The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  The Zimba Room interior was wall-to-wall smoke, GI’s and juke box jazz; Madeleine was at the bar sipping a drink. Looking around, I saw that she was the only woman in the place and already creating a hubbub—soldiers and sailors were elbowing the good news to one another, pointing to the black-clad figure and exchanging whispers.

  I found a zebra-striped booth at the back; it was filled with sailors sharing a bottle. One glance at their peach fuzz faces told me they were underage. I held out my badge and said, “Scram or I’ll have the SP’s here inside of a minute.” The three youths took off in a blue swirl, leaving their jug behind. I sat down to watch Madeleine portray Betty.

  Guzzling half a tumbler of bourbon calmed my nerves. I had a diagonal view of Madeleine at the bar, surrounded by would-be lovers hanging on her every word. I was too far away to hear anything—but every gesture I saw her make was not hers, but that of some other woman. And every time she touched a member of her entourage my hand twitched toward my .38.

  Time stretched, in a haze of navy blue and khaki with a jet black center.

  Madeleine drank, chatted and brushed off passes, her attention narrowing down to a stocky sailor. Her coterie dwindled out as the man shot them mean looks; I killed off the bottle. Staring at the bar kept me from thinking, the loud jazz kept my ears perked for the sound of voices above it, the booze kept me from rousting the stocky man on a half dozen trumped-up charges. Then the woman in black and the sailor in blue were out the door, arms linked, Madeleine inches taller in her high heels.

  I gave them a bourbon-calmed five seconds, then hauled. The Packard was turning right at the corner when I got behind the wheel; gunning it and hanging a hard right myself, I saw taillights at the end of the block. I zoomed up behind them, almost tapping the rear bumper; Madeleine’s signal arm shot out the window, and she veered into the parking lot of a brightly lit auto court.

  I skidded to a stop, then backed up and killed my headlights. From the street I could see sailor boy standing by the Packard smoking a cigarette, while Madeleine hit the motel office for the room key. She came outside with it a moment later, just like our old routine; she made the sailor walk ahead of her, just like she did with me. The lights went on and off inside the room, and when I listened outside it the blinds were drawn and our old station was on the radio.

  Rolling stakeouts.

  Field interrogations.

  The Bunsen burner jockey now a detective with a case.

  I kept Madeleine’s Dahlia act under surveillance for four more nights; she pulled the same MO every time: 8th Street gin mill, hard boy with lots of confetti on his chest, the fuck pad at 9th and Irolo. When the two were ensconsed, I went back and questioned bartenders and GIs she gave the ixnay to.

  What name did the black-clad woman give?

  None.

  What did she talk about?

  The war and breaking into the movies.

  Did you notice her resemblance to the Black Dahlia, that murdered girl from a couple of years ago, and if so, what do you think she was trying to prove?

  Negative answers and theories: She’s a loony who thinks she’s the Black Dahlia; she’s a hooker cashing in on the Dahlia’s look; she’s a policewoman decoy out to get the Dahlia killer; she’s a crazy woman dying of cancer, trying to attract the Dahlia slasher and cheat the Big C.

  I knew the next step was to roust Madeleine’s lovers—but I didn’t trust myself to do it rationally. If they said the wrong thing or the right thing, or pointed me in the wrong/right direction, I knew I couldn’t be held accountable for what I would do.

  The four nights of booze, catnaps in the car and couch naps at home with Kay sequestered in the bedroom took their toll on me. At work I dropped slides and mislabeled blood samples, wrote evidence reports in my own exhaustion shorthand and twice fell asleep hunched over a ballistics miscroscope, awakening to jagged shots of Madeleine in black. Knowing I couldn’t hack night five by myself or give it a pass, I stole some Benzedrine tablets awaiting processing for Narcotics Division. They juiced me out of my fatigue and into a clammy feeling of disgust for what I’d been doing to myself—and they gave me a brainstorm to save me from Madeleine/Dahlia and make me a real cop again.

