by James Ellroy
Lloyd heard footsteps in the hallway, and seconds later a plainclothes cop and two patrolmen in uniform burst into the apartment. He walked into the living room to greet them, pointing a thumb over his shoulder and saying, “In there, guys.” He was staring out the window at the black sky when he heard their first exclamations of horror, followed by the sound of retching.
The plainclothes cop was the first to recover, walking up to Lloyd and blurting out bluff-hearty, “Wow! That’s some stiff! You’re Lloyd Hopkins, aren’t you? I’m Lundquist, Hollywood Dicks.”
Lloyd turned to face the tall, prematurely grey young man, ignoring his outstretched hand. He scrutinized him openly and decided he was stupid and inexperienced.
Lundquist fidgeted under Lloyd’s stare. “I think we got a botched-up burglary, Sergeant,” he said. “I saw B. & E. marks on the door here. I think we should start our investigation by hauling in burglars know to use viol—”
Lloyd shook his head, silencing the younger detective. “Wrong. Those jimmy marks are fresh. The edges would have rounded off from moisture if the attempted burglaries coincided with the murder. That woman has been dead for at least two days. No, the burglar was the guy who called in to report the body. Now listen, the woman’s purse is on that chair over there. Positive I.D. There’s also a paperback book with two bloodstained partial prints. Get them to the lab and have the technicians call me at home when they have something conclusive one way or the other. I want you to search the premises, then seal it–no reporters, no TV assholes. You got that?”
Lundquist nodded.
“Good. Now, I want you to call the M.E. and S.I.D., and have them bring in a fingerprint team and dust this place from top to bottom. I want a complete forensic work-up. Tell the M.E. to call me at home with the autopsy report. Who’s the top dog at Hollywood Dicks?”
“Lieutenant Perkins.”
“Good. I’ll call him. Tell him I’m handling this case for Robbery-Homicide.”
“Right, Sergeant.”
Lloyd walked back into the bedroom. The two patrolmen were staring at the corpse and cracking jokes. “I had a girlfriend once who looked like that,” the older cop said. “Bloody Mary. I could only get together with her for two weeks outta the month, her period lasted so long.”
“That’s nothing,” the younger cop said, “I knew an attendant at the morgue who fell in love with a corpse. He wouldn’t let the Coroner slice her–said it took the R out of romance.”
The other cop laughed and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. “My wife takes the R out of romance every night, also the O and the M.”
Lloyd cleared his throat; he knew that the men were joking to keep their horror at bay, but he was offended anyway, and didn’t want Julia Lynn Niemeyer to hear such things. He rummaged through the bedroom closet until he found a terrycloth robe, then walked into the kitchen and found a serrated-edged steak knife. When he re-entered the bedroom and stood up on the blood-spattered bed, the younger cop said, “You’d better leave her like that for the Coroner, Sergeant.”
Lloyd said, “Shut the fuck up,” and cut through the nylon cord that bound Julia Lynn Niemeyer at the ankle. He gathered her dangling limbs and violated torso into his arms and stepped off the bed, cradling her head into his shoulder. Tears filled his eyes. “Sleep, darling,” he said. “Know that I’ll find your killer.” Lloyd lowered her to the floor and covered her with the robe. The three cops stared at him in disbelief.
“Seal the premises.” Lloyd said.
Three days later, Lloyd was stationed at the main Hollywood Post Office with his eyes glued to the wall containing P.O. boxes 7500 through 7550, armed with the knowledge that Julia Lynn Niemeyer had placed her tabloid advertisements in the company of a tall, blonde woman of about forty. Office personnel at both the L.A. Night-Line and L.A. Swinger had positively identified the dead woman from her driver’s license photograph, and distinctly remembered her female companion.
Lloyd fidgeted, keeping his anger and impatience at bay by recapitulating all the known physical evidence on the killing. Fact: Julia Lynn Neimeyer was killed by a massive dose of heroin, and was mutilated after her death. Fact: The Coroner had placed the time of her murder as seventy-two hours before the discovery of her body. Fact: No one at the Aloha Regency had heard signs of a struggle or knew much about the victim, who lived on money from a trust fund set up by her parents, who had died in a car accident in 1978. This information had been supplied by the woman’s uncle, who had read of the killing in the San Francisco newspapers and who went on to describe Julia Niemeyer as a “very deep, very quiet, very intelligent girl who didn’t let people get close to her.”
