L.A. Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy

by James Ellroy

  Nagler shook his head. “No. Doctor John told me that there was a three percent leak factor in our program. I know exactly what the leak was—it came to me while I was chanting. You’re an Internal Revenue agent. I paid Doctor John’s phone bills while he went skiing in Idaho last December. You checked the records out, because you’re with big brother. You also cross-checked my bank records and the Doctor’s, and saw that I sent him a big check last year. He probably forgot to report it on his tax return. You want a bribe to keep silent. Very well, name your amount and I’ll write a check.” Nagler laughed. “How silly of me. That would leave a record. No, name your amount and I’ll pay you off in cash.”

  Lloyd gasped at Nagler’s recuperative powers. Five minutes earlier, he had been a groveling mass. Now he held the condescending authority of a plantation owner. A “horror movie” and the wrecked equipment in the back room were the dividing points. Thinking, Break him, he said, “Didn’t it surprise you that my partner knew enough to sing you that song?”

  “No. A song is a song.”

  “And a movie is a movie,” Lloyd said, reaching into his pocket. “Bill, it’s 406

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  time I came clean. Doctor John sent me to test your loyalty.” He held out the mug-shot strip of Thomas Goff. “I’m the replacement for the old recruiter. You remember this fellow, don’t you? There’s a guy on Doctor John’s program who looks just like him. I know all about the meetings at the house in Malibu and how you bought the house for the Doctor and how you pay the phone bill. I know about the pay phone contacts and how you don’t fraternize outside the meetings. I know because I’m one of you, Bill.”

  First grief, then bliss, now bewilderment. Lloyd had kept his eyes averted from Nagler, letting him feast on Thomas Goff’s image instead of his own. When he finally reestablished eye contact he saw that the man had fingered the mug-shot strip to pieces and that his spiel had turned him into clay. Feeling like a bullfighter going in for the kill, Lloyd said, “I also lied when I said that Doctor John said that your movies were shit. He really loves your movie work. In fact, just today he told me that he wants you to both star in and direct the script he’s working on. He tol—”

  Lloyd stopped when Nagler’s grief took him over. “Patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum patria infinitum.”

  Lloyd thought of Linda and got up and walked toward the den and the telephone. He had his hand on the receiver when a tap on his shoulder forced him to jump back, turn around, and ball his fists. It was Bergen, looking eerily sober. “I couldn’t find any I.R.S. papers,” he said, “but I did find our pal’s diary under his bed. Renaissance weird, Hopkins. Fucking gothic.”

  Lloyd took the morocco bound book from Bergen’s hands and sat down on the desk. Opening it, he saw that the first entry was dated 11/13/83, and that it and all the subsequent entries were written in an exquisitely flourished longhand. While Bergen stood over him, he read through accounts of Havilland’s “programming,” picking up a cryptically designated cast along the way. There was the “Lieutenant,” who had to be Thomas Goff; the “Fox,” the “Bull dagger,” the “Bookworm,” the “Professor,” the

  “Muscleman,” and “Billy Boy,” who had to be Nagler himself. The entries themselves detailed how Havilland ordered his charges to fast for thirty-six hours, then stand nude in front of full-length mirrors and chant their “fear mantras” into tape recorders, until “subliminal dream consciousness” took over and led them to babble “transcendental fantasies” that he would later sift through for “key details” to translate into

  “reality fodder.” How he paired them off sexually at the “Beach Womb,”

  interrupting the couplings to take vital signs and “stress readings”; how he

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  forced them to kill dogs and cats as “insurance against moral flaccidity”; how the “Lieutenant” interrupted their REM sleep with late night phone calls and brutal interrogations into their dreams. Alternately using the first person “I” and the third person “Billy Boy,”

  Nagler described how he and Doctor John’s other counselees were pimped out to wealthy people who advertised for “fantasy therapists” in privately published and circulated sex tabloids, the weekend “lovemaking seminars” often netting Havilland several thousand dollars, and how the

  “beach womb groupings” were taped and transcribed by the “Lieutenant,”

  who sometimes served as the “Chef ”—concocting mixtures of pharmaceutical cocaine and other prescription drugs that the Doctor would administer to his counselees under “test-flight conditions.”

