The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  “What Beth was good at was writing. I used to sit in on movies at the Majestic, and Beth used to describe things so I’d have something to go with the dialogue. She was brilliant, and I encouraged her to write for the movies, but she just wanted to be an actress like every other silly girl who wanted to get out of Medford.”

  I would have committed mass murder to get out. “Tommy, you said you know the reason Beth was promiscuous.”

  Tommy sighed. “When Beth was sixteen or seventeen, these two thugs assaulted her, somewhere in Boston. One actually raped her, and the other was going to, but a sailor and a marine came by and chased them away.

  “Beth thought the man might have made her pregnant, so she went to a doctor for an examination. He told her she had benign ovarian cysts, that she’d never be able to have children. Beth went crazy, because she’d always wanted lots of babies. She looked up the sailor and marine who’d saved her, and she begged them to father her child. The marine turned her down, and the sailor… he used Beth until he was shipped overseas.”

  I thought immediately of Frenchman Joe Dulange—his account of the Dahlia hipped on being pregnant, how he fixed her up with a “doctor buddy” and a bogus exam. That part of Dulange’s story obviously wasn’t as booze-addled as Russ Millard and I had originally thought—it was now a solid lead on Betty’s missing days, the “doctor buddy” at least a major witness, maybe a major suspect. I said, “Tommy, do you know the names of the sailor and marine? The doctor?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No. But that was when Beth became so loose with servicemen. She thought they were her saviors, that they could give her a child, a little girl to be a great actress in case she never made it. It’s sad, but the only place I heard Beth was a great actress was in bed.”

  I stood up. “What happened with you and Beth then?”

  “We lost touch. She left Medford.”

  “You’ve given me a good lead, Tommy. Thanks.”

  The blind man tapped his cane at the sound of my voice. “Then get who did it, but don’t let Beth get hurt anymore.”

  “I won’t.”

  Thirty-two

  The Short case was hot again—if only with me.

  Hours of Medford pub crawling gave me promiscuous Betty, East Coast style—a big anticlimax after Tommy Gilfoyle’s revelations. I caught a midnight flight back to LA and called Russ Millard from the airport. He agreed: Frenchman Joe’s “roach doctor” was probably legit, independent of Dulange’s DTs. He proposed a call to the Fort Dix CID to try to get more details from the discharged loony, then a three-man canvassing of downtown doctor’s offices, concentrating on the area around the Havana Hotel, where Dulange coupled with Betty. I suggested that the “doctor” was most likely a barfly, an abortionist or a quack; Russ concurred. He said he would talk to R&I and his snitches, and he and Harry Sears would be knocking on doors inside of an hour. We divvied up the territory: Figueroa to Hill, 6th Street to 9th Street for me; Figueroa to Hill, 5th to 1st for them. I hung up and drove straight downtown.

  I stole a Yellow Pages and made a list: legitimate MD’s and chiropractors, herb pushers and mystics—bloodsuckers who sold religion and patent medicine under the “doctor” aegis. The book had a few listings for obstetricians and gynocologists, but instinct told me that Joe Dulange’s doctor ploy was happenstance—not the result of his consciously seeking a specialist to calm Betty down. Running on adrenaline, I worked.

  I caught most of the doctors early in their day, and got the widest assortment of sincere denials I’d ever encountered as a cop. Every solid citizen croaker I talked to convinced me a little bit more that Frenchy’s pal had to be at least a little bit hinky. After a wolfed sandwich lunch, I hit the quasi types.

  The herb loonies were all Chinese; the mystics were half women, half squarejohn lames. I believed all of their bewildered no’s; I pictured all of them too terrified by the Frenchman to consider his offer. I was about to start hitting bars for scuttlebutt on barfly docs when exhaustion hit me. I drove “home” to the El Nido and slept—for all of twenty minutes.

  Too itchy to try sleep again, I tried thinking logically. It was 6:00, doctors’ offices were closing for the day, the bars wouldn’t be ripe for canvassing for at least three hours. Russ and Harry would call me if they got something hot. I reached for the master file and started reading.

