Because the Night (26 page)

*On afternoon of his death, Christie was seen around classified file section at Avonoco. He told secretary he was meeting a “heavy hitter” at the beach that night. When secretary asked why, he clammed up. She said he seemed agitated and elated.

*Re: I.A.D. interviews—Rolando, clean. Kaiser, Tucker, Murray, in protective custody, appear to be clean.

****! Important—while I.A.D. officers were checking out offices of Junior Miss Cosmetics, security guard freaked out and tried to run. He was apprehended and taken into custody (Pos. of marijuana.) Gaffaney is convinced he has guilty knowledge. This man (Hubert Douglas, M.N., age 39) yelped for you (said you were “cool” when you busted him for G.T.A. years ago).
Will talk only to you.
Come to P.C.
immediately.
(Gaffaney's orders) before Douglas makes bail or wangles a writ.

***Call me—D.P.

Lloyd didn't bother to shave or shower or change clothes. Still wearing his B & E outfit, he drove straight to a liquor store. As he recalled, Hubert Douglas was a bonded sourmash fiend. A pint of Jack Daniel's seemed like the ticket to soothe his soul and loosen his tongue. After purchasing the bottle, he raced downtown to Parker Center.

Hubert Douglas was being held in an interrogation cubicle adjoining Fred Gaffaney's office. Lloyd looked through the one-way glass and saw him sitting across a table from the captain, dressed in security guard's uniform replete with gold epaulets and a Sam Browne belt. A loudspeaker about the window crackled with his story of Come-San-Chin, the Chinese cocksucker. Gaffaney listened with his head bowed, fingering his cross-and-flag tie bar.

Lloyd walked in the door just as Douglas delivered his punch line and doubled over with laughter, slapping the table and exclaiming, “Dig it! Dig it!” Seeing Lloyd, he said, “Hopkins, my man!” and got up and extended his hand. Lloyd took it and said, “Hello, Hubert. My colleagues treating you okay?”

Douglas nodded toward Gaffaney, who looked up and glared at Lloyd. “This joker keeps asking me questions. I keep tellin' him I'll talk to you, and he keeps tellin' me you out of touch, the heavy implication bein' that you out pourin' the pork somewhere. I know my rights. I been in custody almost twenty-four hours. You gots to arraign me within twenty-four hours or cut me loose.”

Lloyd looked at Gaffaney, then back at Douglas. “Wrong, Hubert. This is Saturday. We can legally hold you until Monday morning. Have a seat. I'll be back to talk to you after I have a few words with the captain.”

Gaffaney got up and followed Lloyd outside. Measuring him with disdainful eyes, he said, “You need a shave and your clothes are filthy. Where have you been?”

“Out pulling burglaries,” Lloyd said. “What's with Hubert?”

Gaffaney pushed the cubicle door shut. “I was at Junior Miss Cosmetics, along with an aide. We were talking to Dan Murray in his office. We had just gotten word that Christie was checking out the classified file section at Avonoco several hours before he was shot. Since my instincts regarding Murray's behavior told me he was clean, I mentioned it. Douglas was washing windows in the next room. My aide thought he looked hinky and cop-wise, so he kept an eye on him. He bolted when the conversation turned to files. My aide caught him with a big bag of weed in his pocket. He
knows
something, Hopkins. Get it out of him.”

Lloyd let his mental wheels spin. “Captain, have you thrown the name Thomas Goff at that D.M.V. operator who called in about Christie?”

“Yes. I talked to her myself. She said that Goff was
not
the name she dug up for Christie. I also gave her the license number and a description of Goff's vehicle. Negative on that too. What do you—”

Lloyd hushed the captain with a hand on his shoulder. “Has Douglas seen the mug shots of Goff?”

“No.”

“Then get me a copy of them now, and run me a complete all-police computer check on this name—Richard Brian Oldfield, white male, about thirty. Four-one-oh-nine Winder-mere, Hollywood. White Mercedes, FHM-three-six-three. He's clean on wants and warrants, but I need all the details I can get.”

Gaffaney nodded, then said, “What are you fishing for?”

“I'll tell you after I've spoken to Douglas. Will you get me those mug shots now?”

The Captain walked into his office, flushing from his neck all the way up to his crewcut. Returning to Lloyd and handing him the mug-shot strip, he hissed, “Don't make Douglas any promises of leniency.”

