Lloyd Hopkins 3 - Suicide Hill

by James Ellroy

  Unable to speak through his tears, Lloyd hung up and called the number again and again, until the repetition of the message lulled him past weeping, and he fell asleep with the phone in his hands.

  28

  With the bag of money clutched to his chest, Rice beat a footpath to Silver Foxes and the Trans Am, stumbling through dark backyards, scaling fences and rolling into a camouflage ball every time a chopper light came anywhere near him. Roadblocks on Sunset to his north and Fountain to his south fenced him in, and as he crouched low and sprinted across one residential street after another, he could see cars being searched on the wide expressways.

  But here, in a womb of old houses with backyards and apartment buildings connected by block-long cement walls, he was invisible and safe. The cops expected him to be on wheels. In the three hours since blundering into Sharkshit Bobby and blowing him away he’d stuck to the dark like a night animal, working his way deeper into the danger zone, taking shelter in shadows and rest breaks every three blocks. His head still ached from the cold-cock and his vision shimmied when light hit his eyes, but the perk/dexie speedballs he’d eaten just before the one-on-one with the cop kept the pain down and juice in his system. He could still function, and when he got to his car, he could still drive.

  And he could still think.

  Coming out of a long driveway, Rice turned his brain into a map and calculated two blocks to Silver Foxes. If his luck was holding, his registration papers wouldn’t have hit the D.M.V. computer, the fuzz wouldn’t know the Trans Am was his, and the outcall office window he’d blown to bits would give him a shot at some kind of file on Vandy—and the rock sleazos she might have run to. If the office was under guard, he was still armed for pig with the .45.

  The map thinking gave him a new jolt of juice. Getting itchy to be there, he loosened his grip on the bag in order to regrip it for a straight run at his target. When it felt lighter to his touch, he checked the bottom and saw a big hole. Sticking his hand in, he saw that more than half the money had fallen out.

  Catching himself about to scream, Rice clutched the bag with all his strength and beelined, running across the street and sidewalk, back through another driveway and yard. Ignoring a copter light scanning only three houses away, he hurtled an ivy-covered chain fence and ran out to the street. He was about to keep going when a flash of lavender dented his wobbly vision and registered as home.

  Rice let his eyes trawl Gardner Avenue for danger signs. There was no one on either side of the street, and no cop cars, marked or unmarked. Squinting at the whore building, he saw a black tarpaulin covering the demolished front window. Flipping an imaginary brain switch marked “caution,” he placed the money bag on the ground and memorized its location, then took the .45 from his waistband. Catching his breath, he walked to Silver Foxes.

  There were no lights on in the four-flat. Rice checked the luminous dial of his watch, saw that it was 3:40 and did a mental run-through: the whoremasters hobnobbing with the fuzz after the shooting, getting workmen to do a quick fix-up job until the window could be repaired properly, getting rid of the incriminating shit, then getting out. The thought of no files brought him to the point of screaming, and he ran to the tarpaulin, grabbed the right-side fastenings with both hands and pulled.

  The tarp came loose and crashed to the lawn. Rice stepped in the window, found the wall light and turned it on.

  The dispatch room was a bullet-wasted ruin, big chunks of white wall ripped out, the plastic desk dinged and cracked from ricochets. Remembering a Rolodex, Rice scanned the room unsuccessfully for it, then went through the desk drawers. Finding nothing but blank paper and rolls of film, he stood up to think and saw an old-fashioned filing cabinet just inside the bathroom door.

  All three drawers were locked. Standing to one side, Rice closed the door on the barrel of his .45, so that just the silencer was inside the bathroom. He fired seven times at the cabinet, and soft plops went off like muffled thunder. The last shots reverberated off the metal surface and tore the door in half; through muzzle smoke he could see the cabinet on its side spilling manila folders.

  Digging into them, Rice saw names typed on side tabs, and that the files had spilled out in close to alphabetical order. Tearing through the R’s, S’s and T’s, he felt his bowels loosen. Then “Vanderlinden, Annie” was in his hands, and he didn’t know if it was good or bad, so he turned off the light and ran with it out to the Trans Am.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Land mines, booby traps, snipers and werewolf-faced dogs flashed through his mind, and he hit the ground like soldiers in the million old movies he’d seen on TV. Eating curb grass instead of dirt, he waited for machine-gun ack-ack and managed to slide Vandy’s file into his pants along with his .45. When no attack came, he did a squat run over to the money bag and picked it up, then walked slowly toward the Fountain Avenue roadblock—the eye of his hurricane.

