by James Ellroy
“What was it?”
“I want to quit the Life.”
“Then I was right on two counts.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you you were no hooker.”
Lloyd got up and walked out of the apartment, letting his exit line linger.
With the Stanley Rudolph angle covered, Lloyd remembered an investigatory approach so rudimentary that he knew its very simplicity was the reason he had forgotten to explore it. Cursing himself for his oversight, he drove to a pay phone and called Dutch Peltz at the Hollywood Station, asking him to go across the street to the Hollywood Municipal Court and secure a subpoena for Jack Herzog’s bank records. Dutch agreed to the errand, on the proviso that Lloyd fill him in at length on the case when he came by the station to pick up the paperwork. Lloyd agreed in return and drove to Herzog’s apartment house in the Valley, thinking of Linda Wilhite all the way.
At Herzog’s building, Lloyd went straight to the manager’s apartment, flashed his badge, and asked him what bank the missing officer’s rent checks were drawn on. Without hesitation, the frail old man said, “Security-Pacific, Encino branch,” then launched into a spiel on how other officers had been by the previous day and had sealed the nice Mr. Herzog’s nice apartment.
After thanking the manager, Lloyd drove back over the Cahuenga Pass to the Hollywood Station. He found Dutch Peltz in his office, muttering, “Yes, yes,” into the telephone. Dutch looked up, drew a finger across his throat and whispered, “I.A.D.” Lloyd took a chair across from him and put his feet up on the desk. Dutch muttered, “Yes, Fred, I’ll tell him,” and hung up. He turned to Lloyd and said, “Good news and bad news. Which would you prefer first?”
“Take your pick,” Lloyd said.
Dutch smiled and poked Lloyd’s crossed ankles with a pencil. “The good news is that Judge Bitowf issued your subpoena with no questions asked. Wasn’t that nice of him?”
Lloyd took in Dutch’s grin and raised his feet as if to kick his precious quartz bookend off the desk. “Tell me what Fred Gaffaney had to say. Omit nothing.”
“More good news and bad news,” Dutch said. “The good news is that I am your official liaison to I.A.D. on all matters pertaining to the Goff-Herzog case. The bad news is that Gaffaney just reiterated in the strongest possible language that you are to go nowhere near the officers working the moonlight gigs or go near the firms themselves. Gaffaney is preparing an approach strategy, and he and his top men will be conducting interviews within a few days. I will be given Xeroxes of their reports, you can get copies from me. Gaffaney also stated that if you violate these orders, you will be suspended immediately and given a trial board. You like it?”
Lloyd reached over and patted the bookend. “No, I don’t like it. But you do.”
Dutch flashed a shark grin. “I like anything that keeps you reasonably restrained and thereby a continued member of the Los Angeles Police Department. I would hate to see you get shitcanned and go on welfare. You’d be drinking T-bird and sleeping in the weeds within six months.”
Lloyd stood up and grabbed the subpoena off Dutch’s desk. He laid the notebook containing the names from Stanley Rudolph’s address book in its place and said, “I know why you’re acting so sardonic, Dutchman. You had a martini with your lunch. You have one drink a year, and your low tolerance gets you plowed. I’m a detective. You can’t fool me.”
Dutch laughed. “Fuck you. What’s with this notebook and where do you think you’re going? You were going to fill me in on the case, remember?”
Lloyd took a playful jab at the bookend. “Fuck you twice. I don’t confide in alcoholics. Have one of your minions run those names through R. & I., will you?”
“I’ll think about it. Hey Lloydy, how come you took my bad news so easy? I expected you to throw something.”
Lloyd tried to imitate Dutch’s shark grin, but knew immediately that it came out a blush. “I think I’m in love,” he said.
Lloyd drove back to the Valley, highballing it northbound on the Ventura Freeway in order to hit the Encino branch of the Security-Pacific Bank before closing time, making it with two minutes to spare. He showed his I.D. and the subpoena to the manager, a middle-aged Japanese man who led him to the privacy of a safe deposit box examination room, returning five minutes later with a computer printout and a thick transaction file. Bowing, the manager closed the door, leaving Lloyd in impeccable silence.
That silence soon became inhabited by dates and figures that detailed an atypical cop life. Jack Herzog’s savings and checking accounts went back five years. Lloyd started at the beginning of the transaction file and waded through paychecks deposited twice monthly, rent checks drawn monthly and savings stipends deposited every third L.A. City pay period. Jack Herzog was a frugal man. There were no large withdrawals indicating spending sprees; no checks for amounts exceeding his monthly rent payment of $350.00, and out of every third paycheck he deposited $300.00 in a 7½% growth savings account. When Herzog opened his dual accounts in 1979, his total balance was less than six hundred dollars. At the transaction file’s last entry date four months before, he was worth $17,913.49.
Noting that the last entry was on 1/4/84, Lloyd turned to the computer sheet, hoping it contained facts updating Herzog’s two accounts to the present.
It did. The same deposit/check withdrawal motif continued, this time detailed in hard-to-read computer type. Lloyd was about to shake his head at the sadness of close to nineteen grand belonging to a dead man when the final transaction came into focus, grabbing him by the throat.
On March 20, around the time of his disappearance, Jack Herzog closed out both his accounts and purchased an interbranch bank draft for his total balance of $18,641.07. There was a photocopy of the draft clipped to the computer sheet. It stated that the above amount was to be transferred to the West Hollywood branch of Security-Pacific, to the savings account of Martin D. Bergen. Lloyd let the facts sink in, then walked slowly out of the examination room and through the bank proper, bowing to the bank manager and running as soon as he hit the sidewalk.
By speeding through the Hollywood Hills, Lloyd was able to reach the Big Orange Insider office in just under half an hour. The same receptionist gave him the same startled look as he pushed through the connecting door to the editorial department, and seconds later the young man he had tangled with on his previous visit attempted to block his progress by standing in his path with his legs dug in like a linebacker. “I told you before you can’t come back here,” he said.
Lloyd took a bead on his head, then caught himself. “Marty Bergen,” he said. “Official police business. Go get him.”
The young man wrapped his arms around his chest. “Marty is on vacation. Leave now.”
Lloyd took the bank subpoena from his pocket and rolled it up, then tickled the underside of the young man’s chin with the end. When he jerked backward, Lloyd said, “This is a court order to search Bergen’s desk. If you don’t comply with it, I’ll get an order to search the entire premises. Do you dig me, Daddy-o?”
Turning beet red, then pale, the youth flung an arm toward the back of the room. “The last desk against the wall. And let me see that court order.”
Lloyd handed the subpoena over and weaved through a crammed maze of desks, ignoring the stares of the people sitting at them. Bergen’s desk was covered with a pile of papers. Lloyd leafed through them, pushing the stack aside with he saw that every page contained notes scrawled in an indecipherable shorthand. He was about to go through the drawers when a woman’s voice interrupted him. “Officer, is Marty all right?”
Lloyd turned around. A tall black woman wearing an ink-stained printer’s smock was standing beside the desk, holding a long roll of tabloid galley paper. “Is Marty all right?” she repeated.
“No,” Lloyd said. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask? You sound concerned.”
The woman fretted the roll in her hands. “He’s been gone since the last time you were here,” she
said. “He hasn’t been at his apartment and nobody from the Orange has seen him. And right before he took off he grabbed all his columns for the following week, except one. I’m the head typesetter, and I needed to set those issues. Marty really screwed the Orange, and that’s not like him.”
“Has he taken off like this before?”
The women shook her head. “No! I mean sometimes he rents a motel room and goes on a toot, but he always leaves copies of his column for the time he expects to be gone. This time was weird because he took back his columns, and they were really weird to begin with.”
Lloyd motioned the woman to sit down. “Tell me about those columns,” he said. “Try to remember everything you can.”
“They were just weird,” the woman said slowly. “One was called ‘Moonlight Malfeasance.’ It was about these bigshot L.A. cops who had these figurehead jobs bossing around all these low-life rent-a-cops. Weird. The other columns were off-shoots on that one, about the L.A.P.D. manipulating the media, because they got all the inside dirt from the moonlight cops. Weird. I mean the Orange’s meat is it’s anti-fuzz policy, but this stuff was weird, even for Marty Bergen, who was a lovable dude, but weird himself.”
Lloyd felt fragments of his case burst into a strange new light: Marty Bergen had seen the missing L.A.P.D. Personnel files. Swallowing to hold his voice steady, he said, “You told me that Bergen let you keep one of the columns. Have you still got it?”
The woman nodded and rolled out her galley sheet on the desk. “Marty gave real specific instructions on how to set it,” she said. “He said it had to have a heavy black border and that it had to run on May the third, because that was the birthday of this buddy of his. Weird.” She located the section and jabbed it with her finger. “There. Read it for yourself.”
The black-bordered piece was entitled “Night Train to the Big Nowhere.” Lloyd read it over three times, feeling his case move from its strange new light into a stranger darkness.
When a cop jumps on the Night Train to the big nowhere, he doesn’t care about its exact destination, because any terminus is preferable to living inside his own head, with its awful knowledge of how the solar age will never penetrate the Big Iceberg.
When my friend jumped on the Night Train to the Big Nowhere, he probably foresaw only relief from his locked-in knowledge of the big nightmare, and the vice grip of the new nightmare that spelled out his role to play in the shroud dance that owns us all.
That you didn’t purchase your ticket with your gun spoke volumes. Like me, you were a blue-suit sham. You did not use that tool of your trade in your nihilist last hurrah, reaffirming your masquerade. Instead you strangled on a pink cloud of chemical silence, giving yourself time to think of all the puzzles you had solved, and of the cruelty of your final jigsaw revelations. At the end you confronted, and knew. It was your most conscious act of courage in a life vulgarized by fearful displays of bravery. I love you for it, and offer you this twenty-one gun verse valedictory:
Resurrect the dead on this day,
open the doors where
they dare not to stray;
Cancel all tickets to the horror shroud dance,
Burn down the night in the rage of a trance.
Lloyd handed the sheet back to the bewildered typesetter. “Print it,” he said. “Redeem your piece of shit newspaper.”
The woman said, “It ain’t The New York Times, but it’s a regular gig.”
Lloyd nodded, but didn’t reply. When he walked out of the office the strident young man was scrutinizing the bank subpoena with a magnifying glass.
Knowing that he couldn’t bear to recon Marty Bergen’s apartment, Lloyd drove home and called the West Hollywood Sheriff’s, briefly explaining the case and relegating the job to them, omitting his knowledge of the bank draft, telling them to make a check of local motels and to detain Bergen if they found him.
New questions burned in the morass that the Herzog-Goff case had become. Was Jungle Jack Herzog a suicide? If so, where was his body, who had disposed of it, and who had wiped his apartment free of fingerprints? Marty Bergen’s “weird” columns indicated that he had seen the files Herzog had stolen. Where were the files, what was the literal gist of the suicide column, where was Bergen, and what was the extent of his involvement in the case?
When nothing came together for him, Lloyd knew that he was overamped, undernourished, and coming unconnected, and that the only antidote was an evening of rest. After a dinner of cold sliced ham and a pint of cottage cheese, he sat down on his porch to watch the twilight dwindle into darkness, warming to the idea of not thinking.
But he thought.
He thought of the terraced hills of the old neighborhood, and of sleepless ’fifties’ nights spent listening to the howling of dogs imprisoned in the animal shelter two blocks away. The shelter had given his section of Silverlake the nickname of “Dogtown,” and for the years of ’fifty-five and ’fifty-six, when he had been a peewee member of the Dogtown Flats gang, it had supplied him with the sobriquets of “Dogman” and “Savior.” The constant howling, plaintive as it was, had been mysterious and romantic dream fuel. But sometimes the dogs chewed and clawed their way to freedom, only to get obliterated by late-night hot-rodders playing chicken on the blind curve blacktop outside his bedroom window. Even though the corpses were removed by the time he left for school in the morning, with the pavement hosed down by old Mr. Hernandez next door, Lloyd could feel and smell and almost taste the blood. And after awhile, his nights were spent not listening, but cringing in anticipation of coming impacts.
Lack of sleep drew Lloyd gaunt that fall of ’fifty-six, and he knew that he had to act to reclaim the wonder he had always felt after dark. Because the night was there to provide comfort and the nourishing of brave dreams, and only someone willing to fight for its sanctity deserved to claim it as his citadel.
Lloyd began his assault against death, first blocking off “Dead Dog Curve” at both ends with homemade sawhorse detour signs to prevent access to chicken players. The strategem worked for two nights, until a glue-sniffing member of the First Street Flats crashed his ’fifty-one Chevy through the barricade, sideswiping a series of parked cars as he lost control, finally coming to a halt by rear-ending an L.A.P.D. black-and-white. Out on bail the next day, the driver went looking for the puto who had put up the sawhorse, smiling when Dogtown buddies told him it was a crazy fourteen-year-old kid called Dogman and Savior, a loco who was planning to flop in a sleeping bag by Dead Dog Curve to make sure that nobody played chicken on his turf.
That night fourteen-year-old Lloyd Hopkins, six foot one and a hundred and eighty pounds, began the series of mano a mano choose-off’s that rendered the nicknames Dogman and Savior passé and earned him a new title: “Conquistador.” The fights continued for ten nights straight, costing him a twice broken nose and a total of a hundred stitches, but ending chicken on Griffith Park and St. Elmo forever. When his nose was set for the second time and his swollen hands returned to their normal size, Lloyd quit the Dogtown Flats. He knew he was going to become a policeman, and it would not do to have a gang affiliation on his record.
The ringing of a telephone jerked him back to the present. He walked into the kitchen and picked it up. “Yes?”
“Hopkins, this is Linda.”
“What?”
“Are you spaced out or something? Linda Wilhite.
”Lloyd laughed. “Yeah, I am spaced out. How’s tricks?”
“Not funny, Hopkins, but I’ll let you slide because you’re spaced. Listen, I did just trick with Stanley, and I very subtly pried some not too encouraging info out of him.”
“Such as?”
“Such as you were misinformed somehow. Stan baby has never heard of Goff. I described the picture you showed me to him, and he doesn’t know anyone resembling it. Ditto any left-handed man. Stan said he buys his stuff from a black guy who works solo. He did buy some stuff from a white guy, once, last year, but the guy charged too much. Sorry I c
ouldn’t be of more help.”
“You were a lot of help. How did you get my phone number?”
Linda laughed. “You are spaced. From the phone book. Listen, will you let me know how this turns out?”
“Yes. And thanks, Linda.”
“My pleasure. And by the way, if you feel like calling, you don’t have to have a reason, though I’m sure you’ll think one up.”
“Are you telling me I’m devious?”
“No, just lonely and a bit guilt-ridden.”
“And you?”
“Lonely and a bit curious. Bye, Hopkins.”
“Good-bye, Linda.”
15
AFTER a handshake and brief salutations, Linda Wilhite took her seat across from the Doctor and began to talk. When Havilland heard vague self-analysis fill the air, he clicked off his conscious listening power and shifted into an automatic overdrive that allowed him to juxtapose Linda’s beauty against the single most important aspect of his life: thinking one step ahead of Lloyd Hopkins.
Since they were both geniuses, this kept the Night Tripper’s mental engine pushed to its maximum horsepower, searching for loopholes and overlooked flaws in the logical progression of this game. With his physical concentration zeroed in on Linda, he thought of the game’s one possible trouble spot: Jungle Jack Herzog.
Their relationship had been based on mutual respect—Herzog’s genuine, the Doctor’s feigned. The Alchemist was a classic psychiatric prototype—the seeker after truth who retreats into a cocoon of rationalization when confronted with harrowing self-truths. Thus the Doctor had played into his pathetic fantasy of using the stolen files to create an “L.A.P.D. credibility gap” that would by implication exonerate his friend Marty Bergen, while at the same time plumbing the basis of his attraction to a man whose cowardly actions he despised. The truth had finally become too strong, and Herzog had run to some unknown terminus of macho-driven shame. Goff had wiped his apartment shortly after he disappeared, and the odds against his leaving records or contacting Bergen or L.A.P.D. colleagues were astronomical—his shameful new self-knowledge would preclude it. Yet Hopkins had tied in Herzog to the late Thomas Goff, although he had not mentioned the missing files. That was potentially damaging, although Herzog had had no knowledge of his hard criminal activity. The most important part of the game was now to convince Hopkins that he was shielding someone close to Goff; that he was strangling on the horns of an ethical dilemma. He would play the role of every wimpy liberal man of conscience that policemen hated, and “Crazy Lloyd” would buy it—hook, line, and sinker.