The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  “FBI, Special Agent Rice.”

  I stared daggers at Vasquez. “This is Officer Dwight Bleichert, Los Angeles Police Department. I’m in Ensenada, and I screwed up with some Rurales. They’re getting ready to kill me for nothing, and I thought you could talk Captain Vasquez here out of it.”

  “What the—”

  “Sir, I’m a legit LA policemen and you had better do this fast.”

  “You jerking my chain, son?”

  “Goddamn it, you want proof? I worked Central Homicide with Russ Millard and Harry Sears. I worked DA’s Warrants, I worked—”

  “Put the spic fellow on, son.”

  I handed the receiver to Vasquez. He took it and leveled his automatic at me; I kept my .38 on the woman. Seconds ticked; the standoff held as the Rurale boss listened to the fed, getting paler and paler. Finally he dropped the phone and lowered his piece. “Go home, puta. Get out of my city and get out of my country.”

  I holstered my gun and squeezed out of the booth; the woman shrieked. Vasquez stood back and waved his men away. I got in my car and peeled out of Ensenada on fear overdrive. It was only when I was back in America that I started obeying speed laws—and that was when it got bad with Lee.

  Dawn was pushing up over the Hollywood Hills when I knocked on Kay’s door. I stood on the porch shivering, storm clouds and streaks of sunlight looming as strange things I didn’t want to see. I heard “Dwight?” inside, followed by the sound of bolts being unlatched. Then the other remaining partner in the Blanchard/Bleichert/Lake triad was there, saying, “And all that.”

  It was an epitaph I didn’t want to hear.

  I walked inside, stunned at how strange and pretty the living room was. Kay said, “Lee’s dead?”

  I sat down in his favorite chair for the first time. “The Rurales or some Mexican woman or her friends killed him. Oh, babe, I—”

  Using Lee’s endearment jarred me. I looked at Kay, standing by the door, backlighted by the weird sunstreaks. “He hired the Rurales to kill De Witt, but that doesn’t mean shit. We’ve got to get Russ Millard and some decent Mexican cops on it …”

  I stopped, noticing the phone on the coffee table. I started dialing the padre’s home number. Kay’s hand halted me. “No. I want to talk to you first.”

  I moved from the chair to the couch; Kay sat beside me. She said, “You’ll hurt Lee if you go crazy with this.”

  That was when I knew she’d been expecting it; that was when I knew she knew more than I did. “You can’t hurt something dead.”

  “Oh, yes you can, babe.”

  “Don’t call me that! That’s his!”

  Kay moved closer and touched my cheek. “You can hurt him and you can hurt us.”

  I pulled away from the caress. “You tell me why, babe.”

  Kay cinched the belt on her robe and fixed me with a cold look. “I didn’t meet Lee at Bobby’s trial,” she said. “I met him before. We became friends, and I lied about where I was staying so Lee wouldn’t know about Bobby. Then he found out on his own, and I told him how bad it was, and he told me about a business opportunity he had coming up. He wouldn’t tell me the details, and then Bobby was arrested for bank robbery and everything was chaos.

  “Lee planned the robbery and got three men to help him. He’d bought his way out of his contract with Ben Siegel, and it cost him every cent he’d made as a boxer. Two of the men were killed during the robbery, one escaped to Canada, and Lee was the fourth. Lee framed Bobby because he hated him for what he did to me. Bobby didn’t know we were seeing each other, and we made it look like we met at the trial. Bobby knew it was a frame, but he didn’t suspect Lee, just the LAPD in general.

  “Lee wanted to give me a home, and he did. He was very cautious with his part of the robbery money, and he always talked up his boxing savings and his gambling so the brass wouldn’t think he was living above his means. He hurt his career by living with a woman, even though we weren’t together that way. It was like a happy fairy tale until last fall, right after you and Lee became partners.”

  I moved toward Kay, awed by Lee as the most audacious rogue cop in history. “I knew he had it in him.”

  Kay drew away from me. “Let me finish before you get sentimental. When Lee heard about Bobby getting an early parole date, he went to Ben Siegel to try to get him killed. He was afraid of Bobby talking about me, upsetting our fairy tale with all the ugly things he knew about yours truly. Siegel wouldn’t do it, and I told Lee it didn’t matter, that there were three of us now and the truth couldn’t hurt us. Then, right before New Year’s, the third man from the robbery showed up. He knew that Bobby De Witt was getting out on parole, and he made a blackmail demand: Lee was to pay him ten thousand dollars, or he would tell Bobby that Lee masterminded the robbery and framed him.

