True Confessions

THUNDER’S MOUTH PRESS

New York

T
RUE
C
ONFESSIONS

Copyright © 1977 by John Gregory Dunne
Introduction copyright © 2006 by George Pelecanos

Published by
Thunder’s Mouth Press
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.
245 West 17th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10011

First Thunder’s Mouth Press printing January 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
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or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 1-56025-815-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-56025-815-5
eBook ISBN: 9780786737543

Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West

for
      
D
OROTHY
B
URNS
D
UNNE

        
J
OAN
D
IDION

        
Q
UINTANA
R
OO
D
UNNE

        
Generations

“None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore.”

From the opening line of John Gregory Dunne’s
True Confessions
, one would expect another work of nostalgia from an author casting a fond backward glance at the city of his youth. But it is a deceptive sentence, refreshing in its deceptiveness, a head-fake that invites the reader through a door and then presents something completely different than expected once that door slams shut. By then, the reader is fascinated and firmly held in Dunne’s masterful grasp.

That, I imagine, was the reaction of many who experienced the pleasures of
True Confessions
upon its publication in 1977. Because there had not been a book quite like it up to that time.

True Confessions
is based on the Elizabeth Short murder, a shocking, psychosexual homicide that was the talk of Los Angeles in 1947 and remains to this day unsolved. That the Short case was never closed makes it natural fodder for the mystery genre, and indeed it has been the subject of several novels and nonfiction books. Along with
True Confessions
, the most revered is James Ellroy’s
The Black Dahlia
. Ellroy has openly acknowledged his debt to
Confessions
, crediting Dunne for reshaping his own idea of the potential of the crime novel. He is not alone.

Previously, with few exceptions, novelists who toiled in the field of crime fiction were thought to be slumming. The critical establishment and gatekeepers of academia instructed us that this type of genre entertainment, featuring ripe-for-parody elements (guns, tough talk, red lipstick and heaving breasts, garter belts leading to the promised land) and a formula (a murder introduced in the first chapter and the world rearranged by the solving of that murder in the denouement), should be shelved separately, both physically and intellectually, from “serious” fiction. Dunne showed a whole generation of then and future writers that a novel could entertain with street authenticity, plot, and realism, and also be resonant and, yes, achieve the level of literature. In that way,
True Confessions
is one of the more influential novels written in post-Vietnam America. It also stands on its own as a seriously good book.

Dunne does deliver the genre goods. The crime is solved, though I can’t remember, after having read the novel several times, the identity of the killer. More accurately, I don’t care. I come back to
True Confessions
again and again for the characters and the naked honesty in which their lives are presented. Dunne does not allow us to look away from the more sordid aspects of his tale, but never does he lapse into exploitation. The book is authentic but does not suffer from the juvenile nihilism that is pervasive in much of modern hard-boiled fiction. That doesn’t suggest that it’s soft in any way. There is little sentimentality in the novel, but there is humanity to spare.

The book opens in the 1960s, with a long prologue describing the meeting of two old men, former LAPD Homicide cop Tom Spel-lacy, and his brother Desmond Spellacy, a priest in the Catholic Archdiocese of LA. Their conversation, filled with regret, bitterness, and a longing to air out a lifetime of unspoken grievances, ends with Desmond telling his brother that he’s suffering from a terminal illness. “I’m going to die, Tommy,” says Des.

The story then jumps back to 1947, with Tom Spellacy working the murder of a young woman (here dubbed “The Virgin Tramp”) that gives the novel its narrative engine. Desmond would like to succeed the Cardinal, whose days are numbered. Involved in both of their lives is corrupt builder Jack Amsterdam, a large contributor to the Catholic Church. Amsterdam, because of his financial influence, has a say in Desmond Spellacy’s possible promotion. When Jack’s liaison to the church, Dan Campion, is implicated as a sexual partner of the victim, Tom, himself a former Amsterdam bagman, must confront his brother and ask him to choose between conscience and ambition, a decision that will shape both of their futures.

