The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  Another sleepless day ended; I took to driving from bar to bar, playing the radio to keep from dozing off. The news kept droning on about the “milestone refurbishing” of the Holly-woodland sign—playing up the lopping off of L-A-N-D as the biggest thing since Jesus. Mack Sennett and his Hollywood-land tract got a lot of air time, and a theater in Hollywood was reviving a bunch of his old Keystone Kops pictures.

  Toward bar-closing time, I felt like a Keystone Kop and looked like a bum—scraggly beard, soiled clothes, fevered attention that kept wandering off. When drunks eager for more booze and camaraderie began giving me the brush, I took it as a strong hint, drove to a deserted parking lot, pulled in and slept.

  Leg cramps woke me up at dawn. I stumbled out of the car looking for a phone; a black-and-white cruised by, the driver giving me a long fisheye. I found a booth at the corner and dialed the padre’s number.

  “Homicide Bureau. Sergeant Cavanaugh.”

  “Dick, it’s Bucky Bleichert.”

  “Just the man I wanted to talk to. I’ve got the list. You got the pencil?”

  I dug out a pocket notebook. “Shoot.”

  “Okay. These are licensed-revoked doctors. Harry said they were practicing downtown in ‘47. One, Gerald Constanzo, 18411/2 Breakwater, Long Beach. Two, Melvin Praeger, 9661 North Verdugo, Glendale. Three, Willis Roach. That’s Roach like in the bug, in custody at Wayside Honor Rancho, convicted of selling morph in …”

  Dulange.

  The DTs.

  “So I take Dahlia down the street to see the roach doctor. I slip him a tensky, and he gives her a fake examination …”

  Breathing shallowly, I said, “Dick, did Harry write down the address where Roach was practicing?”

  “Yeah. 614 South Olive.”

  The Havana Hotel was two blocks away. “Dick, call Wayside and tell the warden that I’ll be driving up immediately to question Roach on the Elizabeth Short homicide.”

  “Mother dog.”

  “Motherfucking dog.”

  A shower, shave and change of clothes at the El Nido had me looking like a homicide detective; Dick Cavanaugh’s call to Wayside would give me the rest of the juice I needed. I took the Angeles Crest Highway north, laying 50-50 odds that Dr. Willis Roach was Elizabeth Short’s murderer.

  The trip took a little over an hour; Hollywoodland sign spiel accompanied me on the radio. The deputy sheriff in the gate hut examined my badge and ID card and called the main building to clear me; whatever he was told made him snap to attention and salute. The barbed-wire fence swung open; I drove past the inmate barracks and over to a large Spanish-style structure fronted by a tile portico. As I parked, an LASD captain in uniform walked over, hand out, nervous grin on. “Detective Bleichert, I’m Warden Patchett.”

  I got out and gave the man a Lee Blanchard bonecrusher. “A pleasure, Warden. Has Roach been told anything?”

  “No. He’s in an interrogation room waiting for you. Do you think he killed the Dahlia?”

  I started walking; Patchett steered me in the right direction. “I’m not sure yet. What can you tell me about him?”

  “He’s forty-eight years old, he’s an anesthesiologist, and he was arrested in October of ‘47 for selling hospital morphine to an LAPD narcotics officer. He got five to ten, did a year at Quentin. He’s down here because we needed help in the infirmary and the Adult Authority thought he’d be a safe risk. He’s got no prior arrests, and he’s been a model prisoner.”

  We turned into a low, tan brick building, a typical county “utility” job—long corridors, recessed steel doors embossed with numbers and no names. Passing a string of one-way glass windows, Patchett grabbed my arm. “There. That’s Roach.”

  I stared in. A bony middle-aged man in county denims was seated at a card table, reading a magazine. He was a smart-looking bird—high forehead covered by wisps of thinning gray hair, bright eyes, the kind of large, veiny hands you associate with doctors. I said, “Care to sit in, Warden?”

  Patchett opened the door. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Roach looked up. Patchett said, “Doc, this is Detective Bleichert. He’s with the Los Angeles Police, and he’s got a few questions for you.”

  Roach put down his magazine—American Anesthesioligist. Patchett and I took seats across from him; the doctor/dope peddler said, “However I can be of service,” his voice eastern and educated.

  I went right for the throat. “Dr. Roach, why did you kill Elizabeth Short?”

