My Dark Places Read online

  Lloyd moved into the Westwood Hotel. He was off of booze and hard dope and on marijuana maintenance himself. He was flirting with the notion of real sobriety. I told him I wasn’t interested.

  I lied.

  I was almost 30. I wanted to do things. I wasn’t stealing. I wasn’t lusting for my mother. I had my brain back on permanent loan from God or other cosmic sources. I did not hear voices. I was not as fucked-up as I used to be.

  And I was not a civilized human being.

  Marijuana maintenance filled me out physically. I ate a lot, lugged golf bags and cranked hundreds of daily push-ups. I was big, strong and hulking. I had beady brown eyes and wore bead-enhancing wire-rimmed glasses. I was stoned all the time. I looked like a crazy man consumed by interior monologue. Strangers found me disturbing.

  Women found me scary. I tried to pick a few women up in bookstores and frightened the shit out of them. I knew I came off desperate and socially unkempt. My hygiene was markedly substandard.

  I was hungry. I wanted love and sex. I wanted to give my mental stories to the world.

  I knew I couldn’t have those things in my current condition. I had to renounce all forms of dope. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t steal. I couldn’t lie. I had to be a locked-down, uptight, pucker-assed motherfucker. I had to repudiate my old life. I had to build a new life from the sheer desiccated force of my old one.

  I liked the concept. It appealed to my extremist nature. I liked the self-immolation aspect. I liked the air of total apostasy.

  I danced with the concept for weeks. It blitzed my storytelling drive and soured my taste for dope. I wanted to change my whole life.

  Lloyd cleaned up in AA. He told me total abstinence was better than booze and dope at its best. I believed him. He was always smarter and stronger and more resourceful than me.

  I followed his lead. I said “Fuck it” and shrugged off my old life.

  AA was wild. The late-’70s scene was craaaaaazy. It was redemption and sex and God and big stupid pratfalls. It was my sentimental education and road back to the world.

  I met a lot of people who’d lived my life with their own variations. I heard stories that topped mine for sheer horror. I made friends. I learned moral precepts and developed a plainly expressed faith in God that was no more complex and just as heartfelt as a kid in Sunday school’s.

  My initial entry hurt. AA meetings taxed me. The people talked ambiguous juju. I only stuck around to hold hands with women during the Lord’s Prayer.

  The women magnetized me and kept me coming back. I returned “one day at a time” for some hand holding. Lust and my apostolic will kept me sober.

  AA did a subtle job on me. The literature critiqued alcoholism and drug addiction brilliantly. I saw that I carried one strain of a common plague. My story was banal in that context. Only a few incidental details made me unique. The critique gave AA principles a strong moral kick. I found them wholly credible and trusted in their efficacy.

  The principles won me over. The people made me capitulate.

  I got tight with some guys. I unclenched around women and cut my ego loose at AA lecterns. I became an accomplished public speaker fast. My self-destructive exhibitionism turned around full-circle.

  Westside AA swung hard. The demographic makeup was young, white and horny. Booze and dope were out. Sex was in. The Westside mandate was Stay sober, trust God and fuck.

  People went to “Hot Tub Fever” after meetings. A guy threw sober wife-swapping parties. Men and women met at meetings and got married in Vegas two hours later. Nude pool parties reigned. Women hit on men blatantly. Annie “Wild Thing” B. flashed her breasts at Kenny’s Deli after every Thursday-night Ohio Street meeting.

  I got laid. I went through one-, two- and three-night stands and wrenching stabs at hard-line monogamy. I let detoxing smack addicts crash on my floor while I boogied to late dates at Hot Tub Fever. I made 300 a week at the golf course and spent most of it on women. I picked up junkie prostitutes, took them to AA meetings and fed them the Black Dahlia story to scare them out of hooking. It was a frenetic, often joyous profligacy.

  I lived out most of my dope-fueled sex dreams sober.

  The real world eclipsed my fantasy world. My one persistent fantasy was that story I knew was a novel.

  It haunted me. It invaded my thoughts at strange times. I didn’t know if I had the stones to write it. I was enjoying a season of comfort. I didn’t know that I was running from old things.

  My mother was 20 years dead. My father was dead 13. I dreamed about him. I never dreamed about her.

