by James Ellroy
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Dutch watched the muster-room clock strike eleven. He shifted his gaze out the door to the front desk. The desk officer looked up from his telephone and called out, “Nothing yet, skipper. I’ve made contact with twenty-three out of the thirty-one. The rest are no answers or recorded messages. Nothing even remotely suspicious.”
Nodding curtly in answer, Dutch said, “Keep trying” and walked out to the parking lot. He looked up at the black sky and saw the crisscrossed beacons of the helicopter patrols light up low cloud formations and the tops of Hollywood skyscrapers. Save for a skeletal station contingent, every Hollywood Division officer was on the street, on foot, in the air or in a black-andwhite, armed to the teeth and pumped up for glory. Rolling imaginary dice, Dutch calculated the odds on accidental shootings by overeager cops at ten to one, rookies and promotion happy hot dogs the most likely blood spillers.
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With Lloyd still missing and no clues to his whereabouts, he found that he didn’t care. Blood was in the air, and nihilist rectitude was the night’s prevailing logic. He had gone through cartons of Lloyd’s arrest records from his Hollywood Division days, finding no indicators pointing to trauma that might have festered to the point of combustion; he had telephoned every one of Lloyd’s girlfriends whose name he could recall. Nothing. Lloyd was guilty or Lloyd was innocent and Lloyd was nowhere. And if Lloyd was nowhere, then he, Captain Arthur F. Peltz, was a spiritual seeker who had gone to Mecca and had come away with unimpeachable evidence that life was shit.
Dutch walked back inside the station. He was halfway up the stairs to his office when the desk officer ran up to him. “I got a response to your A.P.B., Captain. Vehicle only. I wrote down the address.” Dutch grabbed at the paper the officer was holding, then ran downstairs to the front desk and ran frenzied eyes over Lloyd’s interview list. When 1893 N. Alvarado screamed out from both pieces of paper, he yelled, “Call the officers who called in the bulletin and tell them to resume patrol; this is mine!”
The desk officer nodded. Dutch ran up to his office and got his Ithaca pump. Lloyd was innocent and there was a monster to slay. 19
Awinding two-lane access road led up to the Power Plant. It terminated at the base of a scrub-bush dotted hillside that rose steeply to the tall barbed-wire fence that enclosed the generator facility. There was a dirt parking lot off the left of the road, next to a tool shack sandwiched between two stanchions hung with high powered spotlights. Another spotlight housing was stationed directly across the blacktop, with feeder wires connecting to the Silverlake Reservoir a quarter of a mile north. At 11:30, Lloyd walked up from the playground, staking out the territory as he trudged uphill, the 30.06 resting on his shoulder, the .44 magnum pressed to his leg. He knew only that since assuming his position on the street side of the playground at eight-thirty, six cars had driven northbound 200
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on the access road. Two were official Water and Power Department vehicles, presumably headed for the plant’s administration offices. The four remaining cars had returned within an hour, meaning that the occupants had gotten stoned or laid on the hillside and had retreated back to L.A. proper. Which meant that Teddy Verplanck had arrived on foot or was in the process of driving up.
Lloyd walked north on the dirt shoulder, hugging the embankment that branched into Power Plant Hill. When he reached the last turn in the road he saw that he was correct. Two cars were parked next to the fence beside the tool shack; both were Water and Power vehicles. The embankment ended, and Lloyd had to walk a stretch of pavement before he could scale the hill and establish a killing ground. He treaded lightly, his eyes constantly scanning his blind side. If Verplanck was nearby, he was probably hiding in the clump of trees adjoining the parked cars. He checked his watch: eleven forty-four. At precisely midnight he would blow that clump of trees to kingdom come.
The pavement ended, and Lloyd began to climb uphill, pushing forward slowly, dirt mounds breaking at his feet. He saw a tall scattering of scrub bushes looming in front of him and smiled as he realized that it was the perfect vantage point. He stopped and unslung his 30.06, checking the clip and flipping off the safeties. Everything was operative and set to go at a split second’s notice.
Lloyd was within a yard of his objective when a shot rang out. He hesitated for a brief instant, then hurled himself head first into the dirt just as a second shot grazed his shoulder. He screamed and burrowed into the ground, waiting for a third shot to give him a direction to fire in. The only sound was the pounding of his own chest.
