Because the Night Page 7

  “I can tell you about that,” she said. “Jack was either exhilarated or depressed, like he was on a roller-coaster ride. Most of his conversation had to do with vindicating Marty Bergen. He said he was going to fuck the L.A.P.D. high brass for what they did to him.”

  “Why did you think I was Bergen?” Lloyd asked.

  “Because Bergen and I are the only friends Jack has in the world, and you’re big, the way Jack described Bergen.”

  Lloyd spent a silent minute mustering his thoughts. Finally he asked, “Did Herzog say specifically how he was going to vindicate Bergen or fuck the high brass?”

  “No, never.”

  “Can you give me some specific instances of his exhilarated or depressed behavior?”

  Meg Barnes pondered the question, then said, “Jack was either very quiet or he’d laugh at absolutely everything, whether it was funny or not. He used to laugh hysterically about someone or something called Doctor John the Night Tripper. The last time I saw him he said he was really scared and that it felt good.”

  Lloyd took out his Identikit portrait. “Have you ever seen this man?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Do the names Howard Christie, John Rolando, Duane Tucker, Daniel Murray, or Steven Kaiser mean anything to you?’

  “No.”

  “Avonoco Fiberglass, Jahelka Auto King, Surferdawn Plastics, Junior Miss Cosmetics?”

  “No. What are they?”

  “Never mind. What about my name—Lloyd Hopkins?”

  “No! Why are you asking me these things?”

  Lloyd didn’t answer. He got up from the couch and tossed the upholstered pillow he was leaning against on the floor, then carried the coffee table over to the wall. When he turned around, Meg Barnes was staring at him. “Jack’s dead,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to get the person who did it?”

  Lloyd shuddered back a chill. “Yes.”

  Meg pointed to the floor. “Are you sleeping here?” Acceptance had taken the controlled edge off her voice. Lloyd’s voice sound numb to his own ears. “Yes.”

  “Your wife kick you out?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You could come home with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I don’t make that offer all the time.”

  “I know.”

  She got up and walked to the door. Lloyd saw her strides as a race between her legs and her tears. When she touched the door handle, he asked, “What kind of man was Herzog?”

  Meg Barnes’ words and tears finished in a dead heat. “A kind man afraid of being vulnerable. A tender man afraid of his tenderness, disguising it with a badge and a gun. A gentle man.”

  The door slammed shut as tears rendered words unnecessary. Lloyd turned off the lights and stared out the window at the neon-bracketed darkness.

  7

  “TELL me about your dreams.”

  Linda Wilhite measured the Doctor’s words, wondering whether he meant waking or sleeping. Deciding the latter, she plucked at the hem of her faded Levi skirt and said, “I rarely dream.”

  Havilland inched his chair closer to Linda and formed his fingers into a steeple. “People who rarely dream usually have active fantasy lives. Is that true in your case?” When Linda’s eyelids twitched at the question, he thrust the steeple up to within a foot of her face. “Please answer, Linda.”

  Linda slapped at the steeple, only to find the Doctor’s hands in his lap. “Don’t push so hard,” she said.

  “Be specific,” Havilland said. “Think exactly what you want to say.”

  Linda breathed the words out slowly. “We’re barely into the session and you start taking command. I had some things I wanted to discuss, things that I’ve had on my mind lately, and you barge right in with questions. I don’t like aggressive behavior.”

  The Doctor collapsed the steeple and clasped his hands. “Yet you’re attracted to aggressive men.”

  “Yes, but what does that have to do with it?”

  Havilland slumped forward in his chair. “Touché, Linda. But let me state my case before I apologize. You’re paying me a hundred and fifteen dollars an hour, which you can afford because you earn a great deal of money doing something you despise. I see this therapy as an exercise in pure pragmatism: Find out why you’re a hooker, then terminate the therapy. Once you stop hooking you won’t need me or be able to afford me, and we’ll go our separate ways. I feel for your dilemma, Linda, so please forgive my haste.”

  Linda felt a little piece of her heart melt at the brilliant man’s apology. “I’m sorry I barked,” she said. “I know you’re on my side and I know your methods work. So … in answer to your question, yes, I do have an active fantasy life.”

