by James Ellroy
“Ever talk to him?”
“Not really.”
“Did he ever come in with or leave with anyone?”
The bartender screwed his face into a memory search, then said, “Yeah. He had a buddy. A sandy-haired guy. Medium height, maybe early thirties.”
“Did he meet him here?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
Lloyd walked over to the pay phone outside the men’s room and called Hollywood Station, requesting Lieutenant Perkins. When he came on the line, Lloyd said, “Walt, this is Lloyd Hopkins. I’ve got a question.”
“Hit me.”
“Did Herzog work his bar assignments alone?”
There was a long moment of silence. Finally Perkins said, “I’m not really sure, Lloyd. My guess is sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’ve always given Jack carte blanche. Any arrangements he made with individual squad members would be up to him. Shall I ask around tomorrow night at roll call?”
“Yes. What about a sandy-haired man, medium height, early thirties. Herzog might have worked with him.”
“That’s half our squad, Lloyd.”
There was another stretch of silence. Finally Lloyd said, “He’s dead. I’ll be in touch,” and replaced the receiver. The barman looked up as he strode toward the door. “There’s no mercy!” he called out.
*
*
*
Battered by sleeplessness and dwindling options, Lloyd drove downtown to Parker Center, hoping to find an easily intimidated nightwatch supervisor on duty at Personnel Records. When he saw the man behind the records counter dozing in his chair with a science fiction novel lying on his chest, he knew he was home.
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“Excuse me, Officer!”
The records supervisor jerked awake and stared at Lloyd’s badge. “Hopkins, Robbery/Homicide,” Lloyd said. “Jack Herzog left some files for me in his desk. Will you show me where it is?”
The supervisor yawned, then pointed to a bank of Plexiglas enclosed cubicles. “Herzog’s daywatch, so I don’t know exactly where his desk is. But you go help yourself, Sergeant. The names are on the doors.”
Lloyd walked into the Plexiglas maze, noting with relief that Herzog’s cubicle was well out of the supervisor’s sight. Finding the door unlocked, he rummaged through the desk drawers, feeling another impersonal habitat come into focus as pencils, notepads, and a series of blank office forms were revealed. One drawer; two drawers; three drawers. Herzog the cipher. Lloyd was raising his fist to slam the desktop when he noticed the edges of several slips of paper on the floor, wedged into the juncture where the wall met the carpet. Squatting, he pulled them out, going cold when he saw file requisition slips with the officer’s name, rank, date of birth, and badge number on top and the requesting officer’s name and division below. Squinting, he read over the five slips. The officers’ names were unknown to him, but the requesting officer’s name wasn’t. Captain Frederick T. Gaffaney, Internal Affairs Division, had requested all five files. Old bornagain Christian Fred, who had given him grief as a Robbery/Homicide lieutenant. Squinting harder, Lloyd felt the coldness run up his spine into his brain. He knew Gaffaney’s signature. These were blatant forgeries. Lloyd got out his notebook and wrote down the names of the officers whose files had been requested. Tucker, Duane W., Lieutenant, Wilshire Division; Murray, Daniel X., Captain, Central Division; Rolando, John L., Lieutenant, Devonshire Division; Kaiser, Steven A., Captain, West Valley Division; Christie, Howard J., Lieutenant, Rampart Division. He stared at the names, then on impulse ran his hand under the carpet again, coming away with a last slip of paper, going dead ice cold when he read the name printed on top: Hopkins, Lloyd W. #1114, 2/27/42, Sergeant, Robbery/Homicide Division.
5
Thomas Goff’s surveillance photographs had not prepared him for the woman’s beauty; nothing in Goff’s oral and written reports came close to describing her aura of refinement. A thousand-dollar-a-night whore in a thousand-dollar raw silk dress. Dr. John Havilland leaned back in his chair, pretending to be tongue-tied. Give the woman the temporary upper hand, let her think her charisma had dented his professionalism. When Linda Wilhite didn’t fidget under his gaze, he broke the long introductory silence.
“Will you tell me something about yourself, Ms. Wilhite? The reasons why you’ve decided to enter therapy?”
