by James Ellroy
Returning to Los Angeles at large, Lloyd found that John Havilland had become a cause for ghoulish celebration. The psychiatrist was still frontpage news, and a number of nightclub comedians had made him the focal point of their shticks. The Big Orange Insider had dubbed him the “Witch Doctor,” and the 1958 novelty song “Witch Doctor” by David Seville and the Chipmunks was re-released and climbing the top forty. Charles Manson was interviewed in his cell at Vacaville Prison and proclaimed Dr. John Havilland “a cool dude.”
Medical authorities at the jail ward of the L.A. County Hospital proclaimed the Doctor a vegetable, and Lloyd resisted his own ghoulish impulse to visit his adversary in his padded cell and throw the phrase “snuff film” at what remained of his brain. Instead, before going home or partaking of any post-sequestering amenities, he drove to 4109 Windemere Drive. 422
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No L.A.P.D. or Federal crime scene stickers on the doors or windows; layers of undisturbed dust on the junctures of doors and doorjambs. An ordinary looking Tudor cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Lloyd sighed as he circuited the house on foot. Stonewall. He hadn’t mentioned Oldfield in any of his official reports or earlier communiqués, and the feds who had seized Havilland’s property either hadn’t come across Oldfield’s name or had decided to ignore it. In their fearful haste to deny Jack Herzog, the L.A.P.D. and the F.B.I. were letting the sleeping dogs that were John Havilland’s minions lie. Lloyd broke into the house through a back window and went straight for the bedroom. A mattress lay on the carpeted floor, an identical visual match to the film scrap he had seen at Billy Nagler’s workshop. Reddishbrown matter stained a swatch of carpet near the window. Recalling the adhesive bandage he had found on the front lawn the day before the Malibu apocalypse, Lloyd bent down and examined it. Blood. Checking the rest of the house, Lloyd found it cleaned of personal belongings. No male clothing, no toilet articles, no legal or personal documents. Food, appliances and furniture remained. Oldfield had fled. And judging from the dust on the doorjambs, he had a good head start. Driving back to Parker Center, he put all thoughts regarding Linda Wilhite out of his mind, coming to one solid conclusion. Havilland or Oldfield had destroyed the movie. Had the Department or the feds discovered it, he would have heard. Again he was dealing with theory and circumstantial evidence. It took Officer Artie Cranfield a scant ten minutes to identify the reddish brown matter on the carpet swatch as type O+ blood. Thus armed with facts, Lloyd called the L.A.P.D. Missing Persons Bureau and requested the stats on all female caucasians age twenty-five to forty with type O+ blood reported missing over the past ten days. Only one woman fit the description—Sherry Lynn Shroeder, age thirty-one, reported missing by her parents six days before. Lloyd wept when the clerk ticked off her last known place of employment—Junior Miss Cosmetics.
He had watched her walk in the door.
Tears streaming down his face, Lloyd ran through the halls and out the door of Parker Center, knowing that he was exonerated and that it wasn’t enough; knowing that the woman he wanted to love was innocent of the overall tapestry of evil; she had been psychically violated by a madman. In the parking lot, he slammed the hood of his car and kicked the grill and
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broke off the radio aerial and molded it into a missile of hate. Hurling it at the twelve-story monolith that defined everything he was, he sent up a vow to Sherry Lynn Shroeder and set out to plumb the depths of his whore/lover’s violation.
A call to Telecredit revealed that Linda Wilhite had bank balances totaling $71,843.00 and had made no recent major purchases with any of her credit cards. Richard Oldfield had liquidated his three savings and checking accounts and had sold a large quantity of IBM stock for $91,350.00. A trip to L.A. International Airport armed with D.M.V. snapshots of the two supplied the information that Oldfield had boarded a flight for New York City four days after the Malibu killing, paying cash for his ticket and using an assumed name. Linda had accompanied him to the gate. An alert baggage handler told Lloyd that the two didn’t seem like lovers, they seemed more like “with-it” sister and “out-of-it” brother. Lloyd drove back to L.A. proper feeling jealous and tired and somehow afraid to go home, afraid that there was something he had forgotten to do. He would have to confront Linda soon, but before he did that he needed to pay tribute to a fallen comrade.
