Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  Kathleen’s vision centered in on a low wooden table. When squinting brought her greater clarity she saw that it was only a few feet in front of her. As if in answer, the table, with a scraping sound, moved up to where she could touch it. She twisted her arms again, pain cutting through her numbness. I am dead, but I am not cut in pieces.

  Willing all her senses into her eyes, Kathleen stared at the table. Gradually a room came into view behind it, and then the soft blackness was on and off her like the clicking of a camera shutter, and when the light returned the table was in her face, covered with naked plastic dolls with pins stuck into their crotches and huge heads made out of black and white photographs. I am in hell and these are my fellow exiles.

  Sensing familiarity in the photograph heads, Kathleen forced her mind to function. I am dead, but I can think. She knew that the heads were somehow of her, somehow close to her, somehow—

  Kathleen’s senses snapped. Her arms contracted and her legs jerked upwards, sending her chair to the floor. I am alive and those are the girls from my court and the policeman was right and Teddy from High School is going to kill me.

  Invisible hands picked up the chair and turned it around. Kathleen squirmed and dug her heels into a soft white carpet. My eyelids are forced open and my mouth is taped shut, but I am alive.

  Kathleen rolled her eyes to the far edges of the periphery, memorizing the wall in front of her in hopes of combining sight and thought into something more. When she assimilated all that she saw she began to sob, and tears once again turned her blind. Blood, rose branches, desecrated photographs and excrement. The stench assaulted her. I am going to die.

  There was a whirring sound. Kathleen followed it with her mind and what remained of her vision. She saw a tape recorder on a nightstand. She tried to scream, and felt the tape across her mouth begin to give. If I can scream, I—

  A soft sighing came over the tape machine. Kathleen breathed in through her nose and blew out with all her strength. The tape strained against her mouth and came loose along her lower lip. The soft sighing became a soft singsong voice:

  I am only worthy to love you in verse,

  To spread my love on the wings of a curse;

  They betrayed you and ripped you,

  Buried in dread;

  I avenged your heartache by killing them dead;

  Then you betrayed me with

  Badge one-one-one-four-

  You let him hurt me and make you his whore;

  I cannot blame you–but tonight you must choose;

  With your eyes sewn open you will watch

  him lose;

  I will always love–love…love…”

  The soft voice receded back into a sigh. Kathleen contorted her eyebrows and felt the stiches at the corners of her eyelids loosen. I am going to kill him before he kills me.

  The tape recorder clicked off. Kathleen’s chair was hoisted into the air and spun around in a perfect circle. She screamed and heard the faintest vibration of her own voice, then looked up at Teddy Verplanck in a skin-tight black jumpsuit. She formed words to keep from screaming and ripping the tape from her mouth prematurely. He has become so handsome. Why are cruel-looking men always the most handsome?

  Teddy put a piece of paper in front of Kathleen’s eyes. Biting down on her tongue, she read the block printed script: “I cannot speak to you yet. I am going to take out a knife and mark myself. I will not hurt you with the knife.”

  Kathleen nodded up and down, probing the tape with the tip of her tongue. Feeling was returning to her feet, and she could tell that she was wearing her blunt-toed wingtip flats. Good kicking shoes.

  Teddy smiled at her nodding acquiesence and turned the paper over. The reverse side was covered with faded newspaper clippings. Kathleen’s gaze zeroed in on them. When she saw that the clippings detailed accounts of women’s murders she stifled a dry sob by biting her cheeks and methodically reading every word on the page. Her terror turned to rage and she bit down harder, until blood and spittle filled her mouth. She breathed deeply through her nose and thought: I am going to maim him.

  Teddy threw the paper to the floor and unzipped the top of his jumpsuit, letting it fall to his waist. Kathleen looked at the most perfect male torso she had ever seen, transfixed by the rock-hard perfection until Teddy reached behind his back and drew out a penknife. He held the blade in front of his chest and twirled it like a baton, then pointed the blade at the area above his heart. When the tip drew blood, Kathleen twisted her hands on the arms of her chair, pushing out with her elbows, feeling her right hand bonds give way completely. Now. Now. Now. Please God let me do it now. Now. Now.

