BLOOD ON THE MOON
51
joy and reason for living in themselves. The exultant feelings were the only thing lacking, and in the magnanimity of nostalgia Lloyd chalked up their absence to maturity—he was forty now, not twenty-three; if his seventeen years as a policeman had taught him anything, it was that your expectations diminished as you realized how thoroughly fucked-up the bulk of humanity was, and that you had to go on a hundred seemingly contradictory discourses to keep the major dreams alive. That the discourses were always women and in direct violation of his Presbyterian marriage vows was the ultimate irony, he thought, stopping for the light at Sunset and Echo Park and rolling up the windows to keep the street noise out. An irony that staunch, strong Janice would never understand. Feeling that his reverie was recklessly overstepping its bounds, Lloyd plunged ahead, anxious to voice it flat out, to himself and the vacant air around him: “It wouldn’t work between us, Janice, if I couldn’t cut loose like that. Little things would accumulate and I’d explode. And you’d hate me. The girls would hate me. That’s why I do it. That’s why I . . .” Lloyd couldn’t bring himself to say the word “cheat.”
He stopped his musings and pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store, then dug the computer sheets out of his pocket and settled in to think. The streets were pale pink with black typescript, edged with seemingly random perforations. Lloyd fingered through them, arranging them in chronological order, starting with the ones dated 9–15–82. Beginning with the crime reports, he let his perfectly controlled blank mind drift through brief accounts of rapes, robberies, purse snatchings, shopliftings, and vandalism. Suspect descriptions and weaponry from shotguns to baseball bats were recounted in crisp, heavily abbreviated sentences. Lloyd read through the crime reports three times, feeling the disparate facts and figures sink in deeper with each reading, blessing Evelyn Wood and her method that allowed him to gobble up the printed word at the rate of three thousand per minute.
Next he turned to the field interrogation reports. These were accounts of people stopped on the street, briefly detained and questioned, then released. Lloyd read through the F.I.s four times, knowing with each reading that there was a connection to be made. He was about to give each stack of printouts another go around when he snapped to the buried ellipsis that was crying out to him. Furiously shuffling through the pink rolls of paper, he found his match-up: Crime Report #10691, 10–6–82. Armed robbery. At approximately 11:30 P.M., Thursday, October 6, the Black Cat Bar on 52
L.A. NOIR
Sunset and Vendome was held up by two male Mexicans. They were of undetermined age, but presumed young. They wore silk stockings to disguise their appearances, carried “large” revolvers, and ransacked the cash register before making the proprietor lock up the bar. They then forced the patrons to lie on the floor. While prone, the robbers relieved them of wallets, billfolds and jewelry. They fled a moment later, warning their victims that the
“back-up” would be outside with a shotgun for twenty minutes. They slashed the two phone lines before they left. The bartender ran outside five minutes later. There was no back-up.
Stupid fools, Lloyd thought, risking half a dime minimum for a thousand dollars tops. He read over the F.I. report, filed by a Rampart patrolman: 10–7–82, 1:05 A.M.—“Questioned two w.m. outside res. at 2269
Tracy. They were drinking vodka and sitting on top of late model Firebird, lic. # HBS 027. Explained that car was not theirs, but that they lived in house. Partner and I searched them—clean. Got hot call before we could run warrant check.” The officer’s name was printed below. Lloyd kicked the last bits of information around in his head, thinking it sad that he should have greater intimate knowledge of a neighborhood than the cops who patrolled it. 2269 Tracy Street was a low-life holdover from his high school days over twenty years before, when it had been a halfway house for ex-cons. The charismatic ex-gangster who had run the operation on State funds had embezzled a bundle from local Welfare agencies before selling the house to an old buddy from Folsom, then hightailing it to the border, never to be seen again. The buddy promptly hired a good lawyer to help him keep the house. He won his court battle and dealt quality dope out of the old wood-framed dwelling. Lloyd recalled how his high school pals had bought reefers there back in the late ’50s. He knew that the house had been sold to a succession of local hoods and had acquired the neighborhood nickname of “Gangster Manor.”
Lloyd drove to the Black Cat Bar. The bartender immediately made him for a cop. “Yes, officer?” he said. “No complaints, I hope.”
“None,” Lloyd said. “I’m here about the robbery of October 6th. Were you tending bar that night?”
“Yeah, I was here. You got any leads? Two detectives came in the next day, but that was it.”
“No real leads yet. Do . . .”
Lloyd was distracted by the sound of the jukebox snapping on, beginning