My Dark Places

Davidson drew up a warrant. It charged Robert Wayne Beckett with the murder of Tracy Lea Stewart. Stoner located Daddy Beckett in Las Vegas. He called in a Vegas PD fugitive team and arrested him in his front yard.

Daddy wanted to cut a deal. Stoner told him to get fucked. Daddy saw a judge. The judge said no bail. The L.A. courts were brutally backlogged. The cocksucker wouldn’t get to trial before 1995. Stoner was daydreaming a lot. He was seeing things fast and bright. He was spending lots of time with his dead women.

He was exhausted. He was retiring next month. A funny little thought kept running through his head.

He wasn’t sure he could give up the chase completely.

IV

GENEVA HILLIKER

You’re poised to run. You’ve got time and stealth on your side. Time favors runners. Their tracks disappear. You can’t tell how they hid before they vanished.

You don ’t want me to know. Your secret life was designed to shut certain men out. You ran from men and to men and cut yourself down to nothing. You possessed runner’s guile and wore runner’s camouflage. Your runner’s passion killed you.

You can ’t run from me. I ran from you for too long. This is where I force a runner’s confrontation.

It’s our time now.

14

I flew out to L.A. to see my mother’s murder file. My motives were ambiguous at best.

It was March ’94. Jean Ellroy was 35 years and 9 months dead. I was 46 years old.

I was living in high-line Connecticut. I had a big house like the ones I used to break into. I flew out a day early and got a suite at the Mondrian Hotel. I wanted to hit the file with a clear head and a cold heart.

It started six weeks back. My friend Frank Girardot called me. He said he was writing a piece on old San Gabriel Valley murders. The piece would be published in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Pasadena Star-News. It would spotlight five unsolved killings—my mother’s included. It would spotlight the L.A. Sheriff’s Unsolved Unit.

Frank would view my mother’s file. He would read the reports and see the crime scene photos. He would see Jean Ellroy dead.

It hit me immediately. It hit me hard and fast and on two distinct levels.

I had to see the file. I had to write about the experience and publish the piece in a major magazine. It would stir up publicity for my next novel.

I called my editor at GQ and pitched him. He jumped on the idea and talked to his boss. The boss green-lighted me. I called Frank Girardot and asked him to brace his men at Sheriff’s Unsolved. Frank contacted Sergeant Bill McComas and Sergeant Bill Stoner. They said I could view the file.

I made travel arrangements. The big L.A. earthquake hit and diverted me for weeks. The Hall of Justice was condemned. Sheriff’s Homicide moved out. Their files were stuck in transit. The delay gave me some time to dance with the redhead.

I knew it was time to confront her. An old photograph told me why.

My wife found the picture in a newspaper archive. She bought a duplicate copy and framed it. I’m standing at George Krycki’s workbench. It’s 6/22/58.

You can’t discern my state of mind. I might be bored. I might be catatonic. I’m not giving anything up.

It’s my life at ground zero. I’m too stunned or relieved or lost in calculation to evince signs of simple grief.

That picture was 36 years old. It defined my mother as a body on a road and a fount of literary inspiration. I couldn’t separate the her from the me.

I like to hole up in hotel suites. I like to turn off the lights and crank the AC. I like temperature-controlled and contained environments. I like to sit in the dark and let my mind race. I was set to meet Bill Stoner the next morning. I ordered a room-service dinner and a big pot of coffee. I turned out the lights and let the redhead take me places.

I knew things about us. I sensed other things. Her death corrupted my imagination and gave me exploitable gifts. She taught me self-sufficiency by negative example. I possessed a self-preserving streak at the height of my self-destruction. My mother gave me the gift and the curse of obsession. It began as curiosity in lieu of childish grief. It flourished as a quest for dark knowledge and mutated into a horrible thirst for sexual and mental stimulation. Obsessive drives almost killed me. A rage to turn my obsessions into something good and useful saved me. I outlived the curse. The gift assumed its final form in language.

She hot-wired me to sex and death. She was the first woman on my path to the brilliant and courageous woman I married. She gave me an enduring puzzle to ponder and learn from. She gave me the time and place of her death to extrapolate off. She was the hushed center of the fictional world I’d created and the joyful world I lived in—and to date I had acknowledged her in an altogether perfunctory manner.

I wrote my second novel—Clandestine—in ’8o. It was my first confrontational swipe at Jean Ellroy. I portrayed her as a tortured drunk with a hyperbolically tortured past in hick-town Wisconsin. I gave her a nine-year-old son and an evil ex-husband who physically resembled my father. I threw in autobiographical details and set the bulk of the book in the early ’50s to spotlight a Red Scare subplot. Clandestine superficially addressed Jean Ellroy. It was all about her son at age 32. The hero was an ambitious young cop. He was out to fuck women and ascend at all costs. I was an ambitious young writer. I was hot to ascend.