Angel in black nh-11

by Max Allan Collins

  “You start sniffin’ around Jack Dragna, tryin’ to connect him with the worst, most fiendish murder since Jack the Ripper slashed them limey sluts, and you’re gonna be Jim Richardson’s next juicy headline… Help me on with my coat.”

  I did.

  “Speakin’ of juice, wait’ll you taste my fresh-squeezed. Gotta apologize, though, we yammered so much, I don’t have time for breakfast. I’ll have Johnny show you to the kitchen-just tell the chef you want my special lox-and-onion omelet.”

  “I think maybe I lost my appetite, Mickey.”

  The natty little ape glanced over his shoulder at me, snugging the Borsalino back on. “Don’t offend me, Heller. I don’t like that.”

  It was delicious.

  21

  For a change Jim Richardson wasn’t pacing, that manic engine of his apparently having finally run down. He sat slumped at the head of the conference room table at the Examiner — he and I were alone in the narrow chamber-a cigarette drooping from slack lips. The city room editor was staring woefully at me with both eyes, even the slow one.

  “This fuckin’ story is runnin’ out of steam,” he said.

  I had just reported what I’d learned from my conversations with Granny and Mark Lansom at the Florentine Gardens, including Lansom’s missing address book. I also passed along what Harry the Hat had told Eliot and me about the sorry state of the LAPD’s investigation, all of which Richardson already seemed to know. Anything of value I’d learned, yesterday, I of course withheld-the McCadden Cafe group’s connection to Elizabeth Short, in particular; and certainly nothing about Welles, or Jack Dragna, who I had decided-on Mickey Cohen’s sage advice-not to bother seeing. Dragna seemed not only a dead end, but a potentially deadly one.

  “There’s a lot going on,” I said, shrugging. “Should be plenty of legs left in this thing.”

  Richardson shook his head mournfully. “Too many goddamn leads-too many boy friends, too many bars she frequented, too many lovesick letters she wrote to too many nobodies.”

  “None of your newshounds have turned up anything interesting?”

  “Best thing we got lately is the Dahlia was seen at numerous joints in the company of a big ‘bossy’ blonde.” He crushed out his cigarette in a glass tray, started up another one, then added archly, “If you can believe the cab drivers and bartenders and lushes who shared this hot information.”

  The bossy blonde was probably Helen Hassau.

  “When was this,” I asked, “that she was seen with a blonde?”

  “Just two days before the body turned up. I hear the cops are starting to think Miss Short was a lesbian, and are hitting the dyke bars. The Hat tell you as much?”

  “That he didn’t mention.” Didn’t surprise me that Hansen was holding out on me like I was holding out on him.

  “Fowley’s still chasing soldiers up at Camp Cooke,” Richardson said, shaking his head. “So many leads, and none of ’em cough up a clue.”

  “It’s still early, Jim.”

  “Our readers are getting bogged down in this unproductive crap. I didn’t want the cops to solve this overnight, but I didn’t expect ’em to mount their horses and gallop off in all directions.”

  “She was a good-looking girl who got around town-sorting out her life and loves could take a year.”

  “Meanwhile, my readers get their asses bored off.”

  I rose from the hard chair. “Well, I’m takin’ the rest of the day off. You can let me know Monday morning if you still want me in on this thing.”

  The editor nodded. “Thinkin’ about headin’ back to Chicago with that good-lookin’ bride of yours?”

  “Yeah. Maybe you could sit down with Fowley or somebody and do that puff piece, first-give my agency that boost you promised.”

  “Sure thing. Of course, it would be a better story under a headline about how you found the Black Dahlia’s killer.”

  I was at the door, now. “I’ll see what I can do, over the weekend.”

  “You do that. And I’ll see if maybe I can figure out a way to goose this thing in the ass.”

  “That’s the best place to apply a goose.”

  Richardson snorted a laugh.

  Just as I went out, I glanced back and he was an oddly pitiful figure, sitting there alone in the big room, staring into nothing, one eye going this way, the other that, his bald head wreathed in cigarette smoke.

