Blood on the Moon (29 page)

He walked to the front door and drummed light knuckles across it. Joyous laughter answered the intimacy of the knock. He heard footsteps approaching the door and flattened himself off to the side of it, the knife held against his leg. The door burst open and the woman's voice called out, “Sarge? I knew you were too smart to turn down my offer. I knew—”

He jumped from his hiding place to find the woman framed in the doorway in an attitude of longing. It took seconds for her hopeful face to turn terrified, and when he saw recognition flash in her eyes he raised his knife and held it before her, then flicked it lightly across her cheek. Her hands jumped to her face as blood spurted into her eyes, and he raised a hand to her throat to silence her potential screams. His hand was at the neck of her sweater when he slid on the doormat and crashed to his knees. Joanie's sweater ripped free in his hands, and as he tried to get to his feet she swung the door onto his arm and kicked at his face. A pointed toe caught his mouth and ripped it open. He spit out blood and stabbed blindly through the crack in the doorway. Joanie screamed and kicked again at his face. He ducked at the last second and grabbed her ankle as it descended, yanking it upward, bringing her down in a flailing tangle of limbs. She scuttled backward as he got to his feet and walked inside, weaving the stiletto in front of him in a slow figure-eight pattern. He turned to close the door, and she kicked out and sent a floor lamp crashing into his back. Stunned, he jumped backward, his body weight slamming the door shut.

Joanie got to her feet and stumbled back into her dining room. She wiped blood from her eyes and banged her arms sideways, looking for weapons, her eyes never straying from the jumpsuited figure advancing slowly toward her. Her right arm caught the back of a deck chair, and she hurled it at him. He kicked it out of his way and inched forward teasingly, in a parody of stealth, his knife movements becoming more and more intricate. Joanie crashed into her dining room table and grabbed blindly at a stack of dishes, scattering them, getting her hands on only one dish, then finding herself without the strength to throw it.

She dropped the dish and stepped backward. When she touched the wall she realized that there was no place left to run and opened her mouth to scream. When a gurgling sound came out, Teddy raised his stiletto and threw it at her heart. The knife caught and Joanie felt her life burst, then seep out in a network of fissures. As bright light became darkness she slid to the floor and murmured, “Do-wah, wah-wah-do…”, then surrendered herself to the dark.

Teddy found the bathroom and cleansed his split lips with mouthwash, wincing against the pain but going on to douse the wounds with the whole bottle as penance for allowing himself to be bloodied. The pain enraged him. Hatred of Lloyd Hopkins and contempt for the puny bureaucracy he represented burst out of his every pore.

Let them all know, he decided; let the world know that he was willing to play the game. He found the telephone and dialed O. “I'm in Hollywood and I want to report a murder,” he said.

The stunned operator put him directly through to the switchboard at the Hollywood station. “Los Angeles Police Department,” the switchboard officer said.

Teddy spoke succinctly into the mouthpiece: “Come to 8911 Bowlcrest Drive. The door will be open. There's a dead woman on the floor. Tell Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins that it's open season on police groupies.”

“And what is your name, sir?” the switchboard officer asked.

Teddy said, “My name is about to become a household word,” and hung up.

The bewildering phone call was relayed from the switchboard officer to the desk officer, who flashed on the name “Lloyd Hopkins” and remembered that Hopkins was a good friend of Captain Peltz, the daywatch commander. Having heard rumors that Hopkins was in trouble with I.A.D., the desk officer called Peltz at home with the information. “The operator got the message slightly garbled, Captain,” he said. “She thought it was a crank, but she did mention a dead woman and your buddy Sergeant Hopkins, so I thought I'd call you.”

Dutch Peltz went cold from head to foot. “What
exactly
was the message?” he asked.

“I don't know. Just something about a dead woman and your bu…”

Dutch's voice, filled with worry, interrupted. “Did the caller leave an address?”

“Yes, sir. 8911 Bowlcrest.”

Dutch wrote it down and said, “Have two officers meet me there in twenty minutes and tell no one about this call. Do you understand?”

Dutch didn't wait for an answer, or bother to hang up the phone. He threw on slacks and sweater over his pajamas and ran for his car.

