Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy

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Interviews & Essays

James Ellroy: Blood's A Rover
A Conversation with Carolyn Kellogg

Barnes & Noble Review: In Blood's a Rover, a character says, "We're self absorbed, and we confuse our lives with history." Do you think that history is something that we are inherently connected to, or is that a confusion?

James Ellroy: It's June 22, '58 where it all goes [makes cracking noise] for me -- when I become interested in crime, sexual pathology police work, detection, LA's social history. But I came to a point as a writer where I decided I'd taken LA as far as it could go, and then I write a novel [Blood's a Rover] that comes back to LA. I feel history; as a younger person, I felt it in my bones. And since I am so, so, so inwardly focused -- so disciplined and meticulous in my creativity and so limited and passionate and obsessive in my interests, I've developed a sterling insight.

I went to John Burroughs Junior High over here. From '59-62, the Kennedy era. I was the weirded-out kid, one of five percent, that came from Beverly and Western. WASP kids from Beverly and Western, me and just a few others, and rich kids from Hancock Park, mostly Jewish kids from west of here.

There were six or seven things that I dug, and they're still the 6 or 7 things that I dig. So I focused. Right at the top was American history. I lived through Kennedy, and I lived through the tumult of the sixties. I saw it, and I assimilated it, to whatever degree I assimilated it. And it's in my bones. So what I do, in these big books, is create the private infrastructure of big public events.

I remember at the Larchmont Safeway, which is where Rite-Aid is now, during the Cuban missilecrisis, when everyone thought the world was going to end. I was bicycle stalking a girl named Donna Weiss. My dad sent me to the Safeway, and the shelves were picked clean, because people were getting ready. Our alcoholic neighbor, Big John Kilbride, were stocking up on alcohol and cigarettes. He and I just laughed -- we were the only ones that figured out, the world ain't gonna end. I knew it and Big John knew it, and that was that.

So every once in a while, I dip into culture - under duress or something - I can get to something really quick. I was in Scotland in February of '08. I was in the gym at the hotel, people had the TV on -- I couldn't avoid it. There were snippets of Clinton, McCain, and Obama, and I knew immediately that Obama would win . . . . I could tell you why. McCain vibes crazy. Clinton, she lies routinely; she seizes up and her eyes get big.

Obama is not that good a speaker. He's not as good as I am. He's a Kennedy imitator. I studied John Kennedy and I lived through it.

BNR: That does not look like four shots of espresso.

JE: It's not, and I expected it. [He orders a second four shots at the end of the meal.]

Obama, who's warmer than John Kennedy, and brighter -- they're both about 6'1", and thin, and they wear thin-cut, three-button suits nicely. John Kennedy did not like people crowding him, or touching him. He liked to keep people at bay. Whereas Obama is more genuinely warm, but he has the Kennedy gesture. What's most impressive about him, and what I saw at the gym, is he knows this: whether he is this person or not, his job as a conscious being and as a politician is to imitate the virtue he wishes to express. Which in his case, was probity, poise and composure. And he did that near unfailingly throughout the campaign. Which is why people across a wide ideological range came to vote for him.

BNR: I'm curious about connecting this to your book. I'm curious about performance. Is there any character in this book who isn't performing a role?

JE: ?

BNR: There are many masks. Anybody who is in the FBI is doing two things at once. You've got informants, and revolutionaries, constantly shifting between one mask and another. Is there such a thing as a straightforward character in Blood's a Rover?

JE: Mary Beth Hazard. Joan is, in her vengeance. And in her fire.

BNR: But even Joan goes through - in her evolution, as you say, her moral center gets torqued.

JE: True. But her desire for vengeance is seamless with her personal grievance. And Karen Sefakis's motherhood . . .

BNR: At the same time, Karen has two lovers . . .

JE: She's entirely duplicit. Right. Crutch is the only one who lives in his own unique genius that's uncompromised. All he wants is love. He's just a motherless child adrift, looking to make his way. All he wants is love.

