L.A. Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

by James Ellroy

  He would then jump down from the pole and run for his car, pulling up without lights behind Linda’s Camaro just as she walked out the door. Then he would follow the glow of her taillights as she drove home via the most scenic route possible, almost as if she needed an injection of beauty after her night of debauchery. Keeping a safe distance behind, he would let her part at the intersection of Sunset and the Pacific Coast Highway, wondering how and when he could bring her salvation.

  After two more weeks of extensive surveillance, he wrote in his diary: 6–7–82

  Linda Deverson is a tragic victim of these times. Her sensuality is self-destructive, but indicative of strong parental need. The March woman capitalizes on this; she is a viper. Linda remains unsatisfied in 48

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  both her sensuality and search for a mother (the March woman is at least fifteen years her senior!). Her midnight excursions through the most soulful parts of Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica speak volumes on her guilt and subtle searching nature. Her need for beauty is so strong in the aftermath of her self-destruction. I must take her at this moment—that must be the precise time of her salvation.

  *

  *

  *

  Emboldened by knowledge of the place, he put the time out of his mind, losing himself in his courtship. But the late nights were taking their toll in little portents of slippage in his work life—rolls of film clumsily shot, then stupidly exposed to sunlight; appointments forgotten, photo orders misplaced. The slippage had to stop, and he knew how to do it. He had to consummate his courtship of Linda Deverson.

  He set the date: Tuesday, June 14th, three days hence. His tremors of expectation began to grow. On Monday, June 13th, he went to an auto supply store in the Valley and bought a case of motor oil, then drove to a junkyard and told the owner he was looking for chrome hood ornaments. While the owner scurried about looking for them, he scraped up several huge handfuls of iron filings from the ground and loaded them into a paper bag. The junkman came running back a few minutes later, waving a chrome bulldog. Feeling generous, he offered the man ten dollars for it. The man accepted. Driving back over the Cahuenga Pass to his shop, he threw the bulldog out the window and laughed as it clattered over to the edge of the roadway. His consummation day was carefully planned and honed down to the second. Upon rising he placed the “Closed Due to Illness” sign in the window, then returned to his apartment, where he played his meditation tape and stared at the photos of Linda Deverson. Next he destroyed the pages in his diary that pertained to her and took a long walk through the neighborhood, all the way over to Echo Park, where he spent hours rowing around the lake and feeding the ducks. At nightfall he packed his consummation tools into the trunk of his car and drove to his first and last rendezvous with his beloved.

  At 8:45 he was parked four doors down from Carol March’s house, alternately shifting his gaze from the darkened street to his dashboard clock. At 9:03 Linda Deverson pulled into the driveway. He swooned at the perfection of it; she was right on time. He drove to Santa Monica Canyon, to the intersection of West Channel

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  Road and Biscayne, where West Channel bisected and the right fork led into a small campground filled with picnic tables and swings. If his calculations were correct, Linda would be driving through at precisely ten minutes of midnight. He pulled his car off to the side of the road on the edge of the park proper, where it was shielded from street view by a row of sycamore trees. Then he went for a long walk.

  He returned at 11:40 and got his equipment out of the trunk, first donning his park ranger’s outfit of Smokey the Bear hat, green wool shirt and field belt, then assembling his sawhorse detour signs and carrying them over to the intersection.

  Next he hauled his five gallon can of motor oil and iron filings to the middle of the street and poured them smoothly over the pavement, until the blacktop just before the detour signs was a slippery purple ooze glinting with sharp steel. Then all he could do was wait.

  At 11:52 he heard her car approaching. As her headlights appeared, his body shuddered and he had to will himself to contain his bowels and bladder. The car slowed as it neared the detour signs, braking and going into a right turn, then fishtailing and sliding into the sawhorses as it hit the pool of oil. There was a crash of wood on metal, then two loud ka-plops! as the rear tires blew out. The car came to a stop and Linda got out, slamming the door and muttering, “Oh shit, oh fuck,” then going around to the back of the car to examine the damage.

