They pulled it off.
Ward Littell and Pete Bondurant, two of the Anti-Hero protagonists (if we're being generous) of James Ellroy's American Tabloid, have gotten away with the crime of the century: assassinating President John F. Kennedy at the behest of The Mafia. Littell, organized crime's go-to Amoral Attorney, is hanging around Dallas in the aftermath of the assassination, trying to tie up the legal loose ends and ensure the "lone gunman" explanation for Kennedy's assassination becomes the only accepted narrative. Bondurant is also in Dallas tying up loose ends, albeit in a rather more violent fashion.
The assassination wasn't without a price: Littell was forced to kill his friend Kemper Boyd at the end of American Tabloid, and now both he and Bondurant are trapped in the mob's employ. Of course, the alternative is a brutal death, so Pete and Ward are happy to make themselves useful.
In what seems like an amazing bit of fortuitous timing, Las Vegas police detective Wayne Tedrow Jr. happens to be in Dallas, serving as a reluctant hit man for his thoroughly racist police superiors. Wayne has been sent to Dallas to murder a low-life named Wendell Durfee, a Las Vegas native who is currently hiding out in the area. The price on Durfee's head? A cold six thousand dollars.
But Tedrow, the son of a racist pamphleteer titan who has seemingly rejected his father's hatred, can't go through with it. After his act of mercy is met with horrifying violence, Wayne spirals downward, eventually finding himself in Bondurant's orbit.
Because Big Pete has big plans. American Tabloid turned him into a genuine believer in the cause of bringing down Fidel Castro, and he wants to run an old play one more time — selling heroin and using the profits to fund Cuban rebels. Wayne, a gifted chemist, is a crucial part of these plans. And with the help of the mob and the CIA, Pete and Wayne find themselves with a new source of heroin: Vietnam.
Ward has his own tasks: representing Howard Hughes in his efforts to buy up all of the major Vegas casinos. Except his true clients, the mob's most prominent leaders, have other expectations: they intend to bleed Hughes dry and cheat him on the sales.
All the while, the Civil Rights Movement is in full swing, to J. Edgar Hoover's furious dismay. Ward tries to walk a narrow path, siphoning money from Hughes and the mob to give to the Civil Rights movement, while Pete and Wayne eventually find themselves going back to the assassination well — two more times.
The second book of Ellroy's Underworld Trilogy. Followed by a direct sequel, Blood's a Rover.
This novel contains examples of:
- Amoral Attorney: Ward, as in the previous novel. He's also:
- The Atoner: Riven by guilt, Ward tries to funnel some ill-gotten money to the Civil Rights Movement. He initially does this with J. Edgar Hoover's blessing, but Ward pushes it to the breaking point.
- Ate His Gun: Ward ends his life this way after watching news coverage of the Robert Kennedy assassination.
- Blackmail: Dwight Holly and Wayne Tedrow Sr. leave a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight to Wendell Durfee, knowing Wayne Jr. will follow them and extract horrible vengeance on Durfee for murdering Wayne's wife. Once Wayne does exactly that, Holly springs the trap, and uses the knowledge of Wayne's crime to blackmail him into helping with the assassination of Martin Luther King. Wayne doesn't protest too much.
- The Conspiracy: The assassinations of both Martin Luther King and RFK. The beginning of the novel also has Pete and Ward covering up the Kennedy assassination as well.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: As with many Ellroy stories, betrayal is quite common. Pete gets the worst of it, eventually figuring out that the CIA and the mob no longer care about Cuba, and in fact they're funneling money to Castro in order to shore up the mob's position in left-wing Caribbean nations.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Arden is tortured to death off-screen, but a random mafia enforcer happily fills in all of the details on a wiretap. Unusually, she actually resisted the torture and refused to give up the requested information, eventually biting off her own tongue to prevent herself from talking.
- The Determinator: Pete's mob buddies lure him onto a boat with the promise of a final raid on Cuba, with the intent of betraying and killing him at sea. Pete manages to figure out the plan and overcome and kill everyone on the boat, the last few while he's having a heart attack.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Pete Bondurant actually gets to retire from "the life," reconcile and settle down with his wife. If the epilogue to WhiteJazz is anything to go by he's still alive in the late seventies/early eighties.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Pete makes it clear that he won't kill women and he won't sell drugs to American G Is in Vietnam. He ends up killing a woman, and while he personally never sells drugs to soldiers, he eventually finds out that his supposed allies are happy doing so.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: Pete effectively imprisons Ward in a remote cabin before the RFK assassination. Once the assassination is over, Pete tells Ward he's free to go and leaves himself. But he leaves behind a loaded pistol, and Ward immediately realizes the meaning of that.
- Manipulative Bastard: Hoover, as per usual.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Wayne tracks down Wendell Durfee but lets him go, even giving Durfee the bounty money. Later, back in Vegas, Durfee repays the kindness by raping and murdering Wayne's wife.
- Nostalgia Filter: When Pete strong-arms his way into control of a cab company in Vegas, he re-brands it as "Tiger Kab," the name of the Miami company he and Boyd ran with such panache in American Tabloid. His friends in the mob and CIA tease him for his nostalgia. As it turns out, Pete's nostalgia and his sincere belief in the cause of deposing Castro make him easily exploitable by those same "friends."
- Refuge in Audacity: Pete and Ward offer this as the explanation for why they were able to get away with the JFK assassination: it was so big and so audacious that no one would suspect them.
- Self-Made Orphan: Wayne beats his father to death with a golf club.
- Skewed Priorities: Hoover doesn't care about the brutal racial terrorism of the white authorities in the southern states. Martin Luther King's alleged Communist sympathies? Hoover literally makes a federal case out of those.
- Torture Technician: The mob has a go-to torturer nicknamed "The Vice." No points for guessing his favorite tool.
- The Vietnam War: Pete and Wayne start a heroin business in Vietnam during the early days of American involvement in the war.