  Teddy wiped his torso and squatted in front of Kathleen, holding his chest at her eye level. He whispered, “It’s 10:30. We have to go soon. You were so beautiful with your eyes rolled back.” He wiped his chest a second time. Kathleen saw that he had carved “K Mc” beside his left nipple. She gagged, but held on. Now.

  Teddy squatted lower and smiled. Kathleen spat in his face and kicked out with both her legs, catching him in the groin, jerking her right hand free and pushing forward, toppling her chair just as Teddy crashed to the floor. She screamed and kicked again, her legs glancing off Teddy’s stomach. Teddy dropped his knife and shrieked, wiping bloody spittle from his eyes. Kathleen lunged with her whole body and got her free hand on the knife, hooking her right leg around Teddy to draw her within stabbing range. Teddy twisted and flailed blindly with his arms. Kathleen brought the knife down in a swooping roundhouse at his abdomen. Teddy jerked backwards and the blade cut air. Kathleen stabbed again, the knife snagging into the carpet. Teddy got to his knees and wrapped his fists into a hammer and swung down. Kathleen bared her teeth to bite as the blow arced toward her. She screamed and tasted blood when the hammer made contact. Then there was a throbbing red darkness.

  Dutch watched the muster-room clock strike eleven. He shifted his gaze out the door to the front desk. The desk officer looked up from his telephone and called out, “Nothing yet, skipper. I’ve made contact with twenty-three out of the thirty-one. The rest are no answers or recorded messages. Nothing even remotely suspicious.”

  Nodding curtly in answer, Dutch said, “Keep trying” and walked out to the parking lot. He looked up at the black sky and saw the crisscrossed beacons of the helicopter patrols light up low cloud formations and the tops of Hollywood skyscrapers. Save for a skeletal station contingent, every Hollywood Division officer was on the street, on foot, in the air or in a black-and-white, armed to the teeth and pumped up for glory. Rolling imaginary dice, Dutch calculated the odds on accidental shootings by overeager cops at ten to one, rookies and promotion happy hot dogs the most likely blood spillers. With Lloyd still missing and no clues to his whereabouts, he found that he didn’t care. Blood was in the air, and nihilist rectitude was the night’s prevailing logic. He had gone through cartons of Lloyd’s arrest records from his Hollywood Division days, finding no indicators pointing to trauma that might have festered to the point of combustion; he had telephoned every one of Lloyd’s girlfriends whose name he could recall. Nothing. Lloyd was guilty or Lloyd was innocent and Lloyd was nowhere. And if Lloyd was nowhere, then he, Captain Arthur F. Peltz, was a spiritual seeker who had gone to Mecca and had come away with unimpeachable evidence that life was shit.

  Dutch walked back inside the station. He was halfway up the stairs to his office when the desk officer ran up to him. “I got a response to your A.P.B., Captain. Vehicle only. I wrote down the address.” Dutch grabbed at the paper the officer was holding, then ran downstairs to the front desk and ran frenzied eyes over Lloyd’s interview list. When 1893 N. Alvarado screamed out from both pieces of paper, he yelled, “Call the officers who called in the bulletin and tell them to resume patrol; this is mine!”

  The desk officer nodded. Dutch ran up to his office and got his Ithaca pump. Lloyd was innocent and there was a monster to slay.

  19

  A winding two-lane access road led up to th
e Power Plant. It terminated at the base of a scrub-bush dotted hillside that rose steeply to the tall barbed-wire fence that enclosed the generator facility. There was a dirt parking lot off the left of the road, next to a tool shack sandwiched between two stanchions hung with high powered spotlights. Another spotlight housing was stationed directly across the blacktop, with feeder wires connecting to the Silverlake Reservoir a quarter of a mile north.

  At 11:30, Lloyd walked up from the playground, staking out the territory as he trudged uphill, the 30.06 resting on his shoulder, the .44 magnum pressed to his leg. He knew only that since assuming his position on the street side of the playground at eight-thirty, six cars had driven northbound on the access road. Two were official Water and Power Department vehicles, presumably headed for the plant’s administration offices. The four remaining cars had returned within an hour, meaning that the occupants had gotten stoned or laid on the hillside and had retreated back to L.A. proper. Which meant that Teddy Verplanck had arrived on foot or was in the process of driving up.