Marty Bergen’s landlady opened the door of her former tenant’s apartment and told Lloyd that the people from the Big Orange had come by and taken his beat-up furniture and typewriter, claiming that he promised them to the tabloid in his common law will. She had let them take the stuff because it was worthless, but she kept the box that had the book he was working on, because he owed two months rent and maybe she could sell it to the real newspapers and make up her loss. Was that a crime?
Lloyd shook his head, then took out his billfold and handed her all the cash it contained. She grabbed it gratefully and ran down the hall to her own apartment, returning with a large cardboard box overflowing with typed pages. Lloyd took it from her hands and pointed to the door. The woman genuflected out of the apartment, leaving him alone to read. The manuscript ran over five hundred pages, the typing bracketed with red-inked editorial comments that made it seem like a complete co-authorship. It was the story of two medieval warriors, one prodigal, one chaste, who loved the same woman, a princess who could only be claimed by traversing concentrically arrayed walls of fire, each ring filled with progressively more hideous and bloodthirsty monsters. The two warriors started out as rivals, but became friends as they drew closer and closer to the princess, battling demons who entered them as they entered each gauntlet of flame, 424
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growing telepathic as the guardians of each other’s spirit. When the final wall of fire stood immediately before them, they revolted against the symbiosis and prepared to do battle to the death. At that point the manuscript ended, replaced by contrapuntal arguments in two different handwritings. The quality of the prose had deteriorated in the last chapters. Lloyd pictured Jack Herzog pushed to the edge of his tether by the Witch Doctor, trying to forge poetry out of the horror of his flickering-out life. When he finally put the book down, Lloyd didn’t know if it was good, bad, or indifferent—only that it had to see print as a hymn for the L.A. dead.
The hymn became a dirge as he drove to Linda Wilhite’s apartment, hoping that she wouldn’t be there, so he could go home and rest and prolong the sense of what might have been.
But she was.
Lloyd walked in the half-opened door. Linda was sitting on the living room sofa, perusing the classified section of the Times. When she looked up and smiled, he shuddered. No might-have-beens. She was going to tell him the truth.
“Hello, Hopkins. You’re late.”
Lloyd nodded at the classifieds. “Looking for a job?”
Linda laughed and pointed to a chair. “No, business opportunities. Fifty grand down and a note from the bank gets me a Burger King franchise. What do you think?”
Lloyd sat down. “It’s not your style. Seen any good movies lately?”
Linda shook her head slowly. “I saw a preview of one, and got a vivid synopsis from one of the stars. The one print was destroyed, by me. I’d forgotten how good you were, Hopkins. I didn’t think you knew that part of it.”
“I’m the best. I even know the victim’s name. You want to hear it?”
“No.”
Lloyd mashed his hands together and brought them toward his chest, then stopped when he realized he was unconsciously aping Billy Nagler’s worship pose. “Why, Linda? What the fuck happened with you and Oldfield?”
Linda formed her hands into a steeple, then saw what she was doing and jammed them into her pockets. “The movie was a crazy reenactment of my parents’ deaths. Havilland pushed Richard into it. He ran part of the film for me at his office. I freaked out and screamed. Richard grabbed me, and they doped me and took me out to Malibu. Richard and I talked. I hit the one germ of
sanity and decency that he had. I convinced him that he could
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walk out the door like the movie and Havilland never existed. We were getting ready to walk when Havilland called out ‘Now!’ Marty Bergen could have walked out with us. But then you showed up with your shotgun.”
When Lloyd remained silent, Linda said, “Babe, it was the right thing to do, and I love you for it. Richard and I took off running, and you could have put the cops on to us, but you didn’t, because of what you felt for me. There’s no rights and wrongs in this one. Don’t you know that?”
Lloyd brought his eyes back from deep nowhere. “No, I don’t know that. Oldfield killed an innocent woman. He has to pay. And then there’s us. What about that?”
