The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  Respectfully,

  Dwight W. Bleichert, Badge 1611,

  Central Detectives

  Finishing, I read the letter over, deciding that it worked in just the right blend of respect and exasperation, with the half-truth about the Sergeant’s Exam a good closing line. I was signing the copies when I heard a tremendous ruckus coming from the bullpen.

  I folded the pages into my jacket pocket and went to investigate. A group of detectives and crime lab techs in white smocks were surrounding a table, looking down at it, jabbering and gesturing away. I joined the throng, muttering “Holy fuck,” when I saw what was jazzing them.

  An envelope was lying on a metal evidence tray. It was stamped and postmarked and smelled faintly of gasoline. The front of it was covered with letters clipped from newspapers and magazines, glued to the plain white surface. The words spelled out:

  TO THE HERALD AND OTHER LA PAPERS.

  HERE IS DAHLIA’S BELONGINGS.

  LETTER TO FOLLOW.

  A lab man wearing rubber gloves slit the envelope and pulled out the contents—a little black address book, a plastic-sheathed Social Security card and a thin stack of photographs. Squinting, I read the name on the card—Elizabeth Ann Short—and knew the Dahlia case had blown wide open. The man next to me was talking the delivery up—a postal carrier found the envelope in a mailbox near the downtown library, almost keeled from a heart attack, then grabbed a pair of radio car bulls, who code three’d the booty over.

  Ellis Loew pushed his way up against the lab techs, Fritzie Vogel at his heels. The head tech flailed his hands in anger; a cacophony of speculation hit the pen. Then there was a loud whistle, and Russ Millard yelled, “Damnit, back off and let them work. And give them some quiet.—

  We did.

  The techs descended on the envelope, dusting it with print powder, leafing through the address book, examining the snapshots and calling out their findings like surgeons at an operating table:

  “Two partial latents on the back flap, smudged, no more than one or two comparison points, not enough to run a make on, maybe enough to compare to incoming suspects—”

  “No prints on Social Security card—”

  “Pages of address book readable, but gasoline saturated, no chance of sustaining latents. Names and phone numbers mostly men, not listed alphabetically, some pages ripped out—”

  “Photographs are of Short girl with servicemen in uniform, the men’s faces crossed out—”

  Stunned, I wondered: Would a letter follow? Was my random snuff theory blown? Since the stuff was obviously sent in by the killer, was he one of the servicemen in the pictures? Was the mailing cat and mouse, or the precursor to surrender and confession? All around me, other officers were running with the same dope, the same questions, talking in knots of two and three, or looking rapt, like they were talking with themselves. The lab techs took off with the plethora of new leads, cradling them in rubber-gloved hands. Then the only calm man in the room whistled again.

  And again the commotion froze. Russ Millard, poker-faced, counted the heads and pointed us over to the rear bulletin board. We lined up there; he said, “I don’t know what it means, except I’m pretty sure the killer sent the stuff. The lab boys are going to need more time on the envelope, then they’ll photograph the pages and give us a list of names to do interviews from.”

  Dick Cavanaugh said, “Russ, he’s playing with us. Some of the pages were ripped out, and I’ll lay you ten to one his name was on one of them.”

  Millard smiled. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he’s crazy and wants to get caught, maybe some of the people in the book know him. Maybe the techs will get latents off the photos or be able to identify some of the men from the insignia of their uniforms. Maybe the bastard will send a letter. That’s a lot of maybes, so I’ll tell you what we’ve got for sure: all eleven of you are going to drop what you’re doing and canvass the area around the mailbox where that envelope was found. Harry and I will be going over the case file to see if any of our previous suspects live or work around there. Then, when we’ve got the list of names from the book, we’ll go at it discreetly. Betty spread herself pretty thin with men, and homewrecking isn’t my style. Harry?”

  Sears was standing by the wall map of downtown LA, holding a pen and clipboard. He stuttered, “W-w-we’ll do f-f-foot beats.” I saw my transfer request stamped “Rejected.” Then I heard an argument on the opposite side of the squad-room.

  The arguers were Ellis Loew and Jack Tierney, both of them trying to score points and keep it sotto voce. They ducked behind a wall post for privacy, I ducked over to an adjacent phone cubicle to eavesdrop—hoping for skinny on Lee.

