Earlier this year I read two excellent crime novels written by Newton Thornburg – To Die in California (1973) and Cutter and Bone (1976) – both of them set in Santa Barbara, California. The experience reminded me of just how much good crime fiction has been set in Santa Barbara, or some fictionalized version thereof, over the years, books by the likes of Sue Grafton, Margaret Millar, and Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar, Margaret’s husband). Ten or fifteen years ago I read Tom Nolan’s 1999 biography of Kenneth Millar and discovered that rock-n-roller Warren Zevon was a huge fan of the Lew Archer books, knew them all back and forth. He actually met Millar a couple of times. The first meeting took place in Santa Barbara, where Millar lived, and didn’t go particularly well. Zevon, as was his wont, acted casually and overly familiar with Millar from the beginning. Millar, older and more reserved, was put off by the talky young singer-songwriter. But a few years later, in 1979, at a time when Zevon was in horrible shape because of his alcohol and drug addictions, Paul Nelson, a freelance writer who knew both men, asked Millar if he might be willing to visit Zevon and try to pick up his spirits a bit. By this time, Zevon was living in Montecito, an uber-expensive celebrity enclave located about ten minutes from the city of Santa Barbara. Millar, who lived in Hope Ranch, another expensive suburb of Santa Barbara, agreed to meet Zevon. An account of that meeting is contained in Tom Nolan’s book Ross Macdonald: a Biography. Naturally, Nolan’s book also contains a lot of details about the tragic life and death of Macdonald’s only child, Linda. Back in 2017, I wrote a short story about the meeting of the two men. It contains a lot of factual information gleaned from Nolan’s book and other sources. Some of the dialog comes verbatim from Nolan’s book. The fatal hit-and-run incident in my story is not made up. Nonetheless, this is a work of fiction. My narrator is fictional and is not meant to represent Paul Nelson. I hope you enjoy it.
LEW ARCHER AND THE EXCITABLE BOY
I was the guy who set it up, an intimate one-on-one meeting between two twentieth-century American cultural giants. It happened in 1979. I had been freelancing in the L.A. area for about fifteen years. I first met Kenneth Millar in 1969. I had published a favorable review of The Goodbye Look in an independent weekly called The Santa Monica Voice. I got a nice short letter from Millar thanking me for the kind words. Sensing a chance at a big sale to a major daily newspaper or a prominent national magazine, I wrote back to Millar and asked if I could interview him for a profile. I told him I hoped the profile would serve as a sort of career review that would include favorable commentary on his entire Ross Macdonald oeuvre. I tried not to lay on the flattery too thick. I didn’t want to come across as a sniveling sycophant. The approach worked. Millar suggested I drive up to his house in Santa Barbara the next weekend and chat with him for a few hours. After the profile ran in Parade Magazine, he and I kept in touch. He helped me set up a lot of freelance work. He introduced me to other writers and celebrities. When Warner Brothers made a film version of The Drowning Pool, Millar talked the publicity department into letting me write the film’s official press package, including profiles of all the major participants – director Stuart Rosenberg, actors Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and several others. To me, Millar was a mensch.
