Lloyd studied the jacket. A frizzy-haired white man wearing red satin bell bottoms was honking a saxaphone at a snarling alligator. The song titles listed on the back were the typical ‘sixties dope, sex, and rebellion pap, almost nostalgic in their naïveté. Putting the album down, he wondered if it were a Herzog-Goff link beyond general aesthetic strangeness—a link that could be plumbed for evidence.
There was a rapping on the wall behind him. Lloyd stood up and turned around, seeing Henderson and a small man in a terrycloth bathrobe. The man was casting unbelieving eyes over the black walls, mashing shaky hands together inside the pockets of his robe. “This guy’s the manager, Sarge. Said he saw our buddy this afternoon.”
Lloyd smiled at the man. “My name’s Hopkins. What’s yours?”
“Fred Pellegrino. Who’s going to pay for my busted door and this crazy paint job?”
“Your insurance company,” Lloyd said. “When did you see Thomas Goff last?”
Fred Pellegrino pulled rosary beads from his pocket and fondled them. “Around five o’clock. He was carrying a suitcase. He smiled at me and hotfooted it out to the street. ‘See you soon,’ he said.”
“You didn’t ask him where he was going?”
“Fuck no. He’s paid up three months in advance.”
“Was he alone?”
“Yeah.”
“How long has he lived here?”
“About a year and a half or so.”
“Good tenant?”
“The best. No noise, no complaints, always paid his rent on time.”
“Did he pay by check?”
“No, always cash.”
“Job?”
“He said he was self-employed.”
“What about his friends?”
“What friends? I never seen him with nobody. What if my insurance company don’t pay for this batshit paint job?”
Lloyd ignored Pellegrino and motioned Henderson over to the far side of the room. “What did the other tenants have to say?” he asked.
“The same spiel as Pops,” Henderson said. “Nice, quiet, solitary fellow who never said much besides ‘good morning’ or ‘good night.’”
“And no one else has seen him today?”
“No one else has seen the scumbag in the past week. This is depressing. I wanted to eighty-six the cop-killer motherfucker. Didn’t you?”
Lloyd gave a noncommittal shrug and took Goff’s R. & I. printout from his pocket. He handed it to Henderson and said, “Go back to Rampart and give this to Praeger. A.P.B., All Police Network. Tell him to add ‘armed and extremely dangerous’ and ‘has left-handed male partner,’ and to call the New York State Police and have them wire me all their existing info on Goff. Tell Pellegrino that I’m spending the night here as a safety precaution and shoo him back to his pad.”
“You’re gonna crash here?” Henderson was slack-jawed with disbelief.
Lloyd stared at him. “That’s right, so move it.”
Henderson walked away shaking his head, taking a pliant Fred Pellegrino by the arm and leading him out of the apartment. When they were gone, Lloyd walked to the landing and looked down on the knot of people milling in the driveway. Bullet-proof vested cops with shotguns were assuring pajama-clad civilians that everything was going to be all right. After a few minutes the scene dispersed, the citizens walking back to their dwellings, the cops to their unmarked Matadors. When Henderson pointed a finger at his head and twirled it, then pointed upstairs, Lloyd dragged the sofa over to the devastated front door and barricaded himself in to think.
Two divergent cases had merged into one and had now yielded one known perpetrator and one accomplice, an unknown quantity whose only known crime thus far was defacing rented property. With an A.P.B. in effect and I.A.D. covering the personnel file angle, his job was to deduce Thomas Goff’s behavior and go where less intelligent cops wouldn’t think to look.
Lloyd let his eyes circuit the living room, knowing that it would merge with another horror chamber the very second he closed them, knowing that it was essential to juxtapose the imagery and see what emerged.
He did it, shuddering against the memory of Teddy Verplanck’s bay-windowed apartment, deciding that it was worse because he had known the extent of the Hollywood Slaughterer’s carnage and that he was driving to be destroyed. Thomas Goff’s home bespoke a more subtle drive—the drive of a seasoned street criminal who had very probably not been arrested for anything since 1969, a man with a partner who might well be a restraining influence; a man who spread his insanity all over his walls and walked away saying ‘see you soon’ a few hours ahead of a massive police dragnet.
