The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  Twenty-six

  The phone rang. I reached for the bedside extension, then snapped that I’d been a couch sleeper for the past month and flailed at the coffee table. “Yeah?”

  “You still sleeping?”

  It was the voice of Ray Pinker, my supervisor at SID. “I was sleeping.”

  “Past tense is right. Are you listening?”

  “Keep going.”

  “We’ve got a gunshot suicide from yesterday. 514 South June Street, Hancock Park. Body removed, looks open and shut. Do a complete work-up and drop the report off with Lieutenant Reddin at Wilshire dicks. Got it?”

  I yawned. “Yeah. Premises sealed?”

  “The stiff’s wife will show you around. Be courteous, this is filthy rich we’re dealing with.”

  I hung up and groaned. Then it hit me that the Sprague mansion was a block from the June Street address. Suddenly the assignment was fascinating.

  I rang the bell of the pillared colonial manse an hour later. A handsome gray-haired woman of about fifty opened the door, dressed in dusty work togs. I said, “I’m Officer Bleichert, LAPD. May I express my condolences, Mrs.—”

  Ray Pinker hadn’t given me a name. The woman said, “Condolences accepted, and I’m Jane Chambers. Are you the lab man?”

  The woman was trembling underneath her brusqueness; I liked her immediately. “Yes. If you’ll point me to the place I’ll take care of it and leave you alone.”

  Jane Chambers ushered me into a sedate, all-wood foyer. “The study in back of the dining room. You’ll see the rope. Now, if you’ll excuse me I want to do some gardening.”

  She took off dabbing at her eyes. I found the room, stepped over the crime scene rope and wondered why the bastard did himself in where his loved ones would see the gore.

  It looked like a classic self-inflicted shotgun job: overturned leather chair, the outline of the stiff chalked on the floor beside it. The weapon, a double-barreled .12 gauge, was right where it should have been—three feet in front of the body, the muzzle coated with blood and shredded tissue. The light plaster walls and ceiling showed off blood and caked-on brains to full advantage, the teeth fragments and buckshot a dead giveaway that the victim had stuck both barrels in his mouth.

  I spent an hour measuring trajectories and spatter marks, scraping matter into test tubes and dusting the suicide weapon for latents. When I finished, I took a bag from my evidence kit and wrapped up the shotgun, knowing full well it would end up the property of some LAPD sportsman. Then I walked out to the entrance hall, stopping when I saw a framed painting hung at eye level.

  It was a portrait of a clown, a young boy done up in court jester’s garb from long, long ago. His body was gnarled and hunched; he wore a stuporous ear-to-ear smile that looked like one continuous deep scar.

  I stared, transfixed, thinking of Elizabeth Short, DOA at 39th and Norton. The more I stared the more the two blended; finally I pulled my eyes away and settled them on a photo of two arm-linked young women who looked just like Jane Chambers.

  “The other survivors. Pretty, aren’t they?”

  I turned around. The widow was twice as dusty as before, smelling of insect spray and soil. “Like their mother. How old are they?”

  “Linda’s twenty-three and Carol’s twenty. Are you finished in the study?”

  I thought of the daughters as contemporaries of the Sprague girls. “Yes. Tell whoever cleans it up to use pure ammonia. Mrs. Chambers—”

  “Jane.”

  “Jane, do you know Madeleine and Martha Sprague?”

  Jane Chambers snorted, “Those girls and that family. How do you know them?”

  “I did some work for them once.”

  “Count yourself lucky it was a brief encounter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The hallway phone rang. Jane Chambers said, “Back to condolences. Thank you for being so nice, Mr.—”

  “It’s Bucky. Good-bye, Jane.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I wrote out my report at Wilshire Station, then checked the routine suicide file on Chambers, Eldridge Thomas, DOD 4/2/49. It didn’t tell me much: Jane Chambers heard the shotgun explosion, found the body and called the police immediately. When detectives arrived, she told them her husband was depressed over his failing health and their eldest daughter’s failing marriage. Suicide: case closed pending forensic crime scene work-up.

