Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  She lowered her hands to her husband’s face and gently pushed him away. “I want to see if the girls are all right,” she said. “I’ll have to tell them we were fighting. Then I think I want to sleep alone.”

  Lloyd got to his feet. “I’m sorry I was so late tonight.”

  Janice nodded dumbly and felt her sense of things confirmed. Then she put on a robe and went down the hall to check on her daughters.

  Lloyd knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. After saying good night to the girls, he prowled around downstairs looking for something to do. There was nothing to do but think of Janice and how he could not have her without giving up something dear to him and essential to his daughters. There was no place to go but backward in time.

  Lloyd put on his gunbelt and drove to the old neighborhood.

  He found it waiting for him in the pre-dawn stillness, as familiar as the sigh of an old lover. Lloyd drove down Sunset, feeling overwhelmed by the Tightness of his usurping of innocence via parable. Let them learn it slowly, he thought, not the way I did. Let them learn the beast by story–not repeated example. Let that be the new hallmark of my Irish Protestant irregulars.

  With this surge of affirmation, Lloyd floored the gas pedal, watching night-bound Sunset Boulevard explode in peripheral flashes of neon, sucking him into the middle of a swirling Jetstream. He looked at the speedometer: one hundred thirty-five miles per hour. It wasn’t enough. He bore down on the wheel with his whole being, and the neon turned to burning white. Then he closed his eyes and decelerated until the car hit an upgrade and the laws of nature forced it to a gliding stop.

  Lloyd opened his eyes to discover them flooded with tears, wondering for an awkwardly long moment where on earth he was. Finally, a thousand memories clicked in and he realized that chance had left him at the corner of Sunset and Silverlake–the heart of the old neighborhood. Propelled by a subservient fate, he went walking.

  Terraced hillsides drew Lloyd into a fusion of past, present, and future.

  He sprinted up the Vendome steps, noting with satisfaction that the earth on both sides of the cement stanchions was as soft as ever. The Silverlake hills were formed by God to nurture–let the poor Mexicans live hearty here and thrive; let the old people complain about the steepness yet never move away. Let the earthquake the scientific creeps predicted come…Silverlake, the defiant traditionalist anomaly, would sustain its havoc and stand proud while L.A. proper burst like an eggshell.

  At the top of the hill, Lloyd let his imagination telescope in on the few houses still burning lights. He imagined great loneliness and sensed that the light burners were importuning him for love. He breathed in their love and exhaled it with every ounce of his own, then turned west to stare through the hillside that separated him from the very old house where his crazy brother tended their parents. Lloyd shuddered as discord entered his reverie. The one person he hated guarding his two beloved creators. His one conscious compromise. Unavoidable, but…

  Lloyd recalled how it happened. It was the spring of 1971. He was working Hollywood Patrol and driving over to Silverlake twice a week to visit his parents while Tom was away at work. His father had settled into a quiet, oblivious state in his old age, spending whole days in his back yard shack, tinkering with the dozens of television sets and radios that eclipsed almost every square inch of its floor space; and his mother, then eight years mute, stared and dreamed in her silence, having to be steered to the kitchen thrice daily lest she forget to eat.

  Tom lived with them, as he had all his life, waiting for them to die and leave him the house that had already been placed in his name. He cooked for his parents and cashed their Social Security checks and read to them from the lurid picture histories of Nazi Germany that lined the bookshelves of his bedroom. It was Morgan Hopkins’s express wish to Lloyd that he and his wife live out their days in the old house on Griffith Park Boulevard. Lloyd reassured his father many times, “You’ll always have the house, Dad. Let Tom pay the taxes, don’t even worry about it. He’s a sorry excuse for a man, but he makes money, and he’s good at looking after you and Mother. Leave the house to him; I don’t care. Just be happy and don’t worry.”

  There was a silent agreement between Lloyd and his brother, then thirty-six and a phone sales entrepreneur operating at the edge of the law. Tom was to live at home and feed and care for their parents, and Lloyd was to look the other way at the cache of automatic weapons buried in the back yard of the Hopkins homestead. Lloyd laughed at the inequity of the bargain–Tom, craven beyond words, would never have the guts to use the weaponry, which would be rusted past redemption within a matter of months anyway.

