BLOOD ON THE MOON
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opening the store and taking care of paperwork she would write her dream lover-betrayer into oblivion, consigning him to villainhood on the wings of a scathing broadside against weak, violence-obsessed men. She would meet Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins head-on and defeat him. After coffee, Kathleen sat down at her desk. Words fluttered through her mind, but refused to connect. She considered smoking a joint to get things going, then rejected the notion; it was too early for a reward. Feeling both her resistance and determination deepen, she walked into the front room and stared at the table by the cash register. Her own books, all six of them, arranged in a circle around a pasteboard blow-up of a four-star review in Ms. Kathleen leafed through her own words at random, looking for old ways to say new things. She found passages decrying male hierarchies, but saw that the underlying symbolism centered on glass. She found acid portraits of men seeking shelter, but saw that the central theme was her own need to nurture. When she saw that her most righteously hateful prose featured crimson-flowered redemption, she felt her narcissistic nostalgia die. Her six volumes of poetry had earned her seven thousand four hundred dollars in advances and nothing in royalties. The advances for Knife-edged Chaste and Notes from a Non-Kingdom had paid off her long-standing Visa card bill, which she promptly ran up again, paying off the following year with the advance for Hollywood Stillness. Staring down the Abyss, Womanworld, and Skirting the Void had secured her her bookstore, which was now skirting the edge of bankruptcy. Her remaining volumes had bought her an abortion and a trip to New York, where her editor had gotten drunk and had stuck his hand up her dress at the Russian Tea Room.
Kathleen ran into her bedroom and hauled out her glass encased rose petals. She carried them back to her bookstore–living room and one by one hurled them at the walls, the sound of breaking glass and falling bookshelves drowning out her own screamed obscenities. When the detritus of the past eighteen years of her life had devastated the room, she wiped tears from her eyes and savored the destruction: books lying dead on the floor, glass shards reflecting off the carpet, plaster dust settling like fallout. The overall symbolism was perfection.
Then Kathleen noticed that something was off. A long black rubber cord was dangling from a torn-out section of her ceiling. She walked over and yanked on it, pulling loose spackle-covered wiring that extended all the way around the room. When she got to the wire’s terminus a tiny microphone was revealed. She took up the cord and yanked a second time. The 192
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opposite end led to her front door. She opened the door and saw that the wire continued up to the roof, shielded by the branches of the eucalyptus tree that shaded the front porch.
Kathleen got a ladder. She stood it up on the ground beside the tree and followed the wire up to her roof. She could see that on the rooftop it had been concealed by a thin coat of tar. Squatting down, she ripped the wiring out and let it lead her to a mound of tar paper covered with shellac. She pulled the cord a last time. The tar paper ripped open and she looked down at a tape recorder wrapped in clear plastic.
*
*
*
At Parker Center, Dutch went through Lloyd’s desk, hoping that the I.A.D. officers hadn’t picked it clean. If he could find any of the homicide files that Lloyd was working with, maybe he could form a hypothesis and go from there.
Dutch rifled the drawers, prying the locks open with the buck knife he carried strapped to the inside of his gunbelt, coming away with nothing but pencils, paper clips and wanted posters. Slamming the drawers shut, he pried open the filing cabinets. Nothing; the Internal Affairs vultures had gotten there first.
Dutch emptied the wastebasket, sifting through illegible memos and sandwich wrappers. He was about to give up when he noticed a crumpled piece of Xerox paper. He held it up to the light. There was a list of thirtyone names and addresses in one column, and a list of electronic stores in the other. His heart gave a little leap; this had to be Lloyd’s “suspect” list—
the men that he had wanted him to detach officers to interview. It was slim—but something.
Dutch drove back to the Hollywood Station. He handed the list to the desk officer. “I want you to call all the men on this list,” he said. “Lay out a heavy spiel about ‘routine questioning.’ Let me know who sounds panicky. I’m going out, but I’ll be calling in.”
From his office, Dutch called Lloyd’s house. As he expected, there was no answer. He had called in vain every half hour throughout the night, and now it had become obvious that Lloyd had run to ground. But to where? He was either hiding out from I.A.D. and/or stalking his real or imaginary killer. He might also be—
Unable to complete the thought, Dutch recalled that Kathleen McCarthy had mentioned at the party that her bookstore was on Yucca and Highland. She had fearfully denounced Lloyd on the phone last night, but