  “Will you elaborate?” Havilland asked.

  “About six years ago I posed for a series of clothed and semi-nude photographs that ultimately became this arty-farty coffee table book. There was this awful team of gay photographers and technicians, and they posed me in front of air conditioners to blow my hair and give me goose bumps and beside a heater to make me sweat buckets, and they turned me and threw me around like a rag doll, and it was worse than fucking a three hundred pound drunk.”

  “And?” Havilland whispered.

  “And I used to fantasize murdering those fags and having someone film it, then renting a big movie theatre and filling it with girls in the Life. They’d applaud the movie and applaud me like I was Fellini.”

  The Doctor laughed. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Is that a recurring fantasy?”

  “Well … no …”

  “But variations of it recur?”

  Linda smiled and said, “You should have been a cop, Doctor. People would tell you whatever you wanted to know. Okay, there’s this sort of upbeat version of the movie fantasy. You don’t have to be a genius to see that it derives from my parents’ deaths. I’m behind a camera. A man beats a woman to death, then shoots himself. I film it, and it’s real and it isn’t real. What I mean is, of course what happens is real, only the people aren’t permanently dead. That’s how I justify the fantasy. What I think I—”

  The Doctor cut in: “Interpret the fantasy.”

  “Let me finish!” Linda blurted out. Lowering her voice she said, “I was going to say that somehow it all leads to love. These real or imaginary or whatever people die so that I can figure out what my fucked-up childhood meant. Then I meet this big, rough-hewn man. A lonely, no-bullshit type of man. He’s had the same kind of life as me and I show him the film and we fall in love. End of fantasy. Isn’t it syrupy and awful?”

  Looking straight at the Doctor, Linda saw that his features had softened and that his eyes were an almost translucent light brown. When he didn’t answer, she got up and walked over to the framed diplomas on the wall. On impulse, she asked, “Where’s your family, Doctor?”

  “I don’t really have a family,” Havilland said. “My father disappeared when I was an adolescent and my mother is in a sanitarium in New York.”

  Turning to face him, Linda said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, just tell me what you’re feeling right now.”

  Linda laughed. “I feel like I want a cigarette. I quit eight months ago, one of my little control trips, and now I’m dying for one.”

  Havilland laughed in return. “Tell me more about the man you fall in love with.”

  Linda walked around the office, running her fingertips along the oak walls. “Basically, all I know is that he wears a size forty-four sweater. I know that because I had a john once who had the perfect body and he wore that size—for some reason I looked at the label while he was getting dressed. When I first started having these fantasies 1 used to picture the john’s face—then I made myself forget his face, because it interfered with my fantasy. Once I even drove downtown to Brooks Brothers and spent
two hundred dollars on a size forty-four navy blue cashmere sweater.”

  Linda sat down and drummed the arms of her chair. “Do you think that’s a sad story, Doctor?”

  Havilland’s voice was very soft. “I think I’m going to enjoy taking you beyond your beyond.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a catch phrase of mine dealing with patients’ potentialities. We’ll talk more about that later. Before we conclude, please give me a quick response to a hypothetical situation. Among my patients is a young man who wants to kill. Wouldn’t it be terrible if he met a young woman who wanted to die and if someone were there with a camera to record it?”

  Linda slammed the arms of her chair. The floor reverberated with her words: “Yes! But why does that idea titillate me so?”

  Havilland got up and pointed to the clock. “No souls saved after fifty minutes. Monday at the same time?”

  Linda took his hand on the way to the door. “I’ll be here,” she said, her voice receding to a whisper.

  Havilland drove home to his condominium/sanctuary in Beverly Hills and went straight to his inner sanctum, the only one of the six rooms not walled from floor to ceiling with metal shelves spilling psychology texts.

  The Night Tripper thought of his three dwellings as a wheel of knowledge exploration, with himself as the hub. His Century City office was the induction spoke; his condo the fount of study and contemplation; the Malibu beach house the spoke of dispatch, where he sent his lonelies beyond their beyonds.