Lloyd gave his superior officer a guileless smile. “No, sir.” When Gaffaney walked back to his office, he entered the cubicle and flipped off the loudspeaker. “Let's make a deal,” he said to Hubert Douglas, placing the pint of Jack Daniel's on the table between them. “Tell me what I want to know, and you walk. Fuck me around, and I hotfoot it up to Narco Division and glom a pound of reefer to add to the bag the I.A.D. bulls took off you, making it a felony possession bust. What'll it be?”

Douglas grabbed the bottle and downed half of it in one gulp. “Do I look stupid, Hopkins?”

“No, you look intelligent and handsome and full of
savoir-faire.
Let's accomplish this with a minumum of bullshit and jive. The I.A.D. bulls think that you have some guilty knowledge regarding the classified files at Junior Miss. Let's take it from there.”

Douglas coughed and breathed bourbon in Lloyd's face. “But what if that there guilty knowledge involves coppin' to some illegal shit I pulled?”

“You still walk.”

“No shit, Dick Tracy?”

“If I'm lyin', I'm flyin'. Talk, Hubert.”

Douglas knocked back a drink and wiped his lips. “‘Bout three weeks ago I was drinkin' in a juke joint down the street from Junior Miss. This paddy dude starts a conversation with me, asks me if I like workin' security at Junior Miss, what my duties was, how tight I was in with the security boss, that kind of rebop. He buys me drinks up the ying yang, gets me righteously lubed, then splits. I ain't no dummy, I knows this dude and I ain't seen the last of each other.”

Douglas paused and grabbed the bottle. Lloyd snatched it out of his hand before he could bring it to his lips. Placing the mugshot strip on the table, he said, “Is this the man?”

Douglas stared at the photos and grinned from ear to ear. “Righteous. That's the dude. What kind of shit did he pull?”

“Never mind. Finish your story.”

Casting sad eyes at the pint, Douglas said, “I was right. The dude shows up the very next day, and offers to get me coked. We toot some righteous pharmaceutical blow in the john, then he starts talkin' about this righteous smart fuckin' buddy of his, how the guy was fuckin' obsessed with fuckin'
data,
you know, obsessed with knowin' the fuckin' skinny on other peoples lives. You dig?”

“I dig,” Lloyd said. “Did he tell you the man's name? Did he describe him? Did he say that the man was his half-brother?”

Douglas shook his head. “The fucker didn't even tell me his own fuckin' name, let alone the name of his fuckin' buddy. But dig, that day he makes his pitch: one K and two grams of pharmacy blow for Xerox copies of all the classified files. I tell him it's gonna take time, I gotta make them copies a couple at a time, on the sly. So I does it, without Murray or anyone else at Junior Miss knowin' about it. The dude calls me at the bar to set the tr—”

Lloyd interrupted: “Did he give you an address or a phone number where he could be reached?”

“Fuck, no! He kept callin' himself a ‘justified paranoid' and said that he covered his tracks when he took a fuckin' piss, just to stay in fuckin' practice. He wouldn't even call me at my fuckin' crib; it had to be the fuckin' bar. Anyways, we sets up the trade-off, last week sometime, Tuesday or Wednesday night, and man, it was righteously fuckin' strange. Kick loose with that jug, will you, homeboy? I'm thirsty.”

Lloyd slid the bottle across the table. “Tell me about the trade-off. Take it slow and be very specific.”

Douglas guzzled half of the remaining whiskey. “Righteous. Anyway, I been observin' the dude, and to my mind he seems like he ain't wound together too tight. You know, this seems to be a dude that you might wanta call seriously nervous and itchy. We sets up the meet for Nichols Canyon Park, at night. The dude shows up in his little yellow car, lookin' sweaty, shaky and bug-eyed, lookin' like a righteous fuckin' rabid dog lookin' to die, but lookin' to get in a few righteous fuckin' bites before he goes. He kept grabbin' at himself like he was packin' a roscoe and he kept baitin' me with all this racist shit. Hopkins, this fucker looked like righteous fuckin'
death.
I gave him the files and he gave me the K and the blow and I got the fuck out fast. I don't know what the fucker done, but I wouldn't worry too much about catchin' him, because no fuckin' human bein' can look like that and fuckin' survive. I been to Nam, Hopkins. Righteous fuckin' Khe Sahn. I seen lots of death. This fucker looked worse than the terminal yellow jaundice battle fatigue walkin' dead over there. He was righteous fuckin' death on a popsicle stick.”

