BLOOD ON THE MOON
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that the killer was still in an ascendent sexual curve and assuming that the murders began in or around January 1968, he allotted the monster a fiveyear trauma incubation period and placed him as coming of age in the early to middle ’60s, making him now in his late thirties—forty at the oldest. Exiting the freeway at Sixth and Figueroa, Lloyd whispered, “June 10th, June 10th, June 10th.” He parked illegally on the wrong side of the street and stuck an “Official Police Vehicle” sign under his windshield wiper. Running up the library steps, the epiphany slammed him like an axe handle between the eyes: the monster killed because he wanted to love.
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Lloyd’s microfilm time travel consumed four hours and traversed every June 10th from 1960 to 1982. Starting with the Los Angeles Times and ending with the Los Angeles Herald-Express and its offshoot newspaper the L.A. Examiner, he sifted through headlines, feature articles, and clipped accounts detailing everything from major league baseball to foreign insurrections to previews of summer beach wear to primary election results. Nothing in the parade of information caught his eyes as being a potential contributing factor to murderous passion and nothing caused his mental gears to snap forward and expand on his thesis at any level. June 10th was his one crucial clue to the killer—but Los Angeles newspapers treated it like just another day.
Although Lloyd had expected the negative results, he was still disappointed and was glad that he had saved the film for the four “suicide” years of 1977, ’78, ’80, and ’81 for last.
His disappointment grew. The deaths of Angela Stimka, Laurette Powell, Carla Castleberry, and Marcia Renwick were relegated to quartercolumn obscurity. “Tragic” was the adjective both papers used to describe all four “suicides”; “Funeral arrangements pending” and the names and addresses of the next of kin took up the bulk of the print space. Lloyd rolled up the microfilm, placed it on the librarian’s desk and walked outside into the sunlight. Sidewalk glare and eyestrain from his hours of squinting combined to send a pounding up his neck into his head. Willing the pain down to a murmur, he considered his options. Interview the next of kin? No, sad denials would be the common denominator. Visit the death scenes? Look for indicators, chase hunches? “Legwork!” Lloyd shouted out loud. He ran for his car, and the headache disappeared altogether.
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112
L.A. NOIR
Lloyd drove to West Hollywood and scouted the first three June 10th killing grounds.
Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77, had lived in a mauve-colored ten-unit apartment house, fifties building-boom ugly, an obviously jerry-built structure whose one claim to prestige was its proximity to the gay bars on Santa Monica and the cross-sexual nightlife on the Sunset Strip. Lloyd sat in his car and wrote down a description of the block, his eyes perking only once—when he noticed an “Illegal Nighttime Parking” sign across the street from the 1167 Larrabee address. His gears clicked twice. He was in the heart of the gay ghetto. His killer had probably chosen the Stimka woman for the location of her dwelling as well as for her physicality, somehow wanting to run a gauntlet of subconscious denial by choosing a victim in a largely homosexual neighborhood; and the West Hollywood sheriffs were demons on parking enforcement.
Lloyd smiled and drove two blocks to the small wood-framed house on Westbourne Drive where Laurette Powell had died of Nembutal ingestion and “self-inflicted” knife wounds. Another “Illegal Nighttime Parking”
sign, another click, this one very soft.
The Tropicana Motel yielded a whole series of clicks, resounding gearmashings that went off in Lloyd’s mind like gunshots that tore ceaselessly at innocent bodies. Carla Castleberry, D.O.D. 6/10/80, the means of death a
.38 slug through the roof of the mouth and up into the brain. Women never blew their brains out. Classic homosexual symbolism, perpetrated in a sleazy
“Boy’s Town” motel room.
Lloyd scanned the sidewalk in front of the Tropicana. Crushed amyl nitrate poppers on the ground, fruit hustler junkies holding up the walls of the coffee shop. His thesis exploded in his mind. When its symbiotic thrust dawned through the noise of the explosion, he was terrified. He ignored his terror and ran for a pay phone, dialing seven familiar digits with shaking hands. When an equally familiar voice came on the line, sighing, “Hollywood Station, Captain Peltz speaking,” Lloyd whispered, “Dutch, I know why he kills.”
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An hour later, Lloyd sat in Dutch Peltz’s office, sifting through negative information that had him slamming his best friend’s desk top in frustration. Dutch stood by the door, watching Lloyd read through the teletypes that had just come in from both the L.A.P.D. and Sheriff’s central computers. He wanted to stroke his son’s hair or smooth his shirtfront, anything to ease