  My new life was long on fervor and short on retrospection. I knew I abandoned my father and hastened his death and paid the debt off in increments. My mother was something else.

  I knew her only in shame and loathing. I plundered her in a fever dream and denied my own message of yearning. I was afraid to resurrect her and love her body-and-soul.

  I wrote my novel and sold it. It was all about LA. crime and me. I was afraid to stalk the redhead and give her secrets up. I hadn’t met the man who’d bring her home to me.

  III

  STONER

  You were a ghost. I found you in shadows and reached out to you in terrible ways. You didn’t censure me. You withstood my assaults and let me punish myself.

  You made me. You formed me. You gave me a ghostly presence to brutalize. I never wondered how you haunted other people. I never questioned my sole ownership of your spirit.

  I wouldn’t share my claim. I remade you perversely and sealed you off where others couldn’t touch you. I didn’t know that simple selfishness rendered all my claims invalid.

  You live outside of me. You live in the buried thoughts of strangers. You live through your will to hide and dissemble. You live through your will to elude me.

  I am determined to find you. I know I can’t do it alone.

  12

  His ghosts were all women. They ran through his dreams interchangeably.

  The decomp off Route 126. The waitress in the Marina. The teenager stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.

  Dream logic distorted the details. Victims moved between crime scenes and displayed conflicting signs of death. They came to life sometimes. They looked older or younger or just like they did when they fell.

  Daisie Mae was sodomized like Bunny. Karen took the sap shots that knocked Tracy to her knees. The sap was homemade. The killers stuffed ball bearings into a length of garden hose and taped the ends shut.

  The instant resurrections were unnerving. The women were supposed to stay dead. Murder brought them to him. His love began the moment they died.

  He was dreaming a lot. He was giving up the chase and going through some kind of early withdrawal. It was time to get out. He gave it all he had. He wanted out unequivocally.

  He was leaving debts unpaid. Karen would be sending him reminders. He failed her because the connections weren’t there and other murders scattered his obligations. He was a victim of confusion and chance—just as she was.

  He’d try to pay her off with the love he still carried.

  His name was Bill Stoner. He was 53 years old and a homicide detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was married and had twenty-eight-year-old twin sons.

  It was late March ’94. He was leaving the job in mid-April. He’d served 32 years and worked Homicide for the past 14. He was retiring as a sergeant with 25 years in grade. His pension would sustain him nicely.

  He was leaving the job intact. He wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t obese from liquor and junk food. He stayed with the same woman for 30-plus years and rode out the rough times with her. He didn’t go the bifurcated route so many cops did. He wasn’t juggling a family and a series of girlfriends in the new gender-integrated law-enforcement community.

  He didn’t hide behind the job or revel in a dark world-view. He knew that isolation spawned resentment and self-pity. Police work was inherently ambiguous. Cops developed simple codes to insu
re their moral grounding. The codes reduced complex issues to kick-ass epigrams. Every epigram boiled down to this: Cops know things that other people don’t. Every epigram obfuscated as much as it enlightened.

  Homicide taught him that. He learned it gradually. He saw slam-dunk cases through to successful adjudication and did not understand why the murders occurred. He came to distrust simple answers and solutions and exulted in the few viable ones that he found. He learned to reserve judgment, shut his ego down and make people come to him. It was an inquisitor’s stance. It gave him some distance on himself. It helped him tone down his general temperament and rein in some shitty off-the-job behavior.

  The first 17 years of his marriage were a brush war. He fought Ann. She fought him. It stayed verbal out of luck and a collective sense of boundary. They were equally voluble and profane and thus evenly matched. Their demands were equally selfish. They brought equal reserves of love to the war.

  He grew up as a homicide detective. Ann grew up as a registered nurse. She entered her career late. Their marriage survived because they both grew up in the death business.

  Ann retired early. She had high blood pressure and bad allergies. Their bad years put some bad mileage on her.

  And him.

  He was exhausted. Hundreds of murders and the rough stretch with Ann made for one big load. He wanted to drop the whole thing.

  He knew how to let things go. The death business taught him that. He wanted to be a full-time husband and father. He wanted to see Ann and the boys up-close and permanent.

