Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  “Yeah. I’m sorry I barked at you, kid.”

  “You’re on Janice’s side. I don’t blame you; she’s better looking than I am.”

  Dutch laughed. “Talk to you tomorrow about Wilson’s statement?”

  “Right. I’ll call you.”

  Lloyd found Sarah Smith with the remnants of the spectators, smoking a cigarette and shuffling her feet nervously on the pavement. “Hi, Sarah. How are you feeling?”

  Sarah ground out the cigarette. “All right, I guess. What’s going to happen to what’s-his-name?”

  Lloyd smiled at the sadness of the question. “He’s going to prison for a long time. Don’t you even remember his name?”

  “I’m bad at names.”

  “Do you remember mine?”

  “Floyd?”

  “Close. Lloyd. Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  They walked over to the unmarked Matador and got in. Lloyd scrutinized Sarah openly as she gave her address and fiddled with the contents of her purse. A good girl from a good family gone slightly loose, he decided. Twenty-eight or nine, the light blonde hair legit, the body beneath the black cotton pantsuit both slender and soft. A kind face trying to look tough. Probably a hard worker at her job.

  Lloyd headed straight for the nearest westbound on-ramp, alternately savoring his anniversary triumph and picturing confrontations with Janice, who would doubtless give him one of her incredible slow burns–if not an outright battle for being so late. Feeling kindness well up in him for sparing Sarah Smith the harshness of the law, he tapped her shoulder and said, “It’s going to be all right, you know.”

  Sarah dug into her purse looking for cigarettes and found only an empty pack. She muttered, “Shit” and threw it out the window, then sighed. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. You really get off on being a cop, don’t you?”

  “It’s my life. Where did you meet Wilson?”

  “Is that his name? I met him at a country-western bar. Shit-kicker’s paradise, but at least they treat women with respect. What did he do?”

  “Held up a bar at gunpoint.”

  “Jesus! I figured he was just some kind of dope dealer.”

  Out of the mouths of babes, Lloyd thought. “I’m not lecturing you or anything like that,” he said, “but you shouldn’t hang out in dives. You could get hurt.”

  Sarah snorted. “Then where should I go to meet people?”

  “You mean men?”

  “Well… yeah.”

  “Try the continental approach. Drink coffee and read a book at some picturesque sidewalk café. Sooner or later some nice fellow will start a conversation with you about the book you’re reading. You’ll meet higher class people that way.”

  Sarah laughed wildly and clapped her hands, then poked Lloyd in the arm. When he took his eyes from the road and gave her a deadpan, her laughter became hysterical. “That’s funny, that’s so funny!” she squealed.

  “It’s not that funny.”

  “Yes, it is! You should be on TV!” Sarah’s laughter subsided. She looked at Lloyd quizzically. “Is that how you met your wife?”

  “I didn’t tell you I was married.”

  “I saw your ring.”

  “Very observant. But I met my wife in high school.” Sarah Smith laughed until she ached. Lloyd laughed along in a more sedate cadence, then dug in his pocket for a handkerchief and reached over and dabbed at Sarah’s tear-mottled face. She leaned into his hand, rubbing her nose along his knuckles.

  “You ever wonder why you keep on doing things even when you know they don’t work?” she asked.

  Lloyd ran a finger under her chin and tilted her head upwards to face him. “It’s because outside of the major dreams everything is always changing, and even though you keep doing the same things, you’re looking for new answers.”

  “I believe that,” Sarah said. “Get off at the next exit and turn right.”

  Five minutes later he pulled to the curb in front of an apartment building on Barrington. Sarah poked him in the arm and said, “Thanks.”

  “Good luck, Sarah. Try the book trick.”

  “Maybe I will. Thanks.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Sarah poked Lloyd’s arm a last time and darted out of the car.

  Janice Hopkins looked at the antique clock in her living room and felt her fearful slow burn leap ahead as the hour hand struck ten and she realized that this was her husband’s “second major anniversary” and that she could not rationally fight with him over their missed dinner date, could not use that minor grievance to force confrontations on any of the disturbances that undercut their marriage, could do nothing but say, “Oh shit, Lloyd, where were you this time?”, smile at his brilliant answer, and know how much he loved her. Tomorrow she would call her friend George, and he would come to the shop and they would commiserate at length about men.

  “Oh God, George,” she would say, “the life of a muse!”

  And George would reply, “But you love him?”

  “More than I know.”

  “Realizing that he’s slightly off the deep end?”

  “More than slightly, kiddo, what with his little phobias and all. But they just make him more human, more my baby.”

  And George would smile and talk of his lover, and they would laugh until the Waterford crystal rang and the bone china plates spun on their shelves.

  Then George would take her hand and casually mention the brief affair they had had when George decided he needed to experience women to be more of one himself. It had lasted a week, when George accompanied her to San Francisco for a seminar on appraising antiques. In bed all he talked about was Lloyd. It disgusted her, but thrilled her too, and she went on to divulge the most intimate facts of her marriage.

  When she realized that Lloyd would always be the unseen third party in bed with them, she broke it off. It was the only time she had cheated on her husband, and it was not for the standard reasons of neglect, abuse, or sexual boredom. It was to gain some kind of parity with him for the adventurous life he led. When Lloyd was frightened or angry and came to her with that look of his and she unhooked her bra and gave him her breasts, he was hers utterly. But when he read reports, or talked with Dutch Peltz and his other cop friends in the living room and she saw the wheels turning behind the pale grey eyes, she knew he was going to places that she never could. Her other parities–the success of the boutique, the book on Tiffany mirrors she had co-authored, her business acumen–all these satisfied only at the level of logic. Because Lloyd could fly and she couldn’t; even after seventeen years of marriage, Janice Rice Hopkins did not possess a syllabus to explain why this was so. And inexplicably, her husband’s capacity for flight began to frighten her.

  Against the sum total of over twenty years of intimacy, Janice collated the recent evidences of Lloyd’s strange behavior: his hour-long sojourns in front of the mirror, casting his eyes in circles as though trawling for flying insects; the increasingly long stints spent at his parents’ house, talking to his mother, who had not uttered or comprehended a sound in nineteen years; the insanely sardonic set to his face when he talked to his brother on the telephone about their parents’ care.

  But the stories that he told the girls were the most disturbing: cop tales that Janice suspected to be half parable and half confession, lurid travelogues on the darkest Los Angeles streets, populated by hookers, junkies, and other sundry low-lifes and cops who were often as raunchy and brutal as the people they threw in jail. A year ago Janice had told Lloyd not to tell her the stories. He had agreed with a silent nod of his head and a cold look in his eyes, and took his parable/confessions to the girls, bringing them into adolescence with detailed accounts of sleaze and horror. Anne would shrug the stories off–she was fourteen and boy crazy; Caroline, thirteen and with a real talent for ballet, would brood over them and bring home true detective magazines and ask her father to discourse on the various articles inside. A
nd Penny would listen and listen and listen, with pale grey eyes shining right through her father and her father’s story to some distant termination point. When Lloyd concluded his parable, Penny would kiss him sternly on the cheek and go upstairs and knit the cashmere and madras plaid quilts that had already earned her feature coverage in five Sunday supplements.

  Janice shivered. Was Penny’s innocence blasted beyond redemption already? A master artisan and fledgling entrepreneur at twelve? She shivered again and looked at the clock. An hour of fearful speculation had passed, and Lloyd was still not home. Suddenly she realized that she missed him and wanted him beyond the limits of normal desire in a twenty-year-old love affair. She walked upstairs and undressed in the dark bedroom, lighting the scented candle that was Lloyd’s signal to wake her up and love her. Crawling into bed, a last dark thought crossed her mind, like predator birds blackening a calm sky: As the girls grew older they looked more and more like Lloyd, especially in their eyes.

  She heard Lloyd enter the house an hour later, his ritualistic sounds in the entrance hall: Lloyd sighing and yawning, unhooking his gunbelt and placing it on the telephone stand, the familiar shuffling noises he made as he slowly walked upstairs. Tensing herself for the moment when he would open the door and see her in amber light, Janice ran a teasing hand between her legs.

