The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  “It worked.”

  Two of the marines had managed to get to their feet, and were helping the other one up. When they started for the sidewalk three abreast, Tomas Dos Santos sent a hard right foot at the biggest of the three asses. The fat PFC it belonged to turned to face his attacker; I stepped forward. Surrendering their East LA campaign, the three hobbled out to the street, gunshots and flaming palm trees. Blanchard ruffled Dos Santos’ hair. “You cute little shit, you’re a dead man. Come on, Bleichert, let’s find a place to sit this thing out.”

  We found a house with a stack of daily papers on the porch a few blocks away and broke in. There were two fifths of Cutty Sark in the kitchen cupboard, and Blanchard switched the cuffs from Dos Santos’ wrists to his ankles so he could have his hands free to booze. By the time I made ham sandwiches and highballs, the pachuco had killed half the jug and was belting “Cielito Lindo” and a Mex rendition of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” An hour later the bottle was dead and Tomas was passed out. I lifted him onto the couch and threw a quilt over him, and Blanchard said, “He’s my ninth hard felon for 1943. He’ll be sucking gas inside of six weeks, and I’ll be working Northeast or Central Warrants inside of three years.”

  His certainty rankled me. “Ixnay. You’re too young, you haven’t made sergeant, you’re shacking with a woman, you lost your high brass buddies when you quit fighting smokers and you haven’t done a plainsclothes tour. You—”

  I stopped when Blanchard grinned, then walked to the living room window and looked out. “Fires ova on Michigan and Soto. Pretty.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Yeah, pretty. You know a lot about me, Bleichert.”

  “People talk about you.”

  “They talk about you, too.”

  “What do they say?”

  “That your old man’s some sort of Nazi drool case. That you ratted off your best friend to the feds to get on the Department. That you padded your record fighting built-up middleweights.”

  The words hung in the air like a three-count indictment. “Is that it?”

  Blanchard turned to face me. “No. They say you never chase cooze and they say you think you can take me.”

  I took the challenge. “All those things are true.”

  “Yeah? So was what you heard about me. Except I’m on the Sergeants List, I’m transferring to Highland Park Vice in August and there’s a Jewboy deputy DA who wets his pants for boxers. He’s promised me the next Warrants spot he can wangle.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah? You want to hear something even more impressive?”

  “Hit me.”

  “My first twenty knockouts were stumblebums handpicked by my manager. My girlfriend saw you fight at the Olympic and said you’d be handsome if you got your teeth fixed, and maybe you could take me.”

  I couldn’t tell if the man was looking for a brawl then and there or a friend; if he was testing me or taunting me or pumping me for information. I pointed to Tomas Dos Santos, twitching in his booze sleep. “What about the Mex?”

  “We’ll take him in tomorrow morning.”

  “You’ll take him in.”

  “The collar’s half yours.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Okay, partner.”

  “I’m not your partner.”

  “Maybe someday.”

  “Maybe never, Blanchard. Maybe you work Warrants and pull in repos and serve papers for the shysters downtown, maybe I put in my twenty, take my pension and get a soft job somewhere.”

  “You could go on the feds. I know you’ve got pals on the Alien Squad.”

  “Don’t push me on that.”

  Blanchard looked out the window again. “Pretty. Make a good picture postcard. ‘Dear Mom, wish you were here at the colorful East LA race riot.’”

  Tomas Dos Santos stirred, mumbling, “Inez? Inez? Qué? Inez?” Blanchard walked to a hall closet and found an old wool overcoat and tossed it on top of him. The added warmth seemed to calm him down; the mumbles died off. Blanchard said, “Cherchez la femme. Huh, Bucky?”

  “What?”

  “Look for the woman. Even with a snootful of juice, old Tomas can’t let Inez go. I’ll lay you ten to one that when he hits the gas chamber she’ll be right there with him.”

  “Maybe he’ll cop a plea. Fifteen to life, out in twenty.”

  “No. He’s a dead man. Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”

  I walked through the house looking for a place to sleep, finally settling on a downstairs bedroom with a lumpy bed way too short for my legs. Lying down, I listened to sirens and gunshots in the distance. Gradually I dozed off, and dreamed of my own few and far between women.

