by James Ellroy
“Yeah,” the man said, twisting his wounded shoulder, “I say fuck your mother.”
“A predictable response. Can’t you guys come up with something original like ‘Fuck your father’?”
“Fuck you, flatfoot.”
“That’s better; you’re learning.”
Dutch ran back over. “Ambulance and back-up are on their way.”
“Good. Where’s the girl?”
“She’s still in the car.”
“Good. Look after Mr. Wilson, will you? I want to talk to her.”
Lloyd walked to the black Firebird. The young woman sat rigid in the passenger seat, her hands still clamped to the dashboard. She was crying, and her mascara had run all the way down to her chin. Lloyd knelt by the open door and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Miss?”
The woman turned to face him, starting to weep openly. “I don’t want to have a record!” she bawled. “I just met the guy. I’m not a bad person, I just wanted to get stoned and listen to some music!”
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Lloyd smoothed an errant lock of her blonde hair. “What’s your name?”
he asked.
“Sarah.”
“Sarah Bernhardt?”
“No.”
“Sarah Vaughan?”
“No.”
“Sarah Coventry?”
The woman laughed and wiped her sleeve across her face. “Sarah Smith,”
she said.
Lloyd took her hand. “Good. My name’s Lloyd. Where do you live, Sarah?”
“In West L.A.”
“I’ll tell you what. You go over and wait in that crowd of people. I’ve got a few things to do here, then I’ll drive you home. Okay?”
“Okay . . . and I won’t have a record?”
“No one will ever even know that you were here. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Lloyd watched Sarah Smith compose herself and move into the crowd of rubberneckers on the sidewalk. He walked over to Dutch and Richard Douglas Wilson, who were leaning against the unmarked Matador. Lloyd motioned Dutch to leave, and as he departed, fixed Wilson with a hard look and disgusted shake of the head.
“No honor among thieves, Richard,” he said. “None at all. Especially the punks over at Gangster Manor.” Wilson’s jaw trembled at the last words, and Lloyd continued. “I found a box of shells and a pantyhose wrapper there with your prints on them. But that wasn’t how we nailed you. Somebody snitched you off. Somebody sent the Rampart dicks an anonymous letter making you for the Black Cat stick-up. The letter said you only knocked off fruit bars because you got turned out by some bad-ass jockers at Quentin, and you liked it. You love queers and you hate them too, because of what they made you.”
“That’s a fucking lie!” Wilson screamed. “I took down liquor stores, markets, even a fucking disco! I done—”
Lloyd cut him off with a chopped hand gesture and went in for the kill.
“The letter said that you were drinking outside Gangster Manor after the heist, and you were bragging about all the cunt you scored. Your buddy said he was cracking up because he knew you liked to take it up the ass.”
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Richard Douglas Wilson’s pale, sweat-streaked face went purple. He shrieked. “That scumbag motherfucker! I saved his ass from getting porked by every nigger on the yard! I carried that punk through Quentin, now he—”
Lloyd put a hand on Wilson’s shoulder and said quietly, “Richard, you’re looking at a dime minimum this time. Ten bullets. You think you can handle that? You’re tough, you’re a stand-up guy; I know that. I’m tough too. But you know what? I couldn’t do a dime up there. They got niggers up there who’d eat me for breakfast. Turn your partner over, Richard. He snitched you off. I’ll go . . .” Wilson was shaking his head frantically in denial. Lloyd started to shake his head in pure loathing. “You dumb asshole,”
he said. “Go by the old code, let some piece of shit rat on you, facing five to life and you look a gift horse in the mouth. You dumb motherfucker.” He turned and started to walk away.
He had gotten only a few feet when Wilson called out, “Wait. Wait. Look—”
Lloyd stifled the huge grin that was lighting up his face and said, “I’ll go to the D.A., I’ll talk to the judge, I’ll see to it that you go to the protective custody tank while you’re waiting for your trial.”
Richard Douglas Wilson weighed the pros and cons a last time, then capitulated. “His name is John Gustodas. ‘Johnny The Greek.’ He lives in Hollywood. Franklin and Argylle. The red brick building on the corner.”