I had this amazing moment. I was on a book tour for Destination Morgue. People know the last question is supposed to be "why do you write," and I usually recite a Dylan Thomas poem, "In My Art or Sullen Craft." [Editor's note: Thomas's poem, "In My Craft or Sullen Art," can be found here; Ellroy's variant recital follows, as spoken.]

In my art or sullen craft
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
Do I write
On these spindrift pages
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my art or craft.

It's a good way to shut those readings down. It sounds good, and it's a gas.

But I was tired that night. I was in Phoenix, and I hadn't slept, and someone said, "Why do you write," and I just told the truth: so women will love me.

That's Crutch. By the way, it's why he survives.

BNR: Because of that need?

JE: Joan and Karen may say [Crutch] has got the gene of persistence, but it's because the kid loved. It's because he has that. It's because he will not quit, and he's full of love.

BNR: He's also kind of a -- what do you call him? -- a dipshit.

JE: A jerkoff.

BNR: Tell me about your writing process. Do you write every day? You've got these people who you hire to do research. Do you enjoy the research process? Did you ever?

JE: It's a wonderful time in my life. I have great colleagues, and I have great friends. There are some things that I can do better than any writer I've ever met. I'm not the greatest living writer -- you know, I'm damn good; I can think. I know how to think. I know how to crowd the frame. I can write screenplays, I can write TV shows superlatively well; it's a nice secondary income. I can write essays. I'm obsessed with meaning.

A lot of this is natural predilection, it's early religious training, it's spiritual aptitude. It's who I am. I'm a seeker. I want to get to the big shit.

And I've taught myself to think.

As a kid, growing up, I read a zillion books, and I saw a zillion TV shows -- mostly crime -- and went to a zillion movies -- mostly crime -- and I never thought about what they meant. When I started to write, I was naturally meticulous and diligent and logical. I don't know how much of intelligence or aptitude is inherited. Both my parents were linguists, and both my parents were scientists. My dad was a mathematician and my mother was a biologist and a nurse. I don't know how much of this is inherited and how much of it is the luck of the draw.

I don't like formal learning. I like to assess information as necessary and have it there. So what [my researchers] did for me on The Cold Six Thousand, Blood's a Rover, and American Tabloid, was compile factsheets and chronologies so I wouldn't write myself into error.

So I have the information there. And then I have notes on the personal story, I have research, I have the arc of the love stories, the arc of whatever police investigation has to transpire, the big public events, and I start putting notes together, and before you know it, thirty of forty individual notes on the story will evolve into twenty series of sequences that need to be connected. And before you know it, I'm putting it together . . . I'm putting it together . . . I'm putting it together. The story is almost outside my mental capacity to retain it. There's a great deal that's there.

I made a conscious decision after The Cold Six Thousand -- which was a little bit long, a little bit too rigorous in its presentation of a very complex text, overly stylized Helen Knode [Ellroy's ex-wife and fellow novelist] was the first person -- she's my best reader -- to figure this out. I wanted a more emotionally resonant book. I had gone through the break-up of the marriage, the crack-up, Joan, and everything else. So I made an effort in Blood's a Rover to both crowd the frame of my consciousness and de-crowd it, and emotionalize it. I had a great deal of information [my researcher] had put together for me. I knew that I could go anywhere that I wanted to go in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuban waters, public policy gone wrong in '68-'72, riots in Miami, riots in Chicago. I knew that my take on black militancy was sane, that it was sound to create fictional black militant groups that were lesser [to the Black Panthers] -- I had more latitude to fictionalize. So I had a great deal of the story on paper and in my head, and I do what I've done for 20-odd years. I write at the top of the page: JAM [makes popping sound] I put an exclamation point after it.

And I started with the heist, described in shorthand that only I can read, block print. Little line, Crutch's prologue, boom boom boom. The Wayne chapter, Wayne's cooking heroin, establish this-this-this, Janice is dying of cancer, backstory from American Tabloid. I have Tabloid and Cold Six, annotated with post-it notes sticking out of the paperback, right over here to look at. All the way through, it's 70-odd pages in shorthand to go through the [opening scene] heist to Crutch's soliloquy at the end. I've thought it through.