Linda Wilhite’s eyes circled the office; her hands smoothed the arms of her chair. Brilliantly varnished oak walls, a framed Edward Hopper original. No couch. The chairs she and the Doctor were sitting in were upholstered in pure cashmere. “You love nice things,” she said. Havilland smiled. “So do you. That’s a very beautiful dress.”
“Thank you. Why do most people come to see you?”
“Because they want to change their lives.”
“Of course. Can you guess what I do for a living?”
“Yes. You’re a prostitute.”
“How exactly did you know that?”
“You called my service and made an appointment without asking to speak to me personally, and you wouldn’t say who referred you. When a woman contacts me in that manner, I assume that she’s in the Life. I’ve counseled a great many prostitutes, and I’ve published several monographs on my findings, without ever violating the anonymity of my patients. In criminal parlance I’m a ‘stand-up guy.’ I don’t have a receptionist or a secretary, because I don’t trust such people. Women in the Life trust me for these reasons.”
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Linda traced patterns on her silk and the Doctor’s cashmere. “This dress cost thirteen hundred dollars. My shoes cost six hundred. I love nice things and you love nice things, and we both make a lot of money. But what I do to make money is killing me, and I have to stop.”
Havilland leaned forward as the woman’s words settled in on him. He brought his voice down to its lowest register and said, “Are you ready to sacrifice picayune shit like thirteen hundred dollar dresses to achieve your true power? Are you ready to dig through your past to find out why you need creature comforts at the expense of your integrity? Are you willing to break yourself down to ground zero in order to help me take you as far as you can go?”
Linda flinched at the battery of questions. “Yes,” she said. Havilland stood up, stretched and decided to go in full bore. Sitting back down, he said, “Linda, my brand of therapy is a two-way street. What you think I need to know and what I need to know may well be two different things. I would like this first session to consist of questions and answers. I’ll throw out some educated guesses and assumptions about you, and you tell me how accurate I am. What I want to establish is some kind of instinctive rapport. Do you follow me?”
Her voice quavering, Linda said, “How far is as far as I can go?”
Dr. John Havilland threw back his head and laughed. “My educated guess is that you can hit the ball out of the ballpark and into the next county.”
Linda smiled. “Then let’s do it,” she said.
Havilland got up and walked to the window, glancing down on the jetstream of cars and people twenty-six stories below him. He coughed and pressed the activator button inlaid on the window ledge, sending current to the tape recorder housed behind a section of wall panel. Turning to face Linda Wilhite, he said, “You’re thirty-one or two, large family, northern Midwest—Michigan or Wisconsin. The best and brightest of your siblings. Adored by your brothers, despised by your sisters. Your parents are new money, uneasy about it, terrified of losing their hard-earned status. You dropped out of college in your senior year and worked at odd jobs before a series of disillusionments led you slowly into the Life. How close am I?”
Linda was already shaking her head. “I’m twenty-nine, from L.A., an only child. My parents died when I was ten. I lived in a series of foster homes until I graduated from high school. I never attended college. My parents were semi-poor. I made a conscious decision to become a prostitute, 240
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p; just as I’ve made a conscious decision to quit being one. Please don’t consider me typical.”
Circling the office, his eyes shifting back and forth between Linda Wilhite and the Persian rug that cushioned his footfalls, Havilland said, “Is being typical a crime? No, don’t answer, let me continue. You enjoy sex with certain kinds of older men among your customers, and it hurts you if they sleep with anyone else. If you find a customer attractive, then you fantasize about him and hate yourself for it afterwards. You despise hookers who consider themselves ‘therapists’ and the like. Your basic dilemma is a conservative nature, one grounded in the work ethic, undercut with the knowledge that what you do is shit, antithetical to every decent moral instinct you possess. You have rationalized this contradiction for years, bolstered yourself with self-help books and spiritual tracts, but now it won’t wash anymore and you came to me. Touché, Ms. Wilhite?”
The Doctor’s voice had risen higher and higher, little crescendos of truth that Linda knew would grow in scope and intimacy without the man’s resonance ever cracking. Her hands fluttered over her lap, looking for something of and by herself to touch. When they descended on green paisley silk, she jerked them back and said, “Yes. Yes. Yes. How did you know those things?”
