by James Ellroy
“Yeah. What’s Perkins afraid of, Dutch?”
“None of the stuff you hit him with. He runs one of the cleanest Vice Squads in the city.”
“What, then?”
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“You. A forty-two-year-old hardcharger cop with nothing to lose is a scary fucking thing. Sometimes you even scare me.”
Lloyd’s regret settled like a stone at the center of his heart. “Good night, Dutch.”
“Good night, kid.”
Lloyd replaced the receiver, immediately thinking of new angles on the case. His mental x’s and o’s were settling around blackmail, but his eyes kept straying back to the phone. Call Janice and the girls in San Francisco? Tell them that the house was sealed off almost exactly the way they had left it, that he only used the den and the kitchen, preserving the rest of the rooms as a testament to what they had once had and could have again? His phone conversations with Janice had at last progressed beyond civility. Was this the time to push for the fullest possible restoration of the family’s past?
The job provided the answer. No. The officers who took over the formal investigation of Herzog’s disappearance would check his phone bill and discover the long distance call. Janice’s snotty off-and-on live-in lover would probably not accept a collect call. Fucked again by the verities of being a cop.
Stretching out on the couch, Lloyd dug in for a long stint of mental machinations. He was at it for half an hour, playing variations on blackmail themes, when there was a rapping on the door, followed by a woman’s softly spoken words, “Jack? Jack, are you there?”
Lloyd walked to the door and opened it. A tall blonde woman was framed by the hall light. Her eyes were blurry and her blouse and designer jeans were rumpled. She looked up at him and asked, “Are you Marty Bergen? Is Jack here?”
Lloyd pointed the woman inside, scrutinizing her openly. Early thirties, a soft/strong face informed with intelligence. A lean body clenched against stress and bringing it off with grace. Play her soft. When she was standing by the couch, he said, “My name is Hopkins. I’m a police officer. Jack Herzog has been missing from both his work assignments for close to a month. I’m looking for him.”
The woman took a reflexive step backward, bumping the couch with her heels and then sitting down. Her hands flew to her face, then grasped her thighs. Lloyd watched her fingers turn white. Sitting down beside her, he asked, “What’s your name?”
The woman released her hands, then rubbed her eyes and stared at him.
“Meg Barnes.”
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Taking her steady voice as a signal to press the interrogation, Lloyd said,
“I’ve got a lot of personal questions.”
“Then ask them,” Meg Barnes answered.
Lloyd smiled. “When did you see Herzog last?”
“About a month ago.”
“What was the basis of your relationship?”
“Friends, occasionally lovers. The sexual part came and went. Neither of us pushed it. The last time I saw Jack he told me he wanted to be alone for a while. I told him I’d come by in a month or so.”
“Which you did tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Did Herzog contact you at any time during the month?”
“No.”
“Was the sexual part of your relationship on immediately before you saw Herzog last?”
Meg flinched and said, “No, it wasn’t. But what does this have to do with Jack’s disappearing?”
“Herzog is an exceptional man, Miss Barnes. Everything I’ve discovered about him has pointed that out. I’m just trying to get a handle on his state of mind around the time he disappeared.”
“I can tell you about that,” she said. “Jack was either exhilarated or depressed, like he was on a roller-coaster ride. Most of his conversation had to do with vindicating Marty Bergen. He said he was going to fuck the L.A.P.D. high brass for what they did to him.”
“Why did you think I was Bergen?” Lloyd asked.
“Because Bergen and I are the only friends Jack has in the world, and you’re big, the way Jack described Bergen.”
Lloyd spent a silent minute mustering his thoughts. Finally he asked,
“Did Herzog say specifically how he was going to vindicate Bergen or fuck the high brass?”
“No, never.”
“Can you give me some specific instances of his exhilarated or depressed behavior?”
Meg Barnes pondered the question, then said, “Jack was either very quiet or he’d laugh at absolutely everything, whether it was funny or not. He used to laugh hysterically about someone or something called Doctor John the Night Tripper. The last time I saw him he said he was really scared and that it felt good.”
