Widespread Panic
- Автор: Эллрой Джеймс
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Alfred A. Knopf
- ISBN: 978-0-593-31934-5
- Жанр: Мистика
Электронная книга - «Widespread Panic». Краткое содержание книги:
Confidential presaged the idiot internet — and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson — Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.
“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”
In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.
Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses — and you are here to read and succumb.
Stretch walked over. Her eyes grazed the graph and ran right to “Robin Redbreast.” She got goose bumps. They sprouted and spread up her arms.
I said, “The Sweetzer listening post. Monitor Lez Line #2, every chance you get. I’ll pay you two yards a week.”
She orbed my hopped-up hieroglyphics. She said, “As long as you tell me how all this plays out.”
The North Campus Library at UCLA
3/20/54
Transcripts. One fat file box. She was Joan Marcelline Hubbard then. She’s Joan Horvath of My Heart now.
The admin folks delivered. They called me this a.m. They stridently stressed that rules and regulations apply. View the contents here. Return the box by 9:00 p.m. Don’t snitch documents. Don’t mooch monographs. The honor system applies.
I took a table all by myself. I tallied tabbed file folders and crafted a chronology. Joan Marcelline Hubbard. DOB 11-6-18. She hails from the hellish-hot San Joaquin Valley. She’s farmworker stock. She graduated high school in ’35. She picks fruit with a wetback work crew. She digs her way out of the Depression. She applies to UCLA.
She’s accepted. She hits Westwood in the fall of ’39.
It’s all language labs and lit crit. She learns Russian/Polish/Italian. She flaunts her fluency in class and stages stirs. La Hubbard’s a hambone. She’s a distaff disc jockey on Bruin Radio. She shoves Shostakovich down the throats of the campus illiterati. She rewards them with reductive Rachmaninoff and cheesy Tchaikovsky. She riffs on Russki literature. She writes her own commercials for Russian restaurants. She’s a regular at Karlov’s Kasa Kiev. Karlov kicks back kash. She writes her own commercials for Polish Pete’s Pirogi Palace. Pete pays her in cold cash and kielbasa cutlets. She works her way through college in this mad manner. She’s a noted campus cutup. She’s a sinfully self-promoting cheerleader chick.
She gets the grades. Woooo!!! — Straight A’s across the board. She studies the Russian romantic poets. She cruelly critiques the movement. It’s all marginal and mystical malarkey. She links Polish piano pounder Paderewski to nattering Nazi composers of the oompah-band ilk. Her professors know that she’s a gallivanting gadfly — but stress the solid soundness of her rigor. ’39, ’40, ’41. Joan Marcelline Hubbard makes her mark and goes forth.
She graduates. She goes on to grad school. That crisp chronology cruised me through her academic life. Course names/dates/test scores/grades/the names of professors. The transcripts tripped by as La Joan’s light fantastic. File pages blew by in a blur.
I hit late ’41 and the cusp of ’42. I hit my first chronological misfile. Spring ’40: An Introduction to Polish Labor Movements/Professor Witold Kirpaski. I put the transcript aside and plowed through late ’41. Then this, then this, then THIS:
Fall ’39. The Political Content of the Post-Revolutionary Russian Novel/Guest Professor Constance Woodard.
The nite becomes me. I assume my Pervdog pose. My hophead side sidles forth and fuels me. I’m the Red Devil Bandit, one crazed chromosome removed. It’s kid shit shorn of pretense. I’ve peeped since I was fourteen years old in bumfuck Massachusetts. Thus, I peeped NOW.
I parked outside Connie Woodard’s pad. I popped three Dexedrine and adjusted my adrenaline load. Midnite marched to 1:00 a.m. All Connie’s lights were off. I pondered a B and E — but abstained.
My wall graph walloped me. Lives and lines linked on paper. Fall ’39. Connie Woodard links to Joan Hubbard. Connie’s linked to Steve Cochran. Claire Klein links to Connie. She’s marked a man for murder. She thinks Connie may know things. She knows I know things. She knows I’ve got L.A. hot-wired. I’m the Man to See. Claire talks to me through a mad medium. Listening posts broadcast two ways under her spell. She pounds me, paranoiac. Freddy, what thou hath wrought. She Bible-bashes me. The Book of Revelation 3:8. I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close. She has made me the Man to Be Seen.
I eyeballed the Woodard house. I fought off B & E urges. I felt seen. I kept seeing things that might or might not be there. Cop cars clustered in close surveillance. Women wielding shivs. Claire stamped me stigmatized. We merged heartbeats. She marked me the Man to Be Seen.
I worked the phones all afternoon. I talked to Harry Fremont. He froze on the get-me-into-Connie’s-house front. “I can’t come up with a ruse or diversion, Freddy. Give me time to think this through.” I talked to Stretch. She reported from the Sweetzer listening post and Lez Line #2. She said Claire and some unknown Russki talked mucho McCarthy. Jabbering Joe and his feckless Feds were working L.A., through and through. Joe was set to serve subpoenas and roust Red cliques clicking back twenty years. Joe needed gooooooood publicity baaaaaad. Newspapers gnashed him. Radio reporters rebuffed him. TV pundits punished him for his sins. Brother, I empathize. We’re both Men to Be Seen.
I hid out at the Larchmont listening post and listened to listless dead air. I killed dusk and half the nite there. Connie called nobody, nobody called her. I dozed and dreamed of Stretch and Claire, nude like I’d never seen them. I woke up and drove two blocks to here.
Late nite becomes me. 1:00 became 2:00. I noticed empty milk bottles outside Connie’s front door. I got This Nutty Notion That Just Might Work.
Time ticked. I chain-smoked and chewed Chiclets. The milkman arrived at 4:13 a.m. He grabbed the empty bottles and left a fresh four-pack. I grabbed my sodium secobarbital stash and removed eight capsules. Connie might mix milk with her morning coffee. If so, she’s cooked.
I walked up to the door. I pulled off the bottle caps and whipped in my witches’ brew. Four bottles/eight pills/Freddy O.’s merry milk shake. I shook the bottles and condensed the contents. I slid back to my sled to wait.
Dawn dimmed nightfall. Low clouds closed in and reigned rain. Connie opened her front door at 7:14. It was quick. She filched the four-pack and went back inside.
I waited. Waiting wilts me and wears me thin. I waited, regardless. 7:14 to 8:14. One hour, no more. She’s had coffee or she hasn’t. The kitchen’s the likely location. It’s peepable. Note those low windows facing the driveway.
I peeper-popped over. I peeped one window, two windows, three. There’s Connie. She’s passed out flat on the kitchen floor. There’s spilled coffee au lait. She’s inviting me in.
My #6 pick fit the keyhole. The back door wiggled wide open. I cut into the kitchen. Connie snored. She should inhabit Dreamsville for ten to twelve hours. I had time for a top-end toss.
The kitchen. Chromium and bleached-blond wood. Nothing succulent or suspicious. The living room. All mid-century modern miasma and murky abstract art. A blitzkrieg of black leather. Glare off glass walls. A Kandinskyesque carpet, cobalt-colored and loaded with goofball gewgaw shapes. Nothing succulent or suspicious. Just Connie’s suspect taste.
I checked the downstairs bathroom. Nothing nudged me. I walked upstairs. No surprises sandbagged me, straight off. One bathroom/one bedroom/one office. I always work up to women’s bedrooms. I checked the bathroom first.
No, nein, nyet. Cold-cobalt walls and threadbare throw rugs. No medicine-chest mishpokeh — no dizzy dope/no ribbed rubbers/no diaphragm dusted with cornstarch.
The office. Here it gets gooooooood.