Zevon was a different story. In the early 1970s I was living in a rental house in Laurel Canyon. A lot of my friends were musicians. I had always been more interested in literature than music, but the infectiousness of that whole 1970s Southern California folk-rock scene – the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young – caught me in its sway. And by the mid 1970s I was writing almost exclusively about music. I had even bought myself a drum kit and, after a couple of years of intensive lessons, I found myself performing in a folk-rock band that included several studio-musician friends of mine. We called ourselves Canyon of Dreams. Although I had heard of Warren Zevon as early as 1970, I hadn’t paid much attention to him. His first solo album, Wanted Dead or Alive, was a commercial dud. After that he got gigs touring with, first, Don Everly and then Phil Everly (the brothers were pursuing solo careers at that time). That wouldn’t have garnered any attention from me; I considered the Everlys a couple of nostalgia acts, too old to be cool. Warren and his wife, Crystal, left California for Europe in ’74 or ’75. While living in Spain, whenever they felt homesick for Southern California, Warren and Crystal would seek out one of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries. In America, Warren had never been more than a casual Macdonald fan, preferring the works of more “literary” writers like John Updike and John Fowles. But living in Spain turned him into a hardcore Ross Macdonald enthusiast, an encyclopedist, a completist. He tracked down and devoured everything written by or about Macdonald. He would later tell me, “The fact that Crystal and I were abroad and he was so evocative of Los Angeles caused us to read one book of his after another.” Something else must have happened to him over there, too, because, when he returned, he put out a masterpiece of an album, the self-titled Warren Zevon. From then on, he was never off my radar. I interviewed him, attended his shows, wrote a couple of profiles of him. He and I were not great friends, but he always took time to talk with me whenever we ran into each other at a party or a music-industry event.
Alas, Warren was one of those live-fast-die-young types. By 1979 drug- and alcohol-addiction had turned him into a walking corpse. He and Crystal had separated. He was living by himself in a big ugly house in Montecito, about a fifteen minute drive from Hope Ranch, where Ken and Margaret Millar lived. He had spent some time in the nearby Pinecrest substance-abuse clinic (the inspiration for his song “Detox Mansion”), but had left without completing his treatment (“Never got my diploma,” he used to joke). Friends were trying to talk him into returning to Pinecrest, arguing that he’d be dead in a few months if he didn’t straighten himself out, but Zevon couldn’t seem to summon the will to care anymore. That’s when I got the idea of bringing Millar around to see him. Zevon, as I said, was a hardcore fan of the Ross Macdonald novels. Their noirish view of southern California was mirrored in a lot of Zevon’s songs – “Desperadoes Under the Eaves,” “Carmelita,” “Join Me in L.A.,” “Splendid Isolation,” and so forth. I think Zevon had even sent Millar a couple of fan letters in the past. In a desperate stab at a drug intervention, I went to Millar and asked if he’d be willing to drive out to Zevon’s house with me and pay the rock star an unannounced visit. To my surprise, Millar agreed to do it, despite the protestations of his wife, the novelist Margaret Millar, who was much less social than her husband, and warier of the younger generation. When Ken told her what he was planning to do, she told him, “Good luck. It’s a fine thing you’re trying to do but face it: the guy’s chances of straightening out are about zip.” Fortunately, Ken didn’t listen to her. And so off we drove, from one expensive suburb of Santa Barbara to another.
When Zevon opened the door, I could tell he was a bit freaked out. Kenneth was dressed like Joe Friday: conservative blue suit, strait-and-narrow tie, fedora. Not the kind of look to instill trust in the heart of a junkie. I said to him, “Warren Zevon, you remember by friend Ken Millar. I heard you were a bit down in the dumps so I thought a visit from Lew Archer’s creator might cheer you up.” It was kind of a shitty thing to do. You don’t show up at anybody’s house unannounced, especially not the house of a paranoid junkie with whom you have only the most casual acquaintance. But I knew that if I had tried to make an appointment, Zevon would have just kept putting me off. No self-respecting man wants to meet his hero unless he feels that he can measure up to him in some way, that he’s worthy of the honor. And Zevon looked as though he might soon be riding in the back of a Zebra-striped hearse.
At first, despite his enormous fondness for Millar’s work, Warren seemed reluctant to let us in, as though he thought Ken might be working undercover for the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department’s narcotic division. But Millar handled it beautifully. He told Warren, “Come on, no one’s afraid of old Ken,” and walked right in and made himself at home. Warren looked at me as if to say “What the hell are you doing?” But I just shrugged and followed Millar into the house. Warren had no choice but to close the door and join us in the living room. Either that or flee into the light of the Southern California sun. And his skin was so vampiric at this point, I suspected the sunlight might cause him to combust.
