by James Ellroy
“You’ll be the first to know. I love you, Penny.”
“I love you, too.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“So do I. Love love love.”
“Likewise.”
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“Bye.”
“Bye.”
*
*
*
With “Owe what, Daddy?” trailing in his mind, Lloyd drove downtown to Parker Center. His memo to the chief of detectives rested like a hot coal in his jacket pocket. Deciding to check his incoming basket before dropping it with the chief’s secretary, he took the elevator to the sixth floor and strode down the hall to his cubicle, seeing the note affixed to his door immediately: “Hopkins—call Det. Dentinger, B.H.P.D., re: gun query.”
Lloyd grabbed his phone and dialed the seven familiar digits of the Beverly Hills Police Department, saying, “Detective Dentinger,” when the switchboard operator came on the line. There was the sound of the call being transferred, then a man’s perfunctory voice: “Dentinger. Talk.”
Lloyd was brusque. “Detective Sergeant Hopkins, L.A.P.D. What have you got on my gun query?”
Dentinger muttered “shit” to himself, then said into the mouthpiece,
“We got a burglary from two weeks ago. Unsolved, no prints. A forty-onecaliber revolver was listed on the report of missing items. The reason you didn’t get a quicker response on this is because the burglary dicks who originally investigated think that the report was padded, you know, for insurance purposes. A bunch of shit was reported stolen, but the burglar’s access was this little basement window. He couldn’t have hauled all the shit out—
it wouldn’t have fit. I’ve been assigned to investigate the deal, see if we should file on this joker for submitting a false crime report. I’ll give you the sp—”
Lloyd cut in. “Do you think there was a burglary?”
Dentinger sighed. “I’ll give you my scenario. Yes, there was a burglary. Small items were stolen, like the jewelry on the report, the gun, and probably some shit the victim didn’t report, like cocaine—I’ve got him figured for a stone snowbird, really whacked out. You know the clincher? The guy owns two of these antique guns, mounted in presentation cases, with original ammo from the Civil War, but he only reports one stolen. I don’t doubt that the fucker was stolen, but any intelligent insurance padder would stash the other gun and report it stolen too, am I right?”
Lloyd said, “Right. Give me the information on the victim.”
“Okay,” Dentinger said. “Morris Epstein, age forty-four, eight-one-sixseven Elevado. He calls himself a literary agent, but he’s got that Hollywood big bucks fly-by-night look. You know, live high on credit and bullshit,
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never know where your next buck is coming from. Personally, I think these—”
Lloyd didn’t wait for Dentinger to finish his spiel. He hung up the phone and ran for the elevator.
*
*
*
8167 Elevado was a salmon pink Spanish-style house in the Beverly Hills residential district. Lloyd sat in his car at the curb and saw Dentinger’s “big bucks fly-by-night” label confirmed: The lawn needed mowing, the hedges needed trimming, and the chocolate brown Mercedes in the driveway needed a bath.
He walked up and knocked on the door. Moments later a small middleaged man with finely sculpted salt-and-pepper hair threw the door open. When he saw Lloyd, he reached for the zipper at the front of his jumpsuit and zipped up his chest. “You’re not from Roll Your Own Productions, are you?” he asked.
Lloyd flashed his badge and I.D. card. “I’m from the L.A.P.D. Are you Morris Epstein?”
The man shuffled back into his entrance foyer. Lloyd followed him. “Isn’t this out of your jurisdiction?” the man said.
Lloyd closed the door behind them. “I’ll make it easy on you, Epstein. I have reason to believe that the forty-one revolver you reported stolen might have been used in a triple homicide. I want to borrow your other forty-one for comparison tests. Cooperate, and I’ll tell the Beverly Hills cops that your insurance report was exaggerated, not padded. You dig?”
Morris Epstein went livid. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. He flung an angry arm in the direction of the door and hissed, “Leave this house before I have you sued for police harassment. I have friends in the A.C.L.U. They’ll fix your wagon for real, flatfoot.”
Lloyd pushed past Epstein’s arm into an art-deco living room festooned with framed movie posters and outsized gilt-edged mirrors. A glass coffee table held a single-edged razor blade and traces of white powder. There was a large cabinet against the wall by the fireplace. Lloyd opened and shut drawers until he found the glassine bag filled with powder. He turned to see Epstein standing beside him with the telephone in his hand. When he held the bag in front of Epstein’s eyes, the little man said, “You can’t bluff me. This is illegal search and seizure. I’m personal friends with Jerry Brown. I’ve got clout. One phone call and you are adios, motherfucker.”
Lloyd grabbed the telephone from Epstein’s hand, jerked the cord out of 278
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the wall and tossed it on the coffee table. The table shattered, sending glass shards exploding up to the ceiling. Epstein backed into the wall and whispered, “Now look, pal, we can bargain this out. We can—”
Lloyd said, “We’re past the bargaining stage. Bring me the gun. Do it now.”
Epstein unzipped the top of his jumpsuit and kneaded his chest. “I still say this is illegal search and seizure.”
“This is a legal search and seizure coincident to the course of a felony investigation. Bring me the gun—in its case. Don’t touch the gun itself.”
Morris Epstein capitulated with an angry upward tug of his zipper. When he left the room, Lloyd gave it a quick toss, searching the remaining drawers, wondering whether or not he should go to the Beverly Hills Station and check out the burglary report. Dentinger had said that no prints were found, but maybe there were F.I.’s on yellow Jap imports or other indicators to jog his brain.
He went through the last drawer, then turned his attention to the mantel above the fireplace. He could hear Epstein’s returning footsteps as his eyes caught a cut-glass bowl filled with matchbooks. He grabbed a handful. They were all from First Avenue West—one of the two bars that Jungle Jack Herzog was working.
“Here’s your gun, shamus.”
Lloyd turned around and saw Epstein holding a highly varnished rosewood box. He walked to him and took the box from his hands. Opening the lid, he saw a large blue steel revolver with mother-of-pearl grips mounted on red velvet. Arranged in a circle around it were copper-jacketed softnosed bullets. Taking a pen from his pocket, he inserted it into the barrel and raised the gun upward. Clearly etched on the barrel’s underside were the numbers 9471.
“Satisfied?” Epstein said.
Lloyd lowered the barrel and closed the lid of the box. “I’m satisfied. Where did you get the guns?”
“I bought them cheap from the producer of this Civil War mini-series I packaged last year.”
“Do you know the serial number of the other gun?”
“No, but I know the two guns had consecutive numbers. Listen, do the Beverly Hills fuzz really think I padded that burglary report?”
“Yes, but I’ll slip them the word about how you cooperated. I saw some matches here from First Avenue West. Do you go there a lot?”
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“Yeah. Why?”
Lloyd took a photograph of Jack Herzog from his billfold. “Ever see this man?”
Epstein shook his head. “No.”
Withdrawing a photocopy of his Identikit portrait of the man seen with Herzog, Lloyd said, “What about him?”
Epstein looked at the picture, then flinched. “Man, this is fucking weird. I did some blow with this guy outside Bruno’s Serendipity one night. This is
a great fucking likeness.”
Lloyd felt two divergent evidential lines intersect in an incredible revelation. “Did this man tell you his name?” he asked.
“No, we just did the blow and split company. But it was funny. He was a weird, persistent kind of guy. He kept asking me these questions about my family and if I was into meeting this really incredibly smart dude he knew. What’s the matter, shamus? You look pale.”
Lloyd gripped the gun box so hard that he could hear his finger tendons cracking. “Did you tell him your name?”
“No, but I gave him my card.”
“Did you tell him about your guns?”
Epstein swallowed. “Yeah.”
“When did you talk to the man?”
“Maybe two, three months ago.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“No, I haven’t been back to Bruno’s. It sucks.”
“Did you see the man get into a car?”
“Yeah, a little yellow job.”
“Make and model?”
“It was foreign. That’s all I know. Listen, what’s this all about? You come in here and hassle me, break my coffee table—” Epstein stopped when he saw Lloyd run for the door. He called out, “Hey, shamus, come back and shmooze sometime! I could package a badass fuzz like you into a series!”
*
*
*
Running roof lights and siren, Lloyd made it back to Parker Center in a record twenty-five minutes. Cradling the gun box in the crook of his arm, he ran the three flights of stairs up to the offices of the Scientific Indentification Division, then pushed through a series of doors until he was face to face with Officer Artie Cranfield, who put down his copy of Penthouse and said, “Man, do you look jazzed.”
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Lloyd caught his breath and said “I am jazzed, and I need some favors. This box contains a gun. Can you dust it for latents real quick? After you do that, we need a ballistics comparison.”
“This is a suspected murder weapon?”
“No, but it’s a consecutive serial number to the gun I think is the liquor store murder weapon. Since the ammo in this box and the murder ammo is antique, probably from the same casting, I’m hoping that the rifling marks will be so similar that we can assume th—”
“We can’t make those kinds of assumptions,” Artie interjected. “That kind of theorizing won’t hold up in court.”
Lloyd handed Artie the gun box. “Artie, I’ll lay you twenty to one that this one gets settled on the street. Now will you please dust this baby for me?”
Artie took a pencil from his desk and propped open the lid of the box, then stuck another pencil in the barrel of the revolver, the end affixed to the upper hinge of the box, forming a wedge that held the gun steady. When the box and gun were secure, he took out a small brush and a vial of fingerprint powder and spread it over every blue steel, mother-of-pearl, and rosewood surface. Finishing, he shook his head and said, “Smooth glove prints on the grip, streak prints on the barrel. I dusted the box for kicks. Smudged latents that are probably you, glove prints that indicate that the box was carefully opened. You’re dealing with a pro, Lloyd.”
Lloyd shook his head. “I really didn’t think we’d find anything good. He stole the companion gun, but I figured he might have touched this one, too.”
“He did, with surgical rubber gloves.” Artie started to laugh. Lloyd said, “Fuck you. Let’s take this monster down to the tank and see how it kicks.”
Artie led Lloyd through the Crime Lab to a small room where water and tufted-cotton-layered ballistics tanks were sunk into the floor. Lloyd slipped three slugs into the .41’s chamber and fired into the top layer of water. There was the sound of muffled ricocheting, then Artie squatted and opened up a vent on the tank’s side. Withdrawing the “catcher” layer of cotton, he pulled out the three expended rounds and said, “Perfect. I’ve got a comparison microscope in my office. We’ll sign for the liquor store shells and run them.”
Lloyd signed a crime lab chit for the three rounds taken from the bodies of the liquor store victims and brought them, in a vinyl evidence bag, to
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Artie’s office. Artie placed them on the left plate of a large, doubleeyepieced microscope, then placed the three ballistics tank rounds on the right plate and studied both sets, individually and collectively, for over half an hour. Finally he got up, rubbed his eyes and voiced his findings: “Discounting the fact that the set of rounds fired at the liquor store were flattened by their contact with human skulls, while the tank rounds were intact, and the fact that the impact of the liquor store rounds altered the rifling marks, I would say that the basic land and groove patterns are as identical as slugs fired from two different guns can be. Nail the bastard, Lloyd. Give him the big one where it hurts the most.”
*
*
*
Bruno’s Serendipity was a singles bar/backgammon club on Rodeo Drive, in the heart of Beverly Hills’s boutique strip. The club’s interior was dark and plush, with a long sequin-studded black leather bar dominating one half of the floor space, and lounge chairs and lighted backgammon boards the other. A sequined velvet curtain divided the two areas, with a raised platform just inside the doorway that was visible from both sides of the room. Lloyd smiled as he approached the bar. It was a perfect logistical setup. The bartender was a skinny youth with a punk haircut. Lloyd sat down at the bar and took out his billfold, removing a ten dollar bill and his Identikit portrait and letting the bartender see his badge all in one motion. When the youth said, “Yes, sir, what can I get you?” Lloyd tucked the ten into his vest pocket and handed him the photocopy.
“L.A.P.D. Have you seen this man here before? Take it over to the light and look at it carefully.”
The bartender complied, switching on a lamp by the cash register. He studied the picture, then shook his head and said, “Sure. Lots of times. Kind of an intense dude. I think he swings both ways, I mean I’ve seen him in these really intense conversations with both men and women. What did he do?”
Lloyd gave the youth a stern look. “He molests little boys. When was the last time you saw him?”
“Jesus. Last week sometime. This guy’s a chicken hawk?”
“That’s right. What time does he usually show up?”
The bartender pointed in the direction of the backgammon tables. “You see how dead it is? Nobody shows up here much before eight. We only open up this early because we usually get some businessmen boozehounds in the late afternoon.”
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Lloyd said, “I noticed that you don’t have a parking lot. Have you got any kind of valet parking setup?”
The youth shook his head. “We don’t need one. Plenty of street parking after the boutiques close.” He pointed to the platform inside the doorway.
“You’ll be able to see him real good, though. After dark, every time the door opens disco music goes on and colored lights flash down from the ceiling, white, then blue and red, you know, to let people know who’s arriving. You’ll be able to see him real good.”
Lloyd put a dollar bill on the counter, then walked to a stool at the far end of the bar. “Ginger ale with lime. And bring me some peanuts or something. I forgot to eat lunch.”
*
*
*
For six hours Lloyd drank ginger ale and plumbed logic for something to explain his two cases converging into a single narrative line. Nothing but a sense of his own fitness for the unraveling emerged from his ruminations, which were accompanied by a disco light show at the club’s front door. From six o’clock on, every person who entered was centered in a flashing light show that was stereo-synced to upbeat arrangements of tunes from Sat- urday Night Fever. Most of the people were young and stylishly dressed and did a brief dance step before heading for the bar or backgammon tables. Lloyd scrutinized every male face as the first white light hit it;
no one even vaguely resembled his suspect. Gradually the male and female faces merged into an androgynous swirl that made his eyes ache, combining with the noise of subtle and blatant mating overtures to tilt all his senses out of focus. At eleven o’clock, Lloyd went to the men’s room and soaked his head in a sink filled with cold water. Revived, he dried himself with paper towels and walked back into the club proper. He was about to take his seat at the bar when the Identikit portrait walked past him in the flesh. Lloyd’s skin prickled and he had to ball his gun hand to kill a reflex reach for his .38. The men’s eyes locked for a split second, Lloyd averting his first, thinking Take him outside at his car. Then he heard a hoarse gasp behind him, followed by a clicking of metal on metal.
Both men turned at the same instant. Lloyd saw the Identikit man raise his monster handgun and sight it straight at him. He ducked to his knees as the muzzle burst with red and the report of the shot slammed his ears. Bottles exploded behind the bar as the shot went wide; screams filled the room. Lloyd rolled on the floor toward the sequined divider curtain, drawing his
.38 and attempting to aim from a backward roll as odd parts of frantic bod-
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ies blocked a shot at his target. Two more thunderous explosions; the bar mirror shattering; the screaming reaching toward a crescendo. Lloyd rolled free of the curtain, crashing into a backgammon table. He got to his feet as another shot hit the curtain housing and sent the curtain crashing to the floor. People were huddling under tables, pressing together in a tangle of arms and legs. Muzzle smoke covered the bar area, but through it Lloyd could see his adversary arcing his pistol, looking for his target. Lloyd extended his gun arm, his left hand holding his wrist steady. He fired twice, too high, and saw the Identikit man turn and run back in the direction of the restrooms. Stumbling over an obstacle course of trembling bodies, Lloyd pursued, flattening himself to the wall outside the men’s room, nudging the door inward with his foot. He heard strained breathing inside and pushed the door open, firing blindly at chest level, jerking himself backward just as a return shot blew the door in half. Lloyd slid to the floor, counting expended rounds: five for psycho, three for himself. Charge him and kill him. He fumbled three shells from his belt into the chamber of his snub nose, then fired into the bathroom in hope of getting a return shot in panic. When none came, he pushed through the half-destroyed door, catching a blurry glimpse of a pair of legs pulling themselves up and out of a narrow window above the toilet. Stripping off his jacket, Lloyd leaped up and tried to squeeze out the window. His shoulders jammed and splintered the woodwork, but even by squirming and contracting every inch of his body he wouldn’t fit. Jumping down, he ran back through the club proper, now a wasteland of shattered glass, upended furniture, and shelter-seeking mounds of people. He was only a few feet from the entrance promenade when the door burst open and three patrolmen with pump shotguns came up in front of him and aimed their weapons at his head. Seeing the fear in their eyes and sensing their fingers worrying the triggers, Lloyd let his .38 drop to the floor. “L.A.P.D.,”