  By the morning the riot had cooled off, leaving the sky hung with soot and the streets littered with broken liquor bottles and discarded two-by-fours and baseball bats. Blanchard called Hollenbeck Station for a black-and-white to transport his ninth hard felon of 1943 to the Hall of Justice jail, and Tomas Dos Santos wept when the patrolmen took him away from us. Blanchard and I shook hands on the sidewalk and walked separate routes downtown, him to the DA’s office to write up his report on the capture of the purse snatcher, me to Central Station and another tour of duty.

  The LA City Council outlawed the wearing of the zoot suit, and Blanchard and I went back to polite conversation at roll call. And everything he stated with such rankling certainty that night in the empty house came true.

  Blanchard was promoted to Sergeant and transferred to Highland Park Vice early in August, and Tomas Dos Santos went to the gas chamber a week later. Three years passed, and I continued to work a radio car beat in Central Division. Then one morning I looked at the transfer and promotion board and saw at the top of the list: Blanchard, Leland C, Sergeant; Highland Park Vice to Central Warrants, effective 9/15/46.

  And, of course, we became partners. Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced “Cherchez la femme” that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

  I

  Fire and Ice

  One

  The road to the partnership began without my knowing it, and it was a revival of the Blanchard-Bleichert fight brouhaha that brought me the word.

  I was coming off a long tour of duty spent in a speed trap on Bunker Hill, preying on traffic violators. My ticket book was full and my brain was numb from eight hours of following my eyes across the intersection of 2nd and Beaudry. Walking through the Central muster room and a crowd of blues waiting to hear the P.M. crime sheet, I almost missed Johnny Vogel’s, “They ain’t fought in years, and Horrall outlawed smokers, so I don’t think that’s it. My dad’s thick with the Jewboy, and he says he’d try for Joe Louis if he was white.”

  Then Tom Joslin elbowed me. “They’re talking about you, Bleichert.”

  I looked over at Vogel, standing a few yards away, talking to another cop. “Hit me, Tommy.”

  Joslin smiled. “You know Lee Blanchard?”

  “The Pope know Jesus?”

  “Ha! He’s working Central Warrants.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “How’s this? Blanchard’s partner’s topping out his twenty. Nobody thought he’d pull the pin, but he’s gonna. The Warrants boss is this felony court DA, Ellis Loew. He got Blanchard his appointment, now he’s looking for a bright boy to take over the partner’s spot. Word is he creams for fighters and wants you. Vogel’s old man’s in the Detective Bureau. He’s simpatico with Loew and pushing for his kid to get the job. Frankly, I don’t think either of you got the qualifications. Me, on the other hand …”

  I tingled, but still managed to come up with a crack to show Joslin I didn’t care. “Your teeth are too small. No good for biting in the clinches. Lots of clinches working Warrants.”

  But I
did care.

  That night I sat on the steps outside my apartment and looked at the garage that held my heavy bag and speed bag, my scrapbook of press clippings, fight programs and publicity stills. I thought about being good but not really good, about keeping my weight down when I could have put on an extra ten pounds and fought heavyweight, about fighting tortilla-stuffed Mexican middleweights at the Eagle Rock Legion Hall where my old man went to his Bund meetings. Light heavyweight was a no-man’s-land division, and early on I pegged it as being tailor-made for me. I could dance on my toes all night at 175 pounds, I could hook accurately to the body from way outside and only a bulldozer could work in off my left jab.

  But there were no light heavyweight bulldozers, because any hungry fighter pushing 175 slopped up spuds until he made heavyweight, even if he sacrificed half his speed and most of his punch. Light heavyweight was safe. Light heavyweight was guaranteed fifty-dollar purses without getting hurt. Light heavyweight was plugs in the Times from Braven Dyer, adulation from the old man and his Jew-baiting cronies and being a big cheese as long as I didn’t leave Glassell Park and Lincoln Heights. It was going as far as I could as a natural— without having to test my guts.

  Then Ronnie Cordero came along.

