My Dark Places

slow to rile and a good grudge holder. Her sister lived an alternative life that she found compelling. The explicit details of that life would undoubtedly shock her no end.

My father and I saw the Wagners several times. No discernible Ellroy-Wagner hatred surfaced. Ed and Leoda chalked my calm emotional state up to shock. I kept my mouth shut and let the adults do the talking.

The four of us drove out to El Monte. We stopped at the house and took a last walk through it. I hugged and kissed my dog. She licked my face and pissed all over me. My father goofed on the Kryckis—he thought they were geeks. Ed and Leoda picked up my mother’s personal papers and memorabilia. My father tossed my clothes and books into brown paper bags.

We stopped at Jay’s Market on our way out of town. A checker fussed over me—she knew I was the dead nurse’s kid. My mother started a fight with me in that market just a few weeks back.

Something got her going on my poor scholastic progress. She wanted to show me my potential fate. She hustled me out of the market and drove me down to Medina Court—the heart of the El Monte taco belt.

Mexican punks were out walking that slick walk I admired. There were no houses—just shacks. Half the cars lacked axles and wheels.

My mother pointed out harrowing details. She wanted me to see what my lazy ways would get me. I didn’t take her warnings seriously. I knew my father would never let me turn into a wetback.

I didn’t go to the funeral. The Wagners went back to Wisconsin.

My father took possession of the Buick and sold it to a guy in our neighborhood. He managed to pocket my mother’s down payment. Aunt Leoda became the executrix of my mother’s estate. She held the purse strings on a fat insurance policy.

A double-indemnity clause boosted the premium up to 20 grand. I was the sole beneficiary. Leoda told me she was putting the money in trust for my college education. She said I could extract small amounts for emergencies.

I settled in to enjoy my summer vacation.

The cops came by a few times. They quizzed me on my mother’s boyfriends and other known associates. I told them all I knew.

My father kept some newspaper clippings on the case. He told me the basic facts and urged me not to think about the murder itself. He knew I had a vivid imagination.

I wanted to know the details.

I read the clippings. I saw a picture of myself at Mr. Krycki’s workbench. I nailed down the Blonde and Dark Man scenario. I got a spooky feeling that it was all about sex.

My father found out that I’d been through his clippings. He gave me his pet theory: My mother balked at a three-way with the Blonde and the Dark Man. It was part of a larger riddle: Why did she run to El Monte?

I wanted answers—but not at the expense of my mother’s continued presence. I diverted my curiosity to kid’s crime books.

I stumbled onto the Hardy Boys and Ken Holt series. Chevalier’s Bookstore sold them for a dollar apiece. Adolescent detectives solved crimes and befriended crime victims. Murder was sanitized and occurred off-page. The kid detectives came from affluent families and tooled around in hot rods, motorcycles and speedboats. The crimes went down in swanky resort locations. Everybody ended up happy. The murder victims were dead—but were implicitly having a blast in heaven.

It was a literary formula preordained directly for me. It let me remember and forget in equal measure. I ate those books up wholesale and was blessedly unaware of the internal dynamic that made them so seductive.

The Hardy Boys and Ken Holt were my only friends. Their sidekicks were my sidekicks. We solved perplexing mysteries— but nobody got hurt too severely.

My father bought me two books every Saturday. I went through them fast and spent the rest of the week suffering withdrawal pangs. My father held the line at two a week, no more. I started shoplifting books to fill my reading gaps.

I was a sly little thief. I wore my shirttail out and stuck the books under my waistband. The folks at Chevalier’s probably thought I was a cute little bookworm. My father never mentioned the size of my library.

The summer of ’58 sped by. I rarely thought about my mother. She was compartmentalized and defined by my father’s current indifference to her memory. El Monte was an aberrant non sequitur. She was gone.

Every book I read was a twisted homage to her. Every mystery solved was my love for her in ellipses.

I didn’t know it then. I doubt if my father knew it. He was scheming his way through the summer with his redheaded demon in the ground.

He bought ten thousand Jap surplus “Tote Seats” at ten cents apiece. They were inflatable cushions to sit on at sporting events. He was convinced he could sell them to L.A. Rams and Dodgers organizations. The first batch would get him going. He could get the Japs to churn more Tote Seats out on a consignment basis. His profits would zoom from that point on.

The Rams and Dodgers brushed my father off. He was too proud to hawk the Tote Seats street-vendor style. Our shelves and closets were crammed with inflatable plastic. You could have blown the cushions up and floated half the county out to sea.

My father wrote off the Tote Seat venture and went back to drugstore work. He put in crash hours: noon to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. He let me stay alone while he was gone.

Our pad was un-air-conditioned and soaked in summertime heat. It was starting to smell—Minna defied housebreaking and urinated and defecated all over the floors. Dusk cooled the place off and diffused the stink a little. I loved being alone in the apartment after dark.

I read and skimmed the TV dial for crime shows. I looked through my father’s magazines. He subscribed to Swank, Nugget and Cavalier, They were full of nifty pictures and risque cartoons that went over my head.