It was a late afternoon in mid-autumn, the kind of southern California day immortalized in the works of both Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald – warm, slight breeze, orange sky combined of equal parts smog and sunshine. Cinematographers call that time of day “golden hour,” because of how beautifully everything photographs in that light. But I doubt if even the best lighting in the world could have done much for Warren’s sickly pallor. Inside the house all the curtains were closed and no lights were on. Golden hour was nowhere to be found. Ken and I circled the foyer a time or two before figuring out how to access the living room. The room was a mess. There were beer cans and whiskey bottles and shot glasses everywhere. On one of the coffee tables, a half-eaten Mexican take-out meal was congealing in a Styrofoam container. In one corner I saw a pile of baffle blankets that Warren must have brought home from some recording studio. Perhaps he was planning to set up a recording operation in his own home. Hell, maybe he was sleeping on those big heavy sound baffles. You never knew what Warren was up to. He bounced from enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But he didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic about anything at the moment. Drugs and depression can do that to you. With a shambling gait, he followed Ken and me into the living room and collapsed into a big overstuffed couch. He pointed to a couple of leather club chairs and invited Ken and me to take a seat. Ken ignored Warren’s instruction and instead plopped himself down at the other end of the couch. I slunk off to the farthest of the two club chairs. I wanted to remain as unobtrusive a presence as possible. For this intervention to work, it had to be a meeting of the minds between two great creative artists, both of whom had suffered crippling addictions. My work was done the minute I had gotten the two men into the same room together. After that I barely spoke another word.
Since Warren seemed reluctant to open up about his personal problems, Ken went first. He talked about his own struggles with artistic success. The way that once you become a well-known author, you never quite feel authentic again: the interviews, the fawning fans, the obligatory book tours and glad-handing. “It all serves to make you feel less like a writer and more like a new brand of toothpaste,” Ken said.
Eventually Warren relaxed a bit and began musing on his own ambivalence regarding success. “You don’t know what phoniness is until you find yourself in a limousine being taken to a rock concert at some fancy community center where a bunch of rich kids have shelled out twenty bucks a ticket to hear you sing about junkies and hoboes and crackpots and failures,” Warren said. “It’s like preaching the gospel of Jesus in a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit. I honestly don’t know how Jimmy Swaggart does it without the aid of alcohol or heroin or hookers. Sometimes I think Hank Williams knew what he was doing when he drank himself to death at 29. Can you imagine him rich and fat and living in a Nashville mansion at 49 and still singing about pirogues and bayous and hillbillies?”
A pained expression troubled Ken’s face. Elvis had died just two years earlier, a bloated caricature of his younger self, so it didn’t take much imagination to picture Hank Williams in the same situation. “But you’re not Hank Williams,” he said. “You’ve still got time to turn your life around, to kick the habit. Williams waited too long.”
“I know,” said Warren. “But there seems to be something wrong with me. I’ve got this big house and several nice cars and lots of money, but I don’t like any of it. It all just makes me feel like a fraud.”
“It’s just guilt,” said Ken. “Successful writers and rock stars are overcompensated in our culture. All of us who attain celebrity status feel it, and it can’t help but make us uncomfortable. That’s why so many of us turn to the bottle: Chandler, Hammet, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.”
“I always wanted to write like Fitzgerald,” Warren said.
“Everyone wants to write like Fitzgerald,” Ken said.
“I read somewhere that his favorite drink was gin,” said Warren, “so I started drinking it myself, thinking it would make writing more fun.”
“Fun?” Ken blurted. “Writing’s not supposed to be fun. It’s some of the hardest goddamn work in the world. That’s why so many writers are alcoholics and junkies.”
Warren nodded his agreement. A silence spread out in the room like a ripple in a drowning pool. None of us spoke for several seconds. Finally Warren pointed to a big illustrated book on the coffee table in front of him. “I knew this guy,” he said. The book was a biography of Igor Stravinsky, the great composer.
“You knew Stravinsky?” Ken asked. He seemed genuinely impressed.
