BLOOD ON THE MOON
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He had read the third chapter beside Julia’s body, savoring her nearness, wanting the completeness of her flesh and her words. The men who had told Julia their stories were so blighted in their dishonesty that he wanted to retch. Yet . . . he read the man’s account of driving down Santa Monica Boulevard over and over, looking up only to watch Julia sway on her external axis. She was more of him than any of the first twenty-one, more even than Linda, who had moved him so deeply. She had given him words to keep—tangible love gifts that would grow in him. Yet . . . Santa Monica Boulevard . . . yet . . . the poor wretch so devastated by societal mores that he couldn’t . . .
He walked into the living room. Rage in the Womb. A lesbian poet wrote of her lover’s “multiunioned folds of wetness.” Visions of muscular torsos, broad shoulders, and flat, hard backsides entered him, given to him by Julia, telling him to seek a further union with her by showing courage where the cowardly wretch had failed. He balked inside, searching frantically for words. He tried anagrams of Julia and Kathy, five letters each. It didn’t work. Julia wanted more than the others. He walked back to the bedroom to view her corpse a last time. She sent him visions of sullen young men in macho poses. He obeyed. He drove to Santa Monica Boulevard. He found them a few blocks west of La Brea, standing in front of taco stands, porno bookstores, and bars, outlined in neon tendrils that gave them the added enticements of halos, auras, and wispy appendages. The idea of looking for a specific image or body crossed his mind, but he killed the thought. It would give him time to retreat, and he wanted to impress Julia with his unquestioning compliance.
He pulled to the curb and rolled down the window, beckoning to the young man leaning against a newsrack with one hip thrust toward the street.
The young man walked over and leaned in through the window. “It’s thirty; head only, pitch or catch,” he said, getting an inward wave of the arm as his answer.
They drove around the corner and parked. He clenched his body until he thought his muscles would contract and suffocate him, then whispered,
“Kathy,” and let the young man unbutton his pants and lower his head into his lap. His contractions continued until he exploded, seeing colors when he came. He tossed a handful of cash at the young man, who vanished out 98
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the door. He was still seeing colors, and he saw them on his drive home and in his restive, but altogether wonderful, dreams that night. His post-consummation ritual of sending flowers took up the following morning. Driving away from the florist’s, he noticed that his usual valedictory feeling was missing. He spent the afternoon developing film and setting up shooting assignments for the following week, thoughts of Julia rendering his workday pursuits a treadmill of ugly boredom. He read her manuscript again, staying up all night, seeing colors and feeling the weight of the young man’s head. Then the terror began. He could feel foreign bodies within his body. Tiny melanomas and carcinomas that moved audibly through his bloodstream. Julia wanted more. She wanted written tribute; words to match her words. He severed an artery in his right forearm with a paring knife, then squeezed the gash until it yielded enough blood to fill completely the bottom of a small developing tray. After cauterizing the wound he took a pen quill and ruler and meticulously printed out his tribute. He slept well that night.
In the morning he mailed his poem to the post office address he had seen on the front page of Julia’s manuscript. His feeling of normalcy solidified. But at night the terror returned. The carcinomas were inside him again. He started dropping things. He saw the colors, this time even more vividly. The Santa Monica Boulevard phantasmagoria flashed continually before his eyes. He knew that he had to do something or go insane.
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The poet had now possessed the manuscript for the two weeks since Julia’s death. He began to look on it as an evil talisman. The third chapter was particularly evil, inimical to the control that had been the hallmark of his life. That night he burned the manuscript in his kitchen sink. He doused the charred words with tap water and felt new purpose grip him. There was only one way to obliterate all memory of his twenty-second lover.
He had to find a new woman.
7
It had been seventeen days since the discovery of Julia Niemeyer’s body, and Lloyd wondered for the first time if his Irish Protestant ethos had the juice to carry him through what was turning into the most vexing episode of his life, a crusade that portended some deep, massive loss of control. For perhaps the thousandth time since securing the printouts, he recapitulated all the known physical evidence pertaining to Julia Niemeyer’s murder and unsolved homicides of women in Los Angeles County: the blood that formed the words of the poem was O+. Julia Niemeyer’s blood was AB. There were no fingerprints on the envelope or single piece of paper. Interviews with residents of the Aloha Regency Apartments had yielded nothing; no one knew much about the dead woman; no one knew her to have visitors; no one recalled any strange occurrences in the building near the time of her death. The surrounding area had been thoroughly searched for the double-bladed knife believed to have been used for the mutilations—nothing even closely resembling it had been found. Lloyd’s vague hope that Julia’s killer had been connected to her through the swing parties proved futile. Experienced detectives had interviewed all the people in Joanie Pratt’s Rolodex and had come away with nothing but new insights into lust and sad knowledge of adultery. Two officers had been assigned to check bookshops specializing in poetry and feminist literature for weird male requests for Rage in the Womb and generally strange male behavior. All investigatory avenues were covered.
And the unsolved homicides: The twenty-three Los Angeles County police agencies whose feed-ins composed the central computer file listed 410
of them going back to January 1968. Discounting 143 vehicular homicides, this left 267 unsolved murders. Of these 267, 79 were of women between 100
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the ages of twenty and forty, what Lloyd considered to be his killer’s perimeters of attraction—he was certain the monster liked them young. He looked at the map of Los Angeles County adorning the back wall of his office. There were seventy-nine pins stuck into it, denoting the locations where seventy-nine young women met violent death. Lloyd scrutinized the territory represented and let his intimate knowledge of L.A. and its environs work in concert with his instincts. The pinpoints covered the whole of Los Angeles County, from the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys to the far-flung beach communities that formed her southern and western perimeters. Hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Yet of the seventy-nine, forty-eight were situated in what police referred to as “white trash” suburbs—low income, high crime areas where alcoholism and drug addiction were epidemic. Statistics and his own policeman’s instinct told Lloyd that the bulk of these deaths were related to booze, dope, and infidelity. Which left thirty-one murders of young women, spread throughout middle, upper middle class, and wealthy L.A. County suburbs and municipalities; murders unsolved by nine police agencies. Lloyd had groaned when he had taken his last available direct action of querying those agencies for Xeroxes of their complete case files, realizing that it might take them as long as two weeks to respond. He felt powerless and beset by forces far beyond his bailiwick, imagining a city of the dead coexisting with Los Angeles in another time warp, a city where beautiful women beseeched him with terrified eyes to find their killer. Lloyd’s feelings of powerlessness had peaked three days before, and he had personally telephoned the top interagency liaison officers at the nine departments, demanding that the files be delivered to Parker Center within forty-eight hours. The responses of the nine officers had varied, but in the end they had acquiesced to Lloyd Hopkins’s reputation as a hot-shot Homicide dick and had promised the paperwork in seventy-two hours tops. Lloyd looked at his watch, a Rolex chronometer marked in the twentyfour-hour military time method. Seventy hours and counting down. Adding two hours for bureaucratic delay, the paperwork should arrive by noon. He bolted from his office and ran down six flights of stairs to street level. Four hours of pounding pavement with no destination in mind and a willfully shut-off brain would put him at his optimal mental capabilities—which he was certain that he would need to devour the thirty-one homicide files.
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