BECAUSE THE NIGHT

397

William Nagler was not at home.

Lloyd parked across the street from his two-story redwood A-frame and walked over and knocked on both the front and back doors. No answer, no lights burning and no sounds of habitation. After checking the mailbox and finding two catalogs and a Mastercard bill, he returned to the car and his improbable partner.

“Are you going to open up this thing?” Bergen asked as Lloyd squeezed in behind the wheel.

Lloyd shook his head. “No. I don’t trust the fourth estate. Just play the interrogation by ear. You ever work plainclothes?”

“Yeah. Venice Vice. I’m going to be the good guy, right?”

“No. You’ve got booze breath and you need a shave. You’re big, but I’m bigger, so I can play savior. I’ll ask the questions, you just be abusive. Just imagine yourself as a typical fascist pig out of the pages of the Big Orange In- sider and you’ll be cool.”

Bergen laughed. “You’re the kind of joker who hands out compliments one minute, then rags people who hand out compliments the next, which means one of two things—you either love to give people shit, or you don’t know where your own head is at. Which one is it?”

With his eyes on Nagler’s front door, Lloyd said, “Don’t jerk my chain. If I didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be here. If I didn’t understand what you have to do, I would have busted you for carrying a concealed weapon and kicked your ass back to the slam.”

Bergen scratched his razor stubble and poked Lloyd in the arm. “I apologize for saying I didn’t like your style. What I should have said was that you have style, but you don’t know what to do with it.”

Lloyd turned on the dashboard light and stared at Bergen. “Don’t tell me about style. I read some of your early stuff. It was damn good. You could have been something big, you could have said things worth saying. But you didn’t know what to do with it, because being really good is really scary. I know fear, Bergen. Two niggers blew away your partner and you ran. I can understand that and not judge you for it. But you had the chance to be great and you settled for being a hack, and that I can’t understand.”

Bergen toyed with the knobs of the two-way radio. “You Catholic, Hopkins?”

“No.”

“Tough shit, you’re going to hear my confession anyway. Jack Herzog taught me to write. He ghosted my first published stories, then edited the 398

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ones I actually did write. He formed my style; he was the one who had the chance to be great. It’s weird, Hopkins. You’re supposed to be the pragmatist, but I think you’re really a romantic innocent with an incredible nose for shit. It’s funny. Jack gave me everything I have. He made me a derivative fiction stylist and a competent journalist. He’d been writing a novel, and I was serving as his editor, helping him hold it together as he got crazier and crazier. I’ve never had the chance to be great. But if I had your brains and drive and guts, I’d be more than a gloryhound flatfoot.”

Lloyd turned on the radio and listened to code ones and twos. “It’s a stalemate, Marty, and a life sentence for both of us. But we’re lucky we can play the game.”

Bergen took the pistol from his waistband and rolled down the window and took a bead on the moon. “I believe that,” he said. Two hours passed in silence. Bergen dozed off and Lloyd stared out the window at William Nagler’s driveway, wondering if he should make a run to a phone and call Linda; wondering also if Havilland’s worshippers were in contact with each other and if the already hassled followers had alerted Nagler to the approaching heat. No, he decided finally. Havilland was too well buffered. The worshippers probably had no way of contacting Havilland or each other besides Havilland’s pay phone communiqués, which logic told him were rigidly pre-scheduled. His investigatory parries were buffered against discovery. Then the truth hit. He was pumping himself up with logic because Linda was part of the game and part of him, and if she fell the game was over forever.

Shortly after ten o’clock, a silver Porsche convertible pulled up in front of the A-frame. Lloyd nudged Bergen awake and said, “Our buddy is here. Follow my lead and when I touch my necktie interrupt me and buzz him with ‘behind the green door’ and ‘beyond the beyond.’ This guy had nothing to do with Jack Herzog, so don’t even mention his name. You got it?”

Bergen nodded and squared his shoulders in preparation for his performance. Lloyd grabbed a flashlight and opened the car door just as a man got out of the Porsche and crossed the sidewalk in front of the A-frame. Bergen slammed his door, causing the man to turn around at the foot of the steps.

“Police officers,” Lloyd called out.

The man froze at the words, then walked forward in the direction of his car. Lloyd flashed the light square in his face, forcing him to throw up his hands to shield his eyes. “It—it’s—ma-my car,” he stammered. “I’ve got the pink in the glove compartment.”