Lloyd Hopkins 3 - Suicide Hill

by James Ellroy

  So Plastic Fantastic had to be nearby. Rice drove slowly, watching the Matador hazily disappear in his rearview mirror. Straining to read house numbers was futile, making the blurring worse and causing head pounding and stomach cramps on top of it. Pulling to the curb, he got out and walked.

  His legs were wobbly, but he was able to move in a straight line. Thinking in a straight line was harder, and he kept wondering why the cop car had split, giving him a clean shot. Finally he gave up thinking and kept walking. The front lawns he was passing looked soft and cushiony, and every time the green shined through his tear blur he started to yawn. Reaching into his shirt pocket for the last of the speed, he saw that he’d already swallowed it, and snapped that squinting at addresses from the sidewalk was no better than from the car, and twice as dangerous. He was about to go back to the LTD when strangely dressed people started walking across an especially beautiful stretch of grass. He cut over to meet them, and they slid past him in a jet stream that reminded him of taillights on a freeway at night.

  He grabbed at their shadows and spoke to what he could see of their faces: “Vandy Vanderlinden, you know her? You seen her?” He said it a dozen times, and got nothing but hoots and catcalls in return. Then the people were gone, and there was green grass in all directions. Rice heard breathing in front of him, and rubbed his eyes so he could see who he was talking to.

  The absence of tears gave him back most of his sight, and his eyes honed in on two big men in Windbreakers. When he saw that they were aiming shotguns at him, he reached for the .45. The butts of their weapons crashed into his head just as he remembered he’d left his piece in the car.

  He was on the main drag of Hawaiian Garbage, running red lights on a dare, trying to break his old night record of nine straight. Everything was dark red and very fast, and he knew he could go on forever. Everything was also very warm, getting warmer as the string of reds extended. Then everything went cold, and his eyes were forced open and someone was wiping water from his face. He knew he was standing, that he was being held upright. His old 20/20 snapped in on scrub bushes, dirt and a cement embankment that stank of chemicals. He knew immediately that he was at Suicide Hill.

  A fuzz type in a cheapo suit stepped in front of him, blotting out his view of the terrain. The grip on his arms tightened. Rice saw a weird lapel pin on the fuzz type’s jacket and a .357 Python in his right hand, and knew he was going to die. He tried to think up a suitable wisecrack, but “She was a stone heartbreaker” came out instead. And I loved her was about to come out, but three slugs from the magnum hit him first.

  32

  Lloyd waited in the third-floor attorney room of the Main County Jail. He had a perjury script in his jacket pocket, Stan Klein’s rap sheet in one hand, Louie Calderon’s arrest report in the other. Klein had two convictions for possession of marijuana back in the early seventies, and Likable Louie had been booked for assault on a police officer. So far, the survivor patrol was surviving—at least on the basis of planning strategies and circumstantial facts. And the more he looked at Klein’s mug shot, the more he resembled Joe Garcia.

  A jailer ushered Calderon into the room and pointed him toward the chair across the table from Lloyd. His face was bruised and stitched from the Metro beating, but he walked steadily, and his soft brown eyes were clear. He looked like a man capable of making smart snap decisions.

  Lloyd stood up and stuck out his hand; Calderon sat down without grasping it. “What do you want?” he said.

  Lloyd slid Stan Klein’s mug shot over to him. “I want to save Joe Garcia’s ass from the gas chamber and help you beat your assault beef. Do you know this man?”

  Calderon glanced at the snapshot and shook his head. “No. Who is he?”

  “He’s the third member of the robbery gang. His name is Stan Klein, a.k.a. ‘Stan Man.’ He’s taking the fall for Joe Garcia, and he’s a longtime known associate of yours. Comprende, homeboy?”

  Calderon narrowed his eyes. “He gonna lie down for a frame?”

  Drawing a finger across his throat, Lloyd said, “He’s dead. Have you made a statement to anyone here or back at Rampart?”

  “No. I just kicked loose with the names. You should know—you were there. If this joker Klein is eighty-six, how you gonna make him for the heists? And what the fuck do you want?”

  Savoring Likable Louie’s wariness, Lloyd said, “Rice killed Klein. Bobby Garcia is dead, shot by Rice last night. Joe and Rice are still out there. Rice won’t last much longer, but Joe’s got a chance. Here’s the pitch: I give you a little fact sheet on Klein, you memorize it. You shut your mouth until you get word that Rice is dead. I know he’s a smart guy, but the heat is huge, and no cop is going to let him see due process. When he’s dead, you talk to the D.A.’s investigators, who are going to start hounding your ass as soon as I submit my report to them. You tell them that you sold the hardware to Rice, and that he told you that he was forming a gang—him, Bobby Garcia and Klein. Got it?”

  Calderon leaned forward. “What’s in it for me, and what’s in it for you?”

  Leaning forward himself, Lloyd said, “Louie, there’s a lot of dead people out there, and most of them are cops, and you supplied the guns that killed them. You’re dead and buried. The feds have got your number, the regular L.A.P.D. and the freak cops have got it, I’ve got it. Bobby’s dead, and Rice is as good as dead, and the D.A. is going to look for someone to crucify on this thing, and it’s going to be you.”

  Pale now, Calderon plucked at his stitches until blood trickled out. When he saw what he was doing, he stopped and stammered, “Y-y-yeah, b-b-but what do you want?

  Lloyd said, “To see you and Joe get out of this alive. Here’s the rest of the pitch. I’ve got a little scenario for you to memorize before you talk to the D.A. How you fingered Joe Garcia because he stiffed you on some burglary goods, stuff like that. You play it right, and the D.A. and his boys will buy your story. And I go to the D.A. and tell him how those Metro bulls beat the confession out of you, and I clean all the incriminating shit out of your pad, and I get Nate Steiner to defend you if you go to trial, which you probably won’t, because the D.A. will not want me to testify in court against other officers. I’d lay three to one that if you cooperate with me, you’ll walk.”

  Calderon slammed the tabletop with clenched fists. “Hopkins, nobody does something like that for nothing. What do you fucking want!”

  Smiling, Lloyd took the survival script from his pocket and laid it on the table. “I don’t want anything. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll believe me.”

  He stood up and stuck out his hand, and this time Calderon grasped it and said, “Crazy Lloyd Hopkins, Jesus Christ.”

  Lloyd laughed. “I’m no savior. One more thing: have you got any idea where Joe would run to if he figured the heat was off?”

  Likable Louie thought for a moment, then said, “The guitar shop on Temple and Beaudry. He’s sort of an amateur musician, and sooner or later he’ll show up there.” He put the two pieces of paper in his shirt pocket and added, “Memorize, then flush.”

  Lloyd buzzed for the jailer to return. On his way out the door, he pointed a cocked-gun finger at Calderon and said, “Support your local police.”

  Now the shitwork.

  Lloyd drove to the Western Costume Company and purchased a high-quality black wig and full beard, then drove to Stan Klein’s Mount Olympus villa. A fresh morning newspaper indicated that the pad was untampered with since last night’s prowling with Rhonda. Steeling himself with a deep breath and a handkerchief around his nose, he picked the lock and walked in. The smell was awful, but not overpowering. Lloyd gave the corpse a cursory glance, then donned gloves and went to work.

  First he found the central heating and turned the temperature up to eighty-five, then he stripped to the waist and wiped all the downstairs touch and grab surfaces, visualizing the Klein/Rice/Garcia/Vanderlinden confrontation all the while, finally deciding that musician Joe never made it
to the upper floor. The heat and the increased odor of decomposition it created were oppressive, and he gave up his wiping after a peremptory run-through, leaving the video gadgets surrounding Klein’s body alone.

  With potential Garcia latents in all probability eliminated, Lloyd tossed the house for photographs of Stan Klein. Drenched in sweat, he opened drawers and tore through dressers; checked the bureaus in all three bedrooms. The upstairs yielded a half dozen Polaroids that looked recent, and the living room two framed portrait photos. Lloyd placed them by the banister, then took a pen and notebook paper from his jacket and jogged up to the master bedroom to write.

  With the door shut and the air-conditioning on full, he wrote for three hours, detailing his investigation of the first two robbery/kidnaps, and Captain John McManus’ assigning of him to the Pico-Westholme robbery/homicides. This account was factual. The rest of the report comprised a companion piece to his script for Louie Calderon, and stated how Calderon, under physical duress, gave the names Duane Rice, Bobby Garcia and Joe Garcia to Sergeants W. D. Collins and K. R. Lohmann, later partially recanting his statement to him, stating truthfully that Stanley Klein was the “third man,” and that he had named Joe Garcia for revenge on an old criminal grievance. Omitting mention of Rhonda Morrell, he concluded by stating that he had discovered Stan Klein’s body, and that a scrap of paper beside the corpse led him to Silver Foxes and his still unaccounted-for shootout with Duane Rice. Attributing his delay in reporting the body to a desire to “remain mobile and assist in the active investigation,” Lloyd signed his name and badge number, then sent up a prayer for lackluster forensic technicians to aid him in his lies.

  The smell was now unbearable.

  Lloyd turned off the air-conditioning and heat, then went downstairs and put on his shirt and jacket. Seeing that the body had bloated at the stomach and that the cheeks had rotted through to the gums, he tossed the wig and mustache at the pile of video tapes, then found a plugged-in stereo and turned on the FM full blast. The noise covered the three desecration gunshots with ease, and he forced himself to look at the damage. As he hoped, the entry wounds got lost in the overall decomposition. Knowing he couldn’t bear to crawl under the house for the expended rounds, Lloyd turned off the music and sent up another prayer—this one a general mercy plea. Then he got out, hyperventilating when fresh, sane air hit his lungs.

  Now the loose ends.

  Lloyd drove to Hollywood Station. In the parking lot, he put the report in an envelope and wrote Captain Arthur F. Peltz on the front, then left it with the desk officer, who told him that there was no word on the whereabouts of Duane Richard Rice, and that the dragnet was still in full force.

  The funereal air of the station was claustrophobic. From a street pay phone, Lloyd called the office of Nathan Steiner, Attorney at Law, and asked for a ballpark figure on a murder one defense. Steiner’s head clerk said 40K minimum. Hanging up, Lloyd figured that with a “police discount” he could swing it.

  Now the scary part.

  Lloyd fed all the change in his pockets to the phone and dialed Janice’s Frisco number, grateful that the voices he would be speaking to wouldn’t be able to answer back. Holding his breath, he heard, “Hi, this is Janice Hopkins. The girls and I have taken our act on the road, but we should be returning before Christmas,” and “The woods are lovely dark and deep. Leave a message at the beep.”

  The beep went off. Lloyd let out his breath and said, “Take your act south before I do something crazy. You’re all I’ve got left.” Then he drove home and walked upstairs to the bedroom he had kept inviolate since his wife left him two years before. There, on a dust-covered bed, he fell asleep to wait for survival or oblivion.

  33

  Eight hours after executing his only son’s executioner, Captain Fred Gaffaney sat down in his study and began the writing of his last will and testament.

  The execution weapon rested on the desk beside him, and he breathed cordite residue as he put to paper his bequest: cash amounting to slightly over twenty thousand dollars, the house, its furnishings and his two cars to the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian. The magnum loomed at the corner of his vision, and he tried to recall Bible passages that dictated suicide excluding heaven and meeting the Savior. Verses came and went, but none stuck, and the .357 was still there. Finally he gave up trying and accepted the fact. Only Catholics bought suicide as an exclusionary sin, and they could not justify it with Biblical references. It was an acceptable out for a warrior Christian with nowhere else to go.

  Looking over his words, Gaffaney saw that they took up only one yellow legal page. He had written accident reports ten times that long, and he didn’t want to pull the trigger on a note of brevity. He thought he could perform the execution as a ritual that affirmed the rule of law, but when Lohmann and Collins tossed Duane Rice’s body into its sewage bed grave, he knew that he had violated everything he believed in, and that that apostasy demanded the death sentence. Knowing also that the condemned deserved reflection before their sentence was carried out, he allowed himself the mercy of returning to Suicide Hill in the fall of ’61.

