My Dark Places

20

The Bobbie Long digression stunned me. I spent four days alone with the file.

I put three crime scene photos up on my corkboard. I placed a shot of Bobbie Long alive beside a shot of my mother. I tacked up a Jim Boss Bennett mug shot. I centered the collage around three shots of Jean Ellroy dead.

The effect was more blunt than shocking. I wanted to undermine my mother’s victimhood and objectify her death. There’s the blood on her lips. There’s her pubic hair. There’s the cord and stocking on her neck.

I stared at the corkboard. I bought another board and placed the two together. I tacked up all the Long and Ellroy crime scene shots in contrasting order. I memorized the points of resemblance and the points of departure.

Two ligatures on Jean. One ligature on Bobbie. The purse by the barbed-wire fence. The ivy thicket and the dirt road by the water-pump station. The two overcoats identically discarded.

My mother looked her age and then some. Bobbie Long looked younger than hers. Jim Boss Bennett looked too countrified to be the Swarthy Man.

I studied the Long file. I studied the Ellroy file. I read the Long and Ellroy Blue Books and all the reports and note slips in both folders. I stared at my wall display. I wanted to de-eroticize my mother and get used to seeing her dead. I put the two cases together and built chronologies and narrative lines from odd bits of data.

My mother left the house between 8:00 and 8:30. She was seen at the Manger Bar “between 8:00 and 9:00.” She was alone. The Manger Bar was near the Desert Inn and Stan’s Drive-in. My mother and the Swarthy Man arrived at Stan’s some time after 10:00. Lavonne Chambers served them. They left Stan’s. They arrived at the Desert Inn some time after 10:30. The Blonde Woman arrived with them. Michael Whittaker crashed the party. Margie Trawick observed the group. She left the Desert Inn at 11:30. My mother, the Swarthy Man, the Blonde and Mike Whittaker were still seated together. My mother, the Swarthy Man and the Blonde left around midnight. A waitress named Myrtle Mawby saw my mother and the Swarthy Man at the Desert Inn around 2:00 a.m. They left. They arrived at Stan’s Drive-in around 2:15. Lavonne Chambers served them again. They drove off around 2:40. My mother’s body was discovered at 10:10 a.m. Her car was found behind the Desert Inn.

That was all witness-verified gospel. The chronological gaps formed theoretical vacuums. The Bobbie Long chronology was simple. Bobbie went to Santa Anita Racetrack. Her body was found in La Puente—eight miles southeast.

She met a man at the track. He fed her, fucked her and killed her. It was non-witness-verified gospel. I believed it. Stoner believed it. We couldn’t prove it. The cops operated on that premise back in ’59. It was indisputable today. My mother’s last night alive defied strict interpretation.

She left the house in her car. She was at the Manger Bar alone. She met the Swarthy Man somewhere. She dropped her car off somewhere and got into his car. Lavonne Chambers served them in his car. They left Stan’s Drive-in. They went to the Desert Inn. They picked up the Blonde en route. They went back to Stan’s in his car. Her car was found behind the Desert Inn.

She could have met the Swarthy Man at his pad. She could have met him at a cocktail lounge. She could have left her car at either location. They went to Stan’s in his car. She could have picked up her car right after. He could have picked up the Blonde. She could have picked up the Blonde. They could have met the Blonde outside the Desert Inn. They parried at the Desert Inn. They left together. They could have gone somewhere as a group. The Blonde could have gone off alone. My mother and the Swarthy Man could have kissed and fondled in his car or her car behind the Desert Inn. They could have gone to his pad. They could have kissed and fondled in the Desert Inn parking lot before that 2:00 a.m. nightcap. She could have turned off the sex in his car or her car. She could have shut him down at his pad. They could have gone to the Blonde’s pad. She could have shut him down there. They went back to the Desert Inn. They could have gone back from the Blonde’s place or the Swarthy Man’s place or another cocktail lounge or any dark street in the San Gabriel Valley. My mother could have left her car at the Blonde’s place or the Swarthy Man’s place. She could have left it at either location during any one of the reconstructive time gaps in the evening. The Swarthy Man could have retrieved the car after he killed her. He could have dumped it in the Desert Inn parking lot at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. The Blonde could have dumped it. They could have run a two-car convoy. They could have split the scene in the Blonde’s car or the Swarthy Man’s car.

