Because the Night Read online

  Lloyd recoiled at the knowledge that time was running out. Seated at Dutch Peltz’s desk, savoring the feel of a silent Hollywood Station drifting toward dusk, he read over Xeroxes of the Field Interrogation Reports he had requisitioned city wide. On the night of April 23, eleven yellow Japanese cars had been stopped for traffic violations and/or “suspicious behavior.” Four of the people cited and detained had been women, five had been ghetto black men, two with no criminal record, three with misdemeanor records for possession of drugs and nonpayment of child support. The two remaining white men were a lawyer stopped and ultimately arrested for drunk driving and a teenager popped for driving under the influence of a narcotic substance, which the arresting officer surmised to be airplane glue. No sparks.

  Lloyd yelled, “Shit!” and stormed through his makeshift command post looking for a pen and paper. Finding a yellow legal pad and a stack of pencils atop Dutch’s bookcase, he wrote:

  Dutchman—time running out. There’s a shitload of hotel stick-ups downtown, so I’ll probably get yanked to a robbery assignment soon. The 4/23 F.I.s and the snitch feedback are goose-egg. Will you do the following for me?

  1. Have another team of uniformed officers house to house (6-8 block radius) the area surrounding Freeway Liquor. Have them ask about:

  A. Yellow Jap cars recently seen in area. (Lic. #)

  B. Recent loiterers.

  C. Recent conversations with the three deceased. All 3 victs. were locals. Did they mention anything suspi cious?

  D. Have officers check previous canvass report filed by patrolmen who house-to-housed the night of the kill ings. Have them check residences of people who were not home that night.

  E. Tell the men that Robbery/Homicide has allocated unlimited overtime on this case—they’ll get the $ in their next check.

  2. Glom all H.W. Div. EI.’s for past 6 mos. men tioning yellow Jap. autos. Set aside all incoming FI.s featuring same, and collate all incoming rob. & homicide bulletins mentioning same.

  3. Re: Herzog. I’ve got a weird feeling about this—even beyond the fact J.H. stole my file. I want some kind of handle on it before we call I.A.D. Have you run your grapevines on the 6 officers? Are the files still missing? I’m going to sleep at J.H.’s pad for the next several nights—(886–3317) see what happens—also, if the Rob./Hom. brass can’t find me, they can’t reassign me—L.H.

  There was a knock at the door, followed by the sound of coughing. Lloyd put his memo under Dutch’s quartz bookend and called out, “Enter!”

  Lieutenant Walt Perkins walked in and shut the door behind him. When he shuffled his feet nervously, Lloyd said, “Looking for me or the Dutchman, Walt?”

  “You,” Perkins said.

  Lloyd pointed to a chair. Perkins ignored it. “I checked with the squad,” he said. “Herzog always worked alone. A lot of the men wanted to work with him because of his rep, but Jack always nixed it. He used to joke that ninety-five percent of all vice cops were alcoholics. He …” Perkins faltered as Lloyd came alive with tension. The sandy-haired man was not a cop.

  Perkins shuffled his feet again, drawing figure eights on the floor. “Lloyd, I don’t want I.A.D. nosing around the squad.”

  “Why?” Lloyd asked. “The worst you’ll get is a reprimand. Vice commanders have been working Herzog off the payroll for years. It’s common knowledge.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Perkins ceased his figure eights and forced himself to stare at Lloyd. “It’s you. I know the whole story of what happened with you last year. I got it straight from a deputy chief. I admire you for what you did, that’s not it. It’s just that I know the promotion board has a standing order not to ever promote you or Dutch, and I—”

  Lloyd’s peripheral vision throbbed with black. Swallowing to keep his voice down, he said, “And you want me to sit on this? A brother officer murdered?”

  Shaking his head and lowering his eyes, Perkins whispered, “No. I paid off a clerk at Personnel Records. He’s going to carry Herzog present for another week or so, then report him missing. There’ll be an investigation.”

