My Dark Places

22

Bill wanted to hit Lavonne Chambers clean. He didn’t want to call and request an interview. He wanted to hit her before she had time to think and formulate answers.

We flew to Reno. We got two rooms at a Best Western. The desk clerk gave us a map. We rented a car and drove to Lavonne Chambers’ last known address.

It was outside Reno proper. The area was semi-rural and semi-run-down. Everybody had a truck or a four-wheel-drive camper. The vehicles looked good. The houses looked bad.

We knocked on Lavonne Chambers’ door. A man opened up. Bill badged him and explained our situation. The man said Lavonne was his mother. She was at the Washoe County Medical Center. She had these bad asthma attacks.

The man remembered the murder. He was just a toddler then. He said he’d call his mother and prepare her.

He gave us directions to the hospital. We got there inside ten minutes. A nurse walked us to Lavonne Chambers’ room.

She was sitting up in bed. She had an oxygen tube in her nose. She didn’t look sick. She looked tough and sturdy.

She looked astonished.

Bill and I introduced ourselves. Bill stated his police affiliation. I said I was Jean Ellroy’s son. Lavonne Chambers stared at me. I shaved 36 years off of her and put her in a red-and-gold Stan’s Drive-in outfit. I felt a little shaky. I took a chair uninvited.

Bill sat down beside me. The bed was a few feet in front of us. I got out a notepad and pen. Lavonne said my mother was beautiful. Her voice was strong. She didn’t gasp or wheeze.

I thanked her. She said she felt so darn guilty. Carhops were supposed to jot down license plate numbers. The procedure helped the cops apprehend check dodgers. She never wrote down that plate number. My mother and the man looked respectable. She never regretted anything one iota as much.

I asked her how well she remembered that evening. She said she remembered it good. She used to replay her memories like a broken record. She wanted to be sure she remembered everything.

Bill asked her some background questions. I knew he was testing her. Her answers jibed with the background details in the file.

Bill said, Let’s go back. Lavonne said okay. She described my mother and the Swarthy Man for starters. She said my mother had red hair. She said she served my mother and the Swarthy Man twice. She couldn’t put their visits in chronological perspective. The cops thought the killer was local. She kept glancing around every night she worked at the drive-in. She kept her eyes peeled for years.

Bill mentioned the Bobbie Long murder. Lavonne said she didn’t know it. I said the same man might have killed Bobbie Long. Lavonne asked me when she was killed. I said 1/23/59. Lavonne said she talked to the cops all that summer. They fell out of touch way before January.

Bill mentioned the ’62 lineup. Lavonne’s memories clashed with established Blue Book facts. She said it was a one-man lineup. She said she was the only witness. She confirmed her basic Blue Book statement. She wasn’t sure the man she saw that day was the man with my mother.

Bill showed her two Jim Boss Bennett mug shots. She couldn’t place Jim Boss in any context. I showed her the two Identi-Kit portraits. She placed them immediately.

Bill said, Let’s go back. Lavonne said okay. She ran us through that night again. I interposed spatial questions. I wanted to know exactly where she was standing every time she saw the Swarthy Man. Lavonne said customers flashed their lights to signal for the check. I saw cars and darting high beams and Lavonne slinging trays and two-second profile blips of a man about to kill a woman.

I mentioned the Swarthy Man’s car. Bill cut me off. He asked Lavonne how well she knew cars back then. Most carhops knew all the makes and models. Did she know cars that well?

Lavonne said she was bad at cars. She was no good at distinguishing different makes and models. I saw where Bill was going. I asked Lavonne how she identified the Swarthy Man’s car.

Lavonne said she heard a news broadcast. The dead woman sounded like that redhead she served Saturday night. She stewed about it. She tried to remember the car the redhead was in. She talked to her boss. He pointed out different cars. She narrowed down the car that way.

I looked at Bill. He gave me the cutoff sign. He handed Lavonne a copy of the Jean Ellroy Blue Book and asked her to read through her statement. He said we’d be back later to discuss it.

