seductive. We both knew it. We both understood the rush. It came back to testosterone. You had to control. You had to assert. It got crazy and forced you to capitulate and surrender. Cheap pleasure was a damnable temptation. Booze and dope and random sex gave you back a cheap version of the power you set out to relinquish. They destroyed your will to live a decent life. They sparked crime. They destroyed social contracts. The time-lost/time- regained dynamic taught me that. Pundits blamed crime on poverty and racism. They were right. I saw crime as a concurrent moral plague with entirely empathetic origins. Crime was male energy displaced. Crime was a mass yearning for ecstatic surrender. Crime was romantic yearning gone bad. Crime was the sloth and disorder of individual default on an epidemic scale. Free will existed. Human beings were better than lab rats reacting to stimuli. The world was a fucked-up place. We were all accountable anyway.
I knew it. Bill knew it. He tempered his knowledge with a greater sense of charity than I did. I judged myself harshly and passed the standards of my self-judgment on to other people. Bill believed in mitigation more than I did. He wanted me to extend a sense of mitigation to my mother.
He thought I was too hard on her. He liked my partner-to-partner candor and disliked my lack of son-to-mother sentimentality. I said I was trying to contain her presence. I was running a dialogue on her. It was mostly internal. My external mode was all critique and mock-objective appraisal. She took full flight inside me. She vexed me and vamped me. I put on a white smock and addressed her publicly as a clinician. I voiced blunt comments to provoke blunt responses. We had a two-faced relationship. We were like illicit lovers living in two worlds.
I knew Bill was falling for her. It wasn’t a hard spill like the one he took for Phyllis “Bunny” Krauch. It wasn’t a resurrection fantasy. It didn’t play like his longing to see Tracy Stewart and Karen Reilly exhumed beyond victimhood. He was falling into the redhead’s blank spaces. He wanted to solve the riddle of her character as much as he wanted to find her killer.
We drove. We talked. We chased names. We went off on anthropological tangents. We hit the car lot across the street from the Desert Inn site. We took some names and traced the ownership back to ’58. The old owner’s son owned a Toyota franchise. He gave us four names. We traced two to the morgue and two to car lots in Azusa and Covina. Bill had a hunch that the Swarthy Man was a car salesman. We worked that hunch for ten days straight. We talked to a shitload of old car salesmen. They were all fossilized locals.
None of them remembered our case. None of them remembered the rockin’ Desert Inn. None of them ever noshed at Stan’s Drive-ln. They did not look like clean-living men. Most of them looked downright sodden. They all denied knowledge of the freewheeling El Monte bar scene.
We drove. We talked. We chased names. We rarely strayed out of the San Gabriel Valley. Every new lead and tangent brought us straight back. I learned all the freeway routes from Duarte to Rosemead to Covina and up to Glendora. I learned surface street routes in and out of El Monte. We always passed through El Monte. It was the shortest route to the 10 freeway east and the 605 freeway south. El Monte became dead familiar. The Desert Inn became Valenzuela’s. The food was bad. The service was indifferent. It was a slop chute with a mariachi band. Repetition killed the joint for me. It lost its shock value and charm. It did not exist to chaperone me on mental dates with my mother. There was only one magnetic force field left in El Monte. It was King’s Row by night.
They shut me out sometimes. I’d drive up around midnight and find the gate locked. King’s Row was a high- school access road. It did not exist to reinject me with horror.
I’d find the gate open sometimes. I’d drive in and park with my lights out. I’d sit there. I’d get scared. I’d imagine all sorts of 1995 horror and sit still waiting for it. I wanted to put myself at physical risk in her name. I wanted to feel her fear in this place. I wanted her fear to meld with mine and transmogrify. I wanted to scare myself into a heightened awareness and come away with lucid new perceptions.
My fear always peaked and diminished. I never quite scared myself all the way back to that night.
The
They printed our tip-line number in bold black type.
Calls came in. I kept my answering machine on 24 hours a day. I played my messages periodically and logged in the precise time that each call hit the line. Bill said 1-800 phone bills identified all incoming phone numbers. We could log in the time suspicious calls arrived and trace the callers through our monthly bills.
Forty-two people called and hung up the first day. Two psychics called and solicited business. A man called and said he could throw a seance and summon up my mother’s spirit for a nominal fee. A movie-biz fuckhead called and said he saw my life as a big-budget feature. A woman called and said her father killed my mother. Four people called and said O. J. Simpson did it. An old buddy called and hit me up for a loan.
Twenty-nine people called and hung up the next day. Four psychics called. Two people called and snitched off O.J. Nine people called and wished me good luck. A woman called and said my books were sexy and let’s get together. A man called and said my books were racist and homophobic. Three women called and said their fathers might have killed my mother. Two of them said their fathers molested them.
The calls continued.
We got more hang-ups and more O.J. calls. We got more psychic calls and more good-luck calls. We got two calls from women with repressed memory syndrome. They said their fathers abused them. They said their fathers might have killed my mother. We got three calls from one woman. She said her father killed my mother
Nobody called and said they knew the Blonde. Nobody called and said they knew my mother. No old cops called and said, I popped that swarthy motherfucker.
The call count dropped day by day. I cut down our callback list. I crossed off the nuts and the psychics and the Black Dahlia lady. Bill called the other women who snitched off their fathers and asked them some make-or-break questions.
Their answers cleared their fathers. Their fathers were too young. Their fathers were in prison in 1958. Their fathers did not look like the Swarthy Man.
The women wanted to talk. Bill said he’d listen. Six women told the same story. Their fathers beat up their mothers. Their fathers molested them. Their fathers blew the rent money. Their fathers skeeved on underaged females. Their fathers were dead or atrociously booze-impaired.
The fathers ran to a type. The women ran to a type. They were middle-aged and in therapy. They defined themselves in therapeutic terms. They lived therapy and talked therapy and used therapeutic jargon to express their sincere belief that their fathers really could have killed my mother. Bill taped three interviews. I listened to them. I
