Shakedown: Freddy Otash Confesses (Kindle Single)

by James Ellroy

“I’ll work for anyone but Communists. I’ll do anything short of murder.”

Freddy motto

Homos are “licentious lispers.” Dykes are “beefcake butches.” Drunks are “bibulous bottle hounds” and “dyspeptic dipsos.”

A photo fell out of the box. Holy shit—Rin Tin Tin fucking Katharine Hepburn. I grabbed the box and put the photo in my pocket. My wife Helen was a big Hepburn fan.

I drove a Lin-coon Coon-tinental coon-vertible.

An A-bomb test was scheduled in Nevada. The newspapers predicted some dazzling fireworks. Other bungalow dwellers were up on their roofs. There’s Bob Mitchum and a young quail smoking a reefer, there’s Marilyn Monroe and Lee Strasberg, there’s Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. Everybody looks fuck-struck and happy. Everybody’s got a jug for the toast. Everybody laffed and waved hello. Mitchum brought a portable radio for the countdown. He turned it on. I heard static and “ … 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.” The world went WHOOSH. The ground shook. The sky lit up mauve and pink. We all raised our bottles and applauded. The colors receded into bright white light. I had my arm around Elizabeth Taylor. I looked Ingrid Bergman straight in the eyes.

I developed my personal credo: “I’ll work for anyone but Communists. I’ll do anything short of murder.” Morally sound in L.A., circa ’53.

“You are currently engaged in an intimate relationship with a Pan American stewardess named Barbara Jane Bonvillain, now in federal custody for possession of narcotics procured in Mexico. I must inform you that the outsized Miss Bonvillain is a Communist agent and a personal emissary of Marshal Tito, the Red boss of Yugoslavia. As if that weren’t enough, Miss Bonvillain is really a man. She underwent a sex-change operation in Malmö, Sweden, in late 1951, before her stellar efforts impersonating a woman at the ’52 Olympics. You fucked a man, Freddy. You’re a homo. Get the hell off my police force.”