L.A. Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy Page 17
Lloyd touched her neck with gentle fingertips and said, “And you live in your head, and you’re thirty-something, and you keep wondering if it’s ever going to get better. Please say yes, Kathleen, or just shake your head.”
Kathleen shook her head. Lloyd said, “Good. That’s why I’m here—because I want it to get better for you. Do you believe that?” Kathleen shook her head affirmatively and stared into her lap, clenching her hands. “I have a question for you,” Lloyd said. “A rhetorical question. Did you know that the L.A.P.D. treats the undercarriage of all their unmarked cars with a special shock-proof, scrape-proof coating?”
Kathleen laughed politely at the non sequitur. “No,” she said. Lloyd reached over and secured the passenger safety harness around her shoulders. When she remained blank-faced he waggled his eyebrows and said, “Brace yourself,” then hit the ignition and dropped into low gear, popping the emergency brake and flooring the gas pedal simultaneously, sending the car forward in an almost vertical wheel stand. Kathleen screamed. Lloyd waited until the car began its crashing downward momentum, then gently tapped the accelerator a half dozen times until the rear wheels caught friction and the car lurched ahead, straining to keep its
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front end airborne. Kathleen screamed again. Lloyd felt gravity fighting sheer engine power and winning. As the hood of the Matador swung down, he punched the gas pedal and the car nosed upward, holding its pattern until he saw an intersection coming up and hit the brakes, sending them into a tire squealing fishtail. The car was spinning out toward a row of trees when its front end finally smashed into the pavement. Lloyd and Kathleen bounced in their seats like spastic puppets. Dripping with nervous sweat, Lloyd rolled down his window and saw a group of Chicano teenagers giving him a wild ovation, stomping their feet and saluting the car with raised beer bottles.
He blew them a kiss and turned to Kathleen. She was crying, and he couldn’t tell if in fear or joy. He unstrapped the harness and held her. He let her cry, and gradually felt the tears trail into laughter. When Kathleen finally raised her head from his chest, Lloyd saw the face of a delighted child. He kissed that face with the same tenderness as he kissed the faces of his daughters.
“Urban romanticism,” Kathleen said. “Jesus. What next?”
Lloyd considered options and said, “I don’t know. Let’s stay mobile, though. All right?”
“Will you observe all traffic regulations?”
Lloyd said, “Scout’s honor” and started up the car, waggling his eyebrows at Kathleen until she laughed and begged him to stop. The teenagers gave him another round of applause as he pulled out.
They cruised Sunset, the main artery of the old neighborhood. Lloyd editorialized as he drove, pointing out immortal locations of his past:
“There’s Myron’s Used Cars. Myron was a genius chemist gone wrong. He got strung out on heroin and kicked out of his teaching post at U.S.C. He developed a corrosive solution that would eat off the serial numbers on engine blocks. He stole hundreds of cars, lowered the blocks into his vat of solution and set himself up as the used car king of Silverlake. He used to be a nice guy. He was a big rooter for the Marshall football team, and he lent all the star players cars for hot dates. Then one day when he was fucked up on smack he fell into his vat. The solution ate off both his legs up to the knees. Now he’s a cripple and the single most misanthropic individual I’ve ever known.”
Kathleen joined in the travelogue, pointing across the street and saying,
“Cathcart Drugs. I used to steal stationery there for my court. Scented purple stationery. One day I got caught. Old man Cathcart grabbed me and 136
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dug into my purse. He found some poems I had written on the same kind of stationery. He held me and read the poems aloud to everyone in the store. Intimate poems. I was so ashamed.”
Lloyd felt a sadness intrude on their evening. Sunset Boulevard was too loud and garishly neon. Without saying a word he turned the car north on Echo Park Boulevard and drove past the Silverlake Reservoir. Soon they were in the shadow of the power plant, and he turned and looked at Kathleen for approval.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s perfect.”
