by James Ellroy
Opening his eyes, Havilland recalled the day’s minor testimonials to his will: The manager of his office building had called his condo with the news that he had been burglarized and that workmen were now repairing the damage to his front office door; his answering service had an urgent “call me” message from Linda Wilhite. Those telephone tidings had been such obvious capitulations to his power that he had succumbed to their symbolism and had used the beach phone to call the lonelies with an “assessment” request—ten thousand dollars per person. They had all answered “Yes” with doglike servility.
Let the capitulations continue.
The Night Tripper walked over to the kitchen wall phone and punched Linda Wilhite’s number. When he heard her “Hello?”, he said, “John Havilland, Linda. My service said that you needed to speak to me.”
Linda’s voice took on force. “Doctor, I realize that this is short notice, but I want to let you know that I’m quitting therapy. You’ve opened me up to lots of things, but I want to fly solo from here on in.”
Havilland breathed the words in. When he breathed his own words out, they sounded appropriately choked with sentiment. “I’m very sad to hear that, Linda. We were making such progress. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’m positive, Doctor.”
“I see. Would you agree to one more session? A special session with visual aids? It’s my standard procedure for final sessions, and it’s essential to my form of therapy.”
“Doctor, my days are very tied up. There’s lots of—”
“Would tonight be all right? My office at seven? It’s imperative we conclude this therapy on the right foot, and the session will be free.”
Sighing, Linda said, “All right, but I’ll pay.”
Havilland said, “Good-bye,” and hung up, then punched another seven digits and began hyperventilating.
“Yes?” Hopkins’s voice was expectant.
“Sergeant, this is John Havilland. Strange things have been happening. My office was broken into, and besides that, my source just contacted me. I—I—I—”
“Calm down, Doctor. Just take it slow.”
“I—I was going to say that I still can’t give you his name, but Goff contacted him, because he heard that he was in need of a gun and some money Goff owed him. The money and the gun are in a locker box at the Greyhound Bus Depot downtown. Fr-frankly, Sergeant, my source is afraid of a setup. He’s considering returning to therapy, so I was able to get this information out of him. He-he has a strange relationship with Goff.… It’s fr-fraternal almost.”
“Did he give you the number of the box?”
“Yes. Four-one-six. The key is supposed to be with the man at the candy counter directly across from the row of lockers. Goff gave it to him yesterday, my man told me.”
“You did the right thing, Doctor. I’ll take care of it.”
Dr. John Havilland replaced the receiver, thinking of Richard Oldfield stationed in the bar across from Box 416, armed with Lloyd Hopkins’ personnel file photo and an Uzi submachine gun.
21
LLOYD was leadfooting it northbound on the Harbor Freeway when he realized that he had forgotten to leave Dutch a note explaining his absence. He slammed the dashboard with his palm and began shouting obscenities, then heard his cursing drowned out by the wail of sirens. Looking in his rearview mirror he saw three black-and-whites roar past with cherry lights flashing, heading for the downtown exits. Wondering why, he flipped on his two-way radio. When a squelch filtered voice barked “All units, all units, code three to the bus depot, Sixth and Los Angeles, shot fired,” he shuddered back a wave of nausea and joined the fray.
Sixth and Los Angeles Streets was a solid wall of double-parked patrol cars. Lloyd parked on the sidewalk outside the bus terminal’s south entrance and ran in past a bewildered-looking group of patrolmen carrying shotguns. They were jabbering among themselves, and one tall young officer kept repeating “Psycho. Fucking psycho,” as he fondled the slide of his Ithaca pump. Pushing through a knot of unkempt civilians milling around in front of the ticket counters, Lloyd saw a uniformed sergeant writing in a spiral notebook. He tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hopkins, Robbery/Homicide. What have we got?”
The sergeant grinned. “We got a machinegun nut case. A wino was checking the doors of the lockers across the walkway from the gin mill by the Sixth Street entrance when this psycho runs out of the bar and starts shooting. The wino wasn’t hit, but the lockers were torn up and an old bag lady got grazed by a ricochet. The meat wagon took her to Central Receiving. The juicehounds inside the bar said it sounded like a tommy gun—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. My partner is at the gin mill now, taking statements from the wino and potential witnesses. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.”
Lloyd felt little clicks resound to the beat of the sergeant’s sound effects. “Is there a candy counter directly across from the shooting scene?”
“Yessir.”
“What about the suspect?”
“Probably long gone. The wino said he tucked the burpgun under his coat and ran out to Sixth. Easy to get lost out there.”
Lloyd nodded and ran to the hallway by the Sixth Street entrance. Gray metal lockers with coin slots and tiny key holes covered one entire wall, the opposite wall inset with narrow cubicles where vendors dispensed souvenirs, candy and porno magazines. Checking the lockers close up, he saw that numbers 408 through 430 were riddled with bullet dents, and as he had suspected, the bar the gunman had run out of was directly across from 416.
Crossing to the bar, Lloyd eyeballed the man at the candy counter, catching a cop-wise look on his face. Doing a quick pivot, he walked over and stuck out his hand. “Police officer. I believe someone left a key for me.”
The candy man went pale and stammered, “I—I—didn’t think there’d be no gunplay, Officer. The guy just asked me if I wanted to make twenty scoots for holding on to the key, then whipping it on the guy who asked for it. I didn’t want no part of no shooting.”
The fury of his mental clicking made Lloyd whisper. “Are you telling me that the man who gave you the key is the man who fired off the machinegun?”
“Th-that’s right. This don’t make me no kind of accessory after the fact, does it?”
Lloyd took out a well-thumbed mugshot of Thomas Goff. “Is this the man?”
The candy man shook his head affirmatively and then negatively. “Yes and no. This guy looks enough like him to be his brother, but the gun guy had a skinnier face and a longer nose. It’s a real close resemblance, but I gotta say no.”
Taking the key from the vendor’s shaking hands, Lloyd said with a shaking voice, “Describe the wino the gunman fired at.”
“That’s easy, officer. He was a big husky guy, ruddy complexion, dark hair. He looked kinda like you.”
The final click went off like a flashing neon sign that spelled, “Fool. Patsy. Dupe. Sucker bait.” It was Havilland. The setup was for him, not Oldfield; it was perpetrated by Oldfield, not Goff. Whatever the unrevealed intricacies of the case, Havilland had set him up from the beginning, acting on knowledge of his methods gathered from his L.A.P.D. file. The shrink had set up the psychiatric report on Oldfield as a calculated move based on old Hollywood Division fitness reports that had mentioned his penchant for “search methods of dubious legality.” He had been strung out from before their first meeting; the Night Tripper albums and the Linda Wilhite office photos ploys, with Linda and Stanley Rudolph and Goff and Oldfield and Herzog and how many others dangling on their own puppet strings as the Doctor’s willing or unwitting accomplices? The simple brilliance of it was overpowering. He had pinioned himself to a steel wall with self-constructed steel spikes.
Before the spikes could draw more blood, Lloyd walked to Box 416 and inserted the key. The door jammed briefly, then came open. Inside was a .357 Colt Python and a roll of twenty dollar bills held together with a rubber band. He picked the gun up. The cylinder was empty, but the barrel exuded a faint odo
r of paraffin and the underside of the vent housing bore a plastic sticker reading Christie–L.A.P.D.
The spikes dug in again, wielded from within and without. Lloyd slammed the locker door shut and drove to Parker Center.
He found the sixth floor I.A.D. offices packed with detectives and civilian personnel. A uniformed officer passed him in the hallway and threw words of explanation: “My partner and I just brought in Marty Bergen, grabbed him in Mac Arthur Park, feeding the ducks. He waived his rights. Some Internal Affairs bulls are getting ready to pump him.”
Lloyd ran to the attorney room at the end of the hall. A knot of plainclothes officers were staring through the one-way glass. Squeezing in beside them, he saw Marty Bergen, Fred Gaffaney, a stenographer, and an unidentified woman who had the air of a deputy public defender sitting around a table covered with pencils and yellow legal pads. The woman was whispering in Bergen’s ear, while the stenographer poised fingers over his machine. Gaffaney worried his tie bar and drummed the tabletop.
Noticing wires running along the ceiling wainscoting, Lloyd nudged the officer nearest him and said, “Is there a backup transcription going down?”
The officer nodded. “Tape hookup to the skipper’s office. He’s got another steno at his desk.”
“Headphones?”
“Speaker.”
Lloyd took out his notepad and wrote, John Havilland, M.D., office 1710 Century Park East—All phone #’s from business & residence calls for past 12 mos., then walked down the hall and rapped on the glass door of Fred Gaffaney’s outer office. When his secretary opened it and gave him a harried look, he handed her the notepad. “The captain wants me to listen in on the interview. Could you do me a favor and call Ma Bell and get this information?”
The woman frowned. “The captain told me not to leave the office. Some marijuana that constituted evidence was stolen earlier. He had to release a suspect, and he was very angry about it.”
Lloyd smiled. “That’s a rough break, but this request is direct from Thad Braverton. I’ll hold down the fort.”
The woman’s frown deepened. “All right. But please keep all unauthorized people out.” She closed her hand around the notepad and walked off in the direction of the elevator bank. Lloyd locked the door from the inside and moved to the captain’s private office. A grandmotherly stenographer was sitting at the desk, pecking at her machine while Gaffaney’s sternly enunciated words issued from a wall speaker above her head.
“… and legal counsel is present. Before we begin this interview, Mr. Bergen, do you have anything you wish to say?”
Lloyd pulled up a chair and smiled at the stenographer, who put a finger to her lips and pointed to the speaker just as a burst of electronically amplified laughter hit the room, followed by Marty Bergen’s voice. “Yeah. I wish to go on the record as saying that your tie clasp sucks. If the L.A.P.D. were a just bureaucracy, you would be indicted on five counts of aesthetic bankruptcy, possession of fascist regalia, and general low class. Proceed with your interview, Captain.”
Gaffaney cleared his throat. “Thank you for that unsolicited comment, Mr. Bergen. Proceeding, I will state some specific facts. You may formally object if you consider my facts erroneous. One, you are Martin D. Bergen, age forty-four. You were dismissed from the Los Angeles Police Department after sixteen years of service. While on the Department, you became friends with Officer Jacob M. Herzog, currently missing. Are these facts correct?”
“Yes,” Bergen said.
“Good. Again proceeding, six days ago you were questioned by an L.A.P.D. detective as to the current whereabouts of Officer Herzog. You told the officer that you had not seen Herzog in approximately a month, and that on the occasions of your last meetings Herzog had been ‘moody.’ Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Again proceeding, do you wish to alter your statement to that officer in any way?”
Bergen’s voice was a cold whisper. “Yes, I do. Jack Herzog is dead. He killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates. I discovered his body at his apartment along with a suicide note. I buried him in a rock quarry up near San Berdoo.”
Lloyd heard Bergen’s attorney gasp and begin jabbering words of caution at her client. Bergen shouted, “No goddamn it, I want to tell it!” There was a crescendo of voices, with Gaffaney’s finally predominating: “Do you remember where you buried the body?”
“Yes,” Bergen said. “I’ll take you there, if you like.”
The speaker went silent, then slowly came to life with the sound of animated whispers. Finally Gaffaney said, “Not wanting to put words in your mouth, Mr. Bergen, would you say that the previous statement you made to the police regarding Officer Herzog was misleading or incorrect?”
“What I told Hopkins was pure bullshit,” Bergen said. “When I talked to him Jack was already three weeks in his grave. You see, I thought I could walk from all this. Then it started eating at me. I went on a drunk to sort it out. If those cops hadn’t found me I would have come forward before too long. This has got to be heavy shit that Jack was involved in, or you wouldn’t have put out an A.P.B. on me. I figure that you’ve got me for two misdemeanors—some jive charge for disposing of Jack’s body and receiving stolen documents. So just ask your questions or let me make my statement, so I can get charged and make bail. Okay, Fred baby?”
There was another long silence, this one broken by Fred Gaffaney. “Talk, Bergen. I’ll interject questions if I find them necessary.”
Breath noise filled the speaker. Lloyd’s body clenched in anticipation. Just when he thought he would snap from tension, Bergen said, “Jack was always stretched very thin, because he didn’t have the outlets that other cops have. He didn’t booze or carouse or chase pussy; he just read and brooded and competed with himself, wanting to be like these warrior mystics he worshipped. He got on mental kicks and ran wild with them. For about six months prior to his death he was obsessed with this notion of exonerating me by creating this L.A.P.D. credibility gap—showing the Department in a bad light so that the shame of my dismissal would be diminished by comparison. He talked it up and talked it up and talked it up, because he was a hero, and since he loved me he had to turn me from a coward into a hero to make our friendship real.
“About this time he met some guy in a bar. The guy introduced him to another guy, a guy that Jack called a ‘file-happy genius.’ This guy was some kind of guru who charged big bucks to all these sad guru-worshipper types, helping them with their problems and so forth. He convinced Jack to steal some personnel files that would suit their individual purposes—Jack’s ‘credibility gap’ and the guru’s loony hunger for confidential information. Jack showed me the files. Four of them were brass working outside security gigs where more personnel files were involved, one was Johnny Rolando, the TV guy, and the other was, you know, Lloyd Hopkins. Jack figured that the information in these files would comprise a sleazy picture of the L.A.P.D. and satisfy the guru’s needs.”
“Do you still have the files?” Gaffaney asked.
“No,” Bergen said. “I read them and gave them back to Jack. I tried to put the information to use in a series of columns, as a memorial tribute to him, but finally I decided that it was just a tribute to his disturbance and gave up on the idea.”
“Tell me more about this so-called guru and his friend.”
“All right. First off, I don’t know either of their names, but I do know that the guru was counseling Jack, helping to bring him through some things that were disturbing him. The guru used ambiguous phrases like ‘beyond the beyond’ and ‘behind the green door,’ which is an old song title. Both those phrases were included in Jack’s suicide note.”
Lloyd grabbed the telephone and dialed a number that he knew was a ninety-nine percent sure bet to confirm Havilland’s complicity all the way down the line.
“Hello?”
Turning his back on the stenographer, he whispered, “It’s me, Linda.”
“Hopkins baby!”
“Listen, I can’t talk, but the other night you whispered ‘beyond the beyond’ and something about green doors. Where did you get those phrases?”
“From Dr. Havilland. Why? You sound really spaced, Hopkins. What’s all this about?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“When?”
“I’ll come by in a couple of hours. Stay home and wait for me. Okay?”
Linda’s voice went grave. “Yes. It’s him, isn’t it?”
Lloyd said “Yes,” and hung up, catching Bergen in mid-sentence. “… so from the froth around Jack’s mouth I knew he’d o.d.’d on barbiturates. He used to say that if he ever took the Night Train, he’d never do it with his gun.”
Gaffaney sighed. “Sergeant Hopkins searched Herzog’s apartment and said that the surface had been wiped free of prints by scouring powder. When you discovered the body, did you notice any wipe marks?”
“No. None.”
“Do you recall the exact words of Herzog’s suicide note, in addition to those phrases you mentioned? Did Herzog elaborate on his reasons for killing himself?”
“This is where we part company, Fred baby,” Bergen said. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, except that. And you haven’t got the juice to get it out of me.”
The sound of palms slamming a table top rattled the speaker. “On that note we’ll break for a few hours. We’ve prepared a detention cage for you, Mr. Bergen. Your attorney can keep you company if she wishes to. We’ll pick up where we left off later. Sergeant, show Mr. Bergen to his interim housing.”
The speaker went dead. Lloyd got up and walked to the outer office window, catching a glimpse of a plainclothes officer hustling Marty Bergen and his attorney to the stairs leading to the fifth floor detention cages. Bergen’s post-confession posture signified pure exhaustion: stooped shoulders; glazed eyes; shuffling walk. Lloyd saluted his back as he rounded the corner out of sight, then turned to see Gaffaney’s secretary tapping on the door, holding up a sheaf of papers for him.