by James Ellroy
.357 Colt Python and a roll of twenty dollar bills held together with a rubber band. He picked the gun up. The cylinder was empty, but the barrel exuded a faint odor of paraffin and the underside of the vent housing bore a plastic sticker reading Christie—L.A.P.D.
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The spikes dug in again, wielded from within and without. Lloyd slammed the locker door shut and drove to Parker Center.
*
*
*
He found the sixth-floor I.A.D. offices packed with detectives and civilian personnel. A uniformed officer passed him in the hallway and threw words of explanation: “My partner and I just brought in Marty Bergen, grabbed him in MacArthur Park, feeding the ducks. He waived his rights. Some Internal Affairs bulls are getting ready to pump him.”
Lloyd ran to the attorney room at the end of the hall. A knot of plainclothes officers were staring through the one-way glass. Squeezing in beside them, he saw Marty Bergen, Fred Gaffaney, a stenographer, and an unidentified woman who had the air of a deputy public defender sitting around a table covered with pencils and yellow legal pads. The woman was whispering in Bergen’s ear, while the stenographer poised fingers over his machine. Gaffaney worried his tie bar and drummed the tabletop. Noticing wires running along the ceiling wainscoting, Lloyd nudged the officer nearest him and said, “Is there a backup transcription going down?”
The officer nodded. “Tape hookup to the skipper’s office. He’s got another steno at his desk.”
“Headphones?”
“Speaker.”
Lloyd took out his notepad and wrote, John Havilland, M.D., office 1710
Century Park East— All phone #’s from business & residence calls for past 12
mos., then walked down the hall and rapped on the glass door of Fred Gaffaney’s outer office. When his secretary opened it and gave him a harried look, he handed her the notepad. “The captain wants me to listen in on the interview. Could you do me a favor and call Ma Bell and get this information?”
The woman frowned. “The captain told me not to leave the office. Some marijuana that constituted evidence was stolen earlier. He had to release a suspect, and he was very angry about it.”
Lloyd smiled. “That’s a rough break, but this request is direct from Thad Braverton. I’ll hold down the fort.”
The woman’s frown deepened. “All right. But please keep all unauthorized people out.” She closed her hand around the notepad and walked off in the direction of the elevator bank. Lloyd locked the door from the inside and moved to the captain’s private office. A grandmotherly stenographer
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was sitting at the desk, pecking at her machine while Gaffaney’s sternly enunciated words issued from a wall speaker above her head.
“. . . and legal counsel is present. Before we begin this interview, Mr. Bergen, do you have anything you wish to say?”
Lloyd pulled up a chair and smiled at the stenographer, who put a finger to her lips and pointed to the speaker just as a burst of electronically amplified laughter hit the room, followed by Marty Bergen’s voice. “Yeah. I wish to go on the record as saying that your tie clasp sucks. If the L.A.P.D. were a just bureaucracy, you would be indicted on five counts of aesthetic bankruptcy, possession of fascist regalia, and general low class. Proceed with your interview, Captain.”
Gaffaney cleared his throat. “Thank you for that unsolicited comment, Mr. Bergen. Proceeding, I will state some specific facts. You may formally object if you consider my facts erroneous. One, you are Martin D. Bergen, age forty-four. You were dismissed from the Los Angeles Police Department after sixteen years of service. While on the Department, you became friends with Officer Jacob M. Herzog, currently missing. Are these facts correct?”
“Yes,” Bergen said.
“Good. Again proceeding, six days ago you were questioned by an L.A.P.D. detective as to the current whereabouts of Officer Herzog. You told the officer that you had not seen Herzog in approximately a month, and that on the occasions of your last meetings Herzog had been ‘moody.’
Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Again proceeding, do you wish to alter your statement to that officer in any way?”
Bergen’s voice was a cold whisper. “Yes, I do. Jack Herzog is dead. He killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates. I discovered his body at his apartment along with a suicide note. I buried him in a rock quarry up near San Berdoo.”
Lloyd heard Bergen’s attorney gasp and begin jabbering words of caution at her client. Bergen shouted, “No, goddamn it, I want to tell it!” There was a crescendo of voices, with Gaffaney’s finally predominating: “Do you remember where you buried the body?”
“Yes,” Bergen said. “I’ll take you there, if you like.”
The speaker went silent, then slowly came to life with the sound of animated whispers. Finally Gaffaney said, “Not wanting to put words in your 378
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mouth, Mr. Bergen, would you say that the previous statement you made to the police regarding Officer Herzog was misleading or incorrect?”
“What I told Hopkins was pure bullshit,” Bergen said. “When I talked to him Jack was already three weeks in his grave. You see, I thought I could walk from all this. Then it started eating at me. I went on a drunk to sort it out. If those cops hadn’t found me I would have come forward before too long. This has got to be heavy shit that Jack was involved in, or you wouldn’t have put out an A.P.B. on me. I figure that you’ve got me for two misdemeanors—some jive charge for disposing of Jack’s body and receiving stolen documents. So just ask your questions or let me make my statement, so I can get charged and make bail. Okay, Fred baby?”
