BECAUSE THE NIGHT

241

“Did your parents take photographs of you?”

Linda flinched at the word photographs. She stammered, “N-no.”

Havilland leaned forward and put his hand on her knee. “You’ve gone pale, Linda. Why?”

Flinching again, Linda said, “This is happening so fast. I wasn’t going to tell you today because most of the time it seems so remote. My father was a violent man. He was a longshoreman, and he used to fight bare knuckles for money on the docks at San Pedro. He’d win or he’d lose and he’d always bet heavily on himself, so if he won he showered mother and me with gifts and if he lost he brooded and smashed things. Most of the time it was fifty-fifty, win, lose, win, lose—so that I never knew what to expect.

“Then, when I was ten, Daddy hit a losing streak. He brooded worse than ever and punched out all the windows in our house. It was winter and we were broke and the heat was shut off and cold air blew in through the broken windows. I’ll never forget the day it happened. I came home from school and there were police cars in front of the house. A detective took me aside and told me what happened. Daddy had put a pillow over Mother’s head and shot her in the face. Then he stuck the gun in his mouth and shot himself. I was sent to Juvenile Hall, and a couple of days later a matron told me I had to identify the bodies. She showed me photographs from the autopsy—Daddy and Mother with half their faces blown away. I cried and I cried, but I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures.”

“And, Linda?” Havilland whispered.

Linda said, “And I went to live with an elderly couple who treated me like a princess. I swiped the pictures the matron showed me and forced myself to laugh and gloat over them. Those pictures gave me freedom from the shitty life I had, and laughing at them was like getting revenge on my parents. I—”

Havilland raised a hand in interruption. “Let me finish. Your foster parents caught you laughing over the photographs and punished you? It was never the same with them after that?”

“Yes,” Linda said.

The Doctor circled his office again, running light fingertips over the oak walls. “A few more questions, then we’ll end the session. Is the type of man—of customer—that you’re attracted to large and physical, possessed of intelligence and breeding but also possessed of a certain aura of violence?”

Linda’s whisper was astonished. “Yes.”

242

L.A. NOIR

Havilland smiled. “World-class progress in one session. Does the day after tomorrow—Friday—suit you for our next one? Say ten-thirty?”

Linda Wilhite stood up, surprised to find her legs steady. She smoothed the front of her dress and said, “Yes. I’ll be here. Thank you.”

Havilland took her arm and walked her to his outer office door. “It was my pleasure.”

*

*

*

After Linda Wilhite was gone, the Doctor, armed with her image and facts from Goff’s reconnaissance, turned off the lights and played the timetravel game. When Linda was two and living in a San Pedro dive with her white-trash parents, he was twelve and gaining clandestine access to wealthy homes in Bronxville and Scarsdale, New York, exorcising his nocturnal heart by delivering himself to the quiet muse of other peoples’ dwellings, sometimes stealing, sometimes not . . .

When Linda was fourteen and sexually experimenting with surfer morons in Huntington Beach, he was twenty-four and graduating from Harvard Medical School at the top of his class, the legendary Doctor John the Night Tripper, the genius dope chemist/abortionist who held instructors rapt with his digressions on the theories of Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Havelock Ellis . . .

When Linda was growing into her exquisite beauty in a series of foster homes, filled with wonder at her parents’ deaths and the apostasy that their bloodletting had spawned, he—

The Time Machine screeched, shuddered, and ground to a halt. A green door opened to reveal a man in a gray uniform standing beside a salmonpink ’56 Ford Victoria ragtop. Little girls in party dresses thronged the car, and just before it exploded into flames they turned to point and laugh at him.

The Night Tripper walked to the wall and turned on the light, seeking confirmation. He found it in glass-encased tributes; framed diplomas from New York University and Harvard Med and St. Vincent and Castleford Hospitals—parchment that spelled out plainly that he was the best. The dates on them told him why the Time Machine had malfunctioned. Linda was powerful. Linda had sustained a catastrophe as he had and required that he juxtapose his story against hers from the beginning . . . 1956. Scarsdale, New York. Johnny Havilland, age eleven, known as

“Spaz,” “Wimpdick,” and “Shitstick.” Sherry-guzzling mother with the in-