  Lloyd kicked out at a metal wastebasket, sending a mound of wadded paper onto Perkins’s pantslegs. The lieutenant flinched back into the door and brought his eyes up. “The born-agains in I.A.D. have a hard-on for you, Hopkins. Gaffaney especially. You’re a great cop, but you don’t give a fuck about other cops and the people close to you get hurt. Look at what you’ve done to Dutch Peltz. Can you blame me for wanting to cover my ass?”

  Lloyd released the hands he had coiled into fists. “It’s all a trade-off. You’re an administrator, I’m a hunter. You’re a well liked superior officer, which means that the guys you command are shaking down hookers for head jobs and ripping off dope dealers for their shit and slopping up free booze all over Hollywood. I’m not so well liked, and I get strange, scary ideas sometimes. But I’m willing to pay the price and you aren’t. So don’t judge me. And get out of the way if you don’t want to get hurt, because I’m seeing this thing through.”

  Lloyd pretended to fiddle with the papers on Dutch’s desk. The second he averted his eyes, Perkins slipped out the door.

  An hour later, when the last remnants of twilight dissolved into night, Lloyd drove to Jackie D.’s bar. The barman he had talked to two nights before was on duty and the place was still empty. The barman had the same weary look and automatically put down a napkin as Lloyd took a seat at the bar, shaking his head and saying, “No mercy. The ginger ale drinkers always return. There is no mercy.”

  “What’s the complaint this time?” Lloyd asked.

  “Wet T-shirt contest next door. First I gotta compete with free booze, now I gotta compete with free tits. I heard the guy who owns that puspocket is gonna throw in female mud wrestling, maybe female bush shaving, maybe female dick measuring, make a bundle and go into something stable like pushing heroin. No mercy!”

  “Isn’t his liquor license up for suspension, too?”

  “Yeah, but he’s young and he’s got the chutzpah to think big and diversify. You know, a forty-story swingers’ condo shaped like a dick, with an underground garage shaped like a snatch. You drive in and an electric beam shoots you an orgasm. No mercy!”

  “There is mercy. I’m here to prove it.”

  The barman poured Lloyd a ginger ale. “Cops do not give mercy, they give grief.”

  Lloyd drew a paper bag from his jacket pocket. “You remember the man I was asking you about the other night? You said you saw him here with another man, sandy haired, early thirties?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Good. We’re going to create a little picture of that guy. You’re going to be the artist. Come over on this side of the bar.”

  Lloyd spread out his wares on the bartop. “This is called an Identikit. Little composite facial features that we put together from a witness’ description. We start with the forehead and work down. We’ve got over thirty nose types and so forth. See how the slots fit together?”

  The barman fingered cardboard eyebrows, chins, and mouths and said, “Yeah. I just put these pieces together until it looks like the guy, right?”

  “Right. Then I put the finishing touches in with a pencil. You got it?”

  “Do I look dumb?”

  “You look like Rembrandt.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A bartender who drew pictures on the side.”

  It took the barman half an hour of sifting, comparing, rejecting, and appraising to come up with a composite. Lloyd looked at the portrait and said, “Not bad. A good-looking guy with a mean streak. You agree with that?”

  “Yeah,” the barman said. “Now that you mention it, he did look kinda mean.”

  “Okay. Now show me what these composite pieces have missed.”

  Lloyd took out a pencil and poised it over the Identikit picture. The barman studied his portrait from several different angles, then grabbed the pencil and went to work himself,
shading the cheeks, broadening the nose, adding a thin line of malevolence to the lips. Finishing with a flourish, he said, “There! That is the cocksucker in the flesh!”

  Holding the cardboard up to the light, Lloyd saw a vividly lean countenance come into focus, the thin mouth rendering the handsomeness ice cold. He smiled and felt the barman tugging at his sleeve. “Where’s this fucking mercy you were telling me about?”

  Lloyd stuck the portrait in his pocket. “Call the A.B.C. tomorrow at ten o’clock. They’ll tell you the complaints against you have been removed and that you’re no longer facing a license suspension.”

  “You’ve got that kinda clout?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mercy! Mercy prevails!”