“When I was a teenager, I took private piano lessons from him,” Warren said. “He was a neighbor of ours, and I was considered something of a prodigy back then. I can’t help thinking how ashamed he’d be of me if he could see me now.”
“You’re a successful singer and songwriter,” said Ken. “He’d probably be very proud of you.”
Warren shook his head. “Stravinsky knew more hardship than I ever will,” he said. “He was exiled from his native Russia because of the revolution. He had a wife and four children but struggled to make a living as a composer. A lot of his greatest works weren’t appreciated when they were first performed in public. One of the greatest musical geniuses of the twentieth century and he was forced to beg for money from benefactors like Leopold Stokowski and Coco Chanel. One year his wife died of tuberculosis, the next year his daughter died of it. Stravinsky himself was hospitalized because of it. He was a permanent nomad, pushed by war and revolution and financial hardship from the Ukraine to Switzerland to France to New York and then finally to L.A. where I met him. And yet, through all that hardship and sorrow, the guy lived to be 88 years old, continued composing up to his dying day, and never once had any problems with drugs or alcohol.”
Another silence enveloped the three of us, a silence that was broken by just one word from Ken: “Luck,” he said.
Warren’s eyes suddenly widened, as if he had been vouchsafed a great truth. “Luck?” he said to Ken. By this time I doubt either of them even remembered that I was in the room.
“That’s all it is,” said Ken. “Sheer dumb luck. Some geniuses, like Poe and Hank Williams, couldn’t seem to get through the day without a bit of whiskey. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were addicted to laudanum almost their entire adult lives. Shelley suffered raging laudanum-induced terrors. John Keats was addicted to cocaine, heroin and alcohol. You might think it’s because they were all just weak, but the literature of addiction suggests otherwise. It suggests that something in the temperment, in the very genetic make-up of the creative artist predisposes him to a dependence on stimulants and depressants, drugs to bring him up and drugs to settle him down again. Stravinsky was one of the lucky ones. But that’s all it is – luck. He won some sort of genetic lottery when he was conceived. He was born with an ability to cope with the caprices of the artist’s life without the need for medication. Good for him. But it doesn’t make the rest of us unworthy as people or as artists.”
With one word – “luck” – Millar seemed to have set Warren free. “I never thought about it that way before,” he said. “But if it’s just luck, then I guess it’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“Of course not,” said Ken. “It’s just one more thing – along with writer’s block, an irregular income, and savage critics – that some of us creative types have to deal with.”
“You too?” asked Warren. He was a Ross Macdonald fanboy before the term even existed. He had spent hours in the periodical rooms of libraries all over L.A., digging up old stories by and about Ross Macdonald. He surely knew all about Millar’s heavy drinking, but I imagine he just wanted to hear about it directly from the man himself.
Ken nodded. “Only in my case, I suppose there really is something to be ashamed of. My wife and I both. You see, when our daughter was young, Margaret and I rarely got through a day without resorting to some sort of pick-me-up. We’d pour ourselves a snort before sitting down to write, in order to limber up our imaginations. Then, when the writing session was done, we’d have several drinks to take the edge off. Margaret would often drink six Miller High Lifes in a single evening. I couldn’t get to sleep without my old pal Johnnie Walker to tuck me in at might. And all of this drinking naturally made an impression on our daughter, Linda. You’ve seen that slogan that appears on wall-hangings and posters in hippie households: Children learn what they live? Well, it was certainly true about poor Linda.”
“She became an alcoholic?” said Warren.
“The worst kind,” said Ken. “When she was sixteen she killed a thirteen-year-old boy in a hit-and-run incident.”
“Jesus,” Warren muttered, but I’m sure this wasn’t news to him.