Right from the start, we are thrown into a milieu quite unlike the artifice of West Coast period noir that has been presented to us in the past. The blueprint, of course, was drafted by Raymond Chandler. Much has been made of Chandler’s Los Angeles, and rightfully so. It is a magnificent fictional creation. But it is a fiction. Like the West of our movies, Chandler’s LA did not actually exist, but it has become the reality that we want and need. Dunne, on the other hand, presents an accurate social record of the day (closer to the realist vision of Hammett, if Hammett had been unencumbered by censorship) and lets the city’s inhabitants speak exactly as they would, based on who they were, in their time. Because it is the post-World War II Los Angeles we least expect, it is unsettling to read the following conversation between Tom Spellacy and his partner, Frank Grotty, discussing the possible leads in the case:

The fact that Spellacy simply finishes his beer without comment is telling. In a lesser novel Crotty’s crude language and racial slurs would signal a “bad” character that would need to be reprimanded by the protagonist or in some way merit punishment. But, in 1947, this is the manner in which a certain kind of man would speak. Spellacy, no stranger to using similar language himself, wouldn’t give his partner’s remarks a passing thought. What’s notable is that Mr. Dunne has the courage to lay these men and their attitudes bare. Spellacy and Crotty move freely and with deep experiential knowledge amongst hookers, fight promoters, back-alley abortionists, and all manner of degenerates, and they do so completely in their element. If the reader is to judge them or take offense, so be it. But the author refuses to do so. This type of realism in crime fiction is fairly common today, and in the wrong hands it can be artificial, but it was rare before the publication of this book.

The last chapter of the novel circles back to the ‘60s, with the two brothers confronting their pasts and each other with a final conversation that will leave few unmoved. Dunne’s sharp focus on the guilt inherent in Catholicism and his dead-on portrayal of Irish-Americans have been noted before, but one does not have to be of any particular faith or ethnic extraction to deeply feel the emotion in this section of the book. The writing is superb and understated. Redemption has never been so earned, nor has absolution been so finely detailed. In the end, one realizes that this is not a story about a murder. Rather, it deals with the truly important subjects that the American novel rarely addresses: mortality and the passage of time.

The final words of the novel go, again, to Tom Spellacy: “As for me, I’m in the pink. I’ll be seventy-two next week.”

John Gregory Dunne did not see that milestone. He died at seventy-one, on December 30, 2003. But with
True Confessions
, he achieved what most novelists can only hope for. He left behind a work of art.

—George Pelecanos
Silver Spring, Maryland

T
HIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.
T
HE AUTHOR IS

AWARE OF THE ANACHRONISMS AND AMBIGUITIES

IN THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PUNCTUATION OF

THIS BOOK, AS HE IS AWARE OF DISTORTIONS

OF TIME AND GEOGRAPHY

None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore. There is
a Holiday Inn across from the coroner’s office. And Lorenzo Jones is our mayor.

“Imagine a pickaninny mayor,” Frank Crotty said. “My son is very tight with him.” He chased a digitalis tablet with a swallow of water. “And brags about it.”

“I see your boy’s picture in the paper,” I said carefully.

“His Honor, the Judge,” Crotty said. He didn’t bother to disguise his disgust. “The champion of the poor.”

“A good-looking lad,” I said. It didn’t seem quite enough for a member of the bench. I tried again. “Nice teeth.”

Crotty digested that one for a moment.

“That’s what I always wanted in a son,” he said finally. “Good teeth. He has a lot of nice shoes, too. Forty-two pair, I think. So he can chew good and he can walk good. Never has to worry about wearing out the soles. Think of it, forty-two days and never the same pair of shoes. And the teeth all white and no holes in them either, that the food can hide in and cause the cavities. Yes, that’s what I always wanted in a son. A good walker and a good chewer.” He poured himself some coffee. “With a shine mayor as his best friend.”

