Ellroy, James - Big Nowhere, The

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THE BIG NOWHERE

by James Ellroy

Flyleaf:

Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents: the Commie scare and a string of

brutal mutilation killings. Movieland leftists on a collision course with a

grand jury investigating team. A young homicide detective obsessed with

capturing a murderer of unparalleled viciousness--even though the price may be

horrific self-revelation. Gangsters and cops and fizers and Hollywood grotesques

in a _noir_ novel of epic scope and depth.

_The Big Nowhere_ is the story of three men caught up in a massive web

of ambition, perversion and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff's deputy stuck

with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they're his chance to make his name

as a cop--and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.'s Bureau

brass, climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain

custody of his adopted son--a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe.

Buzz Meeks--bagman, ex-Narco goon and pimp for Howard Hughes--is fighting

Communism for the money. All three have purchased tickets to a nightmare.

_The Big Nowhere_ is dark, brutal, tender and powerful; it is a

remarkably vivid portrait of a remarkable time and place. With his best-selling

_The Black Dahlia_, James Ellroy established himself as the modern master of

_noir_ fiction; _The Big Nowhere_ establishes him as a major American novelist.

The Mysterious Press, 129 West 56th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019

First Printing: September 1988

ISBN 0-89296-283-6

TO GLENDA REVELLE

It was written that i should

be loyal to the nightmare of my choice--

Joseph Conrad

_Heart of Darkness_

PART ONE

Red Crosscurrents

CHAPTER ONE

Thundershowers hit just before midnight, drowning out the horn honks and

noisemaker blare that usually signalled New Year's on the Strip, bringing 1950

to the West Hollywood Substation in a wave of hot squeals with meat wagon

backup.

At 12:03, a four-vehicle fender bender at Sunset and La Cienega resulted

in a half dozen injuries; the deputies who responded got eyewitness testimony:

the crash was caused by the clown in the brown DeSoto and the army major in the

Camp Cooke staff car racing no-hands with dogs wearing paper party hats on their

laps. Two arrests; one call to the Verdugo Street Animal Shelter. At 12:14, an

uninhabited vet's shack on Sweetzer collapsed in a heap of drenched prefab,

killing a teenaged boy and girl necking under the foundation; two County Morgue

DOA's. At 12:29, a neon lawn display featuring Santa Claus and his helpers

short-circuited, shooting flames along the electrical cord to its inside

terminus--a plug attached to a maze of adapters fueling a large, brightly lit

Christmas tree and nativity scene--severely burning three children heaping

tissue-wrapped presents on a glow-in-the-dark baby Jesus. One fire truck, one

ambulance and three Sheriff's prowl cars to the scene, a minor jurisdictional

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Ellroy, James - Big Nowhere, The

foul-up when the LAPD appeared in force, a rookie dispatcher mistaking the

Sierra Bonita Drive address as City--not County--territory. Then five drunk

drivings; then a slew of drunk and disorderlies as the clubs on the Strip let

out; then a strongarm heist in front of Dave's Blue Room, the victims two Iowa

yokels in town for the Rose Bowl, the muscle two niggers who escaped in a '47

Merc with purple fender skirts. When the rain petered out shortly after 3:00,

Detective Deputy Danny Upshaw, the station's acting watch commander, predicted

that the 1950's were going to be a shit decade.

Except for the drunks and non-booze misdemeanants in the holding tank,

he was alone. Every black-and-white and unmarked was out working graveyard;

there was no chain of command, no switchboard/clerical girl, no plainclothes

deputies in the squadroom. No khaki and olive drab patrolmen strutting around,

smirking over their plum duty--the Strip, glossy women, Christmas baskets from

Mickey Cohen, the real grief over the city line with the LAPD. No one to give

him the fisheye when he picked up his criminology textbooks: Vollmer, Thorwald,

Maslick--grid-searching crime scenes, blood spatter marks explained, how to toss

an 18-foot-by-24-foot room for hard evidence in an hour flat.

