L.A. Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

by James Ellroy

  Penny fidgeted when Lloyd took in a deep breath and sighed. She took her head from his shoulder and poked him sharply in the arm. “Don’t be a tease, Daddy!”

  Lloyd laughed and said, “All right. I ran a computer cross-check on vice offenders and registered sex offenders with burglary convictions. Double bingo! Arthur Christiansen, a.k.a. ‘Misty Christie,’ a.k.a. ‘Arlene the Queen’ Christiansen. Specialties: giving cut-rate blow jobs to drunks who thought he was a woman and full-drag B&Es. I staked out his pad for thirtysix hours straight, determining that he was dealing uppers and Percodan—

  I heard his customers comment on the righteous quality of his stuff. This was solid corroboration, but I wanted to catch him-her in the act. The following afternoon old Arthur-Arlene left the pad with a giant quilted shoulder bag and drove to Westwood and walked into a big office building two blocks from the U.C.L.A. campus. Four hours later, an hour after dark, a very ugly creature in a nurse’s uniform walks out, carrying the same shoulder bag. I whip out my badge, yell ‘Police officer!’ and rush Arthur-Arlene, who screams, ‘Chauvinist!’ and swings on me. The blows are ineffectual and I’m reaching for my handcuffs when Arthur-Arlene’s falsies pop out of his blouse. I get him handcuffed and flag down a black-and-white. ArthurArlene is screaming ‘sisterhood is powerful’ and ‘police brutality,’ and a crowd of U.C.L.A. students start shouting obscenities at me. I barely managed to get into the black-and-white. The scene was almost L.A.’s first transvestite police riot.”

  Penny laughed hysterically, collapsing on the bed and pounding the covers with her fists. She burrowed her head into the pillow to wipe away her tears, then giggled, “More, Daddy, more. One more before you go to bed.”

  Lloyd reached over and ruffled Penny’s hair. “Funny or serious?”

  “Serious,” Penny said. “Give me some dark stuff to sate my ghoulish cu-

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  riosity. If you don’t make it good, I’ll stay up all night thinking of ArthurArlene’s falsies.”

  Lloyd traced circles on the bedspread. “How about a knight story?”

  Penny’s face grew somber. She took her father’s hand and scooted down the bed so that Lloyd could rest his head in her lap. When father and daughter were comfortable, Lloyd stared up at the tartan quilt suspended from the ceiling and said, “The knight was caught in a dilemma. He had two anniversaries in one day—one personal, one professional. The professional one took precedence and in the course of it he shot a man, wounding him. About an hour later, after the man was in custody, the knight started to shake like he always did after he fired his gun. All those delayed reaction questions hit him: What if his shots rendered the asshole for good?

  What if next time he gloms the wrong info and takes out the wrong guy?

  What if he starts seeing red all the time and his discretion goes haywire? It’s a shitstorm out there. You know that, don’t you, Penguin?”

  “Yes,” Penny whispered.

  “You know that you’ve got to develop claws to fight it?”

  “Sharp ones, Daddy.”

  “You know the weird thing about the knight? The more complicated his doubts and questions become, the stronger his resolve gets. It just gets weird sometimes. What would you do if things got really weird?”

  Penny played with her father’s hair. “Sharpen my claws,” she said, digging her fingers into Lloyd’s scalp.

  Lloyd grimaced in mock pain. “Sometimes the knight wishes he weren’t such a fucking Protestant. If he were a Catholic he’d be able to get formal absolution.”

  “I’ll always absolve you, Daddy,” Penny said as Lloyd got to his feet. “Like the song said, ‘I’m easy.’”

  Lloyd looked down at his daughter. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you too. One question before you go: You think I’d be a good Robbery/Homicide dick?”

  Lloyd laughed. “No, but you’d be a great Robbery/Homicide dickless.”

  Janice watched Penny squeal in delight, and suddenly she was violated at the womb. She walked back to the bedroom she shared with her husband and flung off her robe, preparing to do her battle in the nude. Lloyd walked through the door moments later, smelling the scented candle and whispering, “Jan? You ardent this late, sweetheart? It’s after midnight.”

