Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  Blood on the Moon

  James Ellroy

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  In Memory of

  KENNETH MILLAR

  1915–1983

  The bay trees in our country are all withered,

  and meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;

  the pale face moon looks bloody on the earth,

  and lean look’d prophets whisper fearful change.

  Shakespeare

  Richard II

  Part One

  First Tastes of Blood

  1

  Friday, June 10th, 1964 was the start of a KRLA golden oldie weekend. The two conspirators scouting the territory where the “kidnaping” would take place blasted their portable radio at full volume to drown out the sound of power saws, hammers and crowbars–the noise of the third floor classroom renovation and the music of the Fleetwoods battling for audial supremacy.

  Larry “Birdman” Craigie, the radio held close to his head, marveled at the irony of this construction work taking place a scant week before school was to close for the summer. Just then, Gary U. S. Bonds came over the airwaves, singing: “School is out at last, and I’m so glad I passed,” and Larry fell to the sawdust covered linoleum floor, convulsed with laughter. School was maybe gonna be out, but he wasn’t gonna pass, and his name was Chuck and he didn’t give a fuck. He rolled on the floor, heedless of his recently swiped purple fuzzy Sir Guy shirt.

  Delbert “Whitey” Haines started to get disgusted and mad. The Birdman was either psycho or faking it, which meant that his long time stooge was smarter than him, which meant that he was laughing at him. Whitey waited until Larry’s laughter wound down and he propped himself into push-up position. He knew what was coming next: A series of lurid remarks about doing push-ups on Ruthie Rosenberg, how Larry was going to make her blow him while he hung from the rings in the girls’ gym.

  Larry’s laughter trailed off, and he opened his mouth to speak. Whitey didn’t let him get that far; he liked Ruthie and hated to hear nice girls blasphemed. He nuzzled the toe of his boot into Larry’s shoulder blades, right where he knew the zits were really bad. Larry screeched and hopped to his feet, cradling the radio into his chest.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “No,” Whitey said, “but I did. I can read your mind, psycho. Phony psycho. So don’t say no nasty things about nice girls. We got the punk to deal with, not nice girls.”

  Larry nodded; that he was included in such important plans took the sting out of the attack. He walked to the nearest window and looked out and thought of the punk in his saddle shoes and his argyle sweaters and his pretty boy looks and his poetry review that he printed up in the camera shop on Aluarado where he lived, sweeping up the store in exchange for room and board.

  The Marshall High Poetry Review–punk, sissy poems; gooey love stuff that everyone knew was dedicated to that stuck-up Irish parochial school transfer girl and the stuck-up snooty bitches in her poet crowd, and vicious fucking attacks on him and Whitey and all the righteous homeboys at Marshall. When Larry had gotten zonked on glue and cherry bombed the Folk Song Club, the Review had commemorated the occasion with line drawings of him in a storm trooper’s outfit and maiming prose: “We now have a brownshirt named Birdman–illiterate, not much of a wordman. His weapons are stealth, and poor mental health; he’s really much more like a turdman.”

  Whitey had fared even worse: after kicking Big John Kafesjian’s ass in a fair fight in the Rotunda Court, the punk had devoted an entire copy of the Review to an “epic” poem detailing the event, calling Whitey a “white trash loser provocateur” and ending with a prediction of his fate, phrased like an epitaph:

  “No autopsy can e’er reveal, what his darkest heart did most conceal; that shallow muscleman void, defined by terror and hate–Let that be the requiem for this light-weight.”

  Larry had volunteered to give Whitey a swift revenge, doing himself a favor in the process: The Boys’ V.P. had said that he would be expelled for one more fight or cherry bomb episode, and the idea of no more school nearly made him cream in his jeans. But Whitey had nixed the notion of quick retribution, saying, “No, it’s too easy. The punk has got to suffer like we did. He made us laughing stocks. We’re gonna return the compliment, and then some.”

  So their plan of disrobing, beating, genital painting, and shaving was hatched. Now, if it all worked out, was the time. Larry watched Whitey trace swastikas in the sawdust with a two by four. The Del-Viking’s rendition of “Come Go With Me” ended and the news came on, meaning it was three o’clock. Larry heard the whoops a moment later, then watched as the workmen gathered up their handtools and power equipment and bustled off down the main staircase, leaving them alone to wait for the poet.

