"Ellroy, James - My Dark Places" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellroy James)

The railroad shot through in 1872 and sparked a real-estate boom. The valley's population increased by 1 ,ooo%. L.A. was becoming a good-sized burg. The valley cashed in on it.
Real-estate profiteers annexed the valley into small cities. A development boom followed and continued straight through the 1920s. City populations grew exponentially.
Housing bans were enforced valley-wide. Mexicans were restricted to slum districts and tin-roof shantytowns. Negroes were not allowed on the streets after dark.
Walnut crops were big. Citrus crops were big. Dairies were a real moneymaker.
The Depression put the skids to San Gabriel Valley growth. World War II resurrected it. Returning GIs got hip to westward migration. Real-estate developers got hip to their hipness.
Tracts and subdivisions went up. Walnut groves and orchards were blitzed to make room for more and more of them. City boundaries expanded.
The population skyrocketed through the '5os. The agriculture biz declined. Manufacturing and light industry flourished. The San Bernardino Freeway stretched from downtown L.A. to south of El Monte. Automobiles became a necessity.
Smog arrived. More housing developments went up. The boom economy brought a new look to the valley--but did not in any way alter its Wild West character.
You had Dust Bowl refugees and their teenage kids. You had pachucos with duck's-ass haircuts, Sir Guy shirts and slitbottomed khakis. Okies hated spics the way the old cowboys hated Indians.
You had a big influx of men flicked .up by World War II and Korea. You had packed suburbs interspersed with large rural patches. You could walk down the Rio Hondo Wash and catch fish with your hands. You could jump into the Rosemead cattle pens and shoot yourself a cow. You could carve yourself a nice fresh steak right there.
You could go drinking. You could hit the Aces, the Torch, the Ship's Inn, the Wee Nipee, the Playroom, Suzanne's, the Kit Kat, the Hat, the Bonnie Rae or theJollyJug. You could see what was shaking at the Horseshoe, the Coconino, the Tradewinds, the Desert Inn, the Time-Out, the Jet Room, the Lucky X or the Alibi. The Hollywood East was good. The Big Time, the Off-Beat, the Manger, the Blue Room and the French Basque were okay. Ditto the Cobra Room, Lab's, the PineAway, the Melody Room, the Cave, the Sportsman, the Pioneer, the 49'er, the Palms and the Twister.
You could belt a few. You might meet somebody. The '5os divorce boom was peaking. You could draw from a big pool of at-the-ready women.