Danny settled in to read, his feet up on the front desk, the

station-to-prowler two-way turned down low. Hans Maslick was digressing on how

to roll fingerprints off severely burned flesh, the best chemical compounds to

remove scabbed tissue without singeing the skin below the surface of the print

pattern. Maslick had perfected his technique during the aftermath of a prison

fire in Düsseldorf in 1931. He had plenty of stiffs and fingerprint abstracts to

work from; there was a chemical plant nearby, with an ambitious young lab

assistant eager to help him. Together, they worked rapid fire: caustic solutions

burning too deep, milder compounds not penetrating scarred flesh. Danny jotted

chemical symbols on a notepad as he read; he pictured himself as Maslick's

assistant, working side by side with the great criminologist, who would give him

a fatherly embrace every time he made a brilliant logical jump. Soon he was

transposing the scorched nativity scene kids against his reading, going solo,

lifting prints off tiny fingers, double-checking them against birth records, the

hospital precaution they took in case newborns got switched around--

"Boss, we got a hot one."

Danny glanced up. Hosford, a uniformed deputy working the northeast

border of the division, was in the doorway. "What? Why didn't you call it in?"

"I did. You mustn't of--"

Danny pushed his text and notepad out of sight. "What is it?"

"Man down. I found him--Allegro, a half mile up from the Strip. Jesus

dog, you ain't ever seen noth--"

"You stay here, I'm going."

ooo

Allegro Street was a narrow residential road, half Spanish bungalow

courts, half building sites fronted by signs promising DELUXE LIVING in the

Tudor, French Provincial and Streamline Moderne styles. Danny drove up it in his

civilian car, slowing when he saw a barrier of sawhorses with red blinkers,

three black-and-whites parked behind it, their headlights beaming out into a

weed-strewn vacant lot.

He left his Chevy at the curb and walked over. A knot of deputies in

rain slickers were pointing flashlights at the ground; cherry lamp glow

fluttered over a sign for the ALLEGRO PLANTATION ARMS--FULL TENANCY BY SPRING

1951. The prowlers' low beams crisscrossed the lot, picking out booze empties,

sodden lumber and paper debris. Danny cleared his throat; one of the men wheeled

and pulled his gun, spastic twitchy. Danny said, "Easy, Gibbs. It's me, Upshaw."

Gibbs reholstered his piece; the other cops separated. Danny looked down

at the corpse, felt his knees buckle and made like a criminologist so he

wouldn't pass out or vomit:

"Deffry, Henderson, keep your lights on the decedent. Gibbs, write down

what I say verbatim.

"Dead male Caucasian, nude. Approximate age thirty to thirty-five. The

cadaver is lying supine, the arms and legs spread. There are ligature marks on

the neck, the eyes have been removed and the empty sockets are extruding a

gelatinous substance."

Danny squatted by the corpse; Deffry and Henderson moved their

flashlights in to give him some close-ups. "The genitals are bruised and

swollen, there are bite marks on the glans of the penis." He reached under the

dead man's back and felt wet dirt; he touched the chest near the heart, got dry

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skin and a residue of body heat. "There is no precipitation on the cadaver, and

since it rained heavily between midnight and three A.M., we can assume the

victim was placed here within the past hour."

A siren wailed toward the scene. Danny grabbed Deffry's flashlight and

went in extra close, examining the worst of it. "There is a total of six oval,

irregular, circumscribed wounds on the torso between the navel and rib cage.

Shredded flesh outlines the perimeters, entrails coated with congealed blood

extruding from them. The skin around each wound is inflamed, directly outlining

the shred marks, and--"

Henderson said, "Hickeys sure as shit."

Danny felt his textbook spiel snap. "What are you talking about?"

Henderson sighed. "You know, love bites. Like when a dame starts sucking

on your neck. Gibbsey, show plainclothes here what that hat check girl at the

Blue Room did to you Christmas."

