My Dark Places

Playboy centerfolds. They were handsomely mounted and laminated with high-gloss shellac.

John sat down in an old recliner. Bill and I sat on the bed. Bill sketched out the Jean Ellroy case. John said he didn’t recall it.

Bill said we were looking up the old El Monte crowd. We wanted to dig the late-’50s scene. We knew he was living on Frankmont.

John said that wasn’t him. That was his late uncle John and aunt Nancy. He lived in La Puente then. El Monte was his stomping grounds. His uncle Tom owned a market in El Monte. El Monte was a swinging location.

I asked him where he hung out. John said the Coconino and the Desert Inn. He went to the Playroom sometimes. It stood behind Stan’s Drive-in. They served shots of whisky for 25 cents.

Bill asked him if he’d ever been arrested. John said he got popped for drunk driving. I came on skeptical. I said, What else? John said he got popped in 1946. Somebody said he pulled some dirty shit.

I said, What kind of shit? He said somebody stuck a dirty book under some woman’s door. He got blamed for it.

Bill said we needed names. We wanted to find the old Desert Inn crowd. We wanted to find every lounge lizard who ever cruised Five Points.

John lit a cigarette. He said he was going in for open-heart surgery tomorrow. He needed all the pleasure he could get.

I said, Give us some names. John dropped eight or ten first names. I said, Give us some full names. John said, “Al Man-ganiello.” Bill said we were looking for him. John said he was working at Glendora Country Club.

I pressed him for more names. Bill pressed him for more names. We named all the El Monte spots and told him to match some names to specific venues. John couldn’t feed us one single name.

I wanted to fuck with him.

I said, We heard that you were one sharp dude with the ladies. John said this was true. I said, We heard you really liked women. John said, Oh, yeah. I said, We heard you got lots of pussy. John said he got more than his share. Bill said, We heard you mauled a woman named Anna May Krycki and shot your load prematurely.

John shook and twitched and cringed and denied his guilt. We thanked him and walked out the door.

24

We worked the case. We probed defective memory vaults. We logged information. We excavated names.

We dug up first names and last names and nicknames and full names and matching and nonmatching descriptions. We got names from the file. We got names from old cops. We got names from elderly barflies and El Monte lifers. We worked the case for eight months. We cultivated names and harvested names. We did not create an incrementally expanding concentric circle of names. We were up against a large place and a large block of time lost.

We kept going.

We found former deputy Bill Vickers. He remembered the two canvass jobs. They thought they had a two-time killer. They figured the same guy choked the nurse and the racetrack lady We asked him for names. He didn’t have any.

We found Al Manganiello. He gave us the same names Roy Dunn and Jana Outlaw gave us. He told us about an old carhop in Pico Rivera. We found her. She was senile. She didn’t remember the late 1950s.

We found Jack Lawton’s sons. They said they’d look for Jack’s notebooks. They looked. They didn’t find them. They figured their dad threw them out.

We found former LASD captain Vic Cavallero. He remembered the Jean Ellroy crime scene. He did not remember the investigation or the Bobbie Long snuff. He said he popped a guy in the late ’50s. The guy was on the LAPD. He was bombing down Garvey double-fast. He had a woman with him. She hopped cars at Stan’s Drive-in. She said the cop beat her up. She refused to file a complaint. The cop was fat and blond. Cavallero said he was one choice prick. He didn’t remember his name.

We found ex-El Monte cop Dave Wire. We asked him for names. He said he had a suspect. His name was Bert Beria. He was dead now. He was an ex-El Monte reserve cop. Bert was a drunk. Bert was nuts. Bert beat up his wife and raced his police car on the San Berdoo Freeway. Bert looked like those old Identi-Kit pix. Bert drank at the Desert Inn. Bert would rape your pet turtle. Wire said we should check Bert out. Wire said we should talk to Keith Tedrow’s ex-wife, Sherry. Sherry knew the El Monte bar scene.

We found Sherry Tedrow. She gave us three names. We looked up two Desert Inn barmaids and a fat cat named Joe Candy. Joe bankrolled Doug Schoenberger. Joe lent him the money to buy the Desert Inn.

We ran some computer checks. Joe Candy and Barmaid #1 came up dead. We found Barmaid #2. She worked at The Place—not the Desert Inn. She knew zilch about late-’5os El Monte.

We talked to El Monte police chief Wayne Clayton. He showed us a 1960 snapshot of Bert Beria. He didn’t look like the Swarthy Man. He was too old and too bald. Clayton said he’d assigned two detectives to check old Bert out. He introduced us to Sergeant Tom Armstrong and Agent John Eckler. We ran our case by them and gave them a Xerox copy of the Blue Book. They checked their in-station files. They thought they might find a separate Jean Ellroy file built up by El Monte PD.

They found a file number. They found out the file was destroyed 20 years ago.

Armstrong and Eckler interviewed Bert Beria’s widow and brother. They pegged Bert as a misanthrope and an all-purpose shit. They didn’t think he killed Jean Ellroy.

We found Margie Trawick’s daughter. She remembered the case. She was 14. We asked her for names. She