  Time flew; names, dates and locations in police jargon kept me awake. Then I saw something that I’d perused a dozen times before, only this time it seemed off.

  It was two memo slips:

  1/18/47: Harry - Call Buzz Meeks at Hughes and have him call around on possible E. Short movie bus. associations. Bleichert says the girl was star struck. Do this independent of Loew - Russ.

  1/22/47: Russ - Meeks says goose egg. Too bad. He was anxious to help - Harry.

  With Betty’s movie mania fresh in my mind, the memos looked different. I remembered Russ telling me that he was going to query Meeks, the Hughes security boss and the Department’s “unofficial liaison” to the Hollywood community; I recalled that this was during the time when Ellis Loew was suppressing evidence on Betty’s promiscuity in order to secure himself a better prosecuting attorney’s showcase. Also: Betty’s little black book listed a number of lower-echelon movie people—names that were checked out during the ‘47 black book interrogations.

  The big question:

  If Meeks really had checked around, why didn’t he come up with at least a few of the black book names and forward them to Russ and Harry?

  I went out to the hall, got the Hughes Security number from the White Pages and dialed it. A singsong woman answered: “Security. May I help you?”

  “Buzz Meeks, please.”

  “Mr. Meeks is out of his office right now. Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Detective Bleichert, LAPD. When will he be back?”

  “When the budget meeting breaks up. May I ask what this is in reference to?”

  “Police business. Tell him I’ll be at his office in half an hour.”

  I hung up and leadfooted it to Santa Monica in twenty-five minutes. The gate guard admitted me to the plant parking lot, pointing to the security office—a Quonset hut at the end of a long string of aircraft hangars. I parked and knocked on the door; the woman with the singsong voice opened it. “Mr. Meeks said you should wait in his office. He won’t be very long.”

  I walked in; the woman left, looking relieved that her day’s work was over. The hut was wallpapered with paintings of Hughes aircraft, military art on a par with the drawings on cereal boxes. Meeks’ office was better decorated: photos of a burly crewcut man with various Hollywood hotshots—actresses I couldn’t place by name along with George Raft and Mickey Rooney.

  I took a seat. The burly man showed up a few minutes later, hand out automatically, like someone whose job was ninety-five percent public relations. “Hello there. Detective Blyewell, is it?”

  I stood up. We shook; I could tell that Meeks was put off by my two-day clothes and three-day beard. “It’s Bleichert.”

  “Of course. What can I do for you?”

  “I have a few questions about an old case you helped Homicide out with.”

  “I see. You’re with the Bureau, then?”

  “Newton Patrol.”

  Meeks sat down behind his desk. “A little out of your bailiwick, aren’t you? And my secretary said you were a detective.”

  I closed the door and leaned against it. “This is personal with me.”

  “Then you’ll top out your twenty rousting nigger piss bums. Or hasn’t anyone told you that cops who take things personal end up from hunger?”

  “They keep telling me, and I keep telling them that’s my hometown. You fuck a lot of starlets, Meeks?”

  “I fucked Carole Lombard. I’d give you her number, but she’s dead.”

  “Did you fuck Elizabeth Short?”

  Tilt, bingo, jackpot, lie detector perfect as Meeks flushed and fingered the papers on his blotter; a wheezi
ng voice to back it up: “You catch a few too many in the Blanchard fight? The Short cooze is dead.”

  I pulled back my jacket to show Meeks the .45 I was carrying. “Don’t call her that again.”

  “All right, tough guy. Now suppose you tell me what you want. Then we settle up and end this little charade before it gets out of hand. Comprende?”

  “In ‘47, Harry Sears asked you to query your movie contacts on Betty Short. You reported back that it was a washout. You were lying. Why?”

  Meeks picked up a letter opener. He ran a finger along the blade, saw what he was doing and put it down. “I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did.”

  “Convince me, or I call up Hedda Hopper and give her tomorrow’s column. How’s this sound: ‘Hollywood hanger-on suppressed Dahlia evidence because blank, blank, blank’? You fill in those blanks for me, or I fill them in for Hedda. Comprende?”

  Meeks gave bravado another try. “Bleichert, you are fucking with the wrong man.”

