The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  “Pending the test results, sure. Here’s what she wasn’t: she wasn’t pregnant, she wasn’t raped, but she had had voluntary intercourse sometime during the past week or so. She took what you might call a gentle whipping within the past week; the last marks on her back are older than the cuts on her front side. Here’s what I think happened. I think she was tied down and tortured with a knife for a minimum of thirty-six to forty-eight hours. I think her legs were broken with a smooth, rounded instrument like a baseball bat while she was still alive. I think she either got beaten to death with something like a baseball bat, or she choked to death on her blood from the mouth wound. After she was dead, she was cut in half with a butcher knife or something resembling it, and the killer went in after her internal organs with something like a penknife. After that, he drained the blood from the body and washed it clean, my guess is in a bathtub. We took some blood samples from the kidneys, and in a few days we’ll be able to tell you if she had any dope or liquor in her system.”

  Lee said, “Doc, did this guy know anything about medicine or anatomy? Why’d he go after that inside stuff?”

  The doctor examined his cigar butt. “You tell me. The top-half organs he could have pulled out easily. The bottom organs he hacked with a knife to get at, like that was what interested him. He could have had medical training, but then again he could have had veterinary training, or taxidermist’s training, or biological training, or he could have taken Physiology 104 in the LA city school system or my Pathology for Beginners class at UCLA. You tell me. I’ll tell you what you’ve got for sure: she was dead six to eight hours before you found her, and she was killed someplace secluded that had running water. Harry, has this girl got a name yet?”

  Sears tried to answer, but his mouth just fluttered. Millard put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Elizabeth Short.”

  The doctor saluted heaven with his cigar. “God love you, Elizabeth. Russell, when you get the son of a bitch who did this to her, give him a kick in the balls and tell him it’s from Frederick D. Newbarr, M.D. Now all of you get out of here. I’ve got a date with a jumper suicide in ten minutes.”

  Walking out of the elevator, I heard Ellis Loew’s voice, an octave louder and deeper than normal, echoing down the corridor. I caught “Vivisection of a lovely young woman,” “Werewolf psychopath” and “My political aspirations are subservient to my desire to see justice done.” Opening a connecting door into the Homicide pen, I saw the Republican bright boy emoting into radio mikes while a recording crew stood by. He was wearing an American Legion poppy on his lapel—probably purchased from the wino legionnaire who slept in the Hall of Records parking lot—a man he had once vigorously prosecuted for vagrancy.

  The bullpen was taken over by ham antics, so I walked across the hall to Tierney’s office. Lee, Russ Millard, Harry Sears and two old-timer cops I hardly knew—Dick Cavanaugh and Vern Smith—were huddled around Captain Jack’s desk, examining a piece of paper the boss was holding up.

  I looked over Harry’s shoulder. Three mug shots of a showstopper brunette were taped to the page, with three-close-up face photos of the corpse at 39th and Norton affixed next to them. The slashed-mouth smile jumped out at me; Captain Jack said, “The mugs are from the Santa Barbara PD. They popped the Short girl in September ‘43 for underaged drinking, sent her home to her mother in Massachusetts. Boston PD contacted her an hour ago. She’s flying out to ID the stiff tomorrow. The Boston cops are doing a background check back east, and all Bureau days off are cancelled. Anybody complains, I point to those pictures. What did Doc Newbarr say, Russ?”

  Millard said, “Tortured for two days. Cause of death the mouth wound or the head bashing. No rape. Internal organs removed. Dead six to eight hours before the body was dumped in the lot. What else have we got on her?”

  Tierney checked some papers on his desk. “Except for the juvie roust, no other record. Four sisters, parents divorced, worked in the Camp Cooke PX during the war. The father’s here in LA. What’s next?”

  I was the only one who blinked when the big boss asked number two for advice. Millard said, “I want to recanvass Leimert Park with the mugs. Me, Harry and two other men. Then I want to go to University Station, read reports and answer calls. Has Loew given the press a look at the mugs?”

  Tierney nodded. “Yeah, and Bevo Means told me the father sold the Times and the Herald some old portrait pictures of the girl. She’ll be front page on the evening editions.”

  Millard barked, “Damn,” the only word of profanity anyone ever heard him use. Seething, he said, “They’ll be coming out of the woodwork to greet her. Has the father been questioned?”

  Tierney shook his head and consulted some memo slips. “Cleo Short, 10201/2 South Kingsley, Wilshire District. I had an officer call him and tell him to stay put, that we’d be sending some men by to talk to him. Russ, you think the strange-o’s will fall in love with this one?”

  “How many confessions so far?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Double that by morning, more if Loew got the press excited with his purple prose.”

  “I would say I got them motivated, Lieutenant. And I would say my prose fit the crime.”

  Ellis Loew was standing in the doorway, Fritz Vogel and Bill Koenig behind him. Millard locked eyes with the radio ham. “Too much publicity is a hindrance, Ellis. If you were a policeman you’d know that.”

  Loew flushed and reached for his Phi Beta Kappa key. “I’m a ranking civilian-police liaison officer, specially deputized by the City of Los Angeles.”

  Millard smiled. “You’re a civilian, counselor.”

  Loew bristled, then turned to Tierney. “Captain, have you sent men to talk to the victim’s father?”

  Captain Jack said, “Not yet, Ellis. Soon.”

  “How about Vogel and Koenig? They’ll get us what we need to know.”

  Tierney looked up at Millard. The lieutenant gave an almost imperceptible head shake; Captain Jack said, “Aah, Ellis, in big homicide jobs the whip assigns the men. Aah, Russ, who do you think should go?”

  Millard scrutinized Cavanaugh and Smith, me trying to look inconspicuous and Lee yawning, slouched against the wall. He said, “Bleichert, Blanchard, you bad pennies question Miss Short’s father. Bring your report to University Station tomorrow morning.”

  Loew’s hands jerked his Phi Beta key clean off its chain; it fell to the floor. Bill Koenig squeezed in the doorway and picked it up; Loew about-faced into the hall. Vogel glared at Millard, then followed him. Harry Sears, breathing Old Grand Dad, said, “He sends a few niggers to the gas chamber and it goes to his head.”

  Vern Smith said, “The niggers must have confessed.”

  Dick Cavanaugh said, “With Fritzie and Bill they all confess.”

  Russ Millard said, “Shit-brained, grandstanding son of a bitch.”

  We took separate cars to the Wilshire District, rendezvousing in front of 10201/2 South Kingsley at dusk. It was a garage apartment, shack sized, at the rear of a big Victorian house. Lights were burning inside; Lee, yawning, said, “Good guy-bad guy,” and rang the buzzer.

  A skinny man in his fifties opened the door and said, “Cops, huh?” He had dark hair and pale eyes similar to the girl in the mug shots, but that was it for familial resemblance. Elizabeth Short was a knockout; he looked like a knockout victim: bony frame in baggy brown trousers and a soiled undershirt, moles all over his shoulders, seamed face pitted with acne scars. Pointing us inside, he said, “I got an alibi, just in case you think I did it. Tighter than a crab’s ass, and that is air tight.”

  Mr. White Hat to the hilt, I said, “I’m Detective Bleichert, Mr. Short. This is my partner Sergeant Blanchard. We’d like to express our condolences for the loss of your daughter.”

  Cleo Short slammed the door. “I read the papers, I know who you are. Neither one of you would have lasted one round with Gentleman Jim Jeffries. And as far as your condolences go, I say c’est la vie. Betty called the tune, so she had to pay
the piper. Nothing’s free in this life. You want to hear my alibi?”

  I sat down on a threadbare sofa and eyeballed the room. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves spilling dime novels; there was the couch, one wooden chair and nothing else. Lee got out his notebook. “Since you’re so anxious to tell us, shoot.”

  Short slumped into the chair and ground the legs into the floor, like an animal pawing the dirt. “I was Johnny on the spot at my job from Tuesday the fourteenth at two P.M. to five P.M. Wednesday the fifteenth. Twenty-seven straight hours, time and a half for the last seventeen. I’m a refrigerator repairman, the best in the west. I work at Frost King Appliances, 4831 South Berendo. My boss’s name is Mike Mazmanian. You call him. He’ll alibi me up tighter than a popcorn fart, and that is air tight.”

  Lee yawned and wrote it down; Cleo Short crossed his arms over his bony chest, daring us to make something of it. I said, “When was the last time you saw your daughter, Mr. Short?”

