Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  Comforted by the knowledge that the force arrayed against him consisted of only one man, Teddy formulated a plan for his elimination, then thought of the path that had brought him to this point.

  He had spent the days after June 10, 1964 regrouping in his art and observing the mutiny of Kathy’s Kourt.

  His initial outrage against his violators had become tragic validation of his art; he had paid for his art in blood, and now it was time to take his blood knowledge and reach for the stars. But the pages he filled up were turgid and hollow, timid and obsessed with form. And they were completely subservient to the drama that was taking place in the rotunda court: a betrayal so brutal that he knew it rivaled his own recent devastation.

  One by one, hurling maiming prose, the girls of Kathy’s Kourt attacked their leader in the very spot where she had given them every sustaining ounce of her love. They called her frigid and a no-talent shanty Mick. They told her that her no-dating policy was a cheap ploy to save them for scuzzy lesbian encounters that she was too cowardly to initiate. They called her a prissy, derivitive poet. They left her with nothing but tears, and he knew that they had to pay.

  But the price eluded him, and he was too fragmented in his own life to pursue the payoff. He spent a year writing an epic poem on the themes of rape and betrayal. When the poem was completed he knew that it was trash and burned it. He grieved for the loss of his art and turned to the sad efficacy of a craft–photography. He knew the rudiments, he knew the business end, and above all he knew that it would supply him with the means to live well and seek beauty in an ugly world.

  He became a proficient, unimaginative commercial photographer, earning a decent living by selling his photographs to newspapers and magazines. But Kathy was always with him, and thoughts of her brought back the terror of June 1964 full force. He knew that he had to combat that terror, that he would not be worthy of Kathy’s memory until he had conquered the fear that always came with it. So for the first time in his life, he sought the purely physical.

  Hundreds of hours of weightlifting and calisthenics transformed the puny body he had always secretly despised into a rock-hard machine; a like amount of time earned him a black belt in karate. He learned about weaponry, becoming an expert rifle and pistol shot. With the gathering of these worldly skills came a concurrent lessening of terror. As he grew stronger his fear became rage and he began to contemplate the murder of the Kathy Kourt betrayers. Death schemes dominated his thoughts, yet last vestiges of fear prevented him from taking action.

  Self disgust was returning in force when he hit on the solution. He needed a rite of blood passage with which to test himself before beginning his revenge. He spent weeks speculating on the means, without results, until one night a phrase from Eliot jumped into his mind and stuck there: “Below, the boardhound and the boar, pursue their pattern as before, yet reconciled among the stars.”

  He knew immediately where that pattern was taking him–the inland regions of Catalina Island, where wild boars roamed in herds. He sailed over the following week, bringing with him a six-shot Derringer and a weighted baseball bat with sharpened ten-penny nails driven into the head. Carrying only those weapons and a canteen of water, he hiked by nightfall into the middle of the Catalina outback, prepared to kill or die.

  It was dawn when he spotted three boars grazing next to a stream. He raised his baseball bat and charged them. One boar retreated, but the other two stood their ground, their tusks pointing straight at him. He was within killing range when they charged. He feinted, and they rushed past him. He waited two seconds, then feinted in the opposite direction, and when the boars snorted in frustration and turned to ram him, he sidestepped again and swung his bat downward at the closest one, catching it in the head, the impact of the blow wrenching the bat from his hands.

  The wounded boar writhed on the ground, squealing and flailing at the embedded bat with its hooves. The other boar turned around, then stood on its hind legs and leaped at him. This time he didn’t feint or sidestep. He stood perfectly still, and when the boar’s tusks were almost in his face he raised the Derringer and blew its brains out.

  On his exultant return hike he let the dozens of boars that he saw live in peace. At last “reconciled among the stars,” he took the tourist steamship back to L.A. proper and began plotting the deaths of Midge Curtis, Charlotte Reilly, Laurel Jensen, and Mary Kunz, first determining their whereabouts through phone calls to the Marshall High Records Office. When he learned that all four girls were scholarship students at Eastern colleges he felt his hatred for them grow in quantum leaps. Now their motive for betraying Kathy was clearly delineated. Academically validated, and thrilled with the prospect of leaving Los Angeles, they had spurned their mentor’s plans to remain in L.A. and be their teacher, attributing it to the basest of desires. He felt his rage branch out into deepening areas of contempt. Kathy would be avenged, and soon.