Dr. John Havilland sat back down and stretched his legs until his feet dangled a few inches from Linda’s alligator shoes. “Linda, I’m the best there is. To be blunt, I am a work of fucking art.”
Linda laughed until she felt a blush creep up from her bodice. “I’ve got a john who says the same thing to me. He collects Colombian art, so I know it’s an informed opinion. And you know the funny thing? He calls me ‘a work of fucking art,’ and he never fucks me—he just takes pictures of me. Isn’t that a hoot?”
Havilland laughed along, first uproariously, then sedately. When his laughter wound down, he said, “What does this man do with the photographs of you?”
“He has them blown up, then he frames them and hangs them in his bedroom,” Linda said.
“How do you feel about that? Worshiped? Adored?”
“I . . . I feel worthy of my beauty.”
“Did your parents recognize your beauty early on? Did they fawn over you because of it?”
“My father did.”
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“Did your parents take photographs of you?”
Linda flinched at the word photographs. She stammered, “N-no.”
Havilland leaned forward and put his hand on her knee. “You’ve gone pale, Linda. Why?”
Flinching again, Linda said, “This is happening so fast. I wasn’t going to tell you today because most of the time it seems so remote. My father was a violent man. He was a longshoreman, and he used to fight bare knuckles for money on the docks at San Pedro. He’d win or he’d lose and he’d always bet heavily on himself, so if he won he showered mother and me with gifts and if he lost he brooded and smashed things. Most of the time it was fifty-fifty, win, lose, win, lose—so that I never knew what to expect.
“Then, when I was ten, Daddy hit a losing streak. He brooded worse than ever and punched out all the windows in our house. It was winter and we were broke and the heat was shut off and cold air blew in through the broken windows. I’ll never forget the day it happened. I came home from school and there were police cars in front of the house. A detective took me aside and told me what happened. Daddy had put a pillow over Mother’s head and shot her in the face. Then he stuck the gun in his mouth and shot himself. I was sent to Juvenile Hall, and a couple of days later a matron told me I had to identify the bodies. She showed me photographs from the autopsy—Daddy and Mother with half their faces blown away. I cried and I cried, but I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures.”
“And, Linda?” Havilland whispered.
Linda said, “And I went to live with an elderly couple who treated me like a princess. I swiped the pictures the matron showed me and forced myself to laugh and gloat over them. Those pictures gave me freedom from the shitty life I had, and laughing at them was like getting revenge on my parents. I—”
Havilland raised a hand in interruption. “Let me finish. Your foster parents caught you laughing over the photographs and punished you? It was never the same with them after that?”
“Yes,” Linda said.
The Doctor circled his office again, running light fingertips over the oak walls. “A few more questions, then we’ll end the session. Is the type of man—of customer—that you’re attracted to large and physical, possessed of intelligence and breeding but also possessed of a certain aura of violence?”
Linda’s whisper was astonished. “Yes.”
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Havilland smiled. “World-class progress in one session. Does the day after tomorrow—Friday—suit you for our next one? Say ten-thirty?”
Linda Wilhite stood up, surprised to find her legs steady. She smoothed the front of her dress and said, “Yes. I’ll be here. Thank you.”
Havilland took her arm and walked her to his outer office door. “It was my pleasure.”
*
*
*
After Linda Wilhite was gone, the Doctor, armed with her image and facts from Goff’s reconnaissance, turned off the lights and played the timetravel game. When Linda was two and living in a San Pedro dive with her white-trash parents, he was twelve and gaining clandestine access to wealthy homes in Bronxville and Scarsdale, New York, exorcising his nocturnal heart by delivering himself to the quiet muse of other peoples’ dwellings, sometimes stealing, sometimes not . . .
When Linda was fourteen and sexually experimenting with surfer morons in Huntington Beach, he was twenty-four and graduating from Harvard Medical School at the top of his class, the legendary Doctor John the Night Tripper, the genius dope chemist/abortionist who held instructors rapt with his digressions on the theories of Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Havelock Ellis . . .
