BECAUSE THE NIGHT

327

utes later with a computer printout and a thick transaction file. Bowing, the manager closed the door, leaving Lloyd in impeccable silence. That silence soon became inhabited by dates and figures that detailed an atypical cop life. Jack Herzog’s savings and checking accounts went back five years. Lloyd started at the beginning of the transaction file and waded through paychecks deposited twice monthly, rent checks drawn monthly and savings stipends deposited every third L.A. City pay period. Jack Herzog was a frugal man. There were no large withdrawals indicating spending sprees; no checks for amounts exceeding his monthly rent payment of

$350.00, and out of every third paycheck he deposited $300.00 in a 7½%

growth savings account. When Herzog opened his dual accounts in 1979, his total balance was less than six hundred dollars. At the transaction file’s last entry date four months before, he was worth $17,913.49. Noting that the last entry was on 1/4/84, Lloyd turned to the computer sheet, hoping it contained facts updating Herzog’s two accounts to the present.

It did. The same deposit/check withdrawal motif continued, this time detailed in hard-to-read computer type. Lloyd was about to shake his head at the sadness of close to nineteen grand belonging to a dead man when the final transaction came into focus, grabbing him by the throat. On March 20, around the time of his disappearance, Jack Herzog closed out both his accounts and purchased an interbranch bank draft for his total balance of $18,641.07. There was a photocopy of the draft clipped to the computer sheet. It stated that the above amount was to be transferred to the West Hollywood branch of Security-Pacific, to the savings account of Martin D. Bergen. Lloyd let the facts sink in, then walked slowly out of the examination room and through the bank proper, bowing to the bank manager and running as soon as he hit the sidewalk.

*

*

*

By speeding through the Hollywood Hills, Lloyd was able to reach the Big Orange Insider office in just under half an hour. The same receptionist gave him the same startled look as he pushed through the connecting door to the editorial department, and seconds later the young man he had tangled with on his previous visit attempted to block his progress by standing in his path with his legs dug in like a linebacker. “I told you before you can’t come back here,” he said.

Lloyd took a bead on his head, then caught himself. “Marty Bergen,” he said. “Official police business. Go get him.”

328

L.A. NOIR

The young man wrapped his arms around his chest. “Marty is on vacation. Leave now.”

Lloyd took the bank subpoena from his pocket and rolled it up, then tickled the underside of the young man’s chin with the end. When he jerked backward, Lloyd said, “This is a court order to search Bergen’s desk. If you don’t comply with it, I’ll get an order to search the entire premises. Do you dig me, Daddy-o?”

Turning beet red, then pale, the youth flung an arm toward the back of the room. “The last desk against the wall. And let me see that court order.”

Lloyd handed the subpoena over and weaved through a crammed maze of desks, ignoring the stares of the people sitting at them. Bergen’s desk was covered with a pile of papers. Lloyd leafed through them, pushing the stack aside when he saw that every page contained notes scrawled in an indecipherable shorthand. He was about to go through the drawers when a woman’s voice interrupted him. “Officer, is Marty all right?”

Lloyd turned around. A tall black woman wearing an ink-stained printer’s smock was standing beside the desk, holding a long roll of tabloid galley paper. “Is Marty all right?” she repeated.

“No,” Lloyd said. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask? You sound concerned.”

The woman fretted the roll in her hands. “He’s been gone since the last time you were here,” she said. “He hasn’t been at his apartment and nobody from the Orange has seen him. And right before he took off he grabbed all his columns for the following week, except one. I’m the head typesetter, and I needed to set those issues. Marty really screwed the Orange, and that’s not like him.”

“Has he taken off like this before?”

The woman shook her head. “No! I mean sometimes he rents a motel room and goes on a toot, but he always leaves copies of his column for the time he expects to be gone. This time was weird because he took back his columns, and they were really weird to begin with.”

Lloyd motioned the woman to sit down. “Tell me about those columns,”

he said. “Try to remember everything you can.”

“They were just weird, ” the woman said slowly. “One was called ‘Moonlight Malfeasance.’ It was about these bigshot L.A. cops who had these figurehead jobs bossing around all these low-life rent-a-cops. Weird. The other columns were offshoots on that one, about the L.A.P.D. manipulating the media, because they got all the inside dirt from the moonlight cops. Weird.