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Lloyd took out his Identikit portrait. “Have you ever seen this man?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Do the names Howard Christie, John Rolando, Duane Tucker, Daniel Murray, or Steven Kaiser mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Avonoco Fiberglass, Jahelka Auto King, Surferdawn Plastics, Junior Miss Cosmetics?”
“No. What are they?”
“Never mind. What about my name—Lloyd Hopkins?”
“No! Why are you asking me these things?”
Lloyd didn’t answer. He got up from the couch and tossed the upholstered pillow he was leaning against on the floor, then carried the coffee table over to the wall. When he turned around, Meg Barnes was staring at him. “Jack’s dead,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to get the person who did it?”
Lloyd shuddered back a chill. “Yes.”
Meg pointed to the floor. “Are you sleeping here?” Acceptance had taken the controlled edge off her voice. Lloyd’s voice sounded numb to his own ears. “Yes.”
“Your wife kick you out?”
“Something like that.”
“You could come home with me.”
“I can’t.”
“I don’t make that offer all the time.”
“I know.”
She got up and walked to the door. Lloyd saw her strides as a race between her legs and her tears. When she touched the door handle, he asked,
“What kind of man was Herzog?”
Meg Barnes’s words and tears finished in a dead heat. “A kind man afraid of being vulnerable. A tender man afraid of his tenderness, disguising it with a badge and a gun. A gentle man.”
The door slammed shut as tears rendered words unnecessary. Lloyd turned off the lights and stared out the window at the neon-bracketed darkness. 7
“ Tell me about your dreams.”
Linda Wilhite measured the Doctor’s words, wondering whether he meant waking or sleeping. Deciding the latter, she plucked at the hem of her faded Levi skirt and said, “I rarely dream.”
Havilland inched his chair closer to Linda and formed his fingers into a steeple. “People who rarely dream usually have active fantasy lives. Is that true in your case?” When Linda’s eyelids twitched at the question, he thrust the steeple up to within a foot of her face. “Please answer, Linda.”
Linda slapped at the steeple, only to find the Doctor’s hands in his lap.
“Don’t push so hard,” she said.
“Be specific,” Havilland said. “Think exactly what you want to say.”
Linda breathed the words out slowly. “We’re barely into the session and you start taking command. I had some things I wanted to discuss, things that I’ve had on my mind lately, and you barge right in with questions. I don’t like aggressive behavior.”
The Doctor collapsed the steeple and clasped his hands. “Yet you’re attracted to aggressive men.”
“Yes, but what does that have to do with it?”
Havilland slumped forward in his chair. “Touché, Linda. But let me state my cas
e before I apologize. You’re paying me a hundred and fifteen dollars an hour, which you can afford because you earn a great deal of money doing something you despise. I see this therapy as an exercise in pure pragmatism: Find out why you’re a hooker, then terminate the therapy. Once you stop hooking you won’t need me or be able to afford me, and we’ll go our separate ways. I feel for your dilemma, Linda, so please forgive my haste.”
Linda felt a little piece of her heart melt at the brilliant man’s apology.
“I’m sorry I barked,” she said. “I know you’re on my side and I know your 264
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methods work. So . . . in answer to your question, yes, I do have an active fantasy life.”
“Will you elaborate?” Havilland asked.
“About six years ago I posed for a series of clothed and semi-nude photographs that ultimately became this arty-farty coffee table book. There was this awful team of gay photographers and technicians, and they posed me in front of air conditioners to blow my hair and give me goose bumps and beside a heater to make me sweat buckets, and they turned me and threw me around like a rag doll, and it was worse than fucking a three hundred pound drunk.”
“And?” Havilland whispered.
“And I used to fantasize murdering those fags and having someone film it, then renting a big movie theater and filling it with girls in the Life. They’d applaud the movie and applaud me like I was Fellini.”
The Doctor laughed. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No.”
