The Black Dahlia

Twenty-nine

For a month she held me in a tight velvet fist.

Emmett, Ramona and Martha were spending June at the family’s beach house in Orange County, leaving Madeleine to look after the Muirfield Road estate. We had twenty-two rooms to play in, a dream house built from immigrant ambition. It was a big improvement over the Red Arrow Motel and Lee Blanchard’s monument to bank robbery and murder.

Madeleine and I made love in every bedroom, tearing loose every silk sheet and brocade coverlet, surrounded by Piscassos and Dutch masters and Ming Dynasty vases worth hundreds of grand. We slept in the late mornings and early afternoons before I headed for niggertown; the looks I got from her neighbors when I walked to my car in full uniform were priceless.

It was a reunion of avowed tramps, rutters who knew that they’d never have it as good with anyone else. Madeleine explained her Dahlia act as a strategy to get me back; she had seen me parked in my car that night, and knew that a Betty Short seduction would keep me returning. The desire behind it moved me even as the elaborateness of the ruse elicted revulsion.

She dropped the look the second the door shut that first time. A quick rinse brought her hair back to its normal dark brown, the pageboy cut returned, the tight black dress came off. I tried everything but threats of leaving and begging; Madeleine kept me mollified with “Maybe some day.” Our implicit compromise was Betty talk.

I asked questions, she digressed. We exhausted actual facts quickly; from then on it was pure interpretation.

Madeleine spoke of her utter malleability, Betty the chameleon who would be anyone to please anybody. I had her down as the center of the most baffling piece of detective work the Department had ever seen, the disrupter of most of the lives close to me, the human riddle I had to know everything about. That was my final perspective, and it felt bone shallow.

After Betty, I turned the conversation to the Spragues themselves. I never told Madeleine that I knew Jane Chambers, broaching Jane’s inside stuff in roundabout ways. Madeleine said that Emmett was mildly worried about the forthcoming demolitions up by the Hollywoodland sign; that her mother’s pageantry and love of strange books and medieval lore were nothing but “Hophead stuff — Mama with time on her hands and a snootful of patent medicine.” After a while, she came to resent my probes and demanded turnabout. I told lies and wondered where I would go if my own past was all I had left.

Thirty

Pulling up in front of the house, I saw a moving van in the driveway and Kay’s Plymouth, top down, packed with boxes. The run for clean uniforms was turning into something else.

I double-parked and bolted up the steps, smelling Madeleine’s perfume on myself. The van started backing out; I yelled, “Hey! Goddamn it, come back here!”

The driver ignored me; words from the porch kept me from going after him. “I didn’t touch your things. And you can have the furniture.”

Kay was wearing her Eisenhower jacket and tweed skirt, just like when I’d first met her. I said, “Babe,” and started to ask “Why?” My wife counterpunched: “Did you think I’d let my husband vanish for three weeks and do nothing about it? I’ve had detectives following you, Dwight. She looks like that fucking dead girl, so you can have her — not me.”

Kay’s dry eyes and calm voice were worse than what she was saying. I felt shakes coming on, bad heebie-jeebies. “Babe, goddamn it—”

Kay backed out of grabbing range. “Whoremonger. Coward. Necrophile.”

The shakes got worse; Kay turned and made for her car, a deft little pirouette out of my life. I caught another scent of Madeleine and walked into the house.

The bentwood furniture looked the same, but there were no literary quarterlies on the coffee table and no cashmere sweaters folded in the dining room cabinet. The cushions on my couch-bed were neatly arrayed, like I’d never slept there. My phonograph was still by the fireplace, but all Kay’s records were gone.

I picked up Lee’s favorite chair and threw it at the wall; I hurled Kay’s rocker at the cabinet, reducing it to glass rubble. I upended the coffee table and rammed it into the front window, then tossed it out on the porch. I kicked the rugs into sloppy piles, pulled out drawers, tipped over the refrigerator and took a hammer to the bathroom sink, smashing it loose from the pipes. It felt like going ten rounds full blast; when my arms were too limp to inflict more damage I grabbed my uniforms and my silencer .45 and got out, leaving the door open so scavengers could pick the place clean.

With the other Spragues due back in LA anyday, there was only one place to go. I drove to the El Nido, badged the desk clerk and told him he had a new tenant. He forked over an extra room key; seconds later I was smelling Russ Millard’s stale cigarette smoke and Harry Sears’ spilled rye. And I was eyeball to eyeball with Elizabeth Short on all four walls: alive and smiling, dumbstruck with cheap dreams, vivisected in a weedy vacant lot.

And without even saying it to myself, I knew what I was going to do.

I removed the file cases from the bed, stacked them in the closet and ripped off the sheets and blankets. The Dahlia photos were nailed to the wall; it was easy to drape the bedding over them so that they were completely covered. The pad perfect, I went prowling for props.

I found a jet-black upswept wig at Western Costume, a yellow barrette at a dime store on the Boulevard. The heebie-jeebies came back — worse than bad. I drove to the Firefly Lounge, hoping it still had Hollywood Vice’s sanction.

One eyeball circuit inside told me it did. I sat down at the bar, ordered a double Old Forester and stared at the girls congregating on a matchbook-size bandstand. Footlights set in the floor shined up at them; they were the only thing in the dump illuminated.

I downed my drink. They all looked typical — hophead whores in cheap slit kimonos. Counting five heads, I watched the girls smoke cigarettes and adjust their slits to show more leg. None was anywhere near close.

Then a skinny brunette in a flouncy cocktail dress stepped onto the bandstand. She blinked at the glare, scratched her pert button nose and toed figure eights on the floor.

I hooked a finger at the bartender. He came over with the bottle; I held a palm over my glass. “The girl in the pink. How much to take her to my place for an hour or so?”

The barman sighed. “Mister, we’ve got three rooms here. The girls don’t like—”

I shut him up with a crisp new fifty. “You’re making an exception for me. Be generous with yourself.”

The fifty disappeared, then the man himself. I filled my glass and downed it, eyes on the bartop until I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Hi, I’m Lorraine.”

I turned around. Close up she could have been any pretty brunette — perfect molding clay. “Hi, Lorraine. I’m... B-B-Bill.”

The girl snickered, “Hi, Bill. You wanna go now?”

I nodded; Lorraine walked outside ahead of me. Straight daylight showed off the runs in her nylons and old needle scars on her arms. When she got in the car I saw that her eyes were dull brown; when she drummed her fingers on the dashboard I saw that her closest link to Betty was chipped nail polish.

It was enough.

We drove to the El Nido and walked up to the room without saying a word. I opened the door and stood aside to let Lorraine enter; she rolled her eyes at the gesture, then gave a low whistle to let me know the place was a dive. I locked the door behind us, unwrapped the wig and handed it to her. “Here. Take off your clothes and put this on.”

Lorraine did an inept strip. Her shoes clunked on the floor, she snagged her nylons pulling them off. I made a move to unzip her dress, but she saw it coming, turned away and did it herself. With her back to me, she unhooked her bra, stepped out of her panties and fumbled with the wig. Facing me, she said, “This your idea of a big thrill?”

The coiffure was askew, like a gag rug on a vaudeville comic; only her breasts were a good match. I took off my jacket and started to work at my belt. Something in Lorraine’s eyes stopped me; I snapped that she was afraid of my gun and handcuffs. I got the urge to calm her down by telling her down by telling her I was a cop — then the look made her seem more like Betty, and I stopped.

The girl said, “You won’t hurt—”; I said, “Don’t talk,” and straightened the wig, bunching her lank brown hair up inside it. The fit was still all wrong, whorish and out of kilter. Lorraine was shaking now; head-to-toe shivers as I stuck the yellow barrette into the coif to make things right. All it did was rip loose strands of black as dry as straw and tilt everything off to one side, like the girl was the slash mouth clown, not my Betty.

I said, “Lie down on the bed.” The girl complied, legs rigid and pressed together, hands underneath her, a skinny length of tics and twitches. Prone, the wig was half on her head, half on the pillow. Knowing the pictures on the wall would spark perfection, I pulled off the sheets covering them.

I stared at portrait-perfect Betty/Beth/Liz; the girl screamed, “No!” Killer! Police!”

Wheeling around, I saw a naked fraud transfixed by 39th and Norton. I hurled myself onto the bed, pressed my hands over her mouth and held her down, talking it right and perfect: “It’s just that she has all these different names to be, and this woman won’t be her for me, and I can’t be just anybody like her, and every time I try I fuck it up, and my friend went crazy because his little sister might have been her if somebody didn’t kill her—”

“KILL—”

The wig in disarray on the bedspread.

My hands on the girl’s neck.

I let go and stood up slowly, palms out, no harm meant. The girl’s vocal cords stretched, but she couldn’t come up with a sound. She rubbed her throat where my hands had been, the imprint still bright red. I backed off to the far wall, unable to talk.

Mexican standoff.

The girl massaged her throat; something like ice came into her eyes. She got off the bed and put on her clothes facing me, the ice getting colder and deeper. It was a look I knew I couldn’t match, so I got out my ID buzzer held up LAPD badge 1611 for her to see. She smiled; I tried to imitate her, she walked up to me and spat on the piece of tin. The door slammed, the pictures on the wall fluttered, my voice came back in racking fits, “I’ll get him for you, he won’t hurt you anymore, I’ll make it up to you, oh Betty Jesus fuck I will.”

Thirty-one

The airplane flew east, slicing through cloud banks and bright blue sky. My pockets were stuffed with cash from my all but liquidated bank account, Lieutenant Getchell had bought my line about a grievously ill high school pal in Boston and had granted me a week’s accumulated sick leave. A stack of notes from the Boston PD’s background check was on my lap — laboriously copied from the El Nido file. I already had an interrogation itinerary printed out, aided by the metropolitan Boston street atlas I’d purchased at the LA airport. When the plane landed, it would be Medford/Cambridge/Stoneham and Elizabeth Short’s past — the part that didn’t get smeared across page one.

I’d hit the master file yesterday afternoon, as soon as I quit shaking and was able to put how close I’d gotten to havoc out of my brain — at least the front part of it. One quick skimming told me that the LA end of the investigation was dead, a second and third told me it was deader, a fourth convinced me that if I stayed in town I’d go batshit over Madeleine and Kay. I had to run, and if my vow to Elizabeth Short was to mean anything, it had to be in her direction. And if it was a wild-goose chase, then at least it was a trip to clean territory — where my badge and live women wouldn’t get me into trouble.

The revulsion on the hooker’s face wouldn’t leave me; I could still smell her cheap perfume and imagined her spitting indictments, the same words Kay had used earlier that day, only worse — because she knew what I was: a whore with a badge. Thinking about her was like scraping the bottom of my life on my knees — the only comfort in it the fact that I couldn’t go any lower — that I’d chew the muzzle of my .38 first.

The plane landed at 7:35; I was the first in line to disembark, notebook and satchel in hand. There was a car rental place in the terminal; I rented a Chevy coupe and headed into the Boston metropolis, anxious to take advantage of the hour or so of daylight left.

My itinerary included the addresses of Elizabeth’s mother, two of her sisters, her high school, a Harvard Square hash house where she slung plates in ’42 and the movie theater where she worked as a candy girl in ’39 and ’40. I decided on a loop through Boston to Cambridge, then Medford — Betty’s real stomping ground.

Boston, quaint and old, hit me like a blur. I followed street signs to the Charles River Bridge and crossed over into Cambridge: ritzy Georgian pads and streets packed with college kids. More signs led me to Harvard Square; there was stop one — Otto’s Hofbrau, a gingerbread structure spilling the aroma of cabbage and beer.

I parked in a meter space and walked in. The Hansel and Gretel motif extended to the whole place — carved wood booths, beer steins lining the walls, waitresses in dirndl skirts. I looked around for the boss, my eyes settling on a smock-clad older man standing by the cash register.

I walked over, and something kept me from badging him. “Excuse me. I’m a reporter, and I’m writing a story on Elizabeth Short. I understand that she worked here back in ’42, and I thought you could tell me a little about her then.”

The man said, “Elizabeth who? She some sort of movie star?”

“She was killed in Los Angeles a few years ago. It’s a famous case. Do you—”

“I bought this place in ’46, and the only employee I got left from the war is Roz. Rozzie, come here! Man wants to talk to you!”

The battle-axe waitress of them all materialized — a baby elephant in a thigh-length skirt. The boss said, “This guy’s a reporter. Wants to talk to you about Elizabeth Short. You remember her?”

Rozzie popped her gum at me. “I told the Globe and the Sentinel and the cops the first time around, and I ain’t changing my story. Betsy Short was a dish dropper and a dreamer, and if she didn’t bring in so much Harvard business, she wouldn’t a lasted a day. I heard she put out for the war effort, but I didn’t know none of her boyfriends. End of story. And you ain’t no reporter, you’re a cop.”

I said, “Thank you for that perceptive comment,” and left.

My atlas placed Medford twelve miles away, a straight run out Massachusetts Avenue. I got there just as night was falling, smelling it first, then seeing it.

Medford was a factory town, smoke-belching foundry stacks forming its perimeter. I rolled up my window to hold off the sulfur stink; the industrial area dwindled into blocks of narrow red-brick houses crammed together with less than a foot between them. Every block had at least two gin mills, and when I saw Swasey Boulevard — the street the movie theater was on — I opened my wind wing to see if the foundry stench was dissipating. It wasn’t — and the windshield was already bearing a film of greasy soot.

I found the Majestic a few blocks down, a typical Medford red-brick building, the marquee heralding Criss Cross with Burt Lancaster and Duel in the Sun — “All Star Cast.” The ticket booth was empty, so I walked straight into the theater and up to the snack stand. The man behind it said, “Anything wrong, officer?” I groaned that the locals had my number — three thousand miles from home.

“No, nothing’s wrong. Are you the manager?”

“The owner. Ted Carmody. You BPD?”

I reluctantly displayed my shield. “Los Angeles Police Department. It’s about Beth Short.”

Ted Carmody crossed himself. “Poor Lizzie. You got some hot leads? That why you’re here?”

I put a nickel on the counter, grabbed a Snickers bar and unwrapped it. “Let’s just say I owe Betty one, and I’ve got a few questions.”

“Ask on.”

“First off, I’ve seen the Boston Police background check file, and your name wasn’t listed on the interview sheet. Didn’t they talk to you?”

Carmody handed me back my nickel. “On the house, and I didn’t talk to the Boston cops because they talked Lizzie up like she was some sort of tramp. I don’t cooperate with badmouthers.”