The killing had made the newspapers in a big way, and similarities to the Tate-LaBianca slayings of 1969 had been graphically pointed out. This caused a torrent of unsolicited information to flood the switchboards of the Los Angeles Police Department, and Lloyd had assigned three officers to interview all callers who didn’t sound like outright cranks. The bloodstained fingerprints on the paperback book–the one hard piece of physical evidence–had been scrutinized by fingerprint experts, then computer fed and teletyped to every police agency in the continental United States, with astoundingly negative results: The partial index and pinky prints could not be attributed to anyone, anywhere, meaning that the killer had never been arrested, never been a member of the armed services or civil service, never been bonded, and had never applied for a driver’s license in thirty-seven of the fifty United States.
Lloyd felt his thesis take on the form of what he called the “Black Dahlia Syndrome,” a reference to the famous unsolved 1947 mutilation murder. He was certain that Julia Lynn Niemeyer had been killed by an intelligent middle-aged man who had never killed before, a man with a low sex drive who had somehow come in contact with Julia Niemeyer, whose persona somehow triggered his long dormant psychoses, and eventually led him to plan her murder carefully. He knew also that the man was physically strong and capable of maneuvering on a broad-based societal level: a solid citizen type who could also score heroin.
Lloyd was impressed with both killer and the challenge his capture presented. He surveyed the post office crowd at random, then shifted his gaze back to Box 7512. He felt his impatience grow. If the “tall blonde woman” didn’t show by lunchtime, he would smash the box open and rip it off by the hinges.
She showed an hour later. Lloyd sensed that it was she as soon as she walked through the broad glass doors and nervously made for the aisles of boxes. A tall, strong-featured woman whose manner was like a barely controlled scream, he could almost feel her body tension as she looked fearfully in all directions, inserted her key and withdrew a handful of mail, then ran back outside.
Lloyd came up behind her as she was opening the door of a double-parked Pinto Hatchback. She turned around as she heard his footsteps, her hand flying to her mouth when she saw the badge he was holding up at eye level. Transfixed by the badge, the woman flopped against the car and let the handful of mail drop to the street.
Lloyd bent down and picked it up. “Police officer,” he said quietly.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Vice?”
Lloyd said, “No, Homicide. It’s about Julia Niemeyer.”
An angry flush came over the woman’s face. “Jesus,” she said, “that’s a relief. I was going to call you. I suppose you want to talk?”
Lloyd smiled; the woman had a certain panache. “We can’t talk here,” he said, “and I don’t want to subject you to a police station. Do you mind driving somewhere?”
“No,” the woman said, adding “Officer” with the thinnest edge of contempt.
Lloyd told her to drive south to Hancock Park. En route he learned that she was Joanie Pratt, age 42, former dancer, singer, actress, waitress, Playboy Club Bunny, model, and kept woman.
“What are you doing now?” he asked as she pulled into the Hancock Park parking lot.
“It’s illegal,” Joanie Pratt said, smiling.
“I do
n’t care,” Lloyd said, smiling back.
“Okay, I deal Quaaludes and fuck for selected older guys who don’t want to get involved.”
Lloyd laughed and pointed to a collection of plaster dinosaurs standing on a grassy knoll a few yards from the Tar Pits. “Let’s go talk,” he said.
When they were seated on the grass, Lloyd bored in, describing Julia Niemeyer’s corpse in hideously graphic detail. Joanie Pratt turned white, then red and started to sob. Lloyd made no move to comfort her. When her tears subsided, he said softly, “I want this animal. I know about the ads you and Julia placed in the sex papers. I don’t care if the two of you have fucked half of L.A. or the kangaroos in the San Diego Zoo or each other. I don’t give a fuck if you deal dope, snort dope, shoot dope, or turn little kids on to dope. I want to know everything that you know about Julia Niemeyer: her love life, her sex life, and why she put those ads in those papers. Have you got that?”
