by James Ellroy
Joanie leaned into the kiss. “Take care, Sarge.”
*
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It was dawn. Lloyd drove downtown to Parker Center, feeling spellbound with purpose. He took the elevator to the fourth-floor computer room. There was a lone operator on duty. The man looked up from his sciencefiction novel as he saw Lloyd approach, wondering if there was a chance to banter with the big detective the other cops called “The Brain.” When he saw the look on Lloyd’s face, he decided against it. Lloyd said brusquely, “Good morning. I want printouts on every unsolved female homicide in Los Angeles County over the past fifteen years. I’ll be up in my office. Ring extension 1179 when you have the information.”
Lloyd about-faced and walked the two flights of stairs up to his office. The cubicle was dark and quiet and peaceful, and he flopped into his chair and fell asleep immediately.
6
It was the poet’s eleventh complete reading of the manuscript, his eleventh journey into his most recent beloved’s shameful passion, his third since he consummated their love.
His hands shook as he turned the pages, and he knew that he would have to return to the repulsively fascinating third chapter, the words that tore and bit at him, that made him feel his organs and their functions, that made him sweat and tingle and drop things and laugh when nothing was funny. The chapter was entitled “Straight Men—Gay Fantasies,” and it reminded him of his early poetry writing days, the days before he became so obsessed with form, when stanzas didn’t have to rhyme, when he trusted the thematic unity of his subconscious. In this chapter his beloved had gotten a disparate sampling of normal men to admit things like, “I would really like to take it up the ass just once. Just do it—and fuck the consequences, then go home and make love to my wife and wonder if it felt any different to her,” and “I’m thirty-four now, and I’ve screwed every woman who’d let me for seventeen years and I still haven’t quite found the nitty-gritty excitement that I thought I would. I drive down Santa Monica Boulevard sometimes and see the male hustlers and everything goes slightly haywire and I think and think and . . . (here Interviewee sighs disgustedly) . . . and then I think that a new woman will do it, and I think of coming here to these parties and before you know it I’m turning off Santa Monica and thinking of my wife and kids and then . . . oh, shit!”
He put the looseleaf binder down, feeling the little body flushes that had ruled his life since his consummation with Julia. She had been dead for two weeks and they were continuing unabated, undaunted by the courage he had shown in writing her anonymous tribute etched in his own blood, undaunted by his first sexual transit since . . .
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*
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He had read the third chapter beside Julia’s body, savoring her nearness, wanting the completeness of her flesh and her words. The men who had told Julia their stories were so blighted in their dishonesty that he wanted to retch. Yet . . . he read the man’s account of driving down Santa Monica Boulevard over and over, looking up only to watch Julia sway on her external axis. She was more of him than any of the first twenty-one, more even than Linda, who had moved him so deeply. She had given him words to keep—tangible love gifts that would grow in him. Yet . . . Santa Monica Boulevard . . . yet . . . the poor wretch so devastated by societal mores that he couldn’t . . .
He walked into the living room. Rage in the Womb. A lesbian poet wrote of her lover’s “multiunioned folds of wetness.” Visions of muscular torsos, broad shoulders, and flat, hard backsides entered him, given to him by Julia, telling him to seek a further union with her by showing courage where the cowardly wretch had failed. He balked inside, searching frantically for words. He tried anagrams of Julia and Kathy, five letters each. It didn’t work. Julia wanted more than the others. He walked back to the bedroom to view her corpse a last time. She sent him visions of sullen young men in macho poses. He obeyed. He drove to Santa Monica Boulevard. He found them a few blocks west of La Brea, standing in front of taco stands, porno bookstores, and bars, outlined in neon tendrils that gave them the added enticements of halos, auras, and wispy appendages. The idea of looking for a specific image or body crossed his mind, but he killed the thought. It would give him time to retreat, and he wanted to impress Julia with his unquestioning compliance.
He pulled to the curb and rolled down the window, beckoning to the young man leaning against a newsrack with one hip thrust toward the street.