  He compiled his college itinerary and left for points east on Christmas day, 1966. Two carefully staged accidental deaths, one forced drug overdose and one killing that matched the Boston Strangler M.O. comprised his mission.

  He landed in snowbound Philadelphia and rented a hotel room for three weeks, then set out by rented car on his circuit of Brandeis, Temple, Columbia, and Wheaton Universities. He was armed with caustic agents, strangling cord, narcotics, and formidable reserves of bloodstained love. He was invulnerable at all levels but one, for when he saw Laurel Jensen sitting alone in the Student Union at Brandeis he knew she was of Kathy, and that he could never harm anyone who was once so close to his beloved. Glimpses of Charlotte Reilly browsing the Columbia bookstore confirmed the symbiotic thrust of their union. He didn’t bother to search out the other two girls; he knew that to see them would render him as vulnerable as a child at its mother’s breast.

  He flew home to Los Angeles, wondering how he could have paid such a severe price and not even have his art or his mission as a reward. He wondered what he was going to do with his life. He fought fear by strict adherence to the most stringent martial arts disciplines and by the penance of prolonged fasting followed by ascetic desert sojourns where he clubbed coyotes to death and roasted their carcasses over fires he built and nurtured with desert tools and his own breath. Nothing worked. The fear still drove him. He was certain that he was going insane, that his mind was a tuning fork that attracted hungry animals who would one day eat him up. He couldn’t think of Kathy–the animals might pick up his thoughts and descend on her.

  Then suddenly things changed. He heard the meditation tape for the first time. And then he met Jane Wilhelm.

  Emboldened by his sojourn in the past, Teddy walked over to the thatch-covered house and stationed himself behind the towering hibiscus plants adjoining the front porch. After a few minutes he heard voices coming from inside, and seconds later the door opened and the policeman was standing there, shivering against the chill night air.

  The woman joined him, huddling into his arms, saying softly, “You promise that you’ll be real careful and call me after you catch the son of a bitch?”

  The big man said, “Yes,” then bent and kissed her on the lips. “No protracted farewells,” the woman said as she closed the door behind her.

  Teddy got to his feet as he watched the tan police car drive off. He pulled a pushbutton stiletto from his pocket. Lloyd Hopkins was going to die soon, and he was going to die regretful of this last visit to his mistress.

  He walked to the front door and drummed light knuckles across it. Joyous laughter answered the intimacy of the knock. He heard footsteps approaching the door and flattened himself off to the side of it, the knife held against his leg. The door burst open and the woman’s voice called out, “Sarge? I knew you were too smart to turn down my offer. I knew—”

  He jumped from his hiding place to find the woman framed in the doorway in an attitude of longing. It took seconds for her hopeful face to turn terrified, and when he saw recognition flash in her eyes he raised his knife and hel
d it before her, then flicked it lightly across her cheek. Her hands jumped to her face as blood spurted into her eyes, and he raised a hand to her throat to silence her potential screams. His hand was at the neck of her sweater when he slid on the doormat and crashed to his knees. Joanie’s sweater ripped free in his hands, and as he tried to get to his feet she swung the door onto his arm and kicked at his face. A pointed toe caught his mouth and ripped it open. He spit out blood and stabbed blindly through the crack in the doorway. Joanie screamed and kicked again at his face. He ducked at the last second and grabbed her ankle as it descended, yanking it upward, bringing her down in a flailing tangle of limbs. She scuttled backward as he got to his feet and walked inside, weaving the stiletto in front of him in a slow figure-eight pattern. He turned to close the door, and she kicked out and sent a floor lamp crashing into his back. Stunned, he jumped backward, his body weight slamming the door shut.

  Joanie got to her feet and stumbled back into her dining room. She wiped blood from her eyes and banged her arms sideways, looking for weapons, her eyes never straying from the jumpsuited figure advancing slowly toward her. Her right arm caught the back of a deck chair, and she hurled it at him. He kicked it out of his way and inched forward teasingly, in a parody of stealth, his knife movements becoming more and more intricate. Joanie crashed into her dining room table and grabbed blindly at a stack of dishes, scattering them, getting her hands on only one dish, then finding herself without the strength to throw it.