“Richard has paid,” Linda said in a whisper. “God, has he paid. For the record, he’s long gone. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t want to know, and if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Do you have any idea what you did? Do you, goddamn it!”
Linda’s whisper was barely audible. “Yes. I figured out that I could walk, and I convinced someone else that he could, too. He deserves the chance. Don’t lay your guilt on me, Hopkins. If Richard hadn’t gotten hooked up with Havilland he never would have killed a fly. What are the odds of his meeting someone else like the Witch Doctor? It’s over, Hopkins. Just let it be.”
Lloyd balled his fists and stared up at the ceiling to hold back a flood of tears. “It’s not over. And what about us?”
Linda put a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I never saw Richard hurt anybody, but I saw what you did to Havilland. If I hadn’t seen it, maybe we could have given it a shot. But now that’s over, too.”
Lloyd stood up. When Linda’s hand dropped from his shoulder, he said,
“I’m going after Oldfield. I’ll try to keep your name out of it, but if I can’t, I won’t. One way or the other, I’m going to get him.”
Linda got to her feet and took Lloyd’s hands. “I don’t doubt it for a minute. This is getting funny and sad and weird, Hopkins. Will you hold me for a minute and then split?”
Lloyd shut his eyes and held the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, closing out the L.A. end of the Havilland case. When he felt Linda start to retreat from the embrace, he turned around and walked, thinking that it was over and it would never be over and wondering how he could get the Herzog/Bergen book published.
Outside, the night shone in jetstreams of traffic light and in flames from a distant brush fire. Lloyd drove home and fell asleep on the couch with his clothes on.
SUICIDE HILL
To Meg Ruley
You’re alone and you know a few things.
The stars are pinholes; slits in the hangman’s mask Them, rats, snakes;
the chased and chasers—
Thomas Lux
Psychiatric Evaluation Memorandum
From: Alan D. Kurland, M.D., Psychiatrist, Personnel Division To: Deputy Chief T. R. Braverton, Commander, Detective Division; Captain John A. McManus, Robbery/Homicide Division Subject: Hopkins, Lloyd W., Sergeant, Robbery/Homicide Division Gentlemen:
As requested, I evaluated Sergeant Hopkins at my private office, in a series of five one-hour counseling sessions, conducted from 6 November to 10
November 1984. I found him to be a physically healthy and mentally alert man of genius-level intelligence. He was a willing, almost eager, participant in these sessions, belying your initial fears about his cooperation. His response to intimate questions and “attack” queries was unwaveringly honest and candid.
Evaluation: Sergeant Hopkins is a violence-prone obsessive-compulsive personality, this personality disorder chiefly manifesting itself in acts of excessive physical force throughout his nineteen-year career as a policeman. Following secondarily but directly in this overall behavior pattern is a strong sexual drive, which he rationalizes as a “counterbalancing effort”
aimed at allaying his violent impulses. Intellectually, both of these drives have been justified by the exigencies of “the Job” and by his desire to uphold his reputation as a uniquely brilliant and celebrated homicide detective; in reality both derive from a strident pragmatism of the type seen in emotionally arrested sociopathic personalities—quite simply, a preadolescent selfishness. Symptomatically, Sergeant Hopkins, a self-described “hot-dog cop” and admitted sybarite, has followed both his violent impulses and his sexual desires with the heedless fervor of a true sociopath. However, throughout the years he has felt deep guilt over his outbursts of violence and extramarital womanizing. This awareness has been gradual, resulting in both the resistance to eschew old behavior patterns and the desire to abandon them and thus gain peace of mind. This emotional dilemma is the salient fact of his 434