  He was a Mex middleweight out of El Monte, fast, with knockout power in both hands and a crablike defense, guard high, elbows pressed to his sides to deflect body blows. Only nineteen, he had huge bones for his weight, with the growth potential to jump him up two divisions to heavyweight and the big money. He racked up a string of fourteen straight early-round KOs at the Olympic, blitzing all the top LA middles. Still growing and anxious to jack up the quality of his opponents, Cordero issued me a challenge through the Herald sports page.

  I knew that he would eat me alive. I knew that losing to a taco bender would ruin my local celebrity. I knew that running from the fight would hurt me, but fighting it would kill me. I started looking for a place to run to. The army, navy and marines looked good, then Pearl Harbor got bombed and made them look great. Then the old man had a stroke, lost his job and pension and started sucking baby food through a straw. I got a hardship deferment and joined the Los Angeles Police Department.

  I saw where my thoughts were going. FBI goons were asking me if I considered myself a German or an American, and would I be willing to prove my patriotism by helping them out. I fought what was next by concentrating on my landlady’s cat stalking a bluejay across the garage roof. When he pounced, I admitted to myself how bad I wanted Johnny Vogel’s rumor to be true.

  Warrants was local celebrity as a cop. Warrants was plainclothes without a coat and tie, romance and a mileage per diem on your civilian car. Warrants was going after the real bad guys and not rousting winos and wienie waggers in front of the Midnight Mission. Warrants was working in the DA’s office with one foot in the Detective Bureau, and late dinners with Mayor Bowron when he was waxing effusive and wanted to hear war stories.

  Thinking about it started to hurt. I went down to the garage and hit the speed bag until my arms cramped.

  Over the next few weeks I worked a radio car beat near the northern border of the division. I was breaking in a fat-mouthed rookie named Sidwell, a kid just off a three-year MP stint in the Canal Zone. He hung on my every word with the slavish tenacity of a lapdog, and was so enamored of civilian police work that he took to sticking around the station after our end of tour, bullshitting with the jailers, snapping towels at the wanted posters in the locker room, generally creating a nuisance until someone told him to go home.

  He had no sense of decorum, and would talk to anybody about anything. I was one of his favorite subjects, and he passed station house scuttlebutt straight back to me.

  I discounted most of the rumors: Chief Horrall was going to start up an interdivisional boxing team, and was shooting me. Warrants to assure that I signed on along with Blanchard; Ellis Loew, the felony court comer, was supposed to have won a bundle betting on me before the war and was now handing me a belated reward; Horrall had rescinded his order banning smokers, and some high brass string puller wanted me happy so he could line his pockets betting on me. Those tales sounded too farfetched, although I knew boxing was somehow behind my front-runner status. What I credited was that the Warrants opening was narrowing down to either Johnny Vogel or me.

  Vogel had a father working Central dicks; I was a padded 36-0-0 in the no-man’s-land division five years before. Knowing the only way to compete with nepotism was to make the weight, I punched bags, skipped meals and skipped rope until I was a nice, safe light heavyweight again. Then I waited.

  TWO

  I was a week at the 175-pound limit, tired of training and dreaming every night of steaks, chili burgers and coconut cream pies. My hopes for the Warrants job had waned to the point where I would have sold them down the river for pork chops at the Pacific Dining Car, and the neighbor who looked after the old man for a double sawbuck a month had called me to say that he was acting up again, taking BB potshots at the neighborhood dogs and blowing his Social Security check on girlie magazines and model airplanes. It was reaching the point where I would have to do something about him, and every toothless geezer I saw on the beat hit my eyes as a gargoyle version of Crazy Dolph Bleichert. I was watching one stagger across 3rd and Hill when I got the radio call that changed my life forever.

  “11-A-23, call the station. Repeat: 11-A-23, call the station.”

  Sidwell nudged me. “We got a call, Bucky.”

  “Roger it.”

  “The dispatcher said to call the station.”

  I hung a left and parked, then pointed to the call box on the corner. “Use the gamewell. The little key next to your handcuffs.”

  Sidwell obeyed, trotting back to the cruiser moments later, looking grave. “You’re supposed to report to the Chief of Detectives immediately,” he said.

