by James Ellroy
“I got your information, Sergeant.”
Lloyd opened the door and took the woman’s pages. “Let me explain this readout,” she said. “The supervisor got me the business and residence calls up to two days ago; that’s as far up-to-date as their computer is fed. When you go through it you’ll notice that only a few of the numbers have names or addresses after them. That’s because virtually all of this person’s calls were made to pay phones. Isn’t that strange? The locations of the pay phones are listed next to the number. Is this what you wanted?”
Lloyd felt another soft click. “This is excellent. Will you do me one other favor? Call the top managing supervisor at Bell and have her try to get me the numbers called from both phones in the past two days. Have her call me at Robbery/Homicide with the information. Tell her it’s crucial to an important murder investigation. Will you do that for me?”
“Yes, Sergeant. Are you going to talk with the captain? I know that he’s interested in what you’re doing.”
Lloyd shook his head. “No. If he needs me, I’ll be in my office. I’m not going to bother him with this phone business until I have something conclusive. He has enough to worry about.”
Gaffaney’s secretary lowered her eyes. “Yes. He works much too hard.”
Lloyd jogged up to his office, wondering if the born-again witch hunter cheated on his wife. Closing the door, he read over the list of phone numbers dialed from Havilland’s office and Beverly Hills apartment, feeling his clicks collide with Hubert Douglas’ snatch of Thomas Goff dialogue: “He kept callin’ himself a ‘justified paranoid’ and said that he covered his tracks when he took a fuckin’ piss, just to stay in fuckin’ practice.”
The pay phone calling translated to Havilland’s “justified paranoia.” The majority of the calls were made to phone booths situated within a quarter mile radius of the homes of Jack Herzog, Thomas Goff, and Richard Oldfield. The calls to Herzog began last November, which coincided with Marty Bergen’s statement that Herzog met “the guru” six months ago; they ended in late March, around the time of Herzog’s suicide. The Goff calls ran from the beginning of the readout until the day after the liquor store slaughter; the Oldfield communications all the way through until the readout terminated forty-eight hours before.
Turning his attention to the other pay phone locations, Lloyd got out his Thomas Brothers L.A. County street map binder, hoping that his theory meshed with Bergen’s statement about the “guru” charging “big bucks” to “these sad guru-worshipper types.” Phone readout to map index to map; five locations, five confirmations. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. All five pay phones were located in shopping centers in expensive residential neighborhoods—Laurel Canyon, Sherman Oaks, Palos Verdes Estates, San Marino, and the Bunker Hill Towers complex. Conclusion: Not counting other potential “worshipper types” living inside his non-toll-call area of Century City and Beverly Hills, Dr. John Havilland had at least five people, perhaps innocent, perhaps violently disturbed, that he was “counseling.” Unanswered question: Citing Havilland’s “justified paranoia” structure, it was obvious that he wanted to be heavily buffered against any kind of scrutiny. Then were did he meet with his patients?
Lloyd recalled the diplomas on Havilland’s office wall: Harvard Medical School; two hospitals from the metropolitan New York area. Click. Click. Click. Thomas Goff was New York born and bred. Could his association with the Doctor date back to his days as a psychiatric resident? All the clues lay in the past, cloaked in medical secrecy. Lloyd imagined himself as a guru-worshipper type about to write a book, armed with nothing but good intentions and a telephone. Five minutes later that telephone became a time machine hurtling toward Dr. John Havilland’s past.
The book ploy worked. Years before he became dedicated to secrecy, John Havilland had possessed an autobiographical bent, one that was captured for posterity in the form of a Harvard Medical School entrance essay that his faculty advisor called “the very model of both excellence in English skills and the exposition of sound motives for becoming a psychiatrist.”
From the gushing advisor’s recollections of Havilland and his essay, Lloyd learned that the guru shrink was born in Scarsdale, New York in 1945, and that when he was twelve his father disappeared, never to be seen again, leaving young John and his mother lavishly well provided for. After weeks of speculating on his father’s absence, John sustained a head injury that left him with fragmented memories and fantasies of the man who had sired him, a patchwork quilt of truth and illusion that his alcoholic mother could not illuminate in any way. Recurring memory symbols of good and evil—loving rides on a Bronx ferris wheel and the persistent questioning of police detectives—tore at John and filled him with the desire to know himself by unselfishly helping others to know themselves. In 1957, at age twelve, John Havilland set out to become the greatest psychiatrist who ever lived.
Lloyd let the advisor gush on, learning that while at Harvard Med Havilland studied symbolic dream therapy and wrote award-winning papers on psychological manipulation and brainwashing techniques; that during his Castleford Hospital residency he counseled court-referred criminals with astounding results—few of the criminals ever repeated their crimes. After concluding with the words, “and the rest of Dr. Havilland’s work was performed in Los Angeles; good luck with your book,” the advisor waited for a reply. Lloyd muttered, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Calls to Castleford and St. Vincent’s Hospitals proved fruitless; they would not divulge information on Havilland and would not state whether Thomas Goff had ever been treated there. The only remaining telephone destination was a twelve-year-old boy’s “memory symbol” of evil.
Lloyd called the Scarsdale, New York, Police Department and talked to a series of desk officers and clerk typists, learning that the department’s records predating 1961 had been destroyed in a fire. He was about to give up when a retired officer visiting the station came on the line.
The man told Lloyd that some time back in the fifties a filthy rich Scarsdale man named Havilland had been the prime suspect in the murder of a Sing Sing Prison guard named Duane McEvoy, who was himself a suspect in the sex murders of several young Westchester County women. Havilland was also suspected of torching a whole block of deserted houses in an impoverished section of Ossining, including a ramshackle mansion that the then Scarsdale police chief had described as a “torture factory.” Havilland had disappeared around the time that McEvoy’s knife hacked body was found floating in the Hudson River. So far as the retired officer knew, he was never brought to justice or seen again.
After hanging up, Lloyd felt his clicking form a tight web of certainty. John Havilland had seized upon him as an adversary, casually remarking on his resemblance to his father at their initial meeting. An obsession with paternal power had led him to acquire a coterie of weak-willed “offspring”—Goff and Oldfield among them—that he was molding into carriers of his own plague and dispatching on missions of horror. Thomas Goff had probably collided with the Doctor at Castleford Hospital, some time shortly after his parole from Attica. Havilland’s “counseling” had steered him away from the criminal tendencies that had ruled his life to that time, accounting for his post-Attica one hundred percent clean record. He had probably been Havilland’s recruiter of “guru-worshipper types”—his bar prowling M.O. and the testimony of Morris Epstein and Hubert Douglas pointed to it.
Lloyd’s clickings departed the realm of certainty and jumped into the realm of pure supposition with a wild leap that nonetheless felt right: Thomas Goff was dead, murdered by Havilland after he freaked out at the liquor store with his .41. Havilland had done the interior decorating at Goff’s apartment, leaving the “Doctor John the Night Tripper” album as bait. The man that Goff’s landlord had seen the afternoon before the police raid was Oldfield—impersonating Goff. Havilland himself had killed Howard Christie.
Fool. Dupe. Patsy. Chump. Sucker bait. The reprisals jarred Lloyd’s mind. He got up and started down the hall t
o Thad Braverton’s office, then stopped when the door embossed with “Chief of Detectives” loomed in his path as a barrier rather than a beacon. All of his evidence was circumstantial, suppositional, and theoretical. He had no evidential basis on which to arrest Dr. John Havilland.
Shifting physical and mental gears, Lloyd walked down to the fifth floor detention area, finding Marty Bergen alone in the first cage, staring out through the wire mesh.
“Hello, Marty.”
“Hello, Hopkins. Come to gloat?”
“No. Just to say thanks for your statement. It was a help to me.”
“Great. I’m sure you’ll make a smashing collar and carve another notch on your legend.”
Lloyd peered in at Bergen. The crisscrossed wire cast shadows across his face. “Have you got any idea how big this thing is?”
“Yeah. I just heard most of the story. Too bad I can’t report it.”
“Who told you?”
“A source. I’d be a shitty reporter if I didn’t have sources. Got any leads on the guru guy?”
Lloyd nodded. “Yes. I think it’s almost over. Why didn’t you tell me what you knew when I talked to you before?”