“It happened back in February of ’56,” Ken told him. “About five-thirty one evening she told us she was going over to her friend Norma’s house to play cards. For her birthday I’d given her a six-cylinder Ford Tudor sedan. It was the biggest mistake of my life. Instead of going to her friend’s house, Linda drove to a liquor store and bought a bottle of wine. Then she drove to a nearby high school and drank it all up. Later she got another bottle and somehow managed to get that down too. Then she went cruising through the streets of Santa Barbara, rendered nearly incapacitated by alcohol. On Alisos Street, three schoolboys were walking home from a basketball game. Linda’s car hit two of them, throwing them seventy feet through the air, killing one and injuring the other. A few minutes later, blocks away from the first accident, she smashed into the rear-end of a Buick and destroyed both her vehicle and the other one. She escaped without much more than a scratch. At first the police failed to connect the two incidents. But within a few days they figured out that the hit-and-run and the collision with the Buick had to be connected. They pulled paint chips from the body of the dead boy and found that they were a match for the paint on Linda’s car.”
“Jesus,” Warren said again. “What happened then?”
“It took a lot of money and some fancy legal work, but Linda managed to avoid jail,” said Ken. “She was required to write out a full confession and plead guilty to the charges. After that, the judge put her on probation for eight years. She was forbidden to drink alcohol or drive a car during that period.”
Hearing this, Warren scratched at his shaggy blond locks and shook his head. Something seemed to be bothering him. I had seen that look come over him a time or two in the past. Usually it happened just as some great idea was occurring to him, some bit of conversation that he thought might make an excellent song lyric, and then he would start scrambling around looking for a notepad and a pen.
“You know, Ken,” he said, “I don’t suppose you’ll believe me, but I think I know something about this case.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Ken said. “It was in all the papers. Caused quite an uproar at the time. We eventually moved north for a few years to escape the stigma of it all.”
“No,” said Warren, “that’s not what I mean. I’m saying, I think I know something about Linda’s case that you yourself don’t know.”
This seemed to rock Ken’s composure slightly. “Really…?” he said.
“Tell me this,” said Warren, “did Linda buy the wine at a shop called the Victorian Garden or something like that?”
“It was called the Victoria Grocery Store,” said Ken, suddenly sounding very intrigued. “Margaret and I used to stop by there for odds and ends now and then.”
“And the high school, was it over on East Figueroa Street?”Ken shook his head. “It was Santa Barbara High on a street called East Anapamu.”
Warren mulled this over. “But they had some tennis courts that fronted on East Figueroa, didn’t they?”
Ken paused for a moment. “Come to think of it, I believe the tennis courts did front on Figueroa. How do you know that?”
Warren fired up a cigarette – a Marlboro – and blew out a puff of smoke. He offered the pack to Ken, but Ken shook his head no.
“About ten years ago,” said Warren, “I met a sound engineer at an L.A. studio where I was recording my first album. It was about six o’clock in the evening and we were both coming out of the studio at the same time. I had heard about a party that some big-time producer was throwing way up in Santa Barbara, but my car was in the shop and I had no way to get there. I’d been riding buses all week long, but Santa Barbara is a good ninety minutes away. A bus wasn’t an option. So I told this engineer – his name was Dale – about the party and said that if he’d drive us up to Santa Barbara, I’d get us into the house. I told him that there’d be plenty of drugs and liquor and girls and maybe even some big-name rock and rollers. He told me he didn’t do drugs or alcohol but he was always eager to meet new girls and big-name rock stars. So we climb into his beat-up Chevy Nova and make the drive north on the PCH to Santa Barbara. The party turned out to be a bit of a bust. There were very few girls there and I didn’t see any musicians I recognized. So I smoked some weed, drank some beers, and hung out with Dale for an hour or two. I kept trying to get him to share a joint with me, but he insisted that he didn’t do that kind of thing any more. This just made me more determined to get the guy drunk or stoned. But it didn’t work. The guy was a total abstainer.”