Gibbs chuckled and kept writing; Danny stood up, pissed at being

patronized by a flunky harness bull. Not talking made the stiff sucker-punch

him; his legs were rubber and his stomach was flip-flops. He flashed the

five-cell at the ground surrounding the dead man, saw that it had been

thoroughly trampled by LASD-issue brogans and that the prowl cars had

obliterated any possible tire tracks. Gibbs said, "I ain't sure I got all them

words spelled right."

Danny found his textbook voice. "It doesn't matter. Just hold on to it

and give it to Captain Dietrich in the morning."

"But I'm off at eight. The skipper don't come in till ten, and I got

Bowl tickets."

"Sorry, but you're staying here until daywatch relieves you or the lab

techs show up."

"The County lab's closed New Year's, and I've had them tickets--"

A Coroner's wagon pulled to a stop by the sawhorses, killing its siren;

Danny turned to Henderson. "Crime scene ropes, no reporters or rubberneckers.

Gibbs stays posted here, you and Deffry start shaking down the locals. You know

the drill: witnesses to the dumping, suspicious loiterers, vehicles."

"Upshaw, it is four-twenty fucking A.M."

"Good. Start now, and you may be finished by noon. Leave a report in

duplicate with Dietrich, and write down all the addresses where no one was home,

so they can be checked later."

Henderson stormed over to his cruiser; Danny watched the Coroner's men

place the body on a stretcher and drape it with a blanket, Gibbs talking a blue

streak to them, Rose Bowl odds and a number on the Black Dahlia case, still

unsolved, still a hot topic. The profusion of cherry lights, flashlights and

headbeams darted over the lot, picking out details: mud puddles reflecting

moonlight and shadows, the neon haze of Hollywood in the distance. Danny thought

of his six months as a detective, his own two homicides open-and-shut family

jobs. The morgue men loaded the body, hung a U-turn and took off sans siren. A

Vollmer maxim hit home: "In murders of extreme passion, the killer will always

betray his pathology. If the detective is willing to sort physical evidence

objectively and then _think_ subjectively from the killer's viewpoint, he will

often solve crimes that are baffling in their randomness."

Eyes poked out. Sex organs mauled. Bare flesh gored down to the quick.

Danny followed the morgue wagon downtown, wishing his car had a siren to get him

there faster.

ooo

The LA City and County morgues occupied the bottom floor of a warehouse

on Alameda just south of Chinatown. A wooden partition separated the two

operations: examination slabs, refrigerators and dissecting tables for bodies

found within City confines, a different set of facilities for stiffs from the

unincorporated area patrolled by the Sheriff's Department. Before Mickey Cohen

sent the LAPD and Mayor's Office topsy-turvy with his Brenda Allen

revelations--the high brass taking kickbacks from LA's most famous whores--there

had been solid City/County cooperation, pathologists and cadaver caddies sharing

plastic sheets, bone saws and pickling fluid. Now, with the County cops giving

Cohen shelter on the Strip, there was nothing but interagency grief.

Edicts had come down from City Personnel: _no_ loan-outs of City medical

tools; _no_ fraternizing with the County crew while on duty; _no_ Bunsen burner

moonshine parties, for fear of mistagged DOA's and body parts snatched as

souvenirs resulting in scandals to back up the Brenda Allen job. Danny Upshaw

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Ellroy, James - Big Nowhere, The

followed the stretcher bearing John Doe # 1--1/1/50 up the County loading dock,

knowing his chance of getting his favorite City pathologist to do the autopsy

was close to nil.

The County side was bustling: traffic fatalities lined up on gurneys,

morgue jockeys tagging big toes, uniformed deputies writing dead body reports

and Coroner's men chaining cigarettes to kill the stench of blood, formaldehyde

and stale chink takeout. Danny side-stepped his way over to a fire exit, then

hooked around to the City loading dock, interrupting a trio of LAPD patrolmen

singing "Auld Lang Syne." Inside, the scene was identical to the one on the

County turf, except that the uniforms were navy blue--not olive drab and khaki.