  Thad Green nodded along as I plea-bargained him: I had seven years on the Department, my run-in with the Vogels was over two years before and mostly forgotten, I hated working SID and wanted to return to a uniformed division—preferably nightwatch. I was studying for the Sergeant’s Exam, SID had served me well as a training ground for my ultimate goal—the Detective Bureau. I started to launch a tirade on my shitty marriage and how nightwatch would keep me away from my wife, faltering when images of the lady in black hit me and I realized I was close to begging. The Chief of Detectives finally silenced me with a long stare, and I wondered if the dope was betraying me. Then he said, “Okay, Bucky,” and pointed to the door. I waited in the outer office for a Benzedrine eternity; when Green walked out smiling, I almost jumped loose of my skin. “Newton Street nightwatch as of tomorrow,” he said. “And try to be civil with our colored brethren down there. You’ve got a bad case of the yips, and I wouldn’t want you passing it on to them.”

  Newton Street Division was southeast of downtown LA, 95 percent slums, 95 percent Negroes, all trouble. There were bottle gangs and crap games on every corner; liquor stores, hair-straightening parlors and poolrooms on every block, code three calls to the station twenty-four hours a day. Footbeat hacks carried metal-studded saps; squadroom dicks packed .45 automatics loaded with un-regulation dum-dums. The local winos drank “Green Lizard”—cologne cut with Old Monterey white port, and the standard pop for a whore was one dollar, a buck and a quarter if you used “her place”—the abandoned cars in the auto graveyard at 56th and Central. The kids on the street were scrawny and bloated, stray dogs sported mange and perpetual snarls, merchants kept shotguns under the counter. Newton Street Division was a war zone.

  I reported for duty after twenty-two hours of sack time, booze-weaned off the Benzies. The station commander, an ancient lieutenant named Getchell, supplied a warm welcome, telling me that Thad Green said I was kosher, and he’d accept me as such until I fucked up and proved otherwise. Personally, he hated boxers and stoolies, but he was willing to let bygones be bygones. My fellow officers would probably take some persuading, however; they really hated glory cops, boxers and Bolsheviks, and Fritzie Vogel was warmly remembered from his Newton Street tour years before. The cordial CO assigned me to a single-o foot beat, and I left that initial briefing determined to out-kosher God himself.

  My first roll call was worse.

  Introduced to the watch by the muster sergeant, I got no applause and a wide assortment of fisheyes, evil eyes and averted eyes. After the reading of the crime sheet, seven men out of the fifty-five or so stopped to shake my hand and wish me good luck. The sergeant gave me a silent tour of the division and dropped me off with a street map at the east edge of my beat; his farewell was, “Don’t let the niggers give you no shit.” When I thanked him, he said, “Fritz Vogel was a good pal of mine,” and sped off.

  I decided to kosherize myself fast.

  My first week at Newton was muscle rousts and gathering information on who the real bad guys were. I broke up Green Lizard parties with my billy club, promising not to roust the winos if they fed me names. If they didn’t kick loose, I arrested them; if they did, I arrested them anyway. I smelled reefer smoke on the sidewalk outside the gassed hair joint on 68th and Beach, kicked the door in and drew down on three grasshoppers holding felony quantities of maryjane. They snitched off their supplier and fingered an upcoming rumble between The Slausons and Choppers in return for my promise of leniency; I called in the info to the squardroom and flagged down a black-and-white to haul the hopheads to the station. Prowling the hooker auto dump got me prostitution collars, and threatening the girls’ johns with calls to their wives got me more names. At week’s end I had twenty-two arrests to my credit—nine of them felonies. And I ha
d names. Names to test my courage on. Names to make up for the main events I’d dodged. Names to make the cops who hated me afraid of me.

  I caught Downtown Willy Brown coming out of the Lucky Time Wine Bar. I said, “Your mother sucks a mean dick, Sambo”; Willy charged me. I took three to give six; when it was over Brown was blowing teeth out his nose. And two cops shooting the breeze across the street saw the whole thing.

  Roosevelt Williams, paroled rape-o, pimp and policy runner, was tougher. His response to “Hello, shitbird” was “You a whitey motherfuck”—and he hit first. We traded shots for close to a minute, in full view of a cadre of Choppers lounging on front stoops. He was getting the better of me, and I almost went for my baton—not the stuff of which legends are made. Finally I pulled a Lee Blanchard move, rolling upstairs-downstairs sets, wham-wham-wham-wham, the last blow sending Williams to dreamland and me to the station nurse for two finger splints.