An electrically amplified voice cut the air: “Hopkins, I have Kathy. She has to choose.”
Lloyd rolled into a sitting position and aimed his 30.06 at the sound of the voice. He knew that Verplanck was a conjuror who could assume shapes and voices and that Kathleen was safe somewhere in her web of fantasies. Clenching his bloodied shoulder into a huge ache to allow for the recoil, he fired off a full clip. When the shattering echoes died out, a laughing voice answered them. “You don’t believe me, so I’ll make you believe me.”
A series of hellish shrieks followed, noises that no conjuror could artifice. Lloyd muttered “No, no, no,” until the electronic voice called out, “Throw down your weapons and come out to meet me or she dies.”
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Lloyd hurled his rifle at the road. When it clattered onto the pavement he stood up and jammed his .44 magnum into the back of his waistband. He stumbled downhill, knowing that he and his evil counterpart were going to die together with no one but the strident woman poet to write their epitaph. He was murmuring “rabbit down the hole, rabbit down the hole,”
when white light blinded him and a white-hot hammer slammed him just above the heart. He flew back into the dirt and rolled like a dervish as the light bored into the ground by his side. Wiping dirt and tears from his eyes, he crawled for the pavement, watching the spotlight’s reflections gradually illuminate Teddy holding Kathleen McCarthy in front of the toolshed. He tore through his blood-drenched shirt and felt his chest, then twisted his right arm and pawed at his back. A small frontal and a crisp exit wound. He would have the juice to kill Teddy before he bled to death. Lloyd pulled out his .44 and spread himself prone, his eyes on the two spotlights next to the toolshed. Only the top light was on. Teddy and Kathleen were right below the housings, forty feet of blacktop and dirt away from the muzzle of his handcannon. One shot at the spotlight; one shot to take off Teddy’s head.
Lloyd squeezed the trigger. The light exploded and died at the precise second that he saw Kathleen break free of Teddy’s grasp and fall to the ground. He got to his feet and stumbled across the pavement, his gun arm extended, his left hand holding his trembling wrist steady. “Kathleen, hit the other light!” he screamed.
Lloyd moved forward into his last gauntlet of darkness, a red-black curtain that masked all his senses and enveloped him like a custom-made shroud. When the spotlight went on Teddy Verplanck was ten feet in front of him, coming to meet his destiny with a .32 automatic and a nail-studded baseball bat.
Both men fired at the same instant. Teddy clutched his chest and pitched backward just as Lloyd felt the bullet tear into his groin. His finger jerked the trigger and recoil sent the gun flying from his hand. He fell to the pavement and watched Teddy crawl toward him, the spikes on the baseball bat gleaming in the white-hot light.
Lloyd pulled out his .38 snub nose and held it upright, waiting for the moment when he could see Teddy’s eyes. When Teddy was on top of him and the bat was descending and he could see that his blood brother’s eyes were blue he pulled the trigger six times. There was nothing but the soft click of metal on metal as Lloyd screamed and blood burst from Teddy’s 202
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mouth. Lloyd wondered how that could be and if he was dead, and then just before losing consciousness he saw Dutch Peltz wipe the blade that stuck out of his steel
-toed paratrooper’s boot.
20
The long transit of horror ended, and the three survivors began the longer process of healing.
Dutch had carried Lloyd and Teddy to his car, and with Kathleen weeping beside him had driven to the home of a doctor under indictment for dealing morphine. With Dutch’s gun at his head the doctor had examined Lloyd, pronouncing him in need of an immediate transfusion of three pints of blood. Dutch checked Lloyd’s driver’s license and the I.D. cards he had taken from the body of Teddy Verplanck. Both men were type O+. The doctor performed the transfusion with a makeshift centrifuge to stimulate Teddy’s heartbeat while Dutch whispered over and over that he would kill all the charges against him, regardless of the cost. Lloyd responded favorably to the transfer of blood, regaining consciousness as the doctor sedated Kathleen and removed the catgut stitches that anchored her eyelids to her brows. Dutch didn’t tell Lloyd where the blood had come from. He didn’t want him to know.