Lloyd squeezed Wilson’s undamaged shoulder. “Good fellow. My partner will take down your statement at the hospital, and I’ll be in touch.” He craned his head to look for Dutch, and spotted him on the sidewalk talking to two uniformed officers. He whistled twice, and Dutch walked over, warily. “You tired, Dutchman?” Lloyd asked.
“A little. Why?”
“Wilson confessed. He snitched off his partner. The guy lives in Hollywood. I want to go home. You want to take down Wilson’s statement, then call Hollywood dicks and give them the info on the guy?”
Dutch hesitated. “Sure, Lloyd,” he said.
“Great. John ‘Johnny The Greek’ Gustodas. Franklin and Argylle. Red brick apartment house on the corner. I’ll write up all the reports, don’t worry about that.”
Lloyd heard the wail of an ambulance siren, and shook his head to combat the noise. “Fucking sirens ought to be outlawed,” he said as the ambulance rounded the corner and ground to a halt. “There’s your chariot. I gotta get out of here. I promised to take Janice out to dinner at eight. It’s
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almost eleven now.” The two policemen shook hands. “We did it again, partner,” Lloyd said.
“Yeah. I’m sorry I barked at you, kid.”
“You’re on Janice’s side. I don’t blame you; she’s better looking than I am.”
Dutch laughed. “Talk to you tomorrow about Wilson’s statement?”
“Right. I’ll call you.”
Lloyd found Sarah Smith with the remnants of the spectators, smoking a cigarette and shuffling her feet nervously on the pavement. “Hi, Sarah. How are you feeling?”
Sarah ground out the cigarette. “All right, I guess. What’s going to happen to what’s-his-name?”
Lloyd smiled at the sadness of the question. “He’s going to prison for a long time. Don’t you even remember his name?”
“I’m bad at names.”
“Do you remember mine?”
“Floyd?”
“Close. Lloyd. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
They walked over to the unmarked Matador and got in. Lloyd scrutinized Sarah openly as she gave her address and fiddled with the contents of her purse. A good girl from a good family gone slightly loose, he decided. Twenty-eight or nine, the light blonde hair legit, the body beneath the black cotton pantsuit both slender and soft. A kind face trying to look tough. Probably a hard worker at her job.
Lloyd headed straight for the nearest westbound on-ramp, alternately savoring his anniversary triumph and picturing confrontations with Janice, who would doubtless give him one of her incredible slow burns—if not an outright battle for being so late. Feeling kindness well up in him for sparing Sarah Smith the harshness of the law, he tapped her shoulder and said, “It’s going to be all right, you know.”
Sarah dug into her purse looking for cigarettes and found only an empty pack. She muttered, “Shit” and threw it out the window, then sighed. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. You really get off on being a cop, don’t you?”
“It’s my life. Where did you meet Wilson?”
“Is that his name? I met him at a country-western bar. Shit-kicker’s paradise, but at least they treat women with respect. What did he do?”
“Held up a bar at gunpoint.”
“Jesus! I figured he was just some kind of
dope dealer.”
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Out of the mouths of babes, Lloyd thought. “I’m not lecturing you or anything like that,” he said, “but you shouldn’t hang out in dives. You could get hurt.”
Sarah snorted. “Then where should I go to meet people?”
“You mean men?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Try the continental approach. Drink coffee and read a book at some picturesque sidewalk café. Sooner or later some nice fellow will start a conversation with you about the book you’re reading. You’ll meet higher class people that way.”
Sarah laughed wildly and clapped her hands, then poked Lloyd in the arm. When he took his eyes from the road and gave her a deadpan, her laughter became hysterical. “That’s funny, that’s so funny!” she squealed.
“It’s not that funny.”
“Yes, it is! You should be on TV!” Sarah’s laughter subsided. She looked at Lloyd quizzically. “Is that how you met your wife?”
“I didn’t tell you I was married.”
“I saw your ring.”
