L.A. Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

by James Ellroy

  Lloyd could almost feel the switchboard operator’s befuddlement—she didn’t know if the caller was for real or not. Muttering “Goddamned creep,”

  she let her end of the line go dead. Lloyd jumped to his feet and threw on his sports jacket. He knew. He ran to his car and tore out for Hollywood.

  *

  *

  *

  The Aloha Regency was a four-story, moss-hung, Spanish-style apartment house painted a bright electric blue. Lloyd walked through the unkempt entrance foyer to the elevator, quickly grasping the building as a once grand Hollywood address gone to despair. He knew that the inhabitants of the Aloha Regency would be an uneasy mélange of illegal aliens, boozehounds, and welfare families. The sadness in the threadbare carpeted hallways was almost palpable.

  He got into the elevator and pressed 4, then unholstered his .38, feeling his skin start to tingle as he sensed the nearness of death. The elevator jerked to a halt and Lloyd got out. He scanned the hallway, noting that the doors on the even-numbered side leading up to 406 bore jimmy marks. After 406 the jimmy marks stopped. The wood on the doorjambs was freshly splintered with no evidence of warping, which meant that the doors had probably been tried as recently as this morning. Feeling a thesis forming already, Lloyd pointed his .38 straight at the door of 406 and kicked it in.

  Holding his gun in front of him as a directional finder, he walked into a small rectangular living room lined with bookshelves and tall potted plants. There was a desk wedged diagonally into one corner and three beanbag chairs on the floor, arranged in a semi-circle opened toward the front picture window. Lloyd walked through the room, savoring its feel. Slowly he swiveled to face the kitchenette off to the left. Freshly scrubbed tile and linoleum; dishes piled neatly by the sink. Which left the bedroom—sepa-

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  rated from the rest of the apartment by a bright green door bearing a Rod Stewart poster.

  Lloyd looked down at the floor and felt his stomach start to churn. In front of the crack below the door was a pile of dead cockroaches, melded together in a pool of congealed blood. He kicked in the door, murmuring,

  “Rabbit down the hole,” closing his eyes until he assimilated the overwhelming stench of decomposing flesh. When he felt his tremors go internal and knew he wouldn’t retch, he opened his eyes and said very softly,

  “Oh God, please no.”

  There was a nude woman hanging by one leg from a ceiling beam directly over a quilt-covered bed. Her stomach had been ripped open from pelvis to ribcage and her intestines were spilled out onto her upended torso, splaying out to cover her blood-matted face. Lloyd memorized the scene: the woman’s free hanging leg swollen and purple and twisted out at a right angle, caked blood on her breasts, a bluish-white tint on what he could see of her unbloodied flesh, the bed coverlet drenched with so much blood that it crusted and peeled in layers, blood on the floor and walls and dresser and mirror, all framing the dead woman in a perfect symmetry of devastation. Lloyd went into the living room and found the telephone. He called Dutch Peltz at the Hollywood Station, saying only, “6819 Leland, Apartment 406. Homicide, ambulance, Medical Examiner. I’ll call you later and tell you about it.”

  Dutch said, “Okay, Lloyd,” and hung up.

  Lloyd walked through the apartment a second time, willing his mind blank so that things could come to him, moving his eyes over the living room until he noticed a leather purse lying next to a cactus plant. He reached down and grabbed it, then dumped its contents onto the floor. Makeup kit, Excedrin, loose change. He opened a handtooled wallet. The woman had been Julia Lynn Niemeyer. The photo and statistics on her driver’s license made him ache: pretty, 5'5", 120 pounds. D.O.B. 2–2–54, making her a month short of twenty-nine.

  Lloyd dropped the wallet and examined the bookshelves. Romances and popular novels predominated. He noticed that the books on the top shelves were covered with dust, while the books on the bottom shelf were clean. He squatted down to examine them more closely. The bottom shelf contained volumes of poetry, from Shakespeare to Byron to feminist poets in soft cover. Lloyd pulled out three books at random and leafed through them, feeling his respect for Julia Lynn Niemeyer grow—she had been read-82

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  ing good stuff in the days before her death. He finished flipping through the classics and picked up an outsized paperback entitled Rage in the Womb—

  An Anthology of Feminist Prose. Opening to the “Contents,” he went numb when he saw dark brown stains on the inside cover. Flipping forward, he found pages stuck together with congealed blood and bloody smatterings growing fainter as he worked toward the end of the book. When he reached the glossy finished back cover, he gasped. Perfectly outlined in white were two bloody partial fingerprints—an index and pinky; enough to run a make on.