Joanie nodded mutely. Lloyd dug a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. She wiped her face and said, “All right, it’s like this. I was in the Hollywood Library about three months ago, returning some books. I notice this good-looking chick standing in line next to me, checking out all these scholarly books on sex–Kraft-Ebbing, Kinsey, The Hite Report. I crack a joke to the girl, who turns out to be Julia. Anyway, we go outside and smoke a cigarette and talk–about sex. Julia tells me she’s researching sexuality–that she wants to write a book about it. I share my racy past with her, and tell her I’ve got this gig going–floating swingers’ parties. It’s kind of a scam–I know some heavyweight real estate people, and I score dope for them in exchange for letting me sublet these really primo houses when the owners are out of town. Then I place ads in the sex papers–high, high line sex parties. Two hundred dollars a couple–to keep the riffraff out. I provide good food and dope, music and a light show. Anyway, Julia–she’s obsessed with sex, but she doesn’t fuck–she’s just a sex scholar…”
Joanie paused, and lit a cigarette. When Lloyd nervously blurted out, “Go on,” she said, “Anyway, Julia wants to interview the people at my parties. I tell her ‘fuck no! These people are paying goood money to come, and they don’t want to be hassled by some sex-obsessed interviewer.’ So Julia says, ‘Look. I’ve got lots of money. I’ll pay for people to come to the parties, and I’ll interview them there, as their price for admission. That way, I can watch them have sex.’ Anyway, that’s why Julia placed those ads. People contacted her, and she offered to pay their way to the parties if they consented to interviews.”
Lloyd was riveted, staring into Joanie Pratt’s pale blue eyes until she started to wave a hand in front of his face. “Come back to earth there, Sergeant. You look like you just took a trip to Mars.”
Lloyd felt vague instincts clicking into place. He brushed Joanie’s hand away. “Go on.”
“Okay, Mars Man. Anyway, Julia conducted her interviews and watched people fuck until she was blue in the face. She wrote out tons of notes and had the first draft of her book completed when her pad was burglarized and her manuscript and all her notes and files were stolen. She tol—”
“What!” Lloyd screamed.
Joanie leaped back, startled. “Whoa there, Sarge. Let me finish. This was about a month ago. The pad was ransacked. Her stereo and TV and a thousand dollars in cash were stolen. She…”
Lloyd interrupted. “Did she report it to the police?”
Joanie shook her head. “No, I told her not to. I told her she could always rewrite her book from memory and do some more interviews. I didn’t want any cops nosing around us. Cops are notorious moralists, and they might have gotten wind of my scam. But listen. About a week before she died, Julia told me she had the feeling she was being followed. There was this man that she used to see in all these odd places–on the street, in restaurants, in the market. He never stared at her or anything like that, but she had this feeling he was stalking her.”
Lloyd went cold all over. “Did she recognize the man from the parties?”
“She said she couldn’t be sure.”
Lloyd was silent for a long moment. “Do you have any of the letters Julia received?”
Joanie shook her head. “No, just the ones I picked up today.”
Lloyd stuck out his hand, and Joanie withdrew the letters from her purse. He stared at her, tapping the collection of envelopes against his leg. “When are you having your next party?”
Joanie lowered her eyes. “Tonight.”
Lloyd said, “Good. I’m going to attend. You’re going to be my date.”
The party was in a three story A-frame nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills. Lloyd wore cuffed chino pants, penny loafers, a striped polo shirt, and a crew-neck sweater over his .38 snubnose, prompting Joanie Pratt to exclaim, “Jesus, Sarge! This is a swing party, not a high school sock hop! Where’s my corsage?”
“It’s in my pants,” he said.
Joanie laughed, then ran hooded eyes over his body. “Nice. You gonna fuck tonight? You’ll get offers.”
“No, I’m saving it for the senior prom. You want to show me around?”