  Bob was running an Ikea store. He was married to a solid woman and had a baby daughter. Bob toed the line. Bill Junior was more problematic. He was lifting weights, going to college and working as a bouncer. He had a son with his Japanese ex-girlfriend. Bill Junior was a brilliant kid and an inveterate fuck-head.

  He loved his grandchildren to death. Life was a kick in the head.

  He had a nice house in Orange County. He had his health and money socked away. He had a good marriage and a separate dialogue with dead women. It was his own take on the Laura Syndrome.

  Homicide detectives loved the movie Laura. A cop gets obsessed with a murder victim and finds out she’s still alive. She’s beautiful and mysterious. She falls in love with the cop.

  Most homicide cops were romantics. They blasted through lives devastated by murder and dispensed comfort and counsel. They nursed entire families. They met the sisters and female friends of their victims and succumbed to sexual tension hotwired to bereavement. They blew their marriages off behind situational drama.

  He wasn’t that crazy or hooked on theatrics. The flip side of Laura was Double Indemnity: A man meets a woman and flushes his life down the toilet. Both scenarios were equally fatuous.

  Dead women fired up his imagination. He honored them with tender thoughts. He didn’t let them run his life.

  He was set to retire soon. Things were running through his head fast and bright.

  He had to drive out to the Bureau. A man was meeting him at 9:00. His mother was murdered 30-some years back. The man wanted to see her file.

  The January earthquake wrecked the Hall of Justice. Sheriff’s Homicide moved to the City of Commerce. It was an hour’s shot north of Orange County.

  He took the 405 to the 710. Freeway runs were half of any given homicide job. Freeway runs exhausted him.

  L.A. County was large, topographically diverse and traversable only by freeway. Freeways streamlined body-disposal problems. Killers could zip to remote canyons and dump their victims fast. Freeways and freeway embankments were four-star drop zones. He rated freeways by their body-dump past and body-dump potential. Every stretch of L.A. freeway marked a dump site or the route to a crime scene. Every on- and off-ramp led him to some murder.

  Bodies tended to stack up in the worst parts of the county. He knew every mile of freeway to and from every skunk town with a Sheriff’s Homicide contract. The mileage accrued and weighed his weary ass down. He wanted to get off the Drop Zone Expressway forever.

  Orange County to downtown L.A. was a hundred miles round-trip. He lived in Orange County because it wasn’t L.A. County and one big map of past and present murder. Most of Orange County was white and monolithically square. He fit in superficially. Cops were hellions masquerading as squares. He liked the Orange County vibe. People got outraged over shit he saw every day. Orange County made him feel slightly disingenuous. Cops flocked to places like Orange County to live the illusion of better times past and pretend they were somebody else. A lot of them carried reactionary baggage. He dumped his a long time ago.

  He lived where he did to keep his two worlds separate. The freeway was just a symbol and a symptom. He’d always be running back and forth—one way or another.

  Sheriff’s Homicide was working out of a courtyard industrial complex. They were squeezed in between toolmaking and computer-chip firms. The setup was temporary. They were supposed to move to permanent digs soon.

  The Hall of Justice oozed style. This place didn’t look remotely coplike. The exterior was plain white stucco. The interior was plain white drywall. The main room featured a hundred desks pushed together. The place looked like a phone sales front.

  The Unsolved Unit was walled off separately. A storeroom lined with shelves adjoined it. The shelves were stuffed with unsolved homicide files.

  Each file was marked with the letter Z and a six-digit number. Stoner found Z-483-362 and carried it back to his desk.

  He spent seven years at Unsolved. The unit had a simple mandate: Check Z-files for workable leads and assess new information coming in on unsolved murders. The job was public relations and anthropological study.

  Unsolved cops rarely solved murders. They fielded phone tips, perused files and got hooked on old killings. They ran checks on old suspects and talked to old detectives. Unsolved entailed a lot of desk work. Older men rotated in before they retired.

  Stoner was ordered in young. Captain Grimm had a special job for him. Grimm thought the Cotton Club murder was workable. He told Stoner to work it full-time.

  The job took four years. It was a high-profile, career-defining glory case.

  It kicked his ass. It put a lot of freeway miles on him.

