The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  Time passed. She concentrated on looking after Martha, pressing her to finish high school early, establishing funds at Otis Art Institute so that she would get special treatment. Martha thrived and excelled at Otis; Ramona lived through her accomplishments, on and off sedatives, often thinking of Georgie—missing him, wanting him.

  Then, in the fall of ‘46, Georgie returned. She overheard him make his blackmail demand of Emmett: “Give him” the girl in the dirty movie, or risk exposure of a good deal of the family’s sordid past and present.

  She became frighteningly jealous and hateful of “that girl,” and when Elizabeth Short showed up at the Sprague house on January 12, 1947, her rage exploded. “That girl” looked so much like Madeleine that it felt like the cruelest of jokes was being played on her. When Elizabeth and Georgie left in his truck, she saw that Martha had gone to her room to pack for her Palm Springs trip. She left a note on her door saying goodbye, that she was sleeping now. Then she casually asked Emmett where “that girl” and Georgie were going.

  He told her he heard Georgie mention one of his abandoneds up on North Beachwood. She went out the backdoor, grabbed their spare Packard, sped to Hollywoodland and waited. Georgie and the girl arrived at the base of the Mount Lee park area a few minutes later. She followed them on foot to the shack in the woods. They went inside; she saw a light go on. It cast shadows over a shiny wood object leaning against a tree trunk—a baseball bat. When she heard the girl giggle, “Did you get those scars in the war?” she went in the door, bat first.

  Elizabeth Short tried to run. She knocked her unconscious and made Georgie strip her and gag her and tie her to the mattress. She promised him parts of the girl to keep forever. She took a copy of The Man Who Laughs from her purse and read aloud from it, casting occasional glances at the girl spread-eagled. Then she cut her and burned her and batted her and wrote in the notebook she always carried while the girl was passed out from the pain. Georgie watched, and together they shouted the chants of the Comprachicos. And after two full days of it, she slashed Elizabeth Short ear to ear like Gwynplain, so she wouldn’t hate her after she was dead. Georgie cut the body in two, washed the halves in the stream outside the shack and carried them to her car. Late at night, they drove to 39th and Norton—a lot that Georgie used to tend for the city. They left Elizabeth Short there to become the Black Dahlia, then she drove Georgie back to his truck and returned to Emmett and Madeleine, telling them that soon enough they would find out where she had been and finally respect her will. As an act of purging, she sold her Gwynplain painting to the bargain-loving art worshipper Eldridge Chambers down the street—making a profit on the deal. Then it was days and weeks of the horror that Martha would find out and hate her—and more and more laudanum and codeine and sleep potion to make it go away.

  I was looking at a row of framed magazine ads—award-winning Martha artwork—when Ramona stopped talking. The silence jarred me; her story rolled on in my head, back and forth in sequence. The room was cool—but I was sweating.

  Martha’s 1948 Advertising Council first prizer featured a handsome guy in a seersucker suit walking on the beach, ogling a blonde dish sunbathing. He was so oblivious to everything else around him that he was about to get creamed by a big wave. The caption at the top of the page read: “Not to worry! In his Hart, Shaffner & Marx Featherweight he’ll be dried out and crisp—and ready to woo her at the club tonight!” The dish was sleek. Her features were Martha’s—a soft, pretty version. The Sprague mansion was in the background, surrounded by palm trees.

  Ramona broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”

  I couldn’t look at her. “I don’t know.”

  “Martha mustn’t know.”

  “You told me that already.”

  The guy in the ad was starting to look like an idealized Emmett—the Scotchman as a Hollywood pretty boy. I threw out the one cop question Ramona’s story inspired: “In the fall of ‘46 someone was throwing dead cats into cemeteries in Hollywood. Was that you?”

  “Yes. I was so jealous of her then, and I just wanted Georgie to know I still cared. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Go upstairs, Ramona. Leave me alone.”

