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.
“Ten minutes, Miss Donnell. That’s all I need.”
“Who do you want me to fink on? I thought I was done there.”
“I’m investigating Joan Horvath’s murder. We’re looking at the CP cell she was in. I’ve talked to Samuel Ahlendorf and Bob Crawshaw already. Quite obviously, you were on my list.”
Party Girl went After you. I entered her demented demimonde. Glass walls winged wide on Wilshire. Dig the deep-pile rugs and lounge-lizard furnishings — all violet velour.
She walked me to a wet bar. She poured two Tom Collins, light on the lime. We sat on black leather stools and nudged knees.
“I didn’t know Joanie that well. I wouldn’t sleep with her, and I outgrew the Party before she did. I tried to recruit her for my stable, but she wouldn’t hear of it. We ratted each other out to you State HUAC guys, but I forget who finked first. The den mother knew her better than any of us, that’s for sure.”
The Liz Scott lisp and low growl. The lioness-level gaze. She’s leading you. KKKomrade X called and warned her. Freddy O.’s en route. He ain’t no HUAC cop. Milk him, baby. He’s money, once removed. He’s susceptible. Spin him into your spell.
She wants to slander-slam den mother Connie. That’s her intention. Field this changeup, bitch:
“Let me issue a warning about a woman that I consider to be quite dangerous — one that I’ve passed on to Mr. Ahlendorf and Mr. Crawshaw already. She has plainly stated that she intends to kill a man in your cell, or the general orbit of Party members you might have knowledge of. Her name is Claire Klein. She’s quite persistent, and she has a way of getting up in your face that I would describe as unforgettable.”
Party Girl lit a cigarette. “Well, there’s one woman and one instance that I can think of, but the name Claire Klein sounds no gongs for me. It was back during the war. ’43, I think.”
I said, “Please continue.”
“Well, it was some sort of Scottsboro Boys revival, and it was supposed to be all-Party — I thought one hundred percent. Then in walks a Wave officer, in her full-dress blues. She sizes me up as a girl who likes to gab, and then she applies the full press.”
The war/the Waves/Lieutenant j.g. Claire Klein. Perdition, catch my soul—
“The funny thing was, it all pertained to Commie arcana in Russia, during the show-trial era. She was hipped on Vsevolod Meyerhold, his importance in radical-theater circles, and how Stalin liquidated his theater, made him attend a self-criticism session, denounced him for abandoning socialist realism, and had him tortured and killed. This is in ’39 and ’40, I think. Here’s the worst part. The NKVD stabbed his wife’s eyes out and stabbed her to death a few months earlier.”
Meyerhold. Sambo Ahlendorf knew that cat.
“That’s the extent of it? This Wave woman pressed you and moved on?”
“Right with Eversharp.”
“Samuel Ahlendorf mentioned Meyerhold to me, earlier today.”
“Sammy’s old, and he’s Russian. He’s dined out on radical-socialist theater, all the time I’ve known him. I dare you to sit through one of Meyerhold’s plays. Crassly put, they ain’t Guys and Dolls.”
I gulped. “Let’s discuss the den mother. I assume you’re referring to Constance Woodard?”
Party Girl crushed her cigarette. “That’s right. Connie was our resident drag and expert on Joanie Hubbard. She was also Joanie’s lover for an indeterminate period of time, during the war and after it, which means that she was awarded the Jealous Lover of All-Time Award for who knows how many years running, because you have never seen jealousy like that, and you have never seen anyone chafe under the yoke of it like Joanie did.”
I said, “Keep going. There’s something you’ve been dying to tell me.”
Party Girl laffed. “I never liked Connie, but I grokked her existential anguish. Because Joanie was a Venus fly trap, and she had men, women, and who knows what else standing in line to get in her bed. Connie pulled a gun on two of Joanie’s would-be suitors, and one man — a lefty lawyer in Marin County — vanished from sight altogether.”
Now, I’m Commified, reconstructivized, social-dialecticized—
“Get it — Mr. State Cop who’s not a state cop? The den mother killed that man, and that’s what tore our dumb Communist cell asunder.”
That man.” Claire’s Meyerhold fix. Dead men and dead Joanie. I was dungeon-deep with dead men and castrated by Communist women. Here I am in the den mother’s bedroom. I’m crapped out on the bed. The red walls clooooose in on me.
I thumbed a library book. I’d bipped by the West L.A. Library, post — Party Girl. I did microfilm research. The San Francisco Chronicle, ’48–’49. An emphasis on local murders.
The book. It’s a big and boring Baedeker on Russian radical theater. There’s big ink on Vsevolod Meyerhold and his actress wife, Zinaida Raikh. Party Girl told it true. Stalin’s goons tortured and shot Meyerhold dead. They stabbed Zinaida’s eyes out and stabbed her dead. They were one comely couple. The pix told it true. He’s hero handsome as he waves a Red flag. She’s beautiful in her babushka. The Red Wheel crushes them flat.
Meyerhold was a Stalin-era stud and swinging swordsman. He brought the brisket to women in Russia and abroad and left bawling babies behind. Those facts fanned me. Ditto this fact. Somebody ratted Meyerhold to the NKVD.
Murder in Moscow. Murder in Marin County. It’s September ’49. “Lefty lawyer” Will Hartshorn vanishes. Will’s a wicked womanizer. Scads of scurrilous Commo women are questioned, to no avail. Wicked Will dips off and disappears. There’s no corpus delecti — case closed.
The den mother’s downstairs. She’s cooking our dinner. She’ll call up to me.
I left the library and sidled up to Silver Lake. There’s the rogue-Fed listening post. It’s a shit shack on Ewing off of Duane Street. Harry told me they run three monitor shifts and lock up at midnite. I drove to Higgins’ Hardware and bought what I’d need. Charles Fullerton lived in the Miracle Mile. The mid-Wilshire fone book said so.
The den mother dipped upstairs. I heard her heels hit. She stood in the doorway. She smiled at me and read me. She went What’s wrong, love?
I said, “I talked to some people who knew you pretty well. You know who I mean, because you gave me their names.”
She said, “Yes?”
I said, “They hold you in the highest contempt, because you stayed the course after they walked, and that made you a dupe and marked you as naïve. You wrote hundreds of pages of cell minutes and spun fantasies. You loved them. They didn’t love you. You carried the torch. You created a pretend world in this very room. That fact alone has convinced me to protect you.”
Connie said, “I ‘stayed the course.’ It’s quite the male concept, but it’s not something I can accept in you, if it means that you consider me pathetic.”
I laffed. “How could I? You killed a man with no compunction, in the Freddy Otash mode. ‘Pathetic’ hardly describes it.”
“He brutalized Joan. He hit her and demeaned her, and I couldn’t stand it. I shot him and dumped his body in a lime pit in Point Reyes. The police questioned me once and believed my denials. They never troubled me again, and my ex-comrades never informed on me.”
“How did you feel, after you killed him?”
“I felt aghast and relieved.”