Leaving Lloyd and Kathleen at the doctor’s house, Dutch drove the remains of Teddy Verplanck to their final resting place, a stretch of condemned beach known to be rife with industrial toxins. Hauling the body over a series of barbed wire fences, he had watched as the poisonous tide swept it away on the wings of a nightmare.
Dutch spent the next week with Kathleen and Lloyd, convincing the doctor to oversee their medical recovery. The house became a hospital with two patients, and when Kathleen came out of her sedation she told Dutch of how Teddy Verplanck had gagged her and slung her over his back, carrying her through the Silverlake hills on his way to ambush Lloyd. He told her of how verse notations on Teddy Verplanck’s calendar had led him to the reservoir and how if Lloyd was to survive as a policeman and
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a human being she would have to be very gentle and never talk to him about Teddy. Weeping, Kathleen agreed.
Dutch went on to say that he would destroy every official trace of Teddy Verplanck, but it would be her job to blunt Lloyd’s terror-driven memory with love. “With all my heart,” was her answer.
Lloyd was delirious for over a week. As his physical wounds healed, his nightmares took over, and gradually, between the gentlest of caresses, Kathleen succeeded in convincing him that the monster was dead and that mercy had somehow prevailed. Holding a mirror to his eyes, she told him tender stories and made him believe that Teddy Verplanck was not his brother but a separate entity who was sent to close out the books on all the anguish in his first forty years. Kathleen was a good storyteller, and tenuously, Lloyd started to believe her. But as Kathleen pieced together the story of Teddy and Lloyd her own terror began. Her phone call to Silverlake Camera had caused the death of Joanie Pratt. Her reluctance to believe Lloyd and smash her own pitiful illusions had resulted in the destruction of a living, breathing woman. She felt it with her every breath, and when she touched Lloyd’s devastated body it felt like a death sentence. Writing about it compounded the grief. It was a life sentence with no parole and no means of atonement. A month to the day after the Silverlake walpurgisnacht, Lloyd discovered that he could walk. Dutch and Kathleen had discontinued their daily visits and the indictment-free doctor had taken him off his pain medication. He would have to retrieve his family and face his I.A.D. inquisitors soon, and before he did that there was a place that he had to visit. The cab dropped him in front of a red brick building on North Alvarado. Lloyd picked the lock on the door and walked upstairs, not knowing if he wanted the worst of his nightmares confirmed or denied. Whatever he saw would determine the course of the rest of his life, but he still didn’t know.
The nightmare room was empty. Lloyd felt his hopes soar and shatter. No blood, no photographs, no body waste, no rose branches. The walls had been painted a guileless light blue. The bay windows were boarded shut. He would never know.
“I knew you’d come.”
Lloyd turned around at the voice. It was Dutch. “I’ve been staking the place out for days,” he said. “I knew you’d come here before you got in touch with your family or reported back to duty.”
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Running light fingertips over the wall, Lloyd said, “What did you find here, Dutch? I have to know.”
Dutch shook his head. “No. Not ever. Don’t ever ask again. I doubted you and I almost betrayed you, but I’ve made my amends and I won’t tell you that. Everything that I could find pertaining to Teddy Verplanck is destroyed. He never existed. If you and Kathleen and I believe that then maybe we can live like normal people.”
Lloyd slammed the wall with his fist. “But I have to know! I’ve got to pay for Joanie Pratt, and I’m not a cop anymore, so I’ve got to figure out what it means so I can know what to do! I had this dream that Jesus God I just can’t ex—”
Dutch walked over and put his hands on Lloyd’s shoulders. “You’re still a cop. I went to the Chief myself. I lied and I threatened and I groveled and it cost me my promotion and my I.A.D. command. Your trouble with I.A.D. never happened, just like Teddy never happened. But you owe me, and you’re going to pay.”
Lloyd wiped tears from his eyes. “What’s the price?”
Dutch said, “Bury the past and get on with your life.”
