by James Ellroy
Thinking of the Los Angeles Police Department as both the keepers and inmates of the Twilight Zone, Lloyd rifled the desk drawers looking for official paper pertaining to Malibu property. Finding nothing but stationery and invoices for movie equipment, he walked down the hall looking for other likely rooms to toss. The bathroom and kitchen would probably yield zilch, but at the end of the hallway stood a half-opened door.
Lloyd walked to it and fumbled at the inside wall for a light switch. An overhead light went on, framing a small room filled with haphazardly discarded movie cameras, rolls of film, and developing trays. The floor was a mass of broken equipment, with plaster chips torn loose from the walls. Noticing a Movieola that remained intact atop a metal desk, Lloyd peered in the viewfinder and saw a celluloid strip showing a pair of inert legs clad in white stockings.
He was about to examine the equipment more closely when singing and chanting blasted from the living room. Walking back to investigate, Lloyd saw and heard a hellish two-part harmony.
Marty Bergen was standing over a kneeling William Nagler, strumming an imaginary guitar and singing, “They had an old piano and they played it hot behind the green door! don’t know what they’re doin’, but they laugh a lot behind the green door! Won’t someone let me in so I can find out what’s behind the green door!”
When Bergen fell silent, fumbling for more verses, Nagler’s chanting took precedence, “Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum.” Muttered in a droning monotone punctuated by the worshipper’s banging of his prayer-clasped hands against his chest, the words seemed to rise from a volition far older and darker than John Havilland or his murderer-father. “Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum.”
Bergen snapped to Lloyd’s presence and shouted above the chanting, “Hi, Hoppy! Think I’ll make the top forty with this? Green Door Green Door Green Door!”
Lloyd grabbed Bergen and shoved him to the wall and held him there, hissing, “Shut the fuck up now, and don’t drink another drop. Go toss the rest of the pad for Nagler’s I.R.S. forms and income tax returns. Don’t say another fucking word, just do it.”
Bergen tried to smile. It came out a death grin. “Okay, Sarge,” he said.
Lloyd released Bergen and watched him ooze off the wall. When he shambled away, the chanting became the dominating aspect of the room, “Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum.”
Lloyd knelt in front of the worshipper, watching his trance grow deeper with each blow to the heart, memorizing every detail of the flagellation in order to justify his next move. When Nagler’s glazed eyes and heaving lungs were permanently imprinted in his mind, he swung a full power open hand at his head and saw the trance crumble as the worshipper was knocked off his knees screaming, “Doctor!”
Lloyd, knocked loose of his own equilibrium, pinned Nagler’s shoulders to the floor and shouted, “Havilland’s dead, William. Before he died he said that you were a chump and a fool and a dupe.”
Nagler’s glazed eyes zeroed in on Lloyd. “No. No. No. Patria infinitum. Patria infin—”
Lloyd dug his fingers into the worshipper’s collarbone. “No, William, you can’t. You can’t go back.”
“Doctor!”
“Shhh. Shhh. You can’t, Bill. You can’t go back.”
“Doctor!”
Lloyd dug his fingers deeper, until Nagler started to sob. Withdrawing his hands altogether, he said, “He talked about how he used you, Bill. How he got you to pay his phone bills, how he made you his slave, how he laughed at you, how your movies were shit, how. you had all that expensive equipment, but you did—”
Lloyd stopped when Nagler’s sobs trailed off into a terrified stutter. “Hor-hor-hor-moo-hor-moo.”
“Shhh, shhh,” Lloyd whispered. “Take it slow and think the words out.”
Nagler stared up at Lloyd. The look on his face wavered between grief and bliss. Finally the bliss prevailed long enough for him to say, “Horror movie. Doctor John made a horror movie. That’s how I know you’re lying about what he said about me. He appreciates my talent. I edited the movie and Doctor said—he said …”
Lloyd stood up, then helped Nagler to his feet and pointed him toward the sofa. When Nagler was seated, he studied his face. He looked like a man about to enter the gas chamber who didn’t know whether or not he wanted to die. Knowing that the bliss/death part of the worshipper had the edge and possessed the potential to produce lucid answers, Lloyd quashed his impulse to bludgeon Nagler into grief/life. Sighing, he sat down beside the ravished young man and stabbed in the dark. “Havilland isn’t really dead, Bill.”
“I know that,” Nagler said. “He was here this morning with—” He stopped and flashed a robot smile. “He was here this morning.”
Lloyd said, “Finish the thought, Bill.”
“I did. Doctor John was here this morning. End of thought.”
“No. Beginning of thought. But let’s change the subject. You don’t really think I’m a policeman, do you?”
Nagler shook his head. “No. Doctor John told me that there was a three percent leak factor in our program. I know exactly what the leak was—it came to me while I was chanting. You’re an Internal Revenue agent. I paid Doctor John’s phone bills while he went skiing in Idaho last December. You checked the records out, because you’re with big brother. You also cross-checked my bank records and the Doctor’s, and saw that I sent him a big check last year. He probably forget to report it on his tax return. You want a bribe to keep silent. Very well, name your amount and I’ll write a check.” Nagler laughed. “How silly of me. That would leave a record. No, name your amount and I’ll pay you off in cash.”
Lloyd gasped at Nagler’s recuperative powers. Five minutes earlier, he had been a groveling mass. Now he held the condescending authority of a plantation owner A “horror movie” and the wrecked equipment in the back room were the dividing points. Thinking, Break him, he said, “Didn’t it surprise you that my partner knew enough to sing you that song?”
“No. A song is a song.”
“And a movie is a movie,” Lloyd said, reaching into his pocket. “Bill, it’s time I came clean. Doctor John sent me to test your loyalty.” He held out the mug-shot strip of Thomas Goff. “I’m the replacement for the old recruiter. You remember this fellow, don’t you? There’s a guy on Doctor John’s program who looks just like him. I know all about the meetings at the house in Malibu and how you bought the house for the Doctor and how you pay the phone bill. I know about the pay phone contacts and how you don’t fraternize outside the meetings. I know because I’m one of you, Bill.”
First grief, then bliss, now bewilderment. Lloyd had kept his eyes averted from Nagler, letting him feast on Thomas Goff’s image instead of his own. When he finally reestablished eye contact he saw that the man had fingered the mug-shot strip to pieces and that his spiel had turned him into clay. Feeling like a bullfighter going in for the kill, Lloyd said, “I also lied when I said that Doctor John said that your movies were shit. He really loves your movie work. In fact, just today he told me that he wants you to both star in and direct the script that he’s working on. He tol—”
Lloyd stopped when Nagler’s grief took him over. “Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum.”
Lloyd thought of Linda and got up and walked toward the den and the telephone. He had his hand on the reciever when a tap on his shoulder forced him to jump back, turn around, and ball his fists.
It was Bergen, looking eerily sober. “I couldn’t find any I.R.S. papers,” he said, “but I did find our pal’s diary under his bed. Renaissance weird, Hopkins. Fucking gothic.”
Lloyd took the morocco bound book from Bergen’s hands and sat down on the desk. Opening it, he saw that the first entry was dated 11/13/83, and that it and all the subsequent entries were written in an exquisitely flourished longhand. While Bergen stood over him, he read through accounts of Ha
villand’s “programming,” picking up a cryptically designated cast along the way. There was the “Lieutenant,” who had to be Thomas Goff; the “Fox,” the “Bull dagger,” the “Bookworm,” the “Professor,” the “Muscleman,” and “Billy Boy,” who had to be Nagler himself.
The entries themselves detailed how Havilland ordered his charges to fast for thirty-six hours, then stand nude in front of full-length mirrors and chant their “fear mantras” into tape recorders, until “subliminal dream consciousness” took over and led them to babble “transcendental fantasies” that he would later sift through for “key details” to translate into “reality fodder.” How he paired them off sexually at the “Beach Womb,” interrupting the couplings to take vital signs and “stress readings”; how he forced them to kill dogs and cats as “insurance against moral flaccidity”; how the “Lieutenant” interrupted their REM sleep with late night phone calls and brutal interrogations into their dreams.
Alternately using the first person “I” and the third person “Billy Boy,” Nagler described how he and Doctor John’s other counselees were pimped out to wealthy people who advertised for “fantasy therapists” in privately published and circulated sex tabloids, the weekend “lovemaking seminars” often netting Havilland several thousand dollars, and how the “beach womb groupings” were taped and transcribed by the “Lieutenant,” who sometimes served as the “Chef”—concocting mixtures of pharmaceutical cocaine and other prescription drugs that the Doctor would administer to his counselees under “test-flight conditions.”
Lloyd leafed full-speed through the diary, looking for incriminating facts: names, addresses and dates. With Marty Bergen hovering beside him and Nagler’s muffled chanting coming in from the living room, he felt like the sole outpost of sanity in a lunatic landscape, the feeling underlined by the fact that the diary contained no facts—only narrated disclosures peopled with coded characters.
Until an entry dated the day before jumped out at him:
Helped set up movie equipment at the Muscleman’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Doctor John supervised. I showed him how to operate the camera. I hope Muscle-man won’t break anything. He scares me—and he looks more and more like the Lieutenant these days.
The entry was followed by a blank page, followed by the diary’s concluding entry, dated that morning. Lloyd felt an icepick at his spine as he read,
It’s not real. They faked it. You can fake anything with new camera technology. It’s a fake. It’s not real.
Lloyd shoved Bergen aside and walked back to the movie room and searched among the upended equipment for film scraps, finding three strips of celluloid wedged underneath the editing machine. Running them through the machine’s feeder-viewfinder, he saw four close-ups of a woman’s white nyloned legs, a long shot of a mattress on a carpeted floor and a blurred extreme close-up of a broad-chested man with what looked like an L.A.P.D. badge pinned to his shirt.
The icepick jabbed his heart. Lloyd thought of the white-stockinged nurse that Richard Oldfield had brought to his house twenty-four hours before. The knife twisted, dug and tore, accompanied by a deafening burst of patria infinitums from the living room.
Lloyd walked toward the sound, finding Nagler still in his mantra pose and Bergen standing beside the fireplace, pouring bottles of liquor over the acrylic “firewood” on the grate. “Long-term interrogation, Sarge,” he said. “It won’t do to get tempted. What’s next?” His ghoul grin had become a feisty smirk, and for one split-second Lloyd found a beacon of sanity.
“I’m leaving, you’re staying here,” he said. “I have to check on someone. Then, if she got my evidence, I have to take our friend’s guru out. You stay here and watchdog him. Hang by the phone. If I need you, I’ll ring once, then call back immediately.”
“I want in on the bust,” Bergen said.
Lloyd shook his head. “No. Just having you here could cause me lots of grief, and I’m not risking my job or you any further.” He watched Bergen’s smirk go hangdog. “What are you going to do when all this is over?”
Bergen laughed as he poured out a bottle of Courvoisier V.S.O.P. “I don’t know. Jack left me close to twenty grand, maybe I’ll just see where that takes me.” When Lloyd didn’t react to his mention of the money, he said, “You knew about the bank draft, right?”
Lloyd said, “Yeah. I didn’t report it because I knew I.A.D. would try to seize your account as evidence.”
“You’re a good shit, Hopkins. You know that?”
“Sometimes.”
“What are you going to do when this is over?”
Lloyd thought of Linda and Janice and his daughters, then looked over at the devastated William Nagler, still chanting at demons. “I don’t know,” he said.
24
THE Night Tripper sat at the recording console in the Beach Womb, listening to Richard Oldfield and Linda Wilhite make frightened small talk upstairs in bedroom number three. The split-second accuracy of his fate had taken on ironic overtones. Linda’s screaming of “Hopkins” combined with the gun in her purse was a tacit admission that the genius cop had figured it out on the same day that he had broken through his childhood void. Richard had blown his chance to kill Hopkins, and his contingency plan to drive Linda over the edge with the snuff film and have her commit the murder had backfired. After twenty-seven years devoted to venting his terror through others, it had all come down to himself. He had claimed his father’s heritage, gaining autonomy along with the knowledge that the game was over. God was a malevolent jokester armed with a blunt instrument called irony.
Havilland leaned back in the chair that Thomas Goff used to occupy, feeling a conscious version of his dream disengagement split him in two. His left side imagined whirling corkboards, while his right side heard words issuing from the bedroom where Richard guarded the object of his corkboard fantasies. Soon exhaustion crept up. The spinning of the corkboard dominated, while the words played on, like dim music at the edge of sound.
“… why are you staring at me?”
“Doctor said to watch you.”
“Do you do everything he tells you to do?”
“Yes. Why are you making nasty faces at me? I’ve been gentle with you.”
“Because Doctor said to be gentle? No, don’t answer, it’ll only make me hate you more. For your information, drugging and kidnapping is not a gentle activity. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes. No. You’re very beautiful.”
“Jesus. Was that movie for real? I mean, there was the awful part, and then this close-up of you. Listen, are you Thomas Goff?”
“I told you my name was Richard.”
“All right, but what about the movie. Was it real? My mother was killed like that, with a pillow and a gun. Is the movie part of your crazy guru’s plans for me?”
“What movie?”
“Jesus. Are you high? I mean, on something besides insanity? You know, on drugs?”
“Doctor gives me tranquilizers and antidepressants. Prescription stuff. He’s a doctor, so it’s legal and not bad.”
“Not bad? Havilland’s a Doctor Feelgood to boot? No, don’t answer, I know he’s capable of anything. I’m not going to let you hurt me, you know. Never. Not ever.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Jesus, you sound like Peter Loire. Does it turn you on that I’m not scared?”
“Yes. No. No!”
“First responses are always the most honest, Richard. If you or that psychopath downstairs tried to hurt me, I’d kick and bite and scratch and rub lye in your eyes. I—”
“I don’t want to hurt you! I’ve done my hurting! It wasn’t good!”
“Y-you—you mean you hurt other women?”
“Yes! No! I mean they hurt me. Me! Me! Me! Me. Me.”
“Who hurt you? What are you talking about?”
“No. Doctor said I should talk to you, but not about bad things.”
“Bad things, hmm? Okay, we’ll change the subject. Let me as
k you a question. Do you honestly think that those overdeveloped muscles of yours are a turn-on to women?”
“No. Yes. Yes!”
“First responses, Richard, and you’re right. A woman sees a man like you and thinks, ‘This guy is so insecure that he spends three hours a day at the gym with all the fags and narcissists, building himself up outside so I won’t know how scared he is inside.’ I’ve got a lover who’s bigger than you and probably almost as strong, but he’s got a trace of flab on his stomach and hips. And I dig it. You know why? Because he lives in reality and does a good job of it, and he hasn’t got time to pump iron. So don’t think your muscles impress me.”
“The … they’re for protection.”
“From the people who hurt you? From the women who hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“Aha, the truth outs. Let me set you straight on something. Muscles don’t rule the world, brains do. Which is how a wimp like Havilland can make a slave out of someone big and strong like you. People protect each other with their love, not their muscles. Someone, probably some woman, hurt you really badly. She didn’t do it with her muscles, because she didn’t have any. You can’t get revenge by hitting back at people the way they hit at you, because then the people who hurt you win—by making you like them. Aren’t you hip to that?”
“No. It’s different with Doctor John. He took me beyond my beyond.”
“What’s your beyond?”
“No!”
“Hurting women? You can’t hurt me, because I’m smarter than you and stronger than you, and because that wimp downstairs told you not to. Some fucking beyond. Brown-noser to a freaked-out headshrinker who’s going to end up in the locked ward at Camarillo for life. Who’s going to protect you when he’s wearing a straitjacket and sucking baby food out of a straw?”