  My first thoughts were of the old man. I leadfooted the six blocks to City Hall and turned the black-and-white over to Sidwell, then took the elevator up to Chief Thad Green’s fourth-floor offices. A secretary admitted me to the Chief’s inner sanctum, and sitting in matched leather chairs were Lee Blanchard, more high brass than I had ever seen in one place and a spider-thin man in a three-piece tweed suit.

  The secretary said, “Officer Bleichert,” and left me standing there, aware that my uniform hung on my depleted body like a tent. Then Blanchard, wearing cord slacks and a maroon letterman’s jacket, got to his feet and played MC.

  “Gentlemen, Bucky Bleichert. Bucky, left to right in uniform, we have Inspector Malloy, Inspector Stensland and Chief Green. The gentleman in mufti is Deputy DA Ellis Loew.”

  I nodded, and Thad Green pointed me to an empty chair facing the assembly. I settled into it; Stensland handed me a sheaf of papers. “Read this, Officer. It’s Braven Dyer’s editorial for this coming Saturday’s Times.”

  The top page was dated 10/14/46, with a block printed title—“Fire and Ice Among LA’s Finest”—directly below it. Below that, the typed text began:

  Before the war, the City of the Angels was graced with two local fighters, born and raised a scant five miles apart, pugilists with styles as different as fire and ice. Lee Blanchard was a bowlegged windmill of a leather slinger, and sparks covered the ringside seats when he threw punches. Bucky Bleichert entered the ring so cool and collected that it was easy to believe he was immune to sweat. He could dance on his toes better than Bojangles Robinson, and his rapier jabs peppered his opponents’ faces until they looked like the steak tartare at Mike Lyman’s Grill. Both men were poets: Blanchard the poet of brute strength, Bleichert the counter poet of speed and guile. Collectively they won 79 bouts and lost only four. In the ring as in the table of elements, fire and ice are tough to beat.

  Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice never fought each other. Divisional boundaries kept them apart. But a sense of duty brought them together in spirit, and both men joined the Los Angeles Police Department and continued fighting out of the ring—this time in the war again
st crime. Blanchard cracked the baffling Boulevard-Citizens bank robbery case in 1939, and captured thrill-killer Tomas Dos Santos; Bleichert served with distinction during the ‘43 Zoot Suit Wars. And now they are both officers in Central Division: Mr. Fire, 32, a sergeant in the prestigious Warrants Squad; Mr. Ice, 29, a patrolman working a dangerous beat in downtown LA. I recently asked both Fire and Ice why they gave up their best ring years to become cops. Their responses are indicative of the fine men they are:

  Sergeant Blanchard: “A fighter’s career doesn’t last forever, but the satisfaction of serving your community does.”

  Officer Bleichert: “I wanted to fight more dangerous opponents, namely criminals and Communists.”

  Lee Blanchard and Bucky Bleichert made great sacrifices to serve their city, and on Election Day, November 5, Los Angeles voters are going to be asked to do the same thing—vote in a five-million-dollar bond proposal to upgrade the LAPD’s equipment and provide for an 8 percent pay raise for all personnel. Keep in mind the examples of Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice. Vote “Yes” on Proposition B on Election Day.

  Finishing, I handed the pages back to Inspector Stensland. He started to speak, but Thad Green shushed him with a hand on his shoulder. “Tell us what you thought of it, Officer. Be candid.”

  I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “It’s subtle.”

  Stensland flushed, Green and Malloy grinned, Blanchard hooted outright. Ellis Loew said, “Proposition B is going to lose hands down, but there’s a chance to reintroduce it in the off-year election next spring. What we had in—”

  Green said, “Ellis, please,” and turned his attention to me. “One of the reasons the bond is going to fail is that the public is less than pleased with the service we’ve been giving them. We were shorthanded during the war, and some of the men we hired to remedy that turned out to be rotten apples and made us look bad. Also, we’re top-heavy with rookies since the war ended, and a lot of good men have retired. Two station houses need to be rebuilt and we need to offer higher starting salaries to attract better men. All this takes money, and the voters aren’t going to give it to us in November.”