by James Ellroy
Madeleine smiled and said, “You’re not. Look, I’m tired. Aren’t you going to ask me to prove I didn’t kill Betty? Since I can prove it, won’t that put an end to this farce?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute. Did Betty ever talk about being in a movie?”
“No, but she was movie-struck in general.”
“Did she ever show you a movie viewfinder? A lens gadget on a chain?”
“No.”
“What about Linda? Did she talk about being in a movie?”
“No, just her hicktown sweetheart.”
“Do you have any idea where she’d go if she was on the lam?”
“Yes. Hicktown, Nebraska.”
“Besides there.”
“No. Can I—”
I touched Madeleine’s shoulder, more of a caress than a pat. “Yeah, tell me your alibi. Where were you and what were you doing from last Monday, January thirteenth, through to Wednesday the fifteenth.”
Madeleine cupped her hands to her mouth and blew a horn fanfare, then rested them on the seat by my knee. “I was at our house in Laguna from Sunday night through Thursday morning. Daddy and Mommy and sister Martha were there with me, and so were our live-in servants. If you want verification, call Daddy. Our number is Webster 4391. But be discreet. Don’t tell him where you met me. Now, do you have any other questions?”
My private Dahlia lead was blown, but it gave me the green light in another direction. “Yeah. You ever do it with men?”
Madeleine touched my knee. “I haven’t met any lately, but I’ll do it with you to keep my name out of the papers.”
My legs were Jell-O. “Tomorrow night?”
“All right. Pick me up at eight, like a gentleman. The address is 482 South Muirfield.”
“I know the address.”
“I’m not surprised. What’s your name?”
“Bucky Bleichert.”
Madeleine said, “It goes with your teeth.”
I said, “Eight o’clock,” and got out of the Packard while my legs could still function.
Eleven
Lee said, “You want to catch the fight films at the Wiltem tonight? They’re showing oldies—Dempsey, Ketchel, Greb. What do you say?”
We were sitting at desks across from each other in the University squadroom, manning telephones. The clerical flunkies assigned to the Short case had been given Sunday off, so regular field dicks were doing the drudge work, taking down tips, then writing out slips assessing the tipsters and routing possible follow-ups to the nearest detective division. We’d been at it for an hour without interruption, Kay’s “gutless” remark hanging between us. Looking at Lee, I saw that his eyes were just starting to pin, a sign that he was coming on to a fresh Benzie jolt. I said, “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a date.”
Lee grinned-twitched. “Yeah? Who with?”
I changed the subject. “Did you smooth it out with Kay?”
“Yeah, I rented a room for my stuff. The El Nido Hotel, Santa Monica and Wilcox. Nine scoots a week, chump change if it makes her feel good.”
“De Witt gets out tomorrow, Lee. I think I should lean on him, maybe get Vogel and Koenig to do it.”
Lee kicked at a wastebasket. Paper wads and empty coffee cups flew out; heads darted up from other desks. Then his phone rang.
Lee picked it up. “Homicide, Sergeant Blanchard speaking.”
I stared at my routing slips; Lee listened to his caller. Wednesday, Dahlia kiss-off time, came into focus as an eternity away, and I wondered if he’d need weaning off the Benzedrine. Madeleine Sprague jumped into my mind—her nine millionth jump since she said, “I’ll do it with you to keep my name out of the papers.” Lee had been on his call for a long time without interjecting comments or questions; I started wishing that my phone would ring and make Madeleine jump away.
Lee put down the receiver. I said, “Anything interesting?”
“Another loony. Who’s your date tonight?”
“A neighbor girl.”
“Nice girl?”
“A honey. Partner, if I find you hopped-up after Tuesday, it’s the Bleichert-Blanchard rematch.”
Lee gave me an outer space grin. “It’s Blanchard-Bleichert, and you’d lose again. I’m getting coffee. You want some?”
“Black, no sugar.
“Coming up.”
I logged in a total of forty-six phone tips, about half of them reasonably coherent. Lee took off in the early afternoon, and Ellis Loew stuck me with the job of typing up Russ Millard’s new summary report. It stated that Red Manley had been released to his wife after conclusively passing lie detector and Pentothal tests, and that Betty Short’s love letters had been thoroughly gone through. A number of her swains had been ID’d and cleared as suspects, as had most of the guys who appeared in her photographs. Efforts to identify the remaining men were continuing, and the Camp Cooke MPs had called in with the word that the soldier who beat up Betty in ‘43 was killed in the Normandy Invasion. As for Betty’s many marriages and engagements, a forty-eight-state capital record check revealed that no marriage licenses had ever been issued to her.
The report went downhill from there. The license numbers that Lee had glommed from the window of Junior Nash’s fuck pad had yielded zero; over three hundred Dahlia sightings a day were flooding LAPD and Sheriff’s Department switchboards. There had been ninety-three phony confessions so far, with four seriously cracked loonies without alibis held at the Hall of Justice Jail, awaiting sanity hearings and probable shipment to Camarillo. Field interrogations were still going full speed—190 full-time men now on the case. The only ray of hope was the result of my 1/17 FI questionings: Linda Martin/Lorna Martilkova was spotted in a couple of Encino cocktail lounges, and a big push to grab her was being centered in that area. I finished up the typing job gut certain that Elizabeth Short’s killer was never going to be found, and put money on it—a double sawbuck on “Unsolved-pay 2 to 1” in the squadroom pool.
I rang the doorbell of the Sprague mansion at exactly 8:00. I was dressed in my best outfit—blue blazer, white shirt and gray flannels—and put money on myself as a fool for kowtowing to the surroundings—I’d be taking the clothes off as soon as Madeleine and I got to my place. The ten hours of phone work stuck with me despite the shower I’d taken at the station, I felt even more out of place than I should have and my left ear still ached from the barrage of Dahlia talk.
Madeleine opened the door, a knockout in a skirt and a tight cashmere sweater. She once-overed me, took my hand and said, “Look, I hate to pull this, but Daddy has heard about you. He insisted you stay for dinner. I told him we met at that art exhibit at Stanley Rose’s Bookshop, so if you have to pump everybody for my alibi, try to be subtle about it. All right?”
I said, “Sure,” let Madeleine link her arm through mine and lead me inside. The entrance foyer was as Spanish as the outside of the mansion was Tudor: tapestries and crossed wrought-iron swords on the whitewashed walls, thick Persian carpets over a polished wood floor. The foyer opened into a giant living room with a men’s club atmosphere—green leather chairs arranged around low tables and settees; huge stone fireplace; small Oriental throw rugs, multicolored, placed together at different angles, so that just the right amount of oak floor bordered them. The walls were cherrywood, and featured framed sepias of the family and their ancestors.
I noticed a stuffed spaniel poised by the fireplace with a yellowed newspaper rolled into its mouth. Madeleine said, “That’s Balto. The paper is the LA Times for August 1,1926. That’s the day Daddy learned he’d made his first million. Balto was our pet then. Daddy’s accountant called up and said, ‘Emmett, you’re a millionaire!’ Daddy was cleaning his pistols, and Balto came in with the paper. Daddy wanted to consecrate the moment, so he shot him. If you look closely, you can see the bullet hole in his chest. Hold your breath, lovey. Here’s the family.”
Slack-jawed, I let Madeleine point me into a small sittin
g room. The walls were covered with framed photographs; the floor space was taken up by the three other Spragues in matching easy chairs. They all looked up; nobody stood up. Smiling without exposing my teeth, I said, “Hello.” Madeleine made the introductions while I gawked down at the still life ensemble.
“Bucky Bleichert, may I present my family. My mother, Ramona Cathcart Sprague. My father, Emmett Sprague. My sister, Martha McConville Sprague.”
The ensemble came to life with little nods and smiles. Then Emmett Sprague beamed, got to his feet and stuck out his hand. I said, “A pleasure, Mr. Sprague,” and shook it, eyeing him while he eyed me. The patriarch was short and barrel-chested, with a cracked, sun-weathered face and a full head of white hair that had probably once been sandy colored. I placed his age as somewhere in his fifties, his handshake as the grip of someone who’d done a good deal of physical labor. His voice was cut-glass Scottish, not the broad burr of Madeleine’s imitation: “I saw you fight Mondo Sanchez. You boxed the pants off him. Another Billy Conn you were.”