I don't know anyone else who does it this way -- even though anyone who makes up their mind to do it, and has the mental stamina to do it, can do it. Nobody can write books this dense without doing this. Frankly most people have mystified ideas as to what writing fiction is. Are afraid of diligence and meticulousness. And that it comes at the expense of improvisation and joie de vivre, when, au contraire, it enhances it, because you have an inviolate document to work from.

I did this in Helen Knode's garage in Carmel, alone one Christmas, mooning for the red goddess in San Francisco, mooning for the married woman back East with her family. Holed up with Helen's dog who disliked me so much that a professional dogwalker had to come in and take her out every day. And I give that dog nothing but love -- anyway, it's a weird deal.

Then I created the outline, which began by addressing the perceived flaws of The Cold Six Thousand -- what I perceived the flaws of the prior novel to be. I was going for a more accessible style, greater transparency, and was writing a book that would in every way be an historical romance.

I predicted a 1,000-page manuscript and a 675 page hardcover and I got close. It's just a question of -- chapter 1, Wayne Tedrow is cooking heroin in his lab, Las Vegas, the date, following background information exposited. Dwight Holly calls Wayne, following information exposited. Go to flashback. This information exposited.

It took me eight months to write the outline. I wrote the text in eleven and a half months.

BNR: That's fast.

JE: This was fast for me because of the emotional import of the book. Joan, the love story, was pressing me. That's how I did it.

So the outline is here. The ratio of outline to book pages that determines the length of the book. The diagram is inviolate, but I have great latitude to improvise within the confines of the story, because the story is there in such detail.

So what evolved: Don Crutchfield's fixation with Scotty Bennett, and the fact that sartorially, he is so out of it, that he has, like me, short hair in 1968 and a polo shirt with a tartan bow tie.

BNR: It's a look you share.

JE: Yeah, it's a look we share. I couldn't have written that if the outline hadn't been so damn strong. It's like that. I've told other writers about that, and a lot of people reject it out of hand. They feel that it's inimical, if not antithetical, to their individual creative process.

BNR: I know that the idea that you're talking against is this idea that characters mysteriously do things that people don't expect, and that they turn the book in ways that the author couldn't possibly predict.

JE: The short answer is it's bullshit.

The long answer is if you write improvisationally you create characters and situations and you get to a point where you have dramatic options and you choose one or the other.

BNR: You mean you're not waiting for Joan to talk to Crutch or not? You know that she's going to talk to him.

JE: Yeah -- this man's gotta meet this woman. It just takes 600 pages, and three years.

BNR: There's a story that you once turned in manuscript that was a third too long, and when your editor gave it back to you, you went through and pulled out all the adjectives.

JE: It was the novel L.A. Confidential, and it wasn't my editor - it was a woman named Nancy Neiman at Warner Books.

BNR: So there's some truth to this?

JE: She just said to my editor, we're going to lose money on this book. It's a 600-page hardcover -- talk to Ellroy about some cuts. And we agreed it was dramatically inviolate. And I went back -- I've never been adjective-heavy, but I cut it down.

BNR: Your prose style is such a signature, with a tremendous amount of momentum. Do you spend much time editing down?

JE: I do. It's crowding the frame. I crowd the frame. I got a desk, it's a good tall guy's desk, it's got a big well. And it's quiet.

I add words, and I subtract words, until it sounds perfect. And I don't go on to the next sentence until it's perfect.

I'll get 40 pages ahead, or 50, handwritten. I write in black ballpoint ink and I correct in red. I have carets above the words and out into the margins, and when I get that many pages ahead, I stop. I go over all 40 pages again, then my assistant gets the pages to my typist back in New York. I get the pages back. I correct for typos, then I correct in ink, and have it re-typed. So I went through twenty 50-page blocks of Blood's a Rover. Then I went back, re-read it and red-inked it again. Then I had it typed, sent to my editor, Sonny Mehta, who had minor comments. I red-inked it again, Then it went to the copy editor. I red-inked it again.

