My Dark Places

misogynist America. Geneva turned Rock Hudson straight. Geneva pussy-whipped JFK and turned him monogamous. We riffed on Geneva and my dad’s monolithic whanger. We wondered why the fuck I didn’t marry a redhaired woman.

Helen found that picture. Helen urged me to study it. She was my mother’s advocate and agent provocateur.

She knew me. She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.

She wanted me to know my mother. She wanted me to find out who she was and why she died.

15

I parked outside the Homicide Bureau. I drank some coffee in my car and stalled a little. I thought about the crime scene photos.

I’d see her dead. I’d see her for the first time since I saw her alive. I kept no pictures of her. All I had were mental portraits of her clothed and nude.

She was tall. I was tall. I had her features and my father’s coloring. I was going gray and bald. She died with a full head of brilliant red hair.

I walked up and rang the bell. A speaker above the door crackled. I asked for Sergeant Stoner.

The door clicked open. Bill Stoner walked up and introduced himself.

He ran about 6’ and 180. He had thin brown hair and a big mustache. He was wearing a dark suit and a striped shirt-and-tie ensemble.

We shook hands and walked back to Unsolved. Stoner flashed a copy of my book White Jazz. He asked me why all the cops were extortionists and perverts. I said good cops made for bad fiction. He pointed to the dust jacket photo. My bull terrier was sprawled across my lap.

He said the dog looked like a bleached pig. I said his name was Barko. He was a smart motherfucker. I missed him. My ex-wife got custody.

Stoner laughed. We sat down at adjoining desks. He passed me a brown accordion folder.

He said the crime scene shots were graphic. He asked me if I wanted to see them.

I said yes.

We were alone in the office. We started talking.

I said I did some county time in the ’60s and ’70s. We discussed the merits and drawbacks of Biscailuz Center and Wayside Honor Rancho. I said I loved the stuffed bell peppers on the county lunch menu. Stoner said he ate them when he worked Wayside.

He had a soft inquisitor’s voice. He laced his monologues with brief pauses. He never interrupted. He held steady eye contact.

He knew how to draw people out. He knew how to extract intimacies. I felt him leading me. I didn’t resist. I knew he’d nailed my exhibitionist side.

I was stalling. The brown folder scared me. I knew Stoner was leading me up to it.

We talked. We traded L A. crime tales. Stoner’s perceptions were sharply lucid and devoid of commonly held police ideology. He called the LAPD a racist institution and spun stories with a vivid sense of drama and theme. He said “fuck” as routinely as I did and used profane language to peak effect. He described the Beckett case and took me straight into Tracy Stewart’s terror.

We talked for two hours. We stopped almost on cue.

Stoner left the room. I quit stalling.

The file contained envelopes and teletype sheets and odd notes scrawled on odd slips of paper. It contained a Sheriff’s Homicide “Blue Book.” The book ran fifty pages. It contained typed reports in chronological order.

The dead body report. The coroner’s report. Reports on exonerated suspects. Three interviews transcribed verbatim.

The Blue Book was flimsy and musty. Two names were typed on the cover. I didn’t recognize them. Sergeants John G. Lawton and Ward E. Hallinen.

The men who asked me who my mother was fucking. One of them bought me a candy bar a million years ago.

The file was badly maintained. It was bulging with loose note slips dropped in and forgotten. The sloppy look offended me and hit me as symbolic. This was my mother’s lost soul.

I imposed order on it. I formed a line of neat paper stacks. I put the envelope marked “Crime Scene Picts.” off to one side. I skimmed the first set of Blue Book reports and noted odd details.

My El Monte address was 756 Maple. Two witnesses saw my mother at the Desert Inn bar. The name stunned me. The papers said she went to a local cocktail lounge. They never got more specific.

I skimmed a few reports. A Desert Inn witness called my mother’s male companion a Mexican. The fact surprised me. Jean Ellroy was right-wing and obsessed with appearances. I couldn’t see her out in public with a cholo.

I skimmed the back section and saw two handwritten letters. Two women snitched off their ex-husbands. They wrote to John Lawton and detailed their rationales.