“That’s admirable, Mr. Carmody. But what would you have told them?”

“Nothing dirty, that’s for damn sure. Lizzie was all aces to me. If the cops had been properly respectful of the dead, I’d have told ’em that.”

The man was exhausting me. “I’m a respectful guy. Pretend that it’s two years ago and tell me.”

Carmody couldn’t quite peg my style, so I chomped the candy bar to ease him into some slack. “I’d have told ’em Lizzie was a bad worker,” he said finally. “And I’d have told ’em I didn’t care. She brought the boys in like a magnet, and if she kept sneaking in to watch the picture, so what? For fifty cents an hour I didn’t expect her to slave for me.”

I said, “What about her boyfriends?”

Carmody slammed the counter; Jujubees and Milk Duds toppled over. “Lizzie wasn’t no roundheels! The only boyfriend I knew she had was this blind guy, and I knew it was just palship. Listen, you want to know what kind of kid Lizzie was? I’ll tell you. I used to let the blind guy in for free, so he could listen to the picture, and Lizzie kept sneaking in to tell him what was on the screen. You know, describe it to him. That sound like tramp behavior to you?”

It felt like a punch to the heart. “No, it doesn’t. Do you remember the guy’s name?”

“Tommy something. He’s got a room over the VFW Hall down the block, and if he’s a killer I’ll flap my arms and fly to Nantucket.”

I stuck out my hand. “Thanks for the candy bar, Mr. Carmody.”

We shook. Carmody said, “You get the guy who killed Lizzie, I’ll buy you the factory that makes the goddamn things.”

As I said the words, I knew it was one of the finest moments of my life:

“I will.”

The VFW Hall was across the street and down from the Majestic, yet another red-brick structure streaked with soot. I walked there thinking of blind Tommy as a big washout, someone I had to talk to to soften up Betty, make her live more easily in me.

Side steps took me upstairs, past a mailbox labeled T. GILFOYLE. Ringing the bell, I heard music; looking in the one window I saw pitch darkness. Then a soft male voice came from the other side of the door. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Los Angeles Police, Mr. Gilfoyle. It’s about Elizabeth Short.”

Light hit the window, the music died. The door opened, and a tall pudgy man wearing dark glasses pointed me inside. He was immaculate in striped sportshirt and slacks, but the room was a pigsty, dust and grime everywhere, an army of bugs scattering from the unaccustomed blast of brightness.

Tommy Gilfoyle said, “My Braille teacher read me the LA papers. Why did they say such nasty things about Beth?”

I tried diplomacy. “Because they didn’t know her like you did.”

Tommy smiled and plopped into a ratty chair. “Is the apartment really disreputable?”

The couch was littered with phonograph records; I scooped a handful aside and sat down. “It could use a lick and a promise.”

“I get slothful sometimes. Is Beth’s investigation active again? Priority stuff?”

“No, I’m here on my own. Where did you pick up the cop lingo?”

“I have a policeman friend.”

I brushed a fat bug off my sleeve. “Tommy, tell me about you and Beth. Give me something that didn’t make the papers. Something good.”

“Is this personal with you? Like a vendetta?”

“It’s more than that.”

“My friend said policemen who take their work personally get in trouble.”

I stomped a cockroach exploring my shoe. “I just want to get the bastard.”

“You don’t have to yell. I’m blind, not deaf, and I wasn’t blind to Beth’s little faults, either.”

“How so?”

Tommy fingered the cane by his chair. “Well, I won’t dwell on it, but Beth was promiscuous, just like the newspapers implied. I knew the reason, but I kept still because I didn’t want to disgrace her memory, and I knew that it wouldn’t help the police find her killer.”

The man was wheedling now, caught between wanting to kick loose and keep secrets. I said, “You let me judge that. I’m an experienced detective.”

“At your age? I can tell by your voice that you’re young. My friend said that to make detective you have to serve at least ten years on the force.”

“Goddamn it, don’t dick me around. I came here on my own and I didn’t come to—”

I stopped when I saw that the man was frightened, one hand going for the telephone. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day, and I’m a long way from home.”

Tommy surprised me by smiling. “I’m sorry, too. I was just being coy to prolong the company, and that’s rude. So I’ll tell you about Beth, her little foibles and all.

“You probably know she was star-struck, and that’s true. You probably guessed that she didn’t have much talent, and that’s true, too. Beth read plays to me — acting all the parts, and she was a terrible ham — just awful. I understand the spoken word, so believe me, I know.

“What Beth was good at was writing. I used to sit in on movies at the Majestic, and Beth used to describe things so I’d have something to go with the dialogue. She was brilliant, and I encouraged her to write for the movies, but she just wanted to be an actress like every other silly girl who wanted to get out of Medford.”

I would have committed mass murder to get out. “Tommy, you said you know the reason Beth was promiscuous.”

Tommy sighed. “When Beth was sixteen or seventeen, these two thugs assaulted her, somewhere in Boston. One actually raped her, and the other was going to, but a sailor and a marine came by and chased them away.

“Beth thought the man might have made her pregnant, so she went to a doctor for an examination. He told her she had benign ovarian cysts, that she’d never be able to have children. Beth went crazy, because she’d always wanted lots of babies. She looked up the sailor and marine who’d saved her, and she begged them to father her child. The marine turned her down, and the sailor... he used Beth until he was shipped overseas.”

I thought immediately of Frenchman Joe Dulange — his account of the Dahlia hipped on being pregnant, how he fixed her up with a “doctor buddy” and a bogus exam. That part of Dulange’s story obviously wasn’t as booze-addled as Russ Millard and I had originally thought — it was now a solid lead on Betty’s missing days, the “doctor buddy” at least a major witness, maybe a major suspect. I said, “Tommy, do you know the names of the sailor and marine? The doctor?”

Tommy shook his head. “No. But that was when Beth became so loose with servicemen. She thought they were her saviors, that they could give her a child, a little girl to be a great actress in case she never made it. It’s sad, but the only place I heard Beth was a great actress was in bed.”

I stood up. “What happened with you and Beth then?”

“We lost touch. She left Medford.”

“You’ve given me a good lead, Tommy. Thanks.”

The blind man tapped his cane at the sound of my voice. “Then get who did it, but don’t let Beth get hurt anymore.”

“I won’t.”

Thirty-two

The Short case was hot again — if only with me.

Hours of Medford pub crawling gave me promiscuous Betty, East Coast style — a big anticlimax after Tommy Gilfoyle’s revelations. I caught a midnight flight back to LA and called Russ Millard from the airport. He agreed: Frenchman Joe’s “roach doctor” was probably legit, independent of Dulange’s DTs. He proposed a call to the Fort Dix CID to try to get more details from the discharged loony, then a three-man canvassing of downtown doctor’s offices, concentrating on the area around the Havana Hotel, where Dulange coupled with Betty. I suggested that the “doctor” was most likely a barfly, an abortionist or a quack; Russ concurred. He said he would talk to R&I and his snitches, and he and Harry Sears would be knocking on doors inside of an hour. We divvied up the territory: Figueroa to Hill, 6th Street to 9th Street for me; Figueroa to Hill, 5th to 1st for them. I hung up and drove straight downtown.

I stole a Yellow Pages and made a list: legitimate MD’s and chiropractors, herb pushers and mystics — bloodsuckers who sold religion and patent medicine under the “doctor” aegis. The book had a few listings for obstetricians and gynocologists, but instinct told me that Joe Dulange’s doctor ploy was happenstance — not the result of his consciously seeking a specialist to calm Betty down. Running on adrenaline, I worked.

I caught most of the doctors early in their day, and got the widest assortment of sincere denials I’d ever encountered as a cop. Every solid citizen croaker I talked to convinced me a little bit more that Frenchy’s pal had to be at least a little bit hinky. After a wolfed sandwich lunch, I hit the quasi types.

The herb loonies were all Chinese; the mystics were half women, half squarejohn lames. I believed all of their bewildered no’s; I pictured all of them too terrified by the Frenchman to consider his offer. I was about to start hitting bars for scuttlebutt on barfly docs when exhaustion hit me. I drove “home” to the El Nido and slept — for all of twenty minutes.

Too itchy to try sleep again, I tried thinking logically. It was 6:00, doctors’ offices were closing for the day, the bars wouldn’t be ripe for canvassing for at least three hours. Russ and Harry would call me if they got something hot. I reached for the master file and started reading.

Time flew; names, dates and locations in police jargon kept me awake. Then I saw something that I’d perused a dozen times before, only this time it seemed off.

It was two memo slips:

With Betty’s movie mania fresh in my mind, the memos looked different. I remembered Russ telling me that he was going to query Meeks, the Hughes security boss and the Department’s “unofficial liaison” to the Hollywood community; I recalled that this was during the time when Ellis Loew was suppressing evidence on Betty’s promiscuity in order to secure himself a better prosecuting attorney’s showcase. Also: Betty’s little black book listed a number of lower-echelon movie people — names that were checked out during the ’47 black book interrogations.

The big question:

If Meeks really had checked around, why didn’t he come up with at least a few of the black book names and forward them to Russ and Harry?

I went out to the hall, got the Hughes Security number from the White Pages and dialed it. A singsong woman answered: “Security. May I help you?”

“Buzz Meeks, please.”

“Mr. Meeks is out of his office right now. Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Detective Bleichert, LAPD. When will he be back?”

“When the budget meeting breaks up. May I ask what this is in reference to?”

“Police business. Tell him I’ll be at his office in half an hour.”

I hung up and leadfooted it to Santa Monica in twenty-five minutes. The gate guard admitted me to the plant parking lot, pointing to the security office — a Quonset hut at the end of a long string of aircraft hangars. I parked and knocked on the door; the woman with the singsong voice opened it. “Mr. Meeks said you should wait in his office. He won’t be very long.”

I walked in; the woman left, looking relieved that her day’s work was over. The hut was wallpapered with paintings of Hughes aircraft, military art on a par with the drawings on cereal boxes. Meeks’ office was better decorated: photos of a burly crewcut man with various Hollywood hotshots — actresses I couldn’t place by name along with George Raft and Mickey Rooney.

I took a seat. The burly man showed up a few minutes later, hand out automatically, like someone whose job was ninety-five percent public relations. “Hello there. Detective Blyewell, is it?”

I stood up. We shook; I could tell that Meeks was put off by my two-day clothes and three-day beard. “It’s Bleichert.”

“Of course. What can I do for you?”

“I have a few questions about an old case you helped Homicide out with.”

“I see. You’re with the Bureau, then?”

“Newton Patrol.”

Meeks sat down behind his desk. “A little out of your bailiwick, aren’t you? And my secretary said you were a detective.”

I closed the door and leaned against it. “This is personal with me.”

“Then you’ll top out your twenty rousting nigger piss bums. Or hasn’t anyone told you that cops who take things personal end up from hunger?”

“They keep telling me, and I keep telling them that’s my hometown. You fuck a lot of starlets, Meeks?”

“I fucked Carole Lombard. I’d give you her number, but she’s dead.”

“Did you fuck Elizabeth Short?”

Tilt, bingo, jackpot, lie detector perfect as Meeks flushed and fingered the papers on his blotter; a wheezing voice to back it up: “You catch a few too many in the Blanchard fight? The Short cooze is dead.”

I pulled back my jacket to show Meeks the .45 I was carrying. “Don’t call her that again.”

“All right, tough guy. Now suppose you tell me what you want. Then we settle up and end this little charade before it gets out of hand. Comprende?”

“In ’47, Harry Sears asked you to query your movie contacts on Betty Short. You reported back that it was a washout. You were lying. Why?”

Meeks picked up a letter opener. He ran a finger along the blade, saw what he was doing and put it down. “I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did.”

“Convince me, or I call up Hedda Hopper and give her tomorrow’s column. How’s this sound: ‘Hollywood hanger-on suppressed Dahlia evidence because blank, blank, blank’? You fill in those blanks for me, or I fill them in for Hedda. Comprende?”

Meeks gave bravado another try. “Bleichert, you are fucking with the wrong man.”

I pulled out the .45, made sure the silencer was on tight and slid a round into the chamber. “No, you are.”

Meeks reached for a decanter on the sideboard by his desk; he poured himself a bracer and gulped it. “What I got was a dead-end lead, but you can have it if you want it so bad.”

I dangled my gun by the trigger guard. “From hunger, shitbird. So give it to me.”

Meeks opened up a safe built into his desk and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He studied them, then swiveled his chair and spoke to the wall. “I got a tip on Burt Lindscott, a producer at Universal. I got it from a guy who hated Lindscott’s pal Scotty Bennett. Scotty was a pimp and a bookie, and he gave out Lindscott’s home phone number in Malibu to all the good-looking young stuff who applied at the Universal casting office. The Short girl got one of Scotty’s cards, and she called Lindscott.

“The rest” the dates and so forth, I got from Lindscott himself. On the night of January tenth, the girl called from the Biltmore downtown. Burty had her describe herself, and he liked what he heard. He told the girl he’d give her a screen test in the morning, when he got back from a poker session at his club. The girl said she didn’t have any place to go until then, so Lindscott told her to come over and spend the night at his place — his houseboy would feed her and keep her company. She took a bus out to Malibu, and the houseboy — he was queer — did keep her company. Then, the next day around noon, Lindscott and three buddies of his came home drunk.

“The guys thought they’d have some fun, so they gave the girl this screen test, reading from a screenplay Burt had lying around. She was bad, and they laughed her out, then Lindscott made her an offer service the four of them and he’d give her a bit part in his next picture. The kid was still mad at them for laughing at her screen test, and she threw a tantrum. She called them draft dodgers and traitors and said they weren’t fit to be soldiers. Burt kicked her out around two-thirty that afternoon, Saturday the eleventh. The houseboy said she was broke and that she said she was gonna walk back downtown.”

So Betty walked, or hitched, twenty-five miles downtown, meeting Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby six hours or so later. I said, “Meeks, why didn’t you report this? And look at me.”

Meeks swiveled around; his features were smeared with shame. “I tried to get ahold of Russ and Harry, but they were out in the field, so I called Ellis Loew. He told me not to report what I’d found out, and he threatened to revoke my security clearance. Later on I found out that Lindscott was a Republican bigwig, and he’d promised Loew a bundle for his run at DA. Loew didn’t want him implicated with the Dahlia.”

I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the man; Meeks copped pleas while I ran pictures of Betty hooted at, propositioned, kicked out to die. “Bleichert, I checked out Lindscott and his houseboy and his buddies. These are legit depositions I’ve got — the megillah. None of them could have killed her. They were all at home and at their jobs from the twelfth straight through Friday the seventeenth. None of them could have done it, and I wouldn’t have sat on it if one of the bastards snuffed her. I’ve got the depositions right here, and I’ll show you.”

I opened my eyes; Meeks was twirling the dial of a wall safe. I said, “How much did Loew pay you to keep quiet?”

Meeks blurted, “A grand,” and backed off as if fearing a blow. I loathed him too much to give him the satisfaction of punishment, and left with his price tag hanging in the air.

I now had Elizabeth Short’s missing days halfway filled in:

Red Manley dropped her in front of the Biltmore at dusk on Friday, January tenth; she called Burt Lindscott from there, and her Malibu adventures lasted until 2:30 the following afternoon. She was back at the Biltmore that evening, Saturday the eleventh, met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the lobby, tricked with Johnny until shortly after midnight, then took off. She met Corporal Joseph Dulange then, or later in the morning, at the Night Owl Bar on 6th and Hill — two blocks from the Biltmore. She was with Dulange, there and at the Havana Hotel, until the afternoon or evening of Sunday, January twelfth, when he took her to see his “doctor buddy.”

Driving back to the El Nido, some missing piece of legwork nagged at me through my exhaustion. Passing a phone booth it came to me: if Betty called Lindscott in Malibu — a toll call — there would be a record with Pacific Coast Bell. If she made other toll calls, at that time or on the eleventh, before or after her coupling with Johnny Vogel, P.C.B. would have the information in its records — the company saved tallies of pay phone transactions for cost and price studies.

My fatigue nosedived once more. I took side streets the rest of the way, running stop signs and red lights; arriving, I parked in front of a hydrant and ran up to the room for a notebook. I was heading for the hallway phone when it foiled me by ringing.

“Yes?”

“Bucky? Sweet, is that you?”

It was Madeleine. “Look, I can’t talk to you now.”

“We had a date yesterday, remember?”

“I had to leave town. It was for work.”

“You could have called. If you hadn’t told me about this little hideaway of yours I’d have thought you were dead.”

“Madeleine, Jesus Christ—”

“Sweet, I need to see you. They’re tearing those letters off the Hollywoodland sign tomorrow, and demolishing some bungalows Daddy owns up there. Bucky, the deeds lapsed to the city, but Daddy bought that property and built those places under his own name. He used the worst materials, and an investigator from the City Council has been nosing around Daddy’s tax lawyers. One of them told him this old enemy of his who committed suicide left the Council a brief on Daddy’s holdings and—”

It sounded like gibberish — tough guy Daddy in trouble, tough boy Bucky the second choice for consolation duty. I said, “Look, I can’t talk to you now,” and hung up.

Now it was real detective shitwork. I arrayed my notebook and pen on the ledge by the phone and emptied a four-day accumulation of coins from my pockets, counting close to two dollars — enough for forty calls. First I called the night supervisor at Pacific Coast Bell, requesting a list of all toll and collect calls made from Biltmore Hotel pay phones on the evenings of January 10, 11, and 12, 1947; the names and addresses of the called parties and the times of the calls.

I stood nervously holding the receiver while the woman did her work, shooting dirty looks to other El Nido residents who wanted to use the phone. Then, a half hour later, she came back on the line and started talking.

The Lindscott number and address was there among the 1/10 listings, but nothing else that night registered as hinky. I wrote all the information down anyway; then, when the woman got to the evening of 1/11 — right around the time Betty met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby — I hit paydirt:

Four toll calls were made to obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills. I took down the names and numbers, along with the numbers for the doctors’ night answering services, and the immediately following toll call listings. They produced no sparks — but I copied them anyway. Then I attacked Beverly Hills with an arsenal of nickels.

It took all my change to get what I wanted.

I told the answering service operators it was a police emergency; they put me through to the doctors at home. They had their secretaries drive to the office to check their back records, then call me at the El Nido. The whole process took two hours. At the end of it I had this:

On the early evening of January 11, 1947, a “Mrs. Fickling” and a “Mrs. Gordon” called a total of four different obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills, requesting appointments for pregnancy testing. The after-hours service operators made appointments for the mornings of January 14 and 15. Lieutenant Joseph Fickling and Major Matt Gordon were two of the war heros Betty dated and pretended to be married to; the appointments were never kept because on the fourteenth she was getting tortured to death; on the fifteenth she was a mutilated pile of flesh at 39th and Norton.

I called Russ Millard at the Bureau; a vaguely familiar voice answered: “Homicide.”

“Lieutenant Millard, please.”

“He’s in Tucson extraditing a prisoner.”

“Harry Sears, too?”

“Yeah. How are you, Bucky? It’s Dick Cavanaugh.”

“I’m surprised you could place my voice.”

“Harry Sears told me you’d be calling. He left a list of doctors for you, but I can’t find it. That what you want?”

“Yeah, and I need to talk to Russ. When’s he coming back?”

“Late tomorrow, I think. Is there someplace I can call you if I find the list?”

“I’m rolling. I’ll call you.”

The other phone numbers had to be tried, but the obstetrician lead was too potent to sit on. I headed back downtown to look for Dulange’s doctor buddy, my exhaustion dropped like a hot rock.

I kept at it until midnight, concentrating on the bars around 6th and Hill, talking up barflies, buying them drinks, racking up booze rebop and a couple of tips on abortion mills that almost sounded legit.

Another sleepless day ended; I took to driving from bar to bar, playing the radio to keep from dozing off. The news kept droning on about the “milestone refurbishing” of the Holly-woodland sign — playing up the lopping off of L-A-N-D as the biggest thing since Jesus. Mack Sennett and his Hollywood-land tract got a lot of air time, and a theater in Hollywood was reviving a bunch of his old Keystone Kops pictures.

Toward bar-closing time, I felt like a Keystone Kop and looked like a bum — scraggly beard, soiled clothes, fevered attention that kept wandering off. When drunks eager for more booze and camaraderie began giving me the brush, I took it as a strong hint, drove to a deserted parking lot, pulled in and slept.

Leg cramps woke me up at dawn. I stumbled out of the car looking for a phone; a black-and-white cruised by, the driver giving me a long fisheye. I found a booth at the corner and dialed the padre’s number.

“Homicide Bureau. Sergeant Cavanaugh.”

“Dick, it’s Bucky Bleichert.”

“Just the man I wanted to talk to. I’ve got the list. You got the pencil?”

I dug out a pocket notebook. “Shoot.”

“Okay. These are licensed-revoked doctors. Harry said they were practicing downtown in ’47. One, Gerald Constanzo, 1841½ Breakwater, Long Beach. Two, Melvin Praeger, 9661 North Verdugo, Glendale. Three, Willis Roach. That’s Roach like in the bug, in custody at Wayside Honor Rancho, convicted of selling morph in...”

Dulange.

The DTs.

“So I take Dahlia down the street to see the roach doctor. I slip him a tensky, and he gives her a fake examination...”

Breathing shallowly, I said, “Dick, did Harry write down the address where Roach was practicing?”

“Yeah. 614 South Olive.”

The Havana Hotel was two blocks away. “Dick, call Wayside and tell the warden that I’ll be driving up immediately to question Roach on the Elizabeth Short homicide.”

“Mother dog.”

“Motherfucking dog.”

A shower, shave and change of clothes at the El Nido had me looking like a homicide detective; Dick Cavanaugh’s call to Wayside would give me the rest of the juice I needed. I took the Angeles Crest Highway north, laying 50–50 odds that Dr. Willis Roach was Elizabeth Short’s murderer.

The trip took a little over an hour; Hollywoodland sign spiel accompanied me on the radio. The deputy sheriff in the gate hut examined my badge and ID card and called the main building to clear me; whatever he was told made him snap to attention and salute. The barbed-wire fence swung open; I drove past the inmate barracks and over to a large Spanish-style structure fronted by a tile portico. As I parked, an LASD captain in uniform walked over, hand out, nervous grin on. “Detective Bleichert, I’m Warden Patchett.”

I got out and gave the man a Lee Blanchard bonecrusher. “A pleasure, Warden. Has Roach been told anything?”

“No. He’s in an interrogation room waiting for you. Do you think he killed the Dahlia?”

I started walking; Patchett steered me in the right direction. “I’m not sure yet. What can you tell me about him?”

“He’s forty-eight years old, he’s an anesthesiologist, and he was arrested in October of ’47 for selling hospital morphine to an LAPD narcotics officer. He got five to ten, did a year at Quentin. He’s down here because we needed help in the infirmary and the Adult Authority thought he’d be a safe risk. He’s got no prior arrests, and he’s been a model prisoner.”

We turned into a low, tan brick building, a typical county “utility” job — long corridors, recessed steel doors embossed with numbers and no names. Passing a string of one-way glass windows, Patchett grabbed my arm. “There. That’s Roach.”

I stared in. A bony middle-aged man in county denims was seated at a card table, reading a magazine. He was a smart-looking bird — high forehead covered by wisps of thinning gray hair, bright eyes, the kind of large, veiny hands you associate with doctors. I said, “Care to sit in, Warden?”

Patchett opened the door. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Roach looked up. Patchett said, “Doc, this is Detective Bleichert. He’s with the Los Angeles Police, and he’s got a few questions for you.”

Roach put down his magazine — American Anesthesioligist. Patchett and I took seats across from him; the doctor/dope peddler said, “However I can be of service,” his voice eastern and educated.

I went right for the throat. “Dr. Roach, why did you kill Elizabeth Short?”

Roach smiled slowly; gradually his grin spread ear to ear. “I expected you back in ’47. After Corporal Dulange made that sad little confession of his, I expected you to break down my office door any second. Two and a half years after the fact surprises me, however.”

My skin was buzzing; it felt like bugs were getting ready to eat me for breakfast. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Roach’s grin disappeared, replaced by a serious look, the movie doctor getting ready to deliver some bad news. “Gentlemen, on Monday, January 13, 1947, I flew to San Francisco and checked in at the Saint Francis Hotel, preparatory to delivering my Tuesday night keynote speech at the annual convention of the Academy of American Anesthesiologists. I gave the speech Tuesday night, and was featured speaker at the farewell breakfast, Wednesday morning, January fifteenth. I was in the constant company of colleagues through the afternoon of the fifteenth, and I slept with my ex-wife at the Saint Francis both Monday and Tuesday nights. If you would like corroboration, call the Academy at their Los Angeles number, and my ex-wife, Alice Carstairs Roach, at San Francisco CR-1786.”

I said, “Check that out for me, would you please, Warden?” my eyes on Roach.

Patchett left; the doctor said, “You look disappointed.”

“Bravo, Willis. Now tell me about you and Dulange and Elizabeth Short.”

“Will you inform the Parole Board that I cooperated with you?”

“No, but if you don’t tell me I’ll have the LA District Attorney file charges on you for obstruction of justice.”

Roach acknowledged match point with a grin. “Bravo, Detective Bleichert. You know, of course, that the reason the dates are so well fixed in my mind is due to all the publicity Miss Short’s death garnered. So please trust my memory.”

I got out a pen and notepad. “Go, Willis.”

Roach said, “In ’47 I had a lucrative little sideline selling pharmaceuticals. I sold them primarily in cocktail lounges, primarily to servicemen who had discovered their pleasures overseas during the war. That was how I met Corporal Dulange. I approached him, but he informed me that he appreciated the pleasures of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch whisky exclusively.”

“Where was this?”

“At the Yorkshire House Bar, 6th and Olive Streets, near my office.”

“Go on.”

“Well, that was the Thursday or Friday before Miss Short’s demise. I gave Corporal Dulange my card — injudiciously, as it turned out — and I assumed that I would never see the man again. Sadly, I was wrong.

“I was in poor shape financially at that time, owing to the ponies, and I was living in my office. On the early evening of Sunday, January twelfth, Corporal Dulange showed up at my door with a lovely young woman named Beth in tow. He was quite drunk, and he took me aside, pressed ten dollars into my hand and told me lovely Beth was hipped on being pregnant. Would I please give her a quick examination and tell her it was so?

“Well, I obliged. Corporal Dulange waited in my outer office, and I took lovely Beth’s pulse and blood pressure and informed her that yes indeed, she was pregnant. Her response was quite strange: she seemed sad and relieved at the same time. My interpretation was that she needed a reason to justify her obvious promiscuity, and child bearing seemed like the ticket.”

I sighed. “And when her death became news, you didn’t go to the police because you didn’t want them nosing around your dope racket?”

“Yes, that’s correct. But there’s more. Beth asked to use my phone. I acceded, and she dialed a number with a Webster prefix and asked to speak to Marcy. She said, ‘It’s Betty,’ and listened for a while, then said, ‘Really? A man with a medical background?’ I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, and Beth hung up and said, ‘I’ve got a date.’ She joined Corporal Dulange in my waiting room, and they left. I looked out the window, and she was giving him the brush-off. Corporal Dulange stormed away, and Beth walked across 6th Street and sat down at the westbound Wilshire Boulevard bus stop. That was about seven-thirty, Sunday the twelfth. There. You didn’t know that last part, did you?”

I finished up my shorthand version of it. “No, I didn’t.”

“Will you tell the Parole Board that I gave you a valuable clue?”

Patchett opened the door. “He’s clean, Bleichert.”

“No shit,” I said.

Another piece of Betty’s missing days revealed; another trip back to the El Nido, this time to check the master file for Webster prefix phone numbers. Going through the paperwork, I kept thinking that the Spragues had a Webster number, the Wilshire bus passed within a couple of blocks of their place and Roach’s “Marcy” could be a mistaken “Maddy” or “Martha.” It didn’t follow logically — the whole family was down at their Laguna beach house the week of Betty’s disappearance, Roach was certain about the “Marcy” and I had squeezed every ounce of Dahlia knowledge out of Madeleine.

Still, the thought simmered, like some buried part of me wanted to hurt the family for the way I’d rolled in the gutter with their daughter and sucked up to their wealth. I threw out another hook to keep it going; it fell flat when confronted with logic:

When Lee Blanchard disappeared in ’47, his “R,” “S” and “T” files were missing; maybe the Sprague file was among them.

But there was no Sprague file, Lee did not know that the Spragues existed, I kept everything pertaining to them away from him out of a desire to keep Madeleine’s lesbian bar doings under wraps.

I continued skimming the file, sweating in the hot, airless room. No Webster prefixes appeared, and I started getting nightmare flashes: Betty sitting on the westbound Wilshire bus stop, 7:30 P.M., 1/12/47, waving bye-bye Bucky, about to jump into eternity. I thought about querying the bus company, a general rousting of drivers on that route — then realized it was too cold, that any driver who remembered picking up Betty would have come forward during all the ’47 publicity. I thought of calling the other numbers I’d gotten from Pacific Coast Bell — then jacked that chronologically they were off — they didn’t jibe with my new knowledge of where Betty was at what time. I called Russ at the Bureau and learned that he was still in Tucson, while Harry was working crowd control up by the Hollywoodland sign. I finished my paper prowl, with a total of zero Webster prefixes. I thought of yanking Roach’s P.C.B file, nixing the notion immediately. Downtown LA, Madison prefix to Webster, was not a toll call — there would be no record, ditto on the Biltmore listings.

It came on then, big and ugly: bye-bye Bleichert at the bus stop, adios shitbird, has-been, never-was, stool pigeon nigger-town harness bull. You traded a good woman for skunk pussy, you’ve turned everything that’s been handed you to pure undiluted shit, your “I will’s” amount to the eighth round at the Academy gym when you stepped into a Blanchard right hand — pratfalling into another pile of shit, clover that you turned to horse dung. Bye-bye Betty, Beth, Betsy, Liz, we were a couple of tramps, too bad we didn’t meet before 39th and Norton, it just might have worked, maybe us would’ve been the one thing we wouldn’t have fucked up past redemption—

I bolted downstairs, grabbed the car and rolled code three civilian, peeling rubber and grinding gears, wishing I had red lights and siren to sanction me faster. Passing Sunset and Vine, traffic got bottlenecked: shitloads of cars turning north on Gower and Beachwood. Even from miles away I could see the Hollywoodland sign dripping with scaffolding, scores of antlike people climbing up the face of Mount Lee. The lull in movement calmed me down, gave me a destination.

I told myself it wasn’t over, that I’d drive to the Bureau and wait for Russ, that with two of us we’d put the rest of it together, that all I had to do was get downtown.

The traffic jam got worse — film trucks were shooting straight north while motorcycle bulls held back east- and westbound vehicles. Kids walked the lanes hawking plastic Hollywoodland sign souvenirs and passing out handbills. I heard, “Keystone Kops at the Admiral! Air-cooled! See the great new revival!” A piece of paper was shoved in my face, the printed “Keystone Kops,” “Mack Sennett” and “Deluxe Air-Cooled Admiral Theatre” barely registering, the photo on the bottom registering hugely loud and wrong, like your own scream.

Three Keystone Kops were standing between pillars shaped like snakes swallowing each other’s tails; a wall inset with Egyptian hieroglyphics was behind them. A flapper girl was lying on a tufted divan in the right-hand corner of the picture. It was unmistakably the background that appeared in the Linda Martin/Betty Short stag film.

I made myself sit still; I told myself that just because Emmett Sprague knew Mack Sennett in the ’20s and had helped him build sets in Edendale, this didn’t mean that he had anything to do with a 1946 smut film. Linda Martin had said the movie was shot in Tijuana; the still unfound Duke Wellington admitted making it. When traffic started moving, I hung a quick left up to the Boulevard and ditched the car; when I bought my ticket at the Admiral box office the girl recoiled from me — and I saw that I was hyperventilating and rank with sweat.

Inside, the air-conditioning froze that sweat, so that my clothes felt like an ice dressing. Final credits were rolling on the screen, replaced immediately by new opening ones, superimposed on papier mâché pyramids. I balled my fists when “Emmett Sprague, Assistant Director,” flashed; I held my breath for a title that said where the thing was shot. Then a printed prologue came on, and I settled into an aisle seat to watch.

The story was something about the Keystone Kops transplanted to biblical days; the action was chases and pie throwing and kicks in the ass. The stag film set recurred several times, confirmed by more details each showing. The exterior shots looked like the Hollywood Hills, but there were no outside-inside scenes to pin down whether the set was in a studio or a private dwelling. I knew what I was going to do, but I wanted another hard fact to buttress all the logical “What if’s” that were stacking up inside me.

The movie dragged on interminably; I shivered from icy sweats. Then the end titles rolled, “Filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A.,” and the “What if’s” fell like tenpins.

I left the theater, shaking from the blast-oven heat outside. I saw that I’d left the El Nido without either my service revolver or off-duty .45, took side streets back and grabbed the handcannon. Then I heard, “Hey, fella. Are you Officer Bleichert?”

It was the next-door tenant, standing in the hallway holding the phone at the end of its cord. I made a running grab for it, blurting, “Russ?”

“It’s Harry. I’m up at the end of B-B-Beachwood Drive. They’re tearing down a b-bunch of b-bungalows, and t-t-this patrolman f-f-found t-this shack all b-b-b-bloodstained. T-T-There was an FI card filed up here on the twelfth and th-th-thirtenth and I–I-I—”

And Emmett Sprague owned property up there; and it was the first time I’d heard Harry stutter in the afternoon. “I’ll bring my evidence kit. Twenty minutes.”

I hung up, took the Betty Short print abstract from the file and ran down to the car. Traffic had slackened; in the distance I could see the Hollywoodland sign missing it’s last two letters. I hauled east to Beachwood Drive, then north. As I approached the park area that bordered Mount Lee, I saw that all the excitement was contained behind ropes guarded by a cordon of bluesuits; double-parking, I glimpsed Harry Sears walking over, badge pinned to his coat front.

His breath was now rife with liquor, the stutter gone. “Jesus Christ, what a piece of luck. This foot hack was assigned to clear out the vagrants before they started the demolitions. He stumbled onto the shack and came down and got me. It looks like tramps have been in and out since ’47, but maybe you could still forensic it.”

I grabbed my evidence kit; Harry and I walked uphill. Wrecking crews were tearing down bungalows on the street paralleling Beachwood, the workers shouting about gas leaking from pipes. Fire trucks stood by, hoses manned and pointed at huge rubble heaps. Bulldozers and earthmovers were lined up on the sidewalks, with patrolmen shepherding the locals out of potential harm’s way. And up ahead of us, vaudeville reigned.

A system of pulleys was attached to the face of Mount Lee, supported by high scaffolding sunk into the ground at its base. The “A” of Hollywoodland, some fifty feet high, was sliding down a thick wire while cameras rolled, photographs snapped, rubberneckers gawked and political types drank champagne. Dust from uprooted scrub bushes was everywhere; the Hollywood High School band sat in folding chairs on a jerry-built bandstand a few feet from the pulley wire’s terminus. When the letter “A” crashed to the dirt, they struck up “Hooray for Hollywood.”

Harry said, “This way.” We veered off on a dirt hiking trail circling the foot of the mountain. Dense foliage pressed in from both sides; Harry took the lead, walking sideways on a footpath pointing straight up the slope. I followed, scrub bushes snagging my clothes and brushing my face. After fifty uphill yards, the path leveled off into a small clearing fronted by a shallow stream of running water. And there was a tiny, pillbox-style cinderblock hut, the door standing wide open.

I walked in.

The side walls were papered with pornographic photographs of crippled and disfigured women. Mongoloid faces sucking dildoes, nudie girls with withered and brace-clad legs spread wide, limbless atrocities leering at the camera. There was a mattress on the floor; it was caked with layers and layers of blood. Bugs and flies were laced throughout the crust, stuck there as they feasted themselves to death. The back wall held tacked-on color photos that looked like they were torn from anatomy texts: close-up shots of diseased organs oozing blood and pus. There were spray and spatter marks on the floor; a small spotlight attached to a tripod was stationed beside the mattress, the light fixture aimed at the center of it. I wondered about electricity, then examined the gizmo’s base and saw a battery hook-up. A blood-sprayed stack of books rested in one corner — mostly science fiction novels, with Gray’s Advanced Anatomy and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs standing out among them.

“Bucky?”

I turned around. “Go get ahold of Russ. Tell him what we’ve got. I’ll do a forensic here.”

“Russ won’t get back from Tucson till tomorrow. And kid, you don’t look too healthy to me right—”

“Goddamn it, get out of here and let me do this!”

Harry stormed out, spitting crushed pride; I thought of the proximity to Sprague property and dreamer Georgie Tilden, bum shack dweller, son of a famous Scottish anatomist. “Really? A man with a medical background?” Then I opened up my kit and raped the nightmare crib for evidence.

First I examined it top to bottom. Aside from obviously recent mud tracks — Harry’s tramps probably — I found narrow strands of rope under the mattress. I scraped what looked like abraded flesh particles off them; I filled up another test tube with blood-matted dark hair taken from the mattress. I checked the blood crust for different color shadings, saw that it was a uniform maroon and took a dozen samples. I tagged and packed the rope away, along with the anatomy pages and smut pictures. I saw a man’s bootprint, blood-outlined, on the floor, measured it and traced the sole treads onto a sheet of transparent paper.

Next it was fingerprints.

I dusted every touch, grab and press surface in the room; I dusted the few smooth spines and glossy pages in the books on the floor. The books yielded only streaks; the other surfaces brought up smudges, glove marks and two separate and distinct sets of latents. Finishing, I took a pen and circled the smaller digits on the door, doorjamb and wall molding by the mattress headboard. Then I got out my magnifying glass and Betty Short’s print blow-up and made comparisons.

One identical print;

Two;

Three — enough for a courtroom.

Four, five, six, my hands shaking because this was unimpeachably where the Black Dahlia was butchered, shaking so hard I couldn’t transfer the other set of latents to plates. I hacked a four-digit spread off the door with my knife and wrapped it in tissue — forensic amateur night. I packed up my kit, tremble-walked outside, saw the running water and knew that was where the killer drained the body. Then a strange flash of color by some rocks next to the stream caught my eye.

A baseball bat — the business end stained dark maroon.

I walked to the car thinking of Betty alive, happy, in love with some guy who’d never cheat on her. Passing through the park, I looked up at Mount Lee. The sign now read just Hollywood; the band was playing, “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

I drove downtown. The LA city personnel office and the office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service were closed for the day. I called R&I and got goose egg on Scotland-born George Tildens — and I knew I’d go crazy if I waited overnight to make the print confirmation. It came down to calling in a superior officer, breaking and entering or bribery.

Remembering a janitor cleaning up outside the personnel office, I tried number three. The old man heard my phony story out, accepted my double-sawbuck, unlocked the door and led me to a bank of filing cabinets. I opened a drawer marked CITY PROPERTY CUSTODIAL — PART-TIME, got out my magnifying glass and powder-dusted piece of wood — and held my breath.

Tilden, George Redmond, born Aberdeen, Scotland, 3/4/1896. 5 foot 11, 185 pounds, brown hair, green eyes. No address, listed as “Transient — contact for work thru E. Sprague, WE-4391.” California Driver’s license # LA 68224, vehicle: 1939 Ford pickup, license 6B119A, rubbish-hauling territory Manchester to Jefferson, La Brea to Hoover — 39th and Norton right in the middle of it. Left- and right-hand fingerprints at the bottom of the page; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine matching comparison points — three for a conviction, six more for a one-way to the gas chamber. Hello, Elizabeth.

I closed the drawer, gave the janitor an extra ten-spot to keep him quiet, packed up the evidence kit and walked outside. I pinpointed the moment: 8:10 P.M., Wednesday, June 29, 1949, the night a flunky harness bull cracked the most famous unsolved homicide in California history. I touched the grass to see if it felt different, waved at office workers passing by, pictured myself breaking the news to the padre and Thad Green and Chief Horrall. I saw myself back at the Bureau, a lieutenant inside of a year, Mr. Ice exceeding the wildest Fire and Ice expectations. I saw my name in the headlines, Kay coming back to me. I saw the Spragues squeezed dry, disgraced by their complicity in the killing, all their money useless. And that was what kiboshed my reverie: there was no way for me to make the arrest without admitting I suppressed evidence on Madeleine and Linda Martin back in ’47. It was either anonymous glory or public disaster.

Or back-door justice.

I drove to Hancock Park. Ramona’s Cadillac and Martha’s Lincoln were gone from the circular driveway; Emmett’s Chrysler and Madeleine’s Packard remained. I parked my lackluster Chevy crossways next to them, the rear tires sunk into the gardener’s rose bush border. The front door looked impregnable, but a side window was open. I hoisted myself up and into the living room.

Balto the stuffed dog was there by the fireplace, guarding a score of packing crates lined up on the floor. I checked them out; they were filled to the top with clothes, silverware and ritzy bone china. A cardbox box at the end of the row was overflowing with cheap cocktail dresses — a weird anomaly. A sketch pad, the top sheet covered with drawings of women’s faces, was wedged into one corner. I thought of commerical artist Martha, then heard voices upstairs.

I went to them, my .45 out, the silencer screwed on tight. They were coming from the master bedroom: Emmett’s burr, Madeleine’s pout. I pressed myself to the hallway wall, eased down to the doorway and listened.

“... besides, one of my foremen said the goddamn pipes are spewing gas. There’ll be hell to pay, lassie. Health and safety code violations at the very least. It’s time for me to show the three of you Scotland, and let our Jew friend Mickey C. utilize his talent for public relations. He’ll put the onus on old Mack or the pinkos or some convenient stiff, trust me he will. And when things are kosher again, we’ll come home.”

“But I don’t want to go to Europe, Daddy. Oh God, Scotland. You’ve never been able to talk about it without saying how dreadful and provincial it is.”

“Is it your toothy chum you think you’ll be missing? Ahh, I suspect it is. Well, let me put your heart to rest. Aberdeen’s got strapping plowboys who’ll put that piss-poor excuse for a man to shame. Less inquisitive, lads who know their place. You’ll not lack for sturdy cocksmen, let me assure you. Bleichert served his purpose to us a long time ago, and it’s just the danger-loving part of you that took him back in. An injudicious part, I might add.”

“Oh Daddy, I don’t—”

I wheeled and stepped into the bedroom. Emmett and Madeleine were lying on the big canopied bed, clothed, her head on his lap, his rough carpenter’s hands massaging her shoulders. The father-lover noticed me first; Madeleine pouted when Daddy’s caresses stopped. My shadow hit the bed; she screamed.

Emmett silenced her, a whip-fast hand glinting with gemstones over her mouth. He said, “This isn’t a cuckold, lad. It’s just affection, and we’ve a dispensation for it.”

The man’s reflexes and dinner table tone were pure style. I aped his calm: “Georgie Tilden killed Elizabeth Short. She called here on January twelfth, and one of you fixed her up with Georgie. She took the Wilshire bus out here to meet him. Now you fill the rest of it in.”

Madeleine, eyes wide, trembled under her father’s hand. Emmett looked at the none too steady gun aimed at him. “I don’t dispute that statement and I don’t dispute your somewhat belated desire to see justice done. Shall I tell you where George can be found?”

“No. First you tell me about you two, then you tell me about your dispensation.”

“It’s not germane, lad. I’ll congratulate you on your detective work and tell you where Georgie can be found, and we’ll leave it at that. Neither of us wants to see Maddy hurt, and discussing dour old family matters would affect her adversely.”

As if to underline paternal concern, Emmett released his hand. Madeleine wiped smeared lipstick off her cheeks and murmured, “Daddy, make him stop.”

I said, “Did Daddy tell you to fuck me? Did Daddy tell you to invite me to dinner so I wouldn’t check your alibi? Did you all figure that a little hospitality and some cunt would brazen things out for you? Did you—”

“Daddy make him stop!”

Emmett’s whip hand flashed again; Madeleine buried her face in it. The Scotchman made the next logical move. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, lad. Put the Sprague family history out of your mind. What do you want?”

I looked around the bedroom, picking out objects — and the price tags that Madeleine had bragged to me. There was the Picasso oil on the back wall — a hundred and twenty grand. Two Ming vases resting on the dresser — seventeen big ones. The Dutch Master above the headboard cost two hundred odd thou; the ugly Pre-Columbian gargoyle on the nightstand a cool twelve and a half. Emmett, smiling now, said, “You appreciate nice things. I appreciate that, and nice things like those can be yours. Just tell me what you want.”

I shot the Picasso first. The silencer went “Pffft” and the .45 hollow point blew the canvas in half. The two Mings were next, crockery fragments exploding all over the room. I missed the gargoyle with my first shot — a gold-bordered mirror the consolation prize. Daddy and darling daughter huddled on the bed; I took sight on Rembrandt or Titian or whoever the fuck it was. My bull’s-eye blew a dandy hole out of it, along with a chunk of the wall. The frame toppled and hit Emmett’s shoulder; the heat of the weapon singed my hand. I held on to it anyway, one round still in the chamber to get me my story.

Cordite, muzzle smoke and plaster haze making the air almost unbreathable. Four hundred grand in bits and pieces. The two Spragues a tangle of limbs on the bed, Emmett coming out of it first, stroking Madeleine, rubbing his eyes and squinting.

I placed the silencer to the back of his head. “You, Georgie, Betty. Make me believe it or I’ll take your whole fucking house down.”

Emmett coughed and patted Madeleine’s stray curls; I said, “You and your own daughter.”

My old brass girl looked up then, tears drying, dust and lipstick mottling her face. “Daddy’s not my real daddy and we’ve never really... so it’s not wrong.”

I said, “Then who is?”

Emmett turned, gently pushing my gun hand out of the way. He didn’t look broken or angry. He looked like a businessman warming to the task of negotiating a tough new contract. “Dreamer Georgie is Maddy’s father, Ramona is her mother. Do you want the details, or will that fact suffice?”

I sat down in a silk brocade chair a few feet from the bed. “All of it. And don’t lie, because I’ll know.”

Emmett stood up and tidied his person, giving the room damage a weather eye. Madeleine went into the bathroom; a few seconds later I heard water running. Emmett sat on the edge of the bed, hands firm on his knees, like it was man-to-man confessional time. I knew he thought he could get away with telling me only what he wanted to; I knew I was going to make him spill it all, whatever it took.

“Back in the mid-20’s Ramona wanted a child,” he said. “I didn’t, and I got damn sick and tired of being nagged about fatherhood. One night I got drunk and thought, ‘Mother, you want a child I’ll give you a lad just like me.’ I did her without wearing a skin, sobered up and put it out of my mind. I didn’t know it, but she took up with Georgie then, just to get that foal she craved so dearly. Madeleine was born, and I thought she was from that one mean time. I took to her — my little girl. Two years later I decided to go for a matched set, and we made Martha.

“Lad, I know you’ve killed two men, which is more than I can brag. So I know you know what it is to hurt. Maddy was eleven when I realized she was the stark spitting image of Georgie. I found him and played tic-tac-toe on his face with a nigger shiv. When I thought he’d die I took him to the hospital and bribed the administrators into putting ‘car crash victim’ on their records. When Georgie got out of the hospital he was a pitiful disfigured wreck. I begged him to forgive me, and I gave him money and I got him work tending my property and hauling rubbish for the city.”

I recalled thinking that Madeleine resembled neither of her parents; I remembered Jane Chambers mentioning Georgie’s car crash and descent to stumblebum. So far, I believed Emmett’s story. “What about Georgie himself? Did you ever think he was crazy? Dangerous?”

Emmett tapped my knee, man-to-man empathy. “Georgie’s father was Redmond Tilden, quite a celebrated doctor in Scotland. He was an anatomist. The Kirk was still strong in Aberdeen back then, and Doc Redmond could only legally dissect the corpses of executed criminals and the child molesters the villagers caught and stoned. Georgie liked to touch the organs his dad threw out. I heard a tale when we were boys, and I credit it. It seems that Doc Redmond bought a stiff from some body snatchers. He cut into the heart, and it was still beating. Georgie saw it, and it thrilled him. I credit the tale because in the Argonne Georgie used to take his bayonet to the dead Jerries. I’m not sure, but I think he’s burgled graves here in America. Scalps and inside organs. Ghastly, all of it.”

I saw an opening, a stab in the dark that might hit home. Jane Chambers had mentioned Georgie and Ramona filming pageants that centered on Emmett’s World War I adventures, and two years ago at dinner, Ramona had said something about “Reenacting episodes out of Mr. Sprague’s past he would rather forget.” I swung out with my hunch: “How could you put up with someone so crazy?”

Emmett said, “You’ve been idolized in your time, lad. You know how it is when a weak man needs you to look after him. It’s a special bond, like having a daft little brother.”

I said, “I had a daft big brother once. I looked up to him.”

Emmett laughed — fraudulently. “That’s a side of the fence I’ve never been on.”

“Oh yeah? Eldridge Chambers says otherwise. He left a brief with the City Council before he died. It seems that he witnessed some of Ramona and Georgie’s pageants back in the thirties. Little girls with soldier kilts and toy muskets, Georgie holding off the Germans, you turning tail and running like a goddamn chickenshit coward.”

Emmett flushed and tried to dredge up a smirk; his mouth twitched spastically with the effort. I shouted, “Coward!” and slapped him full force — and the hardcase Scotchman son of a bitch sobbed like a child. Madeleine came out of the bathroom, fresh makeup, clean clothes. She moved to the bed and embraced her “Daddy,” holding him the way he’d held her just a few minutes before.

I said, “Tell me, Emmett.”

The man wept on the shoulder of his ersatz daughter; she stroked him with ten times more tenderness than she’d ever given me. Finally he got out a shell-shocked whisper: “I couldn’t let Georgie go because he saved my life. We got separated from our company, all alone in a big field of stiffs. A German patrol was reconnoitering, sticking bayonets in everything British, dead or alive. Georgie piled Germans on top of us. They were all in pieces from a mortar attack. Georgie made me crawl under all these arms and legs and guts and stay there, and when it was over he cleaned me up and talked about America to cheer me up. So you see I couldn’t...”

Emmett’s whisper died out. Madeleine caressed his shoulders, ruffled his hair. I said, “I know that the stag film with Betty and Linda Martin wasn’t shot in TJ. Did Georgie have anything to do with it?”

Madeleine’s voice had the timbre Emmet’s had earlier, when he was the one holding up the front. “No. Linda and I were talking at La Verne’s Hideaway. She told me she needed a place to make a little movie. I knew what she meant, and I wanted to be with Betty again, so I let them use one of my daddy’s vacant houses, one that had an old set in the living room. Betty and Linda and Duke Wellington shot the movie, and Georgie saw them doing it. He was always sneaking around Daddy’s empty houses, and he got crazy over Betty. Probably because she looked like me... his daughter.”

I turned away to make it easier for her to spill the rest. “Then?”

“Then, around Thanksgiving, Georgie came to Daddy and said, ‘Give me that girl.’ He said he’d tell the whole world that Daddy wasn’t my daddy, and he’d lie about what we did together, like it was incest. I looked around for Betty, but I couldn’t find her. Later I found out she was in San Diego then. Daddy was letting Georgie stay in the garage, because he was making more and more demands. He gave him money to keep him quiet, but he was still acting nasty and awful.

“Then, that Sunday night, Betty called, out of the blue. She’d been drinking, and she called me Mary or something like that. She said she’d been calling all the friends in her little black book trying to get a loan. I put Daddy on, and he offered Betty money to date a nice man he knew. You see, we thought Georgie just wanted Betty for... sex.”

I said, “After all you knew about him, you believed that?”

Emmett shouted, “He liked to touch dead things! He was passive! I didn’t think he was a goddamned killer!”

I eased them into the rest. “And you told her Georgie had a medical background?”

“Because Betty respected doctors,” Madeleine said. “Because we didn’t want her to feel like a whore.”

I almost laughed. “Then?”

“Then I think you know the rest.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Madeleine delivered, hate oozing out of her. “Betty took the bus out here. She and Georgie left. We thought they’d go someplace decent to be together.”

“Like the Red Arrow Motel?”

“No! Like one of Daddy’s old houses that Georgie took care of! Betty forgot her purse, so we thought she’d be back for it, but she never came back and neither did Georgie, and then the papers came out and we knew what must have happened.”

If Madeleine thought her confession was over, she was wrong. “Tell me what you did then. How you covered things up.”

Madeleine caressed Emmett while she spoke. “I went looking for Linda Martin, and I found her at a motel in the Valley. I gave her money and told her that if the police picked her up and asked her about the movie she was to say it was filmed in Tijuana with a Mexican crew. She kept her part of the bargain when you captured her, and she only mentioned the movie because she had the print in her purse. I tried to find Duke Wellington, but I couldn’t. That worried me, then he sent in his alibi to the Herald-Express, and it didn’t mention where the movie was shot. So we were safe. Then—”

“Then I came along. And you pumped me for dope on the case, and you threw me little tidbits about Georgie to see if I bit.”

Madeleine quit stroking Daddy and studied her manicure. “Yes.”

“What about the alibi you gave me? Laguna Beach, check with the servants?”

“We gave them money in case you actually did check. They don’t speak English too well, and of course you believed me.”

Madeleine was smiling now. I said, “Who mailed Betty’s pictures and little black book in? There were envelopes sent, and you said Betty left her purse here.”

Madeleine laughed. “That was genius sister Martha. She knew I knew Betty, but she wasn’t home that night Betty and Georgie were here. She didn’t know Georgie was blackmailing Daddy or that he killed Betty. She ripped the page with our number on it out of the book, and she scratched the faces off the men in the pictures as her way of saying, ‘Look for a lesbian,’ namely me. She just wanted me smeared, implicated. She also called the police and gave them a tip on La Verne’s. The scratched faces were très genius Martha — she always scratches like a cat when she’s mad.”

Something in her statement hit me as wrong, but I couldn’t pin it down. “Martha told you this?”

Madeleine buffed her red claws. “When the little black book stuff made the papers, I knew it had to be Martha. I scratched a confession out of her.”

I turned to Emmett “Where’s Georgie?”

The old man stirred. “He’s probably staying at one of my vacant houses. I’ll bring you a list.”

“Bring me all four of your passports, too.”

Emmett walked out of the battlefield bedroom. Madeleine said, “I really did like you, Bucky. I really did.”

“Save it for Daddy. You’re wearing the pants now, so save the sugar for him.”

“What are you going to do?”

“First I’m going home and putting all of this on paper, attached to material witness warrants for you and Daddy. Then I’m leaving them with another officer in case Daddy goes to his friend Mickey Cohen with an offer for my head. Then I’m going after Georgie.”

Emmett came back and handed me four U.S. passport holders and a sheet of paper. Madeleine said, “If you turn in those warrants, we’ll ruin you in court. Everything about us will come out.”

I stood up and kissed the brass girl hard on the lips. “Then we’ll all go down together.”

I didn’t drive home to write it all out. I parked a few blocks from the Sprague manse and studied the list of addresses, spooked by the juice Madeleine had shown, by her sense of how deep our stalemate went.

The houses were situated in two locales: Echo Park and Silverlake, and across town in Watts — bad territory for a fifty-three-year-old white man. Silverlake-Echo was several miles due east of Mount Lee, a hilly area with lots of twisting streets, greenery and seclusion, the kind of terrain a necrophiliac might find soothing. I drove there, five addresses circled on Emmett’s sheet.

The first three were plain deserted shacks: no electricity, broken windows, Mexican gang slogans painted on the walls. No ’39 Ford pickup 6B119A nearby — only desolation accompanied by Santa Ana winds blowing down from the Hollywood Hills. Heading toward the fourth pad just after midnight was when I got the idea — or the idea got me.

Kill him.

No public glory, no public disgrace — private justice. Let the Spragues go or coerce a detailed confession out of Georgie before you pull the trigger. Get it on paper, then figure out a way to hurt them with it at your leisure.

Kill him.

And try to live with it.

And try to lead a normal life with Mickey Cohen’s good pal running the same type of schemes on you.

I put it all out of mind when I saw that the fourth house was intact at the dead end of a cul-de-sac — chaste exterior, the lawn neatly tended. I parked two doors down, then prowled the street on foot. There were no Ford trucks — and plenty of curbside spaces for them.

I studied the house from the sidewalk. It was a ’20s stucco job, small, cube-shaped, off-white with a wood-beam roof. I circled it, driveway to tiny backyard and around a flagstone path to the front. No lights — the windows were all covered with what looked like thick blackout curtains. The place was utterly silent.

Gun out, I rang the buzzer. Twenty seconds, no answer. I ran my fingers down the door-doorjamb meeting point, felt cracked wood, got out my handcuffs and wedged in the narrow part of one ratchet. The teeth held; I whittled at the wood near the lock until I felt the door play slacken. Then I gave it a gentle kick — and it opened.

Light from outside guided me to a wall switch; I flipped it on, saw a cobweb-streaked empty room, walked to the porch and shut the door. The blackout curtains held in every bit of illumination. I moved back into the house, closed the door and stuck wood slivers into the bolt fixture to jam the lock.

With front access blocked off, I walked to the rear of the house. A medicinal stench was issuing from a room adjoining the kitchen. I toed the door open and tapped the inside wall for a switch. I hit one; harsh light blinded me. Then my vision cleared and I placed the smell: formaldehyde.

The walls were lined with shelves holding jars of preserved organs; there was a mattress on the floor, half covered by an army blanket. A red-headed scalp and two notebooks lay on top of it. I took a wheezing breath and forced myself to see it all.

Brains, eyes, hearts and intestines floating in fluid. A woman’s hand, wedding ring still attached to her finger. Ovaries, glots of shapeless viscera, a jar filled with penises. Gum sections replete with gold teeth.

I felt dry heaves coming on, and squatted by the mattress so I wouldn’t have to see any more gore. I picked up one of the notebooks and leafed through it; the pages were filled with neatly typed descriptions of grave robberies — cemeteries, plot names and dates in separate columns. When I saw “East Los Angeles Lutheran,” where my mother was buried, I dropped the book and reached for the blanket for something to hold; crusted semen top to bottom made me throw it at the doorway. I opened the other binder to the middle then, neat masculine printing taking me back to January 14, 1947:

I put the notebook down, knowing I could do it, knowing if I faltered, a few more pages would turn me around. I stood up; the organ jars caught my attention, dead things all in a row, so neat, so perfect. I was wondering whether Georgie had ever killed before when I noticed a jar all by itself on the window ledge above the head of the mattress.

A triangular piece of flesh, tattooed. A heart with the Army Air Corps insignia inside it, the words “Betty & Major Matt” below.

I closed my eyes and shook head to toe; I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to tell Betty I was sorry I’d seen that special part of her, that I didn’t mean to pry so far, that I was just trying to help. I tried to say it and say it and say it. Then something touched me softly, and I was grateful for the gentleness.

I turned around and saw a man, his face all scars, his hands holding little hooked instruments, tools for cutting and probing. He touched the scalpels to his cheeks; I gasped at where I’d been and reached for my gun. Twin streaks of steel lashed at me; the .45 slipped out of my waistband and hit the floor.

I sidestepped; the blades snagged my jacket and ripped a piece of my collarbone. I sent a kick at Tilden’s groin; the grave raper caught the blow off balance, buckled and leaped forward, crashing into me, knocking me back into the wall shelving.

Jars broke, formaldehyde sprayed, awful pieces of flesh were loosed. Tilden was right on top of me, trying to bring his scalpels down. I held his wrists up, then shot a knee between his legs. He grunted but didn’t retreat, this face getting closer and closer to mine. Inches away, he bared his teeth and snapped; I felt my cheek tearing. I kneed him again, his arm pressure slackened, I caught another bite on the chin, then dropped my hands. The scalpels hit the shelf in back of me; I flailed for a weapon and touched a big piece of glass. I dug it into Georgie’s face just as he yanked the blades free; he screamed; steel dug into my shoulder.

The shelving collapsed. Georgie fell on top of me, blood pouring from an empty eye socket. I saw my .45 on the floor a few feet away, dragged the two of us there and grabbed it. Georgie raised his head, making animal screeches. He went for my throat, his mouth huge in front of me. I jammed the silencer into his eye hole and blew his brains out.

Thirty-three

Russ Millard supplied the Short case epitaph.

Adrenaline-fried, I left the death house and drove straight to City Hall. The padre had just gotten in from Tucson with his prisoner; when the man was ensconsed in a holding cell, I took Russ aside and told him the entire story of my involvement with the Spragues — from Marjorie Graham’s lez tip to the shooting of Georgie Tilden. Russ, dumbstruck at first, drove me to Central Receiving Hospital. The emergency room doc gave me a tetanus shot, said, “God, those bites look almost human,” and sutured them up. The scalpel wounds were superficial — and required only cleansing and bandaging.

Outside, Russ said, “The case has to stay open. You’ll be canned from the Department if you tell anyone else what happened. Now let’s go take care of Georgie.”

It was 3:00 A.M. when we got to Silverlake. The padre was shaken by what he saw, but held his composure ramrod stiff. Then the best man I ever knew astonished me.

First he said, “Go over and stand by the car”; then he fiddled with some pipes on the side of the house, paced off twenty yards and emptied his service revolver at the spot. Gas ignited; the house went up in flames. We highballed out of there without headlights. Russ shot me his line: “That obscenity did not deserve to stand.”

Then it was incredible exhaustion — and sleep. Russ dropped me at the El Nido, I dived onto the bed and into twenty-odd hours of pitch-black unconsciousness. Waking up, the first thing I saw was the four Sprague passports on the dresser: the first thing I thought was: they have to pay.

If health and safety code violations or worse came down, I wanted the family in the country where they would suffer. I called the U.S. passport office, impersonated a detective captain and put a police hold on passport reissues for all four Spragues. It felt like an impotent gesture — a slap on the wrist. I shaved and showered then, extra careful not to wet my bandages or sutures. I thought about the end of the case so I wouldn’t think about the shambles my life was in. I recalled that something Madeleine said the other day was off, wrong, out of sync. I played with the question while I dressed; going out the door to get something to eat, it hit home:

Madeleine said that Martha called the police with a tip on La Verne’s Hideaway. But: I knew the Short case paperwork better then any cop alive, and there were no notations anywhere pertaining to the place. Two incidents sparked me then. Lee getting a long call during our phone-answering stint the morning after I met Madeleine; Lee going directly to La Verne’s after he cracked up at the stag film showing. Only “Genius” Martha could give me answers. I drove to Ad Agency Row to brace her.

I found Emmett Sprague’s real daughter alone, eating lunch on a bench in the shade of the Young & Rubicam Building. She didn’t look up when I sat down across from her; I remembered that Betty Short’s little black book and pictures were taken out of a mailbox a block away.

I watched the pudgy girl-woman nibble a salad and read the newspaper. In the two and a half years since I’d seen her she’d held her own against fat and bad skin — but she still looked like a tough distaff version of Emmett.

Martha put the paper down and noticed me. I expected rage to light up her eyes; she surprised me by saying, “Hello, Mr. Bleichert,” with just a touch of a smile.

I walked over and sat down beside her. The Times was folded over to a Metro section piece: “Bizarre Fire in Silverlake Foothills — Body Found Charred Beyond Recognition.”

Martha said, “I’m sorry for that picture I drew of you that night you came to dinner.”

I pointed to the newspaper. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“Poor Georgie. No, I’m not surprised to see you. Father told me you knew. I’ve been underestimated all my life, and I always had a feeling Maddy and Father were underestimating you.”

I pushed the compliment aside. “Do you know what ‘Poor Georgie’ did?”

“Yes. From the beginning. I saw Georgie and the Short girl leave the house that night in Georgie’s truck. Maddy and Father didn’t know I knew, but I did. Only Mother never figured it out. Did you kill him?”

I didn’t answer.

“Are you going to hurt my family?”

The pride in the “my” knifed me. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t blame you for wanting to hurt them. Father and Maddy are dreadful people, and I went way out on a limb to hurt them myself.”

“When you sent in Betty’s things?”

Now Martha’s eyes fired up. “Yes. I tore out the page in the book that had our number, but I thought there might be other numbers to lead the police to Father and Maddy. I didn’t have the courage to send our number in. I should have. I—”

I held up a hand. “Why, Martha? Do you know what would have happened if the police got the whole story about Georgie? Accessory charges, court, jail.”

“I didn’t care. Maddy had you and Father, Mother and I had nothing. I just wanted the whole ship to sink. Mother has lupus now, she’s only got a few years left. She’s going to die, and that is so unfair.”

“The pictures and scratch marks. What did you mean by them?”

Martha laced her fingers together and twisted them until the knuckles were white. “I was nineteen, and all I could do was draw. I wanted Maddy smeared as a dyke, and the last picture was Father himself — his face scratched out. I thought he might have left fingerprints on the back. I was desperate to hurt him.”

“Because he touches you like he touches Madeleine?”

“Because he doesn’t!”

I braced myself for the spooky stuff. “Martha, did you call the police with a tip on La Verne’s Hideaway?”

Martha lowered her eyes. “Yes.”

“Did you talk to—”

“I told the man about my dyke sister, how she met a cop named Bucky Bleichert at La Verne’s last night and had a date with him tonight. Maddy was gloating to the whole family about you, and I was jealous. But I only wanted to hurt her — not you.”

Lee taking the call while I sat across a desk from him in University squadroom; Lee going directly to La Verne’s when Slave Girls From Hell drove him around the twist. I said, “Martha, you come clean on the rest of it.”

Martha looked around and clenched herself — legs together, arms to her sides, fists balled. “Lee Blanchard came to the house and told Father he’d talked to women at La Verne’s — lesbians who could tie Maddy in to the Black Dahlia. He said he had to leave town, and for a price he wouldn’t report his information on Maddy. Father agreed, and gave him all the money he had in his safe.”

Lee, Benzie-crazed, absent from City Hall and University Station; Bobby De Witt’s imminent parole his reason for blowing town. Emmett’s money the cash he was flaunting in Mexico. My own voice numb: “Is there more?”

Martha’s body was coiled spring-tight. “Blanchard came back the next day. He demanded more money. Father turned him down, and he beat Father up and asked him all these questions about Elizabeth Short. Maddy and I heard it from the next room. I loved it and Maddy was wicked mad. She left when she couldn’t take any more of her beloved daddy-poo groveling, but I kept listening. Father was afraid that Blanchard would frame one of us for the killing, so he agreed to give him a hundred thousand dollars and told him what happened with Georgie and Elizabeth Short.”

Lee’s bruised knuckles; his lie: “Penance for Junior Nash.” Madeleine on the phone that day: “Don’t come over. Daddy’s having a business soiree.” Our desperate rutting at the Red Arrow an hour later. Lee filthy rich in Mexico. Lee letting Georgie Tilden go scot fucking free.

Martha dabbed at her eyes, saw that they were dry and put a hand on my arm. “The next day a woman came by and picked up the money. And that’s all of it.”

I took out my wallet snapshot of Kay and showed it to her. Martha said, “Yes. That’s the woman.”

I stood up, alone for the first time since the triad was formed. Martha said, “Don’t hurt my family anymore. Please.”

I said, “Get out, Martha. Don’t let them ruin you.”

I drove to West Hollywood Elementary School, sat in the car and kept an eyeball fix on Kay’s Plymouth in the faculty parking lot. Lee’s ghost buzzed in my head as I waited — bad company for close to two hours. The 3:00 bell rang right on time; Kay exited the building in a swarm of children and teachers a few minutes later. When she was alone by her car, I walked over.

She was arranging a load of books and papers in the trunk, her back to me. I said, “How much of the hundred grand did Lee let you keep?”

Kay froze, her hands on a stack of fingerpaintings. “Did Lee tell you about Madeleine Sprague and me back then? Is that why you’ve hated Betty Short all this time?”

Kay ran her fingers over the kiddie artwork, then turned and faced me. “You are so, so good at some things.”

It was another compliment I didn’t want to hear. “Answer my questions.”

Kay slammed the trunk, her eyes dead on mine. “I did not accept a cent of that money, and I didn’t know about you and Madeleine Sprague until those detectives I hired gave me her name. Lee was going to run away no matter what. I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, and I wanted him to be comfortable, if such a thing was possible. He didn’t trust himself to deal with Emmett Sprague again, so I picked up the money. Dwight, he knew I was in love with you, and he wanted us to be together. That was one of the reasons he left.”

I felt like I was sinking in a quicksand of all our old lies. “He didn’t leave, he ran from the Boulevard-Citizens job, from the frame on De Witt, from the trouble he was in with the Depart—”

“He loved us! Don’t take that away from him!”

I looked around the parking lot. Teachers were standing by their cars, eyeing the husband and wife spat. They were too far away to hear; I imagined them chalking up the fight to kids or mortgages or cheating. I said, “Kay, Lee knew who killed Elizabeth Short. Did you know that?”

Kay stared at the ground. “Yes.”

“He just let it go.”

“Things got crazy then. Lee went down to Mexico after Bobby, and he said he’d go after the killer when he got back. But he didn’t come back, and I didn’t want you going down there too.”

I grabbed my wife’s shoulders and squeezed them until she looked at me.

“And you didn’t tell me later? You didn’t tell anyone?”

Kay lowered her head again; I jerked it back up with both my hands. “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

In her calmest schoolteacher voice, Kay Lake Bleichert said, “I almost told you. But you started whoring again, collecting her pictures. I just wanted revenge on the woman who ruined the two men I loved.”

I raised a hand to hit her — but a flash of Georgie Tilden stopped me.

Thirty-four

I called in the last of my accumulated sick leave and spent a week killing time at the El Nido. I read and played the jazz stations, trying not to think about my future. I pored over the master file repeatedly, even though I knew the case was closed. Child versions of Martha Sprague and Lee racked my dreams; sometimes Jane Chambers’ slash-mouth clown joined them, hurling taunts, speaking through gaping holes in his face.

I bought all four LA papers every day, and read them cover to cover. The Hollywood sign hubbub had passed, there was no mention of Emmett Sprague, Grand Jury probes into faulty buildings or the torched house and stiff. I began to get a feeling that something was wrong.

It took a while — long hours spent staring at the four walls thinking of nothing — but finally I nailed it.

“It” was a tenuous hunch that Emmett Sprague set Lee and I up to kill Georgie Tilden. With me he was blatant: “Shall I tell you where Georgie can be found?” — perfectly in character for the man — I would have been more suspicious if he had tried a roundabout approach. He sent Lee after Georgie immediately after Lee beat him up. Was he hoping Lee’s anger would peak when he saw the Dahlia killer? Did he know of Georgie’s grave robbery treasure trove — and count on it making us killing mad? Did he count on Georgie to initiate a confrontation — one that would either eliminate him or the greedy/nosy cops who were creating such a nuisance? And why? For what motive? To protect himself?

The theory had one huge hole: namely, the incredible, almost suicidal audacity of Emmett, not the suicidal type.

And with Georgie Tilden — the Black Dahlia killer pure and clean — nailed — there was no logical reason to pursue it. But “It” was backstopped by a tenuous loose end:

When I first coupled with Madeleine in ’47, she mentioned leaving notes for Betty Short at various bars: “Your lookalike would like to meet you.” I told her the act might come back to haunt her; she said, “I’ll take care of it.”

The most likely one to have “taken care of it” was a policeman — and I refused to. And, chronologically, Madeleine spoke those words right around the time Lee Blanchard made his initial blackmail demand.

It was tenuous, circumstantial and theoretical, probably just another lie or half truth or thread of useless information. A loose end unraveled by a coming-from-hunger cop whose life was built on a foundation of lies. Which was the only good reason I could think of to pursue the ghost of a chance. Without the case, I had nothing.

