by James Ellroy
“The forest for the trees,” Lloyd looked at his list of Hollywood–West Hollywood homicides and felt his skin start to tingle. Four “suicide” killings had taken place on the identical date of June 10th; in 1977, ’78, ’80 and ’81. It was the one indicator that pointed to obsessive, pathological behavior out of his killer’s ice-water restraint norm.
Lloyd grabbed the four folders and read them from cover to cover, once, then twice. When he finished, he turned off the light in his cubicle and sat back and flew with what he had learned.
On Thursday evening, June 10th, 1977, residents of the apartment building at 1167 Larrabee Avenue, West Hollywood, smelled gas coming from the upstairs unit rented by Angela Marie Stimka, a twenty-seven-year-old cocktail waitress. Said residents summoned a deputy sheriff who lived in the building, and the deputy kicked in Angela Stimka’s door, turned off the wall heater from which the gas was emanating and discovered Angela Stimka, dead and bloated on her bedroom floor. He carried her body outside and called the West Hollywood Sheriff’s substation, and within minutes a team of detectives had combed the apartment and had come up with a suicide note that cited the breakup of a long-term love affair as Angela Stimka’s reason for wanting to die. Handwriting experts examined Angela Stimka’s diary and the suicide note, and decided that both were written by the same person. The death was labeled a suicide, and the case was closed. On June 10th of the following year, a sheriff’s patrol car was summoned to a small house on Westbourne Drive in West Hollywood. Neighbors had complained of uncharacteristically loud stereo noise coming from the dwelling, and one old lady told the deputies that she was certain that something was “drastically wrong.” When no one answered the officers’ persistent knocking, they climbed in through a half opened window and discovered the owner of the house, thirty-one-year-old Laurette Powell, dead in a large wicker chair, the arms of the chair, her bathrobe, and the floor in front of her soaked with blood that had exploded out of the arterydeep gashes on both of her wrists. An empty prescription bottle of Nembutal lay on a nightstand a few feet away, and a razor-sharp kitchen cleaver was resting in the dead woman’s lap. There was no suicide note, but homicide detectives, noting the hesitation marks on both wrists and the fact that
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Laurette Powell was a long time holder of several Nembutal prescriptions, quickly classified her death as suicide. Case closed. Lloyd’s wheel turned silently. He knew that the Westbourne Drive and Larrabee Avenue addresses were a scant two blocks apart, and that the Tropicana Motel gun-in-mouth “suicide” of Carla Castleberry on 6/10/80
was less than a half mile from the first two crime scenes. He shook his head in disgust; any cop with half a brain and ten cents’ worth of experience should know that women never kill themselves with guns—the statistics on female gunshot suicides were nonexistent.
The fourth “suicide,” Marcia Renwick, 818 North Sycamore, was the non sequitur, Lloyd surmised; the most recent June 10th murder, four miles east of the first three, in the L.A.P.D.’s Hollywood Division. Occurring a full year after the Carla Castleberry homicide, the Renwick pill overdose had the feel of an unimaginative impulse killing.
Lloyd turned his attention to the file of the most recent victim before Julia Niemeyer. He winced as he read the coroner’s report on Linda Deverson, D.O.D. 6/14/82; chopped to pieces with a two-edged fire axe. Blinding memories of Julia swaying from her bedroom ceiling beam combined with his new knowledge to convince him that somehow, for some god-awful, hellish reason, his killer’s insanity was peaking. Lloyd lowered his head and sent up a prayer to his seldom-sought lipservice God. “Please let me get him. Please let me get him before he hurts anyone else.”
Thoughts of God were paramount in Lloyd’s mind as he walked down the hall and knocked on the door of his immediate superior, Lieutenant Fred Gaffaney. Knowing that the lieutenant was a hard-ass, born-again Christian who held grandstanding, maverick cops in pious contempt, he decided to invoke the deity heavily in his plea for investigatory power. Gaffaney grudgingly had given him a free rein on his caseload, with the implicit proviso that he not beg favors; since he was about to plead for men, money, and media play, he wanted to pitch the lieutenant from a standpoint of mutual religiosity.
