“Hello?”
Havilland grimaced; Sherry’s salutation was slurred into three stoned syllables.
“Hello? Who’s this? Is that you, Otto, you horny hound?”
Havilland’s grimace relaxed. Though loaded, his pawn was lucid. “This is Lloyd, Sherry. How are you?”
“Hi, Lloyd!”
“Hi. Do you remember our deal?”
“Of course, baby. I got ripped off to the max on ‘Steep Throat’ and ‘Nuclear Nookie.’ I’m not letting this one get away.”
Havilland turned around and stretched, catching a glimpse of a man hunched over the phone in the last booth at the end. Even though the caller was a good ten yards away, he turned back and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Good. We’re shooting tomorrow night. Your co-star will pick you up. That’s a little idea of mine. You know, let the stars get acquainted so that they can perform more realistically. He’ll bring an outfit for you to wear. Is that your current address on your business card?”
“Yeah, that’s my crib. And I’ll get the rest of my money then?”
“Yes. Your co-star’s name is Richard. He’ll pick you up at nine. I’ll see you on the set.”
Sherry laughed. “Nine p.m. Tell Richard to be there or be square. Bye, Lloyd.”
“Good-bye, Sherry.”
Havilland hung up and stared through the Plexiglas booth enclosures, noting with relief that the caller was gone. He checked his watch again, then walked to the railing and over to the approximate middle of the parking strip. 8:24. Hopefully, Lieutenant Howard Christie would be punctual.
At precisely eight-thirty, slow footsteps echoed on the blacktop. The Doctor squinted and saw a man materialize out of the shadows and walk straight toward him. When he was ten feet away, a sudden burst of moonlight illuminated his features. It was the man in the phone booth. Shunting that knowledge aside, the Doctor walked forward with his hand extended, watching an archetypal cop come into focus.
He was a big crew-cutted man going to fat. He had a blunt face and cold eyes that measured the Doctor up, down, and sideways without revealing a hint of his appraisal. When they were face to face, he took the extended hand and said, “Doctor Havilland, I presume?”
The words rendered the Doctor mute and faint. He tried to jerk his hand free. It was futile; the force that grasped it was crushing it into numbness.
The force spoke: “Did you think you were dealing with amateurs? I’ve been a cop for twenty-two years, fourteen of them on the take. I know the ropes. I saw you park your car half an hour ago, and ran you through the D.M.V. The White Pages told me the rest. A psychiatrist. Very fucking unimpressive. Do you know how many shrinks I’ve gamed to get out of trouble in the Department? Did you think I’d let you pull this clandestine rendezvous horseshit anonymously? Did you think I believed that snow job you gave me on the phone? A book about secret information abuse? Really, Doctor, you insult my intelligence.”
With a final squeeze, Howard Christie released the Doctor’s hand, then put an arm around his shoulders and led him to the railing. Havilland concentrated on his mantra. He sat on the railing and forced an appropriately frightened laugh. When Christie laughed in return, he felt his newfound courage click in.
Christie took a deep breath of ocean air. “Don’t look so scared, Doc. One thing my first shrink taught me: In all relationships, power bondings are established in the first five minutes. I had to establish the fact that I am the power broker, because I have what you want, and since we are dealing with class two security clearance stuff, this scam is felonious. Capice?”
“Yes,” Havilland said. “I understand. But where are the files?” He ran his right foot nervously over the blacktop in wider and wider circles. A big rock caught his toe. He nudged it toward him and added, “Does anyone else know my name or that I contacted you?”
Christie shook his head. “I told you I knew the ropes. No one at Avonoco knows, and I just found out your name from a D.M.V. clerk who’s already forgotten it. But listen: Where did you get my name?”
Lowering his head, Havilland saw a holstered revolver clipped to Christie’s belt, half covered by his open sports jacket. “I—I—met an L.A.P.D. officer at a bar. He—he told me you had a gambling problem.”
Christie slammed the railing with both palms. “Loudmouthed motherfuckers. For your info, Doc, cops are just like crooks, you can’t trust any of them. What was his name?”
“I—I—don’t remember. Honestly.”
“No problem. People who go to bars forget things fast, which is why they go to bars. I’m glad I’m not a drunk. Two addictions would be too fucking much. Let’s cut the shit and get down to business. First off, don’t tell me why you want the files—I don’t want to know. Second, we’re talking about a long process of photocopying them and moving them out a few at a time. If you want quick gratification, tough shit—discuss it with your shrink. Third, your offer of ten thou doesn’t cut it. I owe a lot of money to some very bad dudes to owe money to. I want thirty K, no less. Capice?”
Havilland faked a coughing attack, leaning over with his head between his knees. When he felt Christie slap his back, he pretended to retch and braced his hands on the pavement, palming the rock, then shoving it into his right jacket pocket as he resumed a sitting position. Wiping his eyes, he inched closed to his adversary, seeing the gun butt fully exposed, Christie’s badge attached to his belt next to it.
Christie slapped his back a last time. “Breathe deep, Doc. That good sea air will put hair on your chest. What do you think of my terms?”
Havilland took a deep breath and stuck his hand in his pocket, closing it around the rock. He calculated potential arcs and slid over to where his left shoulder and Christie’s right shoulder were brushing. “Yes, it’s a deal. You’re holding all the aces.”
Christie laughed. “No gambling metaphors, I’m trying to quit.” He reached his arms up as if to embrace the sky, then brought them down in a huge yawn. “I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s wrap this up for tonight. Here’s what I’m thinking: Six payments of five K apiece, the files to be very cautiously siphoned out at my discretion. You’ll have to trust me on that. I’m the dominant ego in this relationship, but I’ll be benevolent about it. Look at it as a father-son type of gig. Capicel?”
Dr. John Havilland gasped at the worst insult ever hurled at him. He recalled a quote from Christie’s L.A.P.D. file: Long history of overdependence upon supportive figures. Thinking, So be it, the Doctor said, “What do you think I am, an amateur? Don’t you think I know that compulsive gamblers have a need to counterbalance their self-destruction by asserting themselves in business relationships, an unconscious ploy to overrule their awful dependency on their closest loved ones, the ones who rule them and own them and give them the tit they suck on?”
Christie stood up and stammered, “W-w-why you little fuck,” just as Havilland smashed the rock into his face. The cop teetered on the railing, grabbing it with one hand, wiping blood from his eyes with the other. Havilland reached for his waistband and pulled the gun free, then closed his eyes and aimed at where he thought Christie’s face should be. He pulled the trigger twice, screaming along with the explosions, then opened his eyes and saw that Christie’s face was not a face, but a charred blood basin oozing brain and skull fragments. He fired four more times, eyes open and not screaming, ripping Christie’s badge from his belt just as his last shot sheared off his head and sent him pitching over the railing to the rocks thirty feet below. Drenched in blood and inundated by horror and memory, the Night Tripper ran.
17
AT ten o’clock, after nine straight hours of prowling singles bars and simple drinking bars for Thomas Goff and Marty Bergen, Lloyd gave up, surrendering himself to the idea of a trip to New York to prowl Goff’s old haunts. The Department would pay for his ticket and per diem, and before he left he would consult an attorney on legal loopholes to exert against Dr. John Havilland. Defeat loomed like a stark black banner. Lloyd succumbed to the kn
owledge that there was no place to go but backward in time.
The old neighborhood greeted him with banners that mocked his cop exigencies. Parking at Sunset and Vendome, he sprinted up the cracked concrete steps to the highest point in Silverlake, hoping to find a reprise of old themes that would affirm the forty-two-year-old warrior persona he had paid so dearly to assume.
But the timeless L.A. haze blanketed, then shut down his would-be reverie. He could not see his parents’ house a scant half mile away; whole vistas of landmarks were covered by a witch’s brew of evaporating low clouds, industrial fumes and neon. Lloyd’s affirmatipn became a rhapsody of high prices paid for dubious conquests.