I borrowed Harry Sears’ civilian car and ran rolling stakeouts on the Spragues for three days and nights. Martha drove to work and back home; Ramona stayed in; Emmett and Madeleine shopped and did other daytime errands. All four stuck to the manse on evenings one and two; on the third night Madeleine prowled as the Dahlia.

I tailed her to the 8th Street bar strip, to the Zimba Room, to a cadre of sailors and flyboys and ultimately the 9th and Irolo fuck pad with a navy ensign. I felt no jealously, no sex pull this time. I listened outside room twelve and heard KMPC; the venetian blinds were down, no visual access. The only departure from Madeleine’s previous MO was when she ditched her paramour at 2:00 A.M. and drove home — the light going on in Emmett’s bedroom a few moments after she walked in the door.

I gave day four a pass, and returned to my surveillance spot on Muirfield Road shortly after dark that night. I was getting out of the car to give my cramped legs a breather when I heard, “Bucky? Is that you?”

It was Jane Chambers, walking a brown and white spaniel. I felt like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. “Hello, Jane.”

“Hello, yourself. What are you doing? Spying? Torching for Madeleine?”

I remembered our conversation on the Spragues, “Enjoying the crisp night air. How’s that sound?”

“Like a lie. Want to enjoy a crisp drink at my place?”

I looked over at the Tudor fortress; Jane said, “Boy, have you got a bee in your bonnet with that family.”

I laughed — and felt little aches in my bite wounds. “Boy, have you got my number. Let’s go get that drink.”

We walked around the corner to June Street. Jane unhooked the dog’s leash; he trotted ahead of us, down the sidewalk and up the steps to the front door of the Chambers’ colonial. We caught up with him a moment later; Jane opened the door. And there was my nightmare buddy — the scar mouth clown.

I shuddered. “That goddamn thing.”

Jane smiled. “Shall I wrap it up for you?”

“Please don’t.”

“You know, after that first time we talked about it, I looked into its history. I’ve been getting rid of a lot of Eldridge’s things, and I was thinking about giving it to charity. It’s too valuable to give away, though. It’s a Frederick Yannantuono original, and it’s inspired by an old classic novel — The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. The book is about—”

There was a copy of The Man Who Laughs in the shack where Betty Short was killed. I was buzzing so hard I could hardly hear what Jane was saying.

“—a group of Spaniards back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were called the Comprachicos, and they kidnapped and tortured children, then mutilated them and sold them to the aristocracy so that they could be used as court jesters. Isn’t that hideous? The clown in the painting is the book’s main character, Gwynplain. When he was a child he had his mouth slashed ear to ear. Bucky, are you all right?”

MOUTH SLASHED EAR TO EAR.

I shuddered, then forced a smile. “I’m fine. The book just reminded me of something. Old stuff, just a coincidence.”

Jane scrutinized me. “You don’t look fine, and you want to hear another coincidence? I thought Eldridge wasn’t on speaking terms with any of the family, but I found the receipt. It was Ramona Sprague who sold him the painting.”

For a split second I thought Gwynplain was spitting blood at me. Jane grabbed my arms. “Bucky, what is it?”

I found my voice. “You told me your husband bought that picture for your birthday two years ago. Right?”

“Yes. What—”

“In ’47?”

“Yes. Buck—”

“What is your birthday?”

“January fifteenth.”

“Let me see the receipt.”

Jane, spooky eyed, fumbled at some papers on the end table across the hall. I stared at Gwynplain, transposing 39th and Norton glossies against his face. Then: “Here. Now will you tell me what’s going on?”

I took the piece of paper. It was purple stationery, covered with incongruously masculine block printing: “Received from Eldridge Chambers, $3500.00 for the sale of the Frederick Yannantuono painting ‘The Man Who Laughs.’ This receipt constitutes Mr. Chambers’ proof of ownership. Ramona Cathcart Sprague, January 15, 1947.”

The printing was identical to the script in the torture diary I read just before I killed Georgie Tilden.

Ramona Sprague murdered Elizabeth Short.

I grabbed Jane in a hard bear hug, then took off while she stood there looking stunned. I went back to the car, decided it was a single-o play, watched lights go on and off in the big house and sweated through a long night of reconstructions: Ramona and Georgie torturing together, separately, bisecting, divvying up the spare parts, running a two-car caravan to Leimert Park. I played every kind of variation imaginable; I ran riffs on how the thing ignited. I thought of everything but what I was going to do when I got Ramona Sprague alone.

At 8:19 Martha walked out the front door carrying an art portfolio, and drove east in her Chrysler.

At 10:37, Madeleine, valise in hand, got into her Packard and headed north on Muirfield. Emmett waved from the doorway; I decided to give him an hour or so to leave — or take him down along with his wife. Shortly after noon, he played into my hand — tooling off, his car radio humming light opera.

My month of playing house with Madeleine had taught me the servants’ routine: today, Thursday, the housekeeper and gardener were off; the cook showed up at 4:30 to prepare dinner. Madeleine’s valise implied some time away; Martha wouldn’t return from work until 6:00. Emmett was the only wild card.

I walked across the street and reconnoitered. The front door was locked, the side windows were bolted. It was either ring the bell or B&E.

Then I heard tapping on the other side of the glass and saw a blurry white shape moving back into the living room. A few seconds later the sound of the front door opening echoed down the driveway. I walked around to meet the woman head on.

Ramona was standing in the doorway, spectral in a shapeless silk dressing gown. Her hair was a frizzy mess, her face was blotchy red and puffed up — probably from tears and sleep. Her dark brown eyes — identical in color to mine — were scary alert. She pulled a ladylike automatic from the folds of her gown and pointed it at me. She said, “You told Martha to leave me.”

I slapped the gun out of her hand; it hit a straw welcome mat emblazoned with THE SPRAGUE FAMILY Ramona gnawed at her lips; her eyes lost their focus. I said, “Martha deserves better than a murderer.”

Ramona smoothed her gown and patted at her hair. I pegged the reaction as the class of a well-bred hophead. Her voice was pure cold Sprague: “You didn’t tell, did you?”

I picked up the gun and put it in my pocket, then looked at the woman. She had to be jacked on a twenty-year residue of drugstore hop, but her eyes were so dark that I couldn’t tell if they were pinned or not. “Are you telling me Martha doesn’t know what you did?”

Ramona stood aside and bid me to enter. She said, “Emmett told me it was safe now. He said that you’d taken care of Georgie and you had too much to lose by coming back. Martha told Emmett you wouldn’t hurt us, and he said you wouldn’t. I believed him. He was always so accurate about business matters.”

I walked inside. Except for the packing crates on the floor, the living room looked like business as usual. “Emmett sent me after Georgie, and Martha doesn’t know you killed Betty Short?”

Ramona shut the door. “Yes. Emmett counted on you to take care of Georgie. He was confident that he wouldn’t implicate me — the man was quite insane. Emmett is a physical coward, you see. He didn’t have the courage to do it, so he sent an underling. And my God, do you honestly think I’d let Martha know what I’m capable of?”

The torture murderess was genuinely aghast that I’d impugned her as a mother. “She’ll find out sooner or later. And I know she was here that night. She saw Georgie and Betty leave together.”

“Martha left to visit a chum in Palm Springs an hour or so later. She was gone for the next week. Emmett and Maddy know. Martha doesn’t. And my dear God, she mustn’t.”

“Mrs. Sprague, do you know what you’ve—”

“I’m not Mrs. Sprague, I’m Ramona Upshaw Cathcart! You can’t tell Martha what I did or she’ll leave me! She said she wants to get her own apartment, and I haven’t that much more time left!”

I turned my back on the spectacle and walked around the living room, wondering what to do. I looked at the pictures on the walls: generations of kilt-clad Spragues, Cathcarts cutting the ribbons in front of orange groves and vacant lots ripe for development. There was a fat little girl Ramona wearing a corset that must have strictured her bloody. Emmett holding a dark-haired child, beaming. Glassy-eyed Ramona poising Martha’s brush hand over a toy easel. Mack Sennett and Emmett giving each other the cuckold’s horns. At the back of an Edendale group shot I thought I could see a young Georgie Tilden — handsome, no scars on his face.

I felt Ramona behind me, trembling. I said, “Tell me all of it. Tell me why.”

Ramona sat down on a divan and spoke for three hours, her tone sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes brutally detached from what she was saying. There was a table covered with tiny ceramic figurines beside her; her hands played with them constantly. I circled the walls, looking at the family pictures, feeling them meld into her story.

She met Emmett and Georgie in 1921, when they were Scottish immigrant boys on the make in Hollywood. She hated Emmett for treating Georgie like a lackey — and she hated herself for not speaking up about it. She didn’t speak up because Emmett wanted to marry her — for her father’s money, she knew — and she was a homely woman with slender husband prospects.

Emmett proposed. She accepted and settled into married life with the ruthless young contractor and budding real estate tycoon. Who she gradually grew to hate. Who she passively fought by gathering information.

Georgie lived in the apartment above the garage the first years they were married. She learned that he liked to touch dead things, and that Emmett reviled him for it. She took to poisoning the stray cats who trampled her garden, leaving them on Georgie’s doorstep. When Emmett spurned her desire for him to give her a child, she went to Georgie and seduced him — exulting that she had the power to excite him with something alive — the fat body that Emmett derided and only plundered at odd times.

Their affair was brief, but resulted in a child — Madeleine. She lived in terror of a resemblance to Georgie asserting itself, and took to doctor-prescribed opiates. Two years later Martha was born of Emmett. This felt like a betrayal of Georgie — and she went back to poisoning stray animals for him. Emmett caught her in the act one day; he beat her for taking part in “Georgie’s perversion.”

When she told Georgie of the beating, he told her of saving the coward Emmett’s life in the war — putting the lie to Emmett’s version of the story: that he saved Georgie. She started planning her pageants then — how she would get back at Emmett symbolically in ways so subtle that he would never know he was being thrashed.

Madeleine cleaved to Emmett. She was the lovely child, and he doted on her. Martha became her mother’s little girl — even though she was Emmett’s spitting image. Emmett and Madeleine disdained Martha as a fatso and a crybaby; Ramona protected her, teaching her to draw, putting her to bed each night with admonishings not to hate her sister and father — even though she did. Protecting Martha and instructing her in the love of art became her reason for living, her strength in the intolerable marriage.

When Maddy was eleven, Emmett noted her resemblance to Georgie, and slashed her real father’s face beyond recognition. Ramona fell in love with Georgie; he was now even more physically bereft than she — and she felt a parity had been achieved between them.

Georgie rebuffed her persistent advances. She came across Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs then, and was moved by both the Comprachicos and their disfigured victims. She bought the Yannantuono painting and kept it hidden, staring at it as a memento of Georgie in her private hours.

When Maddy hit her teens she became promiscuous, sharing the details with Emmett, cuddling on the bed with him. Martha drew obscene pictures of the sister she hated; Ramona forced her to draw pastoral landscapes to keep her anger from going haywire. To get back at Emmett she staged her long-planned pageants; they spoke obliquely of his greed and cowardice. Toy houses falling down signified Emmett’s jerry-built shacks crashing in the ’33 earthquake; children hiding under store mannequins dressed in ersatz German uniforms portrayed Emmett the yellow. A number of parents found the pageants disturbing, and forbade their children to play with the Sprague girls. Around that time Georgie drifted out of their lives, doing his yard work and rubbish hauling, living in Emmett’s abandoned houses.

Time passed. She concentrated on looking after Martha, pressing her to finish high school early, establishing funds at Otis Art Institute so that she would get special treatment. Martha thrived and excelled at Otis; Ramona lived through her accomplishments, on and off sedatives, often thinking of Georgie — missing him, wanting him.

Then, in the fall of ’46, Georgie returned. She overheard him make his blackmail demand of Emmett: “Give him” the girl in the dirty movie, or risk exposure of a good deal of the family’s sordid past and present.

She became frighteningly jealous and hateful of “that girl,” and when Elizabeth Short showed up at the Sprague house on January 12, 1947, her rage exploded. “That girl” looked so much like Madeleine that it felt like the cruelest of jokes was being played on her. When Elizabeth and Georgie left in his truck, she saw that Martha had gone to her room to pack for her Palm Springs trip. She left a note on her door saying goodbye, that she was sleeping now. Then she casually asked Emmett where “that girl” and Georgie were going.

He told her he heard Georgie mention one of his abandoneds up on North Beachwood. She went out the backdoor, grabbed their spare Packard, sped to Hollywoodland and waited. Georgie and the girl arrived at the base of the Mount Lee park area a few minutes later. She followed them on foot to the shack in the woods. They went inside; she saw a light go on. It cast shadows over a shiny wood object leaning against a tree trunk — a baseball bat. When she heard the girl giggle, “Did you get those scars in the war?” she went in the door, bat first.

Elizabeth Short tried to run. She knocked her unconscious and made Georgie strip her and gag her and tie her to the mattress. She promised him parts of the girl to keep forever. She took a copy of The Man Who Laughs from her purse and read aloud from it, casting occasional glances at the girl spread-eagled. Then she cut her and burned her and batted her and wrote in the notebook she always carried while the girl was passed out from the pain. Georgie watched, and together they shouted the chants of the Comprachicos. And after two full days of it, she slashed Elizabeth Short ear to ear like Gwynplain, so she wouldn’t hate her after she was dead. Georgie cut the body in two, washed the halves in the stream outside the shack and carried them to her car. Late at night, they drove to 39th and Norton — a lot that Georgie used to tend for the city. They left Elizabeth Short there to become the Black Dahlia, then she drove Georgie back to his truck and returned to Emmett and Madeleine, telling them that soon enough they would find out where she had been and finally respect her will. As an act of purging, she sold her Gwynplain painting to the bargain-loving art worshipper Eldridge Chambers down the street — making a profit on the deal. Then it was days and weeks of the horror that Martha would find out and hate her — and more and more laudanum and codeine and sleep potion to make it go away.

I was looking at a row of framed magazine ads — award-winning Martha artwork — when Ramona stopped talking. The silence jarred me; her story rolled on in my head, back and forth in sequence. The room was cool — but I was sweating.

Martha’s 1948 Advertising Council first prizer featured a handsome guy in a seersucker suit walking on the beach, ogling a blonde dish sunbathing. He was so oblivious to everything else around him that he was about to get creamed by a big wave. The caption at the top of the page read: “Not to worry! In his Hart, Shaffner & Marx Featherweight he’ll be dried out and crisp — and ready to woo her at the club tonight!” The dish was sleek. Her features were Martha’s — a soft, pretty version. The Sprague mansion was in the background, surrounded by palm trees.