Lloyd walked through the apartment again, letting little observations snap into place and work in concert with his instincts: the photos of nude men and guns spoke “homosexual,” but somehow that seemed wrong. There was no telephone, which confirmed Goff as a basic loner. The lack of dishes, cooking utensils, and food were typical of ex-convicts, men who were used to being served and who often developed a craving for cafeteria food. The incredible darkness of the rooms was sheer insanity. All indicators pointing to the enormous question of motive.
Lloyd had almost completed his run-through of the apartment when he noticed a built-in wall cupboard in the hall between the living room and bedroom. It had been painted over like the rest of the wall, but cracks in the paint by the wooden opener knob indicated that it had been put to use. He swung the cupboard door open and recoiled when he saw what was affixed to the back.
There was a magazine cutout of a blue uniformed policeman with his hands upraised as if to placate an attacker. Surrounding the cop were outsized porno book penises studded with large metal staples. A circle of handgun cutouts framed the scene, and square in the middle of the cop’s chest was a glued-on white paper facsimile of an L.A.P.D. badge, complete with a drawing of City Hall, the words, “Police Officer” and the number 917.
Lloyd slammed the cupboard with his fist. Jack Herzog’s badge number burned in front of his eyes. He tore the door off by the hinges and hurled it into the living room. Just then Penny’s “Owe what, Daddy?” hit him like a piledriver, and he knew that getting Thomas Goff would be the close-out on all his debts of grief.
11
THE Night Tripper stared at the stunning female beauty that now adorned the walls of his outer office. Thomas Goff’s surveillance photographs of Linda Wilhite were blown up and framed behind glass, woman bait that would lure his policeman/adversary into a trap that would be sprung by his own sexual impluses. The Doctor walked into his private office and thought of how he had planned over a decade in advance, creating a series of buffers that would prevent anyone from knowing that he and Thomas Goff had ever met. He had destroyed Goff’s file at Castleford Hospital; he had even stolen his prison file while visiting Attica on a psychiatric seminar, returning it three weeks later, altered to show a straight, no-parole release. He had never been seen with Goff, and they had always communicated via pay phones. The only possible connection was several times removed—through his lonelies, all of whom Goff had recruited. If the manhunt for his former executive officer received pervasive media play, one of them might snap to a newspaper or TV photograph accompanied by scare rhetoric.
Yet even that avenue of discovery was probably closed, Havilland thought, picking up the morning editions of the L.A. Times and L.A. Examiner. There was no further mention of the shoot-out at Bruno’s Serendipity and no mention of the late night raid on Goff’s apartment. If Hopkins had initiated some sort of media stonewall to keep a lid of secrecy on his investigation, then his complicity in his own destruction would reach epic proportions.
The Night Tripper trembled as he recalled the past thirty-six hours, and his acts of courage. After disposing of Goff’s body, he had walked through downtown L.A., thinking of the probable course of events that had led Hopkins to at least identify Goff at the level of physical description. One thing emerged as a reasonable certainty: It was the Alchemist’s disappearanc
e and presumed death, not the liquor store killings, that had led the policeman to Goff. Goff and Herzog had spent a good deal of time together at bars, and some perceptive witness had probably provided Hopkins with the description that took him to Bruno’s Serendipity. Thus, hours later, after he had smeared Goff’s walls with homosexual bait, he had left the albums that Goff had stashed at Castleford in ’seventy-one and added the touch that would arouse Hopkins’ cop rectitude. Pique his rage with the faggot image of the Alchemist; pique his brain with the wipe marks, diverse script styles, and Goff’s old copy of “Bayou Dreams.”
The most thrilling act of courage had been in implementing Richard Oldfield, dressing him in a bulky sweater that downplayed his musculature and a tweed cap that was very much in Thomas Goff’s style, yet shielded his upper face and non-Goff haircut. He had pumped him up for hours, promising him his very own handpicked victim as his “ultimate assignment,” then had watched from a parked rental car across the street as Oldfield went through his impersonation perfectly, fooling Goff’s landlord dead to rights, with Hopkins and his dragnet only hours away.
Havilland unlocked his desk drawer and dug out the Junior Miss Cosmetics file he had been studying, hoping that fresh work and thoughts of the future would quiet the sense of excitement that made him want to live in the hours just past.
It didn’t help. He kept recalling the flashlights approaching and how he knew that he was now inside the police cordon; how he had hunkered down in the car seat and had heard the officers repeat Goff’s license number over and over, one of them whispering that “Crazy Lloyd” was “leading the raid,” his partner replying with something about “Crazy Lloyd going after that Hollywood psycho with a thirty-ought-six and a forty-four mag.” When the raid itself transpired a half hour later, he could see Hopkins across the street, holding a shotgun, much taller than any of the men he led, looking exactly like his father. It had taken monumental self-control to drive away from the scene without confronting the policeman face to face.
With an effort, the Night Tripper returned to the cosmetics file, reading notations on the life and sleazy times of the woman whom he was certain would become his next pawn.
Sherry Shroeder was a thirty-one-year-old former assembly line worker at Junior Miss Cosmetics, recently fired for stealing chemicals used in the manufacture of angel dust. It had been her fourth and final pilfering “arrest” within the company, resulting in her dismissal under threats of criminal prosecution. Daniel Murray, the L.A.P.D. captain who moonlighted as the Junior Miss security chief, had made her sign a confession and had told her that it would not be submitted to the police if she signed a waiver stating that she would not apply for unemployment benefits or workmen’s compensation. Her three previous “arrests” had been resolved through Daniel Murray’s coercion. Sherry Shroeder was a frequent co-star of low budget pornographic films. Murray had obtained a print of one of her features and had threatened to show it to her parents should she fail to return the chemicals she had stolen. Sherry agreed, eager to retain her four-dollar-an-hour job and spare her parents the grief of viewing her performance. There was no photograph attached to the folder, but her vital statistics of five-seven, 120, blond hair, and blue eyes were enticing enough. There was a final notation in the file, stating that since her dismissal Sherry Shroeder had been seen almost daily in the bars across the street from Junior Miss, drinking with her former fellow employees and “turning tricks” in the back of her van on paydays.
Havilland wrote down Sherry Shroeder’s address and phone number and put it in his pocket. Relieved that his next move was ready to be implemented, he let his thoughts return to Lloyd Hopkins, making a spur of the moment decision that felt uncommonly sound: If the policeman didn’t come his way within forty-eight hours, he would initiate the confrontation himself.
12
AFTER a twenty-four hour stint of Robbery/Homicide conferences and paper chasing at Parker Center, Lloyd drove to Century City to grasp at the wildest of straws, getting honest with himself en route: His investigation was stymied. Every cop in Southern California was shaking the trees for Thomas Goff, and he, the supervising officer and legendary “big brain,” did not yet have a psychological mock-up to work from. If he could use the legendary criminal shrink’s nickname as his entree, he could probably interest him in the Goff case and get him to offer his observations. It was slim, but at least it was movement.
The twenty-four hours at the Center had yielded nothing but negative feedback. The New York State Police had reacted promptly to his inquiry on Thomas Goff, issuing the L.A.P.D. a teletype that ran to six pages. Lloyd learned that Goff was a sadist who picked women up in bars, seduced and then beat them; that he liked to steal late model convertibles, that he had “no known associates” and was given a no-parole release from Attica, most likely a bureaucratic stratagem to encourage his departure from New York State.
The day’s major frustration had been at a late afternoon conference in Thad Braverton’s office, where the Chief of Detectives had read a strongly worded memo from the Big Chief stating that there was to be a total media blackout on the Goff case, for reasons of “public safety.” Lloyd had laughed aloud, then had sat fuming as Braverton and his old nemesis Captain Fred Gaffaney of I.A.D. gave him the fish-eye. He knew that “public safety” translated to “public relations,” and that the media kibosh was undertaken out of apprehension regarding Jack Herzog’s possible criminal activities and his relationship with the disgraced cop Marty Bergen. The icing on that cake was the industrial firm and the brass hats who were moonlighting for them. It would not do to step on their toes. A media blitz might flush Goff out, but the Department was covering its ass.
Lloyd parked in a subterranean facility on Olympic and Century Park East, then took an elevator up to ground level and found the shrink’s building, a glass and steel skyscraper fronted by an astroturf courtyard. The directory in the foyer placed “John Havilland, M.D.,” in suite 2604. Lloyd took a glass-encased elevator to the twenty-sixth floor and walked down a long hallway to an oak door embossed with the psychiatrist’s name. He pushed the door open, expecting to be confronted by the saccharine smile of a medical receptionist. Instead, he was transfixed by photographic images of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
She was obviously tall and slender, with classic facial lines offset by little flaws that made her that much more striking, that much less the trite physical ideal. Her nose was a shade too pointed; her chin bore a middle cleft that gave her whole face an air of resoluteness. Dark hair cascaded at the edge of soft cheekbones and formed a compliment with large eyes whose focus was intense, but somehow indecipherable. Walking up to the wall to examine the photographs at close range, Lloyd saw that they were candid shots, and that much more stunning for the fact. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture the woman nude. When new images wouldn’t coalesce, he knew why: her beauty rendered all attempts at fantasy stillborn. This woman demanded to be seen naked in reality or not at all.
“She’s exquisite, isn’t she?”
The words didn’t dent Lloyd’s reverie. He opened his eyes and saw and heard and felt nothing but the feminine power captured in front of him. When he felt a tap on his shoulder, he turned around and saw a slight man in a navy blazer and gray flannel slacks staring up at him, hand outstretched, light brown eyes amused by his reaction to the photographs. “I’m John Havilland,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”
Lloyd snapped back into a professional posture, taking the man’s hand and grasping it firmly. “Detective Sergeant Hopkins, Los Angeles Police Department. Could I have a few minutes of your time?”
Dr. John Havilland smiled and said, “Sure. We’ll go into my office.” He pointed toward an oak door and added, “I’ve got over half an hour until my next session. You’re blushing, Sergeant, but I don’t blame you.”
Lloyd said, “Who is she?”
“A counselee of mine,” Havilland said. “Sometimes I think she’s the most beau
tiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“I was thinking the same thing. What does she think about being your pinup girl?”
Havilland’s cheeks reddened; Lloyd saw that the man was smitten beyond the bounds of professionalism. “Forget I asked, Doctor. I’ll keep it to business from here on in.”
The Doctor lowered his eyes and led Lloyd into an oak paneled inner office, pointing him to a chair, taking an identical seat a few feet away. Raising his eyes, he said, “Is this personal or an official police inquiry?”
Lloyd stared openly at the psychiatrist. When Havilland didn’t flinch, he realized that he was in the company of an equal. “It’s both, Doctor. The starting point is your nickname. I—”
Havilland was already shaking his head. “It’s a secondhand nickname,” he said. “Doctor John the Night Tripper was a ‘sixties rock and roller. I was given the monicker in med school, because my name was John and I did a certain amount of night tripping. I’ve also counseled a great many criminals, court referred and otherwise. These people have perpetuated the nickname. Frankly, I like it.”
Lloyd smiled and said, “It does have a certain ring.” He dug two snapshots out of his jacket pocket and handed them to Havilland. “Have you ever counseled either of these men?”
The Doctor looked at the photos and handed them back. “No, I haven’t. Who are they?”
Lloyd ignored the question and said, “If you had treated them, would you have told me?”
Havilland formed his fingers into a steeple and placed the point on his chin. “I would have given you a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, then asked, ‘Why do you want to know?’”
“Good direct answer,” Lloyd said. “I’ll reciprocate. The light-haired man recently walked into a liquor store and blew three people to shit. The dark-haired man is an L.A. policeman, missing and presumed dead. Before he disappeared he was hysterical and obsessed with your nickname. I’m certain that the light-haired man killed him. Old light-hair is a world class psycho. Two days ago we shot it out in a Beverly Hills singles bar. You probably read about it in the papers. He escaped. I want to cancel his ticket. Atascadero or the morgue, preferably the latter.”