  Roach smiled slowly; gradually his grin spread ear to ear. “I expected you back in ‘47. After Corporal Dulange made that sad little confession of his, I expected you to break down my office door any second. Two and a half years after the fact surprises me, however.”

  My skin was buzzing; it felt like bugs were getting ready to eat me for breakfast. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  Roach’s grin disappeared, replaced by a serious look, the movie doctor getting ready to deliver some bad news. “Gentlemen, on Monday, January 13, 1947, I flew to San Francisco and checked in at the Saint Francis Hotel, preparatory to delivering my Tuesday night keynote speech at the annual convention of the Academy of American Anesthesiologists. I gave the speech Tuesday night, and was featured speaker at the farewell breakfast, Wednesday morning, January fifteenth. I was in the constant company of colleagues through the afternoon of the fifteenth, and I slept with my ex-wife at the Saint Francis both Monday and Tuesday nights. If you would like corroboration, call the Academy at their Los Angeles number, and my ex-wife, Alice Carstairs Roach, at San Francisco CR-1786.”

  I said, “Check that out for me, would you please, Warden?,” my eyes on Roach.

  Patchett left; the doctor said, “You look disappointed.”

  “Bravo, Willis. Now tell me about you and Dulange and Elizabeth Short.”

  “Will you inform the Parole Board that I cooperated with you?”

  “No, but if you don’t tell me I’ll have the LA District Attorney file charges on you for obstruction of justice.”

  Roach acknowledged match point with a grin. “Bravo, Detective Bleichert. You know, of course, that the reason the dates are so well fixed in my mind is due to all the publicity Miss Short’s death garnered. So please trust my memory.”

  I got out a pen and notepad. “Go, Willis.”

  Roach said, “In ‘47 I had a lucrative little sideline selling pharmaceuticals. I sold them primarily in cocktail lounges, primarily to servicemen who had discovered their pleasures overseas during the war. That was how I met Corporal Dulange. I approached him, but he informed me that he appreciated the pleasures of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch whisky exclusively.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At the Yorkshire House Bar, 6th and Olive Streets, near my office.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, that was the Thursday or Friday before Miss Short’s demise. I gave Corporal Dulange my card—injudiciously, as it turned out—and I assumed that I would never see the man again. Sadly, I was wrong.

  “I was in poor shape financially at that time, owing to the ponies, and I was living in my office. On the early evening of Sunday, January twelfth, Corporal Dulange showed up at my door with a lovely young woman named Beth in tow. He was quite drunk, and he took me aside, pressed ten dollars into my hand and told me lovely Beth was hipped on being pregnant. Would I please give her a quick examination and tell her it was so?

  “Well, I obliged. Corporal Dulange waited in my outer office, and I took lovely Beth’s pulse and blood pressure and informed her that yes indeed, she was pregnant. Her response was quite strange: she seemed sad and relieved at the same time. My interpretation was that she needed a reason to justify her obvious promiscuity, and child bearing seemed like the ticket.”

  I sighed. “And when her death became news, you didn’t go to the police because you didn’t want them nosing around your dope racket?”

  “Yes, that’s correct. But there’s more. Beth asked to use my phone.
I acceded, and she dialed a number with a Webster prefix and asked to speak to Marcy. She said, ‘It’s Betty,’ and listened for a while, then said, ‘Really? A man with a medical background?’ I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, and Beth hung up and said, ‘I’ve got a date.’ She joined Corporal Dulange in my waiting room, and they left. I looked out the window, and she was giving him the brush-off. Corporal Dulange stormed away, and Beth walked across 6th Street and sat down at the westbound Wilshire Boulevard bus stop. That was about seven-thirty, Sunday the twelfth. There. You didn’t know that last part, did you?”

  I finished up my shorthand version of it. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Will you tell the Parole Board that I gave you a valuable clue?”

  Patchett opened the door. “He’s clean, Bleichert.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  Another piece of Betty’s missing days revealed; another trip back to the El Nido, this time to check the master file for Webster prefix phone numbers. Going through the paperwork, I kept thinking that the Spragues had a Webster number, the Wilshire bus passed within a couple of blocks of their place and Roach’s “Marcy” could be a mistaken “Maddy” or “Martha.” It didn’t follow logically—the whole family was down at their Laguna beach house the week of Betty’s disappearance, Roach was certain about the “Marcy” and I had squeezed every ounce of Dahlia knowledge out of Madeleine.