The young man walked over and leaned in through the window. “It’s thirty; head only, pitch or catch,” he said, getting an inward wave of the arm as his answer.
They drove around the corner and parked. He clenched his body until he thought his muscles would contract and suffocate him, then whispered,
“Kathy,” and let the young man unbutton his pants and lower his head into his lap. His contractions continued until he exploded, seeing colors when he came. He tossed a handful of cash at the young man, who vanished out 98
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the door. He was still seeing colors, and he saw them on his drive home and in his restive, but altogether wonderful, dreams that night. His post-consummation ritual of sending flowers took up the following morning. Driving away from the florist’s, he noticed that his usual valedictory feeling was missing. He spent the afternoon developing film and setting up shooting assignments for the following week, thoughts of Julia rendering his workday pursuits a treadmill of ugly boredom. He read her manuscript again, staying up all night, seeing colors and feeling the weight of the young man’s head. Then the terror began. He could feel foreign bodies within his body. Tiny melanomas and carcinomas that moved audibly through his bloodstream. Julia wanted more. She wanted written tribute; words to match her words. He severed an artery in his right forearm with a paring knife, then squeezed the gash until it yielded enough blood to fill completely the bottom of a small developing tray. After cauterizing the wound he took a pen quill and ruler and meticulously printed out his tribute. He slept well that night.
In the morning he mailed his poem to the post office address he had seen on the front page of Julia’s manuscript. His feeling of normalcy solidified. But at night the terror returned. The carcinomas were inside him again. He started dropping things. He saw the colors, this time even more vividly. The Santa Monica Boulevard phantasmagoria flashed continually before his eyes. He knew that he had to do something or go insane.
*
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The poet had now possessed the manuscript for the two weeks since Julia’s death. He began to look on it as an evil talisman. The third chapter was particularly evil, inimical to the control that had been the hallmark of his life. That night he burned the manuscript in his kitchen sink. He doused the charred words with tap water and felt new purpose grip him. There was only one way to obliterate all memory of his twenty-second lover.
He had to find a new woman.
7
It had been seventeen days since the discovery of Julia Niemeyer’s body, and Lloyd wondered for the first time if his Irish Protestant ethos had the juice to carry him through what was turning into the most vexing episode of his life, a crusade that portended some deep, massive loss of control. For perhaps the thousandth time since securing the printouts, he recapitulated all the known physical evidence pertaining to Julia Niemeyer’s murder and unsolved homicides of women in Los Angeles County: the blood that formed the words of the poem was O+. Julia Niemeyer’s blood was AB. There were no fingerprints on the envelope or single piece of paper. Interviews with residents of the Aloha Regency Apartments had yielded nothing; no one knew much about the dead woman; no one knew her to have visitors; no one recalled any strange occurrences in the building near the time of her death. The surrounding area had been thoroughly searched for the double-bladed knife believed to have been used for the mutilations—nothing even closely resembling it had been found. Lloyd’s vague hope that Julia’s killer had been conn
ected to her through the swing parties proved futile. Experienced detectives had interviewed all the people in Joanie Pratt’s Rolodex and had come away with nothing but new insights into lust and sad knowledge of adultery. Two officers had been assigned to check bookshops specializing in poetry and feminist literature for weird male requests for Rage in the Womb and generally strange male behavior. All investigatory avenues were covered.