  As he reached for the light switch, Janice threw her overflowing ashtray 72

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  at the opposite wall and hissed, “You sick, selfish, son-of-a-bitch, can’t you see what you’re doing to that little girl? You call spilling out that violence being a father?” Frozen in the ugliness of the moment, Lloyd pushed the light switch, illuminating Janice, shivering in the nude. “Do you, Lloyd, goddamn you?”

  Lloyd moved toward his wife, arms extended in a supplicating gesture, hoping that physical contact would quell the storm.

  “No!” Janice said as she backed away, “Not this time! This time I want a promise from you, an oath that you will not tell our children those ugly stories!”

  Lloyd reached a long arm out and caught Janice’s wrist. She twisted it free and knocked down the nightstand between them.

  “Don’t, Lloyd. Don’t want me and don’t placate me and don’t touch me until you promise.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and started to tremble. Fighting an impulse to punch the wall, he bent over and picked up the nightstand. “Penny is a subtle child, Jan, possibly a genius,” he said. “What should I do? Tell her about the three . . .”

  Janice hurled her favorite porcelain lamp at the closet and shrieked,

  “She’s just a little girl! A twelve-year-old little girl! Can’t you understand that?”

  Lloyd tripped across the bed and grabbed her around the waist, burying his head in her stomach, whispering, “She has to know, she had to know it, or she’ll die. She has to know.”

  Janice raised her arms and molded her hands into fists. She started to bring them down, clublike, onto Lloyd’s back but hesitated as a thousand instances of his erratic passion washed over her, combining to form an epigram whose words she was too terrified to speak. She lowered her hands to her husband’s face and gently pushed him away.

  “I want to see if the girls are all right,” she said. “I’ll have to tell them we were fighting. Then I think I want to sleep alone.”

  Lloyd got to his feet. “I’m sorry I was so late tonight.”

  Janice nodded dumbly and felt her sense of things confirmed. Then she put on a robe and went down the hall to check on her daughters. Lloyd knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. After saying good night to the girls, he prowled around downstairs looking for something to do. There was nothing to do but think of Janice and how he could not have her with-

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  out giving up something dear to him and essential to his daughters. There was no place to go but backward in time.

  Lloyd put on his gunbelt and drove to the old neighborhood.

  *

  *

  *

  He found it waiting for him in the pre-dawn stillness, as familiar as the sigh of an old lover. Lloyd drove down Sunset, feeling overwhelmed by the rightness of his usurping of innocence via parable. Let them learn it slowly, he thought, not the way I did. Let them learn the beast by story—not repeated example. Let that be the new hallmark of my Irish Protestant irregulars. With this surge of affirmation, Lloyd floored the gas pedal, watching night-bound Sunset Boulevard explode in peripheral flashes of neon, sucking him into the middle of a swirling jetstream. He looked at the speedometer: one hundred thirty-five miles per hour. It wasn’t enough. He bore down on the wheel with his whole being, and the neon turned to burning white. Then he closed his eyes and decelerated until the car hit an upgrade and the laws of nature forced it to a gliding stop.

  Lloyd opened his eyes to discover them flooded with tears, wondering for an awkwardly long moment where on earth he was. Finally, a thousand memories clicked in and he realized that chan
ce had left him at the corner of Sunset and Silverlake—the heart of the old neighborhood. Propelled by a subservient fate, he went walking.

  Terraced hillsides drew Lloyd into a fusion of past, present, and future. He sprinted up the Vendome steps, noting with satisfaction that the earth on both sides of the cement stanchions was as soft as ever. The Silverlake hills were formed by God to nurture—let the poor Mexicans live hearty here and thrive; let the old people complain about the steepness yet never move away. Let the earthquake the scientific creeps predicted come . . . Silverlake, the defiant traditionalist anomaly, would sustain its havoc and stand proud while L.A. proper burst like an eggshell. At the top of the hill, Lloyd let his imagination telescope in on the few houses still burning lights. He imagined great loneliness and sensed that the light burners were importuning him for love. He breathed in their love and exhaled it with every ounce of his own, then turned west to stare through the hillside that separated him from the very old house where his crazy brother tended their parents. Lloyd shuddered as discord entered his reverie. The one person he hated guarding his two beloved creators. His one conscious compromise. Unavoidable, but . . .

