by James Ellroy
Back-up charges were quick in coming, as federal agents investigating the Howard Christie murder moved in and seized everything at Havilland’s Century City office, Beverly Hills condominium, and Malibu house. His handwritten notes alone led to three indictments for first degree murder, handwriting experts having examined verified specimens of the Doctor’s script along with his diary notations stating that he had ordered Thomas Goff to “kill the proprietor of the liquor store on Sunset and the Hollywood Freeway as proof of your desire to move beyond your beyond.” Indentical match ups, three murder one indictments and an indictment for criminal conspiracy resulting.
The agents also found the deed to a storage garage in East Los Angeles, and upon checking it out discovered a yellow Toyota sedan and the decomposed body of Thomas Goff. A right index print belonging to John Havilland was found on the car’s dashboard. The District Attorney of the City of Los Angeles ordered yet another murder indictment. The federal officers could find no concrete evidence linking Havilland to the murder of Howard Christie, and gave up.
Four days into his forced sequestering, Captain Fred Gaffaney visited Lloyd at his typewriter storageroom/domicile and told him that any report that he submitted explaining Martin Bergen’s presence at the Malibu house would be accepted if he agreed to edit cut all mention of former officer Jacob Herzog and all mention of the stolen L.A.P.D. files and the security firms and their files. The various prosecutors thus far involved in the case had read his ninety-four page epic and considered it “overly candid” and “potentially embarrassing to the prosecution.” Lloyd agreed. Gaffaney smiled and told him it was a wise move—he would have been summarily shitcanned from the Department had he refused. Before he left, Gaffaney added that he would be appearing before the Grand Jury in two days. Was there any information he had held back? Lloyd lied and said, “No.”
The worshippers of John Havilland were taken into custody, questioned and released after signing depositions elaborating their relationships with “Doctor John.” A freelance “deprogrammer” of religious cult captives was there to aid the district attorneys and D.A.’s investigators in their interrogations. The combined coercion worked four out of five times, resulting in detailed accounts of brainwashing, dope experimentation, and sexual debasement. Only William Nagler could not be convinced to talk. He screamed his mantra and ranted about “horror movies” and was ultimately released to the care of his parents, who admitted him to an expensive private sanitarium. The D.A.s were pleased overall with their questionings; the depositions would be juicy fodder for the Grand Jury, and they would spare the sad brainwashees the grief of a courtroom appearance.
Lloyd was not spared that grief. He spoke for four straight hours, almost verbatim from his new arrest report, omitting all mention of Herzog, the security files and Martin Bergen’s outsized role in his investigation. He explained Bergen’s presence at the death house as a simple case of a bulldog reporter hot on a story. When Lloyd concluded his own story, he did not mention Richard Oldfield or Linda Wilhite and their presences at the house, or how he happened to be unconscious when the first wave of Sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene. When he walked back to the witness table, Fred Gaffaney was there with a wink and glad tidings: his violations of L.A.P.D. canon were only going to cost him a thirty-day suspension without pay, a slap on the wrist for his vigilante hooliganism.
The final witness to appear before the Grand Jury was a Los Angeles County deputy medical examiner, who stated that in his opinion the flurry of indictments leveled at Havilland was overkill, because the Doctor’s fall down a steep flight of stairs immediately before his arrest had resulted in severe and irrevocable brain damage. Havilland was destined to live out his years insensate, not knowing who, what, or where he was. The impact sustained by his fall had opened up lesions from a previous head injury, quadrupling the neurological destruction. The M.E. ended with the statement, “I tried to get the man to understand that I was a doctor, that I was there to examine him. It was like trying to explain relativity to a turnip. He kept looking at me so pathetically. He had no idea that it was over.”
But Lloyd knew that it wasn’t. There was the unfinished business of the horror movie and the big “why” of Linda’s behavior at the Beach Womb. And when that was settled, there was the matter of homage to Marty Bergen.
Nine days after the incident the press had dubbed the “Malibu Massacre,” Lloyd was released from his “voluntary incarceration” at Parker Center. His thirty-day suspension had twenty-one days left to go, and he was told to remain in Los Angeles for the next two weeks, in order to be available to the myriad D.A.s working on the Havilland case. He was also ordered not to speak to representatives of the media and to refrain from police work on any level.
Returning to Los Angeles at large, Lloyd found that John Havilland had become a cause for ghoulish celebration. The psychiatrist was still front-page news, and a number of nightclub comedians had made him the focal point of their shticks. The Big Orange Insider had dubbed him the “Witch Doctor,” and the 1958 novelty song “Witch Doctor” by David Seville and the Chipmunks was re-released and climbing the top forty. Charles Manson was interviewed in his cell at Vacaville Prison and proclaimed Dr. John Havilland “a cool dude.”