  Driving over the Cahuenga Pass to Jack Herzog’s apartment, Lloyd thought: Only the hunt prevails. Trace all evidential links backward and forward in time and you will find that you are in the exact place that you were in four or eight or sixteen years ago, chasing ghouls too twisted to be called human and too sad to be called anything else, finding or not finding them, holding surveillance on patterns of hatred and fear, imparting morally ambiguous justice, running headlong into epiphanies that were as ever-changing as your need to know them was immutable. That the hunt was always conducted on the same landscape was the safest mark of permanence. Los Angeles County was thousands of miles of blacktop, neon, and scrub-brush-dotted hillside, arteries twisting in and around and back on themselves, creating human migrations that would unfailingly erupt in blood, stain the topography and leave it both changed and the same.

  Lloyd looked out the window, knowing by off-ramp signs exactly where he was. He strained his eyes to see Ray Becker’s Tropics, a bar he had worked as a vice officer fifteen years before. It wasn’t there. The whole block had been razed. The Tropics was now a coin laundry, and the Texaco Station on the corner was a Korean church. A thought crossed his mind. If the city became unrecognizable, and the blood eruptions became the only sign of permanence, would he go insane?

  The entrance foyer of Herzog’s building was crowded with teenagers playing Pac-man. Lloyd walked past them to the elevator and took it up to the fourth floor. The corridor was again deserted, with a wide assortment of music and TV noise blasting behind closed doors. He walked to the door of 423 and listened. Hearing nothing, he picked the lock and moved inside.

  Flipping the wall switch, he saw the same sterile apartment illuminated, the only addition since his previous entry a fresh stack of junk mail and final notices from Bell Telephone and L.A. County Water and Power. Knowing the bedroom and the kitchen would be the same, Lloyd sat down on the couch to be still and think.

  His mind was doing tic-tac-toe, .41 revolvers and Herzog’s file requisition slips as x’s and o’s, when the phone rang. Lloyd picked up the receiver and slurred into the mouthpiece, “Hello?”

  “Dutch, Lloyd.”

  “Shit.”

  “Expecting someone else?”

  “Not really. I’d forgotten I left the number.”

  “Anything new on Herzog?”

  “A good composite I.D. on a man Herzog was seen with. That’s it.”

  “I’ve got some feedback on those file slips. Got a pencil?”

  Lloyd dug a pen and spiral notebook out of his pocket “Shoot.”

  “Okay,” Dutch said. “First off, all the files are still missing. Second, they were not requisitioned from anywhere within the Department. Third, all the six officers are in good standing in the Depart—”

  Lloyd cut in. “What about common denominators? I’m the only one of the six below lieutenant. Have you—”

  “I was getting to that. Okay, six files. One, there’s you, regarded as the best homicide dick in the L.A.P.D. Two, there’s Johnny Rolando. You’ve heard of him—he’s been a technical advisor on half a dozen TV shows. Both of you fall into what you might call the legendary-cop category. Now the other four—Tucker, Murray, Christie, and Kaiser—are just hardworking uniformed brass with over twenty years on the job. What—”

  Lloyd interrupted: “That’s all you’ve got?”

  Dutch sighed. “Just listen, okay? The other four have one thing in common: Moonlight gigs as head of security for industrial firms. You know the kind of deal—plants that hire lots of cheap labor, lots of dopers and ex-cons on the payroll, lots of pilfering, lots of chemicals lying around that can be used to manufacture dope, so you have to keep the lid on—let the employees only rip you off so much, that kind of thing.”

  Lloyd’s mental wheels turned. “How did you grapevine this info, Dutch?”

  “Through a friend on the feds. He said the four firms—Avonoco Fiberglass, Junior Miss Cosmetics, Jahelka Auto King, and Surferdawn Plastics are what you’d call semi-sleazy. Shitkicker security guards who couldn’t make the cops, files with lots of juicy dirt on their employees, to use as levers in case they go batshit from sniffing too much paint thinner. Heavy files on the workers at Avonoco—they’ve got a class-two security rating. They make fasteners for the space program at Andrews Air Force Base and they pay the minimum wage to everyone below management level. You like it?”