  Lloyd walked north on the dirt shoulder, hugging the embankment that branched into Power Plant Hill. When he reached the last turn in the road he saw that he was correct. Two cars were parked next to the fence beside the tool shack; both were Water and Power vehicles.

  The embankment ended, and Lloyd had to walk a stretch of pavement before he could scale the hill and establish a killing ground. He treaded lightly, his eyes constantly scanning his blind side. If Verplanck was nearby, he was probably hiding in the clump of trees adjoining the parked cars. He checked his watch: eleven forty-four. At precisely midnight he would blow that clump of trees to kingdom come.

  The pavement ended, and Lloyd began to climb uphill, pushing forward slowly, dirt mounds breaking at his feet. He saw a tall scattering of scrub bushes looming in front of him and smiled as he realized that it was the perfect vantage point. He stopped and unslung his 30.06, checking the clip and flipping off the safeties. Everything was operative and set to go at a split second’s notice.

  Lloyd was within a yard of his objective when a shot rang out. He hesitated for a brief instant, then hurled himself head first into the dirt just as a second shot grazed his shoulder. He screamed and burrowed into the ground, waiting for a third shot to give him a direction to fire in. The only sound was the pounding of his own chest.

  An electrically amplified voice cut the air: “Hopkins, I have Kathy. She has to choose.”

  Lloyd rolled into a sitting position and aimed his 30.06 at the sound of the voice. He knew that Verplanck was a conjuror who could assume shapes and voices and that Kathleen was safe somewhere in her web of fantasies. Clenching his bloodied shoulder into a huge ache to allow for the recoil, he fired off a full clip. When the shattering echoes died out, a laughing voice answered them. “You don’t believe me, so I’ll make you believe me.”

  A series of hellish shrieks followed, noises that no conjuror could artifice. Lloyd muttered “No, no, no,” until the electronic voice called out, “Throw down your weapons and come out to meet me or she dies.”

  Lloyd hurled his rifle at the road. When it clattered onto the pavement he stood up and jammed his .44 magnum into the back of his waistband. He stumbled downhill, knowing that he and his evil counterpart were going to die together with no one but the strident woman poet to write their epitaph. He was murmuring “rabbit down the hole, rabbit down the hole,” when white light blinded him and a white-hot hammer slammed him just above the heart. He flew back into the dirt and rolled like a dervish as the light bored into the ground by his side. Wiping dirt and tears from his eyes, he crawled for the pavement, watching the spotlight’s reflections gradually illuminate Teddy holding Kathleen McCarthy in front of the toolshed. He tore through his blood-drenched shirt and felt his chest, then twisted his right arm and pawed at his back. A small frontal and a crisp exit wound. He would have the juice to kill Teddy before he bled to death.

  Lloyd pulled out his .44 and spread himself prone, his eyes on the two spotlights next to the toolshed. Only the top light was on. Teddy and Kathleen were right below the housings, forty feet” of blacktop and dirt away from the muzzle of his handcannon. One shot at the spotlight; one shot to take off Teddy’s head.

  Lloyd squeezed the trigger. The light exploded and died at the precise second that he saw Kathleen break free of Teddy’s grasp and fall to the ground. He got to his feet and stumbled across the pavement, his gun arm extended, his left hand holding his trembling wrist steady. “Kathleen, hit the other light!” he screamed.

  Lloyd moved forward into his last gauntlet of darkness, a red-black curtain that masked all his senses and enveloped him like a custom-made shroud. When the spotlight went on Teddy Verplanck was ten feet in front of him, coming to meet his destiny with a .32 automatic and a nail-studded baseball bat.

  Both men fired at the same instant. Teddy clutched his chest and pitched backward just as Lloyd felt the bullet tear into his groin. His finger jerked the trigger and recoil sent the gun flying from his hand. He fell to the pavement and watched Teddy crawl toward him, the spikes on the baseball bat gleaming in the white-hot light.

