by James Ellroy
That first night she was as much my grief catcher as my lover. I was afraid of noise and abrupt movement, so she undressed me and made me be still, murmuring, “And all that,” every time I tried to talk about Fritzie or the Dahlia. She touched me so softly that it was hardly touching at all; I touched every whole and healthy part of her until I felt my own body cease to be fists and cop muscle. Then we roused each other slowly and made love, with Betty Short far away.
A week later I broke it off with Madeleine, the “neighbor girl” whose identity I had kept secret from Lee and Kay. I didn’t offer a reason, and the rich gutter crawler aced me as I was about to hang up the phone. “Find somebody safe? You’ll be back, you know. I look like her.”
Her.
A month passed. Lee didn’t return, the two dope traffickers were convicted and hanged for the De Witt-Chasco killings, my Fire and Ice ad continued to run in all four LA dailies. The Short case moved from headlines to back pages, tips fell off to almost zero, everyone but Russ Millard and Harry Sears went back to their regular assignments. Still assigned to Her, Russ and Harry kept putting in straight eights at the Bureau and in the field, spending evenings at the El Nido, going over the master file. When I got off duty at 9:00, I’d visit for a while on my way to see Kay, quietly amazed at how obsessed Mr. Homicide was becoming, his family neglected as he prowled paper until midnight. The man inspired confession; when I told him the story of Fritzie and the warehouse, his absolution was a fatherly embrace and the admonishing, “Take the Sergeant’s Exam. In a year or so I’ll go to Thad Green. He owes me one, and when Harry retires you’ll be my partner.”
It was a promise to build on, and it kept bringing me back to the file. With my days free and Kay at work, I had nothing to do, so I read it over and over. The “R,” “S,” and “T” folders were missing, which was an annoyance, but other than that it was perfection. My real woman had Betty Short pushed back across a Maginot Line into professional curiosity, and I kept reading, thinking and hypothesizing from the standpoint of becoming a good detective—the road I was on until I tripped that alarm. Sometimes I felt connections begging to be made, sometimes I cursed myself for not having ten percent more gray matter, sometimes the report carbons just made me think of Lee.
I continued with the woman he saved from a nightmare. Kay and I played house three and four times a week, the hours late now that I was working swingwatch. We made our tender kind of love and talked around the bad events of the past months, and as gentle and good as I was, I kept churning inside for an outside conclusion—Lee back, the Dahlia killer on a platter, one more Red Arrow shack with Madeleine or Ellis Loew and Fritzie Vogel nailed to a cross. What always came with it was a big, ugly replay of me hitting Cecil Durkin, followed by the question: how far would you have gone that night?
The beat was where it ate at me the most. I worked East 5th Street from Main to Stanford, skid row. Blood banks, liquor stores selling half pints and short dogs exclusively, fifty-cent-a-night flophouses and derelict missions. The unspoken rule down there was that foot beat hacks worked strong-arm. You broke up bottle gangs by whacking winos with your billy club; you hauled jigs out of the day labor joints when they insisted on getting hired. You rounded up drunks and ragpickers indiscriminately to meet the city quota, beating them down if they tried to run from the drunk wagon. It was attrition duty, and the only officers good at it were the transplanted Okie shitkickers hired in the manpower shortage during the war. I patrolled half-heartedly: little jabs with my stick, handing winos dimes and quarters to get them off the street and into the wine bars where I wouldn’t have to roust them, low quotas on my drunk sweeps. I got a rep as the Central swingwatch “sob sister”; twice Johnny Vogel saw me passing out chump change and hooted uproariously. Lieutenant Jastrow gave me a Class D fitness report my first month back in uniform—a clerical aide told me he cited my “Reluctance to employ sufficient force with recalcitrant misdemeanants.” Kay got a kick out of the line, but I saw a stack of bum paper building up so high that all Russ Millard’s juice wouldn’t be able to return me to the Bureau.
