by James Ellroy
He is capable of bending. I am going to be his music.
Lloyd drove home. He pulled into the driveway to find Janice’s car gone and all the lights in the house glowing brightly. He unlocked the door and walked inside, seeing the note immediately:
Lloyd, darling:
This is goodbye, for awhile at least. The girls and I have gone to San Francisco to stay with a friend of George’s. It is for the best, I know that, because I know that you and I have not communicated for a long, long time, and that our values are markedly different. Your behavior with the girls was the final straw. I have known almost since the beginning of our marriage of some deep disturbance in you–one you disguised (for the most part) very well. What I will not tolerate is your passing your disturbance on to them. Your stories are cancerous in their effect, and Anne, Caroline, and Penny must be free of them. A note on the girls–I am going to enroll them in a Montessori School in S.F., and I will have them call you at least once a week. George’s roommate Rob will look after the shop in my absence. I will decide in the coming months whether or not I want a divorce. I care for you deeply, but I cannot live with you. I am withholding our address in S.F. until I am certain you will not try to do something rash. When I get settled, I’ll call. Until then be well and don’t worry.
Janice
Lloyd put down the note and walked through the empty house. Everything feminine had been cleared out. The girls’ room had been picked clean of personal belongings; the bedroom that he shared with Janice now contained only his solitary aura and the navy blue cashmere quilt that Penny had crafted for his thirty-seventh birthday.
Lloyd drew the quilt around his shoulders and walked outside. He looked up at the sky and hoped for an annihilating rainstorm. When he realized that he couldn’t will thunder and lightning, he fell to his knees and wept.
10
When the poet saw the empty metal box, he screamed. Cancer cells materialized out of the dawn sky and threw themselves at his eyes, hurling him onto the cold pavement. He wrapped his arms around his head and drew himself into a fetal ball to keep the tiny carcinogens from going for his throat, then rocked back and forth until he had blunted all his senses and his body started to cramp, then numb. When he felt self-asphyxiation coming on he breathed out, and familiar Larrabee Avenue came into focus. No cancer cells in the air. His beautiful tape machine was gone, but Officer Pig was still asleep and the early morning scene on Larrabee was normal. No police cars, no suspicious vehicles, no trench-coated figures huddled behind newspapers. He had changed the tape forty-eight hours ago, so the machine was mostly likely discovered that day, when it was empty or running, or yesterday, when it contained a minimum of recorded material. If he hadn’t wanted to touch himself so badly he would never have risked the early pick-up, but he needed the stimulus of Officer Pig and his lackey, who had been doing things to each other on the couch for weeks now, things that Julia had written about in her evil manu—
He couldn’t complete the thought; it was too shameful.
He got to his feet and looked in all directions. No one had seen him. He bit at the skin of his forearms. The blood that trickled out was red and healthy looking. He opened his mouth to speak, wanting to be sure that the cancer cells hadn’t severed his vocal cords. The word that came out was “safe.” He said it a dozen times, each time with a more awed inflection. Finally he shouted it and ran for his car.
Thirty minutes later he had scaled the bookstore roof, a silenced .32 automatic in his windbreaker pocket, smiling when he saw that his Sanyo 6000 was still hidden underneath an outsized sheaf of tarred-over pipe insulation. He grabbed the two spools of finished tape from the machine’s storage compartment. Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe. He said the word over and over again on his drive home, and he was still saying it as he put the first spool on the old machine in the living room, then sat back to listen, his eyes moving over the rose branches and photographs on the walls.
The sound of a switch being flipped; the porch light going on; the trigger activating the tape. His original beloved muttering to herself, then deep silence. He smiled and touched his thighs. She was writing.
The silence stretched. One hour. Two. Three. Four. Then the sound of yawning and the switch being flipped again.
He got to his feet, stretched and changed spools. Again the porch light trigger–his punctual darling, 6:55, like clockwork.