It’s 2:40 a.m. My mother and the Swarthy Man split Stan’s Drive-in. Her car is parked behind the Desert Inn or parked somewhere else. He’s bored and sullen. She’s half-drunk and chatty. They go to his place or the Blonde’s place or Arroyo High School or someplace. She shuts him down again or says the wrong thing or looks at him the wrong way or enrages him with a barely perceptible gesture.

Maybe it’s rape. Maybe it’s sex by consent. Maybe Stoner’s reconstruction was valid. Maybe my MORE theory hit some factual chords. Maybe my mother balked at a three-way at some point in the evening. Maybe the Swarthy Man decided to coerce some solo action. Maybe Lavonne Chambers and Margie Trawick got their times wrong and fucked up the means to establish any kind of accurate time line. Maybe Myrtle Mawby got her time wrong. Maybe my mother and the Swarthy Man left the Desert Inn with the Blonde and did not return for that 2:00 a.m. nightcap. You had a killer and a victim. You had an unidentified woman. You had three female witnesses and a drunken male witness. You had a seven-hour time span and a geographically localized series of prosaic events that resulted in murder. You could extrapolate off the established facts and interpret the prelude in an infinite number of ways.

She might have met the Swarthy Man and the Blonde that night. She might have met them on some previous honky-tonk jaunt. She might have met them separately. The Blonde might have set her up with the Swarthy Man. The Blonde might be an old friend. The Blonde might have urged her to move out to El Monte. The Swarthy Man might be an old lover back for more.

He might be a former Packard-Bell or Airtek employee. He might be an old barroom flame passing through. He might have killed Bobbie Long seven months after he killed my mother.

There was no telephone at 756 Maple. The cops couldn’t check my mother’s toll calls. She might have called the Blonde or the Swarthy Man that evening or some time in the four months she lived in El Monte. Every call outside El Monte proper would register on her phone bills. The Blonde might have lived in Baldwin Park or West Covina. The Swarthy Man might have lived in Temple City. The cops never found my mother’s purse. The cops didn’t find an address book at 756 Maple. It was probably in my mother’s purse. She carried her purse that night. The Swarthy Man got rid of the purse. His name might have been in the address book. The Blonde’s name might have been in it.

It was 1958. Most people had telephones. My mother didn’t. She was hiding out in El Monte.

I studied my mother’s file. I studied the Long file. I picked up strange facts and a wrenching omission.

My mother left an unfinished drink in the kitchen. Maybe the Blonde called her up and suggested some fun. Maybe our cramped little house closed in on her and forced her to bolt. Bobbie Long might have been a closet juicer. A cop found two bottles in her kitchen. I always thought my mother fought the man who killed her. I always thought the cops found bloody skin under her nails. The autopsy report stated nothing of the kind. It was my heroic embellishment. I cast my mother as a redheaded tigress and carried the image for 36 years.

Jean and Bobbie. Bobbie and Jean.

Two murder victims. Near-identical crime scenes a few miles apart. A strong consensus at Sheriff’s Homicide.

The guys thought one man killed both women.

Stoner leaned that way. I leaned that way with one reservation. I did not see the Swarthy Man as a serial killer.

I forced myself to stand back from the judgment. I knew my grounds for rejection were partially aesthetic. Serial killers bored me and vexed me. They were a real-life statistical rarity and a media plague. Novels, films and TV shows celebrated them as monsters and exploited their potential to spark simple suspense plots. Serial killers were self-contained evil units. They were perfect foils for clichéd cops on the edge. Most of them suffered horrific childhood trauma. The details made for good pop-psych drama and gave them a certain victimized panache. Serial killers were hopped-up eyeball fuckers and ravaged inner children. They were scary in the moment and as dismissible as an empty box of popcorn. Their hyperbolic drives sucked in readers and viewers and distanced them within their own ghoulish rapture. Serial killers were very unprosaic. They were hip, slick and cool. They talked wild Nietzschean rebop. They were sexier than the one twisted fuck who killed two women out of lust and panic and perfectly applied pressure on a two-time-only trigger.

