The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  I said, “So Lorna was lying to protect him?”

  Sears nodded. “That looks like the picture. Wellington’s still on the lam from old pimping warrants, though, and Lorna clammed up when she got wise to Meg. And here’s the kicker: we called Loew to tell him the Mex man was horseshit, but a Rurale buddy of ours says that Vogel and Koenig are still rousting spics.”

  The circus was turning into a farce. I said, “If the newspaper letter kiboshes their Mex job, they’ll be looking for patsies up here. We should hold our info back from them. Lee’s on suspension, but he made carbons from the case file, and he’s got them stored in a hotel room in Hollywood. We should hold on to it, use it to store our stuff.”

  Millard and Sears nodded slowly; the real kicker kicked me. “County Parole said Bobby De Witt bought a ticket for TJ. If Lee’s down there too, it could be trouble.”

  Millard shivered. “I don’t like the feel of it. De Witt’s a bad piece of work, and maybe he found out that Lee was headed down there. I’ll call the Border Patrol and have them put out a detain order on him.”

  Suddenly I knew it all came down to me. “I’m going.”

  Fifteen

  I crossed the border at dawn. Tijuana was just coming awake as I turned onto Revolución, its main drag. Child beggars were digging for breakfast in trash cans, taco venders were stirring pots of dog-meat stew, sailors and marines were being escorted out of whorehouses at the end of their five-spot all-nighters. The smarter ones stumbled over to Calle Colon and the penicillin pushers; the stupidos hotfooted toward East TJ, the Blue Fox and Chicago Club—no doubt eager to catch the early morning donkey show. Tourist cars were already lined up outside the cut-rate upholstery joints; Rurales driving prewar Chevys cruised like vultures, wearing black uniforms that looked almost like Nazi issue.

  I cruised myself, looking for Lee and his ‘40 Ford. I thought about stopping at the Border Patrol hut or Rurale substation to seek help, then remembered my partner was suspended from duty, illegally armed and probably stretched so thin that words from the wrong greaser would provoke him to God knows what. Recalling the Divisidero Hotel from my high school excursions south, I drove to the edge of town to seek American aid.

  The pink Art Deco monstrosity stood on a bluff overlooking a tin roof shantytown. I intimidated the desk clerk; he told me the “Loew party” was in suite 462. I found it on the ground floor rear, angry voices booming on the other side of the door.

  Fritzie Vogel was yelling, “I still say we get ourselves a spic! The letter to the Herald didn’t say stag movie, it just said Wellington saw the Dahlia and the other girlie in November! We can still—”

  Ellis Loew shouted back: “We can’t do that! Wellington admitted making the movie to Tierney! He’s the supervising officer, and we can’t go over his head!”

  I opened the door and saw Loew, Vogel and Koenig huddled in chairs, all of them holding eight-star Herald’s obviously hot off the presses. The framing session fell silent; Koenig gawked; Loew and Vogel muttered, “Bleichert,” simultaneously.

  I said, “Fuck the fucking Dahlia. Lee’s down here, Bobby De Witt’s here and it’s got to go bad. You—”

  Loew said, “Fuck Blanchard, he’s suspended” I beelined for him. Koenig and Vogel formed a wedge between us; trying to move through them was like bucking a brick wall. The DA backed off to the other side of the room, Koenig grabbed my arms, Vogel put his hands on my chest and pushed me outside. Loew evil-eyed me from the doorway, then Fritzie chucked my chin. “I’ve got a soft spot for light heavyweights. If you promise not to hit Billy, I’ll help you find your partner.”

  I nodded, and Koenig let me go. Fritzie said, “We’ll take my car. You don’t look fit to drive.”

  Fritzie drove; I eyeballed. He kept up a stream of chatter on the Short case and the lieutenancy it was going to get him; I watched beggars swarm turistas, hookers dispense front seat blow jobs and zoot suit youths prowl for drunks to roll. After four fruitless hours the streets became too car-choked to manuever in, and we got out and walked.

  On foot, the squalor was worse. The kiddie beggars got right up in your face, jabbering, shoving crucifixes at you. Fritzie swatted and kicked them away, but their hunger-ridden faces got to me, so I changed a fiver into pesos and tossed handfuls of coins into the gutter whenever they converged. It spawned scratching, biting and gouging free-for-alls, but it was better than looking into sunken eyes and seeing nada.