And the unsolved homicides: The twenty-three Los Angeles County police agencies whose feed-ins composed the central computer file listed 410
of them going back to January 1968. Discounting 143 vehicular homicides, this left 267 unsolved murders. Of these 267, 79 were of women between 100
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the ages of twenty and forty, what Lloyd considered to be his killer’s perimeters of attraction—he was certain the monster liked them young. He looked at the map of Los Angeles County adorning the back wall of his office. There were seventy-nine pins stuck into it, denoting the locations where seventy-nine young women met violent death. Lloyd scrutinized the territory represented and let his intimate knowledge of L.A. and its environs work in concert with his instincts. The pinpoints covered the whole of Los Angeles County, from the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys to the far-flung beach communities that formed her southern and western perimeters. Hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Yet of the seventy-nine, forty-eight were situated in what police referred to as “white trash” suburbs—low income, high crime areas where alcoholism and drug addiction were epidemic. Statistics and his own policeman’s instinct told Lloyd that the bulk of these deaths were related to booze, dope, and infidelity. Which left thirty-one murders of young women, spread throughout middle, upper middle class, and wealthy L.A. County suburbs and municipalities; murders unsolved by nine police agencies. Lloyd had groaned when he had taken his last available direct action of querying those agencies for Xeroxes of their complete case files, realizing that it might take them as long as two weeks to respond. He felt powerless and beset by forces far beyond his bailiwick, imagining a city of the dead coexisting with Los Angeles in another time warp, a city where beautiful women beseeched him with terrified eyes to find their killer. Lloyd’s feelings of powerlessness had peaked three days before, and he had personally telephoned the top interagency liaison officers at the nine departments, demanding that the files be delivered to Parker Center within forty-eight hours. The responses of the nine officers had varied, but in the end they had acquiesced to Lloyd Hopkins’s reputation as a hot-shot Homicide dick and had promised the paperwork in seventy-two hours tops. Lloyd looked at his watch, a Rolex chronometer marked in the twentyfour-hour military time method. Seventy hours and counting down. Adding two hours for bureaucratic delay, the paperwork should arrive by noon. He bolted from his office and ran down six flights of stairs to street level. Four hours of pounding pavement with no destination in mind and a willfully shut-off brain would put him at his optimal mental capabilities—which he was certain that he would need to devour the thirty-one homicide files.
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Four hours later, his mind clear from a dozen brisk circuits of the Civic Center area, Lloyd returned to Parker Center and jogged up to his office. He could see that the door to his cubicle was open and that someone had turned on the light. A lieutenant in uniform passed him in the hallway and hastily explained, “Your paperwork arrived, Lloyd. It’s in your office.”
Lloyd nodded and peered in his doorway. His desk and both his chairs were covered with thick manila folders filled with papers still reeking of the photostatic process. He counted them, then moved his chairs, wastebasket, and filing cabinet out into the hallway, arraying the files on the floor in a circle and sitting down in the middle of them.
Each folder was marked on the front with the victim’s last name, first name, and date of death. Lloyd divided them first into region, then into year, never looking at the photographs that he knew were clipped to the first page. Starting with Fullmer, Elaine D.; D.O.D. 3/9/68, Pasadena P.D., and ending with Deverson, Linda Holly; D.O.D. 6/14/82, Santa Monica P.D., he selected all the paperwork outside the L.A.P.D. and placed it to one side. This accounted for eighteen files. He looked at the thirteen L.A.P.D. files. Their front markings were slightly more detailed than those of the other departments; each victim’s age and race were listed immediately below her name. Of the thirteen murdered women, seven were listed as black and Hispanic. Lloyd put these folders aside and double-checked his first instincts, letting his mind go blank for a full minute before returning to conscious thought. He decided he was right; his killer preferred white women. This left six L.A.P.D. files and eighteen from other agencies, twenty-four in total. Averting his eyes from the front page photos, Lloyd scanned the interagency files for mention of race. Eight of the victims were listed as being non-Caucasian.
Which left sixteen folders.