Lavonne said we should come back after dinner. She told us to avoid the casinos. You just can’t beat the house odds.

We ate dinner at a steakhouse in the Reno Hilton. We discussed the car issue at length.

I said Lavonne’s car ID might be contaminated. Her boss might have confused her. Her Blue Book statement was emphatic. The Swarthy Man was driving a ’55 or ’56 Olds. Maybe Lavonne tagged the wrong car. Maybe the ID was faulty from the gate. Maybe Hallinen and Lawton got hip to the fact. Maybe that explained the low punch-card count in the file.

Bill said it was possible. Witnesses convinced themselves that certain things were true and stuck to their statements hell or high water. I asked him if we could check old car registration records. He said no. The information wasn’t computerized. The hand-filed records were destroyed a long time ago.

We finished our dinner and walked through the casino. I got a wild urge to shoot craps.

Bill explained the bets to make. The combinations confused me. I said “Fuck it” and put a hundred dollars on the pass line.

The shooter made four straight passes. I won $1,600.

I gave the croupier a hundred dollars and cashed in the rest of my chips. Bill said I should change my name to Bobbie Long Jr.

Lavonne waited up for us. She said she read her old statement. It didn’t spark any fresh recollections.

I thanked her for her diligence—then and now. She said my mother really was very beautiful.

The Reno trip taught me some things. I learned how to talk in a soft register. I learned how to rein in aggressive body language.

Stoner was my teacher. I knew I was shaping my detective persona to his exact specifications. He knew how to subordinate his ego and make people tell him things. I wanted to develop that skill. I wanted to develop it fast. I wanted old people to tell me things before they died or went senile.

A reporter from the L.A. Weekly called me. She wanted to do a story on the new investigation. I asked her if she’d include a toll-free tip-line number. She said she would.

Bill’s Social Security contact reported. He said Jim Boss Bennett died of natural causes in 1979. Billy Farrington reported. He said Jack Lawton’s widow was still alive. She promised to check her garage for Jack’s old notebooks and call if she found them. The clerk at the Bureau called Bill. She said she received Michael Whittaker’s rap sheet. The sheet ran ten pages. She ran down the details.

They were pathetic and horrific. Whittaker was 60 years old now. He was a hophead, a hype and a 30-year junkie. He danced with my mother at the Desert Inn.

I met Bill at the Bureau. We discussed Whittaker.

Bill said he was probably up in Frisco or in jail somewhere. I said he might be dead from AIDS or general attrition. Bill told the clerk to run a public utilities check. He wanted to pin Whittaker down. We had to find him. We had to find Margie Trawick.

I got out our reverse book printout. I said I could call all our Margie Phillips numbers. Bill said we should run an employment check first.

I had the name and address memorized. Margie Trawick worked at Tubesales—2211 Tubeway Avenue. Bill checked a Thomas Guide. The address was five minutes away.

We drove over. The place was a big warehouse and office building combined. We found the personnel boss. We talked to her. She checked her files. She said Margie Trawick worked here from ’56 to ’71. She said all personnel files were strictly confidential.

We persisted. The woman sighed and wrote down Bill’s home number. She said she’d call some old employees and ask them about Margie.

Bill and I drove back to the Bureau. We checked the Ellroy Blue Book and found three more names to run.

Roy Dunn and Al Manganiello—two Desert Inn bartenders. Ruth Schienle—the Airtek personnel director.

We ran the names through the DMV computer. We got four Roy Dunns, no Ruth Schienles and an Al Manganiello in Covina. We ran the names through the DOJ computer. We got three negative hits. We ran Ruth Schienle through the reverse book and got a possible hit in Washington State.

Bill called Al Manganiello. He got an extended dial tone. I called Ruth Schienle. A woman answered the phone.

She was 28 years old and unmarried. She had no relatives named Ruth Schienle.

Bill and I drove back to Orange County. We split up for the day. I took the file. I wanted to know every word in it. I wanted to forge connections that nobody else ever saw.