  But one day in April of ’71, Lloyd got a phone call informing him that there was now a gaping hole at the periphery of his major dreams. An old buddy from the Academy who worked Rampart Patrol had cruised by the Hopkins home, noticing a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. Puzzled, since he had heard Lloyd often mention that his parents would rather die than give up the house, he called Lloyd at Hollywood Station to voice his puzzlement. Lloyd took the words in with a silent rage that had the locker room wobbling surreally before his eyes. Still wearing his uniform, he got his car from the parking lot and drove out to Tom’s office in Glendale.

  The “office” was a converted basement with four dozen small desks jammed together along the walls, and Lloyd walked into it oblivious to the salesmen shouting the panacea of aluminum siding and home bible-study classes into telephones.

  Tom’s desk was off by itself near the front of the room, next to a large urn filled with Benzedrine-laced coffee. Lloyd swung his lead-filled billy club into the urn, puncturing it and sending geysers of hot brown liquid into the air. Tom walked out of the men’s room, saw the rage in his brother’s eyes and the club, and backed into the wall. Lloyd advanced, and was arcing the club in a perfect roundhouse aimed at Tom’s head when the terror in the pale grey eyes that so resembled his own halted him. He threw the billy down and ran to the first row of desks, startled phone salesman darting out of his way, running for cover at the back of the basement.

  Lloyd began jerking the telephone cords out of their wall mountings and hurling the phones across the room. One row; two rows; three rows. When the salesmen had all deserted the office, and the floor was littered with broken glass, scattered order forms, and inoperative telephones, he walked up to his quaking older brother and said, “You will take the house off the market today and never leave Mother and Dad alone.”

  Tom nodded mutely and fainted into a puddle of his dope-saturated coffee.

  Lloyd deepened his gaze into the dark hillside. That was over ten years ago. His mother and father were still alive in their separate solitudes; Tom was still their custodian. It was his one unsatisfying holding action, but there was nothing he could do about it. He recalled his last conversation with Tom. He was visiting his parents and found Tom in the back yard, burying shotguns under cover of night.

  “Talk to me,” Lloyd said.

  “About what, Lloydy?” Tom asked.

  “Say something real. Insult me. Ask me a question. I won’t hurt you.”

  Tom backed a few steps away. “Are you going to kill me when Mom and Dad are gone?”

  Lloyd was thunderstruck. “Why on earth would I want to kill you?”

  Tom retreated again. “Because of what happened on Christmas when you were eight.”

  Lloyd felt himself embraced by monsters, over thirty years dead in the wake of the strong man he had become. His eyes strayed to his father’s radio shack, and he had to will himself to return to the present, the force of the horrific memory was so compelling. “You’re crazy, Tom. You’ve always been crazy. I don’t like you, but I would never kill you.”

  Lloyd watched dawn creep up on the eastern horizon, outlining the L.A. skyline with strands of gold. Suddenly he was lonely and wanted to be with a woman. He sat down on the steps and considered his options. There was Sybil, but she had probably gone back to her husband–she was cons
idering it the last time they talked. There was Colleen, but she was probably on her mid-week sales run to Santa Barbara. Leah? Meg? It was over with them, to resurrect it in the fierceness of early morning need would only cause pain later. There was only the uncertainty of Sarah Smith.

  Lloyd knocked on her door forty-five minutes later. She opened it bleary-eyed, dressed in a denim bathrobe. When her eyes focused in on him she started to laugh.

  “I’m not that funny looking, am I?” Lloyd asked.

  Sarah shook her head. “What’s the matter, your wife kick you out?”

  “Sort of. She found out that I’m really a vampire in disguise. I prowl the lonely dawn streets of Los Angeles looking for beautiful young women to give me transfusions. Take me to your wisest muse.”

  Sarah giggled. “I’m not beautiful.”

  “Yes you are. Do you have to go to work today?”

  Sarah said, “Yeah, but I can call in sick. I’ve never been with a vampire.”

  Lloyd took her hand as she motioned him inside. “Then allow me to introduce myself,” he said.

  Part Three

  Convergence

  5

  Lloyd was seated in his office at Parker Center, his hands playing over papers on his desk, alternately forming steeples and hanging men. It was January 3, 1983, and from his sixth story cubicle he could see dark storm clouds barrelling northward. He hoped for a pulverizing rain storm. He felt warm and protective when foul weather raged.