Lloyd let the barrage of words settle in on him, knowing that they confirmed Thomas Goff's Melbourne Avenue horror show, and
possibly
the killing of Howard Christie; but that they somehow contradicted the revelation of Richard Oldfield and his sibling rivalry with Goff. He said, “Kill the jug, Hubert, you've earned it,” and walked out into the hallway. A secretary passed him and said, “Captain Gaffaney went to lunch, Sergeant. He left your query reply with the duty officer.”

Lloyd thanked the woman and nonchalantly walked into Gaffaney's office. A plastic bag of marijuana tagged with an official evidence sticker was lying on his desk. He pulled off the sticker and put it in his pocket, then opened the window and hurled the bag out into the middle of Los Angeles Street, where it came to rest in the bed of a passing Dodge pickup.

“Support your local police,” Lloyd called out. When only traffic noise answered him, he walked by the interrogation cubicle and gave Hubert Douglas the thumbs up sign. Douglas grinned through the open doorway and raised his empty pint in farewell.

Lloyd took the elevator down to the first floor and walked to the front information desk. The duty officer did a double-take on his outfit and handed him a slip of paper. He leaned against the desk and read: Subject D.O.B. 6/30/53, L.A. Calif. driv. lic. # 1679143, issued 7/69, no moving violations; no wants, warrants or record in Cont. U.S.
squeaky clean
-F.G.

Lloyd felt nameless little clicks assail him. He put his mind through a twenty-four hour instant replay until he hit the source of his confusion: Thomas Goff was born and raised and sent to prison in New York State. Havilland's psychiatric report on his half-brother Richard Oldfield stated that their mother raised the two boys together, presumably in New York. Yet this computer run-through fixed Oldfield's place of birth as Los Angeles. Also, Oldfield was issued a California driver's license in 1969, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, which at least
hinted
at long-term California residency.

Lloyd grabbed the desk phone and dialed Dutch's office number at the Hollywood Station.

“Captain Peltz speaking.”

“It's me, Dutch. You busy?”

“Where the hell have you been? Did you get my memo?”

“Yeah, I got it. Listen, I need your help. Two-man stakeout on a pad near the Hollywood Bowl. It's got to be very cool, no unmarked units, nothing that smacks of heat. I don't want to approach this guy just yet; I only want him pinned.”

“
This guy?
Who the hell is
this guy
?”

“I'll tell you about him when I see you. Can you meet me at my place in an hour? I want to change clothes and grab my civilian wheels.”

Dutch sighed. “I've got a meeting in half an hour. Make it two hours.”

Lloyd sighed back. “Deal.”

Driving home, his little clicks worked themselves into the tapestry of the case, assuming the shape of a man who might or might not be Richard Oldfield; a man adept at manipulating
violent men
in order to achieve his purpose, which now emerged as the accruing of potential blackmail knowledge. Fact: Jack Herzog had stolen six L.A.P.D. Personnel files for his
personal
aim of “vindicating” Marty Bergen, and had told his girlfriend that he was “really scared” in the days before his disappearance/murder/suicide. Bergen considered his best friend's attempt at vindication ridiculous and had destroyed the columns the files had inspired. Yet, Thomas Goff and/or his still unknown “hotshot,” “really smart” accomplice/partner, had used the L.A.P.D. information to cunningly circumvent Captain Dan Murray, wresting confidential file copies from his stooge Hubert Douglas,
killing
Lieutenant Howard Christie, probably for his refusal to deliver the files or on the basis of his demands for exorbitant amounts of money. This evidential and theoretical narrative line was cohesive and arrow straight.

But it contradicted most of his instincts regarding Thomas Goff. Goff was obsessed with his .41 revolver. He had used it on the three liquor store victims, a crime
still lacking a motive;
he had fired it at Lloyd himself, its single-action clumsiness giving him away.
Yet
… Howard Christie was killed with his own gun. Goff, assuming he was the killer, had eschewed a violent pattern in a time of stress, grabbing a weapon from a seasoned police officer, then shooting him with it.
It didn't wash.
The Christie job had the earmarks of a killing perpetrated by a novice, someone who had lulled the cop/security chief into considering him harmless—not the fever- or dope-driven Goff.

This left four potential suspects—Herzog, Havilland, Bergen, and Oldfield. The first three were ridiculous prospects: Herzog was a ninty-nine percent sure dead man; Havilland a love- and conscience-struck coincidental link with no motives; Bergen a pathetic, guilt-ridden drunk. Only Oldfield remained, and even he was shot full of logical holes.