  Still, the thought simmered, like some buried part of me wanted to hurt the family for the way I’d rolled in the gutter with their daughter and sucked up to their wealth. I threw out another hook to keep it going; it fell flat when confronted with logic:

  When Lee Blanchard disappeared in ‘47, his “R,” “S” and “T” files were missing; maybe the Sprague file was among them.

  But there was no Sprague file, Lee did not know that the Spragues existed, I kept everything pertaining to them away from him out of a desire to keep Madeleine’s lesbian bar doings under wraps.

  I continued skimming the file, sweating in the hot, airless room. No Webster prefixes appeared, and I started getting nightmare flashes: Betty sitting on the westbound Wilshire bus stop, 7:30 P.M., 1/12/47, waving bye-bye Bucky, about to jump into eternity. I thought about querying the bus company, a general rousting of drivers on that route—then realized it was too cold, that any driver who remembered picking up Betty would have come forward during all the ‘47 publicity. I thought of calling the other numbers I’d gotten from Pacific Coast Bell—then jacked that chronologically they were off—they didn’t jibe with my new knowledge of where Betty was at what time. I called Russ at the Bureau and learned that he was still in Tucson, while Harry was working crowd control up by the Hollywoodland sign. I finished my paper prowl, with a total of zero Webster prefixes. I thought of yanking Roach’s P.C.B file, nixing the notion immediately. Downtown LA, Madison prefix to Webster, was not a toll call—there would be no record, ditto on the Biltmore listings.

  It came on then, big and ugly: bye-bye Bleichert at the bus stop, adios shitbird, has-been, never-was, stool pigeon nigger-town harness bull. You traded a good woman for skunk pussy, you’ve turned everything that’s been handed you to pure undiluted shit, your “I will’s” amount to the eighth round at the Academy gym when you stepped into a Blanchard right hand—pratfalling into another pile of shit, clover that you turned to horse dung. Bye-bye Betty, Beth, Betsy, Liz, we were a couple of tramps, too bad we didn’t meet before 39th and Norton, it just might have worked, maybe us would’ve been the one thing we wouldn’t have fucked up past redemption—

  I bolted downstairs, grabbed the car and rolled code three civilian, peeling rubber and grinding gears, wishing I had red lights and siren to sanction me faster. Passing Sunset and Vine, traffic got bottlenecked: shitloads of cars turning north on Gower and Beachwood. Even from miles away I could see the Hollywoodland sign dripping with scaffolding, scores of antlike people climbing up the face of Mount Lee. The lull in movement calmed me down, gave me a destination.

  I told myself it wasn’t over, that I’d drive to the Bureau and wait for Russ, that with two of us we’d put the rest of it together, that all I had to do was get downtown.

  The traffic jam got worse—film trucks were shooting straight north while motorcycle bulls held back east- and westbound vehicles. Kids walked the lanes hawking plastic Hollywoodland sign souvenirs and passing out handbills. I heard, “Keystone Kops at the Admiral! Air-cooled! See the great new revival!” A piece of paper was shoved in my face, the printed “Keystone Kops,” “Mack Sennett” and “Deluxe Air-Cooled Admiral Theatre” barely registering, the photo on the bottom registering hugely loud and wrong, like your own scream.

  Three Keystone Kops were standing between pillars shaped like snakes swallowing each other’s tails; a wall inset with Egyptian hieroglyphics was behind them. A flapper girl was lying on a tufted divan in the right-hand corner of the picture. It was unmistakably the background that appeared in the Linda Martin/Betty Short stag film.

  I made myself sit still; I told myself that just because Emmett Sprague knew Mack Sennett in the ‘20s and had helped him build sets in Edendale, this didn’t mean that he had anything to do with a 1946 smut film. Linda Martin had said the movie was shot in Tijuana; the still unfound Duke Wellington admitted making it. When traffic started moving, I hung a quick left up to the Boulevard and ditched the car; when I bought my ticket at the Admiral box office the girl recoiled from me—and I saw that I was hyperventilating and rank with sweat.

  Inside, the air-conditioning froze that sweat, so that my clothes felt like an ice dressing. Final credits were rolling on the screen, replaced immediately by new opening ones, superimposed on papier mâché pyramids. I balled my fists when “Emmett Sprague, Assistant Director,” flashed; I held my breath for a title that said where the thing was shot. Then a printed prologue came on, and I settled into an aisle seat to watch.