  I heard soft footfalls moving out of the room, then sobs, then nothing. I thought about the family’s united front to save Ramona, how arresting her would blow my police career: charges of withholding evidence, obstruction of justice. Sprague money would keep her out of the gas chamber, she’d get eaten alive at Atascadero or a women’s prison until the lupus got her, Martha would be ravaged, and Emmett and Madeleine would still have each other—withholding/obstruction beefs against them would be too second-hand to prosecute on. If I took Ramona in I was shot to shit as a policeman; if I let her go I was finished as a man, and in either case Emmett and Madeleine would survive—together.

  So the patented Bucky Bleichert advance, stymied and stalemated, sat still in a big plush room full of ancestor icons. I looked through the packing crates on the floor—the Sprague getaway if the City Council got uppity—and saw the cheap cocktail dresses and the sketch pad covered with women’s faces, no doubt Martha sketching alter egos to plaster over ads huckstering toothpaste and cosmetics and cornflakes. Maybe she could design an advertising campaign to spring Ramona from Tehachapi. Maybe without torturer Mommy she wouldn’t have the guts to work anymore.

  I left the manse and killed time making rounds of old haunts. I checked out the rest home—my father didn’t recognize me, but looked full of malicious spunk. Lincoln Heights was rife with new houses—prefab pads waiting for tenants—“No Down Payment” for GIs. The Eagle Rock Legion Hall still had a sign ballyhooing Friday night boxing, and my Central Division beat was still winos, rag suckers and Jesus shriekers. At twilight, I gave in: one last shot at the brass girl before I took her mommy down; one last chance to ask her why she was still playing Dahlia when she knew I’d never touch her again.

  I drove to the 8th Street bar strip, parked at the corner of Irolo and waited with an eye on the Zimba Room entrance. I was hoping that the valise I’d seen Madeleine carrying in the morning didn’t mean a trip somewhere; I was hoping her Dahlia prowl of two nights ago wasn’t a one-shot deal.

  I sat there eyeballing foot traffic: servicemen, civilian boozehounds, neighborhood squares going in and out of the hash house next door. I thought of packing it in, then got frightened of the next stop—Ramona—and stuck. Just past midnight Madeleine’s Packard pulled up. She got out—carrying her valise, looking like herself, not Elizabeth Short.

  Startled, I watched her walk into the restaurant. Fifteen minutes passed slowly. Then she sashayed out, Black Dahlia to the nines. She tossed her valise in the Packard’s backseat and hit the Zimba Room.

  I gave her a minute’s slack, then went over and peered in the doorway. The bar was serving a skeleton crew of army brass; the zebra-striped booths were empty. Madeleine was drinking by herself. Two soldiers were primping at stools down from her, getting ready to make the big move. They swooped a half second apart. The dump was too deserted for me to hold surveillance in; I retreated to the car.

  Madeleine and a first lieutenant in summer dress khakis walked out an hour or so later. Per her old MO, they got in the Packard and headed around the corner to the 9th and Irolo auto court. I was right behind them.

  Madeleine parked and walked to the manager’s hut for the key; the soldier waited by the door of room twelve. I thought of frustration: KMPC on loud, venetian blinds down to the sill. Then Madeleine left the office, called to the lieutenant and pointed across the courtyard to a different unit. He shrugged and went over; Madeleine joined him and opened the door. The light went on and off inside.

  I gave them ten minutes, then moved to the bungalow, resigned to big band standards and darkness. Moans were coming from inside, unaccompanied by music. I saw that the one window was open two feet or so, dried paint on the runner holding it stuck. I found shelter beside a trellis overgrown with vines, squatted down a
nd listened.

  Heavier moans, bed springs creaking, male grunts. Her love sounds reaching fever pitch—stagy, more soprano than when she was with me. The soldier groaning hard, all noise subsiding, then Madeleine, speaking with a feigned accent:

  “I wish there was a radio. Back home all the motels had them. They were bolted down and you had to put dimes in, but at least there was music.”

  The soldier, trying to catch his breath: “I heard Boston’s a nice town.”

  I placed Madeleine’s fake voice then: New England blue collar, the way Betty Short was supposed to speak. “Medford’s not nice, not nice at all. I had one lousy job after another. Waitress, candy girl at a theater, file clerk at a factory. That was why I came to California to seek my fortune. Because Medford was so awful.”