Danny headed straight for the office of Dr. Norton Layman, Assistant

Chief Medical Examiner for the City of Los Angeles, author of _Science Against

Crime_ and his instructor for the USC night school course "Forensic Pathology

for Beginners." A note was tacked to the door: "I'm on days starting 1/1. May

God bless our new epoch with less business than the first half of this rather

bloody century--N .L."

Cursing to himself, Danny got out his pen and notepad and wrote:

"Doc--I should have known you'd take the busiest night of the year off.

There's an interesting 187 on the County side--male, sexually mutilated. Grist

for your new book, and since I caught the squeal I'm sure I'll get the case.

Will you try to get the autopsy? Capt. Dietrich says the ME on the County day

shift gambles and is susceptible to bribes. Enough said--D. Upshaw." He placed

the sheet of paper on Layman's desk blotter, anchored it with an ornamental

human skull and walked back to County territory.

Business had slacked off. Daylight was starting to creep across the

loading dock; the night's catch was lined up on steel examination slabs. Danny

looked around and saw that the only live one in the place was an ME's assistant

propped up in a chair by the dispatch room, alternately picking his teeth and

his nose.

He walked over. The old man, breathing raisinjack, said, "Who are you?"

"Deputy Upshaw, West Hollywood Squad. Who's catching?"

"Nice duty. Ain't you a little young for a gravy job like that?"

"I'm a hard worker. Who's catching?"

The old man wiped his nose-picking finger on the wall. "I can tell

conversation ain't your strong suit. Doc Katz was catching, only a snootful of

juice caught him. Now he's catching a few winks in that kike kayak of his. How

come the hebes all drive Cadillacs? You're a detective, you got an answer for

that?"

Danny felt his fists jam into his pockets and clench, his warning to

ease down. "It beats me. What's your name?"

"Ralph Carty, that's--"

"Ralph, have you ever done a preautopsy prep?"

Carty laughed. "Sonny, I done them all. I did Rudy Valentino, who was

hung like a cricket. I did Lupe Velez and Carole Landis, and I got pictures of

both of them. Lupe shaved her snatch. You pretend they ain't dead, you can have

fun. What do you say? Lupe and Carole, five-spot a throw?"

Danny got out his billfold and peeled off two tens; Carty went for his

inside jacket pocket, whipping out a deck of glossies. Danny said, "Nix. The guy

I want is on a tray over there."

"What?"

"I'm doing the prep. _Now_."

"Sonny, you ain't a certified County morgue attendant."

Danny added a five-spot to his bribe and handed it to Carty; the old man

kissed a faded snapshot of a dead movie star. "I guess you are now."

ooo

Danny got his evidence kit from the car and went to work, Carty standing

sentry in case the duty ME showed up pissed.

He stripped the sheet off the corpse and felt the limbs for postmortem

lividity; he held the arms and legs aloft, dropped them and got the buckle that

indicated rigor mortis coming on. He wrote, "Death around 1:00 A.M. likely," on

his notepad, then smeared the dead man's fingertips with ink and rolled his

prints onto a piece of stiff cardboard, pleased that he got a perfect spread the

first time around.

Next he examined the neck and head, measuring the purpled ligature marks

with a caliper, writing the specs down. The marks encompassed the entire neck;

much too long and broad to be a single- or double-hand span. Squinting, he saw a

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Ellroy, James - Big Nowhere, The

fiber under the chin; he picked it off with a tweezer, nailed it as white

terrycloth, placed it in a test tube and on impulse forced the half-locked jaws

open, holding them wide with a tongue depressor. Shining his penlight into the

mouth, he saw identical fibers on the roof, tongue and gums; he wrote,

"Strangled and suffocated with white terrycloth towel," took a deep breath and

checked out the eye sockets.