  “I don’t know. What’s the theory behind it? Hire legit cops as figureheads, keep the shitkickers in line, have them act as go-betweens if a wayward employee gets busted?”

  Dutch yawned. “Basically, yeah, I’d say that’s it.”

  “Any hard dirt on the officers themselves?”

  “Not really. Johnny Rolando screws TV stars; Christie, the Avonoco Fiberglass security man, has a history of compulsive gambling and psychiatric care; you like to give superior officers shit and never go home to sleep. Just a random sampling of L.A.’s finest.”

  Lloyd didn’t know whether to laugh or take offense at the remark. Suddenly regret coiled around him and forced the words out. “I’ll apologize to Perkins.”

  Dutch said, “Good. You owe him. I’ll move on your liquor store memo and I’ll give you another forty-eight on Herzog. After that I’m reporting him missing. Herzog’s father is old, Lloyd. We owe it to him to give him the word.”

  “Yeah. What’s Perkins afraid of, Dutch?”

  “None of the stuff you hit him with. He runs one of the cleanest Vice Squads in the city.”

  “What, then?”

  “You. A forty-two-year-old hardcharger cop with nothing to lose is a scary fucking thing. Sometimes you even scare me.”

  Lloyd’s regret settled like a stone at the center of his heart. “Good night, Dutch.”

  “Good night, kid.”

  Lloyd replaced the receiver, immediately thinking of new angles on the case. His mental x’s and o’s were settling around blackmail, but his eyes kept straying back to the phone. Call Janice and the girls in San Francisco? Tell them that the house was sealed off almost exactly the way they had left it, that he only used the den and the kitchen, preserving the rest of the rooms as a testament to what they had once had and could have again? His phone conversations with Janice had at last progressed beyond civility. Was this the time to push for the fullest possible restoration of the family’s past?

  The job provided the answer. No. The officers who took over the formal investigation of Herzog’s disappearance would check his phone bill and discover the long distance call. Janice’s snotty off-and-on live-in lover would probably not accept a collect call. Fucked again by the verities of being a cop.

  Stretching out on the couch, Lloyd dug in for a long stint of mental machinations. He was at it for half an hour, playing variations on blackmail themes, when there was a rapping on the door, followed by a woman’s softly spoken words, “Jack? Jack, are you there?”

  Lloyd walked to the door and opened it. A tall blond woman was framed by the hall light. Her eyes were blurry and her blouse and designer jeans were rumpled. She looked up at him and asked, “Are you Marty Bergen? Is Jack here?”

  Lloyd pointed the woman inside, scrutinizing her openly. Early thirties, a soft/strong face informed with intelligence. A lean body clench
ed against stress and bringing it off with grace. Play her soft.

  When she was standing by the couch, he said, “My name is Hopkins. I’m a police officer. Jack Herzog has been missing from both his work assignments for close to a month. I’m looking for him.”

  The woman took a reflexive step backward, bumping the couch with her heels and then sitting down. Her hands flew to her face, then grasped her thighs. Lloyd watched her fingers turn white. Sitting down beside her, he asked, “What’s your name?”

  The woman released her hands, then rubbed her eyes and stared at him. “Meg Barnes.”

  Taking her steady voice as a signal to press the interrogation, Lloyd said, “I’ve got a lot of personal questions.”

  “Then ask them,” Meg Barnes answered.

  Lloyd smiled. “When did you see Herzog last?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “What was the basis of your relationship?”

  “Friends, occasionally lovers. The sexual part came and went. Neither of us pushed it. The last time I saw Jack he told me he wanted to be alone for a while. I told him I’d come by in a month or so.”

  “Which you did tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Herzog contact you at any time during the month?”

  “No.”

  “Was the sexual part of your relationship on immediately before you saw Herzog last?”

  Meg flinched and said, “No, it wasn’t. But what does this have to do with Jack’s disappearing?”

  “Herzog is an exceptional man, Miss Barnes. Everything I’ve discovered about him has pointed that out. I’m just trying to get a handle on his state of mind around the time he disappeared.”