  My work-up confirmed the verdict, plain and simple. But it didn’t feel like enough. I liked the widow, the Spragues lived a block away, I was still curious. I got on a squadroom phone and put in calls to Russ Millard’s newspaper contacts, giving them two names: Eldridge Chambers and Emmett Sprague. They did their own digging and calling, and got back to me on the station extension I was hogging. Four hours later I knew the following:

  That Eldridge Chambers died enormously wealthy;

  That from 1930 to 1934 he was president of the Southern California Real Estate Board;

  That he nominated Sprague for membership in Wilshire Country Club in 1929, but the Scotsman was rejected because of his “Jewish business associates”—i.e. East Coast hoodlums;

  And the kicker: Chambers, through intermediaries, got Sprague kicked off the real estate board when several of his houses collapsed during the ‘33 earthquake.

  It was enough for a juicy newspaper obit, but not enough for a test-tube cop with a foundering marriage and time on his hands. I waited four days; then, when the papers told me Eldridge Chambers was in the ground, I went back to talk to his widow.

  She answered the door in gardening clothes, holding a pair of shears. “Did you forget something or are you as curious as I thought you were?”

  “The latter.”

  Jane laughed and wiped dirt from her face. “After you left I put your name together. Weren’t you some sort of athlete?”

  I laughed. “I was a boxer. Are your daughters around? Have you got someone staying with you?”

  Jane shook her head. “No, and I prefer it that way. Will you join me for tea in the backyard?”

  I nodded. Jane led me through the house and out to a shaded veranda overlooking a large bent grass yard more than half dug up into furrows. I sat down in a lounge chair; she poured iced tea. “I’ve done all that garden work since Sunday. I think it’s helped more than all the sympathy calls I’ve gotten.”

  “You’re taking it well.”

  Jane sat down beside me. “Eldridge had cancer, so I half expected it. I didn’t expect a shotgun in our own home, though.”

  “Were you close?”

  “No, not anymore. With the girls grown up, we would have divorced sooner or later. Are you married?”

  “Yes. Almost two years.”

  Jane sipped tea. “God, a newlywed. There’s nothing better, is there?”

  My face must have betrayed me. Jane said, “Sorry,” then changed the subject. “How do you know the Spragues?”

  “I was involved with Madeleine before I met my wife. How well do you know them?”

  Jane considered my question, staring out at the uprooted yard. “Eldridge and Emmett went way back,” she said finally. “They both made a lot of money in real estate and served on the Southern California board together. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, since you’re a policeman, but Emmett was a bit of a crook. A lot of his houses went down during the big quake in ‘33, and Eldridge said that he has lots of other property that has to go bad sooner or later—houses made out of the worst possible material. Eldridge got Emmett booted off the board when he found out that phony corporations controlled the rentals and sales—he was enraged that Emmett would never be held responsible if more lives were lost.”

  I remembered talking with Madeleine about the same thing. “Your husband sounds like a good man.”

  Jane’s lips curled into a smile—it looked like against her will. “He had his moments.”

  “He never went to the police about Emmett?”

  “No. He was afraid of his gangster friends. He jus
t did what he could, a little nuisance to Emmett. Being removed from the board probably cost him some business.”

  “’He did what he could’ isn’t a bad epitaph.”

  Now Jane’s lips curled into a sneer. “It was out of guilt. Eldridge owned slum blocks in San Pedro. When he learned he had cancer, he really started feeling guilty. He voted Democratic last year, and when they got in he had meetings with some of the new City Council members. I’m sure he gave them his dirt on Emmett.”

  I thought of the Grand Jury probe the scandal sheets were predicting. “Maybe Emmett’s heading for a fall. Your husband could have been—”

  Jane rapped her ring finger on the tabletop. “My husband was rich and handsome and did a mean Charleston. I loved him until I found out he was cheating on me, and now I’m starting to love him again. It is so strange.”

  “It’s not so strange,” I said.

  Jane smiled very softly. “How old are you, Bucky?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Well, I’m fifty-one, and I think it’s strange, so it is strange. You shouldn’t be so all-accepting of the human heart at your age. You should have illusions.”