  Lloyd whooped and wrapped the book in his handkerchief and carefully placed it on one of the beanbag chairs. On impulse, he walked back over to the bookshelf and ran a hand in the narrow space between the bottom shelf and the floor. He came away with a handful of vending machine dispensed sex tabloids—the L.A. Nite-Line, L.A. Grope, and L.A. Swinger. He carried them over to the chair and sat down and read, saddened by the lurid fantasy letters and desperate liaison ads. “Attractive divorcee, 40, seeks well-hung white men for afternoon love. Send erect photo and letter to P.O. Box 5816, Gardena, Calif. 90808.”; “Good looking gay guy, 24, into giving head, seeks hunky young high school guys with no mustache. Call anytime—709-6404”; “Mr. Big Dick’s my name, and fucking’s my game! I give good lovin’ to much acclaim! Let’s get together for a swingin’ nite, my dick is hard if your pussy’s tight!—Send spread photo to P.O. Box 6969, L.A., Calif. 90069.”

  Lloyd was about to put the tabloids down and send up a mercy plea for the entire human race when his eyes caught an advertisement circled in red. “Your fantasy or mine? Let’s get together and rap. Any and all sexually liberated people are invited to write to me at P.O. Box 7512, Hollywood, Calif. 90036 (I’m an attractive woman in her late 20s).” He put the paper down and dug through the other two. The identical ad was featured in both. He stuck the papers into his jacket pocket, walked back into the bedroom, and opened the windows. Julia Lynn Niemeyer swayed from the draft, turning on her one-legged axis, the ceiling beam creaking against her weight. Lloyd held her arms gently. “Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered, “oh, baby, what were you looking for? Did you fight? Did you scream?”

  Almost as if in answer, the woman’s cold left arm was caught by a gust of wind and flopped out of Lloyd’s grasp. He grabbed it and held the hand tightly, his eyes moving to the large blue veins at the crook of the elbow. He gasped. A pair of needle marks were outlined clearly against the middle

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  of the largest vein. He checked the other arm—nothing—then scraped away patches of dried blood from the ankles and backs of the knees. No other tracks; the woman had been professionally sedated at the time of her desecration.

  Lloyd heard footsteps in the hallway, and seconds later a plainclothes cop and two patrolmen in uniform burst into the apartment. He walked into the living room to greet them, pointing a thumb over his shoulder and saying,

  “In there, guys.” He was staring out the window at the black sky when he heard their first exclamations of horror, followed by the sound of retching. The plainclothes cop was the first to recover, walking up to Lloyd and blurting out bluff-hearty, “Wow! That’s some stiff! You’re Lloyd Hopkins, aren’t you? I’m Lundquist, Hollywood dicks.”

  Lloyd turned to face the tall, prematurely gray young man, ignoring his outstretched hand. He scrutinized him openly and decided he was stupid and inexperienced.

  Lundquist fidgeted under Lloyd’s stare. “I think we got a botched-up burglary, Sergeant,” he said. “I saw B&E marks on the door here. I think we should start our investigation by hauling in burglars known to use viol—”

  Lloyd shook his head, silencing the y
ounger detective. “Wrong. Those jimmy marks are fresh. The edges would have rounded off from moisture if the attempted burglaries coincided with the murder. That woman has been dead for at least two days. No, the burglar was the guy who called in to report the body. Now listen, the woman’s purse is on that chair over there. Positive I.D. There’s also a paperback book with two bloodstained partial prints. Get them to the lab and have the technicians call me at home when they have something conclusive one way or the other. I want you to search the premises, then seal it—no reporters, no TV assholes. You got that?”

  Lundquist nodded.