“Is that a recurring fantasy?”
“Well . . . no . . .”
“But variations of it recur?”
Linda smiled and said, “You should have been a cop, Doctor. People would tell you whatever you wanted to know. Okay, there’s this sort of upbeat version of the movie fantasy. You don’t have to be a genius to see that it derives from my parents’ deaths. I’m behind a camera. A man beats a woman to death, then shoots himself. I film it, and it’s real and it isn’t real. What I mean is, of course what happens is real, only the people aren’t per- manently dead. That’s how I justify the fantasy. What I think I—”
The Doctor cut in: “Interpret the fantasy.”
“Let me finish!” Linda blurted out. Lowering her voice, she said, “I was going to say that somehow it all leads to love. These real or imaginary or whatever people die so that I can figure out what my fucked-up childhood meant. Then I meet this big, rough-hewn man. A lonely, no-bullshit type of man. He’s had the same kind of life as me and I show him the film and we fall in love. End of fantasy. Isn’t it syrupy and awful?”
Looking straight at the Doctor, Linda saw that his features had softened and that his eyes were an almost translucent light brown. When he didn’t answer, she got up and walked over to the framed diplomas on the wall. On impulse, she asked, “Where’s your family, Doctor?”
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“I don’t really have a family,” Havilland said. “My father disappeared when I was an adolescent and my mother is in a sanitarium in New York.”
Turning to face him, Linda said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just tell me what you’re feeling right now.”
Linda laughed. “I feel like I want a cigarette. I quit eight months ago, one of my little control trips, and now I’m dying for one.”
Havilland laughed in return. “Tell me more about the man you fall in love with.”
Linda walked around the office, running her fingertips along the oak walls.
“Basically, all I know is that he wears a size forty-four sweater. I know that because I had a john once who had the perfect body and he wore that size—for some reason I looked at the label while he was getting dressed. When I first started having these fantasies I used to picture the john’s face—then I made myself forget his face, because it interfered with my fantasy. Once I even drove downtown to Brooks Brothers and spent two hundred dollars on a size forty-four navy blue cashmere sweater.”
Linda sat down and drummed the arms of her chair. “Do you think that’s a sad story, Doctor?”
Havilland’s voice was very soft. “I think I’m going to enjoy taking you beyond your beyond.”
“What’s that?”
“Just a catch phrase of mine dealing with patients’ potentialities. We’ll talk more about that later. Before we conclude, please give me a quick response to a hypothetical situation. Among my patients is a young man who wants to kill. Wouldn’t it be terrible if he met a young woman who wanted to die and if someone were there with a camera to record it?”
Linda slammed the arms of her chair. The floor reverberated with her words: “Yes! But why does that idea titillate me so?”
Havilland got up and pointed to the clock. “No souls saved after fifty minutes. Monday at the same time?”
Linda took his hand on the way to the door. “I’ll be here,” she said, her voice receding to a whisper.
*
*
*
Havilland drove home to his condominium/sanctuary in Beverly Hills and went straight to his inner sanctum, the only one of the six rooms not walled from floor to ceiling with metal shelves spilling psychology texts. The Night Tripper thought of his three dwellings as a wheel of knowledge exploration, with himself as the hub. His Century City office was the 266
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induction spoke; his condo the fount of study and contemplation; the Malibu beach house the spoke of dispatch, where he sent his lonelies beyond their beyonds.
But the central point of his work was here behind a door he had personally stripped of varnish and painted an incongruous bright green. It was the control room of the Time Machine.
A swivel chair and a desk holding a telephone were centered in the room, affording a swivel view of four information-covered walls. One wall held a huge map of Los Angeles County. Red pins signified the addresses of his lonelies, blue pins denoted the pay phones where he contacted them—a safety buffer he had devised. Green pins indicated homes where the lonelies had been placed on assignment, and plastic stick figures marked Thomas Goff, ever mobile in his quest to find more red pins. Two walls comprised a depth gauge, to probe the Night Tripper’s childhood void. Serving as markings on the gauge were WCBS top-forty surveys from Spring 1959, attached to the walls with red and blue pins, and a shelf containing roller-skate wheels that were once the feet of dead animals, lockets of soft brown hair stolen from inside a family Bible, and a swatch of carpet stained with blood.