  Madeleine’s “A’s” were getting broader and broader; she sounded like a Boston guttersnipe. The man said, “You came out here during the war?”

  “Uh-huh. I got a job at the Camp Cooke PX. This soldier beat me up, and this rich man, this award-winning contractor, he saved me. He’s my stepdaddy now. He lets me be with whoever I want to be with so long as I come home to him. He bought me my nice white car and all my nice black dresses, and he gives me back rubs ‘cause he’s not my real daddy.”

  “That’s the kind of dad to have. My dad bought me a bicycle once, and he gave me a couple of bucks toward a soap box derby racer. But he never bought me any Packards, that’s for damn sure. You’ve got yourself a real sugar daddy, Betty.”

  I knelt down lower and peered through the window crack; all I could see were dark shapes on a bed in the middle of the room. Madeleine/Betty said, “Sometimes my stepdaddy doesn’t like my boyfriends. He never makes a fuss, because he’s not my real daddy and I let him give me backrubs. There was this one boy, a policeman. My stepdaddy said he was wishy-washy with a mean streak. I didn’t believe him, because the boy was big and strong, and he had these cute buck teeth. He tried to hurt me, but Daddy settled his hash. Daddy knows how to deal with weak men who suck around money and try to hurt nice girls. He was a big hero in the First World War and the policeman was a draft dodger.”

  Madeleine’s accent was slipping, moving into another voice, low and guttural. I braced myself for more verbal lashing; the soldier said, “Draft dodgers should either be deported to Russia or shot. No, shooting’s too merciful. Hanged by the you know what, that’s more like it.”

  Madeleine, a vibrato rasp, a perfect Mexican accent: “An axe ees better, no? The policeman have a partner. He tie up some loose ends for me—some notes I should not ‘ave lef’ for a not so nice girl. The partner beat up my stepdaddy an’ run away to May-hee-co. I draw pictures of a face to be and buy cheap dress. I hire a detective to find him, an’ I make a pageant. I go down to Ensenada in dees-guise, I wear cheap dress, preten’ to be beggar and knock on hees door. ‘Gringo, gringo, I need money.’ He turn hees back, I grab axe an’ chop him down. I take money he steal from stepdaddy. Seventy-one thousan’ dollar I bring back home.”

  The soldier jabbered, “Look, is this some kind of joke?” I pulled out my .38 and cocked the hammer. Madeleine as Milt Dolphine’s “rich Mex woman” slipped into Spanish, a streak of raspy obscenities. I aimed through the window crack; the light went on inside; lover boy thrashing himself into his uniform spoiled my shot at the killer. I saw Lee in a sand pit, worms crawling out of his eyes.

  The soldier bolted out the door, half dressed. Madeleine, slipping into her tight black gown, was an easy target. I drew a bead; a last flash of her nakedness made me empty the gun into the air. I kicked the window in.

  Madeleine watched me climb over the sill. Undaunted by gunshots and flying glass, she spoke with soft savoir faire: “She was the only thing real to me, and I had to tell people about her. I felt so contrived next to her. She was a natural and I was just an imposter. And she was ours, sweet. You brought her back to me. She was what made it so good with us. She was ours.”

  I mussed up Madeleine’s Dahlia hairdo, so that she looked like just another raven-clad floozy; I cuffed her wrists behind her back and saw myself in the sand pit, worm bait along with my partner. Sirens bared down from all directions; flashlights shined in the broken window. Out in the Big Nowhere, Lee Blanchard reprised his line from the Zoot Suit riot:

  “Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”

  Thirty-five

  We took the fall together.

  Four black-and-whites responded to my shots. I explained to the officers that it was a lights and siren roll to Wilshire Station—I was booking the woman for Murder One. At the Wilshire squadroom, Madeleine confessed to the killing of Lee Blanchard, concocting a brilliant fantasy—a lovers’ triangle of Lee/Madeleine/Bucky, how she was intimately involved with both of us in the winter of 1947. I sat in on the interrogation, and Madeleine was flawless. Seasoned Homicide dicks bought her tale hook, line and sinker: Lee and I rivals for her hand, Madeleine preferring me as a potential husband. Lee going to Emmett, demanding that he “give him” his daughter, beating the man half to death when he refused. Madeleine revenge-stalking Lee in Mexico, axing him to death in Ensenada. No mention of the Black Dahlia murder case at all.