  An hour of prowling two abreast got us no Lee, no Lee’s ‘40 Ford and no gringos resembling Bobby De Witt. Then a Rurale in black shirt and jackboots, lounging in a doorway, caught my eye. He said, “Policia?” and I stopped and flashed my badge in answer.

  The cop dug in his pockets and pulled out a teletype photo strip. The picture was too blurred to identify, but the “Robert Richard De Witt” was plain as day. Fritzie patted the cop’s epaulets. “Where, Admiral?”

  The Mex clicked his heels and barked, “Estación, vamanos!” He marched ahead of us, turning into an alley lined with VD clinics, pointing to a cinderblock hut fenced in with barbed wire. Fritzie handed him a dollar; the Mex saluted like Mussolini and about-faced away. I strode for the station, forcing myself not to run.

  Rurales holding tommy guns flanked the doorway. I showed my badge; they heel clicked and let me in. Fritzie caught up with me inside; dollar bill in hand, he went straight for the front desk. The desk cop grabbed the buck and Fritzie said, “Fugitivo? Americano? De Witt?”

  The deskman smiled and hit a switch beside his chair, barred doors in the side wall clicked open. Fritzie said, “Precisely what is it we want this scum to tell us?”

  I said, “Lee’s down here, probably chasing smut leads on his own. De Witt came here directly from Quentin.”

  “Without checking in with his PO?”

  “Right.”

  “And De Witt has a hard-on for Blanchard from the Boulevard-Citizens job?”

  “Right.”

  “Enough said.”

  We walked down a corridor lined with cells. De Witt was alone in the last lock-up, sitting on the floor. The door buzzed open; Kay Lake’s defiler stood up. The years in stir had not been kind to him: the hatchet-faced tough of the ‘39 newspaper pictures was now a well-used piece of work, bloated in the body, grizzled in the face, his pachuco haircut as outdated as his Salvation Army suit.

  Fritzie and I walked in. De Witt’s greeting was con bravado tinged with just the right amount of subservience. “Cops, huh? Well, at least you’re Americans. Never thought I’d be glad to see you guys.”

  Fritzie said, “Why start now?” and kicked De Witt in the balls. He doubled over, Fritzie grabbed his duck’s ass scruff and gave him a hard backhand. De Witt started to foam at the mouth; Fritzie let go of his neck and wiped pomade on his sleeve. De Witt hit the floor, then crawled over to the commode and vomited into it. When he tried to get himself upright, Fritzie pushed his head back into the bowl and held it there with a big spit-shined wing-tip brogue. The ex-bank-robber-pimp drank piss water and puke.

  Vogel said, “Lee Blanchard’s here in TJ, and you came here flush out of Big Q. That’s a goddamned strange coincidence, and I don’t like it. I don’t like you, I don’t like the syphilitic whore you were born out of, I don’t like being down here in a rat-infested foreign country when I could be at home with my family. I do like inflicting pain on criminals, so you had better answer my questions truthfully, or I’ll hurt you bad.”

  Fritzie released his foot; De Witt came up gasping for air. I picked a soiled skivvy shirt up off the floor, and was about to hand it to him when I remembered the lash scars on Kay’s legs. The image made me throw the shirt at De Witt, then grab a chair from the catwalk and reach for my handcuffs. Fritzie swabbed the ex-con’s face, I shoved him into the seat and cuffed his wrists to the back slats.

  De Witt looked up at us; his trouser legs darkened as his bladder went. Fritzie said, “Did you know that Sergeant Blanchard is here in Tijuana?”

  De Wit
t shook his head back and forth, spraying off the remnants of his toilet dip. “I ain’t seen Blanchard since my fucking trial!”

  Fritzie shot him a little backhand, his Masonic ring severing a cheek vein. “Don’t use profanity with me, and address me as sir. Now, did you know that Sergeant Blanchard is here in Tijuana?”

  De Witt blubbered, “No” Fritzie said, “No, sir,” and slapped him. De Witt hung his head, lolling his chin on his chest. Fritzie prodded it up with one finger. “No, what?”

  De Witt screeched, “No, sir!”

  Even through my hate haze I could tell he was coming clean. I said, “Blanchard’s afraid of you. Why?”

  Twisting in the chair, greasy pompadour wilted over his forehead, De Witt laughed. Wild laughter, the kind that cuts through pain, then makes it worse. Livid, Fritzie balled a fist to punish him; I said, “Let him be.” Vogel relented; De Witt’s loony chuckles trailed off.