  Lloyd pulled out his .38 snub nose and held it upright, waiting for the moment when he could see Teddy’s eyes. When Teddy was on top of him and the bat was descending and he could see that his blood brother’s eyes were blue he pulled the trigger six times. There was nothing but the soft click of metal on metal as Lloyd screamed and blood burst from Teddy’s mouth. Lloyd wondered how that could be and if he was dead, and then just before losing consciousness he saw Dutch Peltz wipe the blade that stuck out of his steel-toed paratrooper’s boot.

  20

  The long transit of horror ended, and the three survivors began the longer process of healing.

  Dutch had carried Lloyd and Teddy to his car, and with Kathleen weeping beside him had driven to the home of a doctor under indictment for dealing morphine. With Dutch’s gun at his head the doctor had examined Lloyd, pronouncing him in need of an immediate transfusion of three pints of blood. Dutch checked Lloyd’s driver’s license and the I.D. cards he had taken from the body of Teddy Verplanck. Both men were type O+. The doctor performed the transfusion with a makeshift centrifuge to stimulate Teddy’s heartbeat while Dutch whispered over and over that he would kill all the charges against him, regardless of the cost. Lloyd responded favorably to the transfer of blood, regaining consciousness as the doctor sedated Kathleen and removed the catgut stitches that anchored her eyelids to her brows. Dutch didn’t tell Lloyd where the blood had come from. He didn’t want him to know.

  Leaving Lloyd and Kathleen at the doctor’s house, Dutch drove the remains of Teddy Verplanck to their final resting place, a stretch of condemned beach known to be rife with industrial toxins. Hauling the body over a series of barbed wire fences, he had watched as the poisonous tide swept it away on the wings of a nightmare.

  Dutch spent the next week with Kathleen and Lloyd, convincing the doctor to oversee their medical recovery. The house became a hospital with two patients, and when Kathleen came out of her sedation she told Dutch of how Teddy Verplanck had gagged her and slung her over his back, carrying her through the Silverlake hills on his way to ambush Lloyd.

  He told her of how verse notations on Teddy Verplanck’s calendar had led him to the reservoir and how if Lloyd was to survive as a policeman and a human being she would have to be very gentle and never talk to him about Teddy. Weeping, Kathleen agreed.

  Dutch went on to say that he would destroy every official trace of Teddy Verplanck, but it would be her job to blunt Lloyd’s terror-driven memory with love. “With all my heart,” was her answer.

  Lloyd was delirious for over a week. As his physical wounds healed, his nightmares took over, and gradually, between the gentlest of caresses, Kathleen succeeded in convincing him that the monster was dead and that mercy had somehow prevailed. Holding a mirror to his eyes, she told him tender stories and made him believe that Teddy Verplanck was not his bro
ther but a separate entity who was sent to close out the books on all the anguish in his first forty years. Kathleen was a good storyteller, and tenuously, Lloyd started to believe her.

  But as Kathleen pieced together the story of Teddy and Lloyd her own terror began. Her phone call to Silverlake Camera had caused the death of Joanie Pratt. Her reluctance to believe Lloyd and smash her own pitiful illusions had resulted in the destruction of a living, breathing woman. She felt it with her every breath, and when she touched Lloyd’s devastated body it felt like a death sentence. Writing about it compounded the grief. It was a life sentence with no parole and no means of atonement.

  A month to the day after the Silverlake walpurgisnacht, Lloyd discovered that he could walk. Dutch and Kathleen had discontinued their daily visits and the indictment-free doctor had taken him off his pain medication. He would have to retrieve his family and face his I.A.D. inquisitors soon, and before he did that there was a place that he had to visit

  The cab dropped him in front of a red brick building on North Alvarado. Lloyd picked the lock on the door and walked upstairs, not knowing if he wanted the worst of his nightmares confirmed or denied. Whatever he saw would determine the course of the rest of his life, but he still didn’t know.

  The nightmare room was empty. Lloyd felt his hopes soar and shatter. No blood, no photographs, no body waste, no rose branches. The walls had been painted a guileless light blue. The bay windows were boarded shut. He would never know.

  “I knew you’d come.”

  Lloyd turned around at the voice. It was Dutch. “I’ve been staking the place out for days,” he said. “I knew you’d come here before you got in touch with your family or reported back to duty.”