My Dark Places

I didn’t want it to end. I wouldn’t let it end. I didn’t want to lose her again.

King’s Row was just a window facing backward. The Swarthy Man was just a witness with a few memories. I was a detective with no official sanction and no evidential rules to restrict me. I could take implication and rumor and hold them as fact. I could travel her life at my own mental speed. I could linger at Tunnel City and El Monte and all points in between. I could grow old in my search. I could fear my own death. I could relive her Sundays at that church by the railroad tracks. They preached heavenly reunions there. I could learn to believe. I could write off my search with a godly dispensation and await the time we lock eyes on a cloud.

It won’t happen. She walked away from that church. She went to that church at gunpoint. She sat in her pew and dreamed. I know her well enough to state that as fact. I know myself well enough to state that I will never stop looking.

I will not let this end. I will not betray her or abandon her again.

I’m with you now. You ran and hid and I found you. Your secrets were not safe with me. You earned my devotion. You paid for it in public disclosure.

I robbed your grave. I revealed you. I showed you in shameful moments. I learned things about you. Everything I learned made me love you more dearly.

I’ll learn more. I’ll follow your tracks and invade your hidden time. I’ll uncover your lies. I’ll rewrite your history and revise my judgment as your old secrets explode. I will justify it all in the name of the obsessive life you gave me.

I can’t hear your voice. I can smell you and taste your breath. I can feel you. You’re brushing against me. You’re gone and I want more of you.

The investigation continues.

Information on the case can be forwarded

to Detective Stoner either through

the toll-free number, 1-800-717-6517, or

his e-mail address, detstoner@earthlink.net.

ALSO BY JAMES ELLROY

“Nobody in his generation matches the breadth and

depth of James Ellroy’s way with noir.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

CRIME WAVE

Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, Ellroy returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where “every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, prostitute, pillhead, pothead or pimp.”

From the 1950s scandal sheets to this morning’s police blotter, and from his mother’s unsolved murder to the slaying of Nicole Brown Simpson, Ellroy investigates true crimes and restores humanity to their victims. He also enlists the forgotten luminaries of a vanished Hollywood in two baroquely twisted novellas of slaughter, smut-mongering, and corruption.

True Crime/Crime Fiction/0-375- 70471-X

VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD

Print free Reading Group Guides at www.vintagebooks.com

Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1997

Copyright © 1996 by James Ellroy

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Photographic credits:

Page 97: Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, UCLA

Library

Page 187: Kathleen Clark

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Ellroy, James, [date]

My dark places: an L.A. Crime memoir / by James Ellroy—1st ed.

p.      cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48851-0

1. Ellroy, James [date]—Family. 2. Novelists, American—20th century

—Family relationships. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions.

4. Mothers and sons—California— Los Angeles.

5. Murder—California—Los Angeles. I. Title.

PS3555.L6274Z466 1996

813’.54—dc20

[B] 96-36673

CIP

Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger