Clandestine Read online

  Praise for James Ellroy

  “Ellroy is the author of some of the most powerful crime novels ever written.”

  —The New York Times

  “Nobody in this generation matches the breadth and depth of James Ellroy’s way with noir.”

  —The Detroit News

  “Our best living mystery writer….Literate, suspenseful, honest….His pages crackle with manic energy….Ellroy captures the vocabulary, the rituals, the smells and rhythms and colors….Nobody since Chandler has evoked so perfectly the seamy side of L.A.”

  —The Austin Chronicle

  “One of the great American writers of our time.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “James Ellroy is the American Dostoevsky.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  James Ellroy

  CLANDESTINE

  James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover, and the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado.

  www.jamesellroy.net

  ALSO BY JAMES ELLROY

  This Storm

  Perfidia

  THE UNDERWORLD U.S.A. TRILOGY

  American Tabloid

  The Cold Six Thousand

  Blood’s A Rover

  THE L.A. QUARTET

  The Black Dahlia

  The Big Nowhere

  L.A. Confidential

  White Jazz

  MEMOIR

  My Dark Places

  The Hilliker Curse

  SHORT STORIES

  Hollywood Nocturnes

  JOURNALISM/SHORT FICTION

  Crime Wave

  Destination: Morgue!

  EARLY NOVELS

  Brown’s Requiem

  Blood on the Moon

  Because the Night

  Suicide Hill

  Killer on the Road

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2021

  Copyright © 1982 by James Ellroy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in paperback by Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, in 1982.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593312223

  Ebook ISBN 9780593312230

  Cover design by Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: Bridge Over L.A. River, February 17, 1955, by R. Rittenhouse. Courtesy of the Fototeka Collection

  www.vintagebooks.com

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by James Ellroy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Part I: Last Season

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II: Death by Strangulation

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part III: Time, Out of Time

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part IV: The Crime Against Marcella

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part V: Wisconsin Dutch

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part VI: The Game for Shelter

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  TO

  Penny Nagler

  INTRODUCTION

  I wrote Clandestine in 1980. I was working as a caddy at Bel-Air Country Club in L.A. and chasing a woman attending law school. It was my second novel. My first novel had just sold as a paperback original in America. I got paid chump change for it. I was a hard-working motherfucker back in 1980. I packed golf bags six days a week and wrote all seven nights. I wrote Clandestine in eight months. I think it’s a wild ride of a book.

  It’s got golf, police corruption, good sex and some raunchy laughs. It’s built around a tender and volatile love story. It’s my first attempt to fictionally address the murder of my own mother. It’s a wildly personal novel and very much the period forerunner of my L.A. Quartet.

  I had a blast writing Clandestine. I think it shows. I hope it transports you back to 1951. I hope some part of you stays there.

  James Ellroy

  Kansas City, 27 June 1996

  PROLOGUE

  During the dark, cold winter of 1951 I worked Wilshire Patrol, played a lot of golf, and sought out the company of lonely women for one-night stands.

  Nostalgia victimizes the unknowing by instilling in them a desire for a simplicity and innocence they can never achieve. The fifties weren’t a more innocent time. The dark salients that govern life today were there then, only they were harder to find. That was why I was a cop, and why I chased women. Golf was no more than an island of purity, something I did exceedingly well. I could drive a golf ball three hundred yards. Golf was breathtaking cleanliness and simplicity.

  My patrol partner was Wacky Walker. He was five years my senior, with the same amount of time in the department. We first bumped into each other in the muster room of Wilshire Station, each of us lugging a golf bag. We both broke into huge grins and knew each other instantly—and completely.

  With Wacky it was poetry, wonder, and golf; with me it was women, wonder, and golf. “Wonder” meant the same thing to both of us: the job, the streets, the people, and the mutable ethos of we who had to deal daily with drunks, hopheads, gunsels, wienie waggers, hookers, reefer smokers, burglars, and the unnamed lonely detritus of the human race. We became the closest of friends, and later partners on day watch.

  The day watch commander, Lieutenant William Beckworth, was a golf fanatic and hopeless ball beater. When he heard I shot scratch he had me put on day watch in exchange for lessons. It was a fair trade, but Beckworth was unteachable. I could wrap the lieutenant around my little finger—I even had him caddying for me on Saturday mornings, when I hustled games at country clubs and municipal courses—so it was easy to get Wacky bumped off night watch and assigned to days with the two of us as partners. Which took us deeper.

  Herbert Lawton Walker was thirty-two years old, deathobsessed, and an alcoholic. He was a genuine hero—a World War II recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, which he was awarded for wiping out two machine gun nests full of Japs on Saipan. He could have gotten any job he wanted. Insurance companies were deluging him with offers when he went touring for war bonds, but he opted for the L
os Angeles Police Department, a blue suit, a gun, and the wonder.

  Of course, as a juicehead his perception of the wonder was somewhat predicated on the amount of booze he consumed. I was his watchdog, denying the sauce to him in the mornings and regulating his intake until our tour ended and we returned to the station.

  In the early evenings, before I went out looking for women, Wacky and I would belt a few at his apartment and discuss the wonder or talk about the war I had avoided and he made his name in. Wacky was convinced that killing the fifteen Japs on Saipan had made him a wonder addict, and that the key to wonder was in death. I disagreed. We argued. I told him life was good. We agreed. “We are the sworn protectors of life,” I said. “But the key is in death, Freddy,” he said. “Can’t you see that? If you ever have to kill you’ll know.” We always came to that stalemate. When that happened Wacky would lead me to the door, shake my hand warmly, and retire back to his living room to drink and write poetry. Leaving me, Frederick Upton Underhill, twenty-six-year-old outsized crew-cut cop, on his doorstep contemplating nightfall and neon and what I could do about it in what I would later know to be the last season of my youth.

  That season was to become a rite of passage composed of many false starts and erroneous conclusions. I was to blunder love and call it many different things; I was to savor the amenities of life on the make and feel last surges of callow power. I was finally to kill—and conclusively disprove Wacky’s thesis, for even with hero’s blood on my hands and laurels at my feet, the wonder in its ultimate state eluded me like a beacon whose light remained fixed while the turbulent waters around it constantly shifted in death and self-renewal.

  It was those waters that grabbed me and gave me, many years later, my salvation. If you trace every link in the Eddie Engels case backward and forward in time you will find no beginning and no end. When my rapacious ambition thrust me into a brutal labyrinth of death and shame and betrayal in 1951, it was only my beginning. At the final unraveling in 1955 I knew that my willingness to move with and be part of a score of hellishly driven lives in clandestine transit was the wonder—as well as my ultimate redemption.

  I

  LAST SEASON

  1

  Wacky and I had been partners for three months when Night Train entered our lives. The roll call sergeant told us about him as we were getting into our ’48 Ford black-and-white in the parking lot at Wilshire Station.

  “Walker. Underhill. Come here a second,” he called at us. We walked over. His name was Gately; he needed a shave and he was smiling. “The loot’s got a good one for you guys. You golfers get all the breaks. You like dogs? I hate dogs. We got a dog who’s terrorizing little kiddies. Stealing their lunches over at the elementary school off Orange and Olympic. Mean old trash can dog, used to belong to a wino. The janitor at the school’s got him. Says he’s going to kill him, or cut his balls off. The Animal Regulation guys don’t want the squeal, ’cause they think the janitor’s crazy. You guys go take the mean old dog to the pound. Don’t shoot it, ’cause there’s all kinds of little kiddies might get upset. You golf guys get all the breaks.”

  Wacky pulled the black-and-white out onto Pico, laughing and talking in verse, which he sometimes did when coffee reactivated the previous night’s booze still in his system.

  “Whither thou, o noble beast, the most we do is ne’er our least, o noble hound, soon to be found, awaits the pound thence gas and ground.”

  I laughed on while Wacky continued, driving his poetry into the pavement.

  The janitor at Wilshire Crest School was a fat Japanese guy of about fifty. Wacky waggled his eyebrows at him, which broke the ice and got a laugh. He led us to the dog, who was locked up inside a portable construction toilet. As we approached I could hear a keening wail arise from the flimsy structure.

  At the prearranged signal from Wacky, I kicked a hole in the side of the outhouse and shoved in our combined lunches—two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a sardine sandwich, one roast beef on rye, and two apples. There was the sound of furious masticating. I threw open the door, glimpsed a dark furry shape with glittering sharp teeth, and slugged it full force, right in the chops. It collapsed, spitting out some ham sandwich in the process. Wacky dragged the dog out.

  He was a nice-looking black Labrador—but very fat. He had a gigantic whanger that must have dragged the ground when he walked. Wacky was in love. “Aww, Freddy, look at my poor baby. Awww.” He picked the unconscious dog up and cradled him in his arms. “Awww. Uncle Wacky and Uncle Freddy will take you back to the station and find a nice home for you. Awww.”

  The janitor was eyeing us suspiciously. “You killee dog?” he asked, drawing a finger across his throat and looking at Wacky, who was already carrying his newfound friend lovingly back to the patrol car.

  I got in the driver’s side. “We can’t take this mutt back to the station,” I said.

  “The hell you say. We’ll stash him in the locker room. When we get off duty I’m taking him home. This dog is gonna be my caddy. I’m gonna fix him up with a harness so he can pack my bag.”

  “Beckworth will have your ass.”

  “Beckworth can kiss my ass. You take care of Beckworth.”

  The dog came awake as we pulled into the parking lot of the station. He started barking furiously. I turned around in my seat to slug him again, but Wacky deflected my arm. “Awww,” he said to the beast, “Awww, Awww!” And the dog shut up.

  I led the dog around to the locker room from the back entrance. Wacky made the run to the hot dog stand next to Sears, and came back with six cheeseburgers. I was petting the hound in front of my locker when Wacky came back and dumped the greasy mess on the floor in front of me. The dog tore into it, and Wacky and I shot out the door and resumed patrol. So began the odyssey of Night Train, as the dog came to be known.

  When we returned from our tour of duty that night we heard Reuben Ramos’s saxophone honking from the locker room. Reuben is a motorcycle officer who picked up a love of jazz from working Seventy-seventh Street Vice, where he raided the bop joints of Central Avenue regularly, looking for hookers, bookies, and hopheads. He had taught himself to play the sax by ear—mostly honks and flub notes, but sometimes he gets going on some simple tune like “Green Dolphin Street.” Tonight he was really cooking—the main theme from “Night Train” over and over.

  When Wacky and I entered the locker room we couldn’t believe our eyes. Reuben, in his Jockey shorts, was twisting all around, blasting out the wild first notes of “Night Train” while the fat black Lab writhed on his back on the concrete floor, yipping, yowling, and shooting a tremendous stream of urine straight up into the air. Groups of off-duty patrolmen walked in and walked out, disgusted. Reuben got tired of the action and went home to his wife and kids, leaving Wacky to yell and scream of the dog’s “genius potential.”

  Wacky named the dog “Night Train” and took him home with him. He serenaded the dog for weeks with saxophone music on his phonograph and fed him steak, all in the fruitless hope of turning him into a caddy. Finally Wacky gave up, decided that Night Train was a free spirit, and cut him loose. We thought we had seen the last of the beast—but we hadn’t. He was to go on to assume legendary status in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  Two days after his release, Night Train showed up at Wilshire Station with a dead cat in his jaws. He was chased out by the desk sergeant, who threw the cat in a trash can. Night Train showed up the following day with another dead cat. This time he was chased out with the cat still in his mouth. He came back later that day with the same cat, somewhat the worse for wear. He came back at the right time, for Wacky and I were just getting off duty. When Night Train saw Wacky he swooned with joy, dropped the battered feline gift of love, ran to Wacky’s outstretched arms, and urinated all over his uniform. Wacky carried Night Train to my car and locked him in. But Wacky was pissed at Lieutenant Beckworth. Beckworth was
supposed to have come across with two cases of Cutty Sark at 75 percent off from a fence he knew, but he had reneged.

  Wacky wanted revenge, so he retrieved the mangled dead cat and attached a note with a straight pin to the cat’s hide. The note read: “This is all the pussy you’re ever going to get, you cheap cocksucker.” He then placed the cat on the lieutenant’s desk.

  Beckworth found it the next morning and went insane. He ordered an all-points bulletin for the dog. He didn’t have to look far. Night Train was discovered where he had been placed the previous night—in the back seat of my car. Beckworth couldn’t mess with me because he knew I could stop his golf lessons, but he could fuck over Night Train for dead sure. He had the dog arrested and placed in the drunk tank. It was the wrong thing to do. Night Train attacked and almost killed three winos. When the jailer was aroused by their screams and rushed to open the tank door, Night Train ran straight past him, out the door of Wilshire Station, across Pico Boulevard and all the way home to Wacky’s apartment, where the two of them lived happily—listening to saxophone music—until the end of the last season of my youth.

  * * *

  —

  A week after the dead cat episode, Beckworth was still pissed.

  We were at the driving range at Rancho Park, where I was trying, unsuccessfully, to correct his chronic slice. It was hopeless. The price of working day watch was high.