Paint It, Red (Part II of II) REVISED.

4

♯ It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black. ♯

-- -- sat upright in his seat and filled the rear-door compartment of his ’62 Lincoln Continental with yellow vomit.  He Herbert Hoovered up three lines of coke and heaved.  Katharine looked at him wide-eyed.  He smelt their Mexican gardener on her still, motor oil, tacos, the scent of illegal immigration but shrugged it off – he’d left town weeks before.  She had threatened to leave some weeks too but he caved in.  She would win their Long Island estate no matter of the circumstances.  Now all he could do was try to win her back.  He patted himself down and told his driver to take them to Giovanni’s in Little Italy, the place of their very first date.  He paused, patting himself frantically, still drooling spit and craving nicotine.  Where the fuck is my father’s cigarette case?  Shit.  It’s in the boardroom. 

            ‘Wait Ellroy!  I’ve left my cigarettes.’

He clambered over his impassive wife and out onto the sidewalk.  -- -- took a deep breath, crossed the sidewalk and into the tinted glass Jenga set before him.  He nodded as Vernon, the old guy who opened and closed the door for a mere 20K a year, smiled at his newly-sacked boss.  He pushed past him, into the lobby, crossing it and into the service elevator.  His nose bled.

The doors sighed open on the eighteenth floor – the boiler room – Carroll ignored him.  Her elbow propped up her heavy head upon its palm, her eyes half open, gazing vacantly into her computer screen.  Those tits.  Talk about loyalty.  He shrugged and adjusted his red and white dotted necktie. 

He pushed open the double doors.

‘Here’s Johnny!’ he said.

            His colleagues didn’t laugh.  -- -- shuffled on through the office, embarrassed at his lost outburst.

Ralph, eyes closed, mouth ajar, glasses clinging for dear life on the cliff of his hook nose, fingers interlocked over his obtrusive bulk of a belly, had his loafers propped up on the desk to his left. 

Pete up ahead had his pen hanging lifelessly from his wide mouth, telephone balancing between his plump fingers, eyes fixed at the desk.  -- -- shrugged again and went into the toilet.

He removed a small vial and a fifty dollar note, emptied it at the top of the basin, rolled up the meaningless green paper and devoured it.  Face numb and eyes bulging he started into the mirror, noticing a creak in the cubicle behind, Donnie, the janitor, head bowed and newspaper outstretched, was still on the toilet, door wide open, not giving a flying fuck or -- -- any attention.

What the fuck have the board made up about me now?

He stopped at the door of the conference room.  Took a deep breath.  Calm and concise now.  He charged into the room. 

His successor Paul was hunched over the telephone.

‘Don’t mind me,’ he said.                  

There it was.  At the head of the desk.  His father’s gunmetal cigarette case from ‘Nam.  He snatched it up and paused to regard the expressions of his fellow directors.  Maude’s face, contorted and mismatched from the shotgun blast, was missing an eye.  The director, his own father, had been blown clear off his chair. 

Paul toppled over onto the floor.  He saw it there.  -- --‘s face  leering over him.  Hanging in mid-air like a puppet.  A thin smile drawn over the lips.  The glassy eyes stared into his.  White powder was smeared over his nostrils.  It was the face of a psychopath, brightening as the rest of him toyed with the fire axe.  Paul started to scream.  It was the axe that cut off his cries for help.

And his head in half.

5

When I got into the car I realized that I’d been carrying half a pound of coke in my pocket around all day.  And not much left to show for it.  I remember thinking, ‘Why do I do this to myself?’  So while the engine and Katharine was still idling I got out of the Lincoln and dumped it in a trash can.  I then got back in the car and Ellroy started to drive us to Little Italy.  We weren’t more than ten feet along the street before we were blocked.  There were cars and ambulances everywhere.  First I thought there’d been a suicide, with Black Monday and all, then I thought, they’re gonna kill me.  I saw this guy pop up alongside the car and jam a gun against the side of my head.  I thought it was all over.  Then he screamed, ‘Put your hands up and step out of the vehicle motherfucker, make a move and I’ll paint your limo red.’

6

“EPILOGUE

When Detective Christopher Kavanagh first apprehended -- --, he had no idea that he would be the maddest criminal he had ever encountered in his 25 year career on the force.

            It had started like every arrest.  There was a caller.  In this case it was the doorman, Vernon Watts, who had received a call from Paul Tanner upstairs prior to being decapitated in the boardroom.  He telephoned 911 and Kavanagh just managed to get to -- -- before he drove off. 

The suspect was different.  Somehow he had managed to usurp the law to satisfy his greed for far too long.  Charges of tax evasion, drug possession, prostitutes and battery surfaced once he was apprehended.  His gardener had gone missing too.  But as for Katharine, nobody knows what happened to her, all that is understood was that she was never in the Lincoln when he was arrested despite everything he has told me and you.

369

Lucy Brown – Making Love to a Murder.”