In the 1965 Watts riot he had killed a fellow National Guardsman who had fired into a storefront church filled with innocent blacks partaking of coffee and prayer. No one had ever made him for the killing, and two months later he entered the Los Angeles Police Academy.
His career as a policeman was sustained brilliance, his concurrent role as husband and father a series of blundering attempts to instill his family with benign equivalents of his knowledge. When the force of his will elicited anger and hurt, he ran back to the job, and when the job swirled him into vortexes of boredom and terror and loathing, he found women who wanted to touch briefly what he was, offer their innocence as barter, and then get out before his hard line fervor destroyed their hard-earned and fatuous sense of life’s amenities.
And then, last year, Teddy Verplanck merged into his path, turning his universe into chaos. When that symbiosis was completed, death and rebirth occurred simultaneously, and as his wounds healed, Lloyd became a hybrid warrior formed of his past and its validity and of accredited blood testimony as to where it would ultimately take him.
And his hard line fervor cracked and solidified, leaving him to tread air in the middle of a fissure.
Before he could consciously recall his vow of abstinence, Lloyd drove to Whilshire and Beverly Glen and the only destination that gave the softer part of his fissure credibility. Finding the door open, he walked into the entrance hall and cleared his throat to announce his presence. His answer was the shuffle of feet and an unexpected giggle.
“You’re early,” Linda called out.
Trying to track the voice, Lloyd said, “It’s Hopkins, Linda.”
Linda stepped out of a closet next to the dining room, dressed in a silk robe. “I know it is.”
Lloyd walked forward to meet her. “Am I that predictable?”
Nodding her head both “yes” and “no,” Linda said, “I don’t know. Just don’t apologize for this afternoon. I was as out of line as you. No pretexts this time?”
“No.”
“Want to talk before or after?”
“After.”
Linda smiled and tilted her head toward the bedroom, then let Lloyd step ahead of her and walk in. When his back was turned, she slipped off her robe and let it fall to the floor. Lloyd swiveled to face the soft sound, seeing Linda nude, framed in the doorway, backlighted by the glow of a hall lamp. Keeping the frame at arm’s length, he undressed, wincing when his gunbelt hit the carpet. Linda giggled at the impact, then laughed outright when he leaned over and fumbled off his shoes and socks and snagged his zipper and nearly fell out of his pants. Whispering something that sounded like “beyond the beyond,” she slid past him and lay down on the bed. Lloyd saw her take up a beckoning position, a single shaft of light fluttering across her abdomen. Using the light as a beacon, he came to her.
She talked while he held her and felt her and tasted her; little sighs about love and green doors. When his kisses became more persistent and then trailed down to her breasts, those sighs became the gasped word “Yes.” Lost in the word’s repetition, he let his lips move lower, until “yes” crescendoed into “Now, please, now!”
Lloyd obeyed, joining their two halves in a single abrupt motion, then pulling back to a sustaining movement as Linda coiled herself around him and pushed upward. He moved slowly; she with the unrestrained fervor of a graceful animal exploding with gracelessness, forming a point-counterpoint give and take that battered awareness of technique to death. Then he began to move with her fury, and the cop/whore entity pushed itself into a wordless, gasping trance.
Linda succumbed to reality first, twisting her head from the crook of Lloyd’s collarbone. She traced his back with her palms and kissed his neck softly, until he pulled his head from the pillow and looked down on her, revealing a blank, tear-mottled face. All she could think of to say was, “Hopkins.”
Lloyd rolled over and took her hand. When he remained silent, Linda said, “It’s after. We were going to talk, remember?”
Twisting sideways to face her, Lloyd said, “What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything except what just happened. It was perfect; let’s not mess with it.”
Lloyd positioned himself so that his eyes and Linda’s were only inches apart. “No earth-shaking postcoital revelations?”