  But the bedroom door didn’t open; she heard Lloyd tiptoe past it and walk down the hall to Penny’s room, then rap his knuckles lightly on her door and whisper, “Penguin? You want to hear a story?” The door creaked open a second later, and Janice heard father and child giggle in gleeful conspiracy.

  She gave her husband half an hour, angrily chainsmoking. When her last remnants of ardor had fled and she started to cough from the half-dozen cigarettes, Janice threw on a robe and walked down the hall to listen.

  Penny’s bedroom door was ajar, and through it Janice could see her husband and youngest daughter sitting on the edge of the bed, holding hands. Lloyd was speaking very softly, in an awe-tinged storyteller’s voice: “…after clearing the Haverhill/Jenkins homicide, I got assigned to a robbery deployment, a loan-out to the West L.A. squadroom. There had been a series of nighttime burglaries of doctor’s offices, all in large buildings in the Westwood area. Cash and saleable drugs were the burglar’s meat; in shortly over a month he’d ripped off over five grand in cash and a shitload of pharmaceutical speed and heavyweight downers. The West L.A. dicks had his M.O. figured out this way: The bastard used to hide out in the building until nightfall, then hit his mark, then break into a second floor office and jump out the window into the parking lot. There was evidence to point to this–chipped cement on the window ledges. The dicks figured him for a gymnast, a bullshit cat burglar type who could jump two stories without getting hurt. The commander of the squad was setting up parking lot surveillances to catch him. When the burglar hit an office building on Wilshire that two teams of detectives were staking out, it blew their thesis to hell and I was called in.”

  Lloyd paused. Penny nuzzled her head into his shoulder and said, “Tell me how you got the scumbag, Daddy.”

  Lloyd brought his storyteller’s voice down to its lowest register: “Sweetheart, nobody jumps two stories repeatedly without getting hurt. I formed my own thesis: The burglar brazenly walked out of the buildings, waving to the security guards in the foyer as if everything were hunky-dory. Only one thing troubled me. Where was he carrying the dope he ripped off? I went back and checked with the guards on duty the nights of the robberies. Yes, both known and unknown men in business suits had walked out of the building in the early evening hours, but none were carrying bags or packages. The guards assumed them to be businessmen with offices in the building and didn’t check them out. I heard that same statement six times before it all came together in my mind: The burglar dressed in drag, probably in the protective coloring of a nurse’s uniform, carrying a large purse or shoulderbag. I checked with the guards again and, bingo! An unknown woman seen wearing a nurse’s uniform and carrying a large shoulderbag was seen leaving the burglarized buildings at almost the exact time on all six burglary nights. The guards couldn’t describe her, but said she was ‘ugly,’ ‘a dog,’ and so forth.”

  Penny fidgeted when Lloyd took in a deep breath and sighed. She took her head from his shoulder and poked him sharply in the arm. “Don’t be a tease, Daddy!”

  Lloyd laughed and said, “Alright. I ran a computer cross-check on vice offenders and registered sex offenders with burglary convictions. Double bingo! Arthur Christiansen, a.k.a. “Misty Christie”, a.k.a. “Arlene the Queen” Christiansen. Specialties: giving cut-rate blow jobs to drunks who thought he was a woman and full-drag B & Es. I staked out his pad for thirty-six hours straight, determining that he was dealing uppers and Percodan–I heard his customers comment on the righteous quality of his stuff. This was solid corroboration, but I wanted to catch him-her in the act. The following afternoon old Arthur-Arlene left the pad with a giant quilted shoulderbag and drove to Westwood and walked into a big office building two blocks from the U.C.L.A. campus. Four hours later, an hour after dark, a very ugly creature in a nurse’s uniform walks out, carrying the same shoulderbag. I whip out my badge, yell ‘Police Officer!’ and rush Arthur-Arlene, who screams, ‘Chauvinist!’ and swings on me. The blows are ineffectual and I’m reaching for my handcuffs when Arthur-Arlene’s falsies pop out of his blouse. I get him handcuffed and flag down a black-and-white. Arthur-Arlene is screaming ‘sisterhood is powerful’ and ‘police brutality,’ and a crowd of U.C.L.A. students start shouting obscenities at me. I barely managed to get into the black-and-white. The scene was almost L.A.’s first transvestite police riot.”

