Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The THE BIG NOWHERE

Dudley Smith had called him at home yesterday afternoon, interrupting a long day of nursing watered-down highballs and working on his file. The Irishman told him to meet him and Considine at West Hollywood Station; the fix was in via Ellis Loew, with the temporary detachment order approved by both Chief Worton and Sheriff Biscailuz. He’d brushed his teeth, gargled and forced down a sandwich before he met them– anticipating one question and building a lie to field it. Since they’d already told him he would be planted around Variety International Pictures and they knew he’d incurred bossman Gerstein’s wrath there, he had to convince them that only the gate guard, the rewrite man and Gerstein saw him in his cop capacity. It was Considine’s _first_ question–and a residue of bourbon calm helped him brazen it out. Smith bought it whole, Considine second-hand, when he ran his prerehearsed spiel on how he would completely alter his haircut and clothes to fit the role of Commie idealist.

Side 86

Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The Smith gave him a stack of UAES paperwork to take home and study and made him scan a batch of psychiatric reports in their presence; then it was hard brass tacks.

His job was to approach UAES’s suspected weak link–a promiscuous woman named Claire De Haven–gain entrance to the union’s strategy meetings and find out what they were planning. Why haven’t they called a strike? Do the meetings involve the actual advocacy of armed revolt? Is there planned subversion of motion picture content? Did the UAES brain trust fall for Considine’s sub-rosa move–planting newspaper and radio pieces that said the grand jury investigation had gone down–and just how strongly is UAES connected to the Communist Party?

Career maker.

“You’ll be a lieutenant before you’re thirty.”

“There’s a woman you’ll have to get next to, lad. You might have to fuck the pants off of her.”

A bludgeon to smash his nightmares.

He felt cocky when he left the briefing, taking the nonpsychiatric reports under his arm, promising to report for a second confab this afternoon at City Hall. He went back to his apartment, called a dozen dental labs that Karen Hiltscher hadn’t tapped and got zilch, read a dozen homosexual homicide histories without drinking or thinking of the Chateau Marmont. He then started feeling very cocky, took his 2307 Tamarind blood scrapings to the USC chemistry building and bribed a forensics classmate into typing them, hoping he could combine the wall spray pictures with the victims’ names, reconstruct and get another fix on his man. The classmate didn’t even blink at the bloodwork and did his tests; Danny took home data and put it together with the photographs.

Three victims, three different blood types–the risk of showing illegally obtained evidence was worth it. The Marty Goines AB+ blood matched the sloppiest of the wall sprays; he was the first victim, and the killer had not yet perfected his interior decorating technique. George Wiltsie and Duane Lindenaur, types O- and B+, had their blood spat out _separately_, Wiltsie in designs less intricate, less polished. Conclusions reinforced and conclusions gained: Marty Goines was a spur-of-the-moment victim, and the killer went at him in a total rage. Although filled with suicidal bravado–as witnessed by his bringing victims two and three to Goines’ apartment–he had to have had an ace reason for choosing Mad Marty, which could be one of three: He knew the man and wanted to kill him out of hatred–a well-defined personal motive;

He knew the man and found him a satisfactory victim based on convenience and/or blood lust;

He did not know Marty Goines previously, but was intimately acquainted with the darktown jazz strip, and trusted himself to find a victim there.

Have _his_ men recanvass the area.

On Wiltsie/Lindenaur:

The killer bit and gnawed and swallowed and sprayed Wiltsie’s blood first, because he was the one who most attracted him. The relative refinement of the Lindenaur blood designs denoted the killer’s satisfaction and satiation; Wiltsie, a known male prostitute, was his primary sex fix.

Tonight, double-agency sanctioned, he’d brace talent agent/procurer Felix Gordean, connected circumstantially to Wiltsie’s squeeze Duane Lindenaur–and try for a handle on who the men were.

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