I thought of Sanchez, a built-up middleweight stiff I’d fought because my manager wanted me to get a rep for creaming Mexicans. “Thanks, Mr. Sprague.”
“Thank you for giving such a dandy performance. Mondo was a good boy, too. What happened to him?”
“He died from a heroin overdose.”
“God bless him. Too bad he didn’t the in the ring, it would have spared his family a lot of grief. Speaking of families, please shake hands with the rest of mine.”
Martha Sprague stood up on command. She was short, plump and blonde, with a tenacious resemblance to her father, blue eyes so light that it looked like she sent them out to be bleached and a neck that was acned and raw from scratching. She looked like a teenaged girl who’d never outgrow her baby fat and mature into beauty. I shook her firm hand feeling sorry for her; she caught what I was thinking immediately. Her pale eyes fired up as she yanked her paw away.
Ramona Sprague was the only one of the three who looked like Madeleine; if not for her I would have thought the brass girl was adopted. She possessed a pushing-fifty version of Madeleine’s lustrous dark hair and pale skin, but there was nothing else attractive about her. She was fat, her face was flaccid, her rouge and lipstick were applied slightly off center, so that her face was weirdly askew. Taking her hand, she said, “Madeleine has said so many nice things about you,” with a trace of a slur. There was no liquor on her breath; I wondered if she was jacked on drugstore stuff.
Madeleine sighed, “Daddy, can we eat? Bucky and I want to catch a nine-thirty show.”
Emmett Sprague slapped me on the back. “I always obey my eldest. Bucky, will you entertain us with boxing and police anecdotes?”
“Between mouthfuls,” I said.
Sprague slapped my back again, harder. “I can tell you didn’t catch too many in the cabeza. Like Fred Allen you are. Come on, family. Dinner is served.”
We filed into a large, wood-paneled dining room. The table in the middle of it was small, with five place settings already laid down. A serving cart was stationed by the door, leaking the unmistakable aroma of corned beef and cabbage. Old Man Sprague said, “Hearty fare breeds hearty people, haute cuisine breeds degenerates. Dig in, lad. The maid goes to her voodoo revival meetings on Sunday nights, so there’s no one here but us white folks.”
I grabbed a plate and piled it with food. Martha Sprague poured the wine and Madeleine dished herself out a small portion of each item and sat down at the table, motioning for me to sit beside her. I did, and Martha announced to the room: “I want to sit opposite Mr. Bleichert so I can draw him.”
Emmett caught my eye and winked. “Bucky, you are in for a cruel caricaturing. Martha’s pencil never flinches. Nineteen years old she is, and a high-paid commercial artist already. Maddy’s my pretty one, but Martha’s my certified genius.”
Martha winced. She placed her plate directly across from me and sat down, arraying a pencil and a small sketch pad beside her napkin. Ramona Sprague took the adjoining seat and patted her arm; Emmett, standing by his chair at the head of the table, proposed a toast: “To new friends, prosperity and the great sport of boxing.”
I said, “Amen,” forked a slice of corned beef into my mouth and chewed it. It was fatty and dry, but I put on a yum-yum face and said, “This is delicious.”
Ramona Sprague gave me a blank look; Emmett said, “Lacey, our maid, believes in voodoo. Some sort of Christian variation on it. She probably put a spell on the cow, made a pact with her nigger Jesus so the beast would be nice and juicy. Speaking of our colored brethren, how did it feel to shoot those two jigaboos, Bucky?”
Madeleine whispered, “Humor him.”
Emmett caught the aside and chuckled. “Yes, lad, humor me. In fact, you should humor all rich men pushing sixty. They might go senile and confuse you with their heirs.”
I laughed, exposing my choppers; Martha reached for her pencil to capture them. “I didn’t feel much of anything. It was them or us.”
“And your partner? That blond lad you fought last year?”
“Lee took it a bit harder than I did.”
Emmett said, “Blonds are overly sensitive. Being one, I know. Thank God I’ve two brownies in the family to keep us pragmatic. Maddy and Ramona have that bulldog tenacity that Martha and I lack.”