  “You’re teasing me, Jane. I’m a cop. Cops don’t have illusions.”

  Jane laughed—heartily. “Touché. Now I’m curious. How did an ex-boxer cop get involved with Madeleine Sprague?”

  Now I lied. “I stopped her for a red light and one thing led to another.” My gut clenching, I asked casually, “What do you know about her?”

  Jane stomped her foot at a crow eyeing the rose bushes just off the veranda. “What I know about the distaff Spragues is at least ten years old and quite strange. Baroque, almost.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Jane said, “Some might say all teeth.” When I didn’t laugh, she looked across the dug-up yard to Muirfield Road and the boom baron’s estate. “When my girls and Maddy and Martha were little, Ramona directed pageants and ceremonies on that huge front lawn of theirs. Little enactments with the girls dressed up in pinafores and animal costumes. I let Linda and Carol participate, even though I knew Ramona was a disturbed woman. When the girls all got a bit older—in their teens—the pageants got stranger. Ramona and Maddy were very good at makeup, and Ramona staged these … epics, reenacting the things that happened to Emmett and his friend Georgie Tilden during World War I.

  “So, she had children wearing soldier kilts and pancake faces, carrying toy muskets. Sometimes she smeared fake blood on them, and sometimes Georgie actually filmed it. It got so bizarre, so out of proportion, that I made Linda and Carol quit playing with the Sprague girls. Then one day Carol came home with some pictures Georgie took of her. She was playing dead, all smeared with red dye. That was the last straw. I stormed over to the Sprague house and berated Georgie, knowing Ramona wasn’t really responsible for her actions. The poor man just took my abuse, and I felt terrible about it later—he was disfigured in a car wreck, and it turned him into a bum. He used to manage property for Emmett, now he just does yard work and weeds lots for the city.”

  “And what happened to Madeleine and Martha then?”

  Jane shrugged. “Martha turned into some sort of art prodigy and Madeleine turned into a roundheels, which I guess you already know.”

  I said, “Don’t be catty, Jane.”

  Tapping the table with her ring, Jane said, “I apologize. Maybe I’m wishing / could pull it off. I certainly can’t spend the rest of my life gardening, and I’m too proud for gigolos. What do you think?”

  “You’ll find yourself another millionaire.”

  “Unlikely, and one was enough to last me a lifetime. You know what I keep thinking? That it’s almost 1950 and I was born in 1898. That floors me.”

  I said what I’d been thinking for the past half hour. “You make me wish things were different. That time was different.”

  Jane smiled and sighed. “Bucky, is that the best I can expect from you?”

  I sighed back. “I think it’s the best anyone can.”

  “You’re a bit of a voyeur, you know.”

  “And you’re a bit of a gossip.”

  “Touché. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”

  We held hands on the way to the door. In the entrance hall, the scar mouth clown painting grabbed me again. Pointing to it, I said, “God, that is spooky.”

  “Valuable, too. Eldridge bought it for my forty-ninth birthday, but I hate it. Would you like to take it with you?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Thank you, then. You were my best condoler.”

  “And you were mine.”

  We embraced for a moment, then I took off.

  Twenty-seven

  Bunsen burner jockey.

  Couch sleeper.

  Detective without a case.

  I worked at all three throughout the spring of ‘49. Kay left for school early each morning; I pretended to sleep until she was gone. Alone in the fairy tale house, I touched my wife’s things—the cashmere sweaters Lee bought her, her essays to be graded, the books she had stacked up waiting to be read. I kept looking for a diary, but never found one. At the lab I pictured Kay prowling my belongings. I toyed with the idea of writing a journal and leaving it out for her to find—detailed accounts of my coupling with Madeleine Sprague—rubbing her nose in it to either gain forgiveness for my fix on the Dahlia or blow our marriage out of its stasis. I got as far as five pages scrawled in my cubicle—stopping when I smelled Madeleine’s perfume melding with the Lysol stench of the Red Arrow Motel. And wadding the pages up and throwing them away only fanned the brush fire into a blaze.

