Blood on the Moon (11 page)

Janice shivered. Was Penny's innocence blasted beyond redemption already? A master artisan and fledgling entrepreneur at twelve? She shivered again and looked at the clock. An hour of fearful speculation had passed, and Lloyd was still not home. Suddenly she realized that she missed him and wanted him beyond the limits of normal desire in a twenty-year-old love affair. She walked upstairs and undressed in the dark bedroom, lighting the scented candle that was Lloyd's signal to wake her up and love her. Crawling into bed, a last dark thought crossed her mind, like predator birds blackening a calm sky: As the girls grew older they looked more and more like Lloyd, especially in their eyes.

She heard Lloyd enter the house an hour later, his ritualistic sounds in the entrance hall: Lloyd sighing and yawning, unhooking his gunbelt and placing it on the telephone stand, the familiar shuffling noises he made as he slowly walked upstairs. Tensing herself for the moment when he would open the door and see her in amber light, Janice ran a teasing hand between her legs.

But the bedroom door didn't open; she heard Lloyd tiptoe past it and walk down the hall to Penny's room, then rap his knuckles lightly on her door and whisper, “Penguin? You want to hear a story?” The door creaked open a second later, and Janice heard father and child giggle in gleeful conspiracy.

She gave her husband half an hour, angrily chainsmoking. When her last remnants of ardor had fled and she started to cough from the half-dozen cigarettes, Janice threw on a robe and walked down the hall to listen.

Penny's bedroom door was ajar, and through it Janice could see her husband and youngest daughter sitting on the edge of the bed, holding hands. Lloyd was speaking very softly, in an awe-tinged storyteller's voice: “…after clearing the Haverhill/Jenkins homicide, I got assigned to a robbery deployment, a loan-out to the West L.A. squadroom. There had been a series of nighttime burglaries of doctor's offices, all in large buildings in the Westwood area. Cash and saleable drugs were the burglar's meat; in shortly over a month he'd ripped off over five grand in cash and a shitload of pharmaceutical speed and heavyweight downers. The West L.A. dicks had his M.O. figured out this way: The bastard used to hide out in the building until nightfall, then hit his mark, then break into a second floor office and jump out the window into the parking lot. There was evidence to point to this–chipped cement on the window ledges. The dicks figured him for a gymnast, a bullshit cat burglar type who could jump two stories without getting hurt. The commander of the squad was setting up parking lot surveillances to catch him. When the burglar hit an office building on Wilshire that two teams of detectives were staking out, it blew their thesis to hell and I was called in.”

Lloyd paused. Penny nuzzled her head into his shoulder and said, “Tell me how you got the scumbag, Daddy.”

Lloyd brought his storyteller's voice down to its lowest register: “Sweetheart, nobody jumps two stories repeatedly without getting hurt. I formed my own thesis: The burglar brazenly walked out of the buildings, waving to the security guards in the foyer as if everything were hunky-dory. Only one thing troubled me. Where was he carrying the dope he ripped off? I went back and checked with the guards on duty the nights of the robberies. Yes, both known and unknown men in business suits had walked out of the building in the early evening hours, but none were carrying bags or packages. The guards assumed them to be businessmen with offices in the building and didn't check them out. I heard that same statement six times before it all came together in my mind: The burglar dressed in drag, probably in the protective coloring of a nurse's uniform, carrying a large purse or shoulderbag. I checked with the guards again and, bingo! An unknown woman seen wearing a nurse's uniform and carrying a large shoulderbag was seen leaving the burglarized buildings at almost the exact time on all six burglary nights. The guards couldn't describe her, but said she was ‘ugly,' ‘a dog,' and so forth.”

Penny fidgeted when Lloyd took in a deep breath and sighed. She took her head from his shoulder and poked him sharply in the arm. “Don't be a tease, Daddy!”

