CHAPTER FOUR
Part of him knew it was just a dream–that it was 1950, not 1941; that the story would run its course while part of him grasped for new details and part tried to be dead still so as not to disrupt the unraveling.
He was speeding south on 101, wheeling a hot La Salle sedan. Highway Patrol sirens were closing the gap; Kern County scrubland loomed all around him.
He saw a series of dirt roads snaking off the highway and hit the one on the far left, figuring the prowl cars would pursue straight ahead or down the middle.
The road wound past farmhouses and fruit pickers’ shacks into a box canyon; he heard sirens to his left and right, behind him and in front of him. Knowing any roadway was capture, he downshifted and plowed across furrowed dirt, gaining distance on the wheeirr, wheeirr, wheeirr. He saw stationary lights up ahead and made them for a farmhouse; a fence materialized; he downshifted, swung around in slow second gear and got a perfect view of a brightly lit picture window: Two men swinging axes at a young blonde woman pressed into a doorway. A half-second flash of an arm severed off. A wide-open mouth smeared with orange lipstick screaming mute.
The dream speeded up.
He made it to Bakersfield; unloaded the La Salle; got paid. Back to San Berdoo, biology classes at JC, nightmares about the mouth and the arm. Pearl Harbor, 4F from a punctured eardrum. No amount of study, cash GTAs or _anything_
can push the girl away. Months pass, and he returns to find out how and why.
It takes a while, but he comes up with a triangle: a missing local girl named Kathy Hudgens, her spurned lover Marty Sidwell–dead on Saipan–questioned by the cops and let go because no body was found. The number-two man most likely Buddy Jastrow, Folsom parolee, known for his love of torturing dogs and cats.
Also missing–last seen two days after he tore across the dry cabbage field. The dream dissolving into typescript–criminology texts filled with forensic gore shots. Joining the LASD in ’44 to know WHY; advancing through jail and patrol duty; other deputies hooting at him for his perpetual all-points want on Harlan
“Buddy” Jastrow.
A noise went off. Danny Upshaw snapped awake, thinking it was a siren kicking over. Then he saw the stucco swirls on his bedroom ceiling and knew it was the phone.
He picked it up. “Skipper?”
“Yeah,” Captain Al Dietrich said. “How’d you know?”
“You’re the only one who calls me.”
Dietrich snorted. “Anyone ever call you an ascetic?”
“Yeah, you.”
Dietrich laughed. “I like your luck. One night as acting watch commander and you get floods, two accident deaths and a homicide. Want to fill me in on that?”
Danny thought of the corpse: bite marks, the missing eyes. “It’s as bad as anything I’ve seen. Did you talk to Henderson and Deffry?”
“They left canvassing reports–nothing hot. Bad, huh?”
“The worst I’ve seen.”
Dietrich sighed. “Danny, you’re a rookie squadroom dick, and you’ve never worked a job like this. You’ve only seen it in your books–in black and white.”
Kathy Hudgens’ mouth and arm were superimposed against the ceiling–in Side 17
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The Technicolor. Danny held on to his temper. “Right, Skipper. It was bad, though. I went down to the morgue and . . . watched the prep. It got worse. Then I went back to help Deffry and Hender–”
“They told me. They also said you got bossy. Shitcan that, or you’ll get a rep as a prima donna.”
Danny swallowed dry. “Right, Captain. Any ID on the body?”
“Not yet, but I think we’ve got the car it was transported in. It’s a
’47 Buick Super, green, abandoned a half block up from the building site. White upholstery with what looks like bloodstains. It was reported stolen at ten this morning, clouted outside a jazz club on South Central. The owner was still drunk when he called in–you call him for details.”
“Print man dusting it?”
“Being done now.”
“Is SID going over the lot?”
“No. The print man was all I could wangle downtown.”