James Ellroy (1948-) was born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles. When he was ten years old his mother was murdered; the killer was never apprehended. There were some similarities in the case to the famous murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, and both murders obsessed Ellroy for many years. He wrote a fictionalized version of the Betty Short murder, The Black Dahlia (1987), which became a New York Times bestseller, and a memoir of his fifteen-month search for his mother’s killer, My Dark Places (1996). As a young man, Ellroy lived a life of petty crime, alcoholism, and drug use, cleaning up his act in the late 1970s to produce his first novel, Brown’s Requiem (1981); his second book, Clandestine (1982), was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. His first hardcover book, Blood on the Moon (1984), began the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy. The masterly Black Dahlia was the first novel in what Ellroy called the L.A. Quartet, which later included The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992). Two of the books became big-budget movies. L.A. Confidential (1997), a critical and commercial success, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. The Black Dahlia (2006), on the other hand, was critically savaged, successfully warning potential audiences away.
Although he later claimed a career change from crime novels to big, ambitious political books, his Underworld trilogy, which he described as “a secret history of America in the mid-to-late twentieth century” — American Tabloid (i995)> The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood’s a Rover (2009) — is heavily spiked with dark crimes and violence. Described as “the American Dostoevsky” by Joyce Carol Oates, Ellroy is arguably the most influential American crime writer of the late twentieth century; his powerful, relentlessly dark prose style of staccato sentences, infused with uniquely American slang that hammers the senses, has been emulated by any number of tough-writing young crime writers.
“Since I Don’t Have You” was first published in A Matter of Crime, volume 4 (1988). It served as the basis for an episode of Showtime’s series Fallen Angels, airing on September 26,1993.
During the postwar years I served two masters — running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined L.A. at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures — the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen — rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster — I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off nigger-town dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff’s bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen Jr. — a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick’s stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.
Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me — Turner “Buzz” Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer; and keeper of the secret key to his masters’ psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens — while I would go anywhere, anyplace — gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business — a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I’d pull a smart segue to keep kicking — and I write this memoir as an old, old man — while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.
Howard. Mickey. Me.
Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call “conflict of interest.” Of course, it was over a woman — and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I’m writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind — that I loved them — even though they were both world-class shitheels.
January 15,1949.
It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case — still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman’s death — he French-kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator — and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I’d been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Year’s. The Mick’s signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who’d fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I’d been having a good run: a half-dozen Midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard’s fuck pads — strategically located apartments tucked all over L.A. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my Quonset-hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.
“That you, Howard?”
Howard Hughes sighed. “What happened to ‘Security, may I help you?
“You’re the only one calls this early, Boss.”
“And you’re alone?”
“Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What’s up?”
“Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour.”
“Right, Boss.”
“Two or three, Buzz? I’m hungry and having four.”
Howard was on his all-chilidog diet; Pink’s Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse meat air-freighted up daily from Tijuana. “One kraut, no chili.”
“Heathen. Pink’s chili is better than Chasen’s.”
“I had a pony when I was a boy.”
“So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn’t eat —”
I said, “Half an hour,” and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn’t have to watch the fourth-richest man in America eat.
Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the back seat of his limousine. He said, “You didn’t really want it, did you?”
I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. “No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style.”
Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing — a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. “Do you need money, Buzz?”
I thought of Leotis Dineen. “Can niggers dance?”
“They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening.”
Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard’s comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. “Getting any, Boss?”