  Lloyd leafed full-speed through the diary, looking for incriminating facts: names, addresses and dates. With Marty Bergen hovering beside him and Nagler’s muffled chanting coming in from the living room, he felt like the sole outpost of sanity in a lunatic landscape, the feeling underlined by the fact that the diary contained no facts—only narrated disclosures peopled with coded characters.

  Until an entry dated the day before jumped out at him: Helped set up movie equipment at the Muscleman’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Doctor John supervised. I showed him how to operate the camera. I hope Muscleman won’t break anything. He scares me—and he looks more and more like the Lieutenant these days. The entry was followed by a blank page, followed by the diary’s concluding entry, dated that morning. Lloyd felt an icepick at his spine as he read, It’s not real. They faked it. You can fake anything with new camera technology. It’s a fake. It’s not real.

  Lloyd shoved Bergen aside and walked back to the movie room and searched among the upended equipment for film scraps, finding three strips of celluloid wedged underneath the editing machine. Running them through the machine’s feeder-viewfinder, he saw four close-ups of a woman’s white nyloned legs, a long shot of a mattress on a carpeted floor and a blurred extreme close-up of a broad-chested man with what looked like an L.A.P.D. badge pinned to his shirt.

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  The icepick jabbed his heart. Lloyd thought of the white-stockinged nurse that Richard Oldfield had brought to his house twenty-four hours before. The knife twisted, dug and tore, accompanied by a deafening burst of patria infinitum s from the living room.

  Lloyd walked toward the sound, finding Nagler still in his mantra pose and Bergen standing beside the fireplace, pouring bottles of liquor over the acrylic “firewood” on the grate. “Long-term interrogation, Sarge,” he said.

  “It won’t do to get tempted. What’s next?” His ghoul grin had become a feisty smirk, and for one split-second Lloyd found a beacon of sanity.

  “I’m leaving, you’re staying here,” he said. “I have to check on someone. Then, if she got my evidence, I have to take our friend’s guru out. You stay here and watchdog him. Hang by the phone. If I need you, I’ll ring once, then call back immediately.”

  “I want in on the bust,” Bergen said.

  Lloyd shook his head. “No. Just having you here could cause me lots of grief, and I’m not risking my job or you any further.” He watched Bergen’s smirk go hangdog. “What are you going to do when all this is over?”

  Bergen laughed as he poured out a bottle of Courvoisier V.S.O.P. “I don’t know. Jack left me close to twenty grand, maybe I’ll just see where that takes me.” When Lloyd didn’t react to his mention of the money, he said,

  “You knew about the bank draft, right?”

  Lloyd said, “Yeah. I didn’t report it because I knew I.A.D. would try to seize your account as evidence.”

  “You’re a good shit, Hopkins. You know that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What are you going to do when this is over?”

  Lloyd thought of Linda and Janice and his daughters, then looked over at the devastated William Nagler, still chanting at demons. “I don’t know,”

  he said.

  24

  The Night Tripper sat at the recording console in the Beach Womb, listening to
Richard Oldfield and Linda Wilhite make frightened small talk upstairs in bedroom number three. The split-second accuracy of his fate had taken on ironic overtones. Linda’s screaming of “Hopkins” combined with the gun in her purse was a tacit admission that the genius cop had figured it out on the same day that he had broken through his childhood void. Richard had blown his chance to kill Hopkins, and his contingency plan to drive Linda over the edge with the snuff film and have her commit the murder had backfired. After twenty-seven years devoted to venting his terror through others, it had all come down to himself. He had claimed his father’s heritage, gaining autonomy along with the knowledge that the game was over. God was a malevolent jokester armed with a blunt instrument called irony.

  Havilland leaned back in the chair that Thomas Goff used to occupy, feeling a conscious version of his dream disengagement split him in two. His left side imagined whirling corkboards, while his right side heard words issuing from the bedroom where Richard guarded the object of his corkboard fantasies. Soon exhaustion crept up. The spinning of the corkboard dominated, while the words played on, like dim music at the edge of sound.