  It wasn’t about Lee—it was about Her.

  “… Jack, Horrall wants to take three quarters of the men off the investigation. Bond issue or no bond issue, he thinks he’s given the voters enough of a show. We can get around him by going at the names in the book a hundred percent. The more publicity the case gets, the more truck we’ve got with Horrall—”

  “Goddamn it, Ellis—”

  “No. Just listen to me. Before, I wanted to downplay the girl as a floozy. The way I see it now is that it’s too far out in the open already to sit on. We know what she was, and we’ll get it confirmed a couple of hundred times by the men in that little black book. We keep our men questioning them, I’ll keep feeding the names to my newspaper contacts, we’ll keep a head of steam on this thing until we get the killer.”

  “It’s a sucker play, Ellis. The killer’s name probably isn’t in the book. He’s a psycho, and he’s showing us his backside and saying, ‘Make something out of it.’ The girl’s a gravy train, Ellis. I’ve known it from the beginning, just like you. But this has got to backfire on us. I’m working a half dozen other homicides with skeleton crews, and if the married men in that book get their names in the paper, then their lives will be shot to shit because they copped Betty Short for a quick piece of tail.”

  There was a long stretch of silence. Then Loew said, “Jack, you know I’ll be DA sooner or later. If not next year, in ‘52. And you know that Green will be retiring in a few years, and you know who I want to replace him. Jack, I’m thirty-six and you’re forty-nine. I may get another shot at something this big. You won’t. For God’s sake take the farsighted view on it.”

  More silence. I pictured Captain Jack Tierney weighing the pros and cons of selling his soul to Satan with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a hard-on for the City of Los Angeles. When he said, “Okay, Ellis,” I tore up my transfer request and walked back to rejoin the circus.

  Eighteen

  Over the next ten days the circus turned into wholesale farce, with an occasional tragedy thrown in.

  No other leads were gleaned from the “Death Letter,” and the 243 names in the book were divvied up between four detective teams, the low number of cops Jack Tierney’s ploy aimed at padding that part of the investigation into extended newspaper and radio juice. Russ Millard argued for twenty teams and a fast, clean sweep; Captain Jack, backstopped by the DA Satan, refused. When Big Bill Koenig was deemed too combustible to work the questionings and was given clerical duties, I was paired with Fritz Vogel. Together, we questioned fifty-odd people, mostly men, about their association with Elizabeth Short. We heard predictable stories of them meeting Betty in bars and buying her drinks and dinner, listening to her fantasies of being the bride or widow of war heros, bedding or not bedding her. A number of the men did not even know the notorious Dahlia—they were “friends of friends,” their names passed on out of pussy hound camaraderie.

  Of our parcel of names, sixteen of the guys were what Fritzie labeled “Certified Dahlia Fuckers.” They were mostly lower-echelon movie minions: agents, talent scouts and casting directors who hung out at Schwab’s Drugstore chasing gullible would-be starlets, empty promises on their lips, Trojan “value packs” in their pockets. They told proud or shamefaced casting couch stories every bit as sad as Betty’s tales of bliss with studs in uniform. Final
ly, the men in Elizabeth Short’s little black book had two things in common—they got their names in the LA dailies and they coughed up alibis that eliminated them as suspects. And word filtered back to the squadroom that the publicity eliminated more than a few of them as husbands.

  The women were a mixed bag. Most were just pals—girl talk acquaintances, fellow cocktail lounge cadgers and aspiring actresses heading nowhere. A dozen or so were hookers and semi-pro B girls, instant soulmates that Betty met in bars. They gave us leads that petered out on follow-up investigation—basically, the word that Betty sold herself freelance to conventioneers at several lower-class downtown hotels. They hedged that Betty rarely peddled it, and could not identify any of her tricks by name; Fritzie’s canvassing of the hotels got him an angry zero, and the fact that several other women—R&I confirmed as prostitutes—couldn’t be located, pissed him off even more.