I made a pass at the check, but not serious enough to fool him: he was the visitor in from the desert, after all. I get along good—the pension from the department, the social security, some savings—and I could handle lunch in a Chinese restaurant, but Crotty, he looked like he could handle it better. He always liked Chinese restaurants, Frank. They were cheap, he always used to say. Which meant he ate on the cuff. A holdover from the days he used to work Vice in Chinatown. A meal on the cuff and a twenty in a fortune cookie and Frank would let the Mah-Jongg game in the back survive for another month. Live and let live. It was the same with Frank’s suits. He knew the head of security out at Warner Brothers and Crotty would buy Sidney Greenstreet’s old suits after every picture for a dollar each. Which was why he was usually dressed in white, Frank.

“Speaking of the mayor,” Crotty said, “Bingo Mclnerney died.”

Bingo Mclnerney. He was Lorenzo Jones’s partner out of the Wilshire Division when they were both in the department. It was with Bingo and Lorenzo that it all started that day twenty-eight years ago. Bingo would be hard to forget. Bingo Mclnerney and Lorenzo Jones.

“Black and white in a black-and-white,” I said.

“Oh, that’s grand, Tom, that’s grand,” Crotty said. “Black and white in a black-and-white.” He snapped his fingers for a check. “Bingo always knew how to drive that coon crazy. ‘Knock, knock,’ I heard him say to him one time. ‘Who’s there?’ the pickaninny said. Smiling, you know, like him and Bingo was the best of friends, making with the knock-knock jokes all the time. ‘Dee,’ Bingo says. ‘Dee who?’ the coon says. And in the swellest dinge accent you ever heard, Bingo says, ‘Dee po-lice.’” The laughter caught in Crotty’s throat and he began to cough. “Oh, my,” he said as the choking subsided. “Oh, my. Like it was yesterday I remember it. And it still makes me roar.”

“Poor Bingo,” I said, not really meaning it. He was a knuckle-head.

“It was the cancer that killed him,” Crotty said. “A tumor the size of a football. They could have kicked a field goal with it, one of them little Greeks could, that kicks the field goals on Sundays.”

Crotty rubbed at a spot of soy sauce on his suit. Still white, but a double knit now. And the hair blown like he was wearing a toupee, and the aviator glasses and the white shoes that had the shiny gold buckles that didn’t buckle anything. And the manicure. He had more than the social security and the pension, Frank, and the Medicare that paid for the digitalis tablets. You treat people right and they treat you right and you can retire in very nice shape. The golden rule of the police department.

“He come to the funeral, the shine,” Crotty said. “Hustling the votes. I thought Bingo’s ma would start having her period when he kissed her. And eighty she is if she’s a day. Telling her that him and Bingo was what America is all about.”

“It’s an election year, Frank.”

Crotty was counting the tip, avoiding my eyes. I knew what he wanted to say. “If it hadn’t been for him and Bingo, Tom . . .”

“If it hadn’t been for a lot of things, Frank.” Suddenly I was tired.

“You think about it then?”

“Occasionally.”

Actually I think about it all the time. I even went down to 39th and Norton last week. Or maybe it was a couple of weeks ago. At my age you lose track. It was the first time in twenty-eight years. I remember the sign on that vacant lot. CRIME SCENE SEARCH AREA NO TRESPASSING. The photo car was there and the assistant coroner’s car and the fingerprint car and Bingo Mc-Inerney and Lorenzo Jones in their black-and-white, they had answered the call. It was a funny neighborhood, 39th and Norton, twenty-eight years ago. You couldn’t even call it a neighborhood, really. A couple of bungalows, the rest of it empty lots and a pile of weeds. There was a beat-up Hudson Terraplane with no axles sitting on one of the lots. No engine, either, and all the felt seat covers cut away. This woman who lived around there had been the first to see Lois Fazenda. She had gone out to buy a bottle of milk and when she turned up Norton, she saw this pair of legs sticking out from under a bush. That’s all she saw, the legs. With all the toenails painted brown. Not that the lady going out for milk noticed that. It turned out later she was banging the guy in the grocery store, which was why she never had her milk delivered. Her husband got it in the basket during the war and the guy pushing milk down to the grocer’s was only too willing to help her out. But that’s another story.