17

Frock-coated figures wielding razor-edged crucifixes chased him across an open field. In the distance a large stone house shimmered in the glow of a white hot spotlight. The house was encircled by iron fencing linked together by musical clefs, and he knew that if he could hit the fence and surround himself with benevolent sound he would survive the onslaught of the cross killers.

The fence exploded as he made contact, hurtling him through barriers of wood, glass, and metal. Hieroglyphics flashed before his eyes; computer printouts that twisted into the shapes of contorted limbs and bombarded him past a last barrier of pulsating red light and into a sedately furnished living room fronted with triangular bay windows. The walls were covered with faded photographs and gnarled flower branches. As he moved closer he saw that the pictures and branches formed a door that he could will open. He was willing himself into a pitch-black trance when a succession of crosses slammed into him and pinned him to the wall. The photographs and branches descended on him.

Lloyd jerked awake, slamming his knees into the dashboard. It was dawn. He looked through the windshield and saw a half-familiar Silverlake side street, then looked at his haggard face in the rear view mirror and felt it all come back: Haines, Verplanck and his planned stakeout around the corner from Silverlake Camera. The speed had boomeranged and had combined with his nervous tension to knock him out. The killer was a block away, asleep. It was time.

Lloyd walked over to Alvarado. The street was perfectly still, and no lights issued from the red brick building that housed the camera store. Remembering that Verplanck's motor vehicle registration listed an identical business and home address, he stared up at the second story windows, then checked the parking lot next door. Verplanck's Dodge van and Datsun sedan were parked side by side.

Lloyd walked around to the alley in back of the building. There was a fire escape that reached up to the second floor and a metal fire door. The door looked impregnable, but there was an unshaded window with a deep brick ledge about four feet off to its right. It was the only possible access.

Lloyd leaped for the bottom rung of the fire escape. His hands caught iron and he hauled himself up the steps. At the second story landing he gave the metal door a gentle push. No give; it was locked from the inside. Lloyd eyed the window, then stood up on the railing and flattened himself into the wall. He took a bead on the ledge and pushed off, landing on it squarely, grasping the window runner to hold himself steady. When his heartbeat subsided to the point where he could think, he looked down and saw that the window led into a small, darkened room filled with cardboard boxes. If he could get in he could reach the apartment proper without rousing Verplanck.

Squatting on the ledge, Lloyd got a grip on the bottom of the window runner and pushed in and up. The window squeaked open and he lowered himself into a closet-sized storage space reeking of chemicals and mildew. There was a door at the front of the room. Lloyd drew his .38 and nudged it open, entering into a carpeted hallway. Using his gun as a directional finder, he crept down it until he came to an open door.

He braced himself head first into the wall and peered in. An empty bedroom with a neatly made bed. Picasso prints on the walls. A connecting door into a bathroom. Complete silence.

Lloyd tiptoed into the bathroom. Immaculate white porcelain; polished brass fixtures. There was a half-open door next to the sink. He looked through the crack and saw steps leading downstairs. He inched down them with painstaking slowness, his gun arm extended to its maximum length, his finger on the trigger.

The steps ended at the back of a large room filled with cardboard photographic displays. Lloyd felt his tension ridden body breathe out of its own accord. Verplanck was gone, he could
feel
it.

Lloyd surveyed the front of the store. It looked like camera stores everywhere: wood counter, neatly arrayed cameras in glass cases, cheerful children and cuddly animals beaming down from the walls.

Treading silently, he walked back upstairs, wondering where Verplanck had spent the night and why he hadn't taken one of his cars.

The second floor was still eerily silent. Lloyd walked through the bathroom and bedroom and down the hall to an ornate oak door. He pushed it open with his gun barrel and screamed. Triangular bay windows made up the front wall. Huge photographs of Whitey Haines and Birdman Craigie covered the side walls, interspersed with taped-on rose branches, the whole collage united by crisscrossed smearings of dried blood.

Lloyd walked along the walls, looking for details to prove his dream a fake, a coincidence, anything but what he couldn't let it mean. He saw dried semen on the photos, crusted over the genital areas of both Haines and Craigie, the word “Kathy” finger-painted in blood. Beneath the photographs there were small holes in the wall stuffed with excrement. The holes were at waist level; higher up the white wallpaper surrounding the photographs bore fingernail tracks and bite marks.

Lloyd screamed again. He ran back through the hallway and bathroom and downstairs. When he reached the first floor he crashed over a pile of cartons and stumbled out the front door. If his dream was for real, then music would save him. Dodging traffic, he ran across Alvarado and around the corner to his car. He hit the ignition and fumbled the radio on, catching the end of a commercial jingle. His mental colors and textures were returning to normal when an alarmed electronic voice leaped out at him:

“The ‘Hollywood Slaughterer' has claimed his third victim in twenty-four hours, and police are gearing up for the greatest manhunt in Los Angeles history! Last night the body of forty-two-year-old actress-singer Joan Pratt was discovered in her Hollywood Hills home, making her the third person to die violently in the Hollywood area in the past two days. Lieutenant Walter Perkins of the L.A.P.D.'s Hollywood Division and Captain Bruce Magruder of the West Hollywood Sheriffs are holding a joint news conference this morning at Parker Center to discuss the massive manhunt and to advise the Hollywood area populace on security measures to thwart the killer or killers. Captain Magruder told reporters this morning that ‘The Sheriff's department and L.A.P.D. have deployed our largest force of street officers ever in our effort to catch this killer. We firmly believe that this person's insanity is peaking and that he will try to kill again soon. There will be helicopter patrols throughout the Hollywood-West Hollywood areas, as well as a concentrated deployment of officers on foot. Our efforts will not cease until the killer is caught. Our entire detective force is tracking down every available lead. In the meantime, remember: This killer has killed both men
and
women. I urge all Hollywood residents not, repeat,
not
to stay alone tonight. Buddy up, for your own safety. We bel…'”

Lloyd began to whimper. He kicked the radio housing, then ripped the metal box free of the dashboard and hurled it out the window. Joanie was dead. His genius had become the door to a telepathic charnel house. He could read Teddy's thoughts and Teddy could read his. The dream and Joanie's death; a logic defying fraternal bonding that would spawn more and more and more horror; a horror that would only end with the killing of his evil symbiotic twin. He looked in the rear view mirror and saw Teddy Verplanck's yearbook picture. The transmogrification was complete. Lloyd drove to the old neighborhood to tell his family that the Irish Protestant ethos was a one-way ticket to hell.

Dutch Peltz sat in his office at the Hollywood Station, armed for betrayal with a Polaroid snapshot of a nude man and woman.

Since he had refused to press assault charges, the Internal Affairs officers investigating Lloyd had been swarming over him in an attempt to find other perfidies that they could bring to light to offset Lloyd's threatened media barrage. They had no idea that the L.A.P.D.'s most brilliant detective had been intimately familiar with Joan Pratt, the third victim of the Hollywood Slaughterer. The photograph was enough evidence to end Lloyd's career at best and have him shot on sight at worst.

Dutch walked to the window and looked out, thinking that he may have already signed away his own best years. His refusal to file charges would cost him his command of I.A.D., and if anyone found out that he had withheld the photograph and of his knowledge of the anonymous phone call that had mentioned Lloyd's name, he would be brought to departmental trial and suffer the ignominy of possible criminal prosecution. Dutch swallowed and asked himself the only question that made any sense. Was Lloyd a murderer? Was his protégé/mentor/son a killer brilliantly concealed by the cloak of genius? Was he a textbook schizophrenic, an academically identifiable split-personality monster?
It couldn't be.

Yet there was a logical narrative line that said “maybe.” Lloyd's erratic behavior throughout the years, his recent obsession with murdered women, his outburst at the party.
That
he had seen himself. When coupled with the traumatic aftermath of his wife and daughters' desertion and Kathleen McCarthy's phone call and the anonymous phone call and Joan Pratt's body and the nude snapshot and—

Dutch couldn't finish the thought. He looked at his telephone. He could call I.A.D. and save himself, dooming Lloyd, but maybe saving innocent lives. He could do nothing or he could track down Lloyd himself. His sleepless night, filled with images of Joan Pratt's body, had given him a good command of his options. Then Dutch asked himself the only other question that made sense. Who mattered the most? When “Lloyd” resounded through him, he tore up the photograph. He would clear the case himself.