BECAUSE THE NIGHT

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ter and minion were thrown to the floor. Goff writhed, foam at his mouth. Havilland got to his knees, seeing his father and the cop separate into individual entities, replaced by a little girl in a fifties-style party dress laughing at him. He shook his head to destroy the vision, then heard Goff’s vertebrae popping as he attempted to turn himself inside-out. Getting to his feet, he saw a door opening on blackness and headstones behind a barbed wire fence. Then he held his hands in front of his face and saw that they were steady. He looked down on the floor and saw Thomas Goff, dead, frozen in a final configuration of anguish.

“Father,” the Night Tripper whispered. “Father. Father.”

Now only the disposal remained.

The Doctor dug through his briefcase, removing the black vinyl body bag and laying it out lengthwise on the floor, zipped open. He tossed Goff’s handgun into the bottom, then stuffed in Goff himself and zipped the bag up.

Goff’s car keys were on the coffee table. Havilland pocketed them, then squatted down and hoisted the pain-free Goff onto his right shoulder. Picking up his briefcase and flicking off the ceiling light, he shut the door and walked outside to the street.

Goff’s Toyota was parked four buildings down. Havilland unlocked the trunk and wedged the dead man inside, securing the body bag by placing a spare tire and bumper jack across Goff’s midsection. Satisfied with the concealment, the Doctor slammed the trunk shut and drove him to his final resting place.

Thomas Goff’s grave was the basement maintenance area of a storage garage in the East Los Angeles industrial district. It was owned by one of the Doctor’s former criminal counselees, currently doing ten to life for a third armed robbery conviction. Havilland paid the taxes and sent the man’s wife a quarterly check; the gloomy old red-brick fortress would be his for at least another eight years.

It took the Night Tripper ten minutes to secure the gravesite, rummaging through the ring of keys his counselee had given him, opening up a series of double padlocked doors, driving through an obstacle course of mildewed cartons and rotting lumber until he was in the pitch black bowels of the building. Wiping the car free of his fingerprints and retracing his steps in the dark, he felt a sense of satisfaction and completion hit him harder with each padlock he snapped shut: Thomas Goff had spent his 290

L.A. NOIR

adult life seeking the absence of light and the Doctor had promised to help; now he would have layer upon layer of darkness to cradle his eternity. When the street door lock was fastened behind him, the Night Tripper walked toward downtown L.A. and shifted his thoughts to the future. With Goff dead, he was flying solo; all the file runs were his. It was time to put off his current lonelies with talk of forthcoming “ultimate” assignments and concentrate on the acquisition of data and his possible combat with the policeman who so resembled his father. Crossing the Third Street bridge, the lights of the downtown business monoliths hovering in front of him, Havilland thought of chess moves: Richard Oldfield, clinically insane yet superbly cautious, who resembled the late Thomas Goff like a twin brother. Pawn to queen. Linda Wilhite, the hooker who fantasized snuff films and who desired a life of blissful domesticity with a big, rough-hewn man. Queen to king.

And finally the highly tarnished “king” himself: Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, the outsized L.A. cop with the off-the-charts I.Q., the man of whom the Alchemist had said: “I glommed his file because he is simply the best there is. If he weren’t such an up-front womanizer and so outlaw in his methods, he’d be chief of detectives. He’s got close to complete autonomy within the Department, because the high brass knows he’s the best and because they think he’s slightly off his nut. He was the one who closed the

‘Hollywood Slaughterer’ case last year. No one really knows what happened, but the rumor is that Hopkins simply went out and killed the bastard.”

Havilland replayed the words in his mind, juxtaposing them with the superlative arrest record and erratic home life detailed in the folder. Check- mate. Staring deeper into the lights before him, he thought of unlocking the door to his childhood void with symbolic patricide. 10

“Before we start, I want you to read this morning’s Big Orange Insider. ”

Lloyd shifted in his chair and lowered his eyes, wondering if Thad