  “The man said Lee’s deadline was Bobby’s release date. Lee put him off, then went to Ben Siegel to try to borrow the money. Siegel wouldn’t do it, and Lee begged him to have the man killed. He wouldn’t do that either. Lee learned that the man hung out with some Negroes who sold marijuana, and he—”

  I saw it coming, huge and black like the headlines it got me, Kay’s words the new fine print: “That man’s name was Baxter Fitch. Siegel wouldn’t help Lee, so he got you. The men were armed, so I guess you were legally justified, and I guess you were damn lucky that no one looked into it. It’s the one thing I can’t forgive him for, the one thing I hate myself for tolerating. Still feeling sentimental, triggerman?”

  I couldn’t answer; Kay did it for me. “I didn’t think so. I’ll finish up, and you tell me if you still want revenge.

  “The Short thing happened then, and Lee latched on to it for his little sister and who knows what else. He was terrified that Fitch had already talked to Bobby, that Bobby knew about the frame. He wanted to kill him or have him killed, and I begged and pleaded with him to just let it be, no one would believe Bobby, so just don’t hurt anybody else. If it wasn’t for that fucking dead girl I might have convinced him. But the case went down to Mexico, and so did Bobby and Lee and you. I knew that the fairy tale was over. And it is.”

  FIRE AND ICE COPS KO NEGRO THUGS

  SOUTHSIDE SHOOTOUT—COPS: 4, HOODLUMS: O

  FOUR HOPHEADS SLAIN BY BOXER—POLICEMEN IN BLOODY LA GUN BATTLE

  Limp all over, I started to stand up; Kay grabbed my belt with both hands and brought me back down. “No! You don’t pull the patented Bucky Bleichert retreat this time! Bobby took pictures of me with animals, and Lee stopped it. He pimped me to his friends and hit me with a razor strap, and Lee stopped it. He wanted to love me, not fuck me, and he wanted us to be together, and if you weren’t so intimidated by him you would have known it. We can’t drag his name down. We have to give it all up and forgive him and get on with just us and—”

  I retreated then, before Kay destroyed the rest of the triad.

  Triggerman.

  Stooge.

  Bumfuck detective too blind to clear the case he was a homicide accessory to.

  The weak point in a fairy tale triangle.

  Best friend to a cop-bank robber, now the keeper of his secrets.

  “Give it all up.”

  I stuck to my apartment for the next week, killing off the remainder of my “vacation.” I hit the heavy bag and skipped rope and listened to music; I sat on the back steps and took finger sights at blue jays perching on my landlady’s clothesline. I convicted Lee of four homicides connected to the Boulevard-Citizens bank job and granted him a pardon based on homicide number five—himself. I thought of Betty Short and Kay until they blurred together; I reconstructed the partnership as a mutual seduction and figured out that I lusted for the Dahlia because I had her number, that I loved Kay because she had mine.

  And I examined the past six months. It was all there:

  The money Lee had been spending in Mexico was probably a separate stash of robbery swag.

  On New Year’s Eve I heard him weeping; Baxter Fitch had made his blackmail dem
and a few days before.

  That fall, Lee had sought out Benny Siegel—in private—every time we went to the fights at the Olympic; he was trying to talk him into killing Bobby De Witt.

  Right before the shoot-out, Lee had spoken on the phone to a snitch—allegedly about Junior Nash. The “snitch” had fingered Fitch and the Negros, and Lee came back to the car looking spooked. Ten minutes later four men were dead.

  On the night I met Madeleine Sprague, Kay shouted at Lee: “After all that might happen”—a portentous line, probably her predicting disaster with Bobby De Witt. During our time working the Dahlia case, she had been jittery, morose, concerned for Lee’s well-being, yet weirdly accepting of his lunatic behavior. I thought she was upset over Lee’s obsession with Betty Short’s murder; she was really running toward and from the fairy tale’s finale.

  It was all there.

  “Give it all up.”

  When my refrigerator was empty, I took the patented Bucky Bleichert retreat down to the market to stock up. Walking in, I saw a box boy reading the local section of the morning Herald. Johnny Vogel’s picture was at the bottom of the page; I looked over the kid’s shoulder and saw that he’d been dismissed from the LAPD on a graft whitewash. A column over, Ellis Loew’s name caught my eye—Bevo Means was quoting him that “The Elizabeth Short investigation is no longer my raison d’etre—I have more pertinent fish to fry.” I forgot all about food, and drove to West Hollywood.

  It was recess. Kay was in the middle of the schoolyard, supervising kids flopping around in a sandbox. I watched her awhile from the car, then walked over.

  The kids noticed me first. I flashed my teeth at them until they started laughing. Kay turned around then. I said, “It’s the patented Bucky Bleichert advance.”

  Kay said, “Dwight”; the kids looked at us like they knew it was a big moment. Kay caught on a second later. “Did you come here to tell me something?”

  I laughed; the kids chortled at another shot of my choppers. “Yeah. I decided to give it all up. Will you marry me?”

  Kay, expressionless, said, “And we’ll bury the rest of it? The f-ing dead girl too?”

  “Yes. Her too.”

  Kay stepped into my arms. “Then yes.”

  We embraced. The children called out, “Miss Lake’s got a boyfriend, Miss Lake’s got a boyfriend!”

  We were married three days later, May 2, 1947. It was a rush job, the vows given by the LAPD Protestant chaplain, the service held in the backyard of Lee Blanchard’s house. Kay wore a pink dress to satirize her lack of virginity; I wore my blue dress uniform. Russ Millard was best man, and Harry Sears came along as a guest. He started out with a stutter, and for the first time I saw that it was precisely his fourth drink that quashed it. I got the old man out of the rest home on a pass, and he didn’t know who the hell I was, but seemed to have a good time anyway—swigging from Harry’s flask, goosing Kay, hopping around to the music from the radio. There was a table laid out with sandwiches and punch, hard and soft. The six of us ate and drank, and total strangers walking down to the Strip heard the music and laughter and crashed the party. By dusk the yard was filled with people I didn’t know, and Harry made a run to the Hollywood Ranch Market for more food and booze. I unloaded my service revolver and let the unknown civilians play with it, and Kay danced polkas with the chaplain. When darkness hit, I didn’t want it to end, so I borrowed strings of Christmas lights from the neighbors and strung them over the backdoor and the clothesline and Lee’s favorite Yucca tree. We danced and drank and ate under a fake constellation, the stars red and blue and yellow. Around 2:00 A.M. , the clubs on the Strip let out, revelers from the Irocadero and Mocambo made the scene, and Errol Flynn hung around for a while, his tux coat doffed for my jacket, replete with badge and pistol medals. If it weren’t for the thunderstorm that struck, it might have gone on forever—and I wanted it to. But the crowd broke up amidst frantic kisses and hugs, and Russ drove the old man back to the rest bin. Kay Lake Bleichert and I retired to the bedroom to make love, and I left the radio on to help distract me from Betty Short. It wasn’t necessary—she never crossed my mind.

  III

  Kay and Madeleine

  Twenty-five

  Time passed. Kay and I worked and played at being a young married couple.

  After our quickie San Francisco honeymoon, I returned to what remained of my police career. Thad Green talked turkey to me: he admired what I did with the Vogels, but considered me useless as a patrol cop—I had earned the enmity of rank and file blues, and my presence in a uniformed division would only create grief. Since my year of junior college showed straight A’s in chemistry and math, he assigned me to the Scientific Investigation Detail as an evidence technician.

  The job was quasi-plainclothes—smocks in the lab and gray suits in the field. I typed blood, dusted for latent prints and wrote ballistics reports; scraped ooze off the walls at crime scenes and examined it under a microscope, letting the Homicide dicks take it from there. It was test tubes and beakers and clinical gore—an intimacy with death that I never became inured to; a constant reminder that I wasn’t a detective, that I couldn’t be trusted to follow up on my own findings.

  From various distances I followed the friends and enemies the Dahlia case had given me.

  Russ and Harry kept the El Nido filé room intact, continuing to work overtime hours on the Short investigation. I had a key to the door, but didn’t use it—per my promise to Kay to bury “that _______ dead girl.” Sometimes I met the padre for lunch and asked him how it was going; he always said, “Slowly,” and I knew that he would never find the killer and never quit trying.