  Lloyd recalled how it happened. It was the spring of 1971. He was work-74

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  ing Hollywood Patrol and driving over to Silverlake twice a week to visit his parents while Tom was away at work. His father had settled into a quiet, oblivious state in his old age, spending whole days in his backyard shack, tinkering with the dozens of television sets and radios that eclipsed almost every square inch of its floor space; and his mother, then eight years mute, stared and dreamed in her silence, having to be steered to the kitchen thrice daily lest she forget to eat.

  Tom lived with them, as he had all his life, waiting for them to die and leave him the house that had already been placed in his name. He cooked for his parents and cashed their Social Security checks and read to them from the lurid picture histories of Nazi Germany that lined the bookshelves of his bedroom. It was Morgan Hopkins’s express wish to Lloyd that he and his wife live out their days in the old house on Griffith Park Boulevard. Lloyd reassured his father many times, “You’ll always have the house, Dad. Let Tom pay the taxes, don’t even worry about it. He’s a sorry excuse for a man, but he makes money, and he’s good at looking after you and Mother. Leave the house to him; I don’t care. Just be happy and don’t worry.”

  There was a silent agreement between Lloyd and his brother, then thirtysix and a phone sales entrepreneur operating at the edge of the law. Tom was to live at home and feed and care for their parents, and Lloyd was to look the other way at the cache of automatic weapons buried in the backyard of the Hopkins homestead. Lloyd laughed at the inequity of the bargain—Tom, craven beyond words, would never have the guts to use the weaponry, which would be rusted past redemption within a matter of months anyway.

  But one day in April of ’71, Lloyd got a phone call informing him that there was now a gaping hole at the periphery of his major dreams. An old buddy from the academy who worked Rampart Patrol had cruised by the Hopkins home, noticing a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. Puzzled, since he had heard Lloyd often mention that his parents would rather die than give up the house, he called Lloyd at Hollywood Station to voice his puzzlement. Lloyd took the words in with a silent rage that had the locker room wobbling surreally before his eyes. Still wearing his uniform, he got his car from the parking lot and drove out to Tom’s office in Glendale. The “office” was a converted basement with four dozen small desks jammed together along the walls, and Lloyd walked into it oblivious to the salesmen shouting the panacea of aluminum siding and home bible-study classes into telephones.

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  Tom’s desk was off by itself near the front of the room, next to a large urn filled with Benzedrine-laced coffee. Lloyd swung his lead-filled billy club into the urn, puncturing it and sending geysers of hot brown liquid into the air. Tom walked out of the men’s room, saw the rage in his brother’s eyes and the club, and backed into the wall. Lloyd advanced, and was arcing the club in a perfect roundhouse aimed at Tom’s head when the terror in the pale gray eyes that so resembled his own halted him. He threw the billy down and ran to the first row of desks, startled phone salesmen darting out of his way, running for cover at the back of the basement. Lloyd began jerking the telephone cords out of their wall mountings and hurling the phones across the room. One row; two rows; three rows. When the salesmen had all deserted the office, and the floor was littered with broken glass, scattered order forms, and inoperative telephones, he walked up to his quaking older brother and said, “You will take the house off the market today and never leave Mother and Dad alone.”

  Tom nodded mutely and fainted into a puddle of his dope-saturated coffee.

  Lloyd deepened his gaze into the dark hillside. That was over ten years ago. His mother and father were still alive in their separate solitudes; Tom was still their custodian. It was his one unsatisfying holding action, but there was nothing he could do about it. He recalled his last conversation with Tom. He was visiting his parents and found Tom in the backyard, burying shotguns under cover of night.

  “Talk to me,” Lloyd said.

  “About what, Lloydy?” Tom asked.