  Bare knuckles were now out of the question. My last two names, Crawford Johnson and his brother Willis, operated a rigged card game out of the rec room of the Mighty Reedeemer Baptist Church on 61st and Enterprise, catty corner from the greasy spoon where Newton cops ate for half price. When I came in the window, Willis was dealing. He looked up and said, “Huh?” my billy club took out his hands and the card table. Crawford went for his waistband; my second baton blow knocked a silencer-fitted .45 from his grip. The brothers crashed out the door howling in pain; I picked up my new off-duty piece and told the other gamblers to grab their money and go home. When I walked outside, I had an audience: bluesuits chomping sandwiches on the sidewalk, watching the Johnson brothers hotfoot it, holding their broken paws. “Some people don’t respond to civility!” I yelled. An old sergeant rumored to hate my guts yelled back, “Bleichert, you’re an honorary white man!” and I knew I was kosherized.

  The Johnson Brothers roust made me a minor legend. My fellow cops gradually warmed to me—the way you do to guys too crazy-bold for their own good, guys that you’re grateful not to be yourself. It was like being a local celebrity again.

  I got straight 100’s on my first month’s fitness report, and Lieutenant Getchell rewarded me with a radio car beat. It was a promotion of sorts, as was the territory that came with it.

  Rumor had it that both the Slausons and the Choppers were out to do me in, and if they failed, Crawford and Willis Johnson were next in line to try. Getchell wanted me out of harm’s way until they cooled off, so he assigned me to a sector on the western border of the division.

  The new beat was an invitation to boredom. Mixed white and Negro, small factories and tidy houses, the best action you could hope for was drunk drivers and hitchhiking hookers soliciting motorists, trying to pick up a few bucks on their way down to the niggertown dope pads. I busted DDs and thwarted assignations by flashing my cherry lights, wrote traffic tickets by the shitload and generally prowled for anything out of the ordinary. Drive-in restaurants were popping up on Hoover and Vermont, spangly modern jobs where you could eat in your car and listen to music on speakers attached to the window posts. I spent hours parked in them, KGFJ blasting be-bop, my two-way on low in case anything hot came over the air. I eyeballed the street while I sat and listened, trawling for white hookers, telling myself that if I saw any who looked like Betty Short, I’d warn them that 39th and Norton was only a few miles away and urge them to be careful.

  But most of the whores were jigs and bleached blondes, not worth warning and only worth busting when my arrest quota was running low. They were women, though, safe places to let my mind dawdle, safe substitutes for my wife at home alone and Madeleine crawling 8th Street gutters. I toyed with the idea of picking up a Dahlia/Madeleine lookalike for sex, but always quashed it—it was too much like Johnny Vogel and Betty at the Biltmore.

  Going off-duty at midnight, I was always itchy, restless, in no mood to go home and sleep. Sometimes I hit the all-night movies downtown, sometimes the jazz clubs on South Central. Bop was moving into its heyday, and all-night sessions with a pint of bonded were generally enough to ease me home and into a dreamless sleep shortly after Kay left for work in the morning.

  But when it didn’t work, it was sweats and Jane Chambers’ smiling clown and Frenchman Joe Dulange smashing cockroaches and Johnny Vogel and his whip and Betty begging me to fuck her or kill her killer, she didn’t care which. And the worst of it was waking up alone in the fairy tale house.

  Summer came on. Hot days sleeping it off on the couch; hot nights patrolling west niggertown, bonded sourmash, the Royal Flush and Bido Lito’s, Hampton Hawes, Dizzy Gillespie, Wardell Gray and Dexter Gordon. Restless attempts to study for the Sergeant’s Exam and the urge to blow off Kay and the fairy tale house and get a cheap pad somewhere on my beat. If it weren’t for the spectral wino it might have gone on forever.

  I was parked in Duke’s Drive-in, eyeing a gaggle of trampy-looking girls standing by the bus stop about ten yards in front of me. My two-way was off, wild Kenton riffs were coming out of the speaker hook-up. The breezeless humidity had my uniform plastered to my body; I hadn’t made an arrest in a week. The girls were waving at passing cars, one peroxide blonde gyrating her hips at them. I started synchronizing the bumps and grinds to the music, playing with the idea of pulling a shakedown, running them through R&I for outstanding warrants. Then a scraggy old wino entered the scene, one hand holding a short dog, the other out begging for chump change.