  Back in the Beverly Hills hotel bungalow, I found a note from Peggy. She was going out shopping with Cathy Ross, for the afternoon-“while I still can.” I knew this to be a reference to her time of the month-tomorrow, or later today, if the flow got really heavy, she’d be bed-bound. She had really hard periods, sometimes accompanied by blazing headaches.

  Couldn’t blame her for wanting to get in a little relaxation before the menstrual onslaught, but I felt helpless and as alone as Richardson had looked. For a case with so many leads, I was fresh out, particularly since Cohen had scratched Dragna off my list.

  I walked the hotel’s manicured, flower-flung grounds and slipped inside the lobby, and grabbed lunch at the Fountain Coffee Shop. When I was strolling past the front desk, an assistant manager called out to me, and handed me a note from my mailbox.

  Lou Sapperstein had been trying to call, all morning-six little slips of paper represented as many attempts.

  That put some spring in my step, and back in the bungalow I called Lou at his home number, and got him on the first ring.

  “You found something,” I said.

  “I found something,” Lou said.

  “Well, it better be good, ’cause as we speak, Sergeant Finis Brown of the LAPD is in town-that is, the town you’re in, partner, Chicago? And Sergeant Brown and I are not good friends.”

  “How unfriendly are you?”

  “Well, if he finds his way to our offices, Lou, you’ll notice a bandage on his nose.”

  Lou sighed. “You broke his nose. You broke the nose of one of the investigating cops.”

  “Why, doesn’t that sound like me, Lou?”

  “It sounds exactly like you, Nate,” he said wearily. “Now I want to ask you something, before I share my tidbit of information, which by the way only cost the A-1 three hundred bucks-”

  “Three hundred!”

  “Yeah-this comes from a doctor in Hammond, Indiana, a rabbit-puller who does not want the attention of the cops or the press, which being the Black Dahlia’s doctor would certainly bring.”

  I frowned. “Black Dahlia? You know the nickname, so the case has hit the Chicago papers.”

  “Yeah, no pics of her yet. Just small, juicy articles; but with a moniker like that-”

  “Right. So spill, Lou-what did this Hammond Dr. Kildare give you?”

  “Let me ask you my question, first. Have you run across any men who say they slept with her? Who actually screwed this girl?”

  “No. She went down on her share, though.”

  “And didn’t you tell me you didn’t remember screwing her, yourself? That you were drunk on your ass that night?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My love life is a regular Cole Porter tune, isn’t it?”

  “Nate, there’s a reason for this girl, this slutty girl, never fucking anybody. She couldn’t. ”

  I sat up. “What the hell do you mean? She was pregnant, wasn’t she?”

  “No. She was not.”

  I was shaking my head, as if not sure my ears were hearing right. “Then what was she going to an abortionist for?”

  Another sigh. “Like a lot of those guys, this quack in Hammond is also a gynecologist. The problem the Short girl had was not that she had your, or anybody’s bun, in her oven. She requested a colposcopy.”

  “Talk English, Lou.”

  “A vaginal exam. But she couldn’t have one. You see, Elizabeth Short had a physical abnormality that made even a routine vaginal exam impossible. The doc called it… let me check my notes… ‘vaginal atresia.’ ”

  “What the hell does that mean?�
��

  There was a shrug in Lou’s voice: “She had something the doctor said happens maybe once in a million births: an undeveloped vaginal canal.”

  “Undeveloped. You mean, like a… kid’s?”

  “Like a child, a female child-Nate, your beautiful Black Dahlia did not have fully developed adult genitals.”

  I just sat there, phone against my ear, staring at a vase of cut flowers on a stand across the room-lovely pink flowers, feminine, delicate. Dead.

  “Nate? You still there?”

  I nodded, then realized Lou couldn’t see that, and said, “Still here. It’s just… so many things make sense now. Of course she satisfied her boy friends orally-it’s all she had.”

  “Sorry for the crudity,” Lou said, “but she probably couldn’t let them in her back door, either, without showing herself-without them seeing that she was… like a child, down there.”