  “Betty came west in the spring of ‘43. Stars in her eyes and hanky-panky on her mind. I hadn’t seen her since I left that dried-up old ginch of a wife of mine in Charlestown, Mass., on March 1,1930 A.D. and never looked back. But Betty wrote me and said she needed a flop, so I—”

  Lee interrupted: “Cut the travelogue, pop. When was the last time you saw Elizabeth?”

  I said, “Back off, partner. The man is cooperating. Go on, Mr. Short.”

  Cleo Short dug in with his chair, glaring at Lee. “Before punchy here got wise, I was gonna tell you that I reached into my own savings and sent Betty a C-note to come west on, then I promised her three squares and a five-spot a week mad money if she kept the house tidy. A generous offer, if you want my opinion. But Betty had other things on her mind. She was a lousy housekeeper, so I gave her the boot on June 2, 1943 A.D., and I ain’t seen her since.”

  I wrote the information down, then asked, “Did you know she was in LA recently?”

  Cleo Short quit glaring at Lee and glared at me. “No.”

  “Did she have any enemies that you knew of?”

  “Just herself.”

  Lee said, “No cute answers, Pops.”

  I whispered, “Let him talk,” then said out loud, “Where did Elizabeth go when she left here in June of ‘43?”

  Short jabbed a finger at Lee. “You tell your pal he calls me Pops I call him stumblebum! Tell him disrespect’s a two-way street! Tell him I repaired Chief CB Horrall’s Maytag 821 model myself, and I mean air tight!”

  Lee walked into the bathroom; I saw him chasing a handful of pills with sink water. I put on my calmest white hat voice: “Mr. Short, where did Elizabeth go in June of ‘43?”

  Short said, “That palooka lays a hand on me, I’ll fix his wagon air tight.”

  “I’m sure you will. Would you ans—”

  “Betty moved up to Santa Barbara, got a job at the Camp Cooke PX. She sent me a postcard in July. It said some soldier beat her up bad. That was the last I ever heard from her.”

  “Did the card mention the soldier’s name?”

  “No.”

  “Did it mention the names of any of her friends up at Camp Cooke?”

  “No.”

  “Any boyfriends?”

  “Hah!”

  I put my pen down. “Why ‘hah’?”

  The old man laughed so hard that I thought his chicken chest would explode. Lee walked out of the bathroom; I gave him a sign to ease off. He nodded and sat down next to me; we waited for Short to laugh himself out. When he was down to a dry chortle, I said, “Tell me about Betty and men.”

  Short giggled. “She liked them and they liked her. Betty believed in quantity before quality, and I don’t think she was too good at saying no, unlike her mother.”

  “Be specific,” I said. “Names, dates, descriptions.”

  “You musta caught too many in the ring, Sonny, ‘cause your seabag’s leaky. Einstein couldn’t remember the names of all Betty’s boyfriends, and my name ain’t Albert.”

  “Give us the names you do remember.”

  Short hooked his thumbs in his belt and rocked in the chair like a cut-rate cock of the walk. “Betty was man crazy, soldier crazy. She went for lounge lizards and anything white in a uniform. When she was supposed to be keeping house for me she was out prowling Hollywood Boulevard, cadging drinks off servicemen. When she was staying here this place was like a branch of the USO.”

  Lee said, “Are you calling your own daughter a tramp?”

  Short shrugged. “I’ve got five daughters. One bad apple ain’t so bad.”

  Lee’s anger was oozing out of him; I put a restraining hand on his arm and could almost feel his blood buzzing. “What about names, Mr. Short?”

  “Tom, Dick, Harry. Those punks took one look at Cleo Short and amscrayed with Betty pronto. That’s as specific as I can get. You look for anything not too ugly in a uniform, you won’t go wrong.”

  I flipped to a fresh notebook page. “What about employment? Was Betty holding down a job when she stayed here?”

  The old man shouted: “Betty’s job was working for me! She said she was looking for movie work, but that was a lie! All she wanted to do was parade the Boulevard in those black getups of hers and chase men! She ruined my bathtub dying her stuff black, then she took off before I could dock the damage out of her wages! Prowling the streets like a black widow spider, no wonder she got hurt! It’s her mother’s fault, not mine! No-cunt shanty Irish bitch! Not my fault!”

