by James Ellroy
Because the Night
James Ellroy
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media ebook
I must take charge of the liquid fire,
and storm the cities of human desire
—W. H. Auden
1
THE liquor store stood at the tail end of a long stretch of neon, where the Hollywood Freeway cut across Sunset, the dividing line between bright lights and residential darkness.
The man in the yellow Toyota pulled into the bushes beside the on-ramp, twisting the wheel outward and snapping on the emergency brake in a single deft motion. He took a big-bore revolver from the glove compartment and stuck it inside a folded-up newspaper with the grip and trigger guard extended, then turned the ignition key to accessory and opened the car door. Breathing shallowly, he whispered, “Beyond the beyond,” and walked up to the blinking fluorescent sign that spelled L-I-Q-U-O-R, the dividing line between his old life of fear and his new life of power.
When he walked through the open door, the man behind the counter noticed his expensive sports clothes and folded Wall Street Journal and decided he was a class Scotch buyer—Chivas or Walker Black at the least. He was about to offer assistance when the customer leaned over the counter, jabbed the newspaper at his chest and said, “Forty-one-caliber special load. Don’t make me prove it. Give me the money.”
The proprietor complied, keeping his eyes on the cash register to avoid memorizing the robber’s features and giving him a reason to kill. He felt the man’s finger on the trigger and caught the shadow of his head circling the store as he fumbled the cash into a paper bag. He was about to look up when he heard a sob behind him near the refrigerator case, followed by the sound of the robber cocking his gun. When he did look up, the Wall Street Journal was gone and a huge black barrel was descending, and then there was a cracking behind his ear and blood in his eyes.
The gunman leaped behind the counter and dragged the man, kicking and flailing, to the rear of the store, then crept to the cardboard beer display that stood next to the refrigerator case. He kicked the display over and saw a young woman in a navy pea coat huddled behind an old man in coveralls.
The robber weaved on his feet; nothing he had been taught had prepared him for three. His eyes shifted back and forth between the two whimpering in front of him and the counterman off to his left, searching for a neutral ground to tell him what to do. His vision crisscrossed the store, picking up geometric stacks of bottles, shelves piled with junk food, cutouts of girls in bikinis drinking Rum Punch and Spañada. Nothing.
A scream was building in his throat when he saw the beige curtain that separated the store from the living quarters behind it. When a gust of wind ruffled the curtain he did scream—watching as the cotton folds assumed the shape of bars and hangman’s nooses.
Now he knew.
He jerked the girl and the old man to their feet and shoved them to the curtain. When they were trembling in front of it, he dragged the counterman over and stationed him beside them. Muttering, “Green door, green door,” he paced out five yards, wheeled and squeezed off three perfect head shots. The horrible beige curtain exploded into crimson.
2
DETECTIVE Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins stared across the desk at his best friend and mentor Captain Arthur Peltz, wondering when the Dutchman would end his preliminaries and get down to the reason why he had called him here. Everything from the L.A.P.D.’s touch football league to recent robbery bulletins had been discussed. Lloyd knew that since Janice and the girls had left him Dutch had to fish for conversational openers—he could never be direct when he wanted something. The rearing of families had always been their ice-breaker, but now that Lloyd was familyless, Dutch had to establish parities by roundabout means. Growing impatient and feeling ashamed of it, Lloyd looked out the window at the nightwatch revving up their black-and-whites and said, “You’re troubled, Dutch. Tell me what it is and I’ll help.”
Dutch put down the quartz bookend he was fingering. “Jungle Jack Herzog. Ring a bell?”
Lloyd shook his head. “No.”
Handing him a manila folder, Dutch said, “Officer Jacob Herzog, age thirty-four. Thirteen years on the job. An exemplary cop, balls like you wouldn’t believe. Looked like a wimp, bench pressed two-fifty. Worked Metro, worked Intelligence Division plants, worked solo on Vice loan-outs to every squadroom in the city. Three citations for bravery. Known as the ‘Alchemist,’ because he could fake anything. He could be an old crippled man, a drunk marine, a fag, a low rider. You name it.”
Lloyd’s eyes bored in. “And?”
“And he’s been missing for three weeks. You remember Marty Bergen? ‘Old Yellowstreak’?”
“I know two jigs blew his partner in half with a ten-gauge and Bergen dropped his gun and ran like hell. I know he faced a trial board for cowardice under fire and got shitcanned from the Department. I know he published some short stories when he was working Hollenbeck Patrol and that he’s been churning out anticop bullshit for the Big Orange Insider since he was fired. How does he figure in this?”
Dutch pointed to the folder. “Bergen was Herzog’s best friend. Herzog spoke up for him at the trial board, made a big stink, dared the Department to fire him. The Chief himself had him yanked off the streets, assigned to a desk job downtown—clerking at Personnel Records. But Jungle Jack was too good to be put to pasture. He’s been working undercover, on requests from half the vice commanders on this side of the hill. He’d been here at Hollywood for the past couple of months. Walt Perkins requested him, paid him cash out of the snitch fund to glom liquor violators. Jack was knocking them dead where Walt’s guys couldn’t get in the door without being recognized.”
Lloyd picked up the folder and put it in his jacket pocket. “Missing Person’s Report? Family? Friends?”
“All negative, Lloyd. Herzog was a stone loner. No family except an elderly father. His landlord hasn’t seen him in over a month, he hasn’t shown up here or at his personnel job downtown.”
“Booze? Dope? A pussy hound?”
Dutch sighed. “I would say that he was what you’d call an ascetic intellectual. And the Department doesn’t seem to care—Walt and I are the first ones to even note his absence. He’s been a sullen hardass since Bergen was canned.”
Lloyd sighed back. “You’ve been using the past tense to describe Herzog, Dutchman. You think he’s dead?”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
Lloyd’s answer was interrupted by shouting from the downstairs muster room. There was the sound of footsteps in the hall, and seconds later a uniformed cop stuck his head in the doorway. “Liquor store on Sunset and Wilton, Skipper. Three people shot to death.”
Lloyd began to tingle, his body going alternately hot and cold. “I’m going,” he said.
3
THE man in the yellow Toyota turned off Topanga Canyon Road and drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway, dawdling at stoplights so that his arrival at the Doctor’s beach house would coincide exactly with dusk. As always, the dimming of daylight brought relief, brought the feeling of another gauntlet run and conquered. With darkness came his reward for being the Doctor’s unexpendable right arm, the one person aside from the Night Tripper who knew just how far his “lonelies” could be tapped, dredged, milked, and exploited.
Spring was a sweet enemy, he thought. There were tortuously long bouts of sunshine to contend with, transits that made nightfall that much more satisfying. This morning he had been up at dawn, running an eight-hour string of telephone credit checks on the names gleaned from the John books of the Doctor’s hooker patients. A full day, with, hopefully, a fuller evening in store: his first grouping since taking three people for the mortal coil shuffle and maybe later
a run to the South Bay singles bars to trawl for more rich lonelies.
The man’s timing was perfect; he pulled off P.C.H. and down the access road just as the Doctor’s introductory music wafted across the parking area. Six cars—six lonelies; a full house. He would have to run for the speaker room before the Night Tripper got impatient.
Inside the house, the man ignored the baroque quartet issuing over the central speakers and made for a small rectangular room lined with acoustical padding. The walls held a master recording console with six speakers—one for each upstairs bedroom, with microphone jacks for each outlet and six pairs of headphones and an enormous twelve-spooled tape deck capable of recording the activity in all the bedrooms with the flick of a single switch.
He went to work, first turning on the power amp, then hitting the volume on all six speakers at once. A cacophony of chanting struck his ears and he turned the sound down. The lonelies were still shouting their mantras, working themselves into the trancelike state that was a necessary precondition to the Doctor’s counseling. Getting out his notebook and pen, the man settled into a leather chair facing the console, waiting for the red lights on the amplifier to flash—his signal to listen in, record, and assess from his standpoint as Dr. John Havilland’s executive officer.
He had held that position for two years; two years spent prowling Los Angeles for human prey. The Doctor had taught him to control his compulsions, and in payment for that service he had become the instrument that brought about realization of Havilland’s own obsession.
As the Doctor explained it, a “consciousness implosion” had replaced the “consciousness explosion” of the 1960s, resulting in large numbers of people abandoning the old American gospels of home, hearth, and country, and the counterculture revelations of the sixties. Three exploitable facts remained, one indigenous to the naive pre-sixties psyche, two to the jaded post: God, sex, and drugs. Given the right people, the variations on those three themes would be infinite.
His assignment was to find the right people. Havilland described his prototypical chess piece as: “White, of either gender, the offspring of big money who never fit in and never grew up; weak, scared, bored to death and without purpose, but given to a mystical bent. They should be orphaned and living on trust funds or investment capital or severely estranged from their families and living on remittances. They should accede to the concept of the ‘spiritual master’ without the slightest awareness that what they really want is someone to tell them what to do. They should love drugs and possess marked sexuality. They should consider themselves rebels, but their rebelliousness should always have been actualized as timid participation in mass movements. Find these people for me. It will be easier than you might think; because as you search for them, they will be searching for me.”
The search took him to singles bars, consciousness workshops, the ashrams of a half dozen gurus, and lectures on everything from New Left social mobilization to macrobiotic midwifery, and resulted in six people who met Havilland’s criteria straight down the line and who fell for his charisma hook, line, and sinker. Along the way he served the Doctor in other capacities, burglarizing the homes of his legitimate patients; reconnoitering for information that would lead to the recruitment of more lonelies; screening sex ads in the underground tabloids for rich older people to pimp the lonelies to; planning his training sessions and keeping his elaborately crossreferenced files.
He had moved forward with the Doctor, indispensable as his procuror of human clay. Soon Havilland would embark on his most ambitious project, with him at his side. Last night he had proved his mettle superbly.
But the headaches …
The light above speaker number one flashed on, causing the man to drop his pen and reach for the headphones. He had managed to adjust them and plug in the jack when he heard the Doctor cough—his signal that it was time to pay careful attention and make notes about anything that seemed special or particularly useful.