  Sucking in breath, De Witt said, “Man o Manieschewitz, what a laugh. Lee beauty gotta be scared of me ‘cause of how I flapped my trap at the trial, but all I know is what I read in the papers, and I gotta tell you that little reefer roust put the fear of God into me, if I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’. Maybe I was thinkin’ revenge up to then, maybe I was talkin’ trash to my cellies, but when Lee beauty killed them niggers and—”

  Vogel right hooked De Witt, toppling him, chair and all, to the floor. Spitting blood and teeth, the aging lounge lizard moaned and laughed at the same time; Fritzie knelt beside him and pinched his carotid artery, shutting off the blood to his brain. “Bobby boy, I do not like Sergeant Blanchard, but he is a fellow officer, and I will not have syphilitic scum like you defaming him. Now you risked a parole violation and a trip back to Q for a trip down here. When I let go of your neck you will tell me why, or I will pinch your neck again until your gray cells go snap, crackle and pop like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies.”

  Fritzie released the hold; De Witt’s face went from blue to dark red. With one hand, Vogel grabbed suspect and chair and placed them upright. Lounge lizard Bobby started to laugh again, then sputtered blood and stopped. Looking up at Fritzie, he reminded me of a dog who loves his cruel master because it’s the only one he’s got. His voice was a beaten dog whimper: “I came down to cop some horse and bring it back to LA before I reported in to my PO. The guy I got is supposed to be a softie, you tell him ‘Gee, sir, I been in stir eight years and I hadda get my ashes hauled,’ and he don’t violate you for bein’ late.”

  De Witt took a deep breath; Fritzie said, “Snap, crackle, pop.” Bobby boy dog whimpered the rest of his confession rapidamente: “The man down here is this cholo named Felix Chasco. He’s supposed to meet me at the Calexico Gardens Motel tonight. The LA man’s the brother of this guy I knew at Quentin. I ain’t met him and please don’t hurt me no more.”

  Fritzie let out a huge whoop and ran out of the cell to report his booty; De Witt licked blood off his lips and looked at me, his dog master now that Vogel was gone. I said, “Finish up on you and Lee Blanchard. And don’t get hysterical this time.”

  De Witt said, “Sir, all that’s between me and Blanchard is that I fucked this cunt Kay Lake.”

  I remember moving toward him and I remember picking him up two-handed by the neck, wondering how hard you had to squeeze a dog’s throat to make its eyeballs pop out. I remember him changing color and voices in Spanish, and Fritzie shouting, “His story checks.” Then I remember being hurled backward, thinking, so that’s what bars feel like. Then I remember nothing.

  I came to thinking I’d been knocked down in a third Bleichert-Blanchard fight, wondering how much hurt I’d put on my partner. I babbled, “Lee? Lee? Are you all right?” then sighted in on two greaser cops with ridiculous dime store regalia on their blackshirts. Fritzie Vogel towered over them, saying, “I let Bobby boy go so we could tail him to his pal. But he blew the tail while you were catching up on your beauty sleep, which was too bad for him.”

  Someone hugely strong lifted me up off the cell floor; coming out of my haze I knew it had to be Big Bill Koenig. Woozy and rubberlegged, I let Fritzie and the Mex cops lead me through the station and outside. It was dusk, and the TJ sky was already lit with neon. A Studebaker patrol car pulled up; Fritzie and Bill ushered me into the backseat. The driver hit the loudest siren the world had ever heard, then gunned it.

  We drove west out of town, stopping in the gravel center of a horseshoe-shaped auto court. TJ cops in khakis and jodhpurs were standing guard in front of a back unit, holding pump shotguns. Fritzie winked and offered me his arm to lean on; I spurned it and got out of the car under my own steam. Fritzie led the way over; the cops saluted us with their gun barrels, then opened the door.

  The room was a cordite-reeking slaughterhouse. Bobby De Witt and a Mexican man lay dead on the floor, bullet holes oozing blood all over them. Brain spatters leaking fluid covered one entire wall; De Witt’s neck was bruised from where I’d been throttling him. My first coherent thought was that I’d done it during my blackout, vigilante vengeance to protect the only two people I loved. Fritzie must have been a mind reader, because he laughed and said, “Not you, boyo. The spic is Felix Casco, a known dope trafficker. Maybe it was other dope scum, maybe it was Lee, maybe it was God. I say let our Mexican colleagues handle their own dirty laundry and let’s us go back to LA and get the son of a bitch who sliced the Dahlia.”