Medical authorities at the jail ward of the L.A. County Hospital proclaimed the Doctor a vegetable, and Lloyd resisted his own ghoulish impulse to visit his adversary in his padded cell and throw the phrase “snuff film” at what remained of his brain. Instead, before going home or partaking of any post-sequentering amenities, he drove to 4109 Winde-mere Drive.
No L.A.P.D. or Federal crime scene stickers on the doors or windows; layers of undisturbed dust on the junctures of doors and doorjambs. An ordinary looking tudor cottage in the Hollywood Hills. Lloyd sighed as he circuited the house on foot. Stonewall. He hadn’t mentioned Oldfield in any of his official reports or earlier communiqués, and the feds who had seized Havilland’s property either hadn’t come across Old-field’s name or had decided to ignore it. In their fearful haste to deny Jack Herzog, the L.A.P.D. and the F.B.I. were letting the sleeping dogs that were John Havilland’s minions lie.
Lloyd broke into the house through a back window and went straight for the bedroom. A mattress lay on the carpeted floor, an indentical visual match to the film scrap he had seen at Billy Nagler’s workshop. Reddish-brown matter stained a swatch of carpet near the window. Recalling the adhesive bandage he had found on the front lawn the day before the Malibu apocalypse, Lloyd bent down and examined it. Blood.
Checking the rest of the house, Lloyd found it cleaned of personal belongings. No male clothing, no toilet articles, no legal or personal documents. Food, appliances and furniture remained. Oldfield had fled. And judging from the dust on the doorjambs, he had a good head start.
Driving back to Parker Center, he put all thoughts regarding Linda Wilhite out of his mind, coming to one solid conclusion. Havilland or Oldfield had destroyed the movie. Had the Department or the feds discovered it, he would have heard. Again he was dealing with theory and circumstantial evidence.
It took Officer Artie Cranfield a scant ten minutes to identify the reddish brown matter on the carpet swatch as type O+ blood. Thus armed with facts, Lloyd called the L.A.P.D. Missing Persons Bureau and requested the stats on all female Caucasians age twenty-five to forty with type O+ blood reported missing over the past ten days. Only one woman fit the description—Sherry Lynn Shroeder, age thirty-one, reported missing by her parents six days before. Lloyd wept when the clerk ticked off her last known place of employment—Junior Miss Cosmetics.
He had watched her walk in the door.
Tears streaming down his face, Lloyd ran through the halls and out the door of Parker Center, knowing that he was exonerated and that it wasn’t enough; knowing that the woman he wanted to love was innocent of the overall tapestry of evil; she had been psychically violated by a madman. In the parking lot, he slammed the hood of his car and kicked the grill and broke off t
he radio aerial and molded it into a missile of hate. Hurling it at the twelve story monolith that defined everything he was, he sent up a vow to Sherry Lynn Shroeder and set out to plumb the depths of his whore/lover’s violation.
A call to Telecredit revealed that Linda Wilhite had bank balances totaling $71,843.00 and had made no recent major purchases with any of her credit cards. Richard Oldfield had liquidated his three savings and checking accounts and had sold a large quantity of IBM stock for $91,350.00.
A trip to L.A. International Airport armed with D.M.V. snapshots of the two supplied the information that Oldfield had boarded a flight for New York City four days after the Malibu killing, paying cash for his ticket and using an assumed name. Linda had accompanied him to the gate. An alert baggage handler told Lloyd that the two didn’t seem like lovers, they seemed more like “with-it” sister and “out-of-it” brother.
Lloyd drove back to L.A. proper feeling jealous and tired and somehow afraid to go home, afraid that there was something he had forgotten to do. He would have to confront Linda soon, but before he did that he needed to pay tribute to a fallen comrade.
Marty Bergen’s landlady opened the door of her former tenant’s apartment and told Lloyd that the people from the Big Orange had come by and taken his beat-up furniture and typewriter, claiming that he promised them to the tabloid in his common law will. She had let them take the stuff because it was worthless, but she kept the box that had the book he was working on, because he owed two months rent and maybe she could sell it to the real newspapers and make up her loss. Was that a crime?
Lloyd shook his head, then took out his billfold and handed her all the cash it contained. She grabbed it gratefully and ran down the hall to her own apartment, returning with a large cardboard box overflowing with typed pages. Lloyd took it from her hands and pointed to the door. The woman genuflected out of the apartment, leaving him alone to read.