  So Harry the Hat’s third piece of information, gathered in the autopsy, was not that the Dahlia was pregnant-but that she was physically incapable of having normal intercourse with a man!

  Something clicked. “Lou-the money she was raising… It wasn’t for an abortion. It was for an operation-she wanted to be a normal woman!”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Lou said. “I guess that’s why you’re the president of this outfit.”

  Her physical abnormality was why she had gone to Dr. Dailey-her old family friend-whose partner, Dr. Winter, was a gynecologist. The money she was saving up-that five hundred dollars she was scrambling after, blackmailing me and others for-was so she could become a complete woman.

  Bobby Savarino had been talking marriage, and Elizabeth Short-like so many women, like so many men, in these sad, hopeful postwar days-wanted the cottage and the picket fence and the whole married American megillah. I’d been right, when I told Fowley that I figured Beth Short wanted to be a wife more than a movie star.

  And so, after years of thinking about it, and dreaming about it, and after discovering that a doctor from back home was practicing in Los Angeles-a doctor specializing in “woman troubles”-she finally had taken the step, to arrange for an operation. An expensive one.

  “What are you going to do with this information, Nate?”

  “The cops already have it,” I said, “or anyway the key cop does.” And I explained how the Hat was keeping this and two other only-the-killer-knows items under wraps. “But it means I have to rethink every piece of information I’ve gathered, every individual I’ve spoken to.”

  Lou laughed humorlessly. “Whole new ball game.”

  “Different game entirely-though this one also starts with a butchered girl in a vacant lot.”

  We discussed Brown’s presence in Chicago, and I told Lou to play it straight down the middle, should Fat Ass show up at the office with questions about me. Soon, perhaps today, I would tell the Hat about having known Short briefly in Chicago, and explain my reticence to come forward, due to the coincidence of having been along with Fowley for the discovery of the body.

  “Now that we know Beth Short wasn’t pregnant,” I said, “I’m much less a viable suspect.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that she told you she was pregnant,” Lou reminded me, “and tried to blackmail you.”

  “If she’d been pregnant by me,” I said, “there was a good chance she could’ve told some girl friend or other, or a doctor, or even another boy friend. But since she was lying to me, scamming me, chances are strong nobody knew about her calling me from the Biltmore… but me.”

  “And me,” Lou said. “But I ain’t tellin’ a soul. We’ll talk about my raise, later.”

  “Fuck you very much. Don’t you see, Lou? If she’d really been pregnant, a whole battery of men might have been suspects. They now have been turned into a meaningless bunch of former boy friends, whose tales of never having sex with the girl suddenly make sense.”

  “So the suspect field is narrowed,” Lou said.

  “Considerably.”

  I did not tell Lou about Watterson, because Eliot had requested I keep the lid on that; but, like a new Rosemary Clooney tune, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run had just jumped back to the top of my personal Hit Parade.

  “On the other hand,” Lou said, “maybe one of those boy friends killed her-you know, flew into a murderous rage when he discovered she could not be fucked.”

  “Jesus, yeah-that does make a terrible kind of sense.”

  Another humorless laugh. “Poor kid was the only prick tease on earth who didn’t want to be.”

  After hanging up, I just sat there on the couch in that bungalow, afternoon sun filtering in lazily through sheer curtains, my interview notepad in hand, and I paged through it as I mentally sorted through every fact, every facet, every suspect, every supposition, every rumor, every seeming coincidence, viewed through the new prism of Beth Short’s disability.

  Perhaps half an hour later, a frantic knocking at the bungalow door jarred me, as if I’d been sleeping and got jolted awake, and I went quickly to the door and opened it. Perhaps I had been in a trancelike state, but seeing Eliot Ness’s uncharacteristically excited expression made me instantly alert.

  “I have some incredible information,” he blurted.

  “You may want to hear mine, first,” I said.

  I sat on the couch and he pulled up an armchair, tossing his fedora on the coffee table, and listened to my retelling of Lou Sapperstein’s bizarre news. Midway he got up and helped himself to some Scotch from the wet bar.

  Visibly shaken, Eliot said, “It’s all beginning to make sick, tragic sense.”