  Sixteen

  Bobby De Witt’s murder got a half column in the LA Mirror, I got a day off from a surprisingly solicitious Ellis Loew, Lee’s disappearance got a squad of Metropolitan Division cops full-time.

  I spent most of the day off in Captain Jack’s office, being interrogated by them. They asked me hundreds of questions about Lee—from the reasons for his outbursts at the stag film and La Verne’s Hideaway, to his obsession with the Short case, to the Nash memo and his shack job with Kay. I played fast and loose with facts, and lied by omission—keeping it zipped about Lee’s Benzedrine use, his file room at the El Nido Hotel and the fact that his cohabitation was chaste. The Metro bulls repeatedly asked me if I thought Lee killed Bobby De Witt and Felix Chasco; I repeatedly told them he wasn’t capable of murder. Asked for an interpretation of my partner’s flight, I told them about beating Lee up over the Nash job, adding that he was an ex-boxer, maybe soon to be an ex-cop, too old to go back to fighting, too volatile to live a squarejohn life—and the Mexican interior was probably as good a place as any for a man like that. As the interrogation wound down, I sensed that the officers weren’t interested in securing Lee’s safety—they were building a case for his LAPD expulsion. I was repeatedly told not to stick my nose in their investigation and each time I agreed I dug my fingers into my palms to keep from hurling insults and worse.

  From City Hall I went to see Kay. Two Metro goons had already paid her a visit, putting her through the wringer about her life with Lee, rehashing her old life with Bobby De Witt. The iceberg look she gave me said I was slime for belonging to the same police department; when I tried to comfort her and offer words of encouragement about Lee’s return, she said, “And all that,” and pushed me away.

  I checked out room 204 of the El Nido Hotel then, hoping for some kind of message, some kind of clue that said, “I’ll be back, and the three of us will keep going.” What I found was a shrine to Elizabeth Short.

  The room was a typical Hollywood bachelor flop: Murphy bed, sink, tiny closet. But the walls were adorned with Betty Short portrait pictures, newspaper and magazine photos, horror glossies from 39th and Norton, dozens of them enlarged to magnify every gruesome detail. The bed was covered with cardboard boxes—an entire detective’s case file, with carbons of miscellaneous memos, tip lists, evidence indexes, FIs and questioning reports all cross-filed alphabetically.

  Having nothing to do and no one to do it with, I leafed through the folders. The bulk of the information was staggering, the manpower behind it more staggering, the fact that it was all over one silly girl the most staggering of all. I didn�
�t know whether to toast Betty Short or rip her off the walls, so I badged the desk clerk on my way out, paid him a month’s rent in advance and kept the room like I promised Millard and Sears—even though I was really holding it for Sergeant Leland C. Blanchard.

  Who was somewhere out there in the Big Nowhere.

  I called up the classified desks of the Times, Mirror, Herald and Daily News, placing a personals ad to run indefinitely: “Fire—Nightflower room will remain intact. Send me a message—Ice.” With that behind me, I drove to the only place I could think of to send him one.

  39th and Norton was just a block of empty lots now. No arclights, no police cars, no nighttime gawkers. A Santa Ana wind blew in while I stood there, and the more I pulled for Lee to come back to me the more I knew my hotshot cop life was as gone as everybody’s favorite dead girl.

  Seventeen

  In the morning I sent the big boys a message. Hiding out in a storage room down the hall from my cubicle, I typed copies of a transfer request letter, one each for Loew, Russ Millard and Captain Jack. The letter read:

  I request to be detached from the Elizabeth Short investigation immediately, and returned to my duties at Central Division Warrants. I feel that the Short case is more than adequately staffed, by far more experienced officers than myself, and that I could more effectively serve the Department working Warrants. Moreover, with my partner, Sergeant L.C. Blanchard, missing, I will be in the position of Senior Officer, and I will need to break in a replacement at a time when there is most likely a large backlog of priority papers. In preparation for my duties as Senior Warrants officer, I have been studying for the Sergeant’s Examination, and expect to take it at the next promotion board this spring. This, I feel, will give me leadership training, and will make up for my relative lack of experience as a plainclothes field officer.