“Very observant. But I met my wife in high school.” Sarah Smith laughed until she ached. Lloyd laughed along in a more sedate cadence, then dug in his pocket for a handkerchief and reached over and dabbed at Sarah’s tearmottled face. She leaned into his hand, rubbing her nose along his knuckles.
“You ever wonder why you keep on doing things even when you know they don’t work?” she asked.
Lloyd ran a finger under her chin and tilted her head upward to face him. “It’s because outside of the major dreams everything is always changing, and even though you keep doing the same things, you’re looking for new answers.”
“I believe that,” Sarah said. “Get off at the next exit and turn right.”
Five minutes later he pulled to the curb in front of an apartment building on Barrington. Sarah poked him in the arm and said, “Thanks.”
“Good luck, Sarah. Try the book trick.”
“Maybe I will. Thanks.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
Sarah poked Lloyd’s arm a last time and darted out of the car.
*
*
*
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67
Janice Hopkins looked at the antique clock in her living room and felt her fearful slow burn leap ahead as the hour hand struck ten and she realized that this was her husband’s “second major anniversary” and that she could not rationally fight with him over their missed dinner date, could not use that minor grievance to force confrontations on any of the disturbances that undercut their marriage, could do nothing but say, “Oh shit, Lloyd, where were you this time?” smile at his brilliant answer, and know how much he loved her. Tomorrow she would call her friend George, and he would come to the shop and they would commiserate at length about men.
“Oh God, George,” she would say, “the life of a muse!”
And George would reply, “But you love him?”
“More than I know.”
“Realizing that he’s slightly off the deep end?”
“More than slightly, kiddo, what with his little phobias and all. But they just make him more human, more my baby.”
And George would smile and talk of his lover, and they would laugh until the Waterford crystal rang and the bone china plates spun on their shelves. Then George would take her hand and casually mention the brief affair they had had when George decided he needed to experience women to be more of one himself. It had lasted a week, when George accompanied her to San Francisco for a seminar on appraising antiques. In bed all he talked about was Lloyd. It disgusted her, but thrilled her too, and she went on to divulge the most intimate facts of her marriage.
When she realized that Lloyd would always be the unseen third party in bed with them, she broke it off. It was the only time she had cheated on her husband, and it was not for the standard reasons of neglect, abuse, or sexual boredom. It was to gain some kind of parity with him for the adventurous life he led. When Lloyd was frightened or angry and came to her with that look of his and she unhooked her bra and gave him her breasts, he was hers utterly. But when he read reports, or talked with Dutch Peltz and his other cop friends in the living room and she saw the wheels turning behind the pale gray eyes, she knew he was going to places that she never could. Her other parities—the success of the boutique, the book on Tiffany mirrors she had co-authored, her business acumen—all these satisfied only at the level of logic. Because Lloyd could fly and she couldn’t; even after seventeen years of marriage, Janice Rice Hopkins did not possess a syllabus to explain why this was so. And inexplicably, her husband’s capacity for flight began to frighten her.
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Against the sum total of over twenty years of intimacy, Janice collated the recent evidences of Lloyd’s strange behavior: his hour-long sojourns in front of the mirror, casting his eyes in circles as though trawling for flying insects; the increasingly long stints spent at his parents’ house, talking to his mother, who had not uttered or comprehended a sound in nineteen years; the insanely sardonic set to his face when he talked to his brother on the telephone about their parents’ care.
But the stories that he told the girls were the most disturbing: cop tales that Janice suspected to be half parable and half confession, lurid travelogues on the darkest Los Angeles streets, populated by hookers, junkies, and other sundry lowlifes and cops who were often as raunchy and brutal as the people they threw in jail. A year ago Janice had told Lloyd not to tell her the stories. He had agreed with a silent nod of his head and a cold look in his eyes, and took his parable/confessions to the girls, bringing them into adolescence with detailed accounts of sleaze and horror. Anne would shrug the stories off—she was fourteen and boy crazy; Caroline, thirteen and with a real talent for ballet, would brood over them and bring home true detective magazines and ask her father to discourse on the various articles inside. And Penny would listen and listen and listen, with pale gray eyes shining right through her father and her father’s story to some distant termination point. When Lloyd concluded his parable, Penny would kiss him sternly on the cheek and go upstairs and knit the cashmere and madras plaid quilts that had already earned her feature coverage in five Sunday supplements. Janice shivered. Was Penny’s innocence blasted beyond redemption already? A master artisan and fledgling entrepreneur at twelve? She shivered again and looked at the clock. An hour of fearful speculation had passed, and Lloyd was still not home. Suddenly she realized that she missed him and wanted him beyond the limits of normal desire in a twenty-year-old love affair. She walked upstairs and undressed in the dark bedroom, lighting the scented candle that was Lloyd’s signal to wake her up and love her. Crawling into bed, a last dark thought crossed her mind, like predator birds blackening a calm sky: As the girls grew older they looked more and more like Lloyd, especially in their eyes.
She heard Lloyd enter the house an hour later, his ritualistic sounds in the entrance hall: Lloyd sighing and yawning, unhooking his gunbelt and placing it on the telephone stand, the familiar shuffling noises he made as he slowly walked upstairs. Tensing herself for the moment when he would
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open the door and see her in amber light, Janice ran a teasing hand between her legs.
But the bedroom door didn’t open; she heard Lloyd tiptoe past it and walk down the hall to Penny’s room, then rap his knuckles lightly on her door and whisper, “Penguin? You want to hear a story?” The door creaked open a second later, and Janice heard father and child giggle in gleeful conspiracy. She gave her husband half an hour, angrily chain-smoking. When her last remnants of ardor had fled and she started to cough from the half-dozen cigarettes, Janice threw on a robe and walked down the hall to listen. Penny’s bedroom door was ajar, and through it Janice could see her husband and youngest daughter sitting on the edge of th
e bed, holding hands. Lloyd was speaking very softly, in an awe-tinged storyteller’s voice:
“. . . after clearing the Haverhill/Jenkins homicide, I got assigned to a robbery deployment, a loan-out to the West L.A. squad room. There had been a series of nighttime burglaries of doctor’s offices, all in large buildings in the Westwood area. Cash and saleable drugs were the burglar’s meat; in shortly over a month he’d ripped off over five grand in cash and a shitload of pharmaceutical speed and heavyweight downers. The West L.A. dicks had his M.O. figured out this way: The bastard used to hide out in the building until nightfall, then hit his mark, then break into a second-floor office and jump out the window into the parking lot. There was evidence to point to this—chipped cement on the window ledges. The dicks figured him for a gymnast, a bullshit cat burglar type who could jump two stories without getting hurt. The commander of the squad was setting up parking lot surveillances to catch him. When the burglar hit an office building on Wilshire that two teams of detectives were staking out, it blew their thesis to hell and I was called in.”
Lloyd paused. Penny nuzzled her head into his shoulder and said, “Tell me how you got the scumbag, Daddy.”
Lloyd brought his storyteller’s voice down to its lowest register: “Sweetheart, nobody jumps two stories repeatedly without getting hurt. I formed my own thesis: The burglar brazenly walked out of the buildings, waving to the security guards in the foyer as if everything were hunky-dory. Only one thing troubled me. Where was he carrying the dope he ripped off? I went back and checked with the guards on duty the nights of the robberies. Yes, both known and unknown men in business suits had walked out of the building in the early evening hours, but none were carrying bags or pack-70
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ages. The guards assumed them to be businessmen with offices in the building and didn’t check them out. I heard that same statement six times before it all came together in my mind: The burglar dressed in drag, probably in the protective coloring of a nurse’s uniform, carrying a large purse or shoulder bag. I checked with the guards again and, bingo! An unknown woman wearing a nurse’s uniform and carrying a large shoulder bag was seen leaving the burglarized buildings at almost the exact time on all six burglary nights. The guards couldn’t describe her, but said she was ‘ugly,’ ‘a dog,’ and so forth.”