BNR: God, you must drive copy editors crazy! Because you're playing with language all the time.

JE: Yes.

BNR: You're doing sentences the way you want to.

JE: I don't use the past-perfect tense, unless it's a more educated person. Marsh Bowen or Karen Sifakis would speak that way. Past-perfect tense from a guy like Crutch would be wrong. It's OK for Dwight, Dwight is a lawyer from Yale. Wayne Tedrow has a chemistry degree.

BNR: So you have to go through and make sure the copy edits are just copy edits.

JE: I love to think -- I have a chaotic inner life, in that I'm very passionate. I'm passionate in my attachments to people, I'm passionately committed to life and the few people that I care deeply about.

BNR: And even their hateful dogs.

JE: Yeah, even their pissed-off, hateful dogs. I'm largely freed to concentrate on what's important to me. And to concentrate on what I think are the big things. And I found ways around it spiritually that make me feel comfortable in the world.

I make a damn good living, and I'm having an especially a good year -- but I have an insane nut (I have to earn a lot of money for alimony to exes, my assistant is a lot of dough, and everything else), but I like it. I like to toil. I like to fight, I like to struggle.

I believe very strongly in God, and I've been gifted -- I have a wonderful gift. I'm good with people, I'm generous with folks, and I don't say no to people. And it helps me with the world, and it brings me back. To things like this -- you know, Blood's a Rover, and whatever it is I'm doing, and the search for truth.

The Hilliker Curse is very much about the search for truth for me.

BNR: Is the process of the writing itself, the discipline of sitting at the desk -- is that a daily practice for you? Is it part of the search for truth?

JE: A lot of the search for truth is -- I lie in the dark. I lie in the dark.

[Long pause]

I think about American history and I think about women.

BNR: Do you listen to music? Do you have Prokofiev on?

JE: I listen to Prokofiev significantly. But I'm fixated on Beethoven. There's a lot of Beethoven in The Hilliker Curse. He's arguably the most unfathomable genius in the history of the world. He was unkempt; he was stone deaf.

BNR: Well, only at the end . . .

JE: He began to go deaf in his early 30s, so all the greatest music was written deaf. The worse it got, the shittier it got, the lonelier he got -- I mean, he had women in his life, but he didn't bathe very often. He was malodorous. I can't quite say that he had bugs crawling out of his hair but it wouldn't have surprised me. . . .

So what I do is I lie around in the dark and I think.

BNR: If you're on book tour, can you lie around in the dark and think? Are you too busy reading, doing all the interviews and whatnot?

JE: The interviews -- they accrete. They become more and more moronic, they become more and more about the topicality, they become more and more about side issues, like movies that were made from your books. And in Europe, they'll cram 20 in a day.

BNR: So you're doing 20 minutes at a time, sitting in a hotel room?

JE: Sitting in a hotel bar, with an interpreter.

BNR: [Laughs] I know you're not kidding, but . . .

JE: Yeah. And then you've got a lunch with people, and then you've got a dinner that goes to 11. It grinds you after a while. You go to Europe, and you're doing the first interview, and in the middle of it, you hear - it's the first interview, some French guy for a rock-n-roll magazine -- and in the first sentence you hear "George W. Bush" and "Iraq" and you're thinking, Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. '68 to '72 - Oh, shit.

BNR: If they've read the book, they'll get there. You've got plenty of revolution in the book. France had their own revolution in '68, right?

JE: And they'll all tell you, if they are my age, that they were there, in the streets. Even if they were in Istanbul.

BNR: People are doing that here now -- take, for example, the cultural hegemony of Woodstock.

JE: I was staring at a picture of the November 1967 Playmate of the month named Kaia Christian.

BNR: You wrote about that. You're telling me a story that was already in a book [Destination Morgue]. I was looking at that book this morning.