Lloyd laughed and said, “Alright. I ran a computer cross-check on vice offenders and registered sex offenders with burglary convictions. Double bingo! Arthur Christiansen, a.k.a. “Misty Christie”, a.k.a. “Arlene the Queen” Christiansen. Specialties: giving cut-rate blow jobs to drunks who thought he was a woman and full-drag B & Es. I staked out his pad for thirty-six hours straight, determining that he was dealing uppers and Percodan–I heard his customers comment on the righteous quality of his stuff. This was solid corroboration, but I wanted to catch him-her in the act. The following afternoon old Arthur-Arlene left the pad with a giant quilted shoulderbag and drove to Westwood and walked into a big office building two blocks from the U.C.L.A. campus. Four hours later, an hour after dark, a very ugly creature in a nurse's uniform walks out, carrying the same shoulderbag. I whip out my badge, yell ‘Police Officer!' and rush Arthur-Arlene, who screams, ‘Chauvinist!' and swings on me. The blows are ineffectual and I'm reaching for my handcuffs when Arthur-Arlene's falsies pop out of his blouse. I get him handcuffed and flag down a black-and-white. Arthur-Arlene is screaming ‘sisterhood is powerful' and ‘police brutality,' and a crowd of U.C.L.A. students start shouting obscenities at me. I barely managed to get into the black-and-white. The scene was almost L.A.'s first transvestite police riot.”

Penny laughed hysterically, collapsing on the bed and pounding the covers with her fists. She burrowed her head into the pillow to wipe away her tears, then giggled, “More, Daddy, more. One more before you go to bed:”

Lloyd reached over and ruffled Penny's hair. “Funny or serious?”

“Serious,” Penny said. “Give me some dark stuff to sate my ghoulish curiosity. If you don't make it good, I'll stay up all night thinking of Arthur-Arlene's falsies.”

Lloyd traced circles on the bedspread. “How about a knight story?”

Penny's face grew somber. She took her father's hand and scooted down the bed so that Lloyd could rest his head in her lap. When father and daughter were comfortable, Lloyd stared up at the tartan quilt suspended from the ceiling and said, “The knight was caught in a dilemma. He had two anniversaries in one day–one personal, one professional. The professional one took precedence and in the course of it he shot a man, wounding him. About an hour later, after the man was in custody, the knight started to shake like he always did after he fired his gun. All those delayed reaction questions hit him: What if his shots rendered the asshole for good? What if next time he gloms the wrong info and takes out the wrong guy? What if he starts seeing red all the time and his discretion goes haywire? It's a shitstorm out there. You know that, don't you, Penguin?”

“Yes,” Penny whispered.

“You know that you've got to develop claws to fight it?”

“Sharp ones, Daddy.”

“You know the weird thing about the knight? The more complicated his doubts and questions become, the stronger his resolve gets. It just gets weird sometimes. What would you do if things got really weird?”

Penny played with her father's hair. “Sharpen my claws,” she said, digging her fingers into Lloyd's scalp.

Lloyd grimaced in mock pain. “Sometimes the knight wishes he weren't such a fucking Protestant. If he were a Catholic he'd be able to get formal absolution.”

“I'll always absolve you, Daddy,” Penny said as Lloyd got to his feet. “Like the song said, ‘I'm easy.'”

Lloyd looked down at his daughter. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you too. One question before you go: You think I'd be a good Robbery/Homicide dick?”

Lloyd laughed. “No, but you'd be a great Robbery/Homicide dickless.”

Janice watched Penny squeal in delight, and suddenly she was violated at the womb. She walked back to the bedroom she shared with her husband and flung off her robe, preparing to do
her
battle in the nude. Lloyd walked through the door moments later, smelling the scented candle and whispering, “Jan? You ardent this late, sweetheart? It's after midnight.”

As he reached for the light switch, Janice threw her overflowing ashtray at the opposite wall and hissed, “You sick, selfish, son-of-a-bitch, can't you see what you're doing to that little girl? You call spilling out that violence being a father?” Frozen in the ugliness of the moment, Lloyd pushed the light switch, illuminating Janice, shivering in the nude. “Do you, Lloyd, goddamn you?”

Lloyd moved toward his wife, arms extended in a supplicating gesture, hoping that physical contact would quell the storm.

“No!” Janice said as she backed away, “Not this time! This time I want a promise from you, an oath that you will not tell our children those ugly stories!”

Lloyd reached a long arm out and caught Janice's wrist. She twisted it free and knocked down the nightstand between them.

“Don't, Lloyd. Don't want me and don't placate me and don't touch me until you promise.”

He ran a hand through his hair and started to tremble. Fighting an impulse to punch the wall, he bent over and picked up the nightstand. “Penny is a subtle child, Jan, possibly a genius,” he said. “What should I do? Tell her about the three…”

Janice hurled her favorite porcelain lamp at the closet and shreiked, “She's just a little girl! A twelve-year-old little girl! Can't you understand that?”