  “. . . why are you staring at me?”

  “Doctor said to watch you.”

  “Do you do everything he tells you to do?”

  “Yes. Why are you making nasty faces at me? I’ve been gentle with you.”

  “Because Doctor said to be gentle? No, don’t answer, it’ll only make me hate you more. For your information, drugging and kidnapping is not a gentle activity. Are you aware of that?”

  “Yes. No. You’re very beautiful.”

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  “Jesus. Was that movie for real? I mean, there was the awful part, and then this close-up of you. Listen, are you Thomas Goff?”

  “I told you my name was Richard.”

  “All right, but what about the movie. Was it real? My mother was killed like that, with a pillow and a gun. Is the movie part of your crazy guru’s plans for me?”

  “What movie?”

  “Jesus. Are you high? I mean, on something besides insanity? You know, on drugs?”

  “Doctor gives me tranquilizers and antidepressants. Prescription stuff. He’s a doctor, so it’s legal and not bad.”

  “Not bad? Havilland’s a Doctor Feelgood to boot? No, don’t answer, I know he’s capable of anything. I’m not going to let you hurt me, you know. Never. Not ever.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Jesus, you sound like Peter Lorre. Does it turn you on that I’m not scared?”

  “Yes. No. No!”

  “First responses are always the most honest, Richard. If you or that psychopath downstairs tried to hurt me, I’d kick and bite and scratch and rub lye in your eyes. I—”

  “I don’t want to hurt you! I’ve done my hurting! It wasn’t good!”

  “Y-you—you mean you hurt other women?”

  “Yes! No! I mean they hurt me. Me! Me! Me! Me. Me.”

  “Who hurt you? What are you talking about?”

  “No. Doctor said I should talk to you, but not about bad things.”

  “Bad things, hmm? Okay, we’ll change the subject. Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly think that those overdeveloped muscles of yours are a turn-on to women?”

  “No. Yes. Yes!”

  “First responses, Richard, and you’re right. A woman sees a man like you and thinks, ‘This guy is so insecure that he spends three hours a day at the gym with all the fags and narcissists, building himself up outside so I won’t know how scared he is inside.’ I’ve got a lover who’s bigger than you and probably almost as strong, but he’s got a trace of flab on his stomach and hips. And I dig it. You know why? Because he lives in reality and does a good job of it, and he hasn’t got time to pump iron. So don’t think that your muscles impress me.”

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  “The . . . they’re for protection.”

  “From the people who hurt you? From the woman who hurt you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aha, the truth outs. Let me set you straight on something. Muscles don’t rule the world, brains do. Which is how a wimp like Havilland can make a slave out of someone big and strong like you. People protect each other with their love, not their muscles. Someone, probably some woman, hurt you really badly. She didn’t do it with her muscles, because she didn’t have any. You can’t get revenge by hitting back at people the way they hit at you, because then the people who hurt you win—by making you like them. Aren’t you hip to that?”

  “No. It’s different with Doctor John. He took me beyond my beyond.”

  “What’s your beyond?”

  “No!”

  “Hurting women? You can’t hurt me, because I’m smarter than you and stronger than you, and because that wimp downstairs told you not to. Some fucking beyond. Brown-noser to a freaked-out headshrinker who’s going to end up in the locked ward at Camarillo for life. Who’s going to protect you when he’s wearing a straitjacket and sucking baby food out of a straw?”

  “No! No! No no no no no. No.”

  “Yes, Richard. Yes. Besides, how many beyonds have you got? One? Two?

  Three? You don’t seem too fulfilled to me. It’s old wimpy’s beyonds we’re talking about, Richard. I almost wish you’d try to get violent with me, so I’d know you had the guts to disobey your slavemaster.”

  “What makes you think you’re so smart and so tough?”

  “I don’t know. Do you know that I’m not scared of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s your answer.”

  “What would you do if I tried to hurt you?”

  “Fight back. Watch you get turned on and watch you lose.”

  “Doctor said you’re a whore. Whores are wrong. Whores are bad.”