JE: A cop buddy of mine said we gotta find Kaia! We gotta find Kaia! I said listen, Kaia was entirely too prudent to post under her own name. She regrets her brief transit with Playboy Magazine in 1967. You're going to find that Kaia is unfindable. She's married, she changed her name. All my cop buddies: we gotta find Kaia, we gotta find Kaia! No, Kaia's unfindable.

BNR: She's better left in that moment.

JE: She's better left . . . . I was living in New York briefly last year, and I gave a talk at Columbia. I thought they were the biggest bunch of dumbshit kids, they were all 26, 27 year olds. It was all about the identity of being a writer . . . . [I wanted to tell them] Learn the rudiments of storytelling, sir. Become less interested in the issue of identity, and talking about writing with other people, and get to the point of publishing a book.

And don't go for this shit about learning on short stories.

BNR: Short stories and novels are two separate animals. It's like learning to swim and saying that's going to teach you to sail.

JE: I wrote a novel first, because I wanted to write a novel first. Nobody told me I couldn't. I see some of these planned writers communities, and writers groups, and they mollycoddle each other. It becomes about the process, rather than about you and it crowding the frame.

I'm a horrible pedagogue. I'm a Scottish preacher's kid. I love to get up in front of a pulpit . . .

BNR: . . . and tell people what to do [laughing].

JE: The greatest education you've ever had as a novelist is the books you've read.

BNR: Really? It's not your life?

JE: They key to writing fiction is, yeah, write what you know, but write the kind of shit that you love to read that nobody else is writing.\

Read an Excerpt

Part I
 
CLUSTER FUCK
 
June 14, 1968-September 11, 1968  
 
Wayne Tedrow Jr.
 
(Las Vegas, 6/14/68)  
 
HEROIN: He'd rigged a lab in his hotel suite. Beakers, vats and Bunsen burners filled up wall shelves. A three-burner hot plate juked small-batch conversions. He was cooking painkiller-grade product. He hadn't cooked dope since Saigon.  
 
A comp suite at the Stardust, vouchered by Carlos Marcello. Carlos knew that Janice had terminal cancer and that he had chemistry skills.  
 
Wayne mixed morphine clay with ammonia. A two-minute heating loosened mica chips and silt. He boiled water to 182°. He added acetic anhydride and reduced the bond proportions. The boil sluiced out organic waste.  
 
Precipitants next-the slow-cook process-diacetyl morph and sodium carbonate.  
 
Wayne mixed, measured and ran two hot plates low. He glanced around the suite. The maid left a newspaper out. The headlines were all him.  
 
Wayne Senior's death by "heart attack." James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan in stir.  
 
His front-page ink. No mention of him. Carlos had chilled out Wayne Senior. Mr. Hoover chilled out the backwash on the King/Bobby hits.  
 
Wayne watched diacetyl mass build. His blend would semi-anesthetize Janice. He was bucking for a big job with Howard Hughes. Hughes was addicted to pharmaceutical narcotics. He could cook him up a private blend and take it to his interview.  
 
The mass settled into cubes and rose out of the liquid. Wayne saw photos of Ray andSirhan on page two. He'd worked on the King hit. His worked it high up. Freddy Otash ran fall guy Ray for King and fall guy Sirhan for Bobby.  
 
The phone rang. Wayne grabbed it. Scrambler clicks hit the line. It had to be a Fed safe phone and Dwight Holly.  
 
"It's me, Dwight."  
 
"Did you kill him?"  
 
"Yes."  
 
" 'Heart attack,' shit. 'Sudden stroke' would have been better."   Wayne coughed. "Carlos is handling it personally. He can frost out anything around here."  
 
"I do not want Mr. Hoover going into a tizzy over this."   "It's chilled. The question is, 'What about the others?' "  
 
Dwight said, "There's always conspiracy talk. Bump off a public figure and that kind of shit tends to bubble. Freddy ran Ray covertly and Sirhan up front, but he lost weight and altered his appearance. All in all, I'd say we're chilled on both of them."  
 
Wayne watched his dope cook. Dwight spieled more news. Freddy O. bought the Golden Cavern Casino. Pete Bondurant sold it to him.  
 