They walked uphill silently, holding hands. Dirt clods broke at their feet, and twice Lloyd had to pull Kathleen forward. When they reached the summit they sat in the dirt, heedless of their clothes, leaning into the wire fence that encircled the facility. Lloyd felt Kathleen pulling apart from him, regrouping against the momentum of her tears. To close the gap, he said, “I like you, Kathleen.”
“I like you, too. And I like it here.”
“It’s quiet here.”
“You love the quiet and you hate music. Where does your wife think you are?”
“I don’t know. Lately she goes out dancing with this fag guy she knows. Her soul sister. They snort cocaine and go to a gay disco. She loves music, too.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?” Kathleen said.
“Well . . . more than anything else I just don’t understand it. I understand why people rob banks and become thieves and get strung out on dope and sex and become cops and poets and killers, but I don’t understand why people fart around in discos and listen to music when they could be goosing the world with an electric cattle prod. I can understand you and your court and your screwing all those dykes and creeps. I understand innocent little children and their love, and their trauma when they discover how cold it can get, but I don’t understand how they cannot want to fight it. I tell my daughters stories so they’ll fight. My youngest, Penny, is a genius. She’s a fighter. My two older girls I’m not so sure about. Janice, my wife, isn’t a fighter. I don’t think she was ever innocent. She was born practical and stable and stayed that way. I think . . . I think maybe . . . that’s why I married her. I think . . . I knew I didn’t have any more innocence, and I wasn’t quite sure that I was a fighter. Then I found out I was and got scared of the price and married Janice.”
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Lloyd’s voice had assumed an almost disembodied monotone. Kathleen thought briefly that he was a ventriloquist’s pawn, and that whoever was pulling his strings was really trying to get to her; laying clues in the strange barrage of confession she had just heard. Two words—“killers” and “price”
stuck out, and in her haste to make sense of the story Kathleen said, “And so you became a policeman to prove you were a fighter, and then you killed in the line of duty and you knew.”
Lloyd shook his head. “No, I killed a man—an evil man—first. Then I became a cop and married Janice. I lose track of chronology sometimes. Sometimes . . . not often . . . when I try to figure out my past I hear noise . . . music . . . awful noise . . . and I have to stop.”
Kathleen felt Lloyd wavering in and out of control, and knew that she had broken through to his essence. She said, “I want to tell you a story. It’s a true romantic story.”
Lloyd shifted his head onto her lap and said, “Tell me.”
“All right. There was once a quiet, bookish girl who wrote poetry. She didn’t believe in God or her parents or the other girls who followed her. She tried very hard to believe in herself. It was easy, for a while. Then her followers left her. She was alone. But someone loved her. Some tender man sent her flowers. The first time there was an anonymous poem. A sad poem. The second time just the flowers. The dream lover continued to send the flowers, anonymously, for many years. Over eighteen years. Always when the lonely woman needed them most. The woman grew as a poet and diarist and kept the flowers dated and pressed in glass. She speculated on this man, but never tried to discover his identity. She took his anonymous tribute to her heart and decided that she would reciprocate his anonymity by keeping her diaries private until after her death. And so she lived and wrote and listened to music—a quiet mover. It almost makes you want to believe in God, doesn’t it, Lloyd?”
Lloyd took his head from its sof
t tweed resting place, shaking it to bring the sad story into sharper focus. Then he stood up and helped Kathleen to her feet. “I think your dream lover is a very strange fighter,” he said, “and I think he wants to own you, not inspire you. I think he doesn’t know how strong you are. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
They stood in the doorway of Kathleen’s bookstore-apartment, holding each other loosely. Kathleen burrowed into Lloyd’s shoulder, and when she raised her head he thought that she wanted to be kissed. As he bent to her, 138
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Kathleen pushed him gently away. “No. Not yet. Please don’t force it, Lloyd.”
“All right.”
“It’s just that the whole thing is so unexpected. You’re so special, and it just . . .”
“You’re special, too.”
“I know, but I’ve got no idea of who you are, of your natural habitat. The little things. Do you understand?”
Lloyd pondered this. “I think so. Look, would you like to go to a dinner party tomorrow night? Policemen and their wives? It’ll probably be dull, but illuminating for you.”
Kathleen smiled. His offer was a major capitulation; he was willing to be bored to please her. “Yes. Be here at seven.” She moved backward into her dark front room and closed the door behind her. When she heard Lloyd’s departing footsteps she turned on the lights and got out her diary. Her mind rambled with profundities until she muttered, “Oh, fuck it,” and wrote:
He is capable of bending. I am going to be his music. Lloyd drove home. He pulled into the driveway to find Janice’s car gone and all the lights in the house glowing brightly. He unlocked the door and walked inside, seeing the note immediately:
Lloyd, darling:
This is goodbye, for a while at least. The girls and I have gone to San Francisco to stay with a friend of George’s. It is for the best, I know that, because I know that you and I have not communicated for a long, long time, and that our values are markedly different. Your behavior with the girls was the final straw. I have known almost since the beginning of our marriage of some deep disturbance in you—one you disguised (for the most part) very well. What I will not tolerate is your passing your disturbance on to them. Your stories are cancerous in their effect, and Anne, Caroline, and Penny must be free of them. A note on the girls—I am going to enroll them in a Montessori School in S.F., and I will have them call you at least once a week. George’s roommate Rob will look after the shop in my absence. I will decide in the coming months whether or not I want a divorce. I care
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for you deeply, but I cannot live with you. I am withholding our address in S.F. until I am certain you will not try to do something rash. When I get settled, I’ll call. Until then be well and don’t worry. Janice
Lloyd put down the note and walked through the empty house. Everything feminine had been cleared out. The girls’ room had been picked clean of personal belongings; the bedroom that he shared with Janice now contained only his solitary aura and the navy blue cashmere quilt that Penny had crafted for his thirty-seventh birthday.
Lloyd drew the quilt around his shoulders and walked outside. He looked up at the sky and hoped for an annihilating rainstorm. When he realized that he couldn’t will thunder and lightning, he fell to his knees and wept. 10
When the poet saw the empty metal box, he screamed. Cancer cells materialized out of the dawn sky and threw themselves at his eyes, hurling him onto the cold pavement. He wrapped his arms around his head and drew himself into a fetal ball to keep the tiny carcinogens from going for his throat, then rocked back and forth until he had blunted all his senses and his body started to cramp, then numb. When he felt self-asphyxiation coming on he breathed out, and familiar Larrabee Avenue came into focus. No cancer cells in the air. His beautiful tape machine was gone, but Officer Pig was still asleep and the early morning scene on Larrabee was normal. No police cars, no suspicious vehicles, no trench-coated figures huddled behind newspapers. He had changed the tape forty-eight hours ago, so the machine was mostly likely discovered that day, when it was empty or running, or yesterday, when it contained a minimum of recorded material. If he hadn’t wanted to touch himself so badly he would never have risked the early pickup, but he needed the stimulus of Officer Pig and his lackey, who had been doing things to each other on the couch for weeks now, things that Julia had written about in her evil manu—
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He couldn’t complete the thought; it was too shameful. He got to his feet and looked in all directions. No one had seen him. He bit at the skin of his forearms. The blood that trickled out was red and healthy looking. He opened his mouth to speak, wanting to be sure that the cancer cells hadn’t severed his vocal cords. The word that came out was
“safe.” He said it a dozen times, each time with a more awed inflection. Finally he shouted it and ran for his car. Thirty minutes later he had scaled the bookstore roof, a silenced .32 automatic in his windbreaker pocket, smiling when he saw that his Sanyo 6000 was still hidden underneath an outsized sheaf of tarred-over pipe insulation. He grabbed the two spools of finished tape from the machine’s storage compartment. Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe. He said the word over and over again on his drive home, and he was still saying it as he put the first spool on the old machine in the living room, then sat back to listen, his eyes moving over the rose branches and photographs on the walls. The sound of a switch being flipped; the porch light going on; the trigger activating the tape. His original beloved muttering to herself, then deep silence. He smiled and touched his thighs. She was writing. The silence stretched. One hour. Two. Three. Four. Then the sound of yawning and the switch being flipped again.
He got to his feet, stretched and changed spools. Again the porch light trigger—his punctual darling, 6:55, like clockwork. He sat down, wondering if he should make himself explode now while he could hear footsteps, or wait and take a chance on his original beloved talking to herself. Then a doorbell rang. Her voice: “Hi, Sergeant.” The scuffle of feet. Her voice again: “I made those phone calls. To over a dozen bookdealers. Nothing. None of my friends recall seeing or talking with a man like the one you described. It was bizarre. I was helping the police to find an insane woman-killer, and women kept—”
At the last words he began to tremble. His body went ice cold, then turned burning hot. He punched the stop button and fell to his knees. He clawed at his face until he drew blood, whimpering safe, safe, safe. He crawled to the window and looked out at the passing parade on Alvarado. He took hope with every identifiable evidence of business as usual: traffic noise, Mexican women with children in tow, junkies waiting to score in front of the burrito stand. He started to say “safe,” then hesitated and whispered “maybe.” “Maybe” grew in his brain until he screamed it and stumbled back to the recorder.
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He pushed the play button. His first beloved was saying something about women interrupting her. Then a man’s voice: “Thank you. I didn’t really expect anything. Right now I’m just fishing. Badge 1114, homicide fisherman on the job.”
He forced himself to listen, gouging his genitals with both hands to keep from screaming. The horrific conversation continued, and words leaped out and made him gouge himself harder. “The idea of mass murderers killing with impunity makes them afraid . . . I have supervised homicide investigations . . . call me Lloyd.”
When the door slammed and the tape spun in blessed silence he took his hands from between his legs. He could feel blood dripping down his thighs, and it reminded him of high school and poetry and the sanctity of his purpose. Mrs. Cuthbertson’s eleventh grade honors English class. Logical fallacies: post hoc, propter ergo hoc—“After this, therefore because of this.”
Knowledge of crimes committed does not mean knowledge of the perpetrator. Policemen were not breaking down his door. “Lloyd,” “Homicide fisherman badge 1114,” had no idea that his original beloved�
��s dwelling was bugged, and may have had nothing to do with the theft of his other tape recorder. “Lloyd” was “fishing” in shark-infested waters, and if he came near him he would eat the policeman alive. Conclusion: they had no idea who he was, and it was business as usual.
Tonight he would claim his twenty-third and most hurriedly courted beloved. No “maybe.” It was a pure “yes,” powerfully affirmed by his meditation tape and every one of his beloveds from Jane Wilhelm on up. Yes. Yes. The poet walked to the window and screamed it to the world at large. 11
His sleepless night in the empty house had been the precursor to a day of total bureaucratic frustration, and each negative feedback tore at Lloyd like a neon sign heralding the end of all the gentle restraining influences in his life. Janice and the girls were gone, and until his genius killer was captured, he was powerless to get them back. 142
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As the day wound down into early evening, Lloyd recounted his dwindling options, wondering what on God’s earth he would do if they died out and left him with only his mind and his will.
It had taken him six hours to call the eighteen stereo supply stores and secure a list of fifty-five people who had purchased Watanabe A.F.Z. 999
recorders over the last eight years. Twenty-four of the buyers had been women, leaving thirty-one male suspects, and Lloyd knew from experience that telephone interviews would be futile—experienced detectives would have to size up the buyers in person and determine guilt or innocence from the suspects’ response to questioning. And if the recorder had been purchased outside L.A. County . . . and if the whole Haines angle had nothing to do with the killings . . . and he would need manpower for interviewing . . . and if Dutch turned him down at the party tonight . . . The negative feedback continued, undercut with memories of Penny and her quilts and Caroline and Anne squealing with delight at his stories. Dutch had gotten nothing positive from his queries to both retired and long-term active juvenile detectives and the “monicker” files on “Bird” and