  She dropped the dish and stepped backward. When she touched the wall she realized that there was no place left to run and opened her mouth to scream. When a gurgling sound came out, Teddy raised his stiletto and threw it at her heart. The knife caught and Joanie felt her life burst, then seep out in a network of fissures. As bright light became darkness she slid to the floor and murmured, “Do-wah, wah-wah-do…”, then surrendered herself to the dark.

  Teddy found the bathroom and cleansed his split lips with mouthwash, wincing against the pain but going on to douse the wounds with the whole bottle as penance for allowing himself to be bloodied. The pain enraged him. Hatred of Lloyd Hopkins and contempt for the puny bureaucracy he represented burst out of his every pore.

  Let them all know, he decided; let the world know that he was willing to play the game. He found the telephone and dialed O. “I’m in Hollywood and I want to report a murder,” he said.

  The stunned operator put him directly through to the switchboard at the Hollywood station. “Los Angeles Police Department,” the switchboard officer said.

  Teddy spoke succinctly into the mouthpiece: “Come to 8911 Bowlcrest Drive. The door will be open. There’s a dead woman on the floor. Tell Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins that it’s open season on police groupies.”

  “And what is your name, sir?” the switchboard officer asked.

  Teddy said, “My name is about to become a household word,” and hung up.

  The bewildering phone call was relayed from the switchboard officer to the desk officer, who flashed on the name “Lloyd Hopkins” and remembered that Hopkins was a good friend of Captain Peltz, the daywatch commander. Having heard rumors that Hopkins was in trouble with I.A.D., the desk officer called Peltz at home with the information. “The operator got the message slightly garbled, Captain,” he said. “She thought it was a crank, but she did mention a dead woman and your buddy Sergeant Hopkins, so I thought I’d call you.”

  Dutch Peltz went cold from head to foot. “What exactly was the message?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just something about a dead woman and your bu…”

  Dutch’s voice, filled with worry, interrupted. “Did the caller leave an address?”

  “Yes, sir. 8911 Bowlcrest.”

  Dutch wrote it down and said, “Have two officers meet me there in twenty minutes and tell no one about this call. Do you understand?”

  Dutch didn’t wait for an answer, or bother to hang up the phone. He threw on slacks and sweater over his pajamas and ran for his car.

  17

  Frock-coated figures wielding razor-edged crucifixes chased him across an open field. In the distance a large stone house shimmered in the glow of a white hot spotlight. The house was encircled by iron fencing linked together by musical clefs, and he knew that if he could hit the fence and surround himself with benevolent sound he would survive the onslaught of the cross killers.

  The fence exploded as he made contact, hurtling him through barriers of wood, glass, and metal. Hieroglyphics flashed before his eyes; computer printouts that twisted into the shapes of contorted limbs and bombarded him past a last barrier of pulsating red light and into a sedately furnished living room fronted with triangular bay windows. The walls were covered with faded photographs and gnarled flower branches. As he moved closer he saw that the pictures and branches formed a door that he could will open. He was willing himself into a pitch-black trance when a succession of crosses slammed into him and pinned him to the wall. The photographs and branches descended on him.

  Lloyd jerked awake, slamming his knees into the dashboard. It was dawn. He looked through the windshield and saw a half-familiar Silverlake side street, then looked at his haggard face in the rear view mirror and felt it all come back: Haines, Verplanck and his planned stakeout around the corner from Silverlake Camera. The speed had boomeranged and had combined with his nervous tension to knock him out. The killer was a block away, asleep. It was time.

  Lloyd walked over to Alvarado. The street was perfectly still, and no lights issued from the red brick building that housed the camera store. Remembering that Verplanck’s motor vehicle registration listed an identical business and home address, he stared up at the second story windows, then checked the parking lot next door. Verplanck’s Dodge van and Datsun sedan were parked side by side.

  Lloyd walked around to the alley in back of the building. There was a fire escape that reached up to the second floor and a metal fire door. The door looked impregnable, but there was an unshaded window with a deep brick ledge about four feet off to its right. It was the only possible access.