Nodding her head so that their noses rubbed, Linda said, “Yes. I’m quitting the Life. I’ve got seventy grand tucked away, which should set me up in some kind of business enterprise. I’m quitting the shrink, too. If I quit hooking on my own I won’t need him, and therapy is too expensive for a fledgling businesswoman.”
“He’ll be very sorry to see you go.”
“I know. He’s a very brilliant shrink, but I shouldn’t associate with men who are obsessed with me. Having pictures of me on the wall is just too sad. Even though he takes them down for my visits, I still feel manipulated. Do you remember the pictures? Exactly how I was posed?”
“You weren’t posed. They were candid type shots.”
Linda’s face clouded. “Really? That’s strange. All the pictures in the book were posed.”
Lloyd shrugged, then felt an overlooked connection hit him. “Never underestimate your power, even over hardnoses like Havilland. Listen, did you ever mention Stanley Rudolph to him?”
Linda said, “Yes, but not by name. All I mentioned was that he liked to take nude pictures of me. Why? I don’t want to talk about your case or my clients.”
“Neither do I. What do you want to talk about?”
“Tell me why you broke up with your wife.”
“It’s not a pretty story.”
“It never is.”
Lloyd turned over on his back, wanting to distance himself from Linda. He tried to find the appropriate words to begin his story, then realized that unless he looked her straight in the eye, his prelude would be self-serving lies. Twisting back around and locking into eye contact, he said, “It happened last year. I had been neglecting my family and cheating on my wife with various women for years before that, but last year was when it all exploded.
“I was working Robbery/Homicide, pretty much on the cases I pleased, when I got an anonymous phone call that led me to a murder victim. A young woman. I headed the investigation and dug up information that pointed to a mass murderer who was so fucking smart that no police agency in L.A. County connected any of his killings. At the time I went to my superiors with my information, he had killed at least sixteen women.”
Linda raised a hand to her face and bit the knuckles. Lloyd said, “My superiors wouldn’t authorize an investigation; it was too potentially embarassing to too many police departments. So I went after him myself. Janice left me about that time, taking the girls with her. There was just me and the killer. I found out who he was—a man named Teddy Verplanck. He made the media very big as the Hollywood Slaughterer. You probably heard about him. I went out to get him, but a woman I was seeing got in the way. He killed her. I went out to kill Verplanck. We shot each other up, and another officer, my best friend, killed him. That part of it never hit the media. Janice and the girls don’t know exactly what happened, but they do know that I was shot, and that the whole episode almost cost me my career. Now I’ve got some nightmares to live with and a lot of innocent blood to atone for.”
Linda astonished Lloyd by smi
ling. “I was expecting some tawdry little tale of other men and other women, not a gothic epic.”
Baffled by the reaction, Lloyd said, “You almost sound titillated by it.”
Linda kissed his lips softly. “My father shot my mother and then blew his brains out. I was ten. I’m no neophyte. Sometimes my thoughts are very dark. Let’s go to sleep on a happy note, though. I want us to be together.”
Lloyd got up and closed the bedroom door, shutting out all traces of light. “So do I,” he said.
The morning began with a muffled cadence counting issuing from the living room. Lloyd put it off as Linda gyrating to a TV exercise program and went back to sleep, only to be awakened again minutes later by a firm bite on his neck. He opened his eyes and saw Linda squatting beside the bed in a black leotard. She was sweating and holding one hand behind her back. He leaned forward to kiss her, only to have her dart out of the way of his lips. “What size sweater do you wear?” she asked.
Lloyd sat up and rubbed his eyes. “No kiss? No offer of breakfast? No ‘when will I see you again?’”
“Later. Answer my question.”
“Size forty-six. Why?”
Linda muttered “shit,” and handed Lloyd a Brooks Brothers box tied with a pink ribbon. He opened it and saw a carefully folded navy blue pullover sweater. Stroking its downy front, he whistled and said, “Cashmere. Did you buy this for me?”
Linda shook her head. “I’ll tell you the story some day. It’s a size too small, but please wear it.”