Bill called me that night. He said Margie Trawick died in 1972. She had terminal cancer. She was sitting in a chair at a beauty shop and collapsed from a brain hemorrhage.

We tracked Michael Whittaker down in San Francisco. We traced him to a dive in the Mission District. Bill called him. He said he wanted to discuss the Ellroy murder. Whittaker said, “All I did was dance with her!”

We took a cab to his hotel. Whittaker wasn’t there. The desk clerk said he boogied out with his wife a few minutes ago. We waited in the lobby. Dopers and hookers bopped through. They gave us weird looks. They sat around and bullshitted. We heard a dozen riffs on O. J. Simpson. The consensus was split two ways: O.J. was framed and O.J. offed the bitch justifiably.

We waited. We saw a ruckus at the projects across the street. A black kid ran in and sprayed the playground with some kind of assault weapon.

Nobody got hurt. The kid ran off. He looked like a delighted child trying out a new toy. The cops came and poked around. The desk clerk said stuff like that happened every day. Sometimes the little humps shot each other.

We waited for six hours. We walked down to a doughnut shop and got some coffee. We walked back. The desk clerk said Mike and his wife just snuck upstairs.

We walked up and knocked on the door. I was pissed off and dead tired. Whittaker let us in.

He was bony and potbellied. He wore his hair in a biker ponytail. He didn’t look scary. He looked weak. He looked like a freak who came to San Francisco to score dope and grow old on welfare.

The room was 9’ x 12’ tops. The floor was covered with pill vials and paperback crime novels. Whittaker’s wife weighed about 300 pounds. She was sprawled on a narrow daybed. The room smelled. I saw bugs on the floor and a line of ants around the baseboard. Bill pointed to the books and said, “Maybe you’ve got some fans here.”

I laughed. Whittaker stretched out on the bed. The mattress sagged and hit the floor.

There were no chairs. There was no bathroom. The sink smelled like a urinal.

Bill and I stood by the door. A breeze blew down the outside hallway. Whittaker and his wife came on obsequious. They started to justify their life and the pill bottles out in plain sight. I cut them off. I wanted to get to that night and hear Whittaker’s version. His formal statement made no sense. I wanted to take a hot knife to his brain.

Bill knew I was getting impatient. He gave me a let-me-talk sign. I moved back and stood in the doorway. Bill laid out a little I’m-not-here-to-judge-you/you’re-in-no-trouble rap. He sucked Whittaker and his wife right in.

Bill talked. Whittaker talked. His wife listened and looked at Bill. I listened and looked at Whittaker.

He ran down his 44 arrests. He did time for every dope charge in the fucking penal code.

Bill took him back to June ’58. Bill walked him to the Desert Inn that night. Whittaker said he went there with a “fat Hawaiian guy who knew karate.” The fat Hawaiian guy “beat a few guys up.” It was pure bullshit.

He didn’t remember the Blonde or the Swarthy Man. He didn’t remember the victim so good. He ran down his drunk arrest later that night. He said the cops questioned him the night after the murder and again two days or so later. He was on methadone now. Methadone fucked with his mind. He only went to that okie bar once. He never went back. The place put a hex on him. He had a pal named Spud then. He knew these guys the Sullivan brothers. They came from his hometown—McKeesport, Pennsylvania. His own brother died of cirrhosis. He had two sisters named Ruthie and Joanne—

I gave Bill the cutoff sign. He nodded and gave Whittaker a let’s-slow-down-now gesture.

Whittaker stopped talking. Bill said we had to get to the airport. He pointed to me and said I was the dead woman’s son. Whittaker oohed and aahed. His wife did a big gee-whiz number. I thawed out a little and slipped them a hundred dollars. It was crap-table money.

Billy Farrington reported. He said Dorothy Lawton couldn’t find Jack’s notebooks. He said he’d contact Jack’s sons and see if they had them.

