"Ellroy, James - White Jazz" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellroy James)

WHITE JAZZ
by James Ellroy

Flyleaf:
Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's all in a day's work for Lieutenant Dave Klein, Los Angeles Police Department. Trained as a lawyer in school, schooled as a strongarm on the street, bought and paid for by the mob, there's nothing he's not into and nobody's better at any of it. But in the fall of 1958, when the Feds announce a full-out investigation into police corruption, everything goes haywire.
Suddenly, the game Klein thought he was running has a new set of rules--and they're _not_ his. He's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own dirty secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.
And it's Klein who tells his own story--his voice clipped and sharp and as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a hellish journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, greed, and perversion. It's a world he helped create, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive . . .
Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor-edge, _White Jazz_ is crime fiction at its most shattering, and the most explosive novel yet from James Ellroy.

Copyright 1992 by James Ellroy
All rights reserved.

This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
ISBN 0-679-41449-5



To Helen Knode

In the end I possess my birthplace
and am possessed by its language.

--Ross MacDonald




All I have is the will to remember. Time revoked/fever dreams--I wake up reaching, afraid I'll forget Pictures keep the woman young.
L.A., fall 1958.
Newsprint: link the dots. Names, events--so brutal they beg to be connected. Years down--the story stays dispersed. The names are dead or too guilty to tell.
I'm old, afraid I'll forget:
I killed innocent men.
I betrayed sacred oaths.
I reaped profit from horror.
Fever--that time burning. I want to go with the music--spin, fall with it



L.A. _Herald-Express_, 10/17/58:

BOXING PROBE IN PROGRESS;
FEDERAL GRAND JURY TO HEAR WITNESSES

Yesterday, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles announced that Federal agents are probing the "gangland infiltrated" Southland prize fight scene, with an eye toward securing grand jury indictments.
U.S. Attorney Welles Noonan, former counsel to the McClellan Rackets Committee, said that Justice Department investigators, acting on information supplied by unnamed informants, are soon to question colorful Los Angeles "mob fringe character" Mickey Cohen. Cohen, now thirteen months out of prison, is rumored to have attempted contract infringement on a number of local prizefighters. Currently being questioned under hotel guard are Reuben Ruiz, bantamweight contender and regular attraction at the Olympic Auditorium, and Sanderline Johnson, former ranked flyweight working as a croupier at a Gardena poker establishment. A Justice Department press release stated that Ruiz and Johnson are "friendly witnesses." In a personal aside to Herald reporter John Eisler, U.S. Attorney Noonan said: "This investigation is now in its infancy, but we have every hope that it wilt prove successful. The boxing racket is Just that: a racket. Its cancerous tentacles link with other branches of organized crime, and should Federal grand jury indictments result from this probe, then perhaps a general probe of Southern California mob activity will prove to be in order. Witness Johnson has assured my investigators that boxing malfeasance is not the only incriminating information he has been privy to, so perhaps we might start there. For now, though, boxing is our sole focus."


POLITICAL STEPPINGSTONES HINTED

Some skepticism greeted news of the prize fight probe. "I'll believe it when the grand jury hands down true bills," said William F. Degnan, a former FBI agent now retired in Santa Monica. "Two witnesses do not make a successful investigation. And I'm wary of anything announced in the press: it smacks of publicity seeking."