  I corroborated Madeleine’s story, saying that I only recently figured out that Lee had been murdered. I then confronted Madeleine with a circumstantial run-though on the snuff and coerced a partial confession out of her. Madeleine was transported to the LA women’s jail, and I went back to the EI Nido—still wondering what I was going to do about Ramona.

  The next day I returned to duty. At the end of my tour a team of Metro goons was waiting for me in the Newton locker room. They grilled me for three hours; I ran with the fantasy ball Madeleine started rolling. The grit of her story and my wild departmental rep carried me through the interrogation—and nobody mentioned the Dahlia.

  Over the next week the legal machinery took over.

  The Mexican government refused to indict Madeleine for the murder of Lee Blanchard—without a corpse and backup evidence extradition proceedings could not be initiated. A Grand Jury was called up to decide her fate; Ellis Loew was slated to present the case for the City of Los Angeles. I told him I would testify only by deposition. Knowing my unpredictability only too well, he agreed. I filled up ten pages with lies on the “lovers’ triangle,” fantasy embellishments worthy of romantic Betty Short at her best. I kept wondering if she would appreciate the irony.

  Emmett Sprague was indicted by a separate Grand Jury—for health and safety code violations stemming from his mob-fronted ownership of dangerously faulty property. He was given fines in excess of $50,000—but no criminal charges were filed. Counting the $71,000 that Madeleine stole from Lee, he was still close to twenty grand in the black on the deal.

  The lovers’ triangle hit the papers the day after Madeleine’s case went to the Grand Jury. The Blanchard-Bleichert fight and the Southside shootout were resurrected, and for a week I was big-time local stuff. Then I got a call from Bevo Means of the Herald: “Watch out, Bucky. Emmett Sprague’s about to hit back, and the shit’s about to hit the fan. ‘Nuff said.”

  It was Confidential magazine that nailed me.

  The July 12 issue ran an article on the triangle. It featured quotes from Madeleine, leaked to the scandal rag by Emmett. The brass girl had me ditching out on duty to couple with her at the Red Arrow Motel; stealing fifths of her father’s whiskey to see me through nightwatch; giving her the inside lowdown on the LAPD’s traffic ticket quota system and how I “beat up niggers.” Innuendos pointed to worse offenses—but everything Madeleine said was true.

  I was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department on grounds of moral turpitude and conduct unbecoming an officer. It was the unanimous decision of a specially convened board of inspectors and deputy chiefs, and I did not protest it. I thought of turning over Ramona in hopes of pulling a grandstander’s turnabout, but kiboshed the idea. Russ Millard might be compelled to admit what he knew and get hurt; Lee’s name would get co
ated with more slime; Martha would know. The firing was about two and a half years overdue; the Confidential exposé my final embarrassment to the Department. No one knew that better than I did.

  I turned in my service revolver, my outlaw .45 and badge 1611. I moved back to the house that Lee bought, borrowed $500 from the padre and waited for my notoriety to the down before I started looking for work. Betty Short and Kay weighed on me, and I went by Kay’s school to look for her. The principal, eyeing me like a bug who just crawled out of the woodwork, said that Kay left a resignation letter the day after I hit the newsstands. It stated that she was going on a long cross-country automobile trip and would not be returning to Los Angeles.

  The Grand Jury bound Madeleine over for trial on Manslaughter Three—“premeditated homicide under psychological duress and with mitigating circumstances.” Her lawyer, the great Jerry Giesler, had her plead guilty and request a judge’s chambers sentencing. Taking into account the recommendations of psychiatrists who found Madeleine to be a “severely delusional violent schizophrenic adept at acting out many different personalities,” the judge sentenced her to Atascadero State Hospital for an “indeterminate period of treatment not to subscribe below the minimum time allotted by the state penalties code: ten years of imprisonment.”