Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  “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 about 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. 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 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 grey 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 strategems 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 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. His 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 adolesence. Assuming 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 five-year 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.

  His disappointment grew. The deaths of Angela Stimka, Laurette Powell, Carla Castleberry, and Marcia Renwick were relegated to quarter-column obscurity. “Tragic” was the adjective both papers used to describe all four “suicides”; “Funeral arrangements pending” and the names and addresses of the next of kin took up the bulk of the print space.

  Lloyd rolled up the microfilm, placed it on the librarian’s desk and walked outside into the sunlight. Sidewalk glare and eyestrain from his hours of squinting combined to send a pounding up his neck into his head. Willing the pain down to a murmur, he considered his options. Interview the next of kin? No, sad denials would be the common denominator. Visit the death scenes? Look for indicators, chase hunches? “Legwork!” Lloyd shouted out loud. He ran for his car, and the headache disappeared altogether.

  Lloyd drove to West Hollywood and scouted the first three June 10th killing grounds.

  Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77, had lived in a mauve-colored ten-unit apartment house, ‘fifties-building boom-ugly, an obviously jerry-built structure whose one claim to prestige was its proximity to the gay bars on Santa Monica and the cross-sexual nightlife on the Sunset Strip.

  Lloyd sat in his car and wrote down a description of the block, his eyes perking only once–when he noticed an “Illegal Nighttime Parking” sign across the street from the 1167 Larrabee address. His gears clicked twice. He was in the heart of the gay ghetto. His killer had probably chosen the Stimka woman for the location of her dwelling as well as for her physicality, somehow wanting to run a gauntlet of subconscious denial by choosing a victim in a largely homosexual neighborhood; and the West Hollywood Sheriffs were demons on parking enforcement.

  Lloyd smiled and drove two blocks to the small wood-framed house on Westbourne Drive where Laurette Powell had died of Nembutal ingestion and “self-inflicted” knife wounds. Another “Illegal Nighttime Parking” sign, another click, this one very soft.

  The Tropicana Motel yielded a whole series of clicks, resounding gear-mashings that went off in Lloyd’s mind like gunshots that tore ceaselessly at innocent bodies. Carla Castleberry, D.O.D. 6/10/80, the means of death a .38 slug through the roof of the mouth and up into the brain. Women never blew their brains out. Classic homosexual symbolism, perpetrated in a sleazy “Boy’s Town” motel room.

  Lloyd scanned the sidewalk in front of the Tropicana. Crushed amyl nitrate poppers on the ground, fruit hustler junkies holding up the walls of the coffee shop. His thesis exploded in his mind. When its symbiotic thrust dawned through the noise of the explosion, he was terrified. He ignored his terror and ran for a pay phone, dialing seven familiar digits with shaking hands. When an equally familiar voice came on the line, sighing, “Hollywood Station, Captain Peltz speaking,” Lloyd whispered, “Dutch, I know why he kills.”

  An hour later, Lloyd sat in Dutch Peltz’s office, sifting through negative information that had him slamming his best friend’s desk top in frustration. Dutch stood by the door, watching Lloyd read through the teletypes that had just come in from both the L.A.P.D. and Sheriff’s central computers. He wanted to stroke his son’s hair or smooth his shirtfront, anything to ease the anguish that had Lloyd’s features contorted in rage. Feeling meek in the wake of that rage, Dutch said, “It’s going to be alright, kid.”

  Lloyd screamed, “No, it’s not! He was assaulted, I’m certain of that, and it happened on a June 10th when he was a juvenile! Juvenile sex-offense records are never shredded! If it’s not on the computer, then it didn’t happen in L.A. County or it was never fucking reported! There’s nothing on these fucking juvie vice printouts except fruit shakedown and backseat blow jobs, and you don’t become a fucking mass murder because you let some old man suck your cock in Griffith Park!”

  Lloyd picked up a quartz bookend and hurled it across the room. It landed on the floor next to the window that overlooked the station parking lot. Dutch peered out at the nightwatch officers revving up their black-and-whites, wondering how he could love them all so much, yet not at all when compared to Lloyd. He placed the bookend back on his desk and ruffled Lloyd’s hair.

  “Feel better, kid?”

  Lloyd gave Dutch a reflex smile that felt like a wince. “Better. I’m beginning to know this animal, and that’s a start.”

  “What about the printout on the parking tickets? What about F.I. cards on the dates of the killings?”

  “Negative. No parking tickets at all on the applicable dates and streets, and the only Sheriffs F.I. cards were filled out on women–hookers working the Strip. It was a long shot at best, and our department wasn’t computerizing F.I.s when the Renwick woman was killed. I’m going to have to start from scratch again, send out sub-rosa queries to old-time juvie dicks, see if I can get some feedback on old assault cases that never made the files.”

  Dutch shook his head. “If this guy got molested or porked or whatever around twenty years ago, like you figure, most of the dicks who might know something would be retired by now.”

  “I know. You send out the feelers, will you? Pull some tails, call in some favors. I want to keep moving out on the street; that’s where it feels right.”

  Dutch took a chair across from Lloyd, trying to gauge the light in his eyes. “O.K., kid. Remember my party Thursday night, and get some rest.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got a date tonight. Janice and the girls are probably hanging out with their fag buddy, anyway. I want to keep moving.”
/>   Lloyd’s eye’s flickered; Dutch’s eyes bored in. “Anything you feel like telling me, kid?”

  Lloyd said, “Yeah. I love you. Now let me get out of here before you get sentimental about it.”

  On the street, without his paperwork to refer to and with three hours to kill before meeting Joanie Pratt, Lloyd recalled that his subordinates had yet to canvass the Hollywood area bookstores.

  He drove to a pay phone and leafed through the yellow pages, finding listings for one poetry bookshop and one specializing in feminist literature:

  New Guard Poetry on La Brea near Fountain and the Feminist Bibliophile on Yucca and Highland.

  Deciding on a circuit that would allow him to hit both stores and then head toward Joanie’s house in the Hollywood Hills, Lloyd drove first to New Guard Poetry, where a bored, scholarly looking man in incongruous farmer overalls told him that no, there had been no suspicious browsers or sales of feminist prose collections to strongly built men in their middle to late thirties, for the simple reason that he did not stock feminist poetry–it was aberrantly anti-classicist. Most of his customers were academics of long standing who preferred to order from his catalog, and that was that.

  Lloyd thanked the man and swung his unmarked Matador north, pulling up in front of the Feminist Bibliophile at precisely six o’clock, hoping that the small, converted-house bookstore would still be open. He trotted up the steps just as he heard the door being bolted from inside, and when he saw the lights in the windows going off he rapped on the door jamb and called out, “Police. Open up, please.”

  The door swung open a moment later, and the woman who opened it stood silhouetted against the light in a challenging attitude. Lloyd’s body gave a slight shudder as he felt the pride in her pose, and before she could voice any challenge out loud he said, “I’m Detective-Sergeant Hopkins, L.A.P.D. Could I talk to you for a moment?”