  Lee drew a hard finger across his throat; we walked out to the street, leaving Cleo Short screaming at his four walls. Lee said, “Jesus fuck” I sighed, “Yeah,” thinking of the fact that we’d just been handed the entire U.S. armed forces as suspects.

  I dug in my pockets for a coin. “Toss you for who writes it up?”

  Lee said, “You do it, okay? I want to stick at Junior Nash’s pad and get some license numbers.”

  “Try and get some sleep, too.”

  “I will.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I can’t shit a shitter. Look, will you go over to the house and keep Kay company? She’s been worried about me, and I don’t want her to be alone.”

  I thought of what I’d said at 39th and Norton last night—that statement of what all three of us knew but never talked about, that move forward that only Kay had the guts to take. “Sure, Lee.”

  I found Kay in her usual weeknight posture—reading on the living room couch. She didn’t look up when I walked in, she just blew a lazy smoke ring and said, “Hi, Dwight.”

  I took a chair across the coffee table from her. “How’d you know it was me?”

  Kay circled a passage in the book. “Lee stomps, you tread cautiously.”

  I laughed. “It’s symbolic, but don’t tell anybody.”

  Kay stubbed out her cigarette and put the book down. “You sound worried.”

  I said, “Lee’s all bent out of shape on the dead girl. He got us detached to work the investigation when we should be going after a priority warrantee, and he’s taking Benzedrine and starting to go a little squirrely. Has he told you about her?”

  Kay nodded. “A little.”

  “Have you read the papers?”

  “I’ve avoided them.”

  “Well, the girl is being played up as the hottest number since the atom bomb. There’s a hundred men working a single homicide, Ellis Loew’s looking to get fat off of it, Lee’s cuckoo on the subject—”

  Kay disarmed my tirade with a smile. “And you were front page news on Monday, but you’re stale bread today. And you want to go after your big bad robber man and get yourself another headline.”

  “Touché, but that’s only part of it.”

  “I know. Once you got the headline, you’d hide out and not read the papers.”

  I sighed. “Jesus, I wish you weren’t so much smarter than me.”

  “And I wish you weren’t so cautious and complicated. Dwight, what is going to happen with us?”

&n
bsp; “The three of us?”

  “No, us.”

  I looked around the living room, all wood and leather and Deco chromium. There was a glass-fronted mahogany cabinet; it was filled with Kay’s cashmere sweaters, all the shades of the rainbow at forty dollars a pop. The woman herself, South Dakota white trash molded by a cop’s love, sat across from me, and for once I said exactly what was on my mind. “You’d never leave him. You’d never leave this. Maybe if you did, maybe if Lee and I were quits as partners, maybe then we’d have a chance together. But you’d never give it all up.”

  Kay took her time lighting a cigarette. Exhaling a breath of smoke, she said, “You know what he’s done for me?”

  I said, “And for me.”

  Kay tilted her head back and eyed the ceiling, brushed stucco with mahogany wainscoting. Blowing smoke rings, she said, “I had such a schoolgirl crush on you. Bobby De Witt and Lee used to drag me to the fights. I brought my sketch pad so I wouldn’t feel like one of those awful women buttering up their men by pretending they liked it. What I liked was you. The way you made fun of yourself with your teeth, the way you covered up so you wouldn’t get hit. Then you joined the Department, and Lee told me how he heard you informed on those Japanese friends of yours. I didn’t hate you for it, it just made you seem more real to me. The zoot suit thing, too. You were my storybook hero, only the stories were real, little bits and pieces here and there. Then the fight came along, and even though I hated the idea of it I told Lee to go ahead, because it seemed to mean the three of us were meant to be.”

  I thought of a dozen things to say, all of them true, and just about the two of us. But I couldn’t, and ran to Lee for cover. “I don’t want you to worry about Bobby De Witt. When he gets out, I’ll lean on him. Hard. He’ll never come near you or Lee.”

  Kay took her eyes off the ceiling and fixed me with a strange look, hard but sad underneath. “I’ve given up worrying about Bobby. Lee can handle him.”

  “I think Lee’s afraid of him.”

  “He is. But I think it’s because he knows so much about me, and Lee’s afraid he’ll let everyone know. Not that anyone cares.”