So I was back where I was before the fight and the bond issue, only further east and on foot. Rumors raged on my way up to Warrants; now speculation centered on my fall. One story had me shitcanned for beating up Lee, others had me infringing on East Valley Division’s process-serving territory, punking out on a bout with the 77th Street rookie who won the ‘46 Golden Gloves, incurring Ellis Loew’s wrath by leaking Dahlia info to a radio station opposed to his upcoming DA candidacy. Every rumor portrayed me as a backstabber, a Bolshevik, a coward and a fool; when my second month’s fitness report ended with the line, “This officer’s passive patrol behavior has earned him the enmity of every enforcement-minded policeman on his watch,” I started thinking of handing out five-spots to the winos and beatings to every bluesuit who looked at me even slightly hinky.
Then she came back.
I never thought about her on the beat; when I studied the file, it was just detective drudge work, facts and theorizing on a common DOA. When my lovemaking with Kay got too involved in affection, she came to help, served her purpose and was banished as soon as we finished. It was when I was asleep and helpless that she lived.
It was always the same dream. I was at the warehouse with Fritz Vogel, beating Cecil Durkin to death. She watched, screaming that none of the drool cases killed her, promising to love me if I made Fritzie quit hitting Charlie Issler. I stopped, wanting the sex. Fritzie continued his carnage, and Betty wept for Charlie while I had her.
I always woke up grateful for daylight, especially when Kay was beside me.
On April 4, almost two and a half months after Lee’s disappearance, Kay got a letter on official LAPD stationery:
4/3/47
Dear Miss Lake-
This is to inform you that Leland C. Blanchard has been formally dismissed from the Los Angeles Police Department on grounds of moral turpitude, effective 3/15/47. You were the beneficiary of his Los Angeles City Credit Union account, and since Mr. Blanchard remains out of touch, we feel it is only fair to send you the existing balance.
Best wishes,
Leonard V. Strock,
Sergeant,
Personnel Division
A check for $14.11 was included. It made me killing mad, and I attacked the master file so I wouldn’t attack my new enemy—the bureaucracy that owned me.
Twenty-three
Two days later the connection jumped up off the carbon and grabbed me by the balls.
It was my own FI report, filed on 1/17/47. Under “Marjorie Graham,” I had written: “M.G. stated E. Short used nickname variations of ‘Elizabeth’ according to the company she was with.”
Bingo.
I had heard Elizabeth Short called “Betty,” “Beth,” and once or twice “Betsy,” but only Charles Michael Issler, a pimp, referred to her as “Liz.” At the warehouse he had denied knowing her. I recalled that he didn’t impress me as a killer, but that I still found him hinky. When I’d thought about the warehouse before, it was Durkin and the stiff that came on strong; now I replayed it strictly for facts:
Fritzie had beat Issler half to death, ignoring the other three loonies.
He had stressed side issues, shouting: “Tell me what you know about the Dahlia’s missing days,” “Tell me what you know,” “Tell me what your girls told you.”
Issler had answered back, “I knew you at Ad Vice.”
I thought of Fritzie’s hands shaking earlier that night; I remembered him shouting at Lorna Martilkova: “You whored with the Dahlia, didn’t you, girlie? Tell me where you were during her lost days.” Then the finale hit: Fritzie and Johnny Vogel whispering on the ride out to the Valley.
“I proved I’m not no nancy boy. Homos couldn’t do what I did.”
“Be still, damn you!”
I ran out to the hall, fed the pay phone a nickel and dialed Russ Millard’s number at the Bureau.
“Central Homicide, Lieutenant Millard.”
<
br /> “Russ, it’s Bucky.”
“Something wrong, bright penny? You sound shaky.”
“Russ, I think I’ve got something. I can’t tell you now, but I need two favors.”
“This is about Elizabeth?”
“Yes. Goddamnit, Russ—”
“Hush, and tell me.”
“I need you to get me the Ad Vice file for Charles Michael Issler. He’s got three pimping priors, so I know he’ll have one.”
“And?”
I dry swallowed. “I want you to check on Fritz Vogel’s and John Vogel’s whereabouts January tenth through fifteenth.”
“Are you telling me—”
“I’m telling you maybe. I’m telling you maybe real strong.”
There was a long silence, then: “Where are you?”
“The El Nido.”
“Stay there. I’ll call you back inside of half an hour.”
I hung up and waited, thinking of a sweet package of glory and revenge. Seventeen minutes later the phone rang; I pounced on it. “Russ, what—”
“The file’s missing. I checked the ‘I’s’ myself. They were all put back unevenly, so my guess is that it was snatched recently. On the other, Fritzie was on duty at the Bureau straight through those days, racking up overtime on old cases, and Johnny was on vacation leave, where I don’t know. Now, will you explain all this?”
I got an idea. “Not now. Meet me here tonight. Late. If I’m not here, wait for me.”
“Bucky—”
“Later, padre.”
I called in sick that afternoon; that night I committed two felony B&E’s.
My first victim was working swingwatch; I called Personnel Division and impersonated a city payroll clerk to get his home address and phone number. The catching officer kicked loose; at dusk I parked across the street and eyeballed the apartment house that John Vogel called home.
It was a stucco four flat on Mentone near the LA-Culver City border, a salmon-pink structure flanked by identical buildings painted light green and tan. There was a pay phone at the corner; I used it to dial Bad Breath Johnny’s number, an extra precaution to make sure the bastard wasn’t in. Twenty rings went unanswered. I walked calmly over, found a bottom floor door with “Vogel” on the mail slot, worked a doubled-over hairpin into the keyhole and let myself in.
Inside, I held my breath, half expecting a killer dog to leap at me. I checked the luminous dial on my watch, decided ten minutes was tops and squinted for a light to turn on.
My eyes caught a floor lamp. I moved to it and pulled the cord, lighting up a tidy living room. There was a tidy bargain basement sofa with matching chairs, an imitation fireplace, cheesecake glossies of Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable and Ann Sheridan Scotch taped to the walls, what looked like a genuine captured Jap flag draped over the coffee table. The phone was on the floor by the sofa, with an address book next to it; I allotted half my time right there.
I checked every page. There was no Betty Short or Charles Issler, and none of the names listed were repeats from the master file or the names in Betty’s “little black book.” Five minutes down, five to go.
A kitchen, dinette and bedroom adjoined the living room. I turned off the lamp, moved in darkness to the half-open bedroom doorway and patted the inside wall for a light switch. Finding one, I flipped it on.
An unmade bed, four walls festooned with Jap flags and a big, scuffed chest of drawers were revealed. I opened the top drawer, saw three German Lugers, spare clips and a scattering of loose shells—and laughed at the taste of Axis Johnny. Then I opened the middle one, and a tingling was all over me.
Black leather harnesses, chains, whips, studded dog collars, Tijuana condoms that gave you a bludgeon-headed extra six inches. Smut books with pictures of naked women getting whipped by other women while they sucked harness-clad guys with big dicks. Close-up photos that captured fat, needle marks, chipped nail polish and dope-glazed eyes. No Betty Short, no Lorna Martilkova, no Slave Girls from Hell Egyptian backdrop or tie-in to Duke Wellington, but a parlay—whips to the coroner’s “light lash marks”—that was enough to nail Johnny Vogel as Dahlia suspect number one.
I shut the drawers, flicked off the light, tingle walked into the living room and turned on the lamp, then reached for the address book. “Daddy & Mom’s” number was GRanite-9401; if I got a no answer, B&E number two was a ten-minute drive away.
I dialed; Fritz Vogel’s phone rang twenty-five times. I turned off the light and hauled ass.
Vogel Senior’s small wood frame house was totally dark when I pulled up across from it. I sat behind the wheel remembering the layout from my previous visit, recalling two bedrooms off a long hallway, the kitchen, a rear service porch and a closed door across the hall from the bathroom. If Fritzie had a private den, that had to be it.
I took the driveway to the back of the house. The screen door to the service porch was open; I tiptoed past a washing machine to the barrier to the house proper. That door was solid wood, but feeling at the jamb I found it connected to the wall with a simple hook and eyelet. I shook the knob and felt plenty of give; if I could pop the little piece of metal, I was in.
I got down on my knees and patted the floor, stopping when my hand hit a skinny piece of metal. Pawing at it like a blind man, I realized I’d found an oil gauge dipstick. I smiled at my luck, stood up and popped the door open.