  But the central point of his work was here behind a door he had personally stripped of varnish and painted an incongruous bright green. It was the control room of the Time Machine.

  A swivel chair and a desk holding a telephone were centered in the room, affording a swivel view of four information-covered walls.

  One wall held a huge map of Los Angeles County. Red pins signified the addresses of his lonelies, blue pins denoted the pay phones where he contacted them—a safety buffer he had devised. Green pins indicated homes where the lonelies had been placed on assignment, and plastic stick figures marked Thomas Goff, ever mobile in his quest to find more red pins.

  Two walls comprised a depth gauge, to probe the Night Tripper’s childhood void. Serving as markings on the gauge were WCBS top-forty surveys from Spring 1957, attached to the walls with red and blue pins, and a shelf containing roller-skate wheels that were once the feet of dead animals, lockets of soft brown hair stolen from inside a family Bible, and a swatch of carpet stained with blood.

  Clues.

  The remaining wall was covered with typed quotations from inhabitants of the void, taped on in approximate chronological order:

  December, 1957: Mother—“Your father was a monster, and I’m glad he’s gone. The administrators of the trust fund have been instructed to tell us nothing, and I’m glad. I don’t want to know.” (Current disposition: Residing in a Yonkers, N.Y., sanitarium with severe alcoholic senility.)

  March, 1958: Frank Baxter (father’s lawyer)—“Just think the best, Johnny. Think that your dad loves you very much, which is why he’s sending you and your mother all that nice money.” (Disposition: Committed suicide, August, 1960)

  Spring, 1958: (Imagined? Recalled from previous summer?) Police detectives questioning mother as to father’s whereabouts—obsequious; deferential to wealth. (Disposition: Complete disregard of all my inquiries to Scarsdale P.D. and Westchester County P.D. 1961-1968) Dreamt?

  June, 1958: Nurse & doctor at Scarsdale Jr. High (overheard)—“I think the boy has a touch of motor aphasia”; “Bah! Doctor, that boy has got a tremendous mind! He just wants to learn what he wants to learn”; “I’ll believe the X ray before I believe your analysis, Miss Watkins.” (Disposition: doctor dead, nurse moved away, address unknown. Note: X rays and other tests taken at Harvard indicate no aphasiac lesions.)

  Walls of clues. Hubs within the hub of himself and all the spokes of his wheels.

  Havilland swiveled in his chair, pushing off with his feet, spinning himself faster and faster, until the room was a blur and the four walls and their clues metamorphosed into rapid-fire images of Linda Wilhite and her home movie fantasies. He shut his eyes and Richard Oldfield was standing nude in front of a movie camera, with other lonelies laboring over arc lights and sound equipment. The chair was close to toppling off its casters when the phone rang and froze the moment. Deep breathing to bail out of his reverie, the Night Tripper let the chair come to a halt. When he was certain his voice would be calm, he picked up the phone and said, “Is this good news, Thomas?”

  Goff’s voice was both self-satisfied and hoarse with tension. “Bingo. Junior Miss Cosmetics. I never even had to contact the cop. I played one of his stooges like an accordion. Murray won’t know anything about it.”

  “Have you got them?”

  “Tonight,” Goff said. “It’s only costing us a grand and some pharmaceutical coke.”

  “Where? I want to know the exact time and place.”

  “Why? You told me this was my baby.”

  “Tell me, Thomas.” Hearing the hoarseness in his own voice, Havilland coated his words with sugar. “You’ve done brilliantly, and it is your baby. I just want to be able to picture your triumph.”

  Goff went silent. The Doctor pictured a proud child afraid to express his gratitude at being wooed with cheap praise. Finally the child bowed to the father. “At ten-thirty tonight. The end of Nichols Canyon Road, in the little park with the picnic benches.”

  Havilland smiled. Throw the child a crumb. “Beyond brilliant. Perfection. I’ll meet you at your apartment at eleven. We’ll celebrate the occasion by planning our next grouping. I need your feedback.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Goff’s voice was one step above groveling. Havilland hung up the phone and replayed the conversation, realizing that Linda Wilhite had remained a half step back in his mind the whole time, waiting.