Warren paused and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Later, when we were driving home, Dale says to me, ‘You wanna know why I don’t get drunk or stoned any more?’ and I said yes, so he cranks the steering wheel and pulls off the highway at the Garden Street exit and heads over towards Santa Barbara High. Then he turns onto East Figueroa and parks his car alongside the tennis courts there. It’s late at night and there’s no one around. No lights on. The place looks kind of eerie, abandoned. And that’s when he tells me this weird story. About fifteen years earlier, when he was twenty-two, he was living in Santa Barbara, in an apartment near the high school. One day he goes to the Victoria Grocery store to do some shopping and a young girl accosts him outside the store and asks him if he’ll buy some wine for her. He liked her looks so he told her he’d buy the wine if she’d share it with him. She agreed. He bought the wine and then the two of them drove over to the parking lot by the tennis courts and drank the bottle down together. After that the two of them became friends. Once or twice a week, in the evening, they’d meet over by the tennis courts and drink wine in the front seat of her car. He was broke and didn’t have a car of his own at the time. One night, after they’d put away a couple of bottles of wine, the two of them decided to go for a little ride. The girl is so drunk she’s practically comatose, so Dale does the driving. Unfortunately, he’s more impaired than he thinks he is and runs into a pair of little boys who are walking along the side of the street. Dale panics. He drives a few blocks away and pulls the car over. He shakes the girl awake and tells her what he’s done. He begs her to drive home and not tell anyone that he was with her. He’s over 21, and if he gets arrested for a felony hit-and-run he can expect to do some serious jail time. He tells the girl to drive home and tell no one about the accident. With luck, no one will ever connect the car to the accident. So he gets out of the car and the girl drives home. A day or two later, Dale reads that the girl has been booked on a charge of drunk driving and felony hit-and-run.”
“And all this happened back in February of 1956?” Ken asked, clearly riveted by Warren’s tale.
“I don’t know exactly when it happened,” said Warren. “Dale told me about it in ’69 or ’70, and as I recall, he said it had happened about fifteen years earlier.”
“Well, that would put it in the approximate time period,” Ken said.
“Yeah, the mid-50s somewhere,” Warren said. “Dale was about ten or fifteen years older than me, so he would have been in his early twenties in 1956.”
“It’s got to be Linda that he was talking about,” said Ken. “If another incident like that happened in Santa Barbara back in the ‘50s, I’d know about it.”
“That’s what I think too,” said Warren.
“So that rat just sat by while Linda took the fall for his crime?”
Warren shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “Dale told me he met Linda one more time at the tennis courts on Figueroa. He told her he couldn’t let her go to jail for something he had done. But she insisted on taking the rap. She told him that, after the fatal crash, she had crashed the car again, just a few minutes later. While trying to drive home, she had rear-ended a car that was waiting at a stoplight – the Buick you mentioned, I suppose. The police had come and arrested her for this second accident. There was no denying that she was drunk and driving. She was bound to be punished anyway, so there was no point in dragging Dale into the situation. She was going to be punished for drunk driving one way or another, so she might as well take the blame for both incidents. After all it was her car that had done the damage. Dale told me that if the girl – Linda, I guess it was – had been given jail time, he would have come forth and confessed to the hit-and-run. But the girl got probation, so Dale kept his involvement a secret. A few months later, he moved out of town and he never saw her again. But he swore to me that he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol or any other mind-altering substance since the night of that terrible incident.”
“Can you put me in touch with this Dale guy?” Ken asked. “I’d like to ask him about this myself.”
Warren emitted a sigh that was one part cigarette smoke and one part regret. “I’m sorry, Ken, but I can’t do that. I don’t even remember Dale’s last name. And the last time I heard anything about him, he was married and had kids of his own. I don’t see any point in trying to force him to dredge up the past.”
“My daughter lived with guilt for the rest of her life,” Ken said. “She died of a brain hemorrhage in 1970 when she was only thirty-one years old, but I’m convinced that the guilt that followed her around after that accident was at least partially responsible for her ill health.”
“Then what I’m telling you should come as a big relief,” said Warren. “I’m saying that maybe her guilt wasn’t as bad as you think. If Dale’s account of the incident is correct, she at least knew that she wasn’t behind the wheel when those two boys died. That must have been some consolation to her.”