  The bottle blonde quit dancing to talk to him; the music went haywire—all screeches—without her accompaniment. I flashed my headlights; the wino shielded his eyes, then shot me the finger. I was out of the black-and-white and on top of him, Stan Kenton’s band my backup.

  Roundhouse lefts and rights, rabbit punches. The girl’s shrieks out-decibeling Big Stan. The wino cursing me, my mother, my father. Sirens in my head, the smell of rotting meat at the warehouse, even though I knew it couldn’t be. The old geez blubbering, “Pleeese.”

  I staggered to the corner pay phone, gave it a nickel and dialed my own number. Ten rings, no Kay, WE-4391 without thinking. Her voice: “Hello, Sprague residence.” My stammers; then, “Bucky? Bucky, is that you?” The wino weaving toward me, sucking his bottle with bloody lips. Hands inside my pockets, pulling out bills to throw him, cash on the pavement. “Come over, sweet. The others are down at Laguna. It could be like old—”

  I left the receiver dangling and the wino scooping up the better part of my last paycheck. Driving to Hancock Park, I ran, just this one time, just to be inside the house again. Knocking on the door, I had myself convinced. Then Madeleine was there, black silk, upswept coiffure, yellow barrette. I reached for her; she stepped back, pulled her hair loose and let it fall to her shoulders. “No. Not yet. It’s all I have to keep you with.”

  IV

  Elizabeth

  Twenty-nine

  For a month she held me in a tight velvet fist.

  Emmett, Ramona and Martha were spending June at the family’s beach house in Orange County, leaving Madeleine to look after the Muirfield Road estate. We had twenty-two rooms to play in, a dream house built from immigrant ambition. It was a big improvement over the Red Arrow Motel and Lee Blanchard’s monument to bank robbery and murder.

  Madeleine and I made love in every bedroom, tearing loose every silk sheet and brocade coverlet, surrounded by Piscassos and Dutch masters and Ming Dynasty vases worth hundreds of grand. We slept in the late mornings and early afternoons before I headed for niggertown; the looks I got from her neighbors when I walked to my car in full uniform were priceless.

  It was a reunion of avowed tramps, rutters who knew that they’d never have it as good with anyone else. Madeleine explained her Dahlia act as a strategy to get me back; she had seen me parked in my car that night, and knew that a Betty Short seduction would keep me returning. The desire behind it moved me even as the elaborateness of the ruse elicted revulsion.

  She dropped the look the second the door shut that first time. A quick rinse brought her hair bac
k to its normal dark brown, the pageboy cut returned, the tight black dress came off. I tried everything but threats of leaving and begging; Madeleine kept me mollified with “Maybe some day.” Our implicit compromise was Betty talk.

  I asked questions, she digressed. We exhausted actual facts quickly; from then on it was pure interpretation.

  Madeleine spoke of her utter malleability, Betty the chameleon who would be anyone to please anybody. I had her down as the center of the most baffling piece of detective work the Department had ever seen, the disrupter of most of the lives close to me, the human riddle I had to know everything about. That was my final perspective, and it felt bone shallow.

  After Betty, I turned the conversation to the Spragues themselves. I never told Madeleine that I knew Jane Chambers, broaching Jane’s inside stuff in roundabout ways. Madeleine said that Emmett was mildly worried about the forthcoming demolitions up by the Hollywoodland sign; that her mother’s pageantry and love of strange books and medieval lore were nothing but “Hophead stuff—Mama with time on her hands and a snootful of patent medicine.” After a while, she came to resent my probes and demanded turnabout. I told lies and wondered where I would go if my own past was all I had left.

  Thirty

  Pulling up in front of the house, I saw a moving van in the driveway and Kay’s Plymouth, top down, packed with boxes. The run for clean uniforms was turning into something else.

  I double-parked and bolted up the steps, smelling Madeleine’s perfume on myself. The van started backing out; I yelled, “Hey! Goddamn it, come back here!”

  The driver ignored me; words from the porch kept me from going after him. “I didn’t touch your things. And you can have the furniture.”