Blood on the Moon (22 page)

Lloyd pondered this. “I think so. Look, would you like to go to a dinner party tomorrow night? Policemen and their wives? It'll probably be dull, but illuminating for you.”

Kathleen smiled. His offer was a major capitulation; he was willing to be bored to please her. “Yes. Be here at seven.” She moved backward into her dark front room and closed the door behind her. When she heard Lloyd's departing footsteps she turned on the lights and got out her diary. Her mind rambled with profundities until she muttered, “Oh, fuck it,” and wrote:

He is capable of bending. I am going to be his music.

Lloyd drove home. He pulled into the driveway to find Janice's car gone and all the lights in the house glowing brightly. He unlocked the door and walked inside, seeing the note immediately:

Lloyd, darling:

This is goodbye, for awhile at least. The girls and I have gone to San Francisco to stay with a friend of George's. It is for the best, I know that, because I know that you and I have not communicated for a long, long time, and that our values are markedly different. Your behavior with the girls was the final straw. I have known almost since the beginning of our marriage of some deep disturbance in you–one you disguised (for the most part) very well. What I will not tolerate is your passing your disturbance on to them. Your stories are cancerous in their effect, and Anne, Caroline, and Penny must be free of them. A note on the girls–I am going to enroll them in a Montessori School in S.F., and I will have them call you at least once a week. George's roommate Rob will look after the shop in my absence. I will decide in the coming months whether or not I want a divorce. I care for you deeply, but I cannot live with you. I am withholding our address in S.F. until I am certain you will not try to do something rash. When I get settled, I'll call. Until then be well and don't worry.

Janice

Lloyd put down the note and walked through the empty house. Everything feminine had been cleared out. The girls' room had been picked clean of personal belongings; the bedroom that he shared with Janice now contained only his solitary aura and the navy blue cashmere quilt that Penny had crafted for his thirty-seventh birthday.

Lloyd drew the quilt around his shoulders and walked outside. He looked up at the sky and hoped for an annihilating rainstorm. When he realized that he couldn't will thunder and lightning, he fell to his knees and wept.

10

When the poet saw the empty metal box, he screamed. Cancer cells materialized out of the dawn sky and threw themselves at his eyes, hurling him onto the cold pavement. He wrapped his arms around his head and drew himself into a fetal ball to keep the tiny carcinogens from going for his throat, then rocked back and forth until he had blunted all his senses and his body started to cramp, then numb. When he felt self-asphyxiation coming on he breathed out, and familiar Larrabee Avenue came into focus. No cancer cells in the air. His beautiful tape machine was gone, but Officer Pig was still asleep and the early morning scene on Larrabee was normal. No police cars, no suspicious vehicles, no trench-coated figures huddled behind newspapers. He had changed the tape forty-eight hours ago, so the machine was mostly likely discovered that day, when it was empty or running, or yesterday, when it contained a minimum of recorded material. If he hadn't wanted to touch himself so badly he would never have risked the early pick-up, but he needed the stimulus of Officer Pig and his lackey, who had been doing things to each other on the couch for weeks now, things that Julia had written about in her evil manu—

He couldn't complete the thought; it was too shameful.

He got to his feet and looked in all directions. No one had seen him. He bit at the skin of his forearms. The blood that trickled out was red and healthy looking. He opened his mouth to speak, wanting to be sure that the cancer cells hadn't severed his vocal cords. The word that came out was “safe.” He said it a dozen times, each time with a more awed inflection. Finally he shouted it and ran for his car.

Thirty minutes later he had scaled the bookstore roof, a silenced .32 automatic in his windbreaker pocket, smiling when he saw that his Sanyo 6000 was still hidden underneath an outsized sheaf of tarred-over pipe insulation. He grabbed the two spools of finished tape from the machine's storage compartment. Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe. He said the word over and over again on his drive home, and he was still saying it as he put the first spool on the old machine in the living room, then sat back to listen, his eyes moving over the rose branches and photographs on the walls.

The sound of a switch being flipped; the porch light going on; the trigger activating the tape. His original beloved muttering to herself, then deep silence. He smiled and touched his thighs. She was writing.