  In June of ‘47, Ben Siegel was shot to death in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room. Bill Koenig, assigned to 77th Street dicks after Fritz Vogel’s suicide, caught a shotgun blast in the face on a Watts street corner early in ‘48. Both killings went unsolved. Ellis Loew was soundly trounced in the June ‘48 Republican primary, and I celebrated by cooking up beakers of moonshine on my Bunsen burner, getting everyone in the crime lab fried.

  The ‘48 general election brought me news of the Spragues. A slate of reform Democrats were running for seats on the LA City Council and Board of Supervisors, “City Planning” their basic campaign theme. They asserted that there were faultily designed, unsafe dwellings all over Los Angeles, and were calling for a grand jury probe on the contractors who built the structures back during the ‘20s real estate boom. The scandal tabloids took up the hue and cry, running articles on the “boom barons”—Mack Sennett and Emmett Sprague among them—and their “gangster ties.” Confidential magazine ran a series on Sennett’s Hollywoodland tract and how the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce wanted to lop the L-A-N-D off the giant Hollywoodland sign on Mount Lee, and there were photographs of the Keystone Kops director standing beside a stocky man with a cute little girl in tow. I couldn’t quite tell if it was Emmett and Madeleine, but I clipped the pictures anyway.

  My enemies;

  My friends;

  My wife.

  I processed evidence and Kay taught school, and for a while we reveled in the novelty of living a squarejohn life. With the house paid off in full and two salaries, there was plenty of money to spend, and we used it to pamper ourselves away from Lee Blanchard and the winter of ‘47. We took weekend trips to the desert and the mountains; we ate in restaurants three and four nights a week. We checked into hotels pretending to be illicit lovers, and it took me well over a year to realize that we did those things because it got us out of the pad the Boulevard-Citizens bank job paid for. And I was so heedless in my pursuit of pampering that it required a live-wire shock to spell it out.

  A floorboard in the hallway came loose, and I pulled it all the way off so I could reglue it. Looking in the hole, I found a cash roll, two thousand dollars in C-notes secured by a rubber band. I didn’t feel joyous or shocked; my brain went tick, tick, tick, and came up with the questions my rush into normal life had quashed:

&nb
sp; If Lee had this money, plus the dough he was spending in Mexico, why didn’t he pay off Baxter Fitch?

  If he had the money, why did he go to Ben Siegel to try to borrow ten grand to meet Fitch’s blackmail demand?

  How could Lee have bought and furnished this house, put Kay through college and still have had a substantial sum left when his cut from the aborted heist couldn’t have amounted to more than fifty grand or so?

  Of course I told Kay; of course she couldn’t answer the questions; of course she loathed me for dredging up the past. I told her we could sell the house and get an apartment like other normal squarejohns—and of course she wouldn’t have it. It was comfort, style—a link to her old life that she would not give up.

  I burned the money in Lee Blanchard’s Deco-streamline fireplace. Kay never asked me what I did with it. The simple act gave me back some smothered part of myself, cost me most of what I had with my wife—and returned me to my ghosts.

  Kay and I made love less and less. When we did it was perfunctory reassurance for her and a dull explosion for me. I came to see Kay Lake Bleichert as wasted by the obscenity in her old life, just short of thirty and already going chaste. I brought the gutter to our bed then, the faces of hookers I saw downtown attached to Kay’s body in the darkness. It worked the first few times, until I saw where I really wanted to go. When I finally made the move and came gasping, Kay stroked me with mothering hands, and I sensed that she knew I’d broken my marriage vow—with her right there.

  1948 became 1949. I turned the garage into a boxing gym, complete with speed bag and heavy bag, jump ropes and barbells. I got back into fighting trim, and decorated the garage walls with fight stills of young Bucky Bleichert, circa ‘40–’41. My own image glimpsed through sweat-streaked eyes brought me closer to her, and I scoured used book stores for Sunday supplements and news magazines. I found sepia candids in Colliers; some family snapshots reproduced in old issues of the Boston Globe. I kept them out of sight in the garage, and the stack grew, then vanished one afternoon. I heard Kay sobbing inside the house that evening, and when I went to talk to her the bedroom door was locked.