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neuroses, yet it is unlikely that it alone, by its long-term nature, could have produced Sergeant Hopkins’s current state of near nervous collapse. Hopkins himself attributes his present state of extreme anxiety, despondency, episodes of weeping and highly uncharacteristic doubts about his abilities as a policeman to his participation in two disturbing homicide investigations. In January of 1983, Sergeant Hopkins was involved in the “Hollywood Slaughterer” case, a case that remains officially unsolved, although Hopkins claims that he and another officer killed the perpetrator, a psychopath believed to have murdered three people in the Hollywood area. Sergeant Hopkins (who estimated the Hollywood Slaughterer’s victims to include an additional sixteen young women) was intimately involved with the psychopath’s third victim, a woman named Joan Pratt. Feeling responsible for Miss Pratt’s death, and the death of another woman named Sherry Lynn Schroeder, who was connected to the Havilland/Goff series of killings (May 1984), Hopkins has transferred that sense of guilt to twin obsessions of
“protecting” innocent women and “getting back” his estranged wife and three daughters, currently residing in San Francisco. These obsessions, which represent delusional thinking of the type common to emotionally disturbed superior intellects, were at the core of the professional blunders which led to Sergeant Hopkins’s present suspension from duty. On October 17 of this year, Sergeant Hopkins had succeeded in locating a third Havilland/Goff suspect, Richard Oldfield, in New Orleans. Believing Oldfield to be armed and dangerous, he requested officers from the New Orleans P.D. to aid him in the arrest. Told to remain at a safe distance while the team of N.O.P.D. plainclothesmen apprehended the suspect, Hopkins disobeyed that order and kicked down Oldfield’s door, hesitating when he saw that Oldfield was with a partially clothed woman. After screaming at the woman to get dressed and get out, Hopkins fired at Oldfield, missing him and allowing him to escape out the back way while he attempted to comfort the woman. The New Orleans officers apprehended Oldfield some minutes later. Two plainclothesmen were injured, one seriously, while making the arrest. Sergeant Hopkins said that his episodes of weeping began shortly after this incident.
At Oldfield’s arraignment, Sergeant Hopkins was caught prevaricating on the witness stand by Oldfield’s attorney. During our second session, he admitted that he faked evidence to obtain an extradition warrant for Oldfield, and that the reason for his courtroom lies was a desire to protect a
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woman involved in the Havilland/Goff/Oldfield case—a woman he was intimately involved with during the investigation. Sergeant Hopkins became verbally abusive at this point, bragging that he would never relinquish the woman’s name to the district attorney or any police agency. Conclusions: Sergeant Hopkins, forty-two, is experiencing cumulative stress reaction, severe type; is suffering severe nervous exhaustion, exacerbated by an intransigent determination to solve his problems himself—a resolve that implicitly reinforces his personality disorder and makes continued counseling untenable. As of this date I deem it impossible for Sergeant Hopkins to conduct homicide investigations without exploiting them in some social or sexual context. It is highly improbable that he ca
n effectively supervise other officers; it is equally improbable that, given his grandiose selfimage, he would ever submit to the performing of nonfield duties. His emotional stability is seriously impaired; his stress instincts disturbed to the point where his armed presence makes him at best ineffective, at worst highly dangerous as a Robbery/ Homicide detective. It is my opinion that Sergeant Hopkins should be given early retirement and a full pension, the result of a service-connected disability, and that the administrative processes involving his separation from the L.A.P.D. should be expedited with all due speed.
Sincerely,
Alan D. Kurland, M.D.
Psychiatrist
1
The sheriff’s transport bus pulled out of the gate of Malibu Fire Camp #7, its cargo sixteen inmates awaiting release, work furlough and sentence modification, its destination the L.A. County Main Jail. Fifteen of the men shouted joyous obscenities, pounded the windows and rattled their leg manacles. The sixteenth, left unencumbered by iron as a nod to his status as a
“Class A” firefighter, sat up front with the driver/deputy and stared at a photo cube containing a snapshot of a woman in punk-rock attire. The deputy shifted into second and nudged the man. “You got a hard-on for Cyndi Lauper?”
Duane Rice said, “No, Officer. Do you?”
The deputy smiled. “No, but then I don’t carry her picture around with me.”
Thinking, fall back—he’s just a dumb cop making conversation—Rice said, “My girlfriend. She’s a singer. She was singing backup for a lounge act in Vegas when I took this picture.”
“What’s her name?”