The manuscript ran over five hundred pages, the typing bracketed with red-inked editorial comments that made it seem like a complete co-authorship. It was the story of two medieval warriors, one prodigal, one chaste, who loved the same woman, a princess who could only be claimed by traversing concentrically arrayed walls of fire, each ring filled with progressively more hideous and bloodthirsty monsters. The two warriors started out as rivals, but became friends as they drew closer and closer to the princess, battling demons who entered them as they entered each gauntlet of flame, growing telepathic as the guardians of each other’s spirit. When the final wall of fire stood immediately before them, they revolted against the symbiosis and prepared to do battle to the death.
At that point the manuscript ended, replaced by contrapuntal arguments in two different handwritings. The quality of the prose had deteriorated in the last chapters. Lloyd pictured Jack Herzog pushed to the edge of his tether by the Witch Doctor, trying to forge poetry out of the horror of his flickering-out life. When he finally put the book down, Lloyd didn’t know if it was good, bad, or indifferent-only that it had to see print as a hymn for the L.A. dead.
The hymn became a dirge as he drove to Linda Wilhite’s apartment, hoping that she wouldn’t be there, so he could go home and rest and prolong the sense of what might have been.
But she was.
Lloyd walked in the half-opened door. Linda was sitting on the living room sofa, perusing the classified section of the Times. When she looked up and smiled, he shuddered. No might-have-beens. She was going to tell him the truth.
“Hello, Hopkins. You’re late.”
Lloyd nodded at the classifieds. “Looking for a job?”
Linda laughed and pointed to a chair. “No, business opportunities. Fifty grand down and a note from the bank gets me a Burger King franchise. What do you think?”
Lloyd sat down. “It’s not your style. Seen any good movies lately?”
Linda shook her head slowly. “I saw a preview of one, and got a vivid synopsis from one of the stars. The one print was destroyed, by me. I’d forgotten how good you were, Hopkins. I didn’t think you knew that part of it.”
“I’m the best. I even know the victim’s name. You want to hear it?”
“No.”
Lloyd mashed his hands together and brought them toward his chest, then stopped when he realized he was unconsciously aping Billy Nagler’s worship pose. “Why, Linda? What the fuck happened with you and Oldfield?”
Linda formed her hands into a steeple, then saw what she was doing and jammed them into her pockets. “The movie was a crazy reenactment of my parents’ deaths. Havilland pushed Richard into it. He ran part of the film for me at his office. I freaked out and screamed. Richard grabbed me, and they doped me and took me out to Malibu. Richard and I talked. I hit the one germ of sanity and decency that he had. I convinced him that he could walk out the door like the movie and Havilland never existed. We were getting ready to walk when Havilland called out ‘Now!’ Marty Bergen could have walked out with us. But then you showed up with your shotgun.”
When Lloyd remained silent, Linda said, “Babe, it was the right thing to do, and I love you for it. Richard and I took off running, and you could have put the cops on to us, but you didn’t, because of what you felt for me. There’s no rights and wrongs in this one. Don’t you know that?”
Lloyd brought his eyes back from deep nowhere. “No, I don’t know that. Oldfield killed an innocent woman. He has to pay. And then there’s us. What about that?”
“Richard has paid,” Linda said in a whisper. “God, has he paid. For the record, he’s long gone. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t want to know, and if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Do you have any idea what you did? Do you, goddamn it!”
Linda’s whisper was barely audible. “Yes. I figured out that I could walk, and I convinced someone else that he could, too. He deserves the chance. Don’t lay your guilt on me, Hopkins. If Richard hadn’t gotten hooked up with Havilland he never would have killed a fly. What are the odds of his meeting someone else like the Witch Doctor? It’s over, Hopkins. Just let it be.”
Lloyd balled his fists and stared up at the ceiling to hold back a flood of tears. “It’s not over. And what about us?”
Linda put a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I never saw Richard hurt anybody, but I saw what you did to Havilland. If I hadn’t seen it, maybe we could have given it a shot. But now that’s over, too.”
Lloyd stood up. When Linda’s hand dropped from his shoulder, he said, “I’m going after Oldfield. I’ll try to keep your name out of it, but if I can’t, I won’t. One way or the other, I’m going to get him.”
Linda got to her feet and took Lloyd’s hands. “I don’t doubt it for a minute. This is getting funny and sad and weird, Hopkins. Will you hold me for a minute and then split?”
Lloyd shut his eyes and held the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, closing out the L. A. end of the Havilland case. When he felt Linda start to retreat from the embrace, he turned around and walked, thinking that it was over and it would never be over and wondering how he could get the Herzog/Bergen book published.
Outside, the night shone in jetstreams of traffic light and in flames from a distant brush fire. Lloyd drove home and fell asleep on the couch with his clothes on.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or l
ocales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by James Ellroy
cover design by Thomas Ng
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Because The Night
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Copyright Page