"We're chilled, Dwight. Tell me we're chilled and convince me."  
 
Dwight laughed. "You sound a little raw, kid."  
 
"I'm stretched a bit thin, yeah. Patricide's funny that way."  
 
Dwight yukked. The dope pots started boiling. Wayne doused the heat and looked at his desk photo.  
 
It's Janice Lukens Tedrow, lover/ex-stepmom. It's '61. She's twisting at the Dunes. She's sans partner, she's lost a shoe, a dress seam has ripped.  
 
Dwight said, "Hey, are you there?"  
 
"I'm here."  
 
"I'm glad to hear it. And I'm glad to hear we're chilled on your end."  
 
Wayne stared at the picture. "My father was your friend. You're going in pretty light with the judgment."  
 
"Shit, kid. He sent you to Dallas."  
 
 
 
Big D. November '63. He was there that Big Weekend. He caught the Big Moment and took this Big Ride.  
 
He was a sergeant on Vegas PD. He was married. He had a chemistry degree. His father was a big Mormon fat cat. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. He did Klan ops for Mr. Hoover and Dwight Holly. He pushed high-line hate tracts. He rode the far-Right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. He knew about the JFK hit. It was multi-faction: Cuban exiles, rogue CIA, mob. Senior bought Junior a ticket to ride.  
 
Extradition job, with one caveat: kill the extraditee.  
 
The PD suborned the assignment. A Negro pimp named Wendell Durfee shivved a casino dealer. The man lived. It didn't matter. The Casino Operators' Council wanted Wendell clipped. Vegas cops got those jobs. They were choice gigs with big bonus money. They were tests. The PD wanted to gauge your balls. Wayne Senior had clout with the PD. He had JFK hit knowledge. Senior wanted Junior there for it. Wendell Durfee fled Vegas to Dallas. Senior doubted Junior's balls. Senior thought Junior should kill an unarmed black man. Wayne flew to Dallas on 11/22/63.  
 
He did not want to kill Wendell Durfee. He did not know about the JFK hit. He got paired up with an extradition partner. The cop's name was Maynard Moore. He worked Dallas PD. He was a redneck psycho doing gofer jobs on the hit.  
 
Wayne clashed with Maynard Moore and tried not to kill Wendell Durfee. Wayne blundered into the hit plot in post-hit free fall. He linked Jack Ruby to Moore and that right-wing merc Pete B. He saw Ruby clip Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV.  
 
He knew. He did not know that his father knew. It all went blooey that Sunday.  
 
JFK was dead. Oswald was dead. He tracked down Wendell Durfee and told him to run. Maynard Moore interceded. Wayne killed Moore and let Durfee go. Pete B. interceded and let Wayne live.  
 
Pete considered his own act of mercy prudent and Wayne's act of mercy rash. Pete warned Wayne that Wendell Durfee might show up again.  
 
Wayne returned to Vegas. Pete B. moved to Vegas for a Carlos Marcello gig. Pete followed up on Durfee and logged tips: he's a rape-o shitbird and worse. It was January '64. Pete heard that Wendell Durfee had fled back to Vegas. He told Wayne. Wayne went after Wendell. Three colored dope fiends got in the way. Wayne killed them. Wendell Durfee raped and murdered Wayne's wife, Lynette.  
 
It was his very own free fall. It started in Dallas and spun all the way up to Now.  
 
Wendell Durfee escaped. Wayne Senior and the PD worked to get Wayne a walk on the dope fiends. Mr. Hoover was amenable. Senior's old chum Dwight Holly was not. Dwight was working for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics then. The dope fiends were pushing heroin and were targeted for prosecution. Dwight squawked to the U.S. attorney. Wayne Junior fucked up his investigation. He wanted to see Wayne Junior indicted and tried. The PD fabricated some evidence and snowed the grand jury. Wayne got a walk on the killings. It left him hollow. He quit the PD and entered The Life.  
 
Soldier of fortune. Heroin runner. Assassin.  
 
