Ellroy, James - Crim..

She said yes, no, or maybe that night. She didn't sense danger. She could have walked away from the
drive-in. She had options that Betty Jean didn't. Her unconsciousness made her passively complicit. Betty
Jean went to the drugstore and bought baby food. Her life ended nineteen years short of my mother's.
I wanted to find the piece of slit who killed her and fuck him for it.
Bill called first thing in the morning. He said he just got off the phone. He talked to Tom Armstrong, Joe
Walker, and Lee Koury.
They traced the kid. He was serving three-to-life. He got out on parole in '75. He stayed out two years
and went down behind a fresh rape.
AND:
Koury said the kid almost confessed to the killing. He almost gave it up at his polygraph test. He said,
"My dad's got heart trouble. This would really kill him."
II
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I replayed the words from L.A. to Fresno. Koury and Meyers made the kid for the Scales snuff. The
kid was 42 now. He was locked down at the California Men's Colony. He fell behind a kidnap-rape in
Bakersfield. Tom Armstrong just received a full report.
Bakersfield was a hundred miles from Fresno. Bill was from Fresno. Betty Jean's parents lived in
Fresno.
We drove up in Bill's car. We took Bill's father along. Angus Stoner was 86. He knew Kern County.
Kern County was all new to me.
Dirt fields and shack towns. Wind and dust and a big flat sky.
Angus supplied travel notes. He identified orchards and harvesting contraptions. He talked up his hobo
adventures, circa 1930.
He picked walnuts and grapes. He slept in boxcars. He poured the pork to numerous women. He cut a
wide indigent swath. Butch queers rode the rails then. They dogged his handsome ass. He kicked their
asses good.
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