It was now the winter of ’43. Coleman was shedding his baby fat, getting handsome. Reynolds became demonstrative to him, physically affectionate–lots of hugs and kisses on the cheek. He suddenly credited the story of the Scotch Voice Man. He joined the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee–a hot lefty item now that the seventeen boys had been convicted–to prove his faith in Coleman.
Reynolds told Coleman to be quiet about the Scotch Voice Man–nobody would believe him, and the important thing was to get the poor persecuted boys out of jail. He told him Scotch Voice would never be caught, but the evil man was probably still looking for Coleman–who needed protective coloration to remain safe from him. Reynolds took Coleman to Dr. Terence Lux and had his face physically altered to his own specifications. While recuperating at the clinic, Coleman went crazy, killing chickens in the hatchery, pretending he was a wolverine while he drank their blood. He got leaves from the clinic and pulled burglaries with Mad Marty, his face bandaged like a movie monster; he went to SLDC rallies with his attentive father–and against his wishes told the story of José Diaz and the Scotch Voice Man. Nobody believed him, everyone patronized him as Reynolds Loftis’ nutty kid brother burned in a fire–lies his father told him to go along with. Then the bandages came off and Coleman was his father twenty years younger. And Reynolds seduced his own youthful mirror image.
Coleman went with it. He knew he was safe from Scotch Voice; while recovering from the surgery he did not know how his new face would look, but he knew now that he was beautiful. The perversion was awful but continually exciting, like being a wolverine prowling a strange dark house twenty-four hours a day. Acting the part of a platonic kid brother was an intriguing subterfuge; Coleman knew Daddy was terrified of their secret coming out and kept mum–he knew also that Reynolds was going to rallies and donating money to causes because he felt guilty for seducing him. Maybe the surgery was not for his safety–just for the seduction. Chaz moved out–bitter over the horrific cuckolding–spurning Reynolds’ offer to make it a menage a trois. Minear went on a sex bender then, a different Felix Gordean male prostitute every night–Reynolds lived in terror of his ex-lover telling them of the incest and tricked with a bunch of prosties himself, for the sex and to keep his ear down.
Coleman was jealous, but kept still about it, and his father’s sudden frugality and displays of nervousness convinced him that Reynolds was being blackmailed.
Then Coleman met Claire De Haven and fell in love with her.
She was Reynolds’ friend and confrere in various leftist organizations, and she became Coleman’s confidante. Coleman had begun to find sex with his father intolerable; he pretended the man was Claire to get through their nights together. Claire heard Coleman’s horror story out and convinced him to see Dr.
Lesnick, the CP’s approved psychiatrist–Saul would never violate Side 192
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The confidentiality with an analysand.
Lesnick heard Coleman out–in a series of arduously detailed two-hour sessions. He believed the Sleepy Lagoon story to be fabricated on two levels: Coleman needing to justify his search for his father and his own latent homosexuality; Coleman wanting to curry favor with SLDC Latins by saying the killer was white–not the unfound Mexican gang members the leftist community asserted the slayers to be. That aside, he believed Coleman’s narratives, comforted him and urged him to break off the affair with his father.
Lesnick was also seeing Loftis as a patient; he knew Reynolds was guilt-crazed over the affair, giving more and more money to more and more causes–especially the SLDC–an adjunct of the lever of manipulation he had applied to get Coleman to consent to the plastic job. Coleman felt reality closing in and began visiting Thomas Cormier’s wolverines again, feeding and loving them. One night he felt an incredible urge to pet and hold one. He opened a pen, tried to embrace the beast and was bitten all over his arms. He and the wolverine fought; Coleman won with a stranglehold. He took the carcass home, skinned it, ate its flesh raw and made dentures out of its teeth, wearing them in his private hours, pretending to be the wolverine–stalking, fucking, killing.