  Larry swallowed and nudged Whitey, afraid of upsetting his silent artwork.

  “Are you sure he’ll come? What if he figures out the note’s a phony?”

  Whitey looked up and kicked out at a half-opened wall locker door, snapping it off at its hinges. “He’ll be here. A note from that Irish cunt? He’ll think it’s some kind of fucking lovers’ rendezvous. Just relax. My sister wrote the note. Pink stationery, a girl’s handwriting. Only it ain’t gonna be no lovers’ rendezvous. You know what I mean, homeboy?”

  Larry nodded; he knew.

  The conspirators waited in silence, Larry daydreaming, Whitey rummaging through the abandoned lockers, looking for left-behinds. When they heard footsteps on the second floor corridor below them, Larry grabbed a pair of jockey shorts from a brown paper bag and pulled a tube of acetate airplane glue from his pocket. He squeezed the tube’s entire contents onto the shorts, then flattened himself against the row of lockers nearest to the stairwell. Whitey crouched beside him, homemade knuckle dusters coiled in his right fist.

  “Sweetheart?”

  The endearment, whispered hesitantly, preceded the sound of footsteps that seemed to grow bolder as they neared the third story landing. Whitey counted to himself, and when he calculated that the poet was within grabbing range he pushed Larry out of the way and stationed himself next to the edge of the stairs.

  “Darling?”

  Larry started to laugh, and the poet froze in mid-step, his hand on the stair rail. Whitey grabbed the hand and jerked upwards, sending the poet sprawling over the last two steps. He yanked again, relieving the pressure at just the right angle to twist the poet into a kneeling position. When his adversary was staring up at him with impotent, beseeching eyes, Whitey kicked him in the stomach, then pulled him to his feet as he trembled uncontrollably.

  “Now, Birdman!” Whitey screeched.

  Larry wrapped the glue-streaked jockey shorts around the poet’s mouth and nostrils and pushed until his tremors became gurgling sounds and the skin around his temples went from pink to red to blue and he started to gasp for breath.

  Larry relinquished his grip and backed away, the jockey shorts falling to the floor. The poet writhed on his feet, then fell backward, crashing into a half open locker door. Whitey stood his ground, both fists cocked, watching the poet retch for breath, whispering, “We killed him. We honest to fucking god killed him.”

  Larry was on his knees, praying and making the sign of the cross, when the poet’s gasps finally caught oxygen and he expelled a huge ball of glue covered phlegm, followed by a screeching syllable, “sc-sc-sc.”

  “Scum!”

  He got the word out in a rush of new breath, the color in his face returning to normal as he drew himself slowly to his knees. “Scum! Dirty white trash, low-life scum! Stupid, mean, ugly, wanton!”

  Whitey Haines started to laugh as relief flooded through him. Larry Craigie began to dry-sob in relief and molded his pr
ayer forming hands into fists. Whitey’s laughter became hysterical, and the poet, on his feet now, turned his fury on him: “Muscle-bound auto mechanic pecker-wood trash! No woman would ever touch you! The girls I know all laugh at you and your two inch dick! No dick, no sex fool. No—”

  Whitey went red, and started to shake. He pulled his foot back and sent it full-force into the poet’s genitals. The poet screamed and fell to his knees. Whitey yelled, “Turn the radio on, full blast!”

  Larry obeyed, and the Beachboys flooded the corridor as Whitey kicked and pummeled the poet, who drew himself into a fetal ball, muttering, “scum, scum” as the blows rained into him.

  When the poet’s face and bare arms were covered with blood, Whitey stepped back to savor his revenge. He pulled down his fly to deliver a warm liquid coup de grace, and discovered he was hard. Larry noticed this, and looked to his leader for some clue to what was supposed to happen. Suddenly Whitey was terrified. He looked down at the poet, who moaned “scum,” and spat out a stream of blood onto the steel-toed paratrooper boots. Now Whitey knew what his hardness meant, and he knelt beside the poet and pulled off his Levi cords and boxer shorts and spread his legs and blunderingly plunged himself into him. The poet screamed once as he entered; then his breathing settled into something strangely like ironic laughter. Whitey finished, withdrew and looked to his shock-stilled underling for support. To make it easy for him, he turned up the volume on the radio until Elvis Presley wailed into a garbled screech; then he watched as Larry delivered his ultimate acquiescence.