I cashed in on serial killers myself. I consciously rejected them three novels back. They were good background fodder. They were silly literary shit from any other standpoint. I didn’t think a serial killer killed my mother and Bobbie Long. I wasn’t sure the same man offed both women. The Swarthy Man was out in public with the Blonde and my mother. His rage seemed to escalate as the night wore on. He knew Arroyo High School. He probably lived in the San Gabriel Valley. Calculating psychopaths don’t shit where they eat.

The Blonde knew the Swarthy Man. She knew he killed my mother. He probably coerced her into silence. Bobbie Long was not the Blonde. Bobbie Long was just a low-rent victim waiting to happen.

She was cheap and avaricious. She was willful. She had a bad history with men and reveled in her petty triumphs over the male gender. She had a bad fucking mouth.

Maybe she met the Swarthy Man at the track. He killed that goddamn nurse last year and his wig was still a bit loose. He took Bobbie someplace for dinner. He lured her back to his crib and promoted some pussy. Bobbie demanded payment. He balked. His wig blew all the way.

Maybe he learned from the redhead. Maybe she flipped his switch irrevocably. Maybe she drove him out of the closet and showed him that rape and consensual sex were incomplete without strangulation. Maybe he became a serial killer.

Maybe Jean and Bobbie flipped his switch the same way. Maybe he killed those two women and crawled back into some psychic black hole. Stocking strangulation was a common MO. The Swarthy Man choked my mother with a sash cord and a stocking. Bobbie Long was killed with a single ligature.

Maybe they were killed by two different men.

I stepped back from the issue. Stoner warned me not to lock into any given theory or hypothetical reconstruction.

I spent four days alone with the files. I locked myself up and focused on the reports and note slips and the pictures on my corkboards. Stoner had duplicate copies of the Long and Ellroy Blue Books. We called each other three or four times a day and discussed points of evidence and general case logic. We agreed that Jim Boss Bennett was not the Swarthy Man. He was too booze-addled and recognizably fucked up to seduce women over the course of a long evening or day at the track. Jim Boss Bennett was a stone juicehead. He chased overtly alcoholic women. He found them in rock-bottom venues. The Desert Inn was upscale by his standards. He went to beer and wine bars that served Eastside Old Tap Lager and T-Bird on the rocks. Stoner said he was probably a longtime date raper. He didn’t penetrate Margaret Telsted. He probably penetrated a dozen other women. He probably blew a few rapes from alcoholic impotence and poor strategic planning. My mother liked cheap men. She possessed egalitarian standards. Jim Boss Bennett was too raggedy-assed and pathetic for her. She dug musky male lowlife. Jim Boss Bennett ran low on musk and high on body odor. He wasn’t her type.

We discussed the two women who snitched off their ex-husbands. Woman #i was named Marian Poirier. Her pussy-hound ex was named Albert. He allegedly had affairs with Jean Ellroy and two other women at Packard-Bell Electronics.

Mrs. Poirier admitted that she had no evidence. She said her husband knew two other murdered women. She said it was “too much of a coincidence.” She didn’t name the dead women. Jack Lawton wrote her a letter and asked her to name them. Mrs. Poirier wrote back and ignored Lawton’s question. Stoner wrote the woman off. He said she sounded like a borderline fruitcake.

Woman #2 was named Shirley Ann Miller. Her ex was named Will Lenard Miller. Will allegedly killed Jean Ellroy. Will allegedly babbled, “I shouldn’t have killed her!” in his sleep one night. Will allegedly painted his two-tone Buick a few days after the snuff. Will allegedly torched a furniture warehouse in 1968.

I found a stack of notes on Will Lenard Miller. Most of them were dated 1970. I saw Charlie Guenther’s name a half-dozen times.

Guenther was Stoner’s old partner. Bill said he was living up near Sacramento. He said we should fly up and run the Miller stuff by him.

We discussed Bobbie Long and my mother. We tried to plumb a through line to connect them in life.

They worked a few miles from each other. They fled bad marriages. They were secretive and self-sufficient. They were remote and superficially outgoing.

My mother was a drunk. Bobbie gambled compulsively. Gambling bored my mother. Sex left Bobbie cold.

They never met in life. All our through lines read like speculative fiction.

I spent some time with Bobbie. I turned off the living room lights and stretched out on the couch with pictures of her and my mother. I was close to a wall switch. I could think in the dark and tap the lights to look at Bobbie and Jean.