  I kept the Muirfield Road mansion under surveillance for four nights running. Parked across the street, I watched lights go on and off, saw shadows flicker across leaded glass windows. I played with notions of crashing the Spragues’ family life, cashing in on being a hard boy to Emmett, coupling with Madeleine all over hot sheet row. None of the family left the manse during those nights—all four of their cars remained on the circular driveway. I kept wondering what they were doing, what shared history they were rehashing, what the odds were on someone mentioning the cop who came to dinner two years before.

  On the fifth night, Madeleine, dressed in slacks and a pink sweater, walked to the corner to mail a letter. When she returned, I saw her notice my car, passing headlights illuminating the surprise on her face. I waited until she hurried back inside the Tudor fortress, then drove home, Jane Chambers’ voice taunting, “Voyeur, voyeur.”

  Walking in, I heard the shower running; the bedroom door was open. Kay’s favorite Brahms quintet was on the phonograph. Remembering the first time I saw my wife naked, I undressed and lay down on the bed.

  The shower went off; Brahms came on that much stronger. Kay appeared in the doorway wrapped in a towel. I said, “Babe,” she said, “Oh, Dwight,” and let the towel drop. We both began talking at once, apologies from both sides. I couldn’t quite make out her words, and I knew that she couldn’t unscramble mine. I started to get up to turn off the phonograph, but Kay moved to the bed first.

  We fumbled at kisses. I went open-mouthed too fast, forgetting how Kay liked to be coaxed. Feeling her tongue, I pulled away, knowing she hated it. Closing my eyes, I trailed my lips down her neck; she moaned, and I knew it was a fake. The love sounds got worse—like something you’d expect from a stag film actress. Kay’s breasts were flaccid in my hands, her legs closed, but braced up against me. A knee nudge parted them—the response was jerky, spasmodic. Hard now, I made Kay wet with my mouth and went inside her.

  I kept my eyes open and on hers so she would know it was just us; Kay turned away, and I knew she saw through it. I wanted to ease off and go slowly, softly, but the sight of a vein throbbing in Kay’s neck made me go as hard as I could. I came grunting, “I’m sorry goddamn you I’m sorry,” and whatever Kay said back was muffled by the pillow she was burying her head in.

  Twenty-eight

  The following night I was parked across the s
treet from the Sprague mansion, this time in the unmarked Ford I drove to SID field jobs. Time was lost on me, but I knew that every second was bringing me closer to knocking on the door or bolting outright.

  My mind played with Madeleine nude; I wowed the other Spragues with killer repartee. Then light cut across the driveway, the door slammed and the Packard’s headbeams went on. It pulled out onto Muirfield, hung a quick left turn on Sixth Street and headed east. I waited a discreet three seconds and followed.

  The Packard stayed in the middle lane; I dogged it from the right one, a good four car lengths behind. We traveled out of Hancock Park into the Wilshire District, south on Normandie and east on 8th Street. I saw glittery bar beacons stretching for a solid mile—and knew Madeleine was close to something.

  The Packard stopped in front of the Zimba Room, a dive with crossed neon spears above the entrance. The only other parking space was right behind it, so I glided up, my headlights catching the driver locking the door, my brain wires unraveling when I saw who it wasn’t and was.

  Elizabeth Short.

  Betty Short.

  Liz Short.

  The Black Dahlia.

  My knees jerked into the steering wheel; my trembling hands hit the horn. The apparition shielded her eyes and squinted into my beams, then shrugged. I saw familiar dimples twitch, and returned from wherever it was I was going.

  It was Madeleine Sprague, completely made over as the Dahlia. She was dressed in an all-black clinging gown, with makeup and hairdo identical to Betty Short at her portrait photo best. I watched her sashay into the bar, saw a dot of yellow in her upswept black curls and knew that she’d taken her transformation all the way to the barrette Betty wore. The detail hit me like a Lee Blanchard one-two. On punch-drunk legs, I pursued the ghost.