Only the food I was chewing kept me from braying outright. I thought of the spoiled sewer crawler I was going to screw later that night and her mother smiling numbly across the table from me. The impulse to laugh came on stronger and stronger; I finally got my mouthful swallowed, belched instead of howled and raised my glass. “To you, Mr. Sprague. For making me laugh for the first time in a week.”
Ramona gave me a disgusted look; Martha concentrated on her artwork. Madeleine played footsie with me under the table and Emmett toasted me back. “Rough week you had, lad?”
I laughed. “In spades. I’ve been detached to Homicide to work on the Black Dahlia thing. My days off have been cancelled, my partner’s obsessed with it, and the crazies have been coming out of the woodwork. There’s two hundred cops working a single case. It’s absurd.”
Emmett said, “It’s tragic, is what it is. What’s your theory, lad? Who on God’s earth could have done a thing like that to another human being?”
I knew then that the family didn’t know about Madeleine’s tenuous connection to Betty Short, and decided not to press for her alibi. “I think it’s a random job. The Short girl was what you might call easy. She was a compulsive liar with a hundred boyfriends. If we get the killer, it’ll be a fluke.”
Emmett said, “God bless her, I hope you get him and I hope he gets a hot date with that little green room up at San Quentin.”
Running her toes up my leg, Madeleine pouted, “Daddy, you’re monopolizing the conversation and you’re making Bucky sing for his supper.”
“Shall I sing for mine, lassie? Even though I’m the breadwinner?”
Old Man Sprague was angry—I could see it in his rising color and the way he hacked at his corned beef. Curious about the man, I said, “When did you come to the United States?”
Emmett beamed. “I’ll sing for anyone who wants to hear my immigrant success story. What kind of name is Bleichert? Dutch?”
“German,” I said.
Emmett raised his glass. “A great people, the Germans. Hitler was a bit excessive, but mark my words that someday we’ll regret not joining forces with him to fight the Reds. Where in Germany are your people from, lad?”
“Munich.”
“Ah, München! I’m surprised they left. If I’d grown up in Edinburgh or some other civilized place I’d still be wearing kilts. But I came from godawful Aberdeen, so I came to America right after the first war. I killed a lot of your fine German countrymen during that war, lad. But they were trying to kill me, so I felt justified. Did you meet Balto out in the parlor?”
I nodded; Madeleine groaned, Ramona Sprague winced and speared a potato. Emmett said, �
�My old dreamer friend Georgie Tilden taxidermied him. Scads of odd talents dreamer Georgie had. We were in a Scots regiment together during the war, and I saved Georgie’s life when a bunch of your fine German countrymen got obstreperous and charged us with bayonets. Georgie was enamored of the flickers; he loved a good nickelodeon show. We went back to Aberdeen after the armistice, saw what a dead dog town it was, and Georgie persuaded me to come to California with him—he wanted to work in the silent flicker business. He was never worth a damn unless I was there to lead him around by the snout, so I looked around Aberdeen, saw that it was a third-class destiny and said, ‘Aye, Georgie, California it is. Maybe we’ll strike rich. And if we don’t, we’ll fail where the sun always shines.’”
I thought of my old man, who came to America in 1908 with big dreams—but married the first German emigrant woman he met and settled for wage slavery with Pacific Gas and Electric. “What happened then?”
Emmett Sprague rapped the table with his fork. “Knock wood, it was the right time to arrive. Hollywood was a cow pasture, but the silents were moving into their heyday. Georgie got work as a lighting man, and I found work building damn good houses—damn good and cheap. I lived outdoors and put every damn good dime back into my business, then took out loans from every bank and shylock willing to lend money and bought damn good property—damn good and cheap. Georgie introduced me to Mack Sennett, and I helped him build sets out at his studio in Edendale, then touched him for a loan to buy more property. Old Mack knew a lad on the make when he saw one, being one himself. He gave me the loan on the proviso that I help him with that housing project he was putting up— Holly woodland—underneath that godawful hundred-foot sign he erected on Mount Lee to ballyhoo it. Old Mack knew how to squeeze a dollar dry, he did. He had extras moonlighting as laborers and vice versa. I’d drive them over to Hollywoodland after ten or twelve hours on a Keystone Kops flicker, and we’d put in another six hours by torchlight. I even got an assistant director’s credit on a couple of movies, old Mack was so grateful for the way I squeezed his slaves.”