  At nine-thirty Havilland drove to Nichols Canyon and parked behind a stand of sycamore trees adjacent to the picnic area. He was shielded from view by mounds of scrub-covered rock which still allowed him visual access to Goff’s meeting spot. The lights that were kept on all night to thwart off gay assignations would frame the picture, and unless Goff and the security stooge spoke in a whisper their voices would carry up to his hiding place. It was perfection.

  At ten past ten, Goff’s yellow Toyota pulled up. Havilland watched his executive officer get out and stretch his legs, then withdraw a large revolver from his waistband and go into a gunfighter’s pirouette, swiveling in all directions, blowing away imaginary adversaries. The overhead lights illuminated a throbbing network of veins in his forehead, the storm warning of a lepto attack. Havilland could almost feel Goff’s speeded-up heartbeat and respiration. When the sound of another car approaching hit his ears and Goff stuck his gun back and covered the butt with his windbreaker, Havilland felt his body go cold with sweat.

  A battered primer-gray Chevy appeared, doing a little fishtail as the driver applied the brakes. A fat black man in a skin-tight uniform of pale blue shirt, khaki pants, and Sam Browne belt got out, making a big show of slamming the door and chugging from a pint of whiskey. Havilland shuddered as he recalled one of Goff’s favorite death fantasies: “Drawing down on niggers.”

  The black man sauntered up to Goff and offered him the bottle. Goff declined with a shake of the head and said, “You brought them?” Havilland squinted and saw that Goff’s fingers were trembling and involuntarily plucking at his waistband.

  The black man knocked back a long drink and giggled. “If you got the money, I’ve got the honey. If you got the dope, I got the … shit, I can’t rhyme that one. You look nervous, homeboy. You been tootin’ a little too much of your own product?”

  Goff took a step backward. His whole left side was alive with tremors. Havilland could see his left leg buckle as though straining to kick out at a right angle. The black man raised his hands in a supplicating gesture, fear in his eyes as he saw Goff’s face
contort spastically. “Man, you reelin’ with the feelin’. I get you the stuff and you pay me off, and we do this all real slow, all right?”

  Goff found his voice. Willing it even made his tremors subside. “Rock steady, Leroy. You want it slow, you got it slow.”

  “My name ain’t Leroy,” the black man said. “You dig?”

  “I dig you, Amos. Now cut the shit and bring me the stuff. You dig?” Goff’s thumbs were hooked in his belt loops. His hands twitched in the direction of the gun. Havilland saw the black man bristle, then smile. “For a K note and two grams of righteous blow you can call me anything short of Sambo.” He walked to his car and reached into the backseat, coming away with two large cardboard suitcases. Returning to Goff and putting them down at his feet, he said, “Fresh off the Xerox machine. Nobody but me knows about it. Come up green, homeboy.”

  Goff stuck a shaking hand into his windbreaker and pulled out a plastic baggie, then tossed it in the dirt beside the black man’s car. “Ride, Leroy. Buy yourself a Cadillac and get your hair processed on me.”

  The black man picked up the baggie and balled it in his fist, then killed the pint and threw it at Goff’s Toyota. When it hit the trunk and shattered, Goff grabbed at his waistband, then stifled a shriek and jerked his gun hand to his mouth and bit it. Havilland stifled his own outcry and watched the black man raise his hands and back up slowly toward his car, murmuring, “I’ll be rockin’ steady, rockin’ steady real slow. Reeeal slow.” His back touched the driver’s side door and he squirmed in behind the wheel, rolled up the window and gunned the car in reverse. When the dust from his exit cleared, Havilland could see Thomas Goff weeping, aiming his handcannon at the moon.

  An hour after Goff’s sobbing departure, the Doctor drove to his underling’s apartment in the Los Feliz district, the moon catching the edge of his vision, constantly drawing his eyes from the road. Parking outside Goff’s building, he checked the contents of his black leather “Truth Kit”: sodium Pentothal ampules, ten c.c. bottles of liquid morphine and an assortment of disposable syringes. He would quash Goff’s pain and gauge the degree of his slippage.