L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

“At the time I was interviewed for the commission by the Procurement Officer it was represented to me that I would receive a grade no lower than Captain as the requisition called for commissions in the grades of Captain and Major,” Parker wrote, with obvious bitterness. “The Procurement Officer further stated that I would be recommended for the higher grade.” He concluded with this legalistic (and hubristic) flourish:

I respectfully submit that by reason of my grade there is no position in prospect in the U.S. Army commensurate with my qualifications and thereby I request relief from active duty under the provisions of Paragraph 3, War Department Letter A.G. 210.85 (30 December 1943) PO-A-A 12 January 1944, at the expiration of my accumulated leave.

The Army was not persuaded. Parker’s request was denied.

In a letter to Helen, Parker reacted by comparing himself to Christ on the road to Golgotha. He was clearly lonely and afraid of losing Helen. Parker’s other correspondents continued to speak of a particularly close relationship she had with a certain male “friend.” It seems clear that the relationship was a romantic one (although it is not clear whether it was merely an extended flirtation or an adulterous fling). For Parker, it must have seemed like a nightmare. It was his first marriage all over again. Distressed, Parker wrote to his bank in September asking it to cut off Helen’s access to his bank account.

This was hardly an action that would go unnoticed. In early October, Helen discovered that her financial lifeline had been sundered. Far from showing chagrin at being found out, Helen went on the offensive, penning her husband a furious letter. Addressed to “First Lt. Wm. H. Parker” from “Policewoman A. Parker” (Amelia being Helen’s Christian name), subject line “Being a Good Soldier,” the letter boldly castigated Parker for his two-faced behavior:

Last nite at about four-thirty I arrived at 2214 India Street, after a day at the plant and the usual long trek home, to find a letter written by you on the 28th of September. The salutation was “My Darling” and the closing line was “Goodnite my dear and may thy dreams be untroubled.”

A very strange missive to receive from you in view of the activity you have taken against me in the past couple of weeks.

At this point, her tone switched from sarcasm to anger. She castigated Parker for cutting off access to the family bank account—without notice—while he was continuing to whisper sweet nothings in his letters. She informed him that the week’s vacation she’d taken off from work had been for purposes of locating a new residence after a dispute with her unreasonable landlord, not, as Parker presumably implied in some missing letter, for some tryst. She also made passing references to her loneliness—a tacit justification for her “friendship” with the mysterious “H.J.”

“So now I come to the end of a story about ‘a good soldier,’” she concluded, “and the end of sixteen years … sixteen long years when I had hoped you had built some faith in me as your wife plus being a pal thru those horrible ‘political battles’ and those many happy occasions when we hunted and fished together, not alone at Topaz but up north and also in the Black Hills.” Her final line was pointed: “True, everything has an ending.”

That Helen’s initial response had been to march down to her local bank to open her own bank account she did not reveal. (The manager, a friend of Bill’s, refused, prompting Helen to fume, “Were Bill’s friends everywhere?”)

Parker’s retreat was swift, his capitulation total—or nearly so. He was desperate to shore up relations with Helen; he simply couldn’t stand the prospect of another marriage disintegrating. In his subsequent letters to her, Parker was both apologetic and a bit defensive about the “the direct and harsh tactics” he had used in an effort “to learn the truth.” (At one point, he would later even go so far as to suggest that “when you pause in retrospection you will realize the justice involved.”) Now Helen had the upper hand, and she used it. It was she who would decide whether the marriage would endure or end.

On February 24, 1945, she wrote the decisive letter. She had spoken with “a man of religion” who had persuaded her to persevere in the marriage. Bill responded by reiterating his unwavering love for her—and warning that “the element of INDECISION must never be allowed to reenter our relationship”:

If other circumstances should arise in the future that should again throw you into a sea of doubt as to whether or not you should continue in our marriage relationship,… while you make up your mind as to what you desire to do you cannot expect me to stand by knowing that my entire happiness hangs in the balance and compel me to accept such a situation with the only compensation that you might possibly decide in my favor. I never want to go through that mental agony again and I do not believe that you should expect me to.