  I pulled out the .45, made sure the silencer was on tight and slid a round into the chamber. “No, you are.”

  Meeks reached for a decanter on the sideboard by his desk; he poured himself a bracer and gulped it. “What I got was a dead-end lead, but you can have it if you want it so bad.”

  I dangled my gun by the trigger guard. “From hunger, shitbird. So give it to me.”

  Meeks opened up a safe built into his desk and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He studied them, then swiveled his chair and spoke to the wall. “I got a tip on Burt Lindscott, a producer at Universal. I got it from a guy who hated Lindscott’s pal Scotty Bennett. Scotty was a pimp and a bookie, and he gave out Lindscott’s home phone number in Malibu to all the good-looking young stuff who applied at the Universal casting office. The Short girl got one of Scotty’s cards, and she called Lindscott.

  “The rest” the dates and so forth, I got from Lindscott himself. On the night of January tenth, the girl called from the Biltmore downtown. Burty had her describe herself, and he liked what he heard. He told the girl he’d give her a screen test in the morning, when he got back from a poker session at his club. The girl said she didn’t have any place to go until then, so Lindscott told her to come over and spend the night at his place—his houseboy would feed her and keep her company. She took a bus out to Malibu, and the houseboy—he was queer—did keep her company. Then, the next day around noon, Lindscott and three buddies of his came home drunk.

  “The guys thought they’d have some fun, so they gave the girl this screen test, reading from a screenplay Burt had lying around. She was bad, and they laughed her out, then Lindscott made her an offer service the four of them and he’d give her a bit part in his next picture. The kid was still mad at them for laughing at her screen test, and she threw a tantrum. She called them draft dodgers and traitors and said they weren’t fit to be soldiers. Burt kicked her out around two-thirty that afternoon, Saturday the eleventh. The houseboy said she was broke and that she said she was gonna walk back downtown.”

  So Betty walked, or hitched, twenty-five miles downtown, meeting Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby six hours or so later. I said, “Meeks, why didn’t you report this? And look at me.”

  Meeks swiveled around; his features were smeared with shame. “I tried to get ahold of Russ and Harry, but they were out in the field, so I called Ellis Loew. He told me not to report what I’d found out, and he threatened to revoke my security clearance. Later on I found out that Lindscott was a Republican bigwig, and he’d promised Loew a bundle for his run at DA. Loew didn’t want him implicated with the Dahlia.”

  I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the man; Meeks copped pleas while I ran pictures of Betty hooted at, propositioned, kicked out to die. “Bleichert, I checked out Lindscott and his houseboy and his buddies. These are legit depositions I’ve got—the megillah. None of them could have killed her. They were all at home and at their jobs from the twelfth straight through Friday the seventeenth. None of them could have done it, and I wouldn’t have sat on it if one of the bastards snuffed her. I’ve got the depositions right here, and I’ll show you.”

  I opened my eyes; Meeks was twirling the dial of a wall safe. I said, “How much did Loew pay you to keep quiet?”

  Meeks blurted, “A grand,” and backed off as if fearing a blow. I loathed him too much to give him the satisfaction of punishment, and left with his price tag hanging in the air.

  I now had Elizabeth Short’s missing days halfway filled in:

  Red Manley dropped her in front of the Biltmore at dusk on Friday, January tenth; she called Burt Lindscott from there, and her Malibu adventures lasted until 2:30 the following afternoon. She was back at the Biltmore that evening, Saturday the eleventh, met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the lobby, tricked with Johnny until shortly after midnight, then took off. She met Corporal Joseph Dulange then, or later in the morning, at the Night Owl Bar on 6th and Hill—two blocks from the Biltmore. She was with Dulange, there and at the Havana Hotel, until the afternoon or evening of Sunday, January twelfth, when he took her to see his “doctor buddy.”

  Driving back to the El Nido, some missing piece of legwork nagged at me through my exhaustion. Passing a phone booth it came to me: if Betty called Lindscott in Malibu—a toll call—there would be a record with Pacific Coast Bell. If she made other toll calls, at that time or on the eleventh, before or after her coupling with Johnny Vogel, P.C.B. would have the information in its records—the company saved tallies of pay phone transactions for cost and price studies.