I resented Bobbie. I didn’t want her to distract me from my mother. I held my mother’s picture to keep Bobbie in her place. Bobbie was a tangential victim.

Bobbie storms to the front of the coffee line. Bobbie gambles herself into debt and rags a friend for playing cards. Gambling was a chickenshit obsession. The big thrill was the risk of self-annihilation and the shot at transcendence through money. Sex obsession was love six times or six thousand times removed. Both compulsions mortified. Both compulsions destroyed. Gambling was always about self-abnegation and money. Sex was a stupid glandular disposition and sometimes the route to big bad love.

Jean and Bobbie were sad and lonely. Jean and Bobbie were up on the same high ledge. You could sift through all the disparate bits of data in their files and say that they were the same woman.

I didn’t believe it. Bobbie was looking to score. Jean was looking to hide and get out of herself and maybe give herself up for something weird or new or better.

Bobbie Long was not our real focus. She was a possible or probable related murder victim and a possible or probable lead on the Swarthy Man’s deteriorating psyche. There were no Long case eyewitnesses. Bobbie’s friends were mid-50-ish in 1959 and were probably all dead now. The Swarthy Man was probably dead. He was probably a hard-living bar habitué. He probably smoked. He probably drank whisky or pure grain spirits. He might have bellied up from cancer in 1982. He might be hooked up to an oxygen mask in scenic La Puente.

I sat in the dark and held the two Identi-Kit portraits. I turned on the lights and looked at them once in a while. I violated Stoner’s rule and reconstructed the Swarthy Man.

Bill saw him as a smooth-talking salesman. I saw him as a slick blue-collar guy. He did odd jobs for extra money. He worked weekend gigs out of his beat-up ’55 or ’56 Olds. He carried a toolbox in the backseat. It contained a length of sash cord.

He was 38 or 39. He liked women older than him. They knew the score on one hand and fell for cheap romance on the other. He hated them as much as he liked them. He never asked himself why this was so.

He met women in bars and nightclubs. He beat a few women up over the years. They said things or did things that got under his skin. He took a few women the hard way. He came on scary and convinced them to give it up before he took it by force. He was fastidious. He was cautious. He could turn on the charm.

He lived in the San Gabriel Valley. He liked the nightspots. He liked the construction-boom scope of the place. He daydreamed a lot. He thought about hurting women. He never asked himself why he was thinking such flat-out crazy shit.

He killed that nurse in June ’58. The Blonde kept her mouth shut. He lived scared for six weeks, six months or a year. His fear fizzled out. He chased women and fucked women and beat up women once in a blue moon.

He aged. His sex drive abated. He quit chasing, fucking and beating up women. He thought about that nurse he killed way back when. He felt no remorse. He never killed another woman. He wasn’t a raging psycho. Things never spun out of control like they did that night with the nurse.

Or:

He picked up Bobbie Long at Santa Anita. The nurse was seven months dead. He picked up a few women in the meantime. He didn’t hurt them. He figured the nurse was some freak accident.

He screwed Bobbie Long. She said something or did something. He throttled her and dumped her body. He lived scared for a long fucking time. He was afraid of the cops and the gas chamber and afraid of himself. He lived with the fear. He grew old with it. He never killed another woman.

I called Stoner and pitched my reconstructions. He found the first one plausible and dismissed the second one. He said you don’t kill two women and just stop there. I disagreed. I told Bill he was unduly tied to cop empiricism. I said the San Gabriel Valley was this deus ex machina. The people who flocked there flocked there for unconscious reasons that superseded the conscious application of logic and made anything possible. The region defined the crime. The region was the crime. You had two sex killings and one or two sex killers eschewing standard sex-killer behavior. The region explained it all. The unconscious San Gabriel Valley migration explained every absurd and murderous act that went down there. Our job was to pinpoint three people within that migration.

Bill listened to my pitch and got specific. He said we needed to comb my mother’s file and start looking for old witnesses. We had to run DMV checks and criminal records checks. We had to evaluate the 1958 investigation. We had to trace my mother’s steps from her cradle to her grave. Homicide jobs veered off in weird directions most of the time. We had to stay on top of our information and always stand ready to jump.

I said I was ready now.

Bill told me to turn off the lights and go back to work.