They walked through the house. All the furniture in the living room and dining room had been moved up against the walls, and the carpets had been rolled up and wadded ceiling high next to a row of low tables where cold cuts, hors d’oeuvres, and canned cocktails in bowls of ice were arrayed. Joanie said, “Buffet and dance floor. There’s a primo stereo system with a hook-up to speakers all over the house.” She pointed to lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling. “The stereo is hooked up to the lights, so the music and the lights work together. It’s wild.” She took his hand and led him upstairs. The two upper floors contained bedrooms and dens on either side of a winding hallway. Red lights blinked on and off above the open doors, and Lloyd could see that inside the entire floor space of each room was covered by mattresses with pink silk sheets.
Joanie poked him in the ribs. “I hire these wetbacks from the slave market on Skid Row. They do all the heavy lifting. I give them ten bucks before the party, then twenty bucks and a bottle of tequila when they move all the furniture back. What’s the matter, Sarge? You’re scowling.”
“I don’t know,” Lloyd said, “but it’s funny. I’m here looking for a killer, this whole ‘party’ is probably against the law, and I think I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time.”
The celebrants started to arrive half an hour later. Lloyd briefed Joanie on what he wanted–she was to circulate, and point out any people she recognized as having been interviewed by or having seemed interested in Julia Niemeyer. She was to report to him all men who even mentioned Julia or her recent demise. She was also to report anything that seemed darkly incongruous, anything that violated her self-described party ethos of “Good music, good dope, good fucking”; no one was to know that he was a police officer.
Lloyd stationed himself behind the two burly bouncers scrutinizing incoming guests and collecting their invitations. The partygoers, coupled off to insure an even ratio of partners, seemed to him to be the very microcosm of jaded money–the finest clothes in the latest styles over unfit, tension-ridden bodies, the men middle-aged and afraid of it, the women looking hard, competitive, and brassy in the worst camped-out faggot manner. As the bouncers locked and bolted the door behind the last arrivals, Lloyd felt that he had just viewed a perfect impressionist representation of hell. His left knee was twitching in reaction to it, and when he walked back to the buffet he knew that he would need every ounce of the love in his Irish Protestant ethos to keep from hating them.
He decided to play the jocular stud. As Joanie Pratt brushed by him, he whispered to her, “Make it look like we’re together.”
Joanie closed her eyes. Lloyd bent in slow motion to kiss her, his hands reaching out and grasping her waist and lifting her so that her feet dangled inches above the floor. Their lips and tongues met and played in perfect unison. Whistling and good natured jib
es drowned out Lloyd’s furious heartbeat, and when he broke the kiss and lowered Joanie to the floor he felt he had conquered the jaded assembly with love.
“That’s all, folks,” he said with a mock humble twang, patting Joanie on the shoulder. “You folks all have a good time. I have to go upstairs and rest.” Wild applause greeted this irony, and he ran for the staircase.
Lloyd found a bedroom at the far end of the third story hallway. He locked himself in, feeling proud of his performance, yet ashamed of its ease and dumbfounded by the fact that he was starting to like the revelers downstairs. He sat down on the pink sheeted mattress and dug out the letters that Joanie had given him–the last correspondence delivered to P.O. Box 7512. He had planned to go over them later, aided by Joanie, but now he needed work to keep his almost heart-stricken ambivalence at bay.
The first two envelopes contained underground junk mail, form letters advertising king-size electric dildos and bondage attire. The third envelope was hand-printed. Lloyd looked more closely and noticed that the letters in the address were perfectly squared off, obviously formed by pen and ruler. His mind clicked, and he held the envelope gently by the edges and slit it open with a deft thrust of his fingernail. It contained a poem, block ruler printed in maroon ink. Lloyd tilted the page sideways. Something about the ink bothered him. Letting the paper wobble in front of his eyes, he realized that the maroon ink was starting to flake, revealing a brighter shade underneath. He deliberately smudged a stanza, then smelled his finger and felt his mind click a second time: The poem was written in blood.
Lloyd willed his mind to be still, using his method of deep breathing and forcing himself to concentrate on the vertical lines in the plaid quilt Penny had loomed for him two Christmases ago. When he had been blank for solid minutes, he began to read the blood-formed words:
