes there were flat and polluted. The people lived in operational squalor. They moved between smoggy towns like rats in a maze. Freeways spun them around in circles. Drugs were a closed circuit of brief ecstasy and despair. Burglary and robbery were drug-adjunct crimes. Murder was a common by-product of drug use and illegal drug trafficking. Drug enforcement was a futile closed circuit. Drug use was an insane and entirely understandable reaction to life in bumfuck L.A. County. He learned these things driving elevated freeways.
He worked Major Frauds in ’78 and moved to VOIT in ’79. VOIT stood for Violent Offender Impact Team. It was a small unit mandated to apprehend serial armed robbers. The job crossed over to Homicide.
Ann got a calling. She obeyed it on instinct. She entered nursing school and excelled at the work. Her stab at independence resurrected their marriage.
He respected her profession. He respected her pursuit of a career at age forty. He liked the way her calling meshed with his new calling.
He wanted to work Sheriff’s Homicide. He wanted to investigate murders. He wanted it with a passionate sense of commitment.
He called in some favors and got it. It brought him to the body off the roadside and the body in the Marina. It brought him to the girl stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.
His ghosts.
13
He learned some things about murder early on. He learned that men killed with less provocation than women. Men killed because they were drunk, stoned and pissed off. Men killed for money. Men killed because other men made them feel like sissies.
Men killed to impress other men. Men killed so they could talk about it. Men killed because they were weak and lazy. Murder sated their lust of the moment and narrowed down their options to a comprehensible few.
Men killed women for capitulation. The bitch wouldn’t give them head or give them her money. The bitch overcooked the steak. The bitch threw a fit when they traded her food stamps for dope. The bitch didn’t like them pawing her 12-year-old daughter.
Men did not kill women because they were systematically abused by the female gender. Women killed men because men fucked them over just that rigorously and persistently.
He considered the rule binding. He didn’t want the rule to be true. He didn’t want to see women as a whole race of victims.
The issue of free will perplexed him. Many female murder victims put themselves in harm’s way and passively co-signed their death warrants. He didn’t want to concede the point. He had a gender-wide crush on women. It was big and random and essentially idealistic. It kept him faithful when his marriage strayed bad.
His first victim was female.
Billy Farrington broke him in at Sheriff’s Homicide. Billy was a black fashion plate. Billy wore custom suits to crime scenes replete with stiffs purging stomach gas and feces. Billy taught him to read crime scenes very slowly and deliberately.
Billy was 55 and near the end of his law-enforcement career. Billy had a big block of vacation time accrued. Billy let him work the Daisie Mae case solo.
It was a body dump up in Newhall. A man spotted a burning bundle and extinguished the flames. He called the New-hall Sheriff’s Station. The watch commander called Sheriff’s Homicide.
Stoner rolled out. He sealed off the crime scene and examined the body.
The victim was fully clothed. She was white and elderly. Her face was contorted. She looked almost