El Monte was the '58 hub of the valley. Early settlers called it "the End of the Santa Fe Trail." It was a shitkicker town and a good place to have fun. Recent settlers called it "the City of Divorced Women." It was a honky-tonk place with a morethan-distinct western atmosphere.
The population hovered around 10,000. It was 90% white and 10% Mexican. The city was five miles square. Unincorporated county land bordered it.
The population expanded on Saturday nights. Out-of-towners drove in to prowl the cocktail joints on Valley and Garvey. The El Monte Legion Stadium featured Cliffle Stone and Hometown Jamboree--broadcast live on KTLA-TV.
The audience wore cowboy garb: Stetsons and pipestem pants for the men; starched hoop skirts for the women. The Stadium ran doo-wop dances on Cliffle's off-Saturdays. Pachucos and white punks slugged it out in the parking lot regularly.
The San Berdoo Freeway cut through El Monte. Motorists exited and took Valley Boulevard eastbound. They stopped to eat at Stan's Drive-In and the Hula-Hut. They stopped to drink at the Desert Inn, the Playroom and the Horseshoe. Valley was _the_ Saturday night thoroughfare. Eastbound motorists ended up dawdling there whether they planned to or not.
The action strip ended at Five Points--the juncture of Valley and Garvey. Stan's and the Playroom stood at the prime northeast corner. Crawford's Giant Country Market was just across the street. A dozen restaurants and juke joints were jammed together off the intersection.
Residential El Monte ran north, south and west of there. Houses were small and came in two styles: faux-ranch and stucco cube. Mexicans were isolated in a strip called Medina Court and a shack town named Hicks Camp.
Medina Court was three blocks long. The houses there were made of cinderblock and scavenged wood. Hicks Camp was just across the Pacific-Electric tracks. The houses there had dirt floors and were built from lumber ripped off of old boxcars.
The movie _Carmen Jones_ was shot at Hicks Camp in A Mexican slum was recast as a Negro sharecropper slum. The set designers did not have to change a single detail.
Medina Court and Hicks Camp were full of winos and hopheads. A favored Hicks Camp form of murder was to get your victim drunk and lay him on the railroad tracks for an oncoming freight to decapitate.
The El Monte PD handled patrol calls and investigated all crimes short of murder. The roster listed twenty-six cops, a matron and a parking meter man. The department had a relatively clean reputation. Local merchants kept the boys well lubed with foodstuffs and liquor. El Monte cops always shopped in their uniforms.
The guys patrolled in one-man cars. The work vibe was friendly--captains and lieutenants drank with plain old harness bulls. The PD was a choice job--you could help people or beat up wetbacks or promote lots of pussy, according to your inclination.
The boys wore all-khaki uniforms and drove '56 Ford Interceptors. They repossessed cars for local dealers and beefed with the Sheriff's over various chickenshit matters. Half the men signed on under a patronage system. Half came in via civil service.
The PD ceded their murder jobs to Sheriff's Homicide. For a rough-and-tumble town, they got very few snuffs.
Two dykey-looking women killed an El Monte house painter on March 30, 1953. The man's name was Lincoln F Eddy.
Eddy and Dorothea Johnson spent that day boozing in several El Monte bars. They stopped at Eddy's house in the late afternoon. Eddy coerced Miss Johnson into a blow job. Miss Johnson went home and discussed the matter with her roommate, Miss Viola Gale. The women got ahold of a rifle and walked back to the Eddy house.
They shot Lincoln Eddy. Two boys playing catch outside saw them enter and leave. They were arrested the next morning. They were tried, convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
On March 17, 1956, Mr. Walter H. Depew drove his car through the front wall of Ray's Inn on Valley Boulevard.
Two men were struck and killed. Mr. Depew's broadside ripped out a 16-foot chunk of the front wall and a 19-foot chunk at the rear. Several other bar patrons were seriously injured.
Mr. Depew was drinking at Ray's Inn earlier in the day. His wife was a barmaid there. Mr. Depew got into an argument with the owner. The owner ejected Mr. Depew a few hours before the incident.
Mr. Depew was arrested immediately. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to a short prison term.
Sheriff's Homicide handled both cases. Their last three El Monte murders got cleared in flicking record time.
The Jean Ellroy job was running longer already.


3

The _Times_, _Express_ and _Mirror_ gave it page-two play. It made the local TV news for five seconds.
The redhead rated zero. The Johnny Stompanato snuff was the real goods. Lana Turner's daughter shanked Johnny back in April. The story was still hot news.
The _Mirror_ ran a shot of the redhead smiling. The Times ran a picture of the kid just after the cops gave him the word. Jean Ellroy was the twelfth county murder victim of 1958.
Armand Ellroy went down to the Coroner's Office early Monday morning. He identified the body and signed a Health and Safety Code form to release it to the Utter-McKinley Mortuary. Dr. Gerald K. Ridge performed the autopsy: Coroner's Case File #35339-6/23/58.
He ascribed cause of death to "asphyxia due to strangulation by ligature." His anatomic summary noted the "totally occlusive double ligature" around the victim's neck. He noted that the victim was in her menstrual phase. His smear for spermatozoa turned up positive. He found a tampon at the rear of the vaginal vault.
He noted the "surgical absence" of the victim's right nipple. He diagrammed the scrapes on her hips and knees and the bruises on the insides of her thighs. He described the body as being "that of a well-developed, well-nourished, unembalmed white female." His external examination notes cut straight to the two garrotes:

There is a double tightly occlusive ligature about the neck, producing deep grooving of the soft tissues. This ligature is comprised of both a length of apparent clothesline cord, which has apparently been placed first about the neck and knotted tightly in the left posterior region. The ends of the cord are free, one extremely short and apparently having been broken loose at the knot, while the other one is of moderate length and extends inferiorly. Apparently applied over the first ligature is a tightly knotted nylon stocking, the knot likewise located in the left posterior lateral surface. The nylon ligature overlies the long limb of the clothesline ligature at that point. The nylon stocking appears to have been tightly affixed by the usual overhand knot first and in the formation of the second knot, one limb of the free end has been looped under a partial slip knot, which is quite tightly drawn up.