BLOOD ON THE MOON
141
He pushed the play button. His first beloved was saying something about women interrupting her. Then a man’s voice: “Thank you. I didn’t really expect anything. Right now I’m just fishing. Badge 1114, homicide fisherman on the job.”
He forced himself to listen, gouging his genitals with both hands to keep from screaming. The horrific conversation continued, and words leaped out and made him gouge himself harder. “The idea of mass murderers killing with impunity makes them afraid . . . I have supervised homicide investigations . . . call me Lloyd.”
When the door slammed and the tape spun in blessed silence he took his hands from between his legs. He could feel blood dripping down his thighs, and it reminded him of high school and poetry and the sanctity of his purpose. Mrs. Cuthbertson’s eleventh grade honors English class. Logical fallacies: post hoc, propter ergo hoc—“After this, therefore because of this.”
Knowledge of crimes committed does not mean knowledge of the perpetrator. Policemen were not breaking down his door. “Lloyd,” “Homicide fisherman badge 1114,” had no idea that his original beloved’s dwelling was bugged, and may have had nothing to do with the theft of his other tape recorder. “Lloyd” was “fishing” in shark-infested waters, and if he came near him he would eat the policeman alive. Conclusion: they had no idea who he was, and it was business as usual.
Tonight he would claim his twenty-third and most hurriedly courted beloved. No “maybe.” It was a pure “yes,” powerfully affirmed by his meditation tape and every one of his beloveds from Jane Wilhelm on up. Yes. Yes. The poet walked to the window and screamed it to the world at large. 11
His sleepless night in the empty house had been the precursor to a day of total bureaucratic frustration, and each negative feedback tore at Lloyd like a neon sign heralding the end of all the gentle restraining influences in his life. Janice and the girls were gone, and until his genius killer was captured, he was powerless to get them back. 142
L.A. NOIR
As the day wound down into early evening, Lloyd recounted his dwindling options, wondering what on God’s earth he would do if they died out and left him with only his mind and his will.
It had taken him six hours to call the eighteen stereo supply stores and secure a list of fifty-five people who had purchased Watanabe A.F.Z. 999
recorders over the last eight years. Twenty-four of the buyers had been women, leaving thirty-one male suspects, and Lloyd knew from experience that telephone interviews would be futile—experienced detectives would have to size up the buyers in person and determine guilt or innocence from the suspects’ response to questioning. And if the recorder had been purchased outside L.A. County . . . and if the whole Haines angle had nothing to do with the killings . . . and he would need manpower for interviewing . . . and if Dutch turned him down at the party tonight . . . The negative feedback continued, undercut with memories of Penny and her quilts and Caroline and Anne squealing with delight at his stories. Dutch had gotten nothing positive from his queries to both retired and long-term active juvenile detectives and the “monicker” files on “Bird” and
“Birdy” had yielded only the names of a dozen ghetto blacks. Useless—the high-pitched voice in Whitey Haines’s living room had obviously belonged to a white man.
But the greatest frustration had been the absence of a print make on the tape recorder. Lloyd had stalked the crime lab repeatedly, looking for the technician he had left the machine with, calling the man at home, only to find that his father had had a heart attack and that he had driven to San Bernardino, taking the recorder with him, intending to use the facilities of the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department for his dusting and comparison tests. “He said that you wanted him to do the tests personally, Sergeant,” the technician’s wife had said. “He’ll call from San Bernardino in the morning with the results.” Lloyd had hung up cursing semantics and his own authoritarian nature. This left two last-ditch, one-man options: Interview the thirty-one buyers himself or cop some bennies and stake out Whitey Haines’s apartment until the bugger showed up. Desperation tactics—and the only avenues he had left.
Lloyd got his car and headed west, toward Kathleen’s bookstore-cottage. When he got off the freeway he realized he was bone weary and flesh hungry and pointed his Matador north, in the direction of Joanie Pratt’s house