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Lloyd got Janice’s new address and flew up to San Francisco the following night. Janice was gone for the weekend, but the girls were there with her friend George, and when he walked through the door they pounced on him until he was certain that they would bruise every inch of his battered body. He had a brief moment of panic when they demanded a story, but the tale of the gentle lady poet and the cop satisfied them until it burst apart in a torrent of tears. Penny was the one to supply the conclusion. Holding Lloyd tightly, she said: “Happy stories are a new mode for you, Daddy. You’ll get the hang of it. Picasso switched his style late in life, so can you.”
Lloyd got a hotel room near Janice’s apartment and spent the weekend with his daughters, taking them to Fisherman’s Wharf and the zoo and the Museum of Natural History. When he dropped them off Sunday night George told him that Janice had a lover, an attorney specializing in tax shelters. He was the one Janice was spending the weekend with. Brief thoughts of wreaking havoc on the affair crossed his mind and he reflexively balled his hands into fists. Then images of Joanie Pratt rendered his blood thoughts stillborn. Lloyd kissed and hugged the girls goodbye and walked back to his hotel. Janice had a lover and he had Kathleen and he didn’t know what he felt, let alone what it all meant.
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On Monday morning Lloyd flew back to Los Angeles and took a cab to Parker Center. He walked up to the sixth floor, feeling the sore muscles around his groin wound stretch and tighten. It would still be weeks before he could make love, but when old doc dope pusher gave him the word he would sweep Kathleen off for a whole shitload of weekends. The sixth-floor corridors were empty. Lloyd checked his watch. 10:35. Morning coffee break. The junior officers’ lounge was probably packed. Dutch had undoubtedly covered his prolonged absence with some sort of story, so why not get the reunion amenities out of the way in one fell swoop?
Lloyd pushed the lounge door open. His face lit up at the sight of a huge roomful of shirt-sleeved men hunched over coffee and donuts, laughing and joking and making good-natured obscene gestures. He stood in the doorway savoring the picture until he felt the noise recede to a hush. Every man in the room was looking at him, and when they all rose to their feet and began to applaud he looked back into their faces and saw nothing but awe and love. The room swayed behind his tears, and shouted “bravos” coupled with the applause to drive him back out into the corridor, dashing more tears from his eyes, wondering what on earth it all meant. Lloyd ran toward his office. He was fumbling in his pocket for his keys when Officer Artie Cranfield came up beside him and said, “Welcome back, Lloyd.”
Lloyd pointed down the hallway and wiped his face. “What the fuck was
that all about, Artie? What the fuck did all that mean?”
Artie looked puzzled, then wary. “Don’t shit a shitter, Lloyd. There’s a rumor all over the department that you cleared the Hollywood Slaughterer case. I don’t know where it started, but everyone in Robbery/Homicide believes it, and so does half the L.A.P.D. The word is that Dutch Peltz told the chief himself and that the chief pulled the Internal Affairs bulls off your ass because keeping you on the Department was the best way to keep your mouth shut. You want to tell me about it?”
Lloyd’s tears of bewilderment became tears of laughter. He opened his door and wiped his face with his sleeve. “The case was cleared by a woman, Artie. A left-wing cop-hater poet. Dig the irony and enjoy your tape recorder.”
Lloyd closed the door on Artie Cranfield’s baffled face. When he heard him walk away muttering to himself he switched on the light and looked at his cubicle. Everything was the same as when he had last seen it, except for 206
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a single red rose sticking out of a coffee cup on his desk. There was a piece of paper next to the cup. Lloyd picked it up and read: Dearest L.—Protracted goodbyes are terrible, so I’ll be brief. I have to go away. I have to go away because you have given me back my life, and now I have to see what I can do with it. I love you and I need your shelter and you need mine, but the mortar that binds us is blood, and if we stay together it will own us and we will never have the chance to be sane. I have given up the bookstore and my apartment. (It belongs to my creditors and the bank, anyway.) I have my car and a few hundred dollars in cash, and am taking off sans excess baggage for parts unknown. (Men have been doing it for years.) I have much on my mind, much writing to do. Does “Penance for Joanie Pratt” sound like a good title? She owns me, and if I give her my best then maybe I’ll be forgiven. I hurt for our past, L.—But I hurt for your future most of all. You have chosen to stalk ugliness and try to replace it with your numbing kind of love, and that is a painful road to follow. Goodbye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