Bergen laughed. “Because I didn’t like your style. I did what I had to do by coming forward, Hopkins, so I’m clean. Don’t ask me to kiss your ass.”
Lloyd gripped the wire a few inches from Bergen’s face. “Then kiss this, motherfucker: if you’d talked to me before, Howard Christie would be alive today. Add that one to your guilt list.”
Bergen flinched. Lloyd walked away, letting his words hang like poisonous fallout.
Driving west toward Hollywood, Lloyd asked himself his remaining unanswered questions, supplying instinctive answers that felt as sound as the rest of his hypothesis. Did John Havilland know that Jungle Jack Herzog was dead? No. Most likely he assumed that the shame of Herzog’s “beyond” would prevent him from clueing in the world at large or the police in specific to the man who had “brought him through” it. The wipe marks in Herzog’s apartment? Probably Havilland; probably the day after the liquor store murders, when he realized that Goff was irrevocably flipped out. Goff had recruited Herzog, so it was likely that he might have visited Jungle Jack’s pad and left prints. Havilland would want that potential link to him destroyed. Yet the Doctor had left himself vulnerable at the level of Herzog.
Lloyd forced himself to say the word out loud. Homosexual. It was there in Herzog’s hero worship; in his awful need to court danger as a policeman; in his lack of sexual interest in his girlfriend immediately before his death. Bergen would not elaborate on the suicide note because that piece of paper said it explicitly, illuminating Havilland’s tragic flaw by implication: he wanted Jack Herzog to roam the world as a testimonial to the power of a man who brought a macho cop out of the closet.
Hatred gripped Lloyd in a vice that squeezed him so hard he could feel his brains threaten to shoot out the top of his head. His foot jammed the gas pedal to the floor in reflex rage, and Highland Avenue blurred before his eyes. Then a line from Marty Bergen’s memorial column forced him to hit the brake and decelerate. “Resurrect the dead on this day.” He smiled. Jungle Jack Herzog was going to return from “beyond the beyond” and frame the man who sent him to his death.
Lloyd passed the Hollywood Bowl and turned onto Windemere Drive, cursing when he saw that Oldfield’s Mercedes was not in front of his house and that a profusion of front lawn barbecues would prevent him from a quick B&E. After parking, he walked over and peered in the front window, finding it still covered with heavy curtains. Swearing again, he gave the front lawn a cursory eyeballing, stopping when he saw a patch of white on the otherwise green expanse.
He walked over. The patch was a piece of adhesive bandage, with a streak of what looked like congealed blood on the sticky side. Another soft click, this one followed with a soft question mark. Lloyd picked the bandage up and headed south toward the purchasing of material for his frame.
Parked outside the Brass Rail gun shop on La Brea, he took Howard Christie’s .357 Magnum from the glove compartment and checked the grips. They were checkered walnut with screw fasteners at the top and bottom; interchangeable, but too ridged to sustain fingerprints. Cursing a blue streak, Lloyd took the gun into the shop and flashed his badge at the proprietor, telling him that he wanted a large handgun with interchangeable smooth wooden grips that would also fit his magnum. The proprietor got out a small screwdriver and arrayed a selection of revolvers on the counter. Ten minutes later Lloyd was three hundred and five dollars poorer and the owner of a Ruger .44 magnum with big fat cherry wood grips, the proprietor having waived the three day waiting period on the basis of a certified police affiliation. Thus armed, Lloyd crossed his fingers and drove to a pay phone, hoping that his luck was still holding.
It was. The Robbery/Homicide switchboard operator had an urgent message for him—call Katherine Daniel—Bell Telephone, 623-1102, extension 129. Lloyd dialed the number and seconds later was listening to a husky-voiced woman digress on how her respect for her late policeman father had fueled her to “kick ass” and get him the information he needed.
“… and so I went down to the computer room and checked the current feed-in on your two numbers. No calls were made either yesterday or today from either the business or residence phones. That got my dander up, so I decided to do some checking on this guy Havilland. I started by checking the computer files on his phone bills, going back a year and a half. He paid by check on both bills—with the exception of last December, when a man named William Nagler paid both bills. I then checked this Nagler guy out. He paid his own bill every month, plus the bill for a number in Malibu. He lives in Laurel Canyon, because his checks have his address on them, and his number has a Laurel Canyon prefix. But—”
Lloyd interrupted: “Take it slow from here on in, I’m writing this down.”
