The killer meets Goines somewhere on the jazz block and talks him into geezing up–despite Marty’s recent dope cure. He’s got the Buick already staked out, door jimmied open or unlocked, wires unhooked and ready to be juiced together for a quick start. They drive someplace quiet, someplace equidistant from darktown and the Sunset Strip. The killer jacks enough horse into a vein near Goines’ spine to pop his heart arteries, a terrycloth towel right there to shove into his mouth and keep blood from drenching him. Figure, by the Zombie barman’s estimate, that the killer and Goines left Central Avenue around 12:15
Side 37
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The to 12:45 A.M., took a half hour to drive to the destination, ten minutes to set the snuff up and accomplish it.
1:00 to 1:30 A.M.
The killer throttles his victim postmortem; fondles his genitals until they bruise, slashes his backside with the razor blade device, pulls out his eyes, screws him in the sockets at least twice, bites–or has an animal bite–through his stomach to the intestines, then cleans him up and drives him to Allegro Street, a rainy night, no moisture atop the body, the rain having stopped shortly after 3:00, the stiff discovered at 4:00 A.M.
An hour to an hour and forty-five minutes to mutilate the body, depending on the location of the killing ground.
The killer so sex-crazed that he ejaculates twice during that time.
The killer–maybe–taking a circuitous route to the Strip, rearview mirror hooked backward so he can view the corpse he is chauffeuring.
Flaw in the reconstruction so far: Doc Layman’s tenuous “blood bait”
theory doesn’t fit. Well-trained vicious dogs did not jibe with the scenario–they would be too difficult to deal with, a nuisance, a mess, too noisy at a murder scene, too hard to contain during moments of psychotic duress.
Which meant that the teeth marks on the torso had to be human, even though the mouth imprints were too large to have been made by a human being biting down.
Which meant that the killer bit and gnawed and swiveled and gnashed his teeth to get a purchase on his victim’s entrails, sucking the flesh upward to leave inflamed borders as he ravaged– Danny bolted out of his cubicle and back to the records alcove adjoining the squadroom. One battered cabinet held the division’s Vice and sex offender files–West Hollywood crime reports, complaint reports, arrest reports and trouble call sheets dating back to the station’s opening in ’37. Some of the folders were filled alphabetically under “Arrestee”; some under “Complainant”; some numerically by “Address of Occurrence.” Some held mugshots, some didn’t; gaps in the “Arrestee” folders indicated that the arrested parties had bribed deputies into stealing reports that might prove embarrassing to them–and West Hollywood was only a small fraction of County territory.
Danny spent an hour scanning “Arrestee” reports, looking for tall, gray-haired, middle-aged men with violence in their MOs, knowing it was a long shot to keep him busy until Musician’s Local 3126 opened at 10:30. The slipshod paperwork–rife with misspellings, smudged carbons and near illiterate recountings of sex crimes–had him to the point of screaming at LASD
incompetence; turgid accounts of toilet liaisons and high school boys bribed into back seat blow jobs kept his stomach churning with a bile that tasted like fried coffee grounds and last night’s six shots of bonded. The time got him four possibles–men aged forty-three to fifty-five, 6’1″ to 6’4″, with a total of twenty-one sodomy convictions among them–most of the beefs stemming from fruit tank punkings–jailhouse coitus interruptus that resulted in additional County charges being filed. At 10:20, he took the folders up to the dispatcher’s office and Karen Hiltscher, sweaty, his clothes wilted before the day had hardly started.
Karen was working the switchboard, plugging in calls, a headset attached to her Veronica Lake hairdo. The girl was nineteen, bottle blonde and busty–a civilian LASD employee flagged for the next woman’s opening at the Sheriff’s Academy. Danny pegged her as bad cop stuff: the Department’s mandatory eighteen-month jail tour would probably send her off the deep end and into the arms of the first male cop who promised to take her away from dyke matrons, Mex gang putas and white trash mothers in for child abuse. The heartthrob of the West Hollywood Substation wouldn’t last two weeks as a policewoman.