BLOOD ON THE MOON
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in the Hollywood Hills. They could love and talk and maybe Joanie’s body would smother his feeling of doomsday attrition coming from all sides. Joanie jumped on Lloyd as he walked through the open front door, exclaiming, “Sarge, wilkommen! Romance on your mind? If so, the bedroom is immediately to your right.” Lloyd laughed. Joanie’s big carnal heart was the perfect spot to place his tenderness.
“Lead the way.”
When they had loved and played and looked at the sunset from the bedroom balcony, Lloyd told Joanie that his wife and children were gone and that in the wake of his abandonment there was only himself and the killer.
“I’m giving my investigation two more days,” he said, “then I’m going public. I’m taking everything I have to Channel 7 News and flushing my career down the toilet. It hit me while we were lying in bed. If the leads I have now don’t pan out I’m going to create such a fucking public stink that every police agency in L.A. County will have to go after this animal; if my reading of him is correct, the exposure will drive him to do something so rash that he’ll blow it completely. I think he has an incredible ego that’s screaming to be recognized, and when he screams it to the world I’ll be there to get him.”
Joanie shuddered, then put a comforting hand on Lloyd’s shoulder.
“You’ll get him, Sarge. You’ll give him the big one where it hurts the most.”
Lloyd smiled at the imagery. “My options are narrowing down,” he said.
“It feels good.” Remembering Kathleen, he added, “I’ve got to go.”
“Hot date?” Joanie asked.
“Yeah. With a poetess.”
“Do me a favor before you go?”
“Name it.”
“I want a happy picture of the two of us.”
“Who’s going to take it?”
“Me. There’s a ten-second delay on my Polaroid. Come on, get up.”
“But I’m naked, Joanie!”
“So am I. Come on.”
Joanie walked into the living room and came back with a camera affixed to a tripod. She pushed some buttons and ran to Lloyd’s side. Blushing, he grabbed her around the waist and felt himself start to go hard. The flash cube popped. Joanie counted the seconds and pulled the film from the camera. The print was perfect: the nude Lloyd and Joanie, she smiling carnally, 144
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he blushing and semi-erect. Lloyd felt his tenderness explode as he looked at it. He took Joanie’s face in his hands and said, “I love you.”
Joanie said, “I love you too, Sarge. Now get dressed. We’ve both got dates tonight, and I’m late for mine.”
*
*
*
Kathleen had spent her entire day in preparation for her evening; long hours in the women’s departments of Brooks Brothers and BoshardDoughty, searching for the romantic purist outfit that would speak eloquently of her past and flatter her in the present. It took hours, but she found it: pink Oxford cloth button down shirt, navy blue ankle socks and cordovan tassel loafers, a navy crew neck sweater and the pièce de résistance—a knee length, pleated, red tartan skirt. Feeling both sated and expectant, Kathleen drove home to savor waiting for her romantic conspirator. She had four hours to kill, and prescribed getting mildly stoned and listening to music as the way to do it. Since tonight she would be juxtaposed iconoclastically against a staid gathering of policemen and their wives, she put a carefully selected medley of flower child revolution on the turntable and sat back in her robe to smoke dope and listen, filled with the knowledge that tonight she would teach the big policeman—wow him with her poetry, read classic excerpts from her diary, and maybe let him kiss her breasts.
As the Colombian gold took her over, Kathleen found herself playing out a new fantasy. Lloyd was her dream lover. He was the one who had sent the flowers all those years; he had waited for the terrible impetus of searching for a killer to bring them together—a casual meeting wouldn’t have been romantic enough for him. The genesis of his attraction had to be Silverlake—they had grown up a scant six blocks apart. Kathleen felt her fantasy drift apart with the diminishing of her high. To fortify it, she smoked her last Thai stick. Within minutes she was at one with the music and Lloyd was nude in front of her, admitting his deepening love of almost two decades, breathless in his desire to have her. Regal in her magnanimity, Kathleen accepted, watching him grow bigger and harder until she, Lloyd, and the deep bass guitar of the Jefferson Airplane exploded at once and her hand jerked from between her legs and she looked reflexively at the clock and saw that it was ten of seven. Kathleen walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower, then dropped her robe and let the stream of water run alternately hot and cold over her until she felt her sober self tenuously emerge. She dressed and ap-