The silence stretched. One hour. Two. Three. Four. Then the sound of yawning and the switch being flipped again.

He got to his feet, stretched and changed spools. Again the porch light trigger–his punctual darling, 6:55, like clockwork.

He sat down, wondering if he should make himself explode now while he could hear footsteps, or wait and take a chance on his original beloved talking to herself. Then a doorbell rang. Her voice: “Hi, Sergeant.” The scuffle of feet. Her voice again: “I made those phone calls. To over a dozen bookdealers. Nothing. None of my friends recall seeing or talking with a man like the one you described. It was bizarre. I was helping the police to find an insane woman-killer, and women kept—”

At the last words he began to tremble. His body went ice cold, then turned burning hot. He punched the stop button and fell to his knees. He clawed at his face until he drew blood, whimpering safe, safe, safe. He crawled to the window and looked out at the passing parade on Alvarado. He took hope with every identifiable evidence of business as usual: traffic noise, Mexican women with children in tow, junkies waiting to score in front of the Burrito stand. He started to say “safe,” then hesitated and whispered “maybe.” “Maybe” grew in his brain until he screamed it and stumbled back to the recorder.

He pushed the play button. His first beloved was saying something about women interrupting her. Then a man's voice: “Thank you. I didn't really expect anything. Right now I'm just fishing. Badge 1114, homicide fisherman on the job.”

He forced himself to listen, gouging his genitals with both hands to keep from screaming. The horrific conversation continued, and words leaped out and made him gouge himself harder. “The idea of mass murderers killing with impunity makes them afraid…I
have
supervised homicide investigations…call me Lloyd.”

When the door slammed and the tape spun in blessed silence he took his hands from between his legs. He could feel blood dripping down his thighs, and it reminded him of high school and poetry and the sanctity of his purpose. Mrs. Cuthbertson's eleventh grade honors English class. Logical fallacies:
post hoc, propter ergo hoc
–“After this, therefore because of this.” Knowledge of crimes committed does
not
mean knowledge of the perpetrator. Policemen were not breaking down his door. “Lloyd,” “Homicide fisherman badge 1114,” had no idea that his original beloved's dwelling was bugged, and may have had nothing to do with the theft of his other tape recorder. “Lloyd” was “fishing” in shark-infested waters, and if he came near him he would eat the policeman alive. Conclusion: they had no idea who he was, and it was business as usual.

Tonight he would claim his twenty-third and most hurriedly courted beloved. No “maybe.” It was a pure “yes,” powerfully affirmed by his meditation tape and every one of his beloveds from Jane Wilhelm on up. Yes. Yes. The poet walked to the window and screamed it to the world at large.

11

His sleepless night in the empty house had been the precursor to a day of total bureaucratic frustration, and each negative feedback tore at Lloyd like a neon sign heralding the end of all the gentle restraining influences in his life. Janice and the girls were gone, and until his genius killer was captured, he was powerless to get them back.

As the day wound down into early evening, Lloyd recounted his dwindling options, wondering what on God's earth he would do if they died out and left him with only his mind and his will.

It had taken him six hours to call the eighteen stereo supply stores and secure a list of fifty-five people who had purchased Watanabe A.F.Z. 999 recorders over the last eight years. Twenty-four of the buyers had been women, leaving thirty-one male suspects, and Lloyd knew from experience that telephone interviews would be futile–experienced detectives would have to size up the buyers in person and determine guilt or innocence from the suspects' response to questioning. And if the recorder had been purchased outside L.A. County…and if the whole Haines angle had nothing to do with the killings…and he would need manpower for interviewing…and if Dutch turned him down at the party tonight…

The negative feedback continued, undercut with memories of Penny and her quilts and Caroline and Anne squealing with delight at his stories. Dutch had gotten nothing positive from his queries to both retired and long-term active juvenile detectives and the “monicker” files on “Bird” and “Birdy” had yielded only the names of a dozen ghetto blacks. Useless–the high pitched voice in Whitey Haines's living room had obviously belonged to a white man.