  “Parts of it are coming clear, but I have to admit, most of it is still pretty goddamn murky from where I sit.”

  “Wait-just wait.” He gulped at the Scotch, then unbuttoned his suitcoat, set the drink on the glass top of the coffee table, and for several long moments sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands; that unruly comma of brown, graying hair hung almost to his eyebrows.

  “Are you all right, Eliot?”

  “Where shall I start?” He sat suddenly straight. “All right, the beginning… I spent two hours with Detective Hansen, wasting time retreading the Butcher inquiry, making the case for this probably not being the same perpetrator. He seemed to buy it well enough. Then I asked Hansen if anyone was exploring abortionists in the city-and he told me, yes, but that he personally thought that was a blind alley.”

  “Considering his knowledge of Beth Short’s deformity, that’s not surprising.”

  Eliot nodded, and pressed on. “But I pushed him, saying that in Cleveland we believed the Kingsbury Run Butcher was a doctor or perhaps ex-doctor, due to the medical precision of the dismemberments. The Black Dahlia’s corpse showed similar medical knowledge and the same sort of surgical skill.”

  “And,” I said, “you naturally told Hansen that if he’s really trying to see whether the Kingsbury Run Butcher committed this crime, then this is a logical path to go down.”

  “Yes. He put me with a young vice squad sergeant, Charles Stoker, and left us alone. I asked Sergeant Stoker for a list of known and suspected abortionists. Stoker gave me one, but Dailey’s name wasn’t on it…”

  “Of course. Dailey’s protected.”

  Eliot nodded. “So I told the young detective that I’d heard about a doctor named Dailey, who was originally from Massachusetts, same as Elizabeth Short.”

  I winced. “Dangerous sharing that…”

  He raised a palm, as if getting sworn in on the stand. “But necessary to get the information-and, anyway, I can play it down, if it gets back to Hansen. Stoker started looking around the bullpen furtively, then finally, uneasily, admitted that certain local doctors suspected of abortion were not ‘bothered’ by the LAPD. He said it rubbed him the wrong way, but the policy in the department was that abortion was a fact of life and a few of the more responsible practitioners were given a blind eye.”

  “And he admitted Dr. Dailey was one of these.”
<
br />   “Yes, a very respectable retired Chief of Staff of Los Angeles County Hospital, after all, retired USC professor. But Stoker had some other interesting information about Dr. Dailey-he was very much aware of Dailey’s failing mental condition.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Eliot smiled tightly, nastily. “Seems Dailey’s estranged wife has been trying to arrange a commitment for her errant hubby-it’s been something of a minor scandal. Apparently Mrs. Dailey thinks this woman, Dr. Winter, is ‘exerting undue influence’ over her husband, using her ‘feminine wiles.’

  “As in, stealing the doc away from her.”

  Nodding again, Eliot said, “Yes, and changing his will to favor Dr. Winter.”

  “It’s not a new story.”

  “But in the context of the death of Elizabeth Short, it makes a very interesting story.”

  I shook my head, confused. “How in hell could the Short girl’s murder have anything-”

  Eliot held up a traffic-cop palm. “Wait. Just wait. After Sergeant Stoker and I were finished, I came back here to the hotel and made a few phone calls… first to the main branch of the L.A. public library, to see if they had Harvard yearbooks on hand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to see if Lloyd Watterson’s father and Dr. Dailey really were classmates. A librarian on the research desk said she would be happy to look into it for me, and she called me back, not half an hour ago. Both men did attend Harvard, just not at the same time-Lloyd’s father graduated the year before Dailey enrolled.”

  “What does that mean to you, Eliot?”

  The Untouchable leaned forward, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “It means Lloyd was lying to us about at least one thing. Getting the job with Dailey had nothing to do with him being a friend and classmate of dear dead dad.”

  “And why would he lie about that?”

  A tiny shrug. “Possibly to make himself look better to us-make it look as if he really was trying to make a clean start, with his family’s help… rather than going to work for an abortionist, through the efforts of some lowlife criminal acquaintance.”