  Madeleine Sprague’s name did not appear in the book, nor did it turn up in any of my subsequent questionings. No dyke or dyke bar leads came out of the 243 names, and every night I checked the University squadroom bulletin boards to see if any of the other teams had latched on to her monicker. None of them did, and I started to feel very safe regarding my evidence suppression tango.

  While the book queries got most of the headlines, the rest of the circus continued on: tips, tips and more tips wasted thousands of police man-hours; poison phone and poison pen communiques had local squadroom dicks bracing spiteful loonies implicating their enemies for hundreds of major and minor grievances. Discarded women’s garments were sifted through at the Central crime lab, and every piece of size eight black female apparel that was found launched another extensive neighborhood run-through.

  The biggest surprise of my little black book tour was Fritz Vogel. Free of Bill Koenig, he possessed a surprising wit, and in his muscle fashion he was as adept an interrogator as Russ Millard. He knew when to punch for information, hitting fast and hard, fueled by personal rancor but capable of putting it out of his mind when the interrogee coughed up what we wanted. Sometimes I sensed that he was holding back out of respect for my nice guy questioning style, that the pragmatist in him knew it was the best way to get results. We became an effective Mutt and Jeff duo fast, and I could tell that I was a restraining influence on Fritzie, a check and balance on his admitted fondness for hurting criminals. He gave me a wary respect for the hurt I’d put on Bobby De Witt, and a few days into the temporary partnership we were bullshitting in broken German, a way to kill time driving to and from questionings. With me, Fritzie spoke less in tirades and came across as one of the guys—with a mean streak. He talked up the Dahlia and his coveted lieutenancy, but didn’t talk frames, and since he never tried to pull any railroad jobs around me and was straight in his FI reports, I got the notion that Loew had either given up the idea or was biding his time. I could also tell that Fritzie was constantly sizing me up, that he knew Koenig wouldn’t cut it as partner to Detective Division brass, but with Lee gone, I would. The appraisal process flattered me, and I kept myself razor sharp during interrogations. I had played second banana to Lee working Warrants, and if Fritzie and I partnered up I wanted him to know that I wouldn’t play stooge—or lacky—like Harry Sears to Russ Millard.

  Millard, Fritzie’s cop antithesis, exerted his own pull on me. He took to using Room 204 at the El Nido as his field office, going there at end of watch to read Lee’s superbly cross-filed collection of paper. With Lee gone, time weighed heavy on me, so I joined him most evenings. When he looked at the Dahlia horror pictures, he always made the sign of the cross and murmured “Elizabeth” with reverence; walking out, he said, “I’ll get him, dear.” He always left at 8:00 on the dot, to go home to his wife and sons. That a man could care so deeply yet put it aside so casually amazed me. I asked him about it; he said, “I will not let brutality rule my life.”

  From 8:00 on, my own life was ruled by two women, a crossfire of their strange, strong wills.

  From the El Nido, I’d go to see Kay. With Lee gone and no longer footing the bills, she had to find full-time work, and she did—getting a job teaching sixth grade at an elementary school a few blocks off the Strip. I’d find her grading book reports and perusing kiddie artwork stoically, glad to see me, but caustic underneath, like maintaining a business-as-usual front would keep her grief over Lee’s absence and her contempt for my reluctance at bay. I tried denting the front by telling her I wanted her, but would only move on it when Lee’s vanishing act was resolved; she answered with overeducated psychological claptrap about our missing third, turning the education he bought her around, using it as a weapon against him. I exploded at phrases like “paranoid tendencies” and “pathological selfishness,” coming back with “he saved you, he made you.” Kay’s comeback for that was, “He only helped me.” I had no comeback for the truth behind the jargon and the fact that without Lee as a centerpiece, the two of us were loose ends, a family sans patriarch. It was that stasis that drove me out the door ten nights running—straight to the Red Arrow Motel.

  So I brought Kay with me to Madeleine.