He sat down, wondering if he should make himself explode now while he could hear footsteps, or wait and take a chance on his original beloved talking to herself. Then a doorbell rang. Her voice: “Hi, Sergeant.” The scuffle of feet. Her voice again: “I made those phone calls. To over a dozen bookdealers. Nothing. None of my friends recall seeing or talking with a man like the one you described. It was bizarre. I was helping the police to find an insane woman-killer, and women kept—”
At the last words he began to tremble. His body went ice cold, then turned burning hot. He punched the stop button and fell to his knees. He clawed at his face until he drew blood, whimpering safe, safe, safe. He crawled to the window and looked out at the passing parade on Alvarado. He took hope with every identifiable evidence of business as usual: traffic noise, Mexican women with children in tow, junkies waiting to score in front of the Burrito stand. He started to say “safe,” then hesitated and whispered “maybe.” “Maybe” grew in his brain until he screamed it and stumbled back to the recorder.
He pushed the play button. His first beloved was saying something about women interrupting her. Then a man’s voice: “Thank you. I didn’t really expect anything. Right now I’m just fishing. Badge 1114, homicide fisherman on the job.”
He forced himself to listen, gouging his genitals with both hands to keep from screaming. The horrific conversation continued, and words leaped out and made him gouge himself harder. “The idea of mass murderers killing with impunity makes them afraid…I have supervised homicide investigations…call me Lloyd.”
When the door slammed and the tape spun in blessed silence he took his hands from between his legs. He could feel blood dripping down his thighs, and it reminded him of high school and poetry and the sanctity of his purpose. Mrs. Cuthbertson’s eleventh grade honors English class. Logical fallacies: post hoc, propter ergo hoc–“After this, therefore because of this.” Knowledge of crimes committed does not mean knowledge of the perpetrator. Policemen were not breaking down his door. “Lloyd,” “Homicide fisherman badge 1114,” had no idea that his original beloved’s dwelling was bugged, and may have had nothing to do with the theft of his other tape recorder. “Lloyd” was “fishing” in shark-infested waters, and if he came near him he would eat the policeman alive. Conclusion: they had no idea who he was, and it was business as usual.
Tonight he would claim his twenty-third and most hurriedly courted beloved. No “maybe.” It was a pure “yes,” powerfully affirmed by his meditation tape and every one of his beloveds from Jane Wilhelm on up. Yes. Yes. The poet walked to the window and screamed it to the world at large.
11
His sleepless night in the empty house had been the precursor to a day of total bureaucratic frustration, and each negative feedback tore at Lloyd like a neon sign heralding the end of all the gentle restraining influences in his life. Janice and the girls were gone, and until his genius killer was captured, he was powerless to get them back.
As the day wound down into early evening, Lloyd recounted his dwindling options, wondering what on God’s earth he would do if they died out and left him with only his mind and his will.
It had taken him six hours to call the eighteen stereo supply stores and secure a list of fifty-five people who had purchased Watanabe A.F.Z. 999 recorders over the last eight years. Twenty-four of the buyers had been women, leaving thirty-one male suspects, and Lloyd knew from experience that telephone interviews would be futile–experienced detectives would have to size up the buyers in person and determine guilt or innocence from the suspects’ response to questioning. And if the recorder had been p
urchased outside L.A. County…and if the whole Haines angle had nothing to do with the killings…and he would need manpower for interviewing…and if Dutch turned him down at the party tonight…
The negative feedback continued, undercut with memories of Penny and her quilts and Caroline and Anne squealing with delight at his stories. Dutch had gotten nothing positive from his queries to both retired and long-term active juvenile detectives and the “monicker” files on “Bird” and “Birdy” had yielded only the names of a dozen ghetto blacks. Useless–the high pitched voice in Whitey Haines’s living room had obviously belonged to a white man.
But the greatest frustration had been the absence of a print make on the tape recorder. Lloyd had stalked the crime lab repeatedly, looking for the technician he had left the machine with, calling the man at home, only to find that his father had had a heart attack and that he had driven to San Bernardino, taking the recorder with him, intending to use the facilities of the San Bernardino Sheriffs Department for his dusting and comparison tests. “He said that you wanted him to do the tests personally, Sergeant,” the technician’s wife had said. “He’ll call from San Bernardino in the morning with the results.” Lloyd had hung up cursing semantics and his own authoritarian nature.
This left two last-ditch, one-man options: Interview the thirty-one buyers himself or cop some bennies and stake out Whitey Haines’s apartment until the bugger showed up. Desperation tactics–and the only avenues he had left.
Lloyd got his car and headed west, toward Kathleen’s bookstore-cottage. When he got off the freeway he realized he was bone weary and flesh hungry and pointed his Matador north, in the direction of Joanie Pratt’s house in the Hollywood Hills. They could love and talk and maybe Joanie’s body would smother his feeling of doomsday attrition coming from all sides.