I got a 1-800 line hooked up to my regular phone line. I changed the message on my answering machine. It went, “If you have information on the murder of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy on June 22, 1958, please leave a message at the tone.” I had two phone numbers and one answering machine. Every incoming caller got the murder message.

A producer from the Day One show called me. He said he read my GQ piece. He talked to some people at GQ and heard about the new investigation. He wanted to film a segment about it. It would run on prime-time network TV.

I said yes. I asked him if he’d run our tip number. He said yes.

I started to get a little queasy. The redhead was stepping out on a big new public scale. She lived in compartmentalized secrecy and shunned all public displays. Publicity was our most direct route to the Blonde. I had to justify my public displays that way.

Bill and I spent four days with the LA. Weekly reporter. We spent a week with the Day One crew. We took them to Arroyo High and Valenzuela’s Restaurant and the old stone cottage on Maple. We ate a lot of bad Mexican food. The folks at Valenzuela’s wondered who the hell we were and why we were always here with camera people and that old file and all those gory black & white pictures. They didn’t speak English. We didn’t speak Spanish. We tipped extravagantly and made Valenzuela’s our El Monte HQ. Bill and I called the place the Desert Inn. That was its righteous name. I started to love the place. That first nighttime visit scared me. My subsequent visits hit me sweet and soft. My mother danced on this spot. I was dancing with her now. The dance was all about reconciliation.

We met the man who owned my old house. His name was Geno Guevara. He bought the house in ’77. A preacher sold it to him. The Kryckis were long gone already.

Geno loved the media people. He let them tromp around his yard and take pictures. I spent some time inside the house. The interior was altered and enlarged. I shut my eyes and tore down the alterations. I stood in my bedroom and my mother’s bedroom the way they were then. I felt her. I smelled her. I smelled Early Times bourbon. The bathroom was intact from 1958. I saw her nude. I saw her run a towel between her legs.

Arroyo High became a public staging ground. The Day One crew shot Bill and me there. The L.A. Weekly photographer shot her own crime scene pix. School kids buzzed around. They wanted to know the whole story. They laughed and tried to squeeze in front of the cameras. We hit Arroyo High five or six times in the course of two media weeks. The visits felt like violations and vulgarizations. I didn’t want the place to lose its power. I didn’t want to turn King’s Row into a common access road and an everyday stop on the publicity track of my life.

El Monte was becoming benignly familiar. The metamorphosis was predictable and altogether disturbing. I wanted El Monte to stay elliptical. I wanted it to hide from me and teach me how she hid. I wanted to reclaim my old fear and learn from it. I wanted to strand myself in the few square miles of El Monte. I wanted to build a manhunting instinct from that isolation.

Bill and I finished our first media run. We found Peter Tubiolo, Roy Dunn and Ellis Outlaw’s daughter Jana. They ran us back to El Monte in 1958.

Tubiolo was 72 now. He was exactly half his current age then. He remembered me. He remembered my mother. He was heavyset and friendly then and now. I could have picked him out of a 50-man lineup. He’d aged in an absolutely recognizable fashion.

He was warm. He was gracious. He said he never went out with my mother. He never knew how the cops got that crazy idea.

I told them. It was true. I saw him pick my mother up in his blue-and-white Nash. I mentioned the Nash. Tubiolo said he loved that car. I didn’t dispute his claim about my mother. The cops cleared him then. His appearance and his guileless manner cleared him now. He was a widower. He was childless. He looked prosperous and seemed happy. He left Anne LeGore School in ’59. He became a big wheel in the L.A. County system. He lived a good life. He probably had some good years left.

He said he never went to the Desert Inn or Stan’s Drive-in. He said I was a high-strung kid. He said the Mexican kids from Medina Court had a dodge back then. They ditched their shoes and came to school barefoot. Kids had to wear shoes to school. It was a heavyweight rule. Tubiolo sent barefoot kids home all the time. My friends Reyes and Danny worked that dodge. I smoked a reefer with them. It was craaaaazy, daddy-o. I saw The Ten Commandments with them. I laughed at all the sacred hoo-ha. Reyes and Danny made me shut up. They were Catholic. My mother hated Catholics. She said they took their orders from Rome. The Swarthy Man was a Latin-type Caucasian. He was probably Catholic. All my mental circuits returned to that night.