  We’d rut first thing, talk later. The talk was always of Madeleine’s family, followed by fantasies that I concocted so as not to feel impoverished in the wake of her tales. The brass girl had robber baron Daddy, the Emmett Sprague, confrere of Mack Sennett in the Hollywood salad days; art poseur and elixir-guzzling Mommy, a direct descendant of the California land grant Cathcarts; genius sister Martha, hotshot commercial artist, rising star on Ad Agency Row downtown. For a supporting cast there was Mayor Fletcher Bowron, public relations-minded thug Mickey Cohen, “Dreamer” Georgie Tilden, Emmett’s former stooge, the son of a famous Scottish anatomist and wastrel nickolodeon artiste. The Dohenys and Sepulvedas and Mulhollands were also close friends, as were Governor Earl Warren and DA Buron Fitts. Having only senile Dolph Bleichert, the late Greta Heilbrunner Bleichert, the Japs I snitched off and fight acquaintances, I spun yarns out of thin air: scholastic medals won and proms attended; bodyguarding FDR in ‘43. I dissembled away until it was time to rut again, grateful that we always kept the lights off between bouts, so Madeleine couldn’t read my face and know I was coming from hunger.

  Or from the Dahlia.

  The first time it happened accidentally. We were making love, both of us close to peaking. My hand slipped off the bed rail and hit the light switch on the wall, illuminating Betty Short below me. For just a few seconds I believed it was her, and I called out for Lee and Kay to help me. When my lover was Madeleine again, I reached for the switch, only to have her grab my wrist. Moving hard, springs creaking, light glaring, I made Madeleine Betty—made her eyes blue instead of hazel, made her body Betty’s body from the stag film, made her silently mouth, “No, please.” Coming, I knew it could never be that good with just plain Madeleine; when the brass girl whispered, “I knew she’d get to you sooner or later,” I dry sobbed that all my pillow stories were lies and poured out the nonstop true story of Lee and Kay and Bucky, straight through to Mr. Fire’s fix on the dead girl and his jump off the face of the earth. When I finished, Madeleine said, “I’ll never be a schoolteacher from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but I’ll be Betty or anyone else you want me to be.” I let her stroke my head, grateful not to have to lie anymore, but sad that she—and not Kay—was my confessor.

  So Elizabeth Short and I were formally joined.

  Nineteen

  Lee stayed gone and Madeleine stayed Betty, and there was nothing I could do about either transformation. Heeding the Metro goons’ warning, I kept my nose out of their investigation, constantly wondering if Mr. Fire took his powder preplanned or accidentally. I did check his bank records, finding an $800 balance with no recent withdrawals, and when I heard that a nationwide and Mexico APB had been issued on Lee and his ‘40 Ford, yielding goose egg, my instincts told me he had fled way south of the border, where the Rurales used gringo police bulletins as toilet paper. Russ Millard told me that two Mexican men, both well-known dope traffic
kers, had been arrested in Juarez for the murder of Bobby De Witt and Felix Chasco, which eased my mind on Metro making Lee for the job—but then scuttlebutt filtered down from high, high brass circles. Chief Horrall had rescinded the APB and decreed, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Thad Green’s secretary told Harry Sears that she had heard Lee was going to be dismissed from the LAPD if he did not show up within thirty days of the time he vanished.

  January dwindled out, rainy days with only one spark of excitement. An envelope arrived by mail at the Bureau. It had a clipped word address, with a clipped word letter on plain bond paper inside:

  HAVE CHANGED MY MIND.

  YOU WOULD NOT GIVE ME A SQUARE DEAL.

  DAHLIA KILLING JUSTIFIED.

  —BLACK DAHLIA AVENGER.

  Taped to the page was a photograph of a short, heavyset man wearing a business suit, his face scratched out. No prints or other forensic leads were gleaned from the snapshot or envelope, and since the servicemen pics from the first letter had been withheld from the press as a suspect elimination device, we knew letter number two was legit. The Bureau consensus was that the photo was of the killer, symbolically eliminating himself from the overall “picture.”

  With the death letter and stag film leads ground to dust, a second consensus took over: we were never going to get the bastard. The odds on “Unsolved” dropped to even money in the squadroom pool; Thad Green told Russ and Captain Jack that Horrall was going to pull the chain on the Dahlia mess on February 5, returning a large number of officers to their normal duties. Rumor had it that I would be one of the returnees, breaking in Johnny Vogel as my partner. Bad Breath Johnny rankled, but going back to Warrants came on as Paradise regained. Betty Short would then exist the only place I wanted her to—as the spark point of my imagination.