Joanie jumped on Lloyd as he walked through the open front door, exclaiming, “Sarge, wilkommen! Romance on your mind? If so, the bedroom is immediately to your right.” Lloyd laughed. Joanie’s big carnal heart was the perfect spot to place his tenderness.
“Lead the way.”
When they had loved and played and looked at the sunset from the bedroom balcony, Lloyd told Joanie that his wife and children were gone and that in the wake of his abandonment there was only himself and the killer. “I’m giving my investigation two more days,” he said, “then I’m going public. I’m taking everything I have to Channel 7 News and flushing my career down the toilet. It hit me while we were lying in bed. If the leads I have now don’t pan out I’m going to create such a fucking public stink that every police agency in L.A. County will have to go after this animal; if my reading of him is correct, the exposure will drive him to do something so rash that he’ll blow it completely. I think he has an incredible ego that’s screaming to be recognized, and when he screams it to the world I’ll be there to get him.”
Joanie shuddered, then put a comforting hand on Lloyd’s shoulder. “You’ll get him, Sarge. You’ll give him the big one where it hurts the most.”
Lloyd smiled at the imagery. “My options are narrowing down,” he said. “It feels good.” Remembering Kathleen, he added, “I’ve got to go.”
“Hot date?” Joanie asked.
“Yeah. With a poetess.”
“Do me a favor before you go?”
“Name it.”
“I want a happy picture of the two of us.”
“Who’s going to take it?”
“Me. There’s a ten-second delay on my Polaroid. Come on, get up.”
“But I’m naked, Joanie!”
“So am I. Come on.”
Joanie walked into the living room and came back with a camera affixed to a tripod. She pushed some buttons and ran to Lloyd’s side. Blushing, he grabbed her around the waist and felt himself start to go hard. The flash cube popped. Joanie counted the seconds and pulled the film from the camera. The print was perfect: the nude Lloyd and Joanie, she smiling carnally, he blushing and semi-erect. Lloyd felt his tenderness explode as he looked at it. He took Joanie’s face in his hands and said, “I love you.”
Joanie said, “I love you too, Sarge. Now get dressed. We’ve both got dates tonight, and I’m late for mine.”
Kathleen had spent her entire day in preparation for her evening; long hours in the women’s departments of Brooks Brothers and Boshard-Doughty, searching for the romantic purist outfit that would speak eloquently of her past and flatter her in the present. It took hours, but she found it: pink Oxford cloth button down shirt, navy blue ankle socks and cordovan tassel loafers, a navy crew neck sweater and the piece de resistance–a knee length, pleated, red tartan skirt.
Feeling both sated and expectant, Kathleen drove home to savor waiting for her romantic conspirator. She had four hours to kill, and prescribed getting mildly stoned and listening to music as the way to do it. Since tonight she would be juxtaposed iconoclastically against a staid gathering of policemen and their wives, she put a carefully selected medley of flower child revolution on the turntable and sat back in her robe to smoke dope and listen, filled with the knowledge that tonight she would teach the big policeman–wow him with her poetry, read classic excerpts from her diary, and maybe let him kiss her breasts.
As the Colombian gold took her over, Kathleen found herself playing out a new fantasy. Lloyd was her dream lover. He was the one who had sent the flowers all those years; he had waited for the terrible impetus of searching for a killer to bring them together–a casual meeting wouldn’t have been romantic enough for him. The genesis of his attraction had to be Silverlake–they had grown up a scant six blocks apart.
Kathleen felt her fantasy drift apart with the diminishing of her high. To fortify it, she smoked her last Thai stick. Within minutes she was at one with the music and Lloyd was nude in front of her, admitting his deepening love of almost two decades, breathless in his desire to have her. Regal in her magnanimity, Kathleen accepted, watching him grow bigger and harder until she, Lloyd, and the deep bass guitar of the Jefferson Airplane exploded at once and her hand jerked from between her legs and she looked reflexively at the clock and saw that it was ten of seven.
Kathleen walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower, then dropped her robe and let the stream of water run alternately hot and cold over her until she felt her sober self tenuously emerge. She dressed and appreciated her image in the full-length mirror: She was perfect, and pleased to note that dressing in such nostalgic garments caused her not a hint of remorse.
