Because the Night Read online

  Robert stammered, “T-to the b-bathroom? To check for drugs?”

  Havilland shook his head. “No. You have drugs on the brain; it’s a weak point of yours. Monte, what would you do?”

  Monte wiped sweat from his chest and twisted to stare at himself in the mirror. “I would wonder why the call was so important that they both had to run for the phone, especially when I was there looking so groovy. So what I would do would be to run for an extension and pick it up the very second that the old fucker did, then listen in and see if there was any salient info I could get from the call.”

  Havilland smiled and said, “Bravo,” then slapped Monte across the face and whispered, “Bravo, but always look at me when you answer. If you look at yourself you get the notion that you thought independently. Do you see the fallacy in that kind of thinking?”

  Monte lowered his eyes, then brought them up to meet Havilland’s. “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Good. Robert, a hypothetical question for you. Think pure efficacy and answer candidly. My supply of legally obtained pharmaceutical drugs runs out, because of new laws passed limiting hypnotics and the like to physicians with hospital affiliations. You crave them and come to realize that they are what you like most about being in my tutelage. What do you do?”

  The Bookworm pondered the question, shifting his gaze back and forth from the mirror to the Doctor. Goff grinned when he realized that Havilland had given the lonelies a Pentothal jolt.

  Finally, Robert whispered, “It would never happen to you. It just couldn’t.”

  Havilland put his hands on Robert’s shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze. “The perfect answer. Monte would have intellectualized it, but your response was pure candor and pure heart. And of course you were right. I want you to both chant your mantras now. Hold eye contact with yourself, but think of me.”

  When Havilland started for the door, Goff padded downstairs and back to the speaker room. He rewound the efficacy training tape and placed the spool in a large manila envelope, then plugged his headphones into the middle speaker just in time to hear male/female sexual grunting move into strangled sighs and girlish giggles. The giggle became a high-pitched smoker’s cough, and Goff himself laughed. It was the tight little redhead he had picked up at the Lingerie Club, the one who had devastated him with her Kundalini yoga positions. He had been lucky to get out of her Bunker Hill Towers condo alive.

  The Doctor was the first to speak. “Bravo. Bravo.” His monotone sent the woman into new gales of laughter. The man she had coupled with was still trying to catch his breath. Goff imagined him lying on the bed on the verge of a coronary.

  The Doctor spoke again. “Later, Helen. I want to check the victim’s pulse. You may have gone too far this time.”

  “Beyond the beyond,” Helen said. “Isn’t that our motto, Doctor?”

  “Touché,” the Doctor said. “I’ll call you Thursday.”

  When a full five minutes of silence followed the sound of little Helen skipping gaily out the bedroom door, Goff’s gut clenched. He knew that the male lover was the real psycho and that the Night Tripper was taking him a major step closer to his brink. Thus the shattering of glass and the obscenities that came in the wake of the stillness were expected, as were the expressions of concern from the Doctor. “It’s all right, Richard, it really is. Sometimes ‘beyond the beyond’ means hating. First you have to accept that reality, then you have to work through it. You can’t hate yourself for being what you are. You are basically good and powerful, or you wouldn’t be with me now. You just happen to have an exceptionally high violence threshold to overcome in order to achieve your selfhood.”

  Thomas Goff shifted into memories of Richard Oldfield’s recruitment, beginning with the crippled whore with the three-hundred-dollar-a-day smack habit he had met at Plato’s Retreat West. She had told him of the stockbroker/bodybuilder/remittance man who paid five C-notes a pop to work her over because of her resemblance to the governess who had tortured him as a child. The approach at the health club had had the thrust of a nightmare; Oldfield looked enough like Goff to be taken for his fraternal twin, and he was dead-lifting four hundred pounds. But the bodybuilder had capitulated to the Doctor’s machinations like a baby going for its mother’s tit.

  More breaking glass. Oldfield weeping. Havilland alternately whistling a tune and murmuring, “There, there.” Goff knew that the reversal was coming.

  It arrived in the form of a slap in the face that filled the speaker with static. “You weakling,” Dr. John Havilland hissed. “You picayune poseur. You sycophantic whoremonger. I give you the best fuck in our program, promise to take you where your chickenshit conscience would never permit you to stray, and you respond by smashing windows and bawling.”

  “Doctor, please,” Richard Oldfield whimpered.

  “Please what, Richard?”

  “Ple—you know …”

  “You have to say it.”

  “Ple-please take me as far as I can go.”

  The Doctor sighed. “Soon, Richard. I’m going to be collecting a great deal of information, and it should yield the name of a woman suitable for you. Think of that when you go through your fear mantras.”

  “Thank you, Doctor John.”

  “Don’t thank me, Richard. Your green doors are my green doors. Go home now. I’m tired, and I’m going to dismiss the grouping early.”

  Goff heard the Doctor escort Oldfield to the door. The tape machine recorded a hissing silence. The Night Tripper’s executive officer imagined it as being inhabited by nightmares in repose, manifested in cold manila folders spilling out data that would transform human beings into chess pieces. The Alchemist and his six offerings were just the beginning. A series of Havilland’s slogans caused Goff to shudder back the headache that was burning behind a beige curtain in his mind. Last night. Three. What if the data keepers couldn’t be bought? The headache throbbed through the curtain, like a hungry worm eating at his brain.

  Doors slamming above him; periods of stillness, followed by the staggered departures of the lonelies. Mercedes and Audis pulling out onto P.C.H. and more silence. Suddenly Goff was terrified.

  “Bad thoughts, Thomas?”

  Goff swung around in his chair, knocking his shorthand pad to the floor. He looked up into the light brown eyes of Dr. John Havilland, locking his own eyes into them exactly as the Doctor had taught him. “Just thoughts, Doctor.”

  “Good. The papers are full of you. How does it feel?”

  “It feels dark and quiet.”

  “Good. Does the ‘psycho killer’ speculation disturb you?”

  “No, it amuses me because it’s so far from the truth.”

  “You had to take out three?”

  “Yes. I—I remembered your efficacy training. Some-sometime I might have to do it again.”

  “A cold gun? Untraceable?”

  “Cold city. I stole it.”

  “Good. How are the headaches?”

  “Not too bad. I chant if they really start to hurt.”

  “Good. If your vision starts to blur again, see me immediately, I’ll give you an injection. Dreams?”

  “Sometimes I dream about the Alchemist. He was good, wasn’t he?”

  “He was superb, Thomas. But he’s gone. I scared him off the face of the earth.”

  Havilland handed Goff a slip of paper. “She’s a legitimate patient—she phoned the office for an appointment. I checked her out with some girls in the life. She’s a thousand dollars a night. Check out her John book—anyone who can afford her can afford us.”

  Goff looked at the slip: Linda Wilhite, 9819 Wilshire Blvd, 91W. He smiled. “It’s an easy building. I’ve hit it before.”

  Havilland smiled back. “Good, Thomas. Go home now and enjoy your dreams.”

  “How do you know I’ll enjoy them?”

  “I know your dreams. I made them.”

  Goff watched the Doctor about-face and walk to the latticework patio that overlooked the beach. He let the Docto
r’s exit line linger in his mind, then turned off the tape console and walked outside to his car. He was about to hit the ignition when he noticed a mound of wadded up plastic on top of the dashboard. He grabbed at it and screamed, because he knew that it was beige plastic, and that meant that he knew.

  Goff ripped the plastic trashbag to shreds, then slammed his fists into the dashboard until the pain numbed the screaming in his mind. Turning on the headlights, he saw something white under his windshield wiper. He got out of the car and examined it. The embossed business card of John R. Havilland, M.D., Practice in Psychiatry, stared at him. He turned the card over. Neatly printed on the back were the words I know your nightmares.

  4

  AFTER thirty-six nonstop hours on the liquor store case, Lloyd Hopkins fell asleep in his cubicle at Parker Center and dreamed of annihilation. Sound waves bombarded him, predator birds attacked the willfully shut-off part of his brain where the man he had killed in the Watts riot and the man he had tried to kill last year resided. The birds tore open jagged sections of sky, letting in crystals the color of blood. When he awakened he bludgeoned the images with quiet still-lifes of Janice and the girls in San Francisco, waiting for time to heal the wounds or reinforce the division. The liquor store/charnel house memory took over from there, pushing family love back into the safety compartment with his nightmares. Lloyd was relieved.

  The death scene expanded in his mind, chalked like a forensic technician’s marking grid. Off to his left were an open cash register, a counter scattered with tens and twenties, broken liquor bottles all along the lower shelves. Heel marks where the proprietor had been dragged to his execution. The right hand grid revealed an overturned cardboard beer display and heel marks where the two other victims had probably crouched to hide from the killer. Bisecting the grids was the crimson wind tunnel into the store’s rear room, three bodies crumpled across a once beige curtain that was torn free from the doorway by the muzzle velocity of three hollow point .41 slugs smashing through three cranial vaults. There were no discernible trajectory or spatter marks; exploded brain and bone debris had rendered the tiny stockroom a slaughterhouse.

  Lloyd shook himself further awake, thinking: Psychopath. He walks into the store, pulls out a monster hand-cannon and demands the money, then sees or hears something that flips his switch. Enraged, he hops over the counter and drags the proprietor by the hair over to the doorway. The girl and the old man betray their presence. He knocks over the display cutout and makes them walk to the curtain. Then he takes them out with three bull’s-eyes from a top-heavy, unvented revolver with monster recoil, leaving the money on the counter. A volcano with ice-water fuel injection.

  Lloyd stood up and stretched. Feeling the last residue of sleep dissipate, he walked down the hall to the mens room and stood before the sink, alternately staring at himself in the mirror and running cold water over his face. He ignored the sound of early arriving officers laughing and primping quietly around him, aware for a split second that they were keeping their voices at a low register out of deference to his reputation and well-known hatred of loud noise. Feeling his rage start to peak, he defined his killer with self-righteous cop invective: psychopathic scumbag. Take him out before his switch flips again.

  The first thirty-six hours of his investigation had been spent thinking and chasing computer type. After noticing a “No Parking” zone outside the liquor store and extending all the way down the block, Lloyd theorized that the killer had either walked to the location or had parked in the bushes beside the freeway on-ramp. His latter thesis had been rewarded—under fluorescent arc lights the forensic technicians had found fresh tire tracks in the soft dirt and minute yellow paint scrapings stuck to the tips of sharp branches. Four hours later the L.A.P.D.’s Scientific Investigation Division completed its tests on the paint and announced the results of the technician’s plaster of paris moldings of the tire tracks: The car was a Japanese import, late model; the paint the standard brand in every Japanese automotive plant; the tires standard equipment radials—used solely by Japanese manufacturers. R & I and a computer cross-check of recent armed robbery and homicide bulletins revealed that there were no yellow Japanese imports registered to convicted and paroled armed robbers or murderers and that none had been mentioned as figuring in any robberies or homicides dating back over a year. The California Department of Motor Vehicles supplied the most frustrating information: There were 311,819 yellow Japanese automobiles, 1977 to 1984 models, registered in Los Angeles County, making a concerted check for criminal records a clerical impossibility. Even the L.A. County “Hot Sheet” yielded zilch—a total of eight yellow Toyotas, Subarus, and Hondas had been reported stolen over the past six weeks, and all eight had been recovered. The car was a dead end.

  Which left the gun.

  Lloyd considered the still awaited latent print workup a foregone conclusion: smudges, streaks, partials, and at best a few completes belonging to local juiceheads who patronized the store. Let the three officers he had assigned to run background checks on the victims have carte blanche there—fingerprint mania or the “kill three to get one” angle his superiors at Robbery/Homicide had told him to stress were as dead as the car. Every ounce of Lloyd’s instinct told him that, just as every ounce had told him that the trinity of this case was the killer’s psychosis, his cool, his gun.

  The Ballistics Report and the Autopsy Protocol were rife with flat-out wonderment. Henry McGuire, Wallace Chamales, and Susan Wischer were killed by a .41 revolver fired from a distance of twelve to fifteen feet, all three slugs hitting them square between the eyes. The killer was a marksman, the gun an anomaly. Forty-one revolvers predated the Wild West days, going out of manufacture before the Civil War. They were too unwieldy, too heavy, and had a marked tendency toward misfiring. Forty-one ammunition was even worse: hardball or hollow point, its unpredictable reports were capable of jerking the shooter’s arm seemingly out of its socket or of going off like a soggy popcorn kernel. Whoever had shot the three people at Freeway Liquor had mastered a difficult antique handgun with antique ammo and had exercised his mastery under a state of extreme duress.

  Lloyd stared deeper at his own mirror image, wondering what to do now that he had already sent stolen gun queries to every police agency in California and had personally questioned every antique gun dealer in the Central Yellow Pages. Negative answers all the way down the line—no .41s in stock, let alone purchased, and it would probably be another twenty-four hours before the responses to his queries began trickling in. All the paperwork was digested; all the facts were lodged. There was nothing he could do but wait.

  And waiting was antithetical to his nature. Lloyd walked back to his cubicle and stared at the walls. Snapshots of his daughters formed a spray around the fed’s ten most wanted; a pincushion map of L.A. County showed that homicides were up in Hollywood, South Central, and the East Valley. On the Freeway Liquor case the obvious next step was a call to Hollywood dicks to see what their snitches had come up with. Looking for something to perk his mental juices, he picked up the file that Dutch Peltz had given him just before the start of the frantic thirty-six hours. Herzog, Jacob Michael, 5/3/49, was typed on the front of the manila folder and inside were Xerox copies of statistical records forms, fitness reports, commendation certificates and odd memoranda from superior officers. Thinking of Herzog as a dead man and of the folder as his epitaph, Lloyd pulled up a chair and read every word in it five times.

  A singular man emerged. Jungle Jack Herzog had a 137 I.Q., barely met the L.A.P.D.’s height and weight requirements and was born in Beirut, Lebanon. He was fluent in three Middle Eastern languages and had protested the Vietnam war in college, before joining the Air National Guard. He had graduated twelfth in his academy class and received scrolls in scholarship, marksmanship, and physical training. His first four years on the job had been spent working Wilshire Patrol and Wilshire Vice, receiving Class A fitness reports, earning praise from all superior officers save one vice squad lieuten
ant, who shunted him back into uniform for refusing to serve in a public restroom deployment to catch persons engaged in homosexual acts. That same lieutenant had then recanted his criticism—later requesting that Herzog train his men in operating bookmaking and prostitution surveillances, heavily emphasizing the use of disguise. Herzog’s “seminars” had been so successful that he gained consultant status, training plainclothes officers city wide, staying in demand while doing four and three year tours of duty at West L.A. and Venice Divisions.

  Jungle Jack became known as the “Alchemist,” a reference to his ability to tranform himself and render himself virtually invisible on the street. He was also spectacularly brave—twice resolving hostage situations, the first time by offering himself to the gunman who had taken over a bar he was staking out for liquor violations.

  The gunman had grabbed a young prostitute and was holding a knife to her throat while his accomplice tapped the cash register and grabbed the purses and billfolds of the bar’s patrons. Herzog, in the guise of a crippled drunk, taunted the knife wielder to release the girl and take him in her stead, screaming obscenities at him, inching closer as the blade drew a trickle of blood at the girl’s throat. When he was two feet away, the gunman shoved the prostitute aside and grabbed Herzog, screaming when Jungle Jack’s elbow crashed into his windpipe. Herzog disabled the man with a flat-handed karate chop and took off after his accomplice, catching him after a five-block foot pursuit.

  The second hostage situation was resolved even more boldly. A man known to local officers as a heavy angel dust user had snatched a little girl and was holding her at gunpoint while a crowd gathered around him. Jack Herzog, in uniform, walked though the crowd and up to the man, who dropped the little girl and fired at him three times. The shots missed, and Herzog blew the man’s brains out at point-blank range.

  Herzog’s reputation grew within the Department; requests from vice squad and plainclothes commanders multiplied. Then Sergeant Martin Bergen, Herzog’s best friend, committed an act of cowardice as noteworthy as Herzog’s acts of bravery. A trial board followed, and Herzog went to the wall for his friend, calling in favors in hope of saving Bergen’s career, testifying as a character witness at his trial, decrying the L.A.P.D.’s hero mentality from his standpoint as one of its greatest heroes. Martin Bergen was banished from the Department in disgrace and Jungle Jack Herzog was banished to a file clerk job—a defeat as ignominious as Bergen’s. Even a hero shouldn’t fuck with the bosses.