  Staying in the shadows of front porches and shrubbery, he saw the cordon setup come into focus: north-south traffic on Gardner was blocked off, with two cops standing at the ready to pass innocent cars through and fire on ones that rabbited. East-west traffic on Fountain was being inspected the same way, but only at stoplights. Since the nearest lights were three blocks away on the east and two on the west, all he had to do was get south of Fountain, steal a car and roll.

  Rice eyed the barricade and cops twenty yards away. The roadblocks had probably been set up right after he plowed the pig on Formosa. They were figuring him for a car thief and had zipped the area up tight as a drum. If they found Bobby Sharkshit, a block off the Boulevard, they were probably knocking down doors up there. Sunset and Fountain were sealed, and probably Hollywood and Franklin. They would not have the men to hit the streets further south, and they probably figured he couldn’t have made it that far anyway.

  Rice swallowed and secured his only three possessions: the gun, the file and the paper bag of money. Feeling them bonded to him, he lowered himself to the ground and rolled off the corner house lawn to the sidewalk and into the street, a dark, pavement-eating dervish. Catching sight of the cops with their backs to him, he kept rolling, gravel digging into his cheeks and shredding the bag until a trail of cash drifted in his wake. He rolled until he hit the opposite sidewalk, then elbowed his way over the curb and rolled until soft grass kissed his gouged face. When he finally felt safe enough to stand up, he was on the beautiful front lawn of a beautiful little house, midway down a beautiful little block, with no barricade at its southern intersection and plenty of beautiful cars parked within stealing distance.

  29

  On the doorstep of the big house, Anne smoothed Joe’s shirt front and said, “You look like a real street person. I’ll tell my friends you’re a producer, that you’re scouting Chicano groups in the Barrio. Just listen to the music, and you’ll have a good time.”

  Punk rock boomed inside. Joe took a long look at the spectacular view: the Strip winding to the east, Beverly Hills below them, glow from swimming pools the only light. “I don’t want to have a good time,” he said. “We’re down to twenty scoots, and we need a traveling stake. Just remember that.”

  Anne said, “You got it, tough guy,” and put out her cigarette on an Astroturf mat embossed with “If You Don’t Rock, Don’t Knock.” She took a deep breath, then started in on her signature boogie and pushed the door open.

  Following a pace behind, Joe thought he’d been transported back to Lincoln Heights in the sixties, when the vatos and the hippies were waging war, and one side of North Broadway was bodegas and poolrooms, the other side a twenty-four-hour-a-day light show/love-in/dope-in. While Anne bebopped into the scene, he hung back and eyeballed for details to prove that it was ’84, not ’68, and he wasn’t having a shock-induced acid flashback.

  The whole downstairs was a pressed-together mass of people in costume—men in full-drape zoot suits and Nazi uniforms, women in gangster moll dresses and Girl Scout outfits. Groups of gangsters and molls slam-danced in
to Nazis and scouts, while colored lights blipped from the ceiling and different rock videos flashed on screens hung to the four walls. The refrain “Go down go down go down go down” blasted from quadrophonic speakers, and Joe felt his head reel as he scoped out Godzilla attacking Tokyo and Marlon Brando tooling on a Harley hog while caped musicians genuflected into his exhaust. The other screens were out of focus, but he could catch people in weird makeup fucking and sucking. A conga line of gangsters were facing off against a trio of goose-stepping Nazis, who were kicking molls and scouts out of their way in the direction of a circle of amyl nitrate sniffers. And preppy Anne cut a path through all of it, screeching, “Where’s Mel? Where’s Mel?”

  Knowing she was stone ’84, Joe stood on his tiptoes and followed her bobbing pink sweater, keeping his head down as he pushed past partyers, hoping they wouldn’t see his face reflected in the lights and know how scared he was. At the far side of the room he saw Anne break free and talk to a guy in a butler’s outfit, who pointed her down the hall. Slipping out of the crowd himself, he caught a glimpse of Anne entering a darkly lit room.