There was another long silence, this one broken by Fred Gaffaney. “Talk, Bergen. I’ll interject questions if I find them necessary.”
Breath noise filled the speaker. Lloyd’s body clenched in anticipation. Just when he thought he would snap from tension, Bergen said, “Jack was always stretched very thin, because he didn’t have the outlets that other cops have. He didn’t booze or carouse or chase pussy; he just read and brooded and competed with himself, wanting to be like these warrior mystics he worshipped. He got on mental kicks and ran wild with them. For about six months prior to his death he was obsessed with this notion of exonerating me by creating this L.A.P.D. credibility gap—showing the Department in a bad light so that the shame of my dismissal would be diminished by comparison. He talked it up and talked it up and talked it up, because he was a hero, and since he loved me he had to turn me from a coward into a hero to make our friendship real.
“About this time he met some guy in a bar. The guy introduced him to another guy, a guy that Jack called a ‘file-happy genius.’ This guy was some kind of guru who charged big bucks to all these sad guru-worshipper types, helping them with their problems and so forth. He convinced Jack to steal some personnel files that would suit their individual purposes—Jack’s ‘credibility gap’ and the guru’s loony hunger for confidential information. Jack showed me the files. Four of them were brass working outside security gigs where more personnel files were involved, one was Johnny Rolando, the TV guy, and the other was, you know, Lloyd Hopkins. Jack figured that the information in these files would comprise a sleazy picture of the L.A.P.D. and satisfy the guru’s needs.”
“Do you still have the files?” Gaffaney asked.
“No,” Bergen said. “I read them and gave them back to Jack. I tried to
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put the information to use in a series of columns, as a memorial tribute to him, but finally I decided that it was just a tribute to his disturbance and gave up on the idea.”
“Tell me more about this so-called guru and his friend.”
“All right. First off, I don’t know either of their names, but I do know that the guru was counseling Jack, helping to bring him through some things that were distu
rbing him. The guru used ambiguous phrases like ‘beyond the beyond’ and ‘behind the green door,’ which is an old song title. Both those phrases were included in Jack’s suicide note.”
Lloyd grabbed the telephone and dialed a number that he knew was a ninety-nine percent sure bet to confirm Havilland’s complicity all the way down the line.
“Hello?”
Turning his back on the stenographer, he whispered, “It’s me, Linda.”
“Hopkins baby!”
“Listen, I can’t talk, but the other night you whispered ‘beyond the beyond’ and something about green doors. Where did you get those phrases?”
“From Dr. Havilland. Why? You sound really spaced, Hopkins. What’s all this about?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“When?”
“I’ll come by in a couple of hours. Stay home and wait for me. Okay?”
Linda’s voice went grave. “Yes. It’s him, isn’t it?”
Lloyd said “Yes,” and hung up, catching Bergen in midsentence. “. . . so from the froth around Jack’s mouth I knew he’d O.D.’d on barbiturates. He used to say that if he ever took the Night Train, he’d never do it with his gun.”
Gaffaney sighed. “Sergeant Hopkins searched Herzog’s apartment and said that the surface had been wiped free of prints by scouring powder. When you discovered the body, did you notice any wipe marks?”
“No. None.”
“Do you recall the exact words of Herzog’s suicide note, in addition to those phrases you mentioned? Did Herzog elaborate on his reasons for killing himself?”
“This is where we part company, Fred baby,” Bergen said. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, except that. And you haven’t got the juice to get it out of me.”
The sound of palms slamming a table top rattled the speaker. “On that 380
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note we’ll break for a few hours. We’ve prepared a detention cage for you, Mr. Bergen. Your attorney can keep you company if she wishes to. We’ll pick up where we left off later. Sergeant, show Mr. Bergen to his interim housing.”
The speaker went dead. Lloyd got up and walked to the outer office window, catching a glimpse of a plainclothes officer hustling Marty Bergen and his attorney to the stairs leading to the fifth floor detention cages. Bergen’s post-confession posture signified pure exhaustion: stooped shoulders; glazed eyes; shuffling walk. Lloyd saluted his back as he rounded the corner out of sight, then turned to see Gaffaney’s secretary tapping on the door, holding up a sheaf of papers for him.
“I got your information, Sergeant.”
Lloyd opened the door and took the woman’s pages. “Let me explain this readout,” she said. “The supervisor got me the business and residence calls up to two days ago; that’s as far up-to-date as their computer is fed. When you go through it you’ll notice that only a few of the numbers have names or addresses after them. That’s because virtually all of this person’s calls were made to pay phones. Isn’t that strange? The locations of the pay phones are listed next to the number. Is this what you needed?”
Lloyd felt another soft click. “This is excellent. Will you do me one other favor? Call the top managing supervisor at Bell and have her try to get me the numbers called from both phones in the past two days. Have her call me at Robbery/Homicide with the information. Tell her it’s crucial to an important murder investigation. Will you do that for me?”
“Yes, Sergeant. Are you going to talk with the captain? I know that he’s interested in what you’re doing.”
Lloyd shook his head. “No. If he needs me, I’ll be in my office. I’m not going to bother him with this phone business until I have something conclusive. He has enough to worry about.”
Gaffaney’s secretary lowered her eyes. “Yes. He works much too hard.”
Lloyd jogged up to his office, wondering if the born-again witch-hunter cheated on his wife. Closing the door, he read over the list of phone numbers dialed from Havilland’s office and Beverly Hills apartment, feeling his clicks collide with Hubert Douglas’s snatch of Thomas Goff dialogue: “He kept callin’ himself a ‘justified paranoid’ and said that he covered his tracks when he took a fuckin’ piss, just to stay in fuckin’ practice.”
The pay phone calling translated to Havilland’s “justified paranoia.” The majority of the calls were made to phone booths situated within a quarter
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mile radius of the homes of Jack Herzog, Thomas Goff, and Richard Oldfield. The calls to Herzog began last November, which coincided with Marty Bergen’s statement that Herzog met “the guru” six months ago; they ended in late March, around the time of Herzog’s suicide. The Goff calls ran from the beginning of the readout until the day after the liquor store slaughter; the Oldfield communications all the way through until the readout terminated forty-eight hours before. Turning his attention to the other pay phone locations, Lloyd got out his Thomas Brothers L.A. County street map binder, hoping that his theory meshed with Bergen’s statement about the “guru” charging “big bucks” to
“these sad guru-worshipper types.” Phone readout to map index to map; five locations, five confirmations. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. All five pay phones were located in shopping centers in expensive residential neighborhoods—Laurel Canyon, Sherman Oaks, Palos Verdes Estates, San Marino, and the Bunker Hill Towers complex. Conclusion: Not counting other potential “worshipper types” living inside his non-toll-call area of Century City and Beverly Hills, Dr. John Havilland had at least five people, perhaps innocent, perhaps violently disturbed, that he was “counseling.” Unanswered question: Citing Havilland’s “justified paranoia” structure, it was obvious that he wanted to be heavily buffered against any kind of scrutiny. Then where did he meet with his patients?
Lloyd recalled the diplomas on Havilland’s office wall: Harvard Medical School; two hospitals from the metropolitan New York area. Click. Click. Click. Thomas Goff was New York born and bred. Could his association with the Doctor date back to his days as a psychiatric resident? All the clues lay in the past, cloaked in medical secrecy. Lloyd imagined himself as a guru-worshipper type about to write a book, armed with nothing but good intentions and a telephone. Five minutes later that telephone became a time machine hurtling toward Dr. John Havilland’s past. The book ploy worked. Years before he became dedicated to secrecy, John Havilland had possessed an autobiographical bent, one that was captured for posterity in the form of a Harvard Medical School entrance essay that his faculty advisor called “the very model of both excellence in English skills and the exposition of sound motives for becoming a psychiatrist.”
From the gushing advisor’s recollections of Havilland and his essay, Lloyd learned that the guru shrink was born in Scarsdale, New York, in 1945, and that when he was twelve his father disappeared, never to be seen again, leaving young John and his mother lavishly well provided for. After weeks 382
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of speculating on his father’s absence, John sustained a head injury that left him with fragmented memories and fantasies of the man who had sired him, a patchwork quilt of truth and illusion that his alcoholic mother could not illuminate in any way. Recurring memory symbols of good and evil—loving rides on a Bronx ferris wheel and the persistent questioning of police detectives—tore at John and filled him with the desire to know himself by unselfishly helping others to know themselves. In 1957, at age twelve, John Havilland set out to become the greatest psychiatrist who ever lived. Lloyd let the advisor gush on, learning that while at Harvard Med Havilland studied symbolic dream therapy and wrote award-winning papers on psychological manipulation and brainwashing techniques; that during his Castleford Hospital residency he counseled court-referred criminals with astounding results—few of the criminals ever repeated their crimes. After concluding with the words, “and the rest of Dr. Havilland’s work was performed in Los Angeles; good luck with your book,” the advisor waited for a reply. Lloyd m
uttered, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Calls to Castleford and St. Vincent’s Hospitals proved fruitless; they would not divulge information on Havilland and would not state whether Thomas Goff had ever been treated there. The only remaining telephone destination was a twelve-year-old boy’s “memory symbol” of evil. Lloyd called the Scarsdale, New York, Police Department and talked to a series of desk officers and clerk typists, learning that the department’s records predating 1961 had been destroyed in a fire. He was about to give up when a retired officer visiting the station came on the line. The man told Lloyd that some time back in the fifties a filthy rich Scarsdale man named Havilland had been the prime suspect in the murder of a Sing Sing Prison guard named Duane McEvoy, who was himself a suspect in the sex murders of several young Westchester County women. Havilland was also suspected of torching a whole block of deserted houses in an impoverished section of Ossining, including a ramshackle mansion that the then Scarsdale police chief had described as a “torture factory.” Havilland had disappeared around the time that McEvoy’s knife-hacked body was found floating in the Hudson River. So far as the retired officer knew, he was never brought to justice or seen again.