Clues.
The remaining wall was covered with typed quotations from inhabitants of the void, taped on in approximate chronological order: December 1957: Mother—“Your father was a monster, and I’m glad he’s gone. The administrators of the trust fund have been instructed to tell us nothing, and I’m glad. I don’t want to know.” (Current disposition: Residing in a Yonkers, N.Y., sanitarium with severe alcoholic senility.)
March 1958: Frank Baxter (father’s lawyer)—“Just think the best, Johnny. Think that your dad loves you very much, which is why he’s sending you and your mother all that nice money.” (Disposition: Committed suicide, August 1960) Spring 1958: (Imagined? Recalled from previous summer?) Police detectives questioning mother as to father’s whereabouts—obsequious; deferential to wealth. (Disposition: Complete disregard of all my in-
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quiries to Scarsdale P.D. and Westchester County P.D. 1961–1968) Dreamt?
June 1958: Nurse & doctor at Scarsdale Jr. High (overheard)—“I think the boy has a touch of motor aphasia”; “Bah! Doctor, that boy has got a tremendous mind! He just wants to learn what he wants to learn”; “I’ll believe the X ray before I believe your analysis, Miss Watkins.” (Disposition: doctor dead, nurse moved away, address unknown. Note: X rays and other tests taken at Harvard indicate no aphasiac lesions.)
Walls of clues. Hubs within the hub of himself and all the spokes of his wheels.
&nbs
p; Havilland swiveled in his chair, pushing off with his feet, spinning himself faster and faster, until the room was a blur and the four walls and their clues metamorphosed into rapid-fire images of Linda Wilhite and her home movie fantasies. He shut his eyes and Richard Oldfield was standing nude in front of a movie camera, with other lonelies laboring over arc lights and sound equipment. The chair was close to toppling off its casters when the phone rang and froze the moment. Deep breathing to bail out of his reverie, the Night Tripper let the chair come to a halt. When he was certain his voice would be calm, he picked up the phone and said, “Is this good news, Thomas?”
Goff’s voice was both self-satisfied and hoarse with tension. “Bingo. Junior Miss Cosmetics. I never even had to contact the cop. I played one of his stooges like an accordion. Murray won’t know anything about it.”
“Have you got them?”
“Tonight,” Goff said. “It’s only costing us a grand and some pharmaceutical coke.”
“Where? I want to know the exact time and place.”
“Why? You told me this was my baby.”
“Tell me, Thomas.” Hearing the hoarseness in his own voice, Havilland coated his words with sugar. “You’ve done brilliantly, and it is your baby. I just want to be able to picture your triumph.”
Goff went silent. The Doctor pictured a proud child afraid to express his gratitude at being wooed with cheap praise. Finally the child bowed to the father. “At ten-thirty tonight. The end of Nichols Canyon road, in the little park with the picnic benches.”
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Havilland smiled. Throw the child a crumb. “Beyond brilliant. Perfection. I’ll meet you at your apartment at eleven. We’ll celebrate the occasion by planning our next grouping. I need your feedback.”
“Yes, Doctor.” Goff’s voice was one step above groveling. Havilland hung up the phone and replayed the conversation, realizing that Linda Wilhite had remained a half step back in his mind the whole time, waiting.
*
*
*
At nine-thirty Havilland drove to Nichols Canyon and parked behind a stand of sycamore trees adjacent to the picnic area. He was shielded from view by mounds of scrub-covered rock which still allowed him visual access to Goff’s meeting spot. The lights that were kept on all night to thwart off gay assignations would frame the picture, and unless Goff and the security stooge spoke in a whisper their voices would carry up to his hiding place. It was perfection.