  “Say something real. Insult me. Ask me a question. I won’t hurt you.”

  Tom backed a few steps away. “Are you going to kill me when Mom and Dad are gone?”

  Lloyd was thunderstruck. “Why on earth would I want to kill you?”

  Tom retreated again. “Because of what happened on Christmas when you were eight.”

  Lloyd felt himself embraced by monsters, over thirty years dead in the wake of the strong man he had become. His eyes strayed to his father’s radio shack, and he had to will himself to return to the present, the force of the horrific memory was so compelling. “You’re crazy, Tom. You’ve always been crazy. I don’t like you, but I would never kill you.”

  *

  *

  *

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  Lloyd watched dawn creep up on the eastern horizon, outlining the L.A. skyline with strands of gold. Suddenly he was lonely and wanted to be with a woman. He sat down on the steps and considered his options. There was Sybil, but she had probably gone back to her husband—she was considering it the last time they talked. There was Colleen, but she was probably on her mid-week sales run to Santa Barbara. Leah? Meg? It was over with them, to resurrect it in the fierceness of early morning need would only cause pain later. There was only the uncertainty of Sarah Smith. Lloyd knocked on her door forty-five minutes later. She opened it blearyeyed, dressed in a denim bathrobe. When her eyes focused in on him she started to laugh.

  “I’m not that funny looking, am I?” Lloyd asked.

  Sarah shook her head. “What’s the matter, your wife kick you out?”

  “Sort of. She found out that I’m really a vampire in disguise. I prowl the lonely dawn streets of Los Angeles looking for beautiful young women to give me transfusions. Take me to your wisest muse.”

  Sarah giggled. “I’m not beautiful.”

  “Yes you are. Do you have to go to work today?”

  Sarah said, “Yeah, but I can call in sick. I’ve never been with a vampire.”

  Lloyd took her hand as she motioned him inside. “Then allow me to introduce myself,” he said.

  PART THREE

  CONVERGENCE

  5

  Lloyd was seated in his office at Parker Center, his hands playing over papers on his desk, alternately forming steeples and hanging men. It was January 3, 1983, and from his sixth-story cubicle he could see dark storm clouds barrelling northward. He hoped for a pulverizing rainstorm. He felt warm and protective when foul weather raged.

  The relative solitude of the office, situated between typewriter storage and Xeroxing rooms, was pleasing, but Lloyd’s primary reason for acquiring it was its proximity to the dispatcher’s office three doors down.
Sooner or later, all homicides within the L.A.P.D.’s jurisdiction were reported over their phone lines, either by investigating officers requesting assistance or concerned parties screaming for help. Lloyd had rigged a special line to his own phone, and whenever an incoming call hit the switchboard a red light on his answering machine went on and he could pick up the receiver and listen in, often making him the first L.A.P.D. detective to gain crucial information on a murder. It was a surefire antidote to burdensome caseloads, dreary report writing, and court appearances; so when Lloyd saw the light on his machine blink, his heart gave a little lurch and he picked up the receiver to listen.

  “Los Angeles Police Department, Robbery/Homicide Division,” the woman at the switchboard said.

  “Is this where you report a murder?” a man stammered in return.

  “Yes, sir,” the woman answered. “Are you in Los Angeles?”

  “I’m in Hollyweird. Man, you wouldn’t believe what I just seen . . .”

  Lloyd came alive with curiosity—the man sounded like he had witnessed a stoned visitation.

  “Do you wish to report a homicide, sir?” The woman was brusque, even a little bullying.

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  “Man, I don’t know if it was the real thing or a fuckin’ hallucination. I’ve been doin’ dust and reds for three days now.”

  “Where are you, sir?”

  “I ain’t nowhere. But you send the cops to the Aloha Apartments on Leland and Las Palmas. Room 406. There’s something inside out of a fuckin’

  Peckinpah movie. I don’t know, man, but either I gotta quit usin’ dust or you got some heavy shit on your hands.” The caller went into a coughing attack, then whispered, “Fuckin’ Hollyweird, man; fuckin’ weird,” and slammed down his receiver.