But the greatest frustration had been the absence of a print make on the tape recorder. Lloyd had stalked the crime lab repeatedly, looking for the technician he had left the machine with, calling the man at home, only to find that his father had had a heart attack and that he had driven to San Bernardino, taking the recorder with him, intending to use the facilities of the San Bernardino Sheriffs Department for his dusting and comparison tests. “He said that you wanted him to do the tests
personally,
Sergeant,” the technician's wife had said. “He'll call from San Bernardino in the morning with the results.” Lloyd had hung up cursing semantics and his own authoritarian nature.

This left two last-ditch, one-man options: Interview the thirty-one buyers himself or cop some bennies and stake out Whitey Haines's apartment until the bugger showed up. Desperation tactics–and the only avenues he had left.

Lloyd got his car and headed west, toward Kathleen's bookstore-cottage. When he got off the freeway he realized he was bone weary and flesh hungry and pointed his Matador north, in the direction of Joanie Pratt's house in the Hollywood Hills. They could love and talk and maybe Joanie's body would smother his feeling of doomsday attrition coming from all sides.

Joanie jumped on Lloyd as he walked through the open front door, exclaiming, “Sarge,
wilkommen!
Romance on your mind? If so, the bedroom is immediately to your right.” Lloyd laughed. Joanie's big carnal heart was the perfect spot to place his tenderness.

“Lead the way.”

When they had loved and played and looked at the sunset from the bedroom balcony, Lloyd told Joanie that his wife and children were gone and that in the wake of his abandonment there was only himself and the killer. “I'm giving my investigation two more days,” he said, “then I'm going public. I'm taking everything I have to Channel 7 News and flushing my career down the toilet. It hit me while we were lying in bed. If the leads I have now don't pan out I'm going to create such a fucking public stink that every police agency in L.A. County will
have
to go after this animal; if my reading of him is correct, the exposure will drive him to do something so rash that he'll blow it completely. I think he has an incredible ego that's screaming to be recognized, and when he screams it to the world I'll be there to get him.”

Joanie shuddered, then put a comforting hand on Lloyd's shoulder. “You'll get him, Sarge. You'll give him the big one where it hurts the most.”

Lloyd smiled at the imagery. “My options are narrowing down,” he said. “It feels good.” Remembering Kathleen, he added, “I've got to go.”

“Hot date?” Joanie asked.

“Yeah. With a poetess.”

“Do me a favor before you go?”

“Name it.”

“I want a happy picture of the two of us.”

“Who's going to take it?”

“Me. There's a ten-second delay on my Polaroid. Come on, get up.”

“But I'm naked, Joanie!”

“So am I. Come on.”

Joanie walked into the living room and came back with a camera affixed to a tripod. She pushed some buttons and ran to Lloyd's side. Blushing, he grabbed her around the waist and felt himself start to go hard. The flash cube popped. Joanie counted the seconds and pulled the film from the camera. The print was perfect: the nude Lloyd and Joanie, she smiling carnally, he blushing and semi-erect. Lloyd felt his tenderness explode as he looked at it. He took Joanie's face in his hands and said, “I love you.”

Joanie said, “I love you too, Sarge. Now get dressed. We've both got dates tonight, and I'm late for mine.”

Kathleen had spent her entire day in preparation for her evening; long hours in the women's departments of Brooks Brothers and Boshard-Doughty, searching for
the
romantic purist outfit that would speak eloquently of her past and flatter her in the present. It
took
hours, but she found it: pink Oxford cloth button down shirt, navy blue ankle socks and cordovan tassel loafers, a navy crew neck sweater and the
piece de resistance
–a knee length, pleated, red tartan skirt.

Feeling both sated and expectant, Kathleen drove home to savor waiting for her romantic conspirator. She had four hours to kill, and prescribed getting mildly stoned and listening to music as the way to do it. Since tonight she would be juxtaposed iconoclastically against a staid gathering of policemen and their wives, she put a carefully selected medley of flower child revolution on the turntable and sat back in her robe to smoke dope and listen, filled with the knowledge that tonight she would teach the big policeman–wow him with her poetry, read classic excerpts from her diary, and maybe let him kiss her breasts.