  He was a rookie then, working daywatch patrol out of East Valley Division, twenty-six years old, with a wife and baby son. His beat included the Sepulveda V.A. Hospital, and half his duty time was spent ferrying sad old soldier boozehounds from the wine bars on Victory Boulevard back to their domiciles, the other half writing traffic citations. It was boring police work for a young man who knew only one thing about himself—that he was ambitious.

  There was an old wino who kept escaping the domicile to get bombed on white port and pass out religious tracts to the teenaged gangsters who inhabited Suicide Hill at night. The local officers respected him, because he refused to accept welfare and stuck the V.A. with the full tab for his room and board. He was a tall, Germanic-looking man with haunting blue eyes, and the tracts he distributed emphasized a warrior Jesus Christ, who loved his followers fiercely and exhorted them to strike down evil wherever they saw it.

  The wino was a brilliant storyteller, and the gangsters liked to get him juiced and incite him to tall tales. He always obliged, and he always weaved sermons into his stories, ending them with a handing out of leaflets emblazoned with a cross and a flag.

  To Officer Fred Gaffaney, Irish Catholic atheist, the wino was a pathetic crackpot. He grudgingly followed the implicit division edict of never busting him for “plain drunk,” but he would not listen to his stories for a second. Thus, when the wino approached him one afternoon with a feverish account of a bunch of Demon Dog members out to kill him, he turned a deaf ear, gave him fifty cents for a jug and told him to get back to the domicile.

  A week later, the wino’s body was found, scattered all over Suicide Hill. He had been drawn and quartered. The investigating detectives reconstructed his death as being caused by four motorcycles taking off simultaneously, each with one of his limbs tied to the rear axle. The M.E. reconstructed that he had been decapitated after his death, and Officer Fred Gaffaney reconstructed himself as a coward and did not come forward with his information on the Demon Dogs, because it would hinder his career.

  The anonymous tip on the Dogs that he sent to Robbery/Homicide Division two torturous weeks after the killing did not lead them to the slayers or ease his conscience. The wino’s blue eyes singed him in his sleep. Booze and illegally procured sleeping pills didn’t help, and he could not talk about it to a single human being.

  So he sought out God.

  Returning to the old Catholic fold helped, but he could not take his wino/victim with him to the confessional. Liquor in concert with the Church helped a little more, but the blue eyes and “The Dogs got a contract out on me, Officer Fred, and you gotta help me!” were always a half step away, ready to pounce just when he thought everything was going to be all right.

  The Job helped most of all, but still did not provide a panacea. He served, working long overtime hours, writing laborious reports on the most minor occurrences, a
fraid that any parcel of information left unreported would lead to spiritual catastrophe and death. A few superior officers regarded him as fanatical, but most considered him a model of police meticulousness. Spurred by constant encouragement, he climbed the ladder.

  He became a sergeant and was assigned to the Detective Division, then passed the lieutenant’s exam and went to Robbery/Homicide. The Church, the wino, and cross and flag nightmares simmered on his soul’s back burner, pushed there by ambitiousness and a barrage of rationalizations—his drive for power was atonement; his stern rule over lax, libertine underlings was a sword thrust that would move the blue-eyed specter himself; encouraging of his son to become a policeman was evidence that the atonement would pass to a second generation of Gaffaneys. His wife’s death of cancer gave a weight of grief to the guilt procession, and when he buried her, he felt that the sad old storyteller had finally been put to rest.

  Then he met Lloyd Hopkins, and the out-of-control hot dog blew everything to hell.

  He had, of course, been hearing about him for years, taking in accounts of his exploits with amazement and disgust, but never considering him worth knowing from the standpoints of career advancement or Robbery/Homicide efficacy. Then, assigned as supervisor of his sector, Thad Braverton gave him the word: “Hopkins is the best. Give him carte blanche.”

  The undercutting of his authority had rankled, but Crazy Lloyd’s actions made it pall by comparison. Hopkins’ life was one giant sword swipe at real and imagined evil; the terror and guilt and rage that burned in his eyes were laser beam incisions into that part of him where “Suicide Hill ’61” was engraved like gang graffiti. He had to fight what Hopkins was, so he tracked down the cross and flag leaflets and was born again.

  It worked.