  “Good. Now, I want you to call the M.E. and S.I.D., and have them bring in a fingerprint team and dust this place from top to bottom. I want a complete forensic work-up. Tell the M.E. to call me at home with the autopsy report. Who’s the top dog at Hollywood dicks?”

  “Lieutenant Perkins.”

  “Good. I’ll call him. Tell him I’m handling this case for Robbery/

  Homicide.”

  “Right, Sergeant.”

  Lloyd walked back into the bedroom. The two patrolmen were staring at the corpse and cracking jokes. “I had a girlfriend once who looked like 84

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  that,” the older cop said. “Bloody Mary. I could only get together with her for two weeks outta the month, her period lasted so long.”

  “That’s nothing,” the younger cop said, “I knew an attendant at the morgue who fell in love with a corpse. He wouldn’t let the coroner slice her—said it took the R out of romance.”

  The other cop laughed and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. “My wife takes the R out of romance every night, also the O and the M.”

  Lloyd cleared his throat; he knew that the men were joking to keep their horror at bay, but he was offended anyway, and didn’t want Julia Lynn Niemeyer to hear such things. He rummaged through the bedroom closet until he found a terrycloth robe, then walked into the kitchen and found a serrated-edged steak knife. When he re-entered the bedroom and stood up on the blood-spattered bed, the younger cop said, “You’d better leave her like that for the coroner, Sergeant.”

  Lloyd said, “Shut the fuck up,” and cut through the nylon cord that bound Julia Lynn Niemeyer at the ankle. He gathered her dangling limbs and violated torso into his arms and stepped off the bed, cradling her head into his shoulder. Tears filled his eyes. “Sleep, darling,” he said. “Know that I’ll find your killer.” Lloyd lowered her to the floor and covered her with the robe. The three cops stared at him in disbelief.

  “Seal the premises.” Lloyd said.

  *

  *

  *

  Three days later, Lloyd was stationed at the main Hollywood post office with his eyes glued to the wall containing P.O. boxes 7500 through 7550, armed with the knowledge that Julia Lynn Niemeyer had placed her tabloid advertisements in the company of a tall, blonde woman of about forty. Office personnel at both the L.A. Night-Line and L.A. Swinger had positively identified the dead woman from her driver’s license photograph, and distinctly remembered her female companion. Lloyd fidgeted, keeping his anger and impatience at bay by recapitulating all the known physical evidence on the killing. Fact: Julia Lynn Neimeyer was killed by a massive dose of heroin, and was mutilated after her death. Fact: The coroner had placed the time of her murder as seventy-two hours before the discovery of her body. Fact: No one at the Aloha Regency had heard signs of a struggle or knew much about the victim, who lived on money from a trust fund set up by her parents, who had died in a car accident in 1978. This information had been supplied by the woman’s uncle, who had read of the killing in the San Francisco newspapers and who went

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  on to describe Julia Niemeyer as a “very deep, very quiet, very intelligent girl who didn’t let people get close to her.”

  The killing had made the newspapers in a big way, and similarities to the Tate-LaBianca slayings of 1969 had been graphically pointed out. This caused a torrent of unsolicited information to flood the switchboards of the Los Angeles Police Department, and Lloyd had assigned three officers to interview all callers who didn’t sound like outright cranks. The bloodstained fingerprints on the paperback book—the one hard piece of physical evidence—had been scrutinized by fingerprint experts, then computer fed and teletyped to every police agency in the continental United States, with astoundingly negative results: The partial index and pinky prints could not be attributed to anyone, anywhere, meaning that the killer had never been arrested, never been a member of the armed services or civil service, never been bonded, and had never applied for a driver’s license in thirty-seven of the fifty United States.

  Lloyd felt his thesis take on the form of what he called the “Black Dahlia Syndrome,” a reference to the famous unsolved 1947 mutilation murder. He was certain that Julia Lynn Niemeyer had been killed by an intelligent middle-aged man who had never killed before, a man with a low sex drive who had somehow come in contact with Julia Niemeyer, whose persona somehow triggered his long dormant psychoses, and eventually led him to plan her murder carefully. He knew also that the man was physically strong and capable of maneuvering on a broad-based societal level: a solid citizen type who could also score heroin.