Anyway, when I got there, Crotty was bending over the second half of Lois Fazenda. The top half. She was naked as a jaybird, both halves. There was no blood. Not a drop. Anywhere. Just this pale green body cut in two. It was too much for Bingo. He took one look at the top half and spilled his breakfast all over her titties, which is a good way to mess up a few clues. Not that it bothered Crotty. “You don’t often see a pair of titties nice as that,” was all he said. Respect for the dead, Crotty always used to say, was bullshit. Dead is dead.

One thing before I forget, the memory being what it is. That’s Lois Fazenda’s nickname. The Virgin Tramp. Howard Terkel down at the
Herald Express
always claimed it was his scoop, that name. He picked it up from a bartender in Long Beach, Howard said. But the fact is, it was me that dreamed that one up, and there hasn’t been a day the past twenty-eight years that I haven’t regretted it. He was a funny little guy, Howard. He couldn’t get with a case until he could pin a catchy nickname on it. The Lipstick Slaying was Howard’s, and The Soda Pop Killer and The Hibiscus Murder. If you were a corpse and there was a palm tree in the neighborhood, then you were going to be The Coconut Caper to Howard. Vampires, he liked when there was a killing, and werewolves, too. The funny thing was, even with a girl cut in two and the top half having a great pair of boobs, Howard still couldn’t find the hook. He tried the werewolf angle first, then the vampire, but they didn’t catch on, and after Lois Fazenda was identified, calling her a “playgirl” somehow didn’t seem enough. One thing Howard could be and that was a pest, and he nearly drove us nuts asking all sorts of questions about that Hudson Terraplane, as if all we had to look for was a werewolf carrying a spare axle. So Crotty says to me, “Think of a nickname and get him off our back.”

’The Magic Pussy Murder,” I said.

“Uh, uh,” Crotty said. “Send him down to Long Beach. Nothing Howard likes better than prowling around Long Beach, interviewing soda jerks.”

“The Sliced-Up Slit Case.”

“Be serious.”

“The Missing Clit Caper.”

“Tom . . .”

“The Virgin Tramp . . .”

Tilt. “And don’t forget to mention Long Beach,” Crotty said. I didn’t. The next day Howard’s story began,

The
Herald Express
learned exclusively today that Lois Fazenda, playgirl victim of a vampire slaying in the shadow of the Los Angeles Coliseum, was known as “The Virgin Tramp” in the chic haunts she frequented in the Long Beach area . . .

A chic haunt in Long Beach, Crotty said, was a place where the bartender didn’t wear a tattoo.

But the joke was on us. Because the really funny thing was that if I hadn’t come up with that name, we would have had a nice quiet little homicide that would have drifted off the front pages in a couple of days. But “The Virgin Tramp” brought us a lot of attention we didn’t need, and with the attention came the heat, and then it got out of control and a lot of things happened that never should have.

Anyway. 39th and Norton two weeks ago. It’s a Jap neighborhood now, Jap and middle-class colored. No empty lots, no bungalows, no Hudson Terraplane. The Neighborhood Association has put up streetlamps that look like gaslights and there are topiary trees and over on Crenshaw there’s a Honda dealer and a Kawasaki dealer and Subaru and Datsun and Toyota dealers. The colored all have Jap gardeners and the Japs have colored cleaning ladies, and right where Frank Crotty said, “You don’t often see a pair of titties as nice as that,” there’s this Jap-style house and just about on the spot where we found Lois Fazenda’s bottom half, this Jap family has put up one of those little cast-iron nigger jockeys.

Son of a bitch if they haven’t.