Ken was silent for over a minute. Warren lit up another cigarette and continued to fill the air with smoke. The room had grown intolerably dark, even for a cave-dwelling junkie. Warren reached up and switched on a lamp beside the couch. “I hope I didn’t do wrong by telling you all this, Ken,” he said.
“You did the right thing,” Ken told him. “In fact, suddenly a whole lot of things that used to bother me are now starting to make sense. Even at the time of the accident, the police suspected that someone else might have been in the car with Linda. Hell, even I suspected it. Linda was always telling me and Maggie that she was going out at night to meet with her friend Norma. But a few weeks before the accident, I saw Norma in a supermarket and asked her about a recent movie she’d seen with Linda. Norma didn’t know what I was talking about. She told me she hadn’t seen Linda in ages. That’s when I began to suspect that maybe Linda had a boyfriend she didn’t want us to know about. Later, after the accident, I asked her point-blank if she’d been with a boy. She insisted she had been alone. But I couldn’t get Norma’s words out of my mind.”
“And there were other things that bothered me too. As part of her plea bargain with the district attorney Linda was required to make a full written confession of guilt. But it was weird. She couldn’t seem to write a coherent account of what happened. She showed me her first effort and it sounded like bad fiction, not at all like something she had actually experienced. I didn’t think the D.A. or the court would approve of it. It was light on specific details and consisted mostly of phrases like ‘I can’t remember what happened next’ and ‘I’m not sure why but I lost control of the vehicle’ and ‘I guess I must have driven away but I don’t remember.’ It sounded as if the author of the confession had sleepwalked through the entire incident. Eventually I wound up writing the whole thing myself. I threw in a lot of specific details, even though I had to make them all up. I had Linda say that she gave a false name to the liquor store clerk whom she got the wine from. I used the name Alicia Morrison. My mother’s maiden name was Anna Moyer, and as a tribute to her I sometimes like to include a female character in my books with the initials A.M. I also had Linda claim that she chewed Dentyne that night to cover up the liquor on her breath. That didn’t make much sense. She smashed into another car, so there was no doubt she was drunk. She never denied that part. And she wasn’t in the habit of carrying Dentyne around with her. That’s something that I do. I guess when I wrote up Linda’s confession, I was still holding out hope that some other person would come forward and take responsibility for the hit-and-run death of that little boy. I wanted the confession to contain internal evidence that it was written not by Linda but by her father. That way, if we had to go back to court later on and have it thrown out, there would be evidence to support its authorship. I think that three-hundred word confession was the hardest thing I’ve ever written in my life.”
“Your instincts were good, Ken,” Warren told him. “Linda wasn’t the driver of that car. Dale was. Which is why she probably had such difficulty producing a believable confession.”
The conversation pretty much ended after that. What more could they have said to each other? Warren thanked Ken for helping him feel less ashamed about his addictions. Ken thanked Warren for telling him about Dale. Years later, Warren would tell a reporter for Rolling Stone, “At the lowest point in my life, the doorbell rang. And there, quite literally, was Lew Archer, on a compassionate mission, come to save my life.”
As I drove Ken back to his house – by now it was quite dark outside – he barely said a word, which was unusual for him. I could tell that he was thinking over what Warren had said about Linda. Always his recollections of her had been marred by his knowledge that she had killed someone else’s child. And now that black mark had been washed from his memories of her. Her name had been cleared. Now she was his innocent little girl again. I pulled up in front of his house, and he barely spoke to me as he got out of the car. I watched him as he walked up the long walkway to his front door. His step was so light he seemed almost to be floating.