First came a profusion of amenities, followed by the two lonelies praising the bedroom’s decor. The man could hear the Doctor pooh-poohing the rococo tapestries, assuring his charges that such surroundings were their birthright.
“Get to it, Doc,” the man muttered.
As if in answer, the Doctor said, “So much for light conversation. We’re here to break through the prosaic, not dawdle in it. How did your ménage in Santa Barbara work out? Did you learn anything about yourselves? Exorcise any demons?”
A soft male voice answered. The man recognized the voice immediately and recalled his recruitment: the gay bar in West Hollywood; the plump executive type whose wary mien was a virtual neon sign announcing “frightened first-timer seeking sexual identity.” The seduction had been easy and the seducee had met all the Doctor’s criteria.
“We used the coke to get things started,” the soft voice said. “Our client was old and afraid of displaying his body, but the coke got his juices running. I—”
A woman’s voice interrupted: “I got the old geezer’s juices going. He wasn’t even down to his skivvies when I grabbed his crotch. He wanted the woman to take the lead; I sensed that as soon as we walked in the door and I saw all that science fiction art on the walls—amazons with chains and whips, all that shit. He—”
The soft male voice rose to a wail. “I was savoring the lead-in! Doctor said to take it slow, the guy wasn’t pre-screened. We got him from the sex ads, and Doctor said that—”
“Bullshit!” the woman barked. “You wanted to get coked yourself, and you wanted the old guy to like you because you were the one with the dope, and if we played it your way the whole assignment would have been a cocaine tea party.”
The man put down his pen as the executive type started to blubber. After a short interval of silence, the Doctor whispered, “Hush, Billy. Hush. Go out and sit in the hallway. I want to talk to Jane alone.”
There were the sounds of footsteps over a hardwood floor and of a door slammed in rage. The man smiled in anticipation of some vintage Havilland. When the Doctor’s voice came over the speaker, he took up his pen with a glee akin to love.
“You’re letting your anger run you, Jane.”
“I know, Doctor,” the woman said.
“Your power lies in exercising it judiciously.”
“I know.”
“Was the assignment fulfilling?”
“Yes. I chose the sex and made them like it.”
“But it felt hollow afterwards?”
“Yes and no. It was satisfying, but Billy and the old man were so weak!”
“Hush, Janey. You deserve to traffic with stronger egos. I’ll keep my eye on the high-line personals. We’ll find you some feisty intellectuals to butt heads with.”
“And a partner with balls?”
“Nooo, you’ll go solo next time.”
The man heard Jane weep in gratitude. Shaking his head in loathing, he listened to the Doctor deliver his coup de grâce: “He paid you the full five thousand?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Did you do something nice for yourself with your gratuity?”
“I bought myself a sweater.”
“You could have done better than that.”
“I—I wanted you to have the money, Doctor. I took the sweater just as a symbol of the assignment.”
“Thank you, Jane. Everything else all right? Reciting your fear mantras? Following the program?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Good. Then leave the money with me. I’ll call you at the pay phone later this week.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
The sounds of departure forced the man to catch up with his note-taking. As if on cue, the Doctor clapped his hands and said, “Jesus, what an ugly creature. Speaker three, Goff. Efficacy training.”
Goff plugged a jack into speaker number three and hit the record switch. When the tape spool began to spin, he tiptoed upstairs to watch. This would be his first visual auditing since blasting his “beyond” to hell, and he had to se
e how far the Night Tripper was taking his recruits. Only one of them was capable of approaching his own degree of extremity, and all his instincts told him that Havilland was just about to push him to it.
Goff was wrong. Peering through a crack in the door, he saw the Professor and the Bookworm kneeling on gym mats facing the mirror that covered the entire west wall. Their hands were clasped as if in prayer and Havilland was standing over them, murmuring works of encouragment. With Billy Boy and the Bull Dagger already counseled, it meant that the Doctor was saving the foxy redhead and the real psycho for last.
Goff pressed himself into the wall and stared into the bedroom just as the two men on the mats pulled off their undershirts and began shouting their fear mantras. “Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum.” With each repetition of the phrase they smashed their hands into their chests, each time harder, shouting louder and louder as the blows hit home. Throughout, they retained eye to eye contact with their own mirror images, never flinching, even as blood-dotted welts rose on their torsos.
Goff checked the second hand of his watch. One minute. Two. Three. Just when he thought the chanters would have to collapse, he heard the word “Stop!”
Havilland knelt on the mat, facing the men. Goff watched them move their eyes from the mirror to the eyes of the Doctor, then extend their right arms and squeeze their hands into fists. Havilland reached into the pocket of his lab coat and withdrew a disposable syringe and a handful of cotton balls. First he injected the Bookworm; then he wiped the needle and injected the Professor. Both lonelies swayed on their knees but remained upright.
The Doctor got to his feet, smiled, and said, “Think pure efficacy. Robert, you have been placed in a very wealthy home on assignment. A couple, an older man and woman, are drooling for your favors. The phone rings. They both go to answer it. Where do you go?”
