II
I knew that an unsolved homicide investigation was never closed, and so after my conversation with Arthur French in Nogales I was able, through an LAPD detective I knew (one who like Maury Ahearne was always available for a little free enterprise) to photocopy the file on Blue Tyler’s schoolfriend Meta Dierdorf, female Caucasian, age 19 years, height 5’3″, weight 121 lbs., eyes brown, hair brown, file A-39536 (dead body). Date: July 27, 1945. Crime: PC 187 (Homicide).
The initial report filed by the primary investigator set the scene:
At 9:45 A.M., July 27, 1945, notified by teletype from Mid-Wilshire substation that there was a dead body in bathtub at El Coronado Apartments, 8497 Fountain Avenue, West Los Angeles. Body discovered by maid upon arriving at site o/a 8:30 A.M. this date. Maid Emerald Johnson notified janitor Cletis Rivers, who notified substation. Proceeded to above location El Coronado apartments. Victim resided in Apartment G, two-floor apartment with three bedrooms and two bathrooms on 2d floor, LR, DR, kitchen and toilet on 1st floor. Found dead body of victim lying in bathtub in bathroom on 2d floor. The head face down was at the spigot end of tub and the left foot was resting upon the upper edge of tub at other end. The right leg was resting in the tub. There was no water in bathtub at time of my arrival at scene. There was small amount of blood upon bottom of bathtub under victim’s face. Also what seemed to be dried discharge upon lower part of buttocks. Victim’s body was nude. There was a wet turkish bath towel lying upon bathroom floor alongside of bathtub. When assistant medical examiner arrived at scene, body was examined, samples taken of dried blood in tub and discharge on victim’s buttocks, and cultures taken from anus and vagina. Body was turned over in bathtub and it was then discovered that a piece of cloth was protruding from victim’s mouth, and the teeth were clamped tightly over same. The piece of cloth had a small red border upon it, and seemed to have been torn or cut from the end of a towel or a roll of bandage. A search was made of every part of the house for a towel with a red border with a part of it missing or a bandage box, but nothing was found. The bedroom of victim is adjacent to the bathroom. There was valuable jewelry and other articles of value upon dresser and in closet, including camera equipment. There were two photograph albums of men in uniform which were collected to aid in investigation, as was film in camera, which was sent to police lab for developing. There was also $272 in cash in stocking drawer. Change purse in pocketbook on dresser contained $14 in bills and $3.42 in coins, as well as victim’s driver’s license, gas and food ration cards, and card saying victim was registered as a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen in Hollywood. A pair of pajama pants was lying upon floor alongside of bed. The pants had a tear in them. There was a blood spot upon carpet next to the door that leads to the bathroom. The carpet was wet around the blood spot and indicated that an attempt had been made to rub it out with a wet cloth. There were no blood spots of any kind upon bathroom floor or upon the bed. Also no indications of struggle having taken place on the bed. In room was also a diary and address book, property of victim. Attempted to question colored maid Emerald Johnson, but she was too distraught to answer questions except to say that she came to apartment to clean three days a week and that nothing of value seemed to be missing. She said that she was at choir practice at Bethany Baptist Church, 3891 Central Avenue, night before. Questioned colored janitor Cletis Rivers, who said victim’s car, a green 1939 Dodge coupe, was not in basement garage where it was usually parked. Notified Mid-Wilshire substation to check DMV re registration and to put trace on vehicle. Photographs were taken of crime site and victim and then body was removed to the county mortuary for further examination and investigation and postmortem operation.
T. J. Spellacy
Lieutenant Robbery-Homicide
Investigator (Primary)
It was odd, even obscene, looking at old forensic photographs of a naked dead nineteen-year-old who if she were still alive would be close to seventy, with all the attendant miseries and complaints of old age and failed expectations. Meta Dierdorf was not a pretty sight in her bathtub. Her face was battered, her nose bloodied, her lips puffed and split, her breasts bare and bruised. On the side of the tub, there were smeared traces of excrement, indicating that as she was dying her sphincter had loosened and she had evacuated her bowels, which meant that the last thing she smelled was the stink of her own shit. In one photo, taken at the County Medical Center morgue after her body had been moved there for the postmortem, a pocket handkerchief