  Joe walked toward the door. When he was just outside it, he heard Anne pleading: “Just two hundred, Mel. My squeeze and I have to leave L.A.”

  “You’ll blow it on blow, Annie,” a coarse male voice said. “And I thought you were with Stan K. I know for a fact he ain’t hurting—I bought some vids off him last week.”

  “Stan and I broke up, Mel. It was sort of … quick. My new guy and I have to leave. You remember Duane?”

  “Sure. Disco Duane the discount car king. Your squeeze before Klein before your current bimbo. You see a pattern there, sweetie?”

  “Mel, he’s crazy, and he’s after me!”

  “I don’t blame him; you’re a class act. Third class, but class nonetheless. Sweetie, if I give you money you’ll just get coked and be broke again quicksville. There’s complimentary outside. Have some.”

  Anne screeched, “I popped some strange stuff I found, and it’s still on! I don’t need blow, I need money!”

  Mel laughed. “You’ve got to earn it.”

  “I know,” Anne said. “I know.”

  Joe walked away from the door, wondering why he felt betrayed—Anne was a one-hour stand at best. Retreating toward the back of the house, the reason grabbed him by the balls. She’s your witness. She saw you kill a man and steal a car and drive a stick shift. She doesn’t know about you being dominated by Bobby. She thinks you’re as bad-ass as Duane Rice.

  Coming to a small room next to the kitchen, Joe looked in and saw a guy watching TV with the sound off. The guy was strumming an electric guitar while chortling at a beer ad, and Joe got another whiff of the bad old sixties. Then double stone ’84 hit the TV, and he knew it was hallucinogenic.

  Bobby was on the screen, wearing gloves and trunks, crouched in his “Boogaloo” stance. Joe ran to the TV and fumbled the volume dial; the guy put down the guitar and blurted, “Hey, man, I want it that way!” Joe got the sound on just as Bobby the boxer dissolved into a shot of paramedics carrying a sheet-covered stretcher out of a church.

  “ … and Garcia is the second person to be murdered in the Hollywood area tonight. His body was discovered inside a Catholic church on Las Palmas and Franklin, half a mile from the spot where an L.A.P.D. officer was hit and run by a man in a stolen car. Police spokesmen have said that there may be a link to Monday’s West L.A. bank robbery that left four dead. Meanwhile, a massive—”

  The TV blipped to another beer ad—“This one’s for you, no matter what you’re doing and you”—and Joe saw that the guitar guy had hit a remote-control button. “This one’s for you!” rang out nonhallucinogenically, and he knew it was Bobby’s epitaph. He grabbed the guitar from the guy’s lap and stalked with it back to the party.

  Gangsters, molls, Nazis and scouts were arranged in a circle in the middle of the living room. The video screens were blank, and the strobes were replaced by indent lighting. Mel’s coarse voice rose from inside the circle: “Ladies and jelly beans, Little Annie Vandy, dirty, raunchy, coked-out and randy, does the too-hep dance of the dirty prep!”

  Holding the guitar by the neck, Joe used the business end as a prod and poked his way into the circle. Anne was there, attempting to gyrate and pull off her sweater at the same time. Her eyes were glazed, and her whole body twitched. Mel, standing beside her in tennis whites, was snapping his fingers.

  “This one’s for you!” and the shot of Bobby in his leopard-skin trunks gave Joe the necessary guts. He roundhoused the guitar at Mel’s head, knocking him into a line of zoot suiters and Nazis, then swung an overhand shot that grazed helmets and snap-brim fedoras before catching the host in the neck. Mel hit the floor, and the partygoers separated and moved backward. Joe saw that they weren’t frightened or shocked, but that they were digging it, and that Anne was running for the door.

  Holding the guitar/weapon by the tuning pegs, he stuck it out at arm’s length and spun around and around on a tiny foot axis, moving into the crowd, assailing them with glancing blows that set off a chain reaction of shrieks, squeals and bursts of applause. As the partygoers gave him more and more space, the applause became thunderous. Joe felt a queasy vertigo, and realized that the sleazebags loved him.