  Lloyd was impressed with both killer and the challenge his capture presented. He surveyed the post office crowd at random, then shifted his gaze back to Box 7512. He felt his impatience grow. If the “tall blonde woman”

  didn’t show by lunchtime, he would smash the box open and rip it off by the hinges.

  She showed an hour later. Lloyd sensed that it was she as soon as she walked through the broad glass doors and nervously made for the aisles of boxes. A tall, strong-featured woman whose manner was like a barely controlled scream, he could almost feel her body tension as she looked fearfully in all directions, inserted her key and withdrew a handful of mail, then ran back outside.

  Lloyd came up behind her as she was opening the door of a doubleparked Pinto hatchback. She turned around as she heard his footsteps, her hand flying to her mouth when she saw the badge he was holding up at eye 86

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  level. Transfixed by the badge, the woman flopped against the car and let the handful of mail drop to the street.

  Lloyd bent down and picked it up. “Police officer,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “Vice?”

  Lloyd said, “No, Homicide. It’s about Julia Niemeyer.”

  An angry flush came over the woman’s face. “Jesus,” she said, “that’s a relief. I was going to call you. I suppose you want to talk?”

  Lloyd smiled; the woman had a certain panache. “We can’t talk here,” he said, “and I don’t want to subject you to a police station. Do you mind driving somewhere?”

  “No,” the woman said, adding “Officer” with the thinnest edge of contempt. Lloyd told her to drive south to Hancock Park. En route he learned that she was Joanie Pratt, age 42, former dancer, singer, actress, waitress, Playboy Club Bunny, model, and kept woman.

  “What are you doing now?” he asked as she pulled into the Hancock Park parking lot.

  “It’s illegal,” Joanie Pratt said, smiling.

  “I don’t care,” Lloyd said, smiling back.

  “Okay, I deal Quaaludes and fuck for selected older guys who don’t want to get involved.”

  Lloyd laughed and pointed to a collection of plaster dinosaurs standing on a grassy knoll a few yards from the tar pits. “Let’s go talk,” he said. When they were seated on the grass, Lloyd bored in, describing Julia Niemeyer’s corpse in hideously graphic detail. Joanie Pratt turned white, then red and started to sob. Lloyd made no move to comfort her. When her tears subsided, he said softly, “I want this animal. I know about the ads you and Julia placed in the sex papers. I don’t care if the two of you have fucked half of L.A. or the kangaroos in the San Diego Zoo or each other. I don’t give a fuck if you deal dope, snort dope, shoot dope, or turn little kids on to do
pe. I want to know everything that you know about Julia Niemeyer: her love life, her sex life, and why she put those ads in those papers. Have you got that?”

  Joanie nodded mutely. Lloyd dug a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. She wiped her face and said, “All right, it’s like this. I was in the Hollywood Library about three months ago, returning some books. I notice this good-looking chick standing in line next to me, checking out all these scholarly books on sex—Kraft-Ebbing, Kinsey, The Hite Re-

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  port. I crack a joke to the girl, who turns out to be Julia. Anyway, we go outside and smoke a cigarette and talk—about sex. Julia tells me she’s researching sexuality—that she wants to write a book about it. I share my racy past with her, and tell her I’ve got this gig going—floating swingers’ parties. It’s kind of a scam—I know some heavyweight real estate people, and I score dope for them in exchange for letting me sublet these really primo houses when the owners are out of town. Then I place ads in the sex papers—high, high line sex parties. Two hundred dollars a couple—to keep the riffraff out. I provide good food and dope, music and a light show. Anyway, Julia—she’s obsessed with sex, but she doesn’t fuck—she’s just a sex scholar . . .”

  Joanie paused, and lit a cigarette. When Lloyd nervously blurted out,

  “Go on,” she said, “Anyway, Julia wants to interview the people at my parties. I tell her ‘fuck no! These people are paying goood money to come, and they don’t want to be hassled by some sex-obsessed interviewer.’ So Julia says, ‘Look. I’ve got lots of money. I’ll pay for people to come to the parties, and I’ll interview them there, as their price for admission. That way, I can watch them have sex.’ Anyway, that’s why Julia placed those ads. People contacted her, and she offered to pay their way to the parties if they consented to interviews.”