  They left him there, bereft of tears or the will to feel anything beyond the hollowness of his devastation. As they walked away, “Cathy’s Clown,” by the Everly Brothers, came on the radio. They had both laughed, and Whitey had kicked him one last time.

  He lay there until he was certain the quad would be deserted. He thought of his true love and imagined that she was with him, her head resting on his chest, telling him how much she loved the sonnets he composed for her.

  Finally, he got to his feet. It was hard to walk; each step shot a rending pain through his bowels up into his chest. He felt at his face; it was covered with dried matter that had to be blood. He scrubbed his face furiously with his sleeve until the abrasions ran with fresh trickles of blood over smooth skin. This made him feel better, and the fact that he hadn’t betrayed tears made him feel better still.

  Except for a few odd groups of kids hanging out and playing catch, the quad was deserted, and the poet made his way across it in slow, painful steps. Gradually, he became aware of a warm liquid running down his legs. He pulled up his right trouser leg and saw that his sock was soaked in blood laced with white matter. Taking off his socks, he hobbled toward the “Arch of Fame,” a marble inlaid walkway that commemorated the school’s previous graduating classes. The poet wiped the bloody handfuls of cotton over mascots depicting the Athenians of ’63 all the way back through the Delphians of ’31, then strode barefoot, gaining strength and purpose with each step, out the school’s south gate and onto Griffith Park Boulevard, his mind bursting with odd bits of poetry and sentimental rhymes; all for her.

  When he saw the florist’s shop at the corner of Griffith Park and Hyperion, he knew that this was his destination. He steeled himself for human contact and went in and purchased a dozen red roses, to be sent to an address he knew by heart but had never visited. He selected a blank card to go with them, and scribbled on the back some musings about love being etched in blood. He paid the florist, who smiled and assured him that the flowers would be delivered within the hour.

  The poet walked outside, realizing that there were still two hours of daylight left, and that he had no place to go. This frightened him, and he tried composing an ode to waning daylight to keep his fear at bay. He tried, and tried, but his mind wouldn’t click in and his fear became terror and he fell to his knees, sobbing for a word or phrase to make it right again.

  2

  When Watts burst into flames on August 23, 1965, Lloyd Hopkins was building sand castles on the beach at Malibu and inhabiting them with members of his family and fictional characters out of his own brilliant imagination.

  A crowd of children had gathered around the gangly twenty-three year old, eager to be entertained, yet somehow deferential to the great mind that they sensed in the big young man whose hands so deftly molded drawbridges, moats, and parapets. Lloyd was at one with the children and with his own mind, which he viewed as a separate entity. The children watched, and he sensed their eagerness and desire to be with him and knew instinctively when to gift them with a smile or waggle his eyebrows so that they would be satisfied and he could return to his real play.

  His Irish Protestant ancestors were fighting with his lunatic brother Tom for control of the castle. It was a battle between the good loyalists of the past and Tom and his rabblerousing paramilitary cohorts who thought that Negroes should be shipped back to Africa and that all roadways should be privately owned. The loonies had the upper hand temporarily–Tom and his backyard arsenal of hand grenades and automatic weaponry were formidable–but the good loyalists were staunch-hearted where Tom and his band were craven, and led by about-to-be police officer Lloyd, the Irish band had surmounted technology and was now raining flaming arrows into the midst of Tom’s hardware, causing it to explode. Lloyd envisioned flames in the sand in front of him, and wondered for the eight thousandth time that day what the Academy would be like. Tougher than basic training? It would have to be, or the city of Los Angeles was in deep trouble.

  Lloyd sighed. He and his loyalists had won the battle and his parents, inexplicably lucid, had come to praise the victorious son and heap scorn on the loser.

  “You can’t beat brains, Doris,” his father told his mother. “I wish it weren’t true, but they rule the world. Learn another language, Lloydy; Tom can commune with those low-lifes in that phone sales racket, but you solve puzzles and rule the world.” His mother nodded mutely; the stroke had destroyed her ability to talk.