When Linda was growing into her exquisite beauty in a series of foster homes, filled with wonder at her parents’ deaths and the apostasy that their bloodletting had spawned, he—
The Time Machine screeched, shuddered, and ground to a halt. A green door opened to reveal a man in a gray uniform standing beside a salmonpink ’56 Ford Victoria ragtop. Little girls in party dresses thronged the car, and just before it exploded into flames they turned to point and laugh at him.
The Night Tripper walked to the wall and turned on the light, seeking confirmation. He found it in glass-encased tributes; framed diplomas from New York University and Harvard Med and St. Vincent and Castleford Hospitals—parchment that spelled out plainly that he was the best. The dates on them told him why the Time Machine had malfunctioned. Linda was powerful. Linda had sustained a catastrophe as he had and required that he juxtapose his story against hers from the beginning . . . 1956. Scarsdale, New York. Johnny Havilland, age eleven, known as
“Spaz,” “Wimpdick,” and “Shitstick.” Sherry-guzzling mother with the in-
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bred look indigenous to high-line Wasps who have never had to work for a living; big bucks father, a hunter whose shotgun volleys have decimated the varmint population of six New York counties. Johnny hates school; Johnny hates to play ball; Johnny loves to dream and listen to music on his portable radio.
Johnny’s father considers him a wimp and decrees a rite to prompt his manhood: Shoot the family’s senile golden retriever. Johnny refuses and is sent by his father to a “training school” run by an extremist sect of nuns. The nuns lock Johnny in a basement full of rats, with no food or water and only a shovel for protection. Two days go by. Johnny huddles in a corner and screams himself hoarse as the rats nip at his legs. On the third day he falls asleep on the floor and wakes up to find a large rat scampering off with a chunk of his lip. Johnny screams, picks up the shovel and beats every rat in the basement to death.
Johnny’s father takes him home the following day, tousling his
hair and calling him “Dad’s little ratter.” Johnny goes straight for his father’s gun rack, grabs a twelve-gauge pump and strides outside to the kennel, where five Labradors and short-haired Pointers frolic behind barbed wire. Johnny blows the dogs to kingdom come and turns to face his father, who turns white and faints. Weeks go by. His father shuns him. Johnny knows that his father has given him a precious gift that is far more valuable than standard manhood. Johnny loves his father and wants to please him with his newfound strength. 1957. “Green Door” by Jim Lowe climbs the hit parade and fills Johnny with portents of dark secrets.
“Midnight, one more night without sleeping.
Watching, ’till the morning comes creeping.
Green door, what’s that secret you’re keeping?”
Johnny wants to know the secret so he can tell his father and make him love him.
The quest for the secret begins with a shinny up a drainpipe into a neighbor’s darkened attic. Johnny finds coyotes mounted on roller-skate wheels and department store mannequins. The mannequins have been gouged in the facial and genital regions and red paint has been daubed in the holes and left to trickle off in simulation of wounds. Johnny steals a coyote’s glass eye and leaves it on his father’s desk. His father never mentions the gift. As 244
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other gifts from other dark houses follow, Johnny perceives that his father is terrified of him.
Johnny’s housebreaking career continues; the spacious homes of Westchester County become his teacher and friend. Thoughts of earning his father’s love grow mute beside the haphazard tides of passion that he assimilates in shadow-shrouded bedrooms and hallways. Green door after green door after green door bursts open. And then there was the next to the last door and the man in the uniform, and the last door opening on a pitchblack void . . . The darkness deepened as the Time Machine suffered its final malfunction, its chronograph needle stuck permanently on June 2, 1957. The void stretched into months. The callow Johnny Havilland who entered was only a shell compared to the self-sufficient John who emerged . . . Always this memory gap, the Night Tripper thought. Father was there when he entered and gone when his recollections again assumed a linear sequence. He took Goff’s photographs of Linda Wilhite from his desk and fanned them like a deck of cards. Linda came briefly to life, the slash of her mouth speaking bewilderment. She wanted to know why he was as great as he was.