“Enter!” Gaffaney called out in answer to the knock. Lloyd walked in the open door and sat down in a folding chair in front of the lieutenant’s desk. Gaffaney looked up from the papers he was shuffling and fingered his cross-and-flag lapel pin.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
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Lloyd cleared his throat and tried to affect a humble look. “Sir, as you know, I’ve been working full time on the Niemeyer killing.”
“Yes. And?”
“And, sir, it’s a stone cold washout.”
“Then stick with it. I have faith in you.”
“Thank you, sir. It’s funny that you mentioned faith.” Lloyd waited for Gaffaney to tell him to continue. When all he got was a silent deadpan, he went on. “This case has been a testing of my own faith, sir. I’ve never been much of a believer in God, but the way that I’ve been stumbling into evidence has me questioning my beliefs. I—”
The lieutenant cut him off with a chopped hand gesture. “I go to church on Sunday and to prayer meetings three times a week. I put God out of my mind when I clip on my holster. You want something. Tell me what it is, and we’ll discuss it.”
Lloyd went red and forced a stammer. “Sir, I . . . I . . .”
Gaffaney leaned back in his chair and ran his hands over his iron-gray crew cut. “Hopkins, you haven’t called a superior officer ‘Sir’ since you were a rookie. You’re the most notorious pussy hound in Robbery/Homicide, and you don’t give a rat’s ass about God. What do you want?”
Lloyd laughed. “Shall I cut the shit?”
“Please do.”
“All right. In the course of my investigation into the Niemeyer killing I’ve come across solid, instinctive evidence that points to at least sixteen other murders of young women, dating back fifteen years. The M.O.s varied, but the victims were all of a certain physical type. I’ve gotten complete case files on these homicides, and chronological consistencies and other factors have convinced me that all sixteen women were killed by the same man, the man who killed Julia Niemeyer. The last two killings have been particularly brutal. I think we’re dealing with a brilliant psychopathic intellect, and unless we direct a massive effort toward his capture he’ll kill with impunity until the day he dies. I want a dozen experienced Homicide dicks full time; I want liaisons set up with every department in the county; I want permission to recruit uniformed officers for the shit work, and authority to grant them unlimited overtime. I want a full-scale media blitz—
I’ve got a feeling that this animal is close to exploding, and I want to push him a little. I—”
Gaffaney raised both hands in interruption. “Do you have any hard physical evidence,” he asked, “any witnesses, any notations from detectives
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within the L.A.P.D. or other department that lend credence to your mass murder theory?”
“No,” Lloyd said.
“How many of these sixteen investigations are still open?”
“None.”
“Are there any other officers within the L.A.P.D. who corroborate your hypothesis?”
“No.”
“Other departments?”
“No.”
Gaffaney slammed his desk top with two flattened palms, then fingered his lapel pin. “No. I won’t trust you on this. It’s too old, too vague, too costly, and too potentially embarrassing to the department. I trust you as a troubleshooter, as a very fine detective with a superb record—”
“With the best fucking arrest record in the department!” Lloyd shouted. Gaffaney shouted back, “I trust your record, but I don’t trust you! You’re a showboat glory-hound womanizer, and you’ve got a wild hair up your ass a
bout murdered women!” Lowering his voice, he added, “If you really care about God, ask him for help with your personal life. God will answer your prayers, and you won’t be so disturbed by things out of your control. Look at how you’re shaking. Forget this thing, Hopkins. Spend some time with your family; I’m sure they’d appreciate it.”
Lloyd got to his feet, trembling, and walked to the door. His peripheral vision throbbed with red. He turned to look at Gaffaney, who smiled and said, “If you go to the media, I’ll crucify you. I’ll have you back in uniform rousting piss bums on skid row.”
Lloyd smiled back and felt a strangely serene bravado course through him. “I’m going to get this animal, and I’m going to stick your words up your ass,” he said.
Lloyd packed the sixteen homicide files into the trunk of his car and drove to the Hollywood Station, hoping to catch Dutch Peltz before he went off duty. He was in luck; Dutch was changing back into civilian clothes in the senior officers’ locker room, knotting his necktie and staring at himself abstractedly in a full-length wall mirror. Lloyd walked over, clearing his throat. Without taking his eyes from the mirror, Dutch said, “Fred Gaffaney called me. He told me that he figured you’d be coming my way. I saved your ass; he was going to blow the whistle on you to one of his born-again high brass buddies, but I told him not to. 108
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He owes me favors, so he agreed. You’re a sergeant, Lloyd. That means you can only act like an asshole with sergeants and below. Lieutenants and up are verboten. Comprende, brain-boy?”
Dutch turned around, and Lloyd saw that his abstracted look was glazed over with fear. “Did Gaffaney tell you all of it?” Lloyd asked. Dutch nodded. “How sure are you?”
“All the way.”
“Sixteen women?”
“At least that many.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Flush him out, somehow. Probably by myself. The department will never authorize an investigation; it makes them look too inept. I was stupid to go to Gaffaney in the first place. If I go over his head and make a stink, I’ll get yanked off the Niemeyer case and detached to some bumfuck robbery assignment. You know what this feels like, Dutchman?”
Dutch looked up at his huge genius-mentor, then turned away when he felt tears of pride welling in his eyes. “No, Lloyd.”
“It feels like I was made for this one,” Lloyd said, keeping eye contact with his own mirror image. “That I won’t know what I am or what I can be until I get this bastard and find out why he’s destroyed so much innocence.”
Dutch put a hand on Lloyd’s arm. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I can’t give you any officers, but I’ll help you myself, we can . . .” Dutch stopped when he saw that Lloyd wasn’t listening; that he was transfixed by the light in his own eyes or some distant vision of redemption.
Dutch withdrew his hand. Lloyd stirred, jerked his gaze from the mirror and said, “When I had two years on the job, I got assigned to the junior high school lecture circuit. Telling the kids picaresque cop stories and warning them about dope and accepting rides from strangers. I loved the assignment, because I love children. One day a teacher told me about a seventh grade girl—she was twelve—who used to give blow jobs for a pack of cigarettes. The teacher asked me if I’d talk to her.
“I looked her up one day after school. She was a pretty little girl. Blonde. She had a black eye. I asked her how she got it. She wouldn’t tell me. I checked out her home situation. It was typical—alcoholic mother on welfare, father doing three-to-five at Quentin. No money, no hope, no chance. But the little girl liked to read. I took her down to a bookstore on Sixth and Western and introduced her to the owner. I gave the owner a hundred bucks and told him that the little girl had that much credit there. I did the
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same thing at a liquor store down the block—a hundred bucks buys a lot of cigarettes.
“The girl was grateful and wanted to please me. She told me she got the black eye because her braces cut some guy she was sucking off. Then she asked me if I want some head. Of course I say ‘No’ and give her a big lecture. But I keep seeing her. She lives on my beat, and I see her all the time, always smoking and carrying a book. She looks happy.
“One day she stops me when I’m out cruising in my black-and-white alone. She says, ‘I really like you and I really want to give you head.’ I say
‘No,’ and she starts to cry. I can’t bear that, so I grab her and hold her and tell her to study like a demon so she can learn how to tell stories herself.”
Lloyd’s voice faltered. He wiped his lips and tried to remember the point he wanted to make. “Oh yeah,” he said finally. “I forgot to mention that the little girl is twenty-seven now, and she’s got a Masters in English. She’s going to have a good life. But . . . but there’s this guy out there who wants to kill her. And your daughters and mine . . . and he’s very smart . . . but I’m not going to let him hurt anyone else. I swear that to you. I swear it.”
When he saw that Lloyd’s pale gray eyes were shrouded with a sadness that he could never express with words, Dutch said, “Get him.”
Lloyd said, “I will,” and walked away, knowing that his old friend had given him a carte blanche absolution for whatever he had to do, whatever rules he had to break.
8
The following morning, after a restive night of assimilating the data in the sixteen files, Lloyd drove to the downtown public library, figuring out the shit work logistics in his mind en route, sorting minor details and bureaucratic cover your ass stratagems to one side so that he could come to his first day of legwork in an absolutely silent mental state. With the car windows rolled up and the squawk box of his two-way radio disconnected to reinforce the silence, Lloyd pushed aside all the extraneous details regarding his investigation. He was covered up drum-tight with Fred 110
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Gaffaney and the higher echelon Robbery/Homicide brass, having called the two detectives working under him on the Niemeyer case, learning that their bookstore canvass of the downtown/central L.A. area had thus far yielded nothing solid, telling them to pursue their instincts full time and on their own autonomy and to report to Gaffaney twice weekly, letting the Jesus freak that they both despised know that Sergeant Hopkins was working hard in the dark solitude that was the stalking ground of genius. Gaffaney would accept this as part of their silent agreement, and if he complained about Lloyd’s absence at Parker Center, Dutch Peltz would intercede and kibosh his complaints with every ounce of his prestige. He was covered.
As for the investigation itself, there were no physical facts that Lloyd didn’t already know from his first run-through of the files. Stunning silence underlined this; Janice and the girls had slept over at the Ocean Park apartment of her friend George, and Lloyd had had a big silent house in which to do his reading. In a desire to juxtapose the destruction of innocence via murder to his own efforts to diminish it through storytelling, he had gone over the hellish manila folders in Penny’s bedroom, hoping that his youngest daughter’s aura would give him the clarity to forge facts out of elliptical psychic labyrinths. No new facts emerged, but his psychological character study of the killer gained an added dimension infused with a coldly subtle verisimilitude.
Although he had no access to information on unsolved homicides before 1968, Lloyd was certain that the murders did not date back much further. He based this on his strongest character assessment/feeling—the killer was a homosexual. His whole genealogy of death was an attempt to hide the fact from himself. He did not yet know. The homicides prior to Linda Deverson and Julia Niemeyer, though often brutal, bespoke an effete satisfaction with a job well done and an almost refined love of anonymity. He did not have an inkling of what he was. Linda and Julia, hideously butchered, were the dividing points, the division irrevocable and based on the terror of an emergent sexuality so shamefully compelling that it had to be drowned in blood. Lloyd traced instinctual links back in time. H
is killer had to live in Los Angeles. His killer was tremendously strong, capable of severing limbs with a single swipe of an axe. His killer was undoubtedly physically attractive and capable of maneuvering with grace in the gay world. He wanted it desperately, yet to submit to the vulnerability inherent in sexual interaction would destroy his urge to kill. Sexuality burgeons in adolescence. Assuming
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that the killer was still in an ascendent sexual curve and assuming that the murders began in or around January 1968, he allotted the monster a fiveyear trauma incubation period and placed him as coming of age in the early to middle ’60s, making him now in his late thirties—forty at the oldest. Exiting the freeway at Sixth and Figueroa, Lloyd whispered, “June 10th, June 10th, June 10th.” He parked illegally on the wrong side of the street and stuck an “Official Police Vehicle” sign under his windshield wiper. Running up the library steps, the epiphany slammed him like an axe handle between the eyes: the monster killed because he wanted to love.
*
*
*
Lloyd’s microfilm time travel consumed four hours and traversed every June 10th from 1960 to 1982. Starting with the Los Angeles Times and ending with the Los Angeles Herald-Express and its offshoot newspaper the L.A. Examiner, he sifted through headlines, feature articles, and clipped accounts detailing everything from major league baseball to foreign insurrections to previews of summer beach wear to primary election results. Nothing in the parade of information caught his eyes as being a potential contributing factor to murderous passion and nothing caused his mental gears to snap forward and expand on his thesis at any level. June 10th was his one crucial clue to the killer—but Los Angeles newspapers treated it like just another day.
Although Lloyd had expected the negative results, he was still disappointed and was glad that he had saved the film for the four “suicide” years of 1977, ’78, ’80, and ’81 for last.