  Penny laughed hysterically, collapsing on the bed and pounding the covers with her fists. She burrowed her head into the pillow to wipe away her tears, then giggled, “More, Daddy, more. One more before you go to bed:”

  Lloyd reached over and ruffled Penny’s hair. “Funny or serious?”

  “Serious,” Penny said. “Give me some dark stuff to sate my ghoulish curiosity. If you don’t make it good, I’ll stay up all night thinking of Arthur-Arlene’s falsies.”

  Lloyd traced circles on the bedspread. “How about a knight story?”

  Penny’s face grew somber. She took her father’s hand and scooted down the bed so that Lloyd could rest his head in her lap. When father and daughter were comfortable, Lloyd stared up at the tartan quilt suspended from the ceiling and said, “The knight was caught in a dilemma. He had two anniversaries in one day–one personal, one professional. The professional one took precedence and in the course of it he shot a man, wounding him. About an hour later, after the man was in custody, the knight started to shake like he always did after he fired his gun. All those delayed reaction questions hit him: What if his shots rendered the asshole for good? What if next time he gloms the wrong info and takes out the wrong guy? What if he starts seeing red all the time and his discretion goes haywire? It’s a shitstorm out there. You know that, don’t you, Penguin?”

  “Yes,” Penny whispered.

  “You know that you’ve got to develop claws to fight it?”

  “Sharp ones, Daddy.”

  “You know the weird thing about the knight? The more complicated his doubts and questions become, the stronger his resolve gets. It just gets weird sometimes. What would you do if things got really weird?”

  Penny played with her father’s hair. “Sharpen my claws,” she said, digging her fingers into Lloyd’s scalp.

  Lloyd grimaced in mock pain. “Sometimes the knight wishes he weren’t such a fucking Protestant. If he were a Catholic he’d be able to get formal absolution.”

  “I’ll always absolve you, Daddy,” Penny said as Lloyd got to his feet. “Like the song said, ‘I’m easy.’”

  Lloyd looked down at his daughter. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you too. One question before you go: You think I’d be a good Robbery/Homicide dick?”

  Lloyd laughed. “No, but
you’d be a great Robbery/Homicide dickless.”

  Janice watched Penny squeal in delight, and suddenly she was violated at the womb. She walked back to the bedroom she shared with her husband and flung off her robe, preparing to do her battle in the nude. Lloyd walked through the door moments later, smelling the scented candle and whispering, “Jan? You ardent this late, sweetheart? It’s after midnight.”

  As he reached for the light switch, Janice threw her overflowing ashtray at the opposite wall and hissed, “You sick, selfish, son-of-a-bitch, can’t you see what you’re doing to that little girl? You call spilling out that violence being a father?” Frozen in the ugliness of the moment, Lloyd pushed the light switch, illuminating Janice, shivering in the nude. “Do you, Lloyd, goddamn you?”

  Lloyd moved toward his wife, arms extended in a supplicating gesture, hoping that physical contact would quell the storm.

  “No!” Janice said as she backed away, “Not this time! This time I want a promise from you, an oath that you will not tell our children those ugly stories!”

  Lloyd reached a long arm out and caught Janice’s wrist. She twisted it free and knocked down the nightstand between them.

  “Don’t, Lloyd. Don’t want me and don’t placate me and don’t touch me until you promise.”

  He ran a hand through his hair and started to tremble. Fighting an impulse to punch the wall, he bent over and picked up the nightstand. “Penny is a subtle child, Jan, possibly a genius,” he said. “What should I do? Tell her about the three…”

  Janice hurled her favorite porcelain lamp at the closet and shreiked, “She’s just a little girl! A twelve-year-old little girl! Can’t you understand that?”

  Lloyd tripped across the bed and grabbed her around the waist, burying his head in her stomach, whispering, “She has to know, she had to know it, or she’ll die. She has to know.”

  Janice raised her arms and molded her hands into fists. She started to bring them down, clublike, onto Lloyd’s back but hesitated as a thousand instances of his erratic passion washed over her, combining to form an epigram whose words she was too terrified to speak.