  The story was something about the Keystone Kops transplanted to biblical days; the action was chases and pie throwing and kicks in the ass. The stag film set recurred several times, confirmed by more details each showing. The exterior shots looked like the Hollywood Hills, but there were no outside-inside scenes to pin down whether the set was in a studio or a private dwelling. I knew what I was going to do, but I wanted another hard fact to buttress all the logical “What if’s” that were stacking up inside me.

  The movie dragged on interminably; I shivered from icy sweats. Then the end titles rolled, “Filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A.,” and the “What if’s” fell like tenpins.

  I left the theater, shaking from the blast-oven heat outside. I saw that I’d left the El Nido without either my service revolver or off-duty .45, took side streets back and grabbed the handcannon. Then I heard, “Hey, fella. Are you Officer Bleichert?”

  It was the next-door tenant, standing in the hallway holding the phone at the end of its cord. I made a running grab for it, blurting, “Russ?”

  “It’s Harry. I’m up at the end of B-B-Beachwood Drive. They’re tearing down a b-bunch of b-bungalows, and t-t-this patrolman f-f-found t-this shack all b-b-b-bloodstained. T-T-There was an FI card filed up here on the twelfth and th-th-thirtenth and I-I-I—”

  And Emmett Sprague owned property up there; and it was the first time I’d heard Harry stutter in the afternoon. “I’ll bring my evidence kit. Twenty minutes.”

  I hung up, took the Betty Short print abstract from the file and ran down to the car. Traffic had slackened; in the distance I could see the Hollywoodland sign missing it’s last two letters. I hauled east to Beachwood Drive, then north. As I approached the park area that bordered Mount Lee, I saw that all the excitement was contained behind ropes guarded by a cordon of bluesuits; double-parking, I glimpsed Harry Sears walking over, badge pinned to his coat front.

  His breath was now rife with liquor, the stutter gone. “Jesus Christ, what a piece of luck. This foot hack was assigned to clear out the vagrants before they started the demolitions. He stumbled onto the shack
and came down and got me. It looks like tramps have been in and out since ‘47, but maybe you could still forensic it.”

  I grabbed my evidence kit; Harry and I walked uphill. Wrecking crews were tearing down bungalows on the street paralleling Beachwood, the workers shouting about gas leaking from pipes. Fire trucks stood by, hoses manned and pointed at huge rubble heaps. Bulldozers and earthmovers were lined up on the sidewalks, with patrolmen shepherding the locals out of potential harm’s way. And up ahead of us, vaudeville reigned.

  A system of pulleys was attached to the face of Mount Lee, supported by high scaffolding sunk into the ground at its base. The “A” of Hollywoodland, some fifty feet high, was sliding down a thick wire while cameras rolled, photographs snapped, rubberneckers gawked and political types drank champagne. Dust from uprooted scrub bushes was everywhere; the Hollywood High School band sat in folding chairs on a jerry-built bandstand a few feet from the pulley wire’s terminus. When the letter “A” crashed to the dirt, they struck up “Hooray for Hollywood.”

  Harry said, “This way.” We veered off on a dirt hiking trail circling the foot of the mountain. Dense foliage pressed in from both sides; Harry took the lead, walking sideways on a footpath pointing straight up the slope. I followed, scrub bushes snagging my clothes and brushing my face. After fifty uphill yards, the path leveled off into a small clearing fronted by a shallow stream of running water. And there was a tiny, pillbox-style cinderblock hut, the door standing wide open.

  I walked in.

  The side walls were papered with pornographic photographs of crippled and disfigured women. Mongoloid faces sucking dildoes, nudie girls with withered and brace-clad legs spread wide, limbless atrocities leering at the camera. There was a mattress on the floor; it was caked with layers and layers of blood. Bugs and flies were laced throughout the crust, stuck there as they feasted themselves to death. The back wall held tacked-on color photos that looked like they were torn from anatomy texts: close-up shots of diseased organs oozing blood and pus. There were spray and spatter marks on the floor; a small spotlight attached to a tripod was stationed beside the mattress, the light fixture aimed at the center of it. I wondered about electricity, then examined the gizmo’s base and saw a battery hook-up. A blood-sprayed stack of books rested in one corner—mostly science fiction novels, with Gray’s Advanced Anatomy and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs standing out among them.