  Stoner looked through the Z-file he pulled. The autopsy photo was gruesome. The Arroyo High shots were almost as ugly. He’d prepare the man first.

  Cops cruised by his desk and ragged him about his retirement. His partner, Bill McComas, just had a quadruple bypass. The guys wanted a progress report.

  Mac was tenuously okay. He was set to retire next month— less than intact.

  Stoner kicked his chair back and daydreamed. He was still seeing things fast and bright.

  He was a California boy. His people split Fresno and bopped to L.A. County during the war. His parents fought like cougars. It pissed him off and scared his sisters.

  He grew up in South Gate. It was flat, hot and postwar stucco. Transplanted Okies reigned. They liked hot rods and barn music. They worked industrial jobs and snagged boom-economy paychecks. The old South Gate spawned blue-collar squares. The new South Gate spawned dope fiends.

  He grew up hooked on girls and sports and nursed a vague sense of adventure. His father was a foreman at the Proto-Tool plant. It was lots of work for marginal pay and zero adventure. He tried Proto-Tool himself. It was boring and hard on the body. He tried junior college and pondered a teaching career. The notion didn’t really send him.

  His sisters married cops. He had one brother-in-law on the South Gate PD and one on the Highway Patrol. They told him enticing stories. The yarns dovetailed with some other notions he’d been kicking around.

  He wanted adventure. He wanted to help people. He took the entrance test for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department the day after his twenty-first birthday.

  He passed it. He passed the physical and the background check. He was assigned to the Sheriff’s Academy class of December ’61.

  The Department was shorth
anded. He was pre-assigned to the Hall of Justice Jail. He met some celebrated killers straight off.

  He met John Deptula. Crazy John burglarized a bowling alley and woke up a live-in handyman named Roger Alan Mosser. Deptula beat Mosser to death and carted his body out to the Angeles National Forest. He decapitated Mosser and stuck his head down a campground porta-toilet. Ward Hallinen cleared the case for Sheriff’s Homicide.

  He met Sam LoCigno. LoCigno popped Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen. It was a contract hit. It occurred at Rondelli’s Restaurant in December ’59. The hit was botched six ways from Sunday.

  His tier featured drag queens and badass armed robbers. He listened to them and learned things. He entered the Academy and devoured a four-month course in criminal justice. He met a good-looking blonde named Ann Schumacher. She was working at the Autonetics plant in Downey. They made plans to go out on his graduation night.

  He graduated the Academy in April ’62. He took Ann to the Crescendo on the swinging Sunset Strip. Ann looked good. He looked good. He was packing a .38 snub-nose. He was twenty-one years old and unassailably cool.

  He wanted to work a prowl-car beat. The Sheriff’s were running patrol units out of fourteen stations. He wanted full-time action.

  He got jail duty.

  They assigned him to the Wayside Honor Rancho. It was sixty-five miles from his pad. The job initiated his long and ugly relationship with freeways.

  Wayside knocked some youth out of him. Wayside was a good course in pre-breakdown American justice.

  Wayside housed inmates sentenced to county time and Hall of Justice Jail overflow headed to the joint. Whites, Negroes and Mexicans hated each other but refrained from racial warfare. Wayside was an efficient cog in a still-operational system. The system worked because criminal numbers were far short of stratospheric and most criminals did not employ violence. Heroin was the big bad drug of the era. Heroin was a well-contained dope epidemic. Heroin made you pull B&Es and pimp your girlfriend to support your habit. Heroin made you nod out. Heroin did not make you freak out and chop up your girlfriend—like crack would 20 years later. The system worked because felons and misdemeanants plead guilty most of the time and did not file nuisance appeals routinely. The system worked because pre-breakdown jail time was doable. Criminals were pre-psychologized. They accepted authority. They knew they were lowlife scum because they saw it on TV and read it in the papers. They were locked into a rigged game. Authority usually won. They took pleasure in picayune triumphs and reveled in the game’s machinations. The game was insiderism. Insiderism and fatalism were hip. If you stayed shy of the gas chamber, the worst you’d get was penitentiary time. Pre-breakdown joint time was doable. You could drink pruno and fuck sissies in the ass. The system worked because America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.