Lynette was dead. He vowed to find Wendell Durfee and kill him. Lynette was his best friend and sweetheart and the wall to shut out his love for his father's second wife. Janice was older, she watched him grow up, she stayed with Senior for his money and clout. Janice returned Wayne's love. The longing went both ways. It stayed there and plain grew.  
 
Wayne fell in with Pete and his wife, Barb. Pete was tight with a mob lawyer named Ward Littell. Ward was ex-FBI and the point man for the JFK hit. He was working for Carlos Marcello and Howard Hughes and playing both ends back, front and sideways. Wayne had Pete and Ward as teachers. He learned The Life from them. He blew through their curriculum at a free-fall pace.  
 
Pete was hopped up on the Cuban exile cause. Vietnam was getting hot. Howard Hughes was nurturing crazy plans to buy up Las Vegas. Wayne Senior got in with Hughes' Mormon guard. Ward Littell developed a grudge against Senior. A rogue CIA man recruited Pete for a Saigon-to-Vegas dope funnel, profits to the Cuban cause, vouchsafed by Carlos Marcello. Pete needed a dope chemist and recruited Wayne. Ward's hatred of Wayne Senior grew. Ward fucked with Senior. He informed Wayne that his father sent him to Dallas.  
 
Wayne reeled and grabbed at air and barely stayed upright. Wayne fucked Janice in his father's house and made sure that Wayne Senior saw it.  
 
"The Life," a noun. A haven for Mormon burnouts, rogue chemists, coon killers.  
 
Wayne Senior divorced Janice. He beat her with a silver-tipped cane to offset the cost of the settlement. Janice limped from that day on and still played scratch golf. Ward Littell sold Howard Hughes Las Vegas at the mob's inflated prices and began a sporadic love affair with Janice. Wayne Senior increased his pull with Howard Hughes and sucked up to former veep Dick Nixon. Dwight Holly left the Bureau of Narcotics and went back on the FBI. Mr. Hoover directed Dwight to disrupt Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Dwight deployed Wayne Senior in anti-Klan mail-fraud ops, a sop to sob sisters at Justice.  
 
Wayne cooked heroin in Saigon and ran it through to Vegas. Wayne chased Wendell Durfee for four years. The country blew up with riots and a shitstorm of race hate. Dr. King trumped Mr. Hoover on all moral fronts and wore the old man down just by being. Mr. Hoover had tried everything. Mr. Hoover whined to Dwight that he had done all he could. Dwight understood the cue and recruited Wayne Senior. Wayne Senior wanted Wayne Junior to be in on it. Senior thought they needed a recruitment wedge. Dwight went out and found Wendell Durfee.  
 
Wayne got a pseudo-anonymous tip. He found Wendell Durfee on L.A. skid row and killed him in March. It was a put-up job. Dwight gathered forensic evidence and coerced him into the hit plan. Wayne worked with his father, Dwight, Freddy Otash and pro shooter Bob Relyea.  
 
Janice was diagnosed with last-stage cancer. Her beating injuries cloaked early detection of the disease. The Saigon dope deal factionalized and blew into chaos. On one side: mob ghouls and crazy Cuban exiles. On the other: Wayne, Pete and a French merc named Jean-Philippe Mesplede. April and May were pure free fall. The election hovered. King was dead. Carlos Marcello and the boys decided to clip Bobby Kennedy. Pete was coerced in. Freddy O. waltzed over from the King hit. Ward Littell was still working angles on Carlos and Howard Hughes. Ward had inherited an anti-mob file. He left it with Janice for safekeeping.  
 
Wayne went to see Janice on June 4. The cancer had taken her strength and her curves and had rendered her slack. They made love a second time. She told him more about Ward's file. He searched her apartment and found it. The file was very detailed. It specifically indicted Carlos and his New Orleans operation. Wayne sent it to Carlos, along with a note.  
 
"Sir, my father was planning to extort you with this file. Sir, could we discuss that?"  
 
Robert F. Kennedy was shot two hours later. Ward Littell killed himself. Howard Hughes offered Wayne Senior Ward's job as mob fixer/liaison. His first assignment: purchase the loyalty of GOP front-runner Dick Nixon.  
 
