My Dark Places

18

I drove out to El Monte that night. It was soaringly hot and humid.

The San Gabriel Valley always ran hot. My mother died in an early-summer heat wave. It was just that hot now.

I followed an old homing instinct. I kept my windows down and let hot air in the car. I passed the El Monte Police Station. It was right there in its 1958 location. The building looked different. It might have had a face-lift. My car felt like a fucking time machine.

I turned north on Peck Road. I remembered a long walk back from a movie. I sat through The Ten Commandments. I got home and found my mother blitzed to the gills.

I turned west at Peck and Bryant. I saw a 7-Eleven store on the southwest corner. The customers were Latin. The counterman was Asian. White El Monte was long gone. I turned on Maple and parked across the street from my old house.

It was my third visit in 36 years. Media people accompanied me the first two times. I was glib on both occasions. I pointed out anachronisms and riffed on what subsequent tenants did to the property. This was my first nighttime visit. Darkness covered the alterations and returned the house to me as it was then. I remembered the night I watched a rainstorm from my mother’s bedroom window. I stretched out on her bed and turned the lights off to see the colors better. My mother was out somewhere. She caught me in her bedroom once before and reprimanded me. I snuck around her bedroom and checked out her lingerie drawer every time she split for the evening.

I swung back to Peck Road and drove down to Medina Court. It was exponentially more run-down than it was in ’58. I saw four sidewalk dope buys in the course of three blocks. My mother drove me down Medina Court a few weeks before she died. I was a lazy little boy. She wanted to show me my future as an Anglo-Saxon wetback.

El Monte was a shit town now. El Monte was a shit town in 1958. It was a genteel shit town indigenous to its era. Dope was clandestine. Guns were scarce. El Monte was running at 10% of its current population and 1/30th of its current crime rate.

Jean Ellroy was a freak El Monte victim. El Monte appealed to her honky-tonk side. She thought she found a good place to hide. It met her safety standards. It included a weekend playground. She’d see the danger here today. She’d stay away. She brought her own danger here in 1958.

She sought this place out. She made it her separate world. It was 14 miles from my fictional and real L.A.

El Monte scared me. It was the bridge between my separate real and fictional worlds. It was a perfectly circumscribed zone of loss and full-blown random horror.

I drove to 11721 Valley. The Desert Inn was now Valenzuela’s Restaurant. It was a white adobe building with a terracotta roof.

I parked in the back. My mother parked her Buick in the same spot that night.

I walked into the restaurant. The layout shocked me.

It was narrow and L-shaped. A service counter faced the door. It looked exactly like the fantasy image I’d held for 36 years.

The booths. The low ceiling. The base of the L off to my right. Everything matched my old mental print.

Maybe she brought me here. Maybe I saw a picture. Maybe I just walked into a weird psychic matrix.

I stood in the doorway and looked around. All the waitresses and customers were Latin. I got half a dozen who-the-fuck-are-you looks.

I walked back to my car. I drove up Valley to Garvey. I cruised the parking lot on the northeast corner.

Stan’s Drive-In was here then. An abandoned coffee shop was here now. Stan’s was six blocks from the Desert Inn. The Desert Inn was a mile and a half from 756 Maple. 756 Maple was a mile and a half from Arroyo High School.

It was all tight and local.

I drove to Arroyo High. The sky was hazy black. I couldn’t see the mountains two miles north of me.

I parked on King’s Row. I hit my high beams and framed the crime scene.

I assumed the Swarthy Man’s perspective. I transposed my lust for MORE into his lust to fuck my mother. I put all my rage to surmount my past into his rage to destroy my mother’s resistance. I nailed his determination and the blood in his eyes. I fell short on his will to inflict pain in pursuit of pleasure.

I remembered a sad incident. It happened in ’71 or ’72.

It was 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. I was coming off inhalers in Robert Burns Park. I thought I heard a woman scream.

I wasn’t quite sure. I was jacked up on amphetamine. I was hearing the Voices.

The scream scared me. I knew it came from the apartments on the west side of the park. I wanted to run away and hide. I wanted to save the woman. I hesitated and ran toward the sound.

I scaled the park fence. I made a lot of noise.

I looked into a bright bedroom window. I saw a woman putting on a robe. She looked in my direction. She turned the light off and screamed. The scream didn’t sound like the scream I thought I heard. I jumped back into the park and ran off down Beverly Boulevard. The Voices followed me. They told me to find the woman and assure her I intended no harm. I figured out that the first scream wasn’t a scream. It was a woman making love.

I got drunk the next morning. The Voices subsided. I never apologized to the woman.

The incident spooked me. I scared that woman. I knew she’d never understand my good intentions.

I drove back to Newport Beach. I checked my machine and caught a message from Bill Stoner.

He said he had urgent news. He said to call him regardless of the time.

I called him. Bill said he found an old Unsolved file that blew his fucking mind.

The date was 1/23/59. The victim was named Elspeth “Bobbie” Long. She was beaten. She was strangled with a nylon stocking. She was dumped on a road in La Puente—four miles from El Monte. The Long case and the Ellroy case were point-by-point twins.