I knew I’d get to 39th and Norton eventually, because I drive a lot these days. Trying to put it all back together about me and Des. Over to Boyle Heights usually, where we grew up. The signs today are all different in Boyle Heights. It’s one big body shop now. Acapulco Wrecking. Azteca Body Repair. Carro Latina. Not like when Des and me were kids. Boyle Heights was tough mick then, just like it’s tough Mex now. Cops and priests, that’s what the Heights was famous for. And drunks, hod carriers and bookies. A few stickup men, an occasional shooter. The priesthood, that was a way out. And the department. Boxing was the way I got out. I was the terror of the schoolyard at Saint Anatole’s. The enforcer. The smart guys ran the pitch-penny games and put the market value on the bubble-gum baseball cards—three Ross Youngs for one Joe Dugan—and if any kid didn’t like it, I put him on the grass. At home I used to lie in bed and try not to listen to the old man grinding away at the old lady in the next room, him drunk and her saying, Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the Beginning, is Now and Ever shall be, World Without End, Amen. It made you think a bit about how much fun it was to fuck, and so I used to lie in bed and imagine a bell ringing and the microphone coming down into the ring and some guy in a tuxedo pointing his finger at me and saying, “. . . the welterweight champion of the world.” Anyway, I joined the navy when I was seventeen. Some old petty officer in the recruiting office said I could join the boxing team and avoid sea duty and fuck Chinese girls, which is pretty much what I did for six years. None of the Chinese girls ever said the Gloria. Four years straight I made the quarter finals in the China navy championships, but when the tough boys came in, I stuck and ran and made sure I didn’t get knocked out and bet on the other guy. The funny thing was, I always knew I couldn’t fight much. I had bad hands and no punch and I always had trouble making the weight. The rap on me after I got out of the navy and turned professional was that I liked to hit all right, I just didn’t like to get hit back.

You’re just like your father, the old lady used to say to me. I guess she meant no good. She had other plans for Des. He couldn’t have been more than three when she had him spelling all the Holy Days of Obligation.
A-s-c-e-n-s-i-o-n T-h-u-r-s-d-a-y. I-m-m-a-c-u-l-a-t-e C-o-n-c-e-p-t-i-o-n
. The priests loved it. I remember our pastor, Monsignor Shea. The monsignor was a man of a few firmly held opinions. Like the Jews killed Jesus and you named your first daughter Mary and your first son John. When my cousin Jerry got baptized, Monsignor Shea wouldn’t pour the water on his head. “Jerry!” he said, that big harp voice booming through the sanctuary. “What kind of name is Jerry? You ever heard of a Saint Jerry? It’s a name for a tap dancer.”

And that was that. Except to the day he got killed breaking up a strike at the Ford plant in Pico Rivera in 1937, my cousin Jerry was always called Taps. There were a lot of guys like Taps Keogh in Boyle Heights, hard guys with not too many brains, good only for strike breaking or doing heavy work for Frankie Foley. Frankie was king of the Heights when me and Des were growing up, a real Public Enemy. Girls, protection, every now and then a hit. They made his life story into a Jimmy Cagney movie, although it was more Cagney than Frankie. I mean, I used to do errands for Frankie and he never wore a tuxedo and a wing collar and spats and a gray fedora like Cagney wore in the movie. And he was never good to his ma and the freckle-faced kid brother who wanted to be an altar boy. Then he got burned on a Murder One rap and he got life in San Quentin. I used to see Frank occasionally when I delivered bad guys to Q. He’d become the queen of the joint. The fag Cag, Des called him. The story made him laugh.

The house where Des and I grew up is still standing, which should tell you something about Boyle Heights. All I can really remember about the house is when the priest came to call. The priest would be there to take the parish census and he and my mother would sit there and drink tea and talk about living saints. She should have been a nun, my mother. She set great store by living saints.

“Tell me about Maureen Delaney, Father. Does she still come to the Sodality Meetings?”

“Never misses, Mrs. Spellacy.”