Carlos called Wayne and thanked him for the heads-up. Carlos said, "Let's have dinner."  
 
Wayne decided to murder his father. Wayne decided that Janice should beat him dead with a golf club.  
 
Carlos kept a mock-Roman suite at the Sands. A toga-clad geek played centurion and let Wayne in. The suite featured mock-Roman pillars and sack-of-Rome art. Price tags drooped from wall frames.  
 
A buffet was laid out. The geek sat Wayne down at a lacquered table embossed with spqr. Carlos walked in. He wore nubby silk shorts and a stained tuxedo shirt.  
 
Wayne stood up. Carlos said, "Don't." Wayne sat down. The geek spooned food on two plates and vanished. Carlos poured wine from a screw-top bottle.  
 
Wayne said, "It's a pleasure, sir."  
 
"Don't make like I don't know you. You're Pete and Ward's guy, and you worked for me in Saigon. You know more about me than you should, plus all the shit in that file. I know your story, which is some fucking story compared to the other dickhead stories I heard lately."  
 
Wayne smiled. Carlos pulled two bobbing-head dolls from his pockets. One doll represented RFK. One doll represented Dr. King. Carlos smiled and snapped off their heads.  
 
"Salud, Wayne."  
 
"Thank you, Carlos."  
 
"You're looking for work, right? This ain't about a handshake and a thank-you envelope."  
 
Wayne sipped wine. It was present-day liquor-store vintage.  
 
"I want to assume Ward Littell's role in your organization, along with the position in the Hughes organization that my father had just inherited from Ward. I have the skills and the connections to prove myself valuable, I'm prepared to favor you in all my dealings with Mr. Hughes, and I'm aware of the penalties you dispense for disloyalty."  
 
Carlos speared an anchovy. His fork slid. Olive oil hit his tux shirt.  
 
"Where's your father going to be throughout all of this?"   Wayne toppled the RFK doll. A plastic arm fell off. Carlos picked his nose.  
 
"Okay, even if I'm fucking susceptible to favors and prone to like you, why should Howard Hughes go outside his own organization full of suck-asses he feels comfortable with to hire a fucked-up ex-cop who goes around shooting niggers for kicks?"  
 
Wayne flinched. He gripped his wine glass and almost snapped the stem.  
 
"Mr. Hughes is a xenophobic drug addict known to inject narcotics into a vein in his penis, and I can concoct-"  
 
Carlos yukked and slapped the table. His wine glass capsized. Pepper chunks flew. Olive oil spritzed.  
 
"-Drugs that will stimulate and sedate him and diminish his mental capacities to the point that he will become that much more tractable in all his dealings with you. I also know that you have a very large envelope for Richard Nixon, should he be nominated. Mr. Hughes is putting in 20%, and I plan to raid my father's cash reserve and get you another five million cold."  
 
The toga geek walked in. He brought a sponge and swabbed the mess presto-chango. Carlos snapped his fingers. The toga geek disappeared.  
 
"I keep coming back to your father. What's Wayne Tedrow Senior going to be doing while Wayne Tedrow Junior sticks him the big one where it hurts the most?"  
 
Wayne pointed to the dolls and back up to heaven. Carlos cracked his knuckles.  
 
"Okay, I'll bite."  
 
Wayne raised his glass. "Thank you."  
 
Carlos raised his glass. "You get two fifty a year and points, and you jump on Ward's old job straight off. I need you to oversee the buyouts of legitimate businesses started with Teamster Pension Fund loans, so we can launder it and funnel it into a slush fund to build these hotel-casinos somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. You know what we're looking for. We want some pliable, anti-Communist el jefe type who'll do what we want and keep all the dissident hippie protest shit down to a dull roar. Sam G.'s running point now. We've got it narrowed down to Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. That's your main fucking job. You make it happen and you make your hophead pal keep buying our hotels, and you make sure we get to keep our inside guys, who just might help us out with some skim."