Driving back to L.A. that night, I thought about what a wonderful thing I had witnessed. Two men bringing each other genuine solace. Only later did I begin to grow suspicious of Warren’s story about “Dale.” I had done a lot of research on Ken’s life. For a while I had contemplated writing a biography of him. But I soon realized that an honest biography of him – dealing with his alcoholism, his daughter’s mental woes, etc – would almost certainly bring an end to our relationship. In the end, I decided I valued the relationship more than I did the idea of writing a biography. But my research had turned up all of the things Warren had mentioned: the name of the street where the boys were killed, the ages of the dead boys, the Victoria Grocery Store, the tennis courts on East Figueroa – all this was part of the public record. The newspaper reports even mention police suspicions that someone else might have been in the car with Linda at the time of the hit-and-run. Anyone who spent an hour or two at the public library looking up the facts of Ken’s life would probably have uncovered all this stuff. And Warren was a longtime fan of Ken’s. No doubt he had known all about the hit-and-run incident for years. I began to suspect that Warren, touched by Ken’s concern for him, had decided to reciprocate by improvising a story about a fictional acquaintance named Dale. This wasn’t much of a stretch. Anyone who has ever listened to “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” or “Vera Cruz” or “Excitable Boy” knows what a great storyteller Warren was. And, heck, crime and criminality were nearly as much a part of Warren’s work as they were of Ken’s.
I planned to question Warren about “Dale” when next I saw him, but as it turned out I didn’t see him again until nearly ten years later. In 1980, Warren released the album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. The album’s dedication read: For Ken Millar – il migliore fabbro. Alas, it didn’t sell particularly well. His next album, The Envoy, didn’t sell well either. In 1983 Ken Millar died, of Alzheimer’s disease, at the age of 67. That same year, Warren moved out to the east coast. I’m not sure if Millar’s death had anything to do with it, but southern California had lost its luster for Warren. He stayed away for several years. When I finally saw him again, he was a different man than the one I had seen on the couch with Ken Millar. For one thing, he was off drugs. I asked him about the “Dale” story, whether he had made it up just to give Ken some peace of mind. But Warren shrugged off my question. “I can’t remember what kind of sandwich I had for lunch,” he joked. “You think I can recall the details of a conversation that took place back in the Seventies?” I decided not to push him for an answer.
Warren died in 2003, twenty years after Millar’s death. He was only 56. True or not, Warren’s story about “Dale” seemed to bring Ken some measure of what we now call “closure” to an incident that had haunted him for nearly a quarter of a century. I promised I’d keep my knowledge of what I have come to think of as “the Dale story” to myself until after both men were dead. Now they are both long gone and I am an old man, so I have decided to pass on this memory to anyone who might care to read about it. Officially, Linda Millar remains guilty of the death of that little boy who was run down by her Ford Tudor back in 1956. Whether the official record is correct or not, I will leave to others to decide. It would take the talents of a Lew Archer to track down the truth at this point. And they just don’t seem to make private eyes like him any more.
I don't know if this old friend of mine is still alive, but George P. from Charlotte went through rehab with Warren. He attnded his funeral. Lost touch with George 15+ years ago.
Wow. This was a gripping and very emotional read. I’m a transplanted Californian, and although having recently moving out of state was the right call in a lot of ways, I miss California very much. Particularly the vibe and beauty of my home state. I was blessed to grow up there, and not that I’m well-traveled, but I can’t imagine there are many places in the world that have the same feel. Your tale transported me back there.
And you’re right! A lot of detective stories use California as their setting. I never really thought about that before. I love Sue Grafton’s books, and after reading your tale I will be diving into some Ross McDonald ones to see how I like him. I knew his nom de plume and recall seeing his books in bookstores when I was younger, but never read any. Not sure why.
I was especially captivated that Warren Zevon was one of the people in your retelling of this nexus moment between the two men. I’ve been a fan girl of his since Excitable Boy came out. No other musician I’ve enjoyed over the years had quite the same ability to write songs of biting wit or longing and despair like he could. He lives on forever in the music and words he left us.
This was a riveting tale, and you told it so beautifully. So much tragedy, yet grace notes come unexpectedly. And the mystery not being fully resolved is haunting. Thank you for crafting this. I won’t soon forget it.