Roy Dunn and Jana Outlaw took us back to the Desert Inn.

We interviewed them at home. Dunn lived in Duarte. Jana Outlaw lived in El Monte. They were San Gabriel Valley lifers.

Dunn remembered the murder. Jana didn’t. She was nine years old then. Dunn used to drink with Harry Andre. Harry drank at the Playroom Bar. Dunn worked at the Playroom and the Desert Inn. Ellis Outlaw paid good wages. Ellis choked to death on a piece of food in 1969. He was half-dead from booze already. Myrtle Mawby was dead. Ellis’ wife was dead. The Desert Inn enjoyed a ten-year run. The joint fucking rocked. Spade Cooley played there—years before he beat his wife to death. Ellis brought in colored entertainers. Joe Liggins and some Ink Spot clones played the Desert Inn. The Desert Inn was a bookie front. Ellis ran card games and served liquor after-hours. Hookers worked the bar. The food was good. Ellis fed the El Monte cops at a sizable discount. He sold the Desert Inn to a guy named Doug Schoenberger. Doug renamed it The Place. He let gambling and bookmaking and prostitution flourish. Doug was tight with an ex-El Monte cop named Keith Tedrow. Keith saw the Jean Ellroy crime scene. He spread a stupid rumor about Jean Ellroy’s body. He said the killer bit one nipple off. Keith quit the El Monte PD. He joined the Baldwin Park PD. He got murdered in ’71. He was parked in his car. A woman shot him. She pled insanity and beat the rap. It looked like Keith was trying to shake her down for a head job. Doug Schoenberger sold The Place and moved to Arizona. He got murdered in the mid-’8os. The crime went unsolved. Doug’s son was the #i suspect.

Roy and Jana knew the Desert Inn. They had the place down cold. They fell short on hard information.

We needed names.

We needed the names of old Desert Inn regulars and San Gabriel Valley cocktail lounge trawlers. We had to find out who they knew in 1958. We had to establish a range of friendships and acquaintanceships. We had to find names to match the physical characteristics of the Blonde and the Swarthy Man. We had to create an ever-widening concentric circle of names. We had to find two names in a big place and a faraway time.

Roy and Jana gave us three names:

An old Desert Inn waitress now employed at a local Moose Lodge. An old Stan’s carhop. An old Desert Inn bartender.

We found the waitress and the carhop. They didn’t know shit about the Jean Ellroy case and couldn’t supply any names. Roy and Jana got their time and venues wrong. The carhop worked at Simon’s Drive-in. The waitress worked at The Place, not the Desert Inn. She knew a much younger crowd.

Bill and I discussed the Desert Inn. We placed it in the context of late June ’58.

Ellis Outlaw was about to serve a drunk-driving sentence. He catered to local yokels and illegal off-track bettors. He catered to local hoods and satellite people with shit to hide from the cops. Margie Trawick saw the Blonde and the Swarthy Man one time only. Myrtle Mawby saw them one time only. Margie worked part-time. Myrtle worked part-time. The Swarthy Man was probably a local guy. The Desert Inn was the local spot. The Swarthy Man could have passed through before that night and left his image in a hundred memory banks. Hallinen and Lawton camped out at the Desert Inn all summer. They took down names and left them in their personal notebooks. Certain people could have lied to them. Certain people could have known. The Blonde could have owed Ellis Outlaw money. The Swarthy Man could have told certain people that the nurse was a goddamn cocktease. Certain people could have figured the cunt had it coming. Certain people could have lied to the cops.

Bill and I agreed.

Our crime played out within narrow boundaries. The Blonde and the Swarthy Man got lucky and fell through the cracks.

We had to uncover two names and link them to a runner in hiding.