  Screaming “Bobby!” he hurled the guitar into the middle of them and ran out the door. Reeling across the lawn toward a speck of pink down the street, he thought he saw an unmarked fuzz car parked in the shadows. Feeling invulnerable, he flipped it the bird and ran until his preppy partner was only a few feet away. Slowing to a walk, he caught up with her and tapped her shoulder. When she turned and looked at him with Twilight Zone eyes, he gasped, “I ain’t no fucking musician. I ain’t no fucking rock and roll fool.”

  30

  Sunlight on his face forced Lloyd awake. The telephone fell from his lap, and he bent over to pick it up. Remembering Dutch’s promised surveillance deployment, he put the receiver to his ear and started to call the Hollywood Station number. Then three little clicks came over the line instead of a dial tone, and the phone fell from his hands.

  Bugged.

  Gaffaney.

  Lloyd ran outside and looked up and down the block. There were no vans on the street, and no other vehicles large enough to hold a mobile bugging apparatus. The tap was stationary and had to originate in a nearby dwelling.

  Eye trawling, Lloyd saw his familiar landscape of two-story houses and apartment buildings turn menacing. His own small Colonial seemed suddenly vulnerable, surrounded by potential monsters. Then the most likely monster caught his attention and made him wince: the old Spanish-style building next door, recently converted to condos.

  Lloyd ran into the entrance vestibule and checked the mailboxes. Only one unit—7—was without a name. He walked down the hallway, feeling his rage escalating as the numbers increased, hoping for a flimsy door and another shot at Sergeant Wallace D. Collins. Finding a solid doorway with a Mickey Mouse lock, he took a credit card from his wallet, slipped it into the runner crack and jiggled the knob. The door opened, and he entered a musty apartment furnished with only a desk holding electrical equipment.

  Calling out “Collins,” Lloyd reached for his .45, then flinched at the simple reflex and what it meant. When no sounds answered his call, he moved to the desk and examined the setup.

  It was a simple tapper to outside wires hookup, with a tape recorder attached to record calls. A red light glowed on the panel by the “Remote Receiver” button, and a green light and the number 12 flashed on and off under the switch marked “Messages Received.” Shuddering, Lloyd pushed the “Rewind” button and watched the tape spool spin. When it stopped, he hit “Play.” “Hollywood Station, Captain Peltz speaking” filled the empty room, bouncing off the walls like a deadpan death decree.

  Lloyd pushed the “Off” button. Gaffaney and his freaks had word on the surveillances and had listened to him sob to the inanimate voices of his wife and favorite daughter, and there was nothing he c
ould do to turn it around.

  Turning off the recorder and pulling the plug on the bugging device made the powerless feeling worse. Lloyd walked home. The phone was ringing, and he picked up the receiver like it was something about to explode.

  “Yes?”

  “Dutch, Lloyd.”

  “And?”

  “And you owe me a report, and that outcall place on Gardner was broken into last night. The files were gone through, and there’s fresh large-caliber gunshot holes in the walls, and they had to have come from a silencered piece, because two of my men were stationed at a roadblock half a block away. A Ford LTD was reported stolen on the adjoining block, and there’s no reports from the first surveillance shift. I just dispatched daywatch units to relieve them, so that’s covered. And—”

  Lloyd hung up. Listening to Dutch’s angry litany had been like watching two trains heading toward each other on the same track, both on locked-in automatic pilot. All he could do now was patrol the wreckage and hope for survivors.

  31

  Rice steered the LTD through the winding roads of Trous dale Estates. His vision was going blurry again, and he had to hold Vandy’s file up to right in front of his eyes in order to read the address. Driving with one hand, he remembered his first three possibilities—big dark houses with fuzzmobiles parked across the street. If he hadn’t given each pad a slow-around-the-block circuit, he’d be dead. This approach had to be just as cautious.

  By squinting until tears came into his eyes, he was able to pick out Hillcrest. He tried to make his brain into a map like he did in Hollywood, then flashed that that only worked when you had some idea where you were. Slowing to a crawl, he squinted for street signs. There weren’t any; Trousdale was strictly for people who knew where they were going. He was about to scrounge the glove compartment for a street atlas when an unmarked Matador passed him in the opposite direction.