  The relative solitude of the office, situated between typewriter storage and Xeroxing rooms, was pleasing, but Lloyd’s primary reason for acquiring it was its proximity to the dispatcher’s office three doors down. Sooner or later, all homicides within the L.A.P.D.’s jurisdiction were reported over their phone lines, either by investigating officers requesting assistance or concerned parties screaming for help. Lloyd had rigged a special line to his own phone, and whenever an incoming call hit the switchboard a red light on his answering machine went on and he could pick up the receiver and listen in, often making him the first L.A.P.D. detective to gain crucial information on a murder. It was a sure-fire antidote to burdensome caseloads, dreary report writing, and court appearances; so when Lloyd saw the light on his machine blink, his heart gave a little lurch and he picked up the receiver to listen.

  “Los Angeles Police Department, Robbery-Homicide Division,” the woman at the switchboard said.

  “Is this where you report a murder?” a man stammered in return.

  “Yes, sir,” the woman answered. “Are you in Los Angeles?”

  “I’m in Hollyweird. Man, you wouldn’t believe what I just seen…” Lloyd came alive with curiousity–the man sounded like he had witnessed a stoned visitation.

  “Do you wish to report a homicide, sir?” The woman was brusque, even a little bullying.

  “Man, I don’t know if it was the real thing or a fuckin’ hallucination. I’ve been doin’ dust and reds for three days now.”

  “Where are you, sir?”

  “I ain’t nowhere. But you send the cops to the Aloha Apartments on Leland and Las Palmas. Room 406. There’s something inside out of a fuckin’ Peckinpah movie. I don’t know, man, but either I gotta quit usin’ dust or you got some heavy shit on your hands.” The caller went into a coughing attack, then whispered, “Fuckin’ Holly-weird, man; fuckin’ weird,” and slammed down his receiver.

  Lloyd could almost feel the switchboard operator’s befuddlement–she didn’t know if the caller was for real or not. Muttering “Goddamned creep,” she let her end of the line go dead. Lloyd jumped to his feet and threw on his sports jacket. He knew. He ran to his car and tore out for Hollywood.

  The Aloha Regency was a four story, moss-hung, Spanish-style apartment house painted a bright electric blue. Lloyd walked through the unkempt entrance foyer to the elevator, quickly grasping the building as a once grand Hollywood address gone to despair. He knew that the inhabitants of the Aloha Regency would be an uneasy melange of illegal aliens, boozehounds, and welfare families. The sadness in the threadbare carpeted hallways was almost palpable.

  He got into the elevator and pressed 4, then unholstered his .38, feeling his skin start to tingle as he sensed the nearness of death. The elevator jerked to a halt and Lloyd got out. He scanned the hallway, noting that the doors on the even-numbered side leading up to 406 bore jimmy marks. After 406 the jimmy marks stopped. The wood on the door jambs was freshly splintered with no evidence of warping, which meant that the doors had probably been tried as recently as this morning. Feeling a thesis forming already, Lloyd pointed his .38 straight at the door of 406 and kicked it in.

  Holding his gun in front of him as a directional finder, he walked into a small rectangular living room lined with bookshelves and tall potted plants. There was a desk wedged diagonally into one corner and three beanbag chairs on the floor, arranged in a semi-circle opened toward the front picture window. Lloyd walked through the room, savoring its feel. Slowly he swiveled to face the kitchenette off to the left. Freshly scrubbed tile and linoleum; dishes piled neatly by the sink. Which left the bedroom–separated from the rest of the apartment by a bright green door bearing a Rod Stewart poster.

  Lloyd looked down at the floor and felt his stomach start to churn. In front of the crack below the door was a pile of dead cockroaches, melded together in a pool of congealed blood. He kicked in the door, murmuring, “Rabbit down the hole,” closing his eyes until he assimilated the overwhelming stench of decomposing flesh. When he felt his tremors go internal and knew he wouldn’t retch, he opened his eyes and said very softly, “Oh God, please no.”