  Tom just glowered in defeat.

  Out of nowhere, Lloyd heard the music and very slowly, very consciously forced himself to turn in the direction from which the raucous sound was coming.

  A little girl was holding a radio, cradled preciously into herself, attempting to sing along. When Lloyd saw the little girl, his heart melted. She didn’t know how he hated music, how it undercut his thought processes. He would have to be gentle with her, as he was with women of all ages. He caught the little girl’s attention, speaking softly, even as his headache grew: “Do you like my castle, sweetheart?”

  “Y… Yes,” the little girl said.

  “It’s for you. The Good Loyalists fought the battle for a fair damsel, and that damsel is you.”

  The music was growing deafening; Lloyd thought briefly that the whole world could hear it. The little girl shook her head coquettishly, and Lloyd said, “Can you turn the radio off, sweetie? Then I’ll take you on a tour of your castle.” The child complied, and fumbled the volume switch the wrong way just as the music stopped and a stern-voiced announcer intoned: “And Governor Edmund G. Brown has just announced that the National Guard has been ordered into South Central Los Angeles in force to stop the two day reign of looting and terror that has already left four dead. All members of the following units are to report immediately…”

  The little girl fiddled the radio off just as Lloyd’s headache metamorphosed into a perfect stillness. “You ever read Alice in Wonderland, sweetheart?” he asked.

  “My mommy read me from the picture book,” the little girl said.

  “Good. Then you know what it means to follow the rabbit down the hole?”

  “Does it mean what Alice did when she went into Wonderland?”

  “That’s right; and that’s what old Lloyd has to do now–the radio just said so.”

  “Are you ‘Old Lloyd’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s going to happen to your castle?”

  “You inherit it, fai
r damsel–it’s yours to do with as you please.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  The little girl hopped into the air and came down square on top of the castle, obliterating it. Lloyd ran for his car and what he hoped would be his baptism by fire.

  In the Armory, Staff Sergeant Beller took his prize cadre aside and told them that for a few bucks they could appreciably cut down the odds of getting eaten alive in niggerland and maybe have a few laughs, besides.

  He motioned Lloyd Hopkins and two other P.F.C.s into the lavatory and displayed his wares and elaborated: “.45 automatic. Your classic officer’s sidearm. Guaranteed to drop any firebreathing nigger at thirty yards, regardless of where it hits him. Strictly illegal for E.M., and a valuable asset in its own right–but these babies are fully automatic–machine pistols, with my specially devised elephant clip–twenty shots, reload in five seconds flat, The piece overheats, but I throw in a glove. The piece, two elephant clips and the glove–an even C-note. Takers?” He proffered the sidearms around. The two motor pool P.F.C.s eyed them longingly and hefted them with love, but declined.

  “I’m broke, Sarge,” the first P.F.C. said.

  “I’m staying behind at the command post with the halftracks, Sergeant,” the second P.F.C. said.

  Beller sighed, and looked up at Lloyd Hopkins, who gave him the creeps. “The Brain,” the guys in the company called him. “Hoppy, what about you?”

  “I’ll take them both,” Lloyd said.

  Dressed in Class C fatigues, leggings, full bandoliers and helmet liners, Co. A of the 2nd Battalion, 46th Division, California National Guard stood at parade rest in the main meeting hall of the Glendale Armory, waiting to be briefed. Their battalion commander, a forty-four year old Pasadena dentist who held the reserve rank of Lieutenant Colonel, formulated his thoughts and orders into what he hoped would be considered a fierce brevity and spoke into the microphone. “Gentlemen, we are going into the firestorm. The Los Angeles police have just informed us that a forty-eight square mile portion of South Central Los Angeles is engulfed in flames, and that entire commercial blocks have been pillaged and then set on fire. We are being sent in to protect the lives of the firemen battling those fires and to divert through our presence the looting and other criminal activity taking place. This is the sole regular infantry company in an otherwise armored division. You men, I’m sure, will be the spearhead of this peace-keeping force of civilian soldiers. You will be briefed further when we reach our objective. Good day, and God be with you!”