Ramona broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”

I couldn’t look at her. “I don’t know.”

“Martha mustn’t know.”

“You told me that already.”

The guy in the ad was starting to look like an idealized Emmett — the Scotchman as a Hollywood pretty boy. I threw out the one cop question Ramona’s story inspired: “In the fall of ’46 someone was throwing dead cats into cemeteries in Hollywood. Was that you?”

“Yes. I was so jealous of her then, and I just wanted Georgie to know I still cared. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Go upstairs, Ramona. Leave me alone.”

I heard soft footfalls moving out of the room, then sobs, then nothing. I thought about the family’s united front to save Ramona, how arresting her would blow my police career: charges of withholding evidence, obstruction of justice. Sprague money would keep her out of the gas chamber, she’d get eaten alive at Atascadero or a women’s prison until the lupus got her, Martha would be ravaged, and Emmett and Madeleine would still have each other — withholding/obstruction beefs against them would be too second-hand to prosecute on. If I took Ramona in I was shot to shit as a policeman; if I let her go I was finished as a man, and in either case Emmett and Madeleine would survive — together.

So the patented Bucky Bleichert advance, stymied and stalemated, sat still in a big plush room full of ancestor icons. I looked through the packing crates on the floor — the Sprague getaway if the City Council got uppity — and saw the cheap cocktail dresses and the sketch pad covered with women’s faces, no doubt Martha sketching alter egos to plaster over ads huckstering toothpaste and cosmetics and cornflakes. Maybe she could design an advertising campaign to spring Ramona from Tehachapi. Maybe without torturer Mommy she wouldn’t have the guts to work anymore.

I left the manse and killed time making rounds of old haunts. I checked out the rest home — my father didn’t recognize me, but looked full of malicious spunk. Lincoln Heights was rife with new houses — prefab pads waiting for tenants — “No Down Payment” for GIs. The Eagle Rock Legion Hall still had a sign ballyhooing Friday night boxing, and my Central Division beat was still winos, rag suckers and Jesus shriekers. At twilight, I gave in: one last shot at the brass girl before I took her mommy down; one last chance to ask her why she was still playing Dahlia when she knew I’d never touch her again.

I drove to the 8th Street bar strip, parked at the corner of Irolo and waited with an eye on the Zimba Room entrance. I was hoping that the valise I’d seen Madeleine carrying in the morning didn’t mean a trip somewhere; I was hoping her Dahlia prowl of two nights ago wasn’t a one-shot deal.

I sat there eyeballing foot traffic: servicemen, civilian boozehounds, neighborhood squares going in and out of the hash house next door. I thought of packing it in, then got frightened of the next stop — Ramona — and stuck. Just past midnight Madeleine’s Packard pulled up. She got out — carrying her valise, looking like herself, not Elizabeth Short.

Startled, I watched her walk into the restaurant. Fifteen minutes passed slowly. Then she sashayed out, Black Dahlia to the nines. She tossed her valise in the Packard’s backseat and hit the Zimba Room.

I gave her a minute’s slack, then went over and peered in the doorway. The bar was serving a skeleton crew of army brass; the zebra-striped booths were empty. Madeleine was drinking by herself. Two soldiers were primping at stools down from her, getting ready to make the big move. They swooped a half second apart. The dump was too deserted for me to hold surveillance in; I retreated to the car.

Madeleine and a first lieutenant in summer dress khakis walked out an hour or so later. Per her old MO, they got in the Packard and headed around the corner to the 9th and Irolo auto court. I was right behind them.

Madeleine parked and walked to the manager’s hut for the key; the soldier waited by the door of room twelve. I thought of frustration: KMPC on loud, venetian blinds down to the sill. Then Madeleine left the office, called to the lieutenant and pointed across the courtyard to a different unit. He shrugged and went over; Madeleine joined him and opened the door. The light went on and off inside.

I gave them ten minutes, then moved to the bungalow, resigned to big band standards and darkness. Moans were coming from inside, unaccompanied by music. I saw that the one window was open two feet or so, dried paint on the runner holding it stuck. I found shelter beside a trellis overgrown with vines, squatted down and listened.

Heavier moans, bed springs creaking, male grunts. Her love sounds reaching fever pitch — stagy, more soprano than when she was with me. The soldier groaning hard, all noise subsiding, then Madeleine, speaking with a feigned accent:

“I wish there was a radio. Back home all the motels had them. They were bolted down and you had to put dimes in, but at least there was music.”

The soldier, trying to catch his breath: “I heard Boston’s a nice town.”

I placed Madeleine’s fake voice then: New England blue collar, the way Betty Short was supposed to speak. “Medford’s not nice, not nice at all. I had one lousy job after another. Waitress, candy girl at a theater, file clerk at a factory. That was why I came to California to seek my fortune. Because Medford was so awful.”

Madeleine’s “A’s” were getting broader and broader; she sounded like a Boston guttersnipe. The man said, “You came out here during the war?”

“Uh-huh. I got a job at the Camp Cooke PX. This soldier beat me up, and this rich man, this award-winning contractor, he saved me. He’s my stepdaddy now. He lets me be with whoever I want to be with so long as I come home to him. He bought me my nice white car and all my nice black dresses, and he gives me back rubs ’cause he’s not my real daddy.”

“That’s the kind of dad to have. My dad bought me a bicycle once, and he gave me a couple of bucks toward a soap box derby racer. But he never bought me any Packards, that’s for damn sure. You’ve got yourself a real sugar daddy, Betty.”

I knelt down lower and peered through the window crack; all I could see were dark shapes on a bed in the middle of the room. Madeleine/Betty said, “Sometimes my stepdaddy doesn’t like my boyfriends. He never makes a fuss, because he’s not my real daddy and I let him give me backrubs. There was this one boy, a policeman. My stepdaddy said he was wishy-washy with a mean streak. I didn’t believe him, because the boy was big and strong, and he had these cute buck teeth. He tried to hurt me, but Daddy settled his hash. Daddy knows how to deal with weak men who suck around money and try to hurt nice girls. He was a big hero in the First World War and the policeman was a draft dodger.”

Madeleine’s accent was slipping, moving into another voice, low and guttural. I braced myself for more verbal lashing; the soldier said, “Draft dodgers should either be deported to Russia or shot. No, shooting’s too merciful. Hanged by the you know what, that’s more like it.”

Madeleine, a vibrato rasp, a perfect Mexican accent: “An axe ees better, no? The policeman have a partner. He tie up some loose ends for me — some notes I should not ‘ave lef’ for a not so nice girl. The partner beat up my stepdaddy an’ run away to May-hee-co. I draw pictures of a face to be and buy cheap dress. I hire a detective to find him, an’ I make a pageant. I go down to Ensenada in dees-guise, I wear cheap dress, preten’ to be beggar and knock on hees door. ‘Gringo, gringo, I need money.’ He turn hees back, I grab axe an’ chop him down. I take money he steal from stepdaddy. Seventy-one thousan’ dollar I bring back home.”

The soldier jabbered, “Look, is this some kind of joke?” I pulled out my .38 and cocked the hammer. Madeleine as Milt Dolphine’s “rich Mex woman” slipped into Spanish, a streak of raspy obscenities. I aimed through the window crack; the light went on inside; lover boy thrashing himself into his uniform spoiled my shot at the killer. I saw Lee in a sand pit, worms crawling out of his eyes.

The soldier bolted out the door, half dressed. Madeleine, slipping into her tight black gown, was an easy target. I drew a bead; a last flash of her nakedness made me empty the gun into the air. I kicked the window in.

Madeleine watched me climb over the sill. Undaunted by gunshots and flying glass, she spoke with soft savoir faire: “She was the only thing real to me, and I had to tell people about her. I felt so contrived next to her. She was a natural and I was just an imposter. And she was ours, sweet. You brought her back to me. She was what made it so good with us. She was ours.”

I mussed up Madeleine’s Dahlia hairdo, so that she looked like just another raven-clad floozy; I cuffed her wrists behind her back and saw myself in the sand pit, worm bait along with my partner. Sirens bared down from all directions; flashlights shined in the broken window. Out in the Big Nowhere, Lee Blanchard reprised his line from the Zoot Suit riot:

“Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”

Thirty-five

We took the fall together.

Four black-and-whites responded to my shots. I explained to the officers that it was a lights and siren roll to Wilshire Station — I was booking the woman for Murder One. At the Wilshire squadroom, Madeleine confessed to the killing of Lee Blanchard, concocting a brilliant fantasy — a lovers’ triangle of Lee/Madeleine/Bucky, how she was intimately involved with both of us in the winter of 1947. I sat in on the interrogation, and Madeleine was flawless. Seasoned Homicide dicks bought her tale hook, line and sinker: Lee and I rivals for her hand, Madeleine preferring me as a potential husband. Lee going to Emmett, demanding that he “give him” his daughter, beating the man half to death when he refused. Madeleine revenge-stalking Lee in Mexico, axing him to death in Ensenada. No mention of the Black Dahlia murder case at all.

I corroborated Madeleine’s story, saying that I only recently figured out that Lee had been murdered. I then confronted Madeleine with a circumstantial run-though on the snuff and coerced a partial confession out of her. Madeleine was transported to the LA women’s jail, and I went back to the EI Nido — still wondering what I was going to do about Ramona.

The next day I returned to duty. At the end of my tour a team of Metro goons was waiting for me in the Newton locker room. They grilled me for three hours; I ran with the fantasy ball Madeleine started rolling. The grit of her story and my wild departmental rep carried me through the interrogation — and nobody mentioned the Dahlia.

Over the next week the legal machinery took over.

The Mexican government refused to indict Madeleine for the murder of Lee Blanchard — without a corpse and backup evidence extradition proceedings could not be initiated. A Grand Jury was called up to decide her fate; Ellis Loew was slated to present the case for the City of Los Angeles. I told him I would testify only by deposition. Knowing my unpredictability only too well, he agreed. I filled up ten pages with lies on the “lovers’ triangle,” fantasy embellishments worthy of romantic Betty Short at her best. I kept wondering if she would appreciate the irony.

Emmett Sprague was indicted by a separate Grand Jury — for health and safety code violations stemming from his mob-fronted ownership of dangerously faulty property. He was given fines in excess of $50,000 — but no criminal charges were filed. Counting the $71,000 that Madeleine stole from Lee, he was still close to twenty grand in the black on the deal.

The lovers’ triangle hit the papers the day after Madeleine’s case went to the Grand Jury. The Blanchard-Bleichert fight and the Southside shootout were resurrected, and for a week I was big-time local stuff. Then I got a call from Bevo Means of the Herald: “Watch out, Bucky. Emmett Sprague’s about to hit back, and the shit’s about to hit the fan. ’Nuff said.”

It was Confidential magazine that nailed me.

The July 12 issue ran an article on the triangle. It featured quotes from Madeleine, leaked to the scandal rag by Emmett. The brass girl had me ditching out on duty to couple with her at the Red Arrow Motel; stealing fifths of her father’s whiskey to see me through nightwatch; giving her the inside lowdown on the LAPD’s traffic ticket quota system and how I “beat up niggers.” Innuendos pointed to worse offenses — but everything Madeleine said was true.

I was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department on grounds of moral turpitude and conduct unbecoming an officer. It was the unanimous decision of a specially convened board of inspectors and deputy chiefs, and I did not protest it. I thought of turning over Ramona in hopes of pulling a grandstander’s turnabout, but kiboshed the idea. Russ Millard might be compelled to admit what he knew and get hurt; Lee’s name would get coated with more slime; Martha would know. The firing was about two and a half years overdue; the Confidential exposé my final embarrassment to the Department. No one knew that better than I did.

I turned in my service revolver, my outlaw .45 and badge 1611. I moved back to the house that Lee bought, borrowed $500 from the padre and waited for my notoriety to the down before I started looking for work. Betty Short and Kay weighed on me, and I went by Kay’s school to look for her. The principal, eyeing me like a bug who just crawled out of the woodwork, said that Kay left a resignation letter the day after I hit the newsstands. It stated that she was going on a long cross-country automobile trip and would not be returning to Los Angeles.

The Grand Jury bound Madeleine over for trial on Manslaughter Three — “premeditated homicide under psychological duress and with mitigating circumstances.” Her lawyer, the great Jerry Giesler, had her plead guilty and request a judge’s chambers sentencing. Taking into account the recommendations of psychiatrists who found Madeleine to be a “severely delusional violent schizophrenic adept at acting out many different personalities,” the judge sentenced her to Atascadero State Hospital for an “indeterminate period of treatment not to subscribe below the minimum time allotted by the state penalties code: ten years of imprisonment.”

So the brass girl took the heat for her family and I took it for myself. My farewell to the Spragues was a front-page photo in the LA Daily News. Matrons were leading Madeleine out of the courtroom while Emmett wept at the defense table. Ramona, hollow-cheeked with disease, was being shepherded by Martha, all good strong business in a tailored suit. The picture was a lock on my silence forever.

Thirty-six

A month later I got a letter from Kay.

I kept the letter and re-read it at least a couple of hundred times. I didn’t think about what it meant, or implied about my future, or Kay’s, or ours together. I just re-read it and thought about Betty.

I dumped the El Nido master file in the garbage and thought about her. H.J. Caruso gave me a job selling cars, and I thought about her while I was hawking the 1950 line. I drove by 39th and Norton, saw that houses were going up on the vacant lot and thought about her. I didn’t question the morality of letting Ramona walk or wonder whether Betty would approve. I just thought about her. And it took Kay, always the smarter of the two of us, to put it together for me.

Her second letter was postmarked Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was written on stationery for the Harvard Motor Lodge.

I didn’t call or write. I put Lee Blanchard’s house on the market and caught a flight to Boston.

Thirty-seven

On the plane I thought of all the things I’d have to explain to Kay, evidence to keep a new foundation of lies from destroying the two — or three — of us.

She would have to know that I was a detective without a badge, that for one month in the year 1949 I possessed brilliance and courage and the will to make sacrifices. She would have to know that the heat of that time would always make me vulnerable, prey to dark curiosities. She would have to believe that my strongest resolve was not to let any of it hurt her.

And she had to know that it was Elizabeth Short who was giving us our second chance.

Nearing Boston, the plane got swallowed up by clouds. I felt heavy with fear, like the reunion and fatherhood had turned me into a stone plummeting. I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer. The clouds broke up and the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love.