  There was a nude woman hanging by one leg from a ceiling beam directly over a quilt-covered bed. Her stomach had been ripped open from pelvis to ribcage and her intestines were spilled out onto her upended torso, splaying out to cover her blood-matted face. Lloyd memorized the scene: the woman’s free hanging leg swollen and purple and twisted out at a right angle, caked blood on her breasts, a bluish-white tint on what he could see of her unbloodied flesh, the bed coverlet drenched with so much blood that it crusted and peeled in layers, blood on the floor and walls and dresser and mirror, all framing the dead woman in a perfect symmetry of devastation.

  Lloyd went into the living room and found the telephone. He called Dutch Peltz at the Hollywood Station, saying only, “6819 Leland, Apartment 406. Homicide, ambulance, Medical Examiner. I’ll call you later and tell you about it.”

  Dutch said, “Okay, Lloyd,” and hung up.

  Lloyd walked through the apartment a second time, willing his mind blank so that things could come to him, moving his eyes over the living room until he noticed a leather purse lying next to a cactus plant. He reached down and grabbed it, then dumped its contents onto the floor. Make-up kit, Excedrin, loose change. He opened a hand-tooled wallet. The woman had been Julia Lynn Niemeyer. The photo and statistics on her driver’s license made him ache: pretty, 5’5”, 120 pounds. D.O.B. 2-2-54, making her a month short of twenty-nine.

  Lloyd dropped the wallet and examined the bookshelves. Romances and popular novels predominated. He noticed that the books on the top shelves were covered with dust, while the books on the bottom shelf were clean.

  He squatted down to examine them more closely. The bottom shelf contained volumes of poetry, from Shakespeare to Byron to feminist poets in soft cover. Lloyd pulled out three books at random and leafed through them, feeling his respect for Julia Lynn Niemeyer grow–she had been reading good stuff in the days before her death. He finished flipping through the classics and picked up an outsized paperback entitled Rage In The Womb–An Anthology of Feminist Prose. Opening to the “Contents,” he went numb when he saw dark brown stains on the inside cover. Flipping forward, he found pages stuck together with congealed blood and bloody smatterings growing fainter as he worked toward the end of the book. When he reached the glossy finished back cover, he gasped. Perfectly outlined in white were two bloody partial fingerprints–an index and pinky; enough to run a m
ake on.

  Lloyd whooped and wrapped the book in his handkerchief and carefully placed it on one of the beanbag chairs. On impulse, he walked back over to the bookshelf and ran a hand in the narrow space between the bottom shelf and the floor. He came away with a handful of vending machine dispensed sex tabloids–The L.A. Nite-Line, L.A. Grope, and L.A Swinger.

  He carried them over to the chair and sat down and read, saddened by the lurid fantasy letters and desperate liaison ads. “Attractive divorcee, 40, seeks well-hung white men for afternoon love. Send erect photo and letter to P.O. Box 5816, Gardena, 90808, Calif.”; “Good looking gay guy, 24, into giving head, seeks hunky young high school guys with no mustache. Call anytime—709–6404”; “Mr. Big Dick’s my name, and fucking’s my game! I give good lovin’ to much acclaim! Let’s get together for a swingin’ nite, my dick is hard if your pussy’s tight!—Send spread photo to P.O. Box 6969, L.A. 90069, Calif.”

  Lloyd was about to put the tabloids down and send up a mercy plea for the entire human race when his eyes caught an advertisement circled in red. “Your fantasy or mine? Let’s get together and rap. Any and all sexually liberated people are invited to write to me at P.O. Box 7512, Hollywood, 90036, Calif. (I’m an attractive woman in her late 20s.)” He put the paper down and dug through the other two. The identical ad was featured in both.

  He stuck the papers into his jacket pocket, walked back into the bedroom, and opened the windows. Julia Lynn Niemeyer swayed from the draft, turning on her one-legged axis, the ceiling beam creaking against her weight. Lloyd held her arms gently. “Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered, “oh, baby, what were you looking for? Did you fight? Did you scream?”

  Almost as if in answer, the woman’s cold left arm was caught by a gust of wind and flopped out of Lloyd’s grasp. He grabbed it and held the hand tightly, his eyes moving to the large blue veins at the crook of the elbow. He gasped. A pair of needle marks were outlined clearly against the middle of the largest vein. He checked the other arm–nothing–then scraped away patches of dried blood from the ankles and backs of the knees. No other tracks; the woman had been professionally sedated at the time of her desecration.