Lloyd tripped across the bed and grabbed her around the waist, burying his head in her stomach, whispering, “She has to know, she had to know it, or she'll die. She has to know.”

Janice raised her arms and molded her hands into fists. She started to bring them down, clublike, onto Lloyd's back but hesitated as a thousand instances of his erratic passion washed over her, combining to form an epigram whose words she was too terrified to speak.

She lowered her hands to her husband's face and gently pushed him away. “I want to see if the girls are all right,” she said. “I'll have to tell them we were fighting. Then I think I want to sleep alone.”

Lloyd got to his feet. “I'm sorry I was so late tonight.”

Janice nodded dumbly and felt her sense of things confirmed. Then she put on a robe and went down the hall to check on her daughters.

Lloyd knew that he wouldn't be able to sleep. After saying good night to the girls, he prowled around downstairs looking for something to do. There was nothing to do but think of Janice and how he could not have her without giving up something dear to him and essential to his daughters. There was no place to go but backward in time.

Lloyd put on his gunbelt and drove to the old neighborhood.

He found it waiting for him in the pre-dawn stillness, as familiar as the sigh of an old lover. Lloyd drove down Sunset, feeling overwhelmed by the Tightness of his usurping of innocence via parable. Let them learn it slowly, he thought, not the way I did. Let them learn the beast by story–not repeated example. Let that be the new hallmark of my Irish Protestant irregulars.

With this surge of affirmation, Lloyd floored the gas pedal, watching night-bound Sunset Boulevard explode in peripheral flashes of neon, sucking him into the middle of a swirling Jetstream. He looked at the speedometer: one hundred thirty-five miles per hour. It wasn't enough. He bore down on the wheel with his whole being, and the neon turned to burning white. Then he closed his eyes and decelerated until the car hit an upgrade and the laws of nature forced it to a gliding stop.

Lloyd opened his eyes to discover them flooded with tears, wondering for an awkwardly long moment where on earth he was. Finally, a thousand memories clicked in and he realized that chance had left him at the corner of Sunset and Silverlake–the heart of the old neighborhood. Propelled by a subservient fate, he went walking.

Terraced hillsides drew Lloyd into a fusion of past, present, and future.

He sprinted up the Vendome steps, noting with satisfaction that the earth on both sides of the cement stanchions was as soft as ever. The Silverlake hills were formed by God to nurture–let the poor Mexicans live hearty here and thrive; let the old people complain about the steepness yet never move away. Let the earthquake the scientific creeps predicted come…Silverlake, the defiant traditionalist anomaly, would sustain its havoc and stand proud while L.A. proper burst like an eggshell.

At the top of the hill, Lloyd let his imagination telescope in on the few houses still burning lights. He imagined great loneliness and sensed that the light burners were importuning him for love. He breathed in their love and exhaled it with every ounce of his own, then turned west to stare through the hillside that separated him from the very old house where his crazy brother tended their parents. Lloyd shuddered as discord entered his reverie. The one person he hated guarding his two beloved creators. His one conscious compromise. Unavoidable, but…

Lloyd recalled how it happened. It was the spring of 1971. He was working Hollywood Patrol and driving over to Silverlake twice a week to visit his parents while Tom was away at work. His father had settled into a quiet, oblivious state in his old age, spending whole days in his back yard shack, tinkering with the dozens of television sets and radios that eclipsed almost every square inch of its floor space; and his mother, then eight years mute, stared and dreamed in her silence, having to be steered to the kitchen thrice daily lest she forget to eat.

Tom lived with them, as he had all his life, waiting for them to die and leave him the house that had already been placed in his name. He cooked for his parents and cashed their Social Security checks and read to them from the lurid picture histories of Nazi Germany that lined the bookshelves of his bedroom. It was Morgan Hopkins's express wish to Lloyd that he and his wife live out their days in the old house on Griffith Park Boulevard. Lloyd reassured his father many times, “You'll always have the house, Dad. Let Tom pay the taxes, don't even worry about it. He's a sorry excuse for a man, but he makes money, and he's good at looking after you and Mother. Leave the house to him; I don't care. Just be happy and don't worry.”