Lloyd decided to make a collage of photographs before reading the complete files. Again willing a blank mind, he slipped the snapshots out of their folders face down in chronological order. “Talk to me,” he said aloud, turning the photographs over. When six of the snapshots smiled up at him he felt his mind begin to lurch forward convulsively, grasping at the horrific knowledge that he was assimilating. He flipped over the remaining photos and felt the logic of terror grip him like a blood-spattered vice. The dead women were all of a kind, almost kinlike in the Anglo-Saxon planes of their faces; all possessed demure, feminine hairstyles; all were 102
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wholesome-looking in the spirit of more traditional times. Lloyd whispered the single word that summed up his constituency of the dead, “Innocent, innocent, innocent.” He surveyed the photographs a dozen more times, picking up details—strands of pearls and high school rings on chains, the absence of makeup, shoulders and necks clad in sweaters and anachronistic formal wear. That the women had been killed by one monster for the destruction of the innocence they heralded so splendidly was beyond question. With trembling hands Lloyd read through the folders, partaking of death’s communion served up by strangulation, gunshot, decapitation, forced ingestion of caustic fluids, bludgeoning, gas, drug overdose, poisoning, and suicide. Disparate methods that would eliminate police awareness of mass murder. The one common denominator: no clues. No physical evidence. Women chosen for slaughter because of the way they looked. Julia Niemeyer killed sixteen times over, and how many more in different places?
Innocence was the epidemic of youth.
Lloyd read through the folders again, coming out of his trance with the realization that he had been sitting on the floor for three hours and that he was drenched in sweat. As he got to his feet and stretched his painfully cramped legs, he felt the big horror overtake him: The killer’s genius was unfathomable. There were no clues. The Niemeyer trail was dead cold. The other trails were colder. There was nothing he could do. There was always something he could do.
Lloyd got a roll of masking tape from his desk and began taping the photographs along the walls of his office. When the smiling faces of dead women stared down at him from all directions he said to himself, “Finis. Morte. Cold City. Muerto. Dead.”
Then he closed his eyes and read the vital statistics page in each folder, forcing himself to think only region. This accomplished, he got out his notebook and pen and wrote: Central Los Angeles:
1. Elaine Marburg, D.O.D. 11/24/69
2. Patricia Petrelli, D.O.D. 5/20/75
3. Karlen La Pelley, D.O.D. 2/14/71
4. Caroline Werner, D.O.D. 11/9/79
5. Cynthia Gilroy, D.O.D. 12/5/71
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Valley and Foothill Communities:
1. Elaine Fullmer, D.O.D. 3/9/68
2. Jeanette Willkie, D.O.D. 4/15/73
3. Mary Wardell, D.O.D. 1/6/74
Hollywood–West Hollywood:
1. Laurette Powell, D.O.D. 6/10/78
/> 2. Carla Castleberry, D.O.D. 6/10/80
3. Trudy Miller, D.O.D. 12/12/68
4. Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77
5. Marcia Renwick, D.O.D. 6/10/81
Bev. Hills–Santa Monica–Beach Communities:
1. Monica Martin, D.O.D. 9/21/74
2. Jennifer Szabo, D.O.D. 9/3/72
3. Linda Deverson, D.O.D. 6/14/82
Willing himself to think only modus operandi, Lloyd read through the Vital Statistics page a second time, coming away with three bludgeonings, two dismemberments, one horseback riding accident that was seriously considered as a homicide, two deaths by gunshot, two stabbings, four suicides attributed to different means, one poisoning, and one drug overdose-gassing that was labeled “murder-suicide?” by a baffled records clerk. Turning to chronology, Lloyd read over the dates of death that he had written next to his list of victims, gaining his first make on the killer’s methodology. With the exception of a twenty-five month hiatus between Patricia Petrelli, D.O.D. 5/20/75 and Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77, and a seventeen-month gap between Laurette Powell, D.O.D. 6/10/78 and Caroline Werner, D.O.D. 11/9/79, his killer performed his executions at intervals of between six months to fifteen months which, Lloyd concluded, was why he was able to elude capture for so long. The murders were undoubtedly brilliantly executed and based on intimate knowledge gleaned from long-term surveillance. And, he reasoned further, those longer hiatuses probably contained victims that could be attributed to lost files and computer errors—every police agency was susceptible to a large paperwork margin of error. Lloyd closed his eyes and imagined time warps within time warps within time warps; wondering how far back the killings went—all police depart-104
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ments in Los Angeles County threw out their unsolved files after fifteen years, giving him zero access to information predating January 1968. It was then that his mind pulsated into perfect focus, and as he whispered
