BLOOD ON THE MOON
187
Lloyd tiptoed into the bathroom. Immaculate white porcelain; polished brass fixtures. There was a half-open door next to the sink. He looked through the crack and saw steps leading downstairs. He inched down them with painstaking slowness, his gun arm extended to its maximum length, his finger on the trigger.
The steps ended at the back of a large room filled with cardboard photographic displays. Lloyd felt his tension ridden body breathe out of its own accord. Verplanck was gone, he could feel it. Lloyd surveyed the front of the store. It looked like camera stores everywhere: wood counter, neatly arrayed cameras in glass cases, cheerful children and cuddly animals beaming down from the walls. Treading silently, he walked back upstairs, wondering where Verplanck had spent the night and why he hadn’t taken one of his cars. The second floor was still eerily silent. Lloyd walked through the bathroom and bedroom and down the hall to an ornate oak door. He pushed it open with his gun barrel and screamed. Triangular bay windows made up the front wall. Huge photographs of Whitey Haines and Birdman Craigie covered the side walls, interspersed with taped-on rose branches, the whole collage united by crisscrossed smearings of dried blood. Lloyd walked along the walls, looking for details to prove his dream a fake, a coincidence, anything but what he couldn’t let it mean. He saw dried semen on the photos, crusted over the genital areas of both Haines and Craigie, the word “Kathy” finger-painted in blood. Beneath the photographs there were small holes in the wall stuffed with excrement. The holes were at waist level; higher up the white wallpaper surrounding the photographs bore fingernail tracks and bite marks. Lloyd screamed again. He ran back through the hallway and bathroom and downstairs. When he reached the first floor he crashed over a pile of cartons and stumbled out the front door. If his dream was for real, then music would save him. Dodging traffic, he ran across Alvarado and around the corner to his car. He hit the ignition and fumbled the radio on, catching the end of a commercial jingle. His mental colors and textures were returning to normal when an alarmed electronic voice leaped out at him:
“The ‘Hollywood Slaughterer’ has claimed his third victim in twentyfour hours, and police are gearing up for the greatest manhunt in Los Angeles history! Last night the body of forty-two-year-old actress-singer Joan Pratt was discovered in her Hollywood Hills home, making her the third person to die violently in the Hollywood area in the past two days. Lieu-188
L.A. NOIR
tenant Walter Perkins of the L.A.P.D.’s Hollywood Division and Captain Bruce Magruder of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s are holding a joint news conference this morning at Parker Center to discuss the massive manhunt and to advise the Hollywood area populace on security measures to thwart the killer or killers. Captain Magruder told reporters this morning that ‘The Sheriff’s department and L.A.P.D. have deployed our largest force of street officers ever in our effort to catch this killer. We firmly believe that this person’s insanity is peaking and that he will try to kill again soon. There will be helicopter patrols throughout the Hollywood–West Hollywood areas, as well as a concentrated deployment of officers on foot. Our efforts will not cease until the killer is caught. Our entire detective force is tracking down every available lead. In the meantime, remember: This killer has killed both men and women. I urge all Hollywood residents not, repeat, not to stay alone tonight. Buddy up, for your own safety. We bel . . .’ ”
Lloyd began to whimper. He kicked the radio housing, then ripped the metal box free of the dashboard and hurled it out the window. Joanie was dead. His genius had become the door to a telepathic charnel house. He could read Teddy’s thoughts and Teddy could read his. The dream and Joanie’s death; a logic-defying fraternal bonding that would spawn more and more and more horror; a horror that would only end with the killing of his evil symbiotic twin. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Teddy Verplanck’s yearbook picture. The transmogrification was complete. Lloyd drove to the old neighborhood to tell his family that the Irish Protestant ethos was a one-way ticket to hell.
*
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Dutch Peltz sat in his office at the Hollywood Station, armed for betrayal with the Polaroid snapshot of a nude man and woman. Since he had refused to press assault charges, the Internal Affairs officers investigating Lloyd had been swarming over him in an attempt to find other perfidies that they could bring to light to offset Lloyd’s threatened media barrage. They had no idea that the L.A.P.D.’s most brilliant detective had been intimately familiar with Joan Pratt, the third victim of the Hollywood Slaughterer. The photograph was enough evidence to end Lloyd’s career at best and have him shot on sight at worst. Dutch walked to the window and looked out, thinking that he may have already signed away his own best years. His refusal to file charges would cost him his command of I.A.D., and if anyone found out that he had withheld the photograph and of his knowledge of the anonymous phone call that had