Katherine Daniel drew in a breath and said, “All right. I was saying this guy Nagler paid the bill for this number in Malibu—four-five-two, six-one-five-one. The address is unlisted—as long as Nagler pays the bill on the phone there, Ma Bell doesn’t care if it’s in Timbuctu. Anyway, I ran a random sampling of the six-one-five-one toll calls over the past year, and got a lot of the same pay phone numbers the other supervisor gave you on your earlier query. I also ran the computer feed-in from yesterday and today and got some toll calls, all in this area code. Do you want them?”
“Yes,” Lloyd said. “Slow and easy. Have you got names and addresses on them?”
“Do you think I’d do a half-assed job, Officer?”
Lloyd’s forced laugh sounded hysterical to his ears. “No. Go ahead.”
“Okay. Six-two three, eight-nine-one-one, Helen Heil-brunner, Bunker Hill Towers, unit eight-forty-three; three-one-seven, four-zero-four-zero, Robert Rice, one-zero-six-seven-seven Via Esperanza, Palos Verdes Estates; five-zero-two, two-two-one-one, Monte Morton, one-twelve LaGrange Place, Sherman Oaks; four-eight-one, one-two-zero-two, Jane O’Mara, nine-nine-zero-nine Leveque Circle, San Marino; two-seven-five, seven-eight-one-five, Linda Whilhite, nine-eight-one-nine Wilshire, West L.A.; four-seven-zero, eight-nine-five-three, Lloyd W. Hopkins, three-two-nine-zero Kelton, L.A. Hey, is that last guy related to you?”
Lloyd had his laugh perfected. “No. Hopkins is a common name. Have you got Nagler’s phone number and address?”
“Sure. Four-nine-eight-zero Woodbridge Hollow, Laurel Canyon. Four-six-three, zero-six-seven-zero. Is that it?”
“Yes. Farewell, sweet Katherine!”
Husky chuckles came over the line.
Sweating, his legs weak from tension, Lloyd called Dutch’s private line at the Hollywood Station, connecting with a desk sergeant who said that Captain Peltz was out for the afternoon, but would be calling in hourly for his messages. Speaking very slowly, Lloyd explained what he wanted: Dutch was to dispatch trustworthy squadroom dicks to the following addresses and have them lay intimidating “routine questioning” spiels on the people who
answered the door, using “beyond the beyond” and “behind the green door” as buzzwords. Holding back William Nagler’s name and address, he read off the others, having the officer repeat the message. Satisfied, Lloyd said that he would be calling back hourly to clarify the urgency of the matter with Dutch and hung up.
Now the risky part. Now the conscious decision to jeopardize an innocent woman’s life for the sake of a murder indictment, an action that was an indictment of his own willingness to deny everything that had happened with Teddy Verplanck. Driving to Linda’s apartment, Lloyd prayed that she would do or say something to prove the jeopardy move right or wrong, saving them both indictments on charges of cowardice or heedless will.
Linda opened the door with a drink in one hand. Lloyd looked at her posture and the light in her eyes, seeing indignation moving into anger, a prostitute who got fucked once too often. When he moved to embrace her, she stepped out of his way. “No. Tell me first. Then don’t touch me, or I’ll lose what I’m feeling.”
Lloyd walked into the living room and sat down on the sofa, outright scared that Linda’s rectitude said all systems go. He pulled out the .44 magnum and laid it on the coffee table. Linda took a chair and stared at the gun without flinching. “Tell me, Hopkins.”
With his eyes tuned in to every nuance of Linda’s reaction, Lloyd told the entire story of the Havilland case, ending with his theory of how the Doctor had played off the two of them, counting on at least a one-way attraction developing. Linda’s face had remained impassive during the recounting, and it was only when he finished that Lloyd could tell that her gut feeling was awe.
“Jesus,” she said. “We’re dealing with the Moby Dick of psychopaths. Do you really think he has the hots for me, or is that just part of his scam?”
