My Dark Places

named Ruthie and Joanne—

I gave Bill the cutoff sign. He nodded and gave Whittaker a let’s-slow-down-now gesture.

Whittaker stopped talking. Bill said we had to get to the airport. He pointed to me and said I was the dead woman’s son. Whittaker oohed and aahed. His wife did a big gee-whiz number. I thawed out a little and slipped them a hundred dollars. It was crap-table money.

Billy Farrington reported. He said Dorothy Lawton couldn’t find Jack’s notebooks. He said he’d contact Jack’s sons and see if they had them.

I got a 1-800 line hooked up to my regular phone line. I changed the message on my answering machine. It went, “If you have information on the murder of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy on June 22, 1958, please leave a message at the tone.” I had two phone numbers and one answering machine. Every incoming caller got the murder message.

A producer from the Day One show called me. He said he read my GQ piece. He talked to some people at GQ and heard about the new investigation. He wanted to film a segment about it. It would run on prime-time network TV.

I said yes. I asked him if he’d run our tip number. He said yes.

I started to get a little queasy. The redhead was stepping out on a big new public scale. She lived in compartmentalized secrecy and shunned all public displays. Publicity was our most direct route to the Blonde. I had to justify my public displays that way.

Bill and I spent four days with the LA. Weekly reporter. We spent a week with the Day One crew. We took them to Arroyo High and Valenzuela’s Restaurant and the old stone cottage on Maple. We ate a lot of bad Mexican food. The folks at Valenzuela’s wondered who the hell we were and why we were always here with camera people and that old file and all those gory black & white pictures. They didn’t speak English. We didn’t speak Spanish. We tipped extravagantly and made Valenzuela’s our El Monte HQ. Bill and I called the place the Desert Inn. That was its righteous name. I started to love the place. That first nighttime visit scared me. My subsequent visits hit me sweet and soft. My mother danced on this spot. I was dancing with her now. The dance was all about reconciliation.

We met the man who owned my old house. His name was Geno Guevara. He bought the house in ’77. A preacher sold it to him. The Kryckis were long gone already.

Geno loved the media people. He let them tromp around his yard and take pictures. I spent some time inside the house. The interior was altered and enlarged. I shut my eyes and tore down the alterations. I stood in my bedroom and my mother’s bedroom the way they were then. I felt her. I smelled her. I smelled Early Times bourbon. The bathroom was intact from 1958. I saw her nude. I saw her run a towel between her legs.

Arroyo High became a public staging ground. The Day One crew shot Bill and me there. The L.A. Weekly photographer shot her own crime scene pix. School kids buzzed around. They wanted to know the whole story. They laughed and tried to squeeze in front of the cameras. We hit Arroyo High five or six times in the course of two media weeks. The visits felt like violations and vulgarizations. I didn’t want the place to lose its power. I didn’t want to turn King’s Row into a common access road and an everyday stop on the publicity track of my life.

El Monte was becoming benignly familiar. The metamorphosis was predictable and altogether disturbing. I wanted El Monte to stay elliptical. I wanted it to hide from me and teach me how she hid. I wanted to reclaim my old fear and learn from it. I wanted to strand myself in the few square miles of El Monte. I wanted to build a manhunting instinct from that isolation.

Bill and I finished our first media run. We found Peter Tubiolo, Roy Dunn and Ellis Outlaw’s daughter Jana. They ran us back to El Monte in 1958.

Tubiolo was 72 now. He was exactly half his current age then. He remembered me. He remembered my mother. He was heavyset and friendly then and now. I could have picked him out of a 50-man lineup. He’d aged in an absolutely recognizable fashion.

He was warm. He was gracious. He said he never went out with my mother. He never knew how the cops got that crazy idea.

I told them. It was true. I saw him pick my mother up in his blue-and-white Nash. I mentioned the Nash. Tubiolo said he loved that car. I didn’t dispute his claim about my mother. The cops cleared him then. His appearance and his guileless manner cleared him now. He was a widower. He was childless. He looked prosperous and seemed happy. He left Anne LeGore School in ’59. He became a big wheel in the L.A. County system. He lived a good life. He probably had some good years left.

He said he never went to the Desert Inn or Stan’s Drive-in. He said I was a high-strung kid. He said the Mexican kids from Medina Court had a dodge back then. They ditched their shoes and came to school barefoot. Kids had to wear shoes to school. It was a heavyweight rule. Tubiolo sent barefoot kids home all the time. My friends Reyes and Danny worked that dodge. I smoked a reefer with them. It was craaaaazy, daddy-o. I saw The Ten Commandments with them. I laughed at all the sacred hoo-ha. Reyes and Danny made me shut up. They were Catholic. My mother hated Catholics. She said they took their orders from Rome. The Swarthy Man was a Latin-type Caucasian. He was probably Catholic. All my mental circuits returned to that night.

Roy Dunn and Jana Outlaw took us back to the Desert Inn.

We interviewed them at home. Dunn lived in Duarte. Jana Outlaw lived in El Monte. They were San Gabriel Valley lifers.

Dunn remembered the murder. Jana didn’t. She was nine years old then. Dunn used to drink with Harry Andre. Harry drank at the Playroom Bar. Dunn worked at the Playroom and the Desert Inn. Ellis Outlaw paid good wages. Ellis choked to death on a piece of food in 1969. He was half-dead from booze already. Myrtle Mawby was dead. Ellis’ wife was dead. The Desert Inn enjoyed a ten-year run. The joint fucking rocked. Spade Cooley played there— years before he beat his wife to death. Ellis brought in colored entertainers. Joe Liggins and some Ink Spot clones played the Desert Inn. The Desert Inn was a bookie front. Ellis ran card games and served liquor after-hours. Hookers worked the bar. The food was good. Ellis fed the El Monte cops at a sizable discount. He sold the Desert Inn to a guy named Doug Schoenberger. Doug renamed it The Place. He let gambling and bookmaking and prostitution flourish. Doug was tight with an ex-El Monte cop named Keith Tedrow. Keith saw the Jean Ellroy crime scene. He spread a stupid rumor about Jean Ellroy’s body. He said the killer bit one nipple off. Keith quit the El Monte PD. He joined the Baldwin Park PD. He got murdered in ’71. He was parked in his car. A woman shot him. She pled insanity and beat the rap. It looked like Keith was trying to shake her down for a head job. Doug Schoenberger sold The Place and moved to Arizona. He got murdered in the mid-’8os. The crime went unsolved. Doug’s son was the #i suspect.

Roy and Jana knew the Desert Inn. They had the place down cold. They fell short on hard information.