BECAUSE THE NIGHT

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beneath his fist. Burnside flew back onto the pavement, moaning and drawing himself into a ball to escape more blows. Lloyd walked to his car feeling old and numb and tired of his profession.

9

The Night Tripper was on his fourth reading of the Junior Miss Cosmetics files when the phone in his private study rang, twenty-four hours before Goff’s next scheduled call. Picturing his terminal man straining against a bacterial fever, he picked up the receiver and whispered, “You’re early, Thomas. What is it?”

Goff’s reply came out in series of gasps. “Cop! Big man from the cop files!

I tried to wax him like the liquor store scum, but he—” The gasps became a horrified wailing.

Havilland envisioned Goff hyperventilating and frothing and burning up the phone booth with his fever and bewildered rage. Passing sentence in his mind, he said aloud, “Go home, Thomas. Can you understand that? Go home and wait for me. Draw in three breaths and tell me you’ll go home. Will you do that for me?”

The three breaths drew out the semblance of a human voice. “Yes . . . yes . . . please hurry.”

The Doctor replaced the receiver and held his hands in front of his eyes. They were perfectly steady. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. His light brown eyes were unwavering in their knowledge that although Goff had fallen, he was invulnerable. He reached below the sink and picked up the death kit he had prepared the previous night, then went back to his study and stuffed it inside the old leather briefcase he had saved since med school. Squatting down, he pulled up a section of loose carpeting and opened his floor safe, extracting a single manila folder, thinking for a split second that the man in the photo attached to the first page looked exactly like his father.

Thus armed for mercy, he left his apartment and walked out to the street to look for a cab. One cruised by a few minutes later. “Michael’s Restaurant 288

L.A. NOIR

on Los Feliz and Hillhurst,” Havilland told the driver. “And please hurry.”

The driver sped through the late evening traffic, never looking back at his passenger. Pulling up in front of the restaurant, he said, “Fast enough for you?”

The Doctor smiled and handed him a twenty. “Keep the change,” he said. When the cab drove away, Havilland walked the four blocks to Goff’s apartment, noting with relief that all the lights in the adjoining units were off. He rapped softly on the door, hearing otherworldly moans respond to his knock. The inside chain was withdrawn, and Goff was framed in the doorway, beseeching him with terrified eyes and hands pressed together in prayer. The doctor stared at the hands as they trembled a few inches in front of him. The fingers were bloody stubs, as if Goff’s animal panic had driven him to try to dig a way out of his life. Looking at the inside of the door, he saw gouge marks and trickles of blood.

Havilland put gentle hands on Goff’s shoulders and pushed him back into the living room, seeing his cordite-stinking handgun on the coffee table. Shutting and bolting the door, he pointed Goff to the couch, then rummaged in his briefcase for his instruments of accusation and mercy. Laying the manila folder face down on the floor and filling a syringe from a lab vial of strychnine, he whispered, “Two questions before I sedate you, Thomas. One, did the police see your car?”

Goff shook his head and tried to form ‘no’ with his lips. The Doctor looked into his eyes. Probable truth.

Whispering, “Good, good,” he clasped his left hand over Goff’s mouth and pressed his head to the wall with all his strength. Goff’s eyes bulged but remained locked into the eyes of his master. Havilland took the manila folder from the floor and slipped off the front page photograph. Holding it up for Goff to see, he said, “Is this the policeman?”

Goff’s eyes widened, the pupils dilated. A scream rose in his throat and he twisted his head and bit at the Doctor’s hand. Havilland pushed forward with all his weight, flailing with his free arm for the syringe, finding it just as Goff’s teeth grazed his palm. Throwing himself across Goff’s squirming torso, he stabbed the needle into his neck, missing his target vein, pulling it free as the point struck muscle tissue. Aiming again, he saw his father and the cop in the photo fuse into one persona just as the ferris wheel at the Bronx amusement park began its descent. The spike struck home; his thumb worked the plunger; the poison entered. Goff’s back arched as his feet twisted and pushed off the wall in a huge full-body seizure. Both mas-