  Steeling himself with all the courtliness he could muster, he walked from the trees and called out, “Are you okay, miss? That was a nasty slide you took.”

  Linda called back, “Yes, I’m okay. But my car!”

  He pulled a flashlight from his field belt and shined it into the darkness, arcing it over the campground several times before letting the beam rest on his beloved. Linda blinked against the glare, raising a hand to shield her face. He walked toward her, pointing his light at the ground. She smiled as she noticed his hat—Smokey the Bear to the rescue; it was good that she had smoked her last cigarette at Carol’s. “Oh God, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I saw that detour sign and then skidded on something. I think two of my tires blew out.”

  “That’s no problem,” he said. “My service shack is right over here; we’ll call an all-night gas station.”

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  “Oh God, what a pain in the ass,” Linda said, fumbling in gratitude for the arm of her savior. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

  He faltered at her touch; joy consumed him and he said, “I’ve loved you for so long. Since we were kids. Since all tho . . .”

  Linda gasped. “What the he . . .” she said. “Who the he . . .”

  She started to back away, then tripped and fell to the ground. He reached out a hand to help her up. She hesitated. “No, please,” she whimpered, moving backward. He fumbled at his field belt and unclipped a two-edged fire axe. He bent down again, grabbing Linda at the wrist and yanking her up just as he brought the axe down in a high, rail-splitting swing. Linda’s skull crashed inward as his love went into slow motion and blood and brain fragments burst into the air, suspending the moment into a thousand eternities. He brought the axe down again and again until he was drenched in blood and blood had splattered onto his face and into his mouth and through his brain and his entire soul was a bright lover’s red; the bright red of flowers he would send his true love tomorrow. For you, for you, all for you, the poet muttered as he left the remains of Linda Deverson and walked to his car; my soul, my life for you.

  4

  Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins celebrated the seventeenth anniversary of his appointment to the Los Angeles Police Department in his usual manner, grabbing a computer printout of recent crimes and field interrogation reports filed by Rampart Division, then driving to the old neighborhood to breathe past and present from the vantage point of seventeen years of protecting innocence.

  The October day was smoggy and just short of hot. Lloyd got his unmarked Matador from the lot at Parker Center and drove westbound on Sunset, reminiscing: over a decade and a half and the fulfillment of his major dreams—the job, the wife, and the three wonderful daughters. The job thrilling and sad in excess of fulfillment; the marriage strong in the sense of the strong people he and Janice had become; the daughters pure

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  joy and reason for living in themselves. The exultant feelings were the only thing lacking, and in the magnanimity of nostalgia Lloyd chalked up their absence to maturity—he was forty now, not twenty-three; if his seventeen years as a policeman had taught him anything, it was that your expectations diminished as you realized how thoroughly fucked-up the bulk of humanity was, and that you had to go on a hundred seemingly contradictory discourses to keep the major dreams alive. That the discourses were always women and in direct violation of his Presbyterian marri
age vows was the ultimate irony, he thought, stopping for the light at Sunset and Echo Park and rolling up the windows to keep the street noise out. An irony that staunch, strong Janice would never understand. Feeling that his reverie was recklessly overstepping its bounds, Lloyd plunged ahead, anxious to voice it flat out, to himself and the vacant air around him: “It wouldn’t work between us, Janice, if I couldn’t cut loose like that. Little things would accumulate and I’d explode. And you’d hate me. The girls would hate me. That’s why I do it. That’s why I . . .” Lloyd couldn’t bring himself to say the word “cheat.”

  He stopped his musings and pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store, then dug the computer sheets out of his pocket and settled in to think. The streets were pale pink with black typescript, edged with seemingly random perforations. Lloyd fingered through them, arranging them in chronological order, starting with the ones dated 9–15–82. Beginning with the crime reports, he let his perfectly controlled blank mind drift through brief accounts of rapes, robberies, purse snatchings, shopliftings, and vandalism. Suspect descriptions and weaponry from shotguns to baseball bats were recounted in crisp, heavily abbreviated sentences. Lloyd read through the crime reports three times, feeling the disparate facts and figures sink in deeper with each reading, blessing Evelyn Wood and her method that allowed him to gobble up the printed word at the rate of three thousand per minute.

