Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The THE BIG NOWHERE

Danny said, “No.”

Dudley Smith said, “Yes,” kissed him full on the lips and walked away whistling a love song.

o

o

o

Machines that know.

Drugs that don’t let you lie.

Danny took a cab home. He unlocked the door and went straight for his files: facts you could put together for the truth, Dudley and Breuning and HIM

nailed by 11:59, a last-minute reprieve like in the movies. He hit the hall light, opened the closet door. No file boxes, the rugs that covered them neatly folded on the floor.

Danny tore up the hall carpet and looked under it, dumped the bedroom cabinet and emptied the drawers, stripped the bed and yanked the medicine chest off the bathroom wall. He upended the living room furniture, looked under the cushions and tossed the kitchen drawers until the floor was all cutlery and broken dishes. He saw a half-full bottle by the radio, opened it, found his throat muscles too constricted and hurled it, knocking down the venetian blinds.

He walked to the window, looked out and saw Dudley Smith haloed by a streetlight.

And he knew he knew. And tomorrow they would all know.

Blackmail bait.

His name in sex files.

His name bandied in queer chitchat at the Chateau Marmont.

Machines that know.

Drugs that don’t let you lie.

Polygraph needles fluttering off the paper every time they asked him why he cared so much about a string of queer fag homo fruit snuffs.

No reprieve.

Danny unholstered his gun and stuck the barrel in his mouth. The taste of oil made him gag and he saw how it would look, the cops who found him making jokes about why he did it that way. He put the .45 down and walked to the kitchen.

Weapons galore.

Danny picked up a serrated-edged carving knife. He tested the heft, found it substantial and said goodbye to Mal and Jack and Doc. He apologized for the cars he stole and the guys he beat up who didn’t deserve it, who were just there when he wanted to hit something. He thought of his killer, thought that he murdered because someone made him what he himself was. He held the knife up and forgave him; he put the blade to his throat and slashed himself ear to ear, down to the windpipe in one clean stroke.

PART THREE

Wolverine

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

A week later Buzz went by the grave, his fourth visit since LASD hustled the kid into the ground. The plot was a low-rent number in an East LA cemetery; the stone read:

Daniel Thomas Upshaw

1922–1950

Side 158

Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The No beloved whatever of.

No son of whoever.

No crucifix cut into the tablet and no RIP. Nothing juicy to catch a passerby’s interest, like “Cop Killer” or “Almost DA’s Bureau Brass.” Nothing to spell it out true to whoever read the half-column hush job on the kid’s accidental death–a slip off a chair, a nose dive onto a kitchen cutlery rack.

Fall Guy.

Buzz bent down and pulled out a clump of crabgrass; the butt of the gun he’d killed Gene Niles with dug into his side. He stood up and kicked the marker; he thought that “Free Ride” and “Gravy Train” and “Dumb Okie Luck” might look good too, followed by a soliloquy on Deputy Danny Upshaw’s last days, lots of details on a tombstone skyscraper high, like the ones voodoo nigger pimps bought for themselves. Because Deputy Danny Upshaw was voodooing him, little pins stuck in a fat little Buzz Meeks voodoo doll.

Mal had called him with the word. The rain dug up Niles’ body, LAPD

grabbed Danny as a suspect, roughhoused him and cut him loose with orders to report for a lie detector test and sodium pentothal questioning the next day.

When the kid didn’t show, City bulls hit his pad in force and found him dead on the living room floor, throat slashed, the pad trashed. Nort Layman, distraught, did the autopsy, dying to call it a 187; the evidence wouldn’t let him: fingerprints on the knife and the angle of the cut and fall said

“self-inflicted,” case closed. Doc called the death wound “amazing”–no hesitation marks, Danny Upshaw wanted out bad and now.

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