L.A. Confidential

Set in 1950s Los Angeles, L.A. Confidential is the third installment in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet series. It follows three flawed LAPD officers whose separate investigations into a mass murder converge to expose a criminal conspiracy reaching into the highest levels of the police department.

A prologue set in February 1950 establishes the criminal underworld. Buzz Meeks, an ex-cop, hides in the San Bernardino foothills with ninety-four thousand dollars and eighteen pounds of heroin stolen from a drug summit between mobsters Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna. Before Meeks can escape, LAPD Lieutenant Dudley Smith ambushes and kills him, seizing the cash and drugs.

The story begins on Christmas Eve 1951, introducing the three protagonists. Officer Bud White is a hulking detective with a violent fixation on men who abuse women. Sergeant Ed Exley is the ambitious son of LAPD Inspector Preston Exley, a construction magnate who solved the 1934 Loren Atherton child murder case and is now building an amusement park called Dream-a-Dreamland for animation mogul Raymond Dieterling. Sergeant Jack Vincennes is a celebrity narcotics cop who stages drug busts for tabloid Hush-Hush Magazine and its editor, Sid Hudgens, and acts as a bagman for ambitious Deputy District Attorney Ellis Loew, hiding a dark secret: In 1947, while intoxicated on duty, Vincennes shot and killed two innocent bystanders and has been sending anonymous payments to their children ever since.

The officers' fates intertwine during the "Bloody Christmas" scandal. At a Central Station party, drunk officers storm the jail and beat six Mexican prisoners accused of assaulting fellow cops. Exley writes strategically shifted depositions and testifies as the department's key witness, sacrificing White's partner, Dick Stensland, and earning a detective promotion. Vincennes testifies reluctantly and is transferred to Administrative Vice. White, saved from indictment by Dudley Smith's coercion of witnesses, is recruited for Smith's violent Surveillance Detail. The three men now despise each other.

In April 1953, six people are shotgunned to death at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop in Hollywood. The LAPD arrests three young Black men, Raymond "Sugar Ray" Coates, Tyrone Jones, and Leroy Fontaine, after their purple Mercury is linked to the crime scene. During interrogation, Exley realizes the suspects were elsewhere that night, gang-raping a college student named Inez Soto. White rescues Inez, killing her captor, and begins a protective relationship with her. When the suspects escape from jail, Exley tracks them to a rooming house and kills all four occupants with a shotgun. None are armed. He is promoted to captain and awarded the Medal of Valor.

Simultaneously, Vincennes pursues a pornography case, tracking magazines with inked-in blood simulating severed limbs. The trail leads to Pierce Patchett, a wealthy financier who runs call girls surgically altered to resemble movie stars and distributes illicit goods through a service called Fleur-de-Lis. Vincennes finds Hudgens hacked to death, the mutilations matching the magazine poses. He steals Hudgens' files, but the murder goes cold.

White, investigating Nite Owl victim Duke Cathcart, a small-time pimp, discovers Cathcart's apartment wiped of fingerprints and someone impersonating Cathcart's style around Hollywood. When Cathcart's teenage girlfriend, Kathy Janeway, is murdered, White traces a lead to Patchett and begins a years-long relationship with Lynn Bracken, Patchett's Veronica Lake look-alike call girl.

Years pass. Stensland turns to armed robbery after his release, is captured by Exley, and is executed for murder. Vincennes' career deteriorates. White quietly pursues unsolved prostitute murders across the western states while assembling a private Nite Owl file. He discovers the body identified as Cathcart does not match Cathcart's prison records, concluding an impersonator was killed at the Nite Owl.

In early 1958, Exley takes command of Internal Affairs and discovers that Inez, with whom he has had a relationship, has been sleeping with White for four years. In a devastating confrontation, Inez reveals the central lie: The three men Exley killed could not have committed the Nite Owl because they were with her all night. She lied to spare his feelings. External pressure mounts. White leaks his impersonator theory to Whisper magazine. The Englekling brothers, San Bernardino printshop operators who earlier testified about a pornography scheme involving Cathcart, are found tortured and murdered. A San Quentin inmate provides a polygraph-verified alibi for the dead suspects. Chief Parker orders the case reopened.

Exley assembles Vincennes and White as field investigators, keeping the inquiry autonomous from Dudley Smith's official team. Through Patchett's associates, Exley learns Patchett developed heroin from the 1950 drug summit, that an unnamed man coerced him into extortion after the Nite Owl, and that Patchett keeps a booby-trapped safe at his house. Vincennes identifies the real victim as Dean Van Gelder, a convict linked to Cohen's associate Davey Goldman, and finds Cathcart's actual body in San Bernardino. When Vincennes confronts Patchett while wired and wearing a bulletproof vest, Patchett shoots him and injects him with heroin. Before losing consciousness, Vincennes hears voices shouting "No, Abe, no, Lee, no," implicating Cohen associates Abe Teitlebaum and Lee Vachss, who then kill Patchett.

White makes the critical breakthrough. He traces phone calls from Teitlebaum and Cohen's former bodyguard, Johnny Stompanato, directly to Dudley Smith's home. He discovers a primer-gray Mercury registered to Dot Rothstein, Dudley's associate, under a false name. This was the car planted near the Nite Owl to frame the Black suspects. The three investigators pool their findings: Dudley masterminded the Nite Owl to control Patchett's heroin and pornography rackets, planting evidence to frame convenient scapegoats.

Exley also discovers that the blood designs in the pornographic magazines match the mutilations from his father's 1934 Atherton case. Miller Stanton, a former Dieterling child actor, confesses that Dieterling and Patchett coached him as a boy to give false testimony to Preston Exley. The true co-killer was Dieterling's illegitimate son Douglas, who lived for decades as David Mertens, a set designer on the Badge of Honor television show, kept docile by drugs and surgery. When Mertens' keeper, a male nurse named Jerry Marsalas, loses control of him, Mertens murders Billy Dieterling, Raymond's son, and Marsalas.

Events accelerate. White and Vincennes confront Teitlebaum and Vachss at a delicatessen, triggering a firefight. The dying Teitlebaum confirms the Nite Owl killers: "Me. Lee. Johnny Stomp. Deuce drove." He also reveals a prison-train escape orchestrated by Stompanato. At the interception, 28 inmates and 7 guards die. Vincennes is shot and killed. White, shot multiple times by the conspiracy's enforcer, Deuce Perkins, beats Perkins to death before collapsing in critical condition.

Exley recovers Patchett's safe containing heroin, cash, and blackmail files, but Dudley's name appears nowhere. He commits Mertens to a locked psychiatric ward and confronts Dieterling, who reveals the full truth: He sacrificed his son Paul as a scapegoat for Douglas's crimes, and Preston Exley killed the boy believing him guilty. Exley tells his father Paul was innocent; Preston shows no remorse. Exley's official report omits Dudley, the Atherton connection, and his father's crimes.

Preston Exley, Dieterling, and Inez are found dead together at Dream-a-Dreamland, all suicides with no notes. Exley forces District Attorney Ellis Loew to resign using the blackmail files and is promoted to Deputy Chief of Detectives, the position Dudley coveted. Lynn Bracken tells Exley she is leaving for Arizona with White, who survived but cannot speak. At her car, White sits with his mouth wired shut. Exley takes his hands: "I swear to you I'll get Dudley." He tells White, "You were my redemption." Lynn drives away. White presses his palms to the glass; Exley runs alongside until the car disappears. He stands alone: "Gold stars. Alone with his dead."