  Next he turned to the field interrogation reports. These were accounts of people stopped on the street, briefly detained and questioned, then released. Lloyd read through the F.I.s four times, knowing with each reading that there was a connection to be made. He was about to give each stack of printouts another go around when he snapped to the buried ellipsis that was crying out to him. Furiously shuffling through the pink rolls of paper, he found his match-up: Crime Report #10691, 10–6–82. Armed robbery. At approximately 11:30 P.M., Thursday, October 6, the Black Cat Bar on 52

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  Sunset and Vendome was held up by two male Mexicans. They were of undetermined age, but presumed young. They wore silk stockings to disguise their appearances, carried “large” revolvers, and ransacked the cash register before making the proprietor lock up the bar. They then forced the patrons to lie on the floor. While prone, the robbers relieved them of wallets, billfolds and jewelry. They fled a moment later, warning their victims that the

  “back-up” would be outside with a shotgun for twenty minutes. They slashed the two phone lines before they left. The bartender ran outside five minutes later. There was no back-up.

  Stupid fools, Lloyd thought, risking half a dime minimum for a thousand dollars tops. He read over the F.I. report, filed by a Rampart patrolman: 10–7–82, 1:05 A.M.—“Questioned two w.m. outside res. at 2269

  Tracy. They were drinking vodka and sitting on top of late model Firebird, lic. # HBS 027. Explained that car was not theirs, but that they lived in house. Partner and I searched them—clean. Got hot call before we could run warrant check.” The officer’s name was printed below. Lloyd kicked the last bits of information around in his head, thinking it sad that he should have greater intimate knowledge of a neighborhood than the cops who patrolled it. 2269 Tracy Street was a low-life holdover from his high school days over twenty years before, when it had been a halfway house for ex-cons. The charismatic ex-gangster who had run the operation on State funds had embezzled a bundle from local Welfare agencies before selling the house to an old buddy from Folsom, then hightailing it to the border, never to be seen again. The buddy promptly hired a good lawyer to help him keep the house. He won his court battle and dealt quality dope out of the old wood-framed dwelling. Lloyd recalled how his high school pals had bought reefers there back in the late ’50s. He knew that the house had been sold to a succession of local hoods and had acquired the neighborhood nickname of “Gangster Manor.”

  Lloyd drove to the Black Cat Bar. The bartender immediately made him for a cop. “Yes, officer?” he said. “No complaints, I hope.”

  “None,” Lloyd said. “I’m here about the robbery of October 6th. Were you tending bar that night?”

  “Yeah, I was here. You got any leads? Two detectives came in the next day, but that was it.”

  “No real leads yet. Do . . .”

  Lloyd was distracted by the sound of the jukebox snapping on, beginning

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  to spill out a disco tune. “Turn that off, will you?” he said. “I can’t compete with an orchestra.”

  The barman laughed. “That’s no orchestra, that’s ‘The Disco Doggies.’

  Don’t you like them?”

  Lloyd couldn’t tell if the man was being pleasant or trying to vamp him; homosexuals were hard to read. “Maybe I’m behind the times. Just turn it off, okay? Do it now.”

  The bartender caught the edge in Lloyd’s voice and complied, creating a small commotion as he yanked the cord on the jukebox. Returning to the bar he said warily, “Just what was it you wanted to know?”

  Relieved by the music’s termination, Lloyd said, “Only one thing. Are you certain the two robbers were Mexican?”

  “No, I’m not certain.”

  “Didn’t you . . .”

  “They wore masks, officer. What I told the cops is that they talked English with Mexican accents. That’s what I said.”

  “Thank you,” Lloyd said, and ran out to his car.

