Because the Night by James Ellroy Read Free Book Online Page A

interruption. “Let me finish. Your foster parents caught you laughing over the photographs and punished you? It was never the same with them after that?”
    â€œYes,” Linda said.
    The Doctor circled his office again, running light finger-tips over the oak walls. “A few more questions, then we’ll end the session. Is the type of man—of customer—that you’re attracted to large and physical, possessed of intelligence and breeding but also possessed of a certain aura of violence?”
    Linda’s whisper was astonished. “Yes.”
    Havilland smiled. “World-class progress in one session. Does the day after tomorrow—Friday—suit you for our next one? Say ten-thirty?”
    Linda Wilhite stood up, surprised to find her legs steady. She smoothed the front of her dress and said, “Yes. I’ll be here. Thank you.”
    Havilland took her arm and walked her to his outer office door. “It was my pleasure.”
    After Linda Wilhite was gone, the Doctor, armed with her image and facts from Goff’s reconnaissance, turned off the lights and played the time-travel game.
    When Linda was two and living in a San Pedro dive with her white-trash parents, he was twelve and gaining clandestine access to wealthy homes in Bronxville and Scarsdale, New York, exorcising his nocturnal heart by delivering himself to the quiet muse of other peoples’ dwellings, sometimes stealing, sometimes not.…
    When Linda was fourteen and sexually experimenting with surfer morons in Huntington Beach, he was twenty-four and graduating from Harvard Medical School at the top of his class, the legendary Doctor John the Night Tripper, the genius dope chemist/abortionist who held instructors rapt with his digressions on the theories of Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Havelock Ellis.…
    When Linda was growing into her exquisite beauty in a series of foster homes, filled with wonder at her parents’ deaths and the apostasy that their bloodletting had spawned, he—
    The Time Machine screeched, shuddered, and ground to a halt. A green door opened to reveal a man in a gray uniform standing beside a salmon-pink ‘fifty-six Ford Victoria ragtop. Little girls in party dresses thronged the car, and just before it exploded into flames they turned to point and laugh at him.
    The Night Tripper walked to the wall and turned on the light, seeking confirmation. He found it in glass-encased tributes; framed diplomas from New York University and Harvard Med and St. Vincent and Castleford Hospitals—parchment that spelled out plainly that he was the best. The dates on them told him why the Time Machine had malfunctioned. Linda was powerful. Linda had sustained a catastrophe as he had and required that he juxtapose his story against hers from the beginning.…
    1956. Scarsdale, New York. Johnny Havilland, age eleven, known as “Spaz,” “Wimpdick,” and “Shitstick.” Sherry-guzzling mother with the inbred look indigenous to high-line Wasps who have never had to work for a living; big bucks father, a hunter whose shotgun volleys have decimated the varmint population of six New York counties. Johnny hates school; Johnny hates to play ball; Johnny loves to dream and listen to music on his portable radio.
    Johnny’s father considers him a wimp and decrees a rite to prompt his manhood: Shoot the family’s senile golden retriever. Johnny refuses and is sent by his father to a “training school” run by an extremist sect of nuns. The nuns lock Johnny in a basement full of rats, with no food or water and only a shovel for protection. Two days go by. Johnny huddles in a corner and screams himself hoarse as the rats nip at his legs. On the third day he falls asleep on the floor and wakes up to find a large rat scampering off with a chunk of his lip. Johnny screams, picks up the shovel and beats every rat in the basement to death.
    Johnny’s father takes him home