BECAUSE THE NIGHT

407

forced them to kill dogs and cats as “insurance against moral flaccidity”; how the “Lieutenant” interrupted their REM sleep with late night phone calls and brutal interrogations into their dreams. Alternately using the first person “I” and the third person “Billy Boy,”

Nagler described how he and Doctor John’s other counselees were pimped out to wealthy people who advertised for “fantasy therapists” in privately published and circulated sex tabloids, the weekend “lovemaking seminars” often netting Havilland several thousand dollars, and how the

“beach womb groupings” were taped and transcribed by the “Lieutenant,”

who sometimes served as the “Chef ”—concocting mixtures of pharmaceutical cocaine and other prescription drugs that the Doctor would administer to his counselees under “test-flight conditions.”

Lloyd leafed full-speed through the diary, looking for incriminating facts: names, addresses and dates. With Marty Bergen hovering beside him and Nagler’s muffled chanting coming in from the living room, he felt like the sole outpost of sanity in a lunatic landscape, the feeling underlined by the fact that the diary contained no facts—only narrated disclosures peopled with coded characters.

Until an entry dated the day before jumped out at him: Helped set up movie equipment at the Muscleman’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Doctor John supervised. I showed him how to operate the camera. I hope Muscleman won’t break anything. He scares me—and he looks more and more like the Lieutenant these days. The entry was followed by a blank page, followed by the diary’s concluding entry, dated that morning. Lloyd felt an icepick at his spine as he read, It’s not real. They faked it. You can fake anything with new camera technology. It’s a fake. It’s not real.

Lloyd shoved Bergen aside and walked back to the movie room and searched among the upended equipment for film scraps, finding three strips of celluloid wedged underneath the editing machine. Running them through the machine’s feeder-viewfinder, he saw four close-ups of a woman’s white nyloned legs, a long shot of a mattress on a carpeted floor and a blurred extreme close-up of a broad-chested man with what looked like an L.A.P.D. badge pinned to his shirt.

408

L.A. NOIR

The icepick jabbed his heart. Lloyd thought of the white-stockinged nurse that Richard Oldfield had brought to his house twenty-four hours before. The knife twisted, dug and tore, accompanied by a deafening burst of patria infinitum s from the living room.

Lloyd walked toward the sound, finding Nagler still in his mantra pose and Bergen standing beside the fireplace, pouring bottles of liquor over the acrylic “firewood” on the grate. “Long-term interrogation, Sarge,” he said.

“It won’t do to get tempted. What’s next?” His ghoul grin had become a feisty smirk, and for one split-second Lloyd found a beacon of sanity.

“I’m leaving, you’re staying here,” he said. “I have to check on someone. Then, if she got my evidence, I have to take our friend’s guru out. You stay here and watchdog him. Hang by the phone. If I need you, I’ll ring once, then call back immediately.”

“I want in on the bust,” Bergen said.

Lloyd shook his head. “No. Just having you here could cause me lots of grief, and I’m not risking my job or you any further.” He watched Bergen’s smirk go hangdog. “What are you going to do when all this is over?”

Bergen laughed as he poured out a bottle of Courvoisier V.S.O.P. “I don’t know. Jack left me close to twenty grand, maybe I’ll just see where that takes me.” When Lloyd didn’t react to his mention of the money, he said,

“You knew about the bank draft, right?”

Lloyd said, “Yeah. I didn’t report it because I knew I.A.D. would try to seize your account as evidence.”

“You’re a good shit, Hopkins. You know that?”

“Sometimes.”

“What are you going to do when this is over?”

Lloyd thought of Linda and Janice and his daughters, then looked over at the devastated William Nagler, still chanting at demons. “I don’t know,”

he said.

24

The Night Tripper sat at the recording console in the Beach Womb, listening to Richard Oldfield and Linda Wilhite make frightened small talk upstairs in bedroom number three. The split-second accuracy of his fate had taken on ironic overtones. Linda’s screaming of “Hopkins” combined with the gun in her purse was a tacit admission that the genius cop had figured it out on the same day that he had broken through his childhood void. Richard had blown his chance to kill Hopkins, and his contingency plan to drive Linda over the edge with the snuff film and have her commit the murder had backfired. After twenty-seven years devoted to venting his terror through others, it had all come down to himself. He had claimed his father’s heritage, gaining autonomy along with the knowledge that the game was over. God was a malevolent jokester armed with a blunt instrument called irony.

Havilland leaned back in the chair that Thomas Goff used to occupy, feeling a conscious version of his dream disengagement split him in two. His left side imagined whirling corkboards, while his right side heard words issuing from the bedroom where Richard guarded the object of his corkboard fantasies. Soon exhaustion crept up. The spinning of the corkboard dominated, while the words played on, like dim music at the edge of sound.

“. . . why are you staring at me?”

“Doctor said to watch you.”

“Do you do everything he tells you to do?”

“Yes. Why are you making nasty faces at me? I’ve been gentle with you.”

“Because Doctor said to be gentle? No, don’t answer, it’ll only make me hate you more. For your information, drugging and kidnapping is not a gentle activity. Are you aware of that?”

“Yes. No. You’re very beautiful.”

410

L.A. NOIR

“Jesus. Was that movie for real? I mean, there was the awful part, and then this close-up of you. Listen, are you Thomas Goff?”

“I told you my name was Richard.”

“All right, but what about the movie. Was it real? My mother was killed like that, with a pillow and a gun. Is the movie part of your crazy guru’s plans for me?”

“What movie?”

“Jesus. Are you high? I mean, on something besides insanity? You know, on drugs?”

“Doctor gives me tranquilizers and antidepressants. Prescription stuff. He’s a doctor, so it’s legal and not bad.”

“Not bad? Havilland’s a Doctor Feelgood to boot? No, don’t answer, I know he’s capable of anything. I’m not going to let you hurt me, you know. Never. Not ever.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Jesus, you sound like Peter Lorre. Does it turn you on that I’m not scared?”

“Yes. No. No!”

“First responses are always the most honest, Richard. If you or that psychopath downstairs tried to hurt me, I’d kick and bite and scratch and rub lye in your eyes. I—”

“I don’t want to hurt you! I’ve done my hurting! It wasn’t good!”

“Y-you—you mean you hurt other women?”

“Yes! No! I mean they hurt me. Me! Me! Me! Me. Me.”

“Who hurt you? What are you talking about?”

“No. Doctor said I should talk to you, but not about bad things.”

“Bad things, hmm? Okay, we’ll change the subject. Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly think that those overdeveloped muscles of yours are a turn-on to women?”

“No. Yes. Yes!”

“First responses, Richard, and you’re right. A woman sees a man like you and thinks, ‘This guy is so insecure that he spends three hours a day at the gym with all the fags and narcissists, building himself up outside so I won’t know how scared he is inside.’ I’ve got a lover who’s bigger than you and probably almost as strong, but he’s got a trace of flab on his stomach and hips. And I dig it. You know why? Because he lives in reality and does a good job of it, and he hasn’t got time to pump iron. So don’t think that your muscles impress me.”