  “You almost got me there, but you missed by a few days. I quit. I walked. I walked. You can, too. You can walk out the door and wave goodbye to the Doctor, and he’ll be terrified, because without you he’s just another L.A. fruitcake with no place to hang his hat. Think on that. I’m going to try to sleep, but you think on that.”

  The Night Tripper awakened, instantly aware that his corkboard dreams had destroyed the music voices in bedroom number three. He checked the 412

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  console and saw that he had forgotten to hit the “record” switch, then heard a soft male sobbing come over the speakers and pictured Richard distraught over his dictate not to hurt the whore. Richard was a day too late. Linda was his. In the morning he would sacrifice her to his father’s memory. He would end the game on his own terms. 25

  Dawn.

  Lloyd sped north on Pacific Coast Highway, running on adrenaline, rage, and terror. His jeopardy gambit had become a sacrificial offering, and if the fires had already been fed, he would have to take out the Beach Womb and everyone in it and throw himself into the flames. He looked at the pump shotgun resting on the seat beside him. Five rounds. Enough for Havilland, Oldfield, two miscellaneous worshippers, and himself. The thought of self-immolation jerked his mind off of the immediate future and back to the immediate past. After leaving Bergen and Nagler, he had driven to Linda’s apartment. She was not there, and her Mercedes was not in the garage. Now frightened, he had run dome light and siren to Havilland’s Century City office. The night watchman in the lobby told him that he had admitted a very beautiful young woman at about seven o’clock, and that an hour later the nice Dr. Havilland and another man had brought her downstairs, looking high as a kite. “Emergency tooth extraction,” the Doctor had said. “I’m not a dentist, but I gave it a go anyway.” The two men had then hustled the near-comatose woman off in the direction of the parking lot. After frantically driving by Havilland’s Beverly Hills condo and finding no one there, Lloyd had run code three to the Pacific Palisades residential address of Ginjer Buchanan of Ginjer Buchanan Properties. The woman was not at home, but her live-in housekeeper succeeded in rousing her by pho
ne at her boyfriend’s apartment in Topanga Canyon. After Lloyd explained the urgency of the matter, the realtor agreed to meet him at her of-

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  fice with the information he needed. An hour later, at five A.M., he was staring at a floor plan of the Beach Womb.

  Then the terror that he had held at bay by movement took over. If he called the Malibu sheriffs for assistance, they would storm the beachfront house S.W.A.T. style, with all the accoutrements of military/police overkill: Gas, machine guns, bullhorns, and the substation’s lackluster hostage negotiation team. Loudspeaker amplified pleas, counterpleas and simplistic psychological manipulation that Havilland would laugh at; itchy-fingered deputies weaned on TV cop shows; automatic weaponry fired in panic. Linda in the crossfire. No. The jeopardy gambit came down to himself. Again Lloyd looked at his Ithaca pump. When the taste of cordite and charred flesh rose in his throat, he pulled over to the side of the highway and a long row of pay phones. Jungle Jack Herzog redux—with a blackmail demand.

  He had the receiver to his ear and a handkerchief over the mouthpiece when a strangely familiar vehicle ground to a halt behind his cruiser. Squinting through the Plexiglas, he saw Marty Bergen get out on the driver’s side door and walk over to the booths, holding a quart bottle of beer out at arm’s length, as though he were afraid of being contaminated. Lloyd slammed down the receiver, wondering how someone so sad could look so scary.

  Bergen smiled. “Maintenance jug. I haven’t touched it yet. Emergencies only. You looked scared, Hopkins. Really scared.”

  Lloyd grabbed the bottle and smashed it to pieces on the pavement. Only when the smell of beer hit his nostrils did he realize what he had done. “I told you to stay with Nagler.”

  “I couldn’t. I had to move, so I tied him up and split. Is that a misdemeanor or a felony? When I was on the job I never did learn the penal code.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “That one I do know: 413.5—Impersonating a Police Officer. I called the number on the real estate brochure. The woman told me you’d just walked out the door. She gave me the guru guy’s address. I was headed up there when I saw your car.”