The bell rang at seven. Kathleen turned off the stereo and threw open the door. Seeing Lloyd standing there, huge and somehow graceful, jerked her back to her fantasy. When he smiled and said, “Jesus, are you stoned,” she returned to the present, laughed guiltily and said, “I’m sorry. Weird thoughts. Do you like my outfit?”
Lloyd said, “You’re beautiful. Traditional clothes become you. I didn’t think you were a doper. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Dutch Peltz and his wife Estelle lived in Glendale, in a ranch-style house adjoining a golf course. Lloyd and Kathleen drove there in tense silence, Lloyd thinking of desperation tactics and killers and Kathleen thinking of ways to regain the parity she had lost by appearing loaded.
Dutch greeted them in the doorway, bowing to Kathleen. Lloyd made the introductions.
“Dutch Peltz, Kathleen McCarthy.”
Dutch took Kathleen’s hand. “Miss McCarthy, a pleasure.”
Kathleen returned the bow with a satirical flourish. “Should I call you by your rank, Mr. Peltz?”
“Please call me Arthur or Dutch, all my friends do.” Turning to Lloyd, he said, “Circulate for awhile, kid. I’ll show Kathleen around. We should talk before you leave.”
Catching the edge in Dutch’s voice, Lloyd said, “We need to talk sooner than that. I’m going to get a drink. Kathleen, if Dutch gets too boring, have him show you his boot trick.”
Kathleen looked down at Dutch’s feet. Although dressed in a business suit, he was wearing thick-soled bla
ck paratrooper boots. Dutch laughed and banged the back of his right heel on the floor. A long, double-bladed stiletto sprang out of the side of his boot. “My trademark,” he said. “I was a commando in Korea.” He nudged the knife point into the carpet, and the blade retracted.
Kathleen forced a grin. “Macho.”
Dutch smiled. “Touché. Come on Kathleen, I’ll show you around.”
Dutch steered Kathleen toward the dining room buffet, where women were readying dishes of salad and standing over steaming hot trays of corned beef and cabbage, laughing and lauding the food and party preparations. Lloyd watched them depart, then walked into the living room, whistling when he saw that every inch of floor space was eclipsed by heavyweight high brass: Commanders, Inspectors, and up. He counted heads–seven Commanders, five Inspectors, and four Deputy Chiefs. The lowest ranking officer in the room was Lieutenant Fred Gaffaney, standing by the fireplace with two Inspectors wearing cross-and-flag lapel pins. Gaffaney looked over and caught Lloyd’s eye, then turned quickly away. The two Inspectors followed suit, flinching when Lloyd stared straight at them. Something was off.
Lloyd found Dutch in the kitchen, regaling Kathleen and a Deputy Chief with one of his dialect anecdotes. When the Chief walked away shaking his head and laughing, Lloyd said, “Have you been holding out on me, Dutchman? Something’s got to be up; I’ve never seen this many heavy hitters in one place in my whole career.”
Dutch swallowed. “I took the Commander’s exam and passed high. I didn’t tell you because I—” He nodded toward Kathleen.
“No,” Lloyd said, “she stays. Why didn’t you tell me, Dutch?”
“You don’t want Kathleen to hear this,” Dutch said.
“I don’t care. Tell me, goddamnit!”
Dutch spat it out. “I didn’t tell you because with me on the Commander’s list there would be no end to the favors you would have asked. I was going to tell you if I passed and when I got assigned. Then I got the word from Fred Gaffaney–They’re going to offer me the command of Internal Affairs when Inspector Eisler retires. Gaffaney is on the Captain’s list; he’s almost certain to be my exec. Then you blew up at him, causing me to lose a great deal of face. I patched it up; old Dutch always looks out for his temperamental genius. Things are changing, Lloyd. The department has been taking a beating from the media–shootings of blacks, police brutality, those two cops busted for possession of coke. There’s a shake-up coming. I.A.D. is filled with born-agains, and the Chief himself wants a crackdown on officers shacking up, fucking whores, chasing pussy, that kind of bullshit. I’m going to have to go along with it, and I don’t want you to get hurt! I told Gaffaney that you’d apologize to him, and I expected you to show up with your wife, not one of your goddamned girlfriends!”
