My Dark Places

Criminal Investigative Profiler/Consultant

Avila thought we had a serial killer. He thought my mother fucked the Swarthy Man willingly. He hedged to a slight degree:

“It appears that the victim had engaged in consensual intercourse.”

“Whatever circumstances triggered the offender’s anger occurred after the victim had reinserted the tampon.”

Bill and I discussed the profile in general and the consensual-sex-versus-rape point in specific. We agreed with Avila’s take on the killer’s psychology. Bill went along with his serial killer conclusion. I disputed it. I conceded one point only. My mother might have been the first victim in a serial killer chain. Carlos Avila was an established criminological expert. I wasn’t. I distrusted his conclusion because it was based on an aggregate knowledge of similar criminal cases and their common pathological underpinnings. I distrusted the logical strictures and the encapsulated knowledge that prompted him to the conclusion. The conclusion undermined my basic law of murder: Criminal passion derived from long-suppressed fears brought to momentary consciousness by the unique alchemy of killer and victim. Two unconscious states dovetail and create an explicative flashpoint. The killer knows. The killer goes ahead—“It just felt like something I had to do.” The victim feeds the killer the knowledge. Female victims tap out signals in sex semaphore. Look at that chipped nail polish. Look at how sordid lovemaking is two seconds after you come. Sex semaphore is all misogynist subtext. All men hate all women for tried-and-true reasons they share in jokes and banter every day. Now you know. You know that half the world will condone what you are just about to do. Look at the bags under the redhead’s eyes. Look at her stretch marks. She’s putting that cunt rag back in. She’s getting blood all over your seat covers—

He killed her that night. He could not have killed any other woman. He did not seek out a woman to kill that night. She could not have prompted any other man to that explicative flashpoint. Their alchemy was binding and mutually exclusive.

Bill thought it was rape. I thought it was rape. Bill said we had to keep an open mind. I embraced the serial killer theory momentarily. I asked Bill if we could run a statewide or nationwide records check and catalog choke murders back to our time frame. He said most of the records weren’t computerized. A lot of hand-filed records had already been destroyed. There was no systematic way to access the information. The big FBI computer did not store data that old. Publicity was still our best shot. The LA. Weekly piece was coming out in mid-February. Day One was set to air in April. Some old cops might read the piece or see the program. They might call us and say, “I had a case like that….”

We put the profile aside. We chased more names.

We found an old doctor. He had an office near the Desert Inn. He gave us the name Harry7 Bullard. Harry owned the Coconino. He mentioned the Pitkin brothers. They owned a couple of gas stations near Five Points.

We found the Pitkin brothers. They didn’t give us any names. They told us Harry Bullard was dead.

We wanted to spark a name landslide. We were name-deprived and intractably determined to grab more names. The investigation was now three and a half months old.

Helen came out for Christmas. We spent Christmas Eve with Bill and Ann Stoner. Bill and I discussed the case by the Christmas tree. I ignored all the holiday chitchat. Helen knew the case inside out. We’d talked every night for three-plus months. She sent me out to chase a redheaded ghost. She didn’t treat the ghost as a rival or a threat. She monitored her evolution through my thoughts and talked murder theory as precisely as Bill and I did. Helen was Geneva’s deconstructor. She warned me not to judge her or glamorize her. Helen satirized Geneva’s appetites. Helen fixed Geneva up with skeevy politicians and got some righteous laughs. Bill Clinton left Hillary for Geneva and blew the ’96 election. Hillary moved to El Monte and started fucking Jim Boss Bennett. The Swarthy Man was big in the Right to Life movement. The Blonde had Newt Gingrich’s love child.

Bill spent a week with his family. I spent a week with Helen. We put the case on temporary hold. I went into murder withdrawal. I talked to the boss at Sheriff’s Homicide and went out on some active calls.

I carried a beeper. I got beeped and directed out to two crime scenes. I caught two gang killings. I saw bloodstains and bullet holes and grieving families. I wanted to write a magazine essay. I wanted to slam this new mechanistic horror up against my old sex horror. My thoughts didn’t jell. I caught two male victims. I looked at spattered brain fluids and saw my mother on King’s Row. I looked at a dead gangbanger’s brother and saw my father poised and pleased at the El Monte Station. The old Sheriff’s Homicide squad fielded 14 men. The current squad was a full-fledged division. L.A. County had 43 homicides in 1958. L.A. County had 500 this year. Sheriff’s Homicide was a class-A unit. They called themselves the Bulldogs. The Sheriff’s Homicide squad room was a fucking Bulldog pen. Bulldog regalia reigned. The place was submerged in desk clutter marked with Bulldog emblems. A plaque covered the front wall. It listed every detective who ever worked the unit.

The new Bulldogs were multiracial and bi-gender. They were up against high-tech murder and public accountability and racial polarization and overpopulation and a jurisdiction in gradual decline. The old Bulldogs were white men with bottles in their desks. The odds were stacked in their favor. They were up against low-tech murder in a stratified and segregated society. Everybody respected them or feared them. They could employ coercive methods with impunity. They could work a dual-world scheme without the fear of dual-world overlap. They could work murders in Niggertown or wetback El Monte and go home to the safe world where they stashed their families. They were bright men and driven men and men susceptible to the fleshpot temptations of their on-duty world. They were bright men. They weren’t prescient thinkers or dystopian futurists. They couldn’t predict that their on-duty world would swallow their safe world one day. There were 14 Bulldogs in 1958. There were 140 today. The increased number said there was no place to hide. The increased number contextualized my old horror. It implied that my old horror still packed some clout. My old horror lived in pre-tech memories. The Blonde told people. Barstool talk was still floating around. Memories meant names.

The holidays ended. Helen went home. Bill and I went back to work.

Chief Clayton gave us some names. The El Monte Museum director gave us some names. We checked them out. They went nowhere. We hit the two El Monte bars still in operation since 1958. They were redneck joints then. They were Latin joints now. They’d changed hands a dozen times. We tried to trace the ownerships back to ’58. We ran into missing records. We ran into missing names.

We chased names around the San Gabriel Valley. People moved to the San Gabriel Valley and rarely moved out. Sometimes they moved to skunk towns like Colton and Fontana. Bill made me drive every day. Freeway driving made him retire. I made him unretire. This meant I had to play chauffeur. This meant I had to stand abuse for my poor driving skills.

We drove. We talked. We spun off our case and encapsulated the whole criminal world. We drove freeways and surface streets. Bill pointed out body dump locales and riffed on his old cases. I described my pathetic crime exploits. Bill described his patrol years with picaresque zeal. We both worshipped testosterone overload. We both reveled in tales of male energy displaced. We both saw through it. We both knew it killed my mother. Bill saw my mother’s death in full-blown context. I loved him for it.

It rained like a motherfucker all through January. We sat out rush-hour traffic and freeway floods. We hit the Pacific Dining Car and ate big steak dinners. We talked. I started to see how much we both hated sloth and disorder. I lived it for 20 years solid. Bill lived it once-removed as a cop. Sloth and disorder could be sensual and