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.
We made sense and no sense. My monologue on money/Montego Bay/Manhattan. My rude riffs on the Janey Blaine job as really MURDER. Lois on Nick Ray and Jimmy Dean and We Can’t Let Them Make That Movie. I heard what I heard and knew she heard me back the same way. I said We’ve Got Some Money twelve million times. She said Chessman and What Will You Do About It? twelve million times back. We talked at each other. We wrapped ourselves up together and tried to find some fit we never found.
I went out or passed out and went someplace Lois wasn’t. It was booze and dope and Jack and Janey and Jimmy leaving me. I tumbled. I saw things that weren’t there and went somewhere Lois wasn’t. I woke up for real at 4:00 a.m. Lois was gone, her suitcase was gone, she left no note on the pillow. All I had was her scent.
The Hats were off hunting Fat Boy Mazmanian. I drove home and changed clothes. I checked my answering service. Nobody called me. I heard Chessman and What Will You Do About It? — but she wasn’t there.
I called Jimmy’s pad and service and got no answers. What Will You Do?/What Will You Do? She ventriloquized me. I heard her say it — but she wasn’t there.
Jimmy had a crawl-in crib off of Wilshire and La Brea. He slid in there to sleep and be alone. It was an above-garage abode and a cool caterpillar’s cocoon. I drove over and brazenly broke in.
It was easy. One lock poke, one shoulder shove. It’s a room-with-bath/eat-off-a-hot-plate deal. I scoped the one room. Here’s what I saw:
A Chessman shrine. The Chessman Taj Mahal and Sistine Chapel. The Chessman Mount Rushmore and National Cathedral. Newspaper headlines taped wall-to-wall. Chessman foto glossies shellacked to the ceiling. Movie-type test fotos stacked on the bed. Jimmy Dean made up as Caryl Chessman.
He’s got darker hair here. It’s been cut and kinked à la Chessman. A makeup man puttied his nose. That prominent prow is Chessman’s choice feature.
Jimmy always looks peeved and pissed off. It’s always there and always offset by his native pride and prettification. He embodies hip hurt and magnified maladjustment. It’s his studly stock in trade. Here, he moves into MEAN. He looks older. He’s usurped and channeled Chessman. It’s a trenchant transubstantiation. He’s made himself vicious and vile. It’s a metamorphosis, man to monster.
Harrowing headlines hemmed me in. They were existentially Chessman/No Exit. They jumped from January ’48 and jammed up to now. Red Light Bandit Sought. Red Light Bandit Captured! Chessman Convicted — Gas Chamber Looms. Victims Describe Degradation. Third Victim Hinted At.
The walls whipped around me. They coldly constricted me and cut off my air. Pictures popped out. Regina Johnson and Mary Alice Meza. Victims 1 and 2, weeping. Apoplectic appeals. High Court Rules No Stay Of Execution. Worldwide Protests: Free Caryl Chessman!!!
I gasped for air. I stumbled and fell on the bed. I looked up at Jimmy’s Michelangelo art. He’d pasted Chessman pix to the bodies of Greek cherubs. They flew, flitted, and flung the face of the Beast down at the whimpering world.
Maladjustment. He’s memorializing it. It’s his movie motivation. He’s a tortured teenager tempting teens to toss themselves at the abyss. He’s a mad marionette of modernist depravity. And Nihilist Nick Ray is pulling the strings.
I shut my eyes and conjured Lois. I counted to fifty thousand dollars, one dollar bill at a time. I magically misplaced myself: Montego Bay, Manhattan, the mountains on the moon. I opened my eyes and saw the file cabinet by the bed.
Flimsy green metal. One file drawer. File-tabbed C.C./San Quentin Correspondence.
I opened the drawer. I saw dozens of envelopes dumped in. They were addressed to Nicholas Ray and James Dean and postmarked San Rafael, California. I recognized Chessman’s handwriting. The Herald had run two of his prison letters in full cursive. He moved these missives past censors and guards and got them into the mail.
I plucked the first envelope and pulled the first page. The sassy salutation said, “Hey there, Jimmy and Nick.” It was dated 12/18/54. The first line read, “Before we start, let me state that I want Elizabeth Taylor to play the Meza bitch. She’s got bigger jugs, that’s the main thing.”
Chessman scrawled a script title here. If I Really Did It — (heh, heh).
I read my way through the whole file. I popped sweat and sweltered out toxins from my delirious last days. Some tears must have merged there. My eyes burned bad and felt funny. I kept wiping them.
Chessman admitted all of it. He copped to the most minute evidentiary details. It was a savagely sustained depiction of sexual horror. It was demonically descriptive. Chessman recalled sights, scents, and sounds. He reveled in the mess he’d made of lives for years to come. He described the Shirley Tutler assault and designated Shirley by name. He spent forty-three pages extolling each and every time he bit her. He said he sucked the blood off her blouse front. He wrote, “Maybe we can get Natalie Wood to play Shirley.”
I read all of it. I read Jimmy’s margin notes. He wrote, “Wow!” “Dig it!” and “This Caryl cat is cold,” repeatedly.
I got my evidence kit out of the car. I walked back inside and prepped my shooting stage. I turned on all the room lights and photographed all the pages. I ran through twelve rolls of film and dumped the envelopes back in the drawer in approximate order.
My legs quake-quivered and almost caved. I walked into the bathroom and doused my face. I looked different. What Will You Do About It? I looked older. I wondered if Lois would notice.
Evidence. “This Caryl cat” was cooked. His rights of redress had run out. I just punched his ticket to the green room.
Dizzy spells. Discontent and discombobulation. Don’t go for exultant. There’s No Exit, Baby. Don’t pop to your pad or rack out at the Ranch Market. Roll somewhere nobody can find you.
I’d lost a full day and a half at Jimmy’s crawl crib. It was the next nite of the next day at least. I drove downtown and parked in the cop lot at City Hall. My car cocooned me and sent me soporific. I tried to count from one to fifty thousand. I fell asleep at two thousand-something.
Bill Parker rapped on my windshield and woke me up. I popped the passenger door. He stepped in and dropped the early a.m. Herald on my lap.
I saw the Call Girl Homicide headline. Plus Coroner Curphey’s Accident Ruling “Hogwash,” Anonymous Source Sez.
Janey Blaine, hot off the press. There’s one fab foto. She’s fetching fine in ’49. She’s Miss Visalia JC.
There’s zero per Jack the K. Ouch — Prominent politicos among her many patrons. LAPD with egg on face. Chief Parker pledges revived investigation.
I said, “Who’s the source?”
Parker said, “As if you didn’t know.”
“Are you saying you won’t buy the pillow-talk defense?”
“No, and I would think you’d have figured out that you’re being spot-tailed a goodly portion of the time, and would have learned to conduct your liaisons accordingly.”
I lit a cigarette. Parker passed me his flask. I dunked deep and passed it back. Parker dunked deep. A barter bid’s boding. He’d have bitch-slapped me otherwise.
I said, “Let’s trade favors. Binding, as of now.”
He said, “You ask first.”
I said, “No reprisals on Lois Nettleton.”
He said, “Granted. On my end, I want you to assist in the dope raid on the Rebel gang. We’re going in at eight p.m. tomorrow. We’re hitting the Marmont, instead of the set. The head shitheels are camped out there, and they’re the ones we want to shake.”