The penlight beam picked out bruised membranes streaked with the

gelatinous substance he'd noticed at the building site; Danny took a Q-tip and

swabbed three slide samples from each cavity. The goo had a minty medicinal

odor.

Working down the cadaver, Danny spot-checked every inch; scrutinizing

the inside crook of the elbows, he tingled: old needle scars--faded, but there

in force on both the right and left arms. The victim was a drug addict--maybe

reformed--none of the tracks were fresh. He wrote the information down, grabbed

his caliper and braced himself for the torso wounds.

The six ovals measured to within three centimeters of each other. They

all bore teeth mark outlines too shredded to cut casts from--and all were too

large to have been made by a human mouth biting straight down. Danny scraped

congealed blood off the intestinal tubes that extended from the wounds; he

smeared the samples on slides and made a speculative jump that Doc Layman would

have crucified him for:

The killer used an animal or animals in the postmortem abuse of his

victim.

Danny looked at the dead man's penis; saw unmistakable human teeth marks

on the glans, what Layman called "homicidal affection," working for laughs in a

classroom packed with ambitious off-duty cops. He knew he should check the

underside and scrotum, saw Ralph Carty watching him and did it, getting no

additional mutilations. Carty cackled, "Hung like a cashew"; Danny said, "Shut

the fuck up."

Carty shrugged and went back to his _Screenworld_. Danny turned the

corpse onto its back and gasped.

Deep, razor-sharp cuts, dozens of them crisscrossing the back and

shoulders from every angle, wood splinters matted into the narrow strips of

caked blood.

Danny stared, juxtaposing the front and backside mutilations, trying to

put them together. Cold sweat was soaking his shirt cuffs, making his hands

twitch. Then a gruff voice. "Carty, who is this guy? What's he doing here?"

Danny turned around, putting a pacify-the-locals grin on; he saw a fat

man in a soiled white smock and party hat with "1950" in green spangles. "Deputy

Upshaw. You're Dr. Katz?"

The fat man started to stick out his hand, then let it drop. "What are

you doing with that cadaver? And by what authority do you come in here and

disrupt my workload?"

Carty was shrinking into the background, making with supplicating eyes.

Danny said, "I caught the squeal and wanted to prep the body myself. I'm

qualified, and I lied and told Raiphy you said it was kosher."

Dr. Katz said, "Get out of here, Deputy Upshaw."

Danny said, "Happy New Year."

Ralph Carty said, "It's the truth, Doc--if I'm lyin', I'm flyin'."

Danny packed up his evidence kit, wavering on a destination: canvassing

Allegro Street or home, sleep and dreams: Kathy Hudgens, Buddy Jastrow, the

blood house on a Kern County back road. Walking out to the loading dock, he

looked back. Ralph Carty was splitting his bribe money with the doctor in the

rhinestone party hat.

CHAPTER TWO

Lieutenant Mal Considine was looking at a photograph of his wife and

son, trying not to think of Buchenwald.

It was just after 8:00 A.M.; Mal was in his cubicle at the DA's Criminal

Investigation Bureau, coming off a fitful sleep fueled by too much Scotch. His

trouser legs were covered with confetti; the roundheeled squadroom steno had

smeared kisses on his door, bracketing EXECUTIVE OFFICER in Max Factor's Crimson

Decadence. The City Hall sixth floor looked like a trampled parade ground; Ellis

Loew had just awakened him with a phone call: meet him and "someone else" at the

Pacific Dining Car in half an hour. And he'd left Celeste and Stefan at home

alone to ring in l950--because he knew his wife would turn the occasion into a

Side 5

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Ellroy, James - Big Nowhere, TheTHE BIG NOWHERE by James EllroyFlyleaf:Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents: the Commie scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Movieland leftists on a collision course with a grand jury investigating team. A young homicide detective obsessed with capturing ...

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