Thinking fifteen minutes tops, I moved through the kitchen, over to the hallway and down it, my hands in front of me to deflect unseen obstacles. A nightlight glowed inside the bathroom doorway—pointing me straight across to what I hoped was Fritzie’s hideaway. I tried the knob—and the door opened.
The little room was pitch dark. I banged along the walls, hitting picture frames, feeling iceberg spooky until my leg grazed a tall wobbly object. It was about to topple when I snapped that it was a gooseneck lamp, reached for the top part and flipped the switch.
Light.
The pictures were photographs of Fritzie in uniform, in plainclothes, standing at attention with the rest of his 1925 Academy class. There was a desk positioned against the back wall, facing a window covered with a velvet curtain, a swivel chair and a filing cabinet.
I slid the top compartment open and fingered through manila folders stamped “Intelligence Rpt—Bunco Division,” “Intelligence Rpt—Burglary Division,” “Intelligence Rpt—Robbery Division”—all with the names of individuals typed on side tabs. Wanting some kind of common denominator, I checked the first sheets of the next three folders I came to—finding only one carbon page in each of them.
But those single pieces of paper were enough.
They were financial accountings, lists of bank balances and other assets, tallies made on known criminals that the Department couldn’t legally touch. The routing designations at the top of each sheet spelled it out plain—it was the LAPD shooting the feds hot dope so that they could initiate tax evasion investigations. Handwritten notes—phone numbers, names and addresses—filled the margins, and I recognized Fritzie’s Parker penmanship hand.
My breath came in short cold bursts as I thought: shakedown. He’s either putting the screws to the hoods based on info in the rest of the files or selling them tip-offs on impending fed rousts.
Extortion, first degree.
Theft and harboring of official LAPD documents.
Impeding the progress of federal investigations.
But no Johnny Vogel, Charlie Issler or Betty Short.
I tore through another fourteen folders, finding the same scrawled-over financial reports in all of them. I memorized the side tab names, then moved to the bottom compartment. I saw “Known Offender Rpt—Administrative Vice Division” on the first file inside it—and knew I’d gotten the whole ball of wax.
Page one detailed the arrests, MO and confessing career of Charles Michael Issler, white male, born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1911; page two listed his “Known Associates.” A June 1946 “whore book” check by his probation officer yielded six gi
rls’ names, followed by phone numbers and the arrest dates and dispositions of their hooking convictions. There were an additional four female names below the heading “?—No Prostitution Record.” The third name was “Liz Short—Transient?”
I turned to page three and read down the column headed “KAs, cont”; one name harpooned me. “Sally Stinson” was in Betty Short’s little black book, and none of the four questioning teams had been able to locate her. In brackets beside her name, some Ad Vice dick had penciled in, “Works out of Biltmore bar—conventioneer johns.” Doodles in Fritzie’s ink color surrounded the entry.
I forced myself to think like a detective, not a revenge-happy kid. The extortion stuff aside, it was certain that Charlie Issler knew Betty Short. Betty knew Sally Stinson, who hooked out of the Biltmore. Fritz Vogel didn’t want anybody to know it. He probably arranged the warehouse stunt to find out how much Sally and/or his other girls had told Issler about Betty and the men she was recently with.
“I proved I’m not no nancy boy. Homos couldn’t do what I did. I’m not cherry no more, so don’t say nancy boy.”
I put the folders back in order, closed the cabinet, hit the light and relatched the backdoor before walking out the front like I owned the place, wondering briefly if there was any connection between Sally Stinson and the missing “S’s” in the master file. Treading air to my car, I knew it couldn’t be—Fritzie didn’t know that the El Nido work room existed. Then another thought took over: if Issler had blabbed about “Liz” and her tricks I would have overheard. Fritzie was confident he could keep me quiet. It was an underestimation that I was going to bleed him for.
Russ Millard was waiting for me with two words: “Report, Officer.”
I told him the whole story in detail. When I finished, he saluted Elizabeth Short on the wall, said, “We’re making progress, dear,” and formally stuck out his hand.
We shook, sort of like father and son after the big game. “What next, padre?”