  My fatigue nosedived once more. I took side streets the rest of the way, running stop signs and red lights; arriving, I parked in front of a hydrant and ran up to the room for a notebook. I was heading for the hallway phone when it foiled me by ringing.

  “Yes?”

  “Bucky? Sweet, is that you?”

  It was Madeleine. “Look, I can’t talk to you now.”

  “We had a date yesterday, remember?”

  “I had to leave town. It was for work.”

  “You could have called. If you hadn’t told me about this little hideaway of yours I’d have thought you were dead.”

  “Madeleine, Jesus Christ—”

  “Sweet, I need to see you. They’re tearing those letters off the Hollywoodland sign tomorrow, and demolishing some bungalows Daddy owns up there. Bucky, the deeds lapsed to the city, but Daddy bought that property and built those places under his own name. He used the worst materials, and an investigator from the City Council has been nosing around Daddy’s tax lawyers. One of them told him this old enemy of his who committed suicide left the Council a brief on Daddy’s holdings and—”

  It sounded like gibberish—tough guy Daddy in trouble, tough boy Bucky the second choice for consolation duty. I said, “Look, I can’t talk to you now,” and hung up.

  Now it was real detective shitwork. I arrayed my notebook and pen on the ledge by the phone and emptied a four-day accumulation of coins from my pockets, counting close to two dollars—enough for forty calls. First I called the night supervisor at Pacific Coast Bell, requesting a list of all toll and collect calls made from Biltmore Hotel pay phones on the evenings of January 10, 11, and 12, 1947; the names and addresses of the called parties and the times of the calls.

  I stood nervously holding the receiver while the woman did her work, shooting dirty looks to other El Nido residents who wanted to use the phone. Then, a half hour later, she came back on the line and started talking.

  The Lindscott number and address was there among the 1/10 listings, but nothing else that night registered as hinky. I wrote all the information down anyway; then, when the woman got to the evening of 1/11—right around the time Betty met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby—I hit paydirt:

  Four toll calls were made to obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills. I took down the names and numbers, along with the numbers for the doctors’ night answering services, and the immediately following t
oll call listings. They produced no sparks—but I copied them anyway. Then I attacked Beverly Hills with an arsenal of nickels.

  It took all my change to get what I wanted.

  I told the answering service operators it was a police emergency; they put me through to the doctors at home. They had their secretaries drive to the office to check their back records, then call me at the El Nido. The whole process took two hours. At the end of it I had this:

  On the early evening of January 11, 1947, a “Mrs. Fickling” and a “Mrs. Gordon” called a total of four different obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills, requesting appointments for pregnancy testing. The after-hours service operators made appointments for the mornings of January 14 and 15. Lieutenant Joseph Fickling and Major Matt Gordon were two of the war heros Betty dated and pretended to be married to; the appointments were never kept because on the fourteenth she was getting tortured to death; on the fifteenth she was a mutilated pile of flesh at 39th and Norton.

  I called Russ Millard at the Bureau; a vaguely familiar voice answered: “Homicide.”

  “Lieutenant Millard, please.”

  “He’s in Tucson extraditing a prisoner.”

  “Harry Sears, too?”

  “Yeah. How are you, Bucky? It’s Dick Cavanaugh.”

  “I’m surprised you could place my voice.”

  “Harry Sears told me you’d be calling. He left a list of doctors for you, but I can’t find it. That what you want?”

  “Yeah, and I need to talk to Russ. When’s he coming back?”

  “Late tomorrow, I think. Is there someplace I can call you if I find the list?”

  “I’m rolling. I’ll call you.”

  The other phone numbers had to be tried, but the obstetrician lead was too potent to sit on. I headed back downtown to look for Dulange’s doctor buddy, my exhaustion dropped like a hot rock.

  I kept at it until midnight, concentrating on the bars around 6th and Hill, talking up barflies, buying them drinks, racking up booze rebop and a couple of tips on abortion mills that almost sounded legit.