  Lloyd leaped for the bottom rung of the fire escape. His hands caught iron and he hauled himself up the steps. At the second story landing he gave the metal door a gentle push. No give; it was locked from the inside. Lloyd eyed the window, then stood up on the railing and flattened himself into the wall. He took a bead on the ledge and pushed off, landing on it squarely, grasping the window runner to hold himself steady. When his heartbeat subsided to the point where he could think, he looked down and saw that the window led into a small, darkened room filled with cardboard boxes. If he could get in he could reach the apartment proper without rousing Verplanck.

  Squatting on the ledge, Lloyd got a grip on the bottom of the window runner and pushed in and up. The window squeaked open and he lowered himself into a closet-sized storage space reeking of chemicals and mildew. There was a door at the front of the room. Lloyd drew his .38 and nudged it open, entering into a carpeted hallway. Using his gun as a directional finder, he crept down it until he came to an open door.

  He braced himself head first into the wall and peered in. An empty bedroom with a neatly made bed. Picasso prints on the walls. A connecting door into a bathroom. Complete silence.

  Lloyd tiptoed into the bathroom. Immaculate white porcelain; polished brass fixtures. There was a half-open door next to the sink. He looked through the crack and saw steps leading downstairs. He inched down them with painstaking slowness, his gun arm extended to its maximum length, his finger on the trigger.

  The steps ended at the back of a large room filled with cardboard photographic displays. Lloyd felt his tension ridden body breathe out of its own accord. Verplanck was gone, he could feel it.

  Lloyd surveyed the front of the store. It looked like camera stores everywhere: wood counter, neatly arrayed cameras in glass cases, cheerful children and cuddly animals beaming down from the walls.

  Treading silently, he walked back upstairs, wondering where
Verplanck had spent the night and why he hadn’t taken one of his cars.

  The second floor was still eerily silent. Lloyd walked through the bathroom and bedroom and down the hall to an ornate oak door. He pushed it open with his gun barrel and screamed. Triangular bay windows made up the front wall. Huge photographs of Whitey Haines and Birdman Craigie covered the side walls, interspersed with taped-on rose branches, the whole collage united by crisscrossed smearings of dried blood.

  Lloyd walked along the walls, looking for details to prove his dream a fake, a coincidence, anything but what he couldn’t let it mean. He saw dried semen on the photos, crusted over the genital areas of both Haines and Craigie, the word “Kathy” finger-painted in blood. Beneath the photographs there were small holes in the wall stuffed with excrement. The holes were at waist level; higher up the white wallpaper surrounding the photographs bore fingernail tracks and bite marks.

  Lloyd screamed again. He ran back through the hallway and bathroom and downstairs. When he reached the first floor he crashed over a pile of cartons and stumbled out the front door. If his dream was for real, then music would save him. Dodging traffic, he ran across Alvarado and around the corner to his car. He hit the ignition and fumbled the radio on, catching the end of a commercial jingle. His mental colors and textures were returning to normal when an alarmed electronic voice leaped out at him:

  “The ‘Hollywood Slaughterer’ has claimed his third victim in twenty-four hours, and police are gearing up for the greatest manhunt in Los Angeles history! Last night the body of forty-two-year-old actress-singer Joan Pratt was discovered in her Hollywood Hills home, making her the third person to die violently in the Hollywood area in the past two days. Lieutenant Walter Perkins of the L.A.P.D.’s Hollywood Division and Captain Bruce Magruder of the West Hollywood Sheriffs are holding a joint news conference this morning at Parker Center to discuss the massive manhunt and to advise the Hollywood area populace on security measures to thwart the killer or killers. Captain Magruder told reporters this morning that ‘The Sheriff’s department and L.A.P.D. have deployed our largest force of street officers ever in our effort to catch this killer. We firmly believe that this person’s insanity is peaking and that he will try to kill again soon. There will be helicopter patrols throughout the Hollywood-West Hollywood areas, as well as a concentrated deployment of officers on foot. Our efforts will not cease until the killer is caught. Our entire detective force is tracking down every available lead. In the meantime, remember: This killer has killed both men and women. I urge all Hollywood residents not, repeat, not to stay alone tonight. Buddy up, for your own safety. We bel…’”