PART FOUR
MOON DESCENDING
12
His intended was named Peggy Morton, and she was chosen for the challenge her consummation presented as much as for her persona. Since Julia Niemeyer and her manuscript and his curbside assignation he had been feeling slippage on all fronts. His lean, strong body looked the same, but felt sluggish and flaccid; his normally clear blue eyes were evasive, clouded with fear when he stared at himself in the mirror. To combat these little crumblings the poet had resurrected several of his pre-Jane Wilhem disciplines. Hours were spent practicing judo and karate and firing his handguns at the N.R.A. range, doing push-ups and chin-ups and sit-ups until he was one mindless ache. They worked only as a picayune holding action, and nightmares still gnawed at him. Fetching young men on the street seemed to be pantomiming obscene overtures; cloud formations twisted into bizarre patterns that spelled his name for all of Los Angeles to read.
Then his tape recorder was stolen and he gained a faceless nemesis: Sergeant Lloyd the homicide fisherman. In the eleven hours since first hearing the man’s voice on the tape he had exploded four times, progressively more graphic Boy’s Town fantasies driving him into a near stuporous state that would evaporate within minutes, leaving him ready to explode again, but afraid of the price. Looking at the memorabilia on his walls didn’t help; only the voice excited him. Then he thought of Peggy Morton, who lived only a few blocks from a street filled with young men for hire, young men to match the shame-including voice on the tape, young men who shared the hideous lifestyle of Officer Pig and his lackey. He drove to West Hollywood and consummation.
Peggy Morton lived in a “security” building on Flores Avenue, two blocks south of the Sunset Strip. He had followed her home one morning from the 152
L.A. NOIR
all-night market on Santa Monica and Sweetzer, staying along the treeshrouded sidewalk, listening as she conjugated verbs in French. There was something very simple and wholesome about her; and in the traumatic aftermath of Julia he had seized on that simplicity as the basis for his ardor. It had taken him a scant week to establish the pretty young redhaired woman as an extreme creature of habit: She left her cashier’s job at Tower Records at precisely midnight, and her lover Phil, the night manager of the store, would walk her down to the market, where she would buy groceries, then walk her home. Phil would sleep over only on Tuesdays and Fridays.
“It’s our deal, sweetie,” he heard Peggy say a half dozen times. “I have to study my French. You promised you wouldn’t press me.”
The good-natured, doltish Phil would protest briefly, then grab Peggy and her shopping bag in an exasperated embrace and walk away shaking his head. Peggy would then shake her head as if to say, “Men,” and dig a bunch of keys out of her purse and unlock the first of the many doors that would take her up to her fourth-floor apartment.
The apartment building fascinated and challenged him. Seven stories of glass and steel and concrete, advertised by signs in its entrance foyer as “a 24-hour total electronic security environment.” He shook his head at the sadness of people needing such protection and rose to the challenge. He knew that there were four keys on Peggy’s key ring, and that they were all necessary to gain access to her apartment—he had heard Phil joke about it. He knew also that wall-mounted electronic movie cameras patrolled the foyer constantly. The first step had to be to obtain keys . . . It was easily accomplished, but gained him only partial access. After three days of studying Peggy’s routine, he knew that when she arrived at work at four o’clock she went first to the employees’ “breakroom” at the back of the store. She would then leave her purse on a table next to the Coke machine and walk to the adjoining storeroom to check out the incoming supply of albums. He observed this through a sliding glass door for three days running. On the fourth day he made his move—and botched it when Peggy’s returning footsteps forced him to run back into the store proper with only one key in his hand.
But it was the key to the front entrance foyer, and that night, dressed as a woman and carrying a bag of groceries as camouflage, he brazenly unlocked the door and walked straight to a bank of mailboxes that designated Peggy’s apartment as 423. From there he circled the foyer and learned that a separate key was required for the elevator door. Undaunted, he noticed a