  He drove straight to 2269 Tracy Street—Gangster Manor. As he expected, the old house was deserted. Cobwebs, dust, and used condoms covered the warped wood floor, and sets of footprints that Lloyd knew had to be recent were clearly outlined. He followed them into the kitchen. All the fixtures were ripped out and the floor was covered with rodent droppings. Lloyd opened cabinets and drawers, finding only dust, spider webs, and mildewed, maggot-infested groceries. Then he opened a floral patterned bread basket and jumped into the air, dunking imaginary baskets and whooping when he saw what he found: a brand new box of Remington hollow point .38 shells and two pair of Sheer Energy pantyhose. Lloyd whooped again. “Thank you, o’ nesting grounds of my youth!” he shouted. Phone calls to the California Department of Motor Vehicles and L.A.P.D. Records and Information confirmed his thesis. A 1979 Pontiac Firebird, license number HBS 027 was registered to Richard Douglas Wilson of 11879 Saticoy Street, Van Nuys. R&I supplied the rest: Richard Douglas Wilson, white male, age thirty-four was a two-time convicted armed robber who had recently been paroled from San Quentin after serving three and a half years of a five-year sentence. Heart bursting, and snug in his soundless phone booth, Lloyd dialed a third number, the home of his one-time mentor and current follower, Captain Arthur Peltz. 54

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  “Dutch? Lloyd. What are you doing?”

  Peltz yawned into the mouthpiece. “I’m taking a nap, Lloyd. I’m off today. I’m an old man and I need a siesta in the afternoon. What’s up? You sound jazzed.”

  Lloyd laughed. “I am jazzed. You want to take a couple of armed robbers?”

  “All by ourselves?”

  “Yeah. What’s the matter? We’ve done it a million times.”

  “At least a million—more like a million and a half. Stake out?”

  “Yeah, at the guy’s pad in Van Nuys. Van Nuys Station in an hour?”

  “I’ll be there. You realize that if this thing is a washout, you’re buying me dinner?”

  “Anywhere you want,” Lloyd said, and hung up the phone.

  *

  *

  *

  Arthur Peltz was the first Los Angeles policeman to recognize and herald Lloyd Hopkins’s genius. It happened when Lloyd was a twenty-seven-yearold patrolman working Central Division. The year was 1969, and the hippie era of love and good vibes had dwindled out, leaving a backwash of indigent, drug-addicted youngsters floating through the poorer sections of Los Angeles, begging for spare change, shoplifting, sleeping in parks, back yards and doorways and generally contributing to a drastic rise in misdemeanor arrests and felony ar
rests for possession of narcotics. Fear of hippie nomads was rife among solid citizen Angelenos, particularly after the Tate-LaBianca slayings were attributed to Charles Manson and his hirsute band. The L.A.P.D. was importuned to come down hard on the destitute minstrels of love; which it did—raiding hippie campgrounds, frequently stopping vehicles containing furtive-looking longhairs and generally letting them know that they were personae non gratas in Los Angeles. The results were satisfying—there was a general hippie move toward eschewing outdoor living and “cooling it.” Then five longhaired young men were shot to death on the streets in Hollywood over a period of three weeks. Sergeant Arthur “Dutch” Peltz, then a forty-one-year-old Homicide detective, was assigned to the case. He had very little to work on, except a strong instinct that the murders of the unacquainted young men were drug related and that the so-called “ritual markings” on their bodies—an xed out letter H—were put there as subterfuge.

  Investigation into the recent pasts of the victims proved fruitless; they were transients existing in a subculture of transients. Dutch Peltz was baffled. He was also an intellectual given to contemplative pursuits, so he de-

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  cided to take his two-week vacation smack in the middle of his case. He came back from fishing in Oregon clearheaded, spiritually renewed, and pleased to find that there were no new victims of the “Hippie Hunter,” as the press had dubbed him. But dire things were happening in Los Angeles. The basin had been flooded with a particularly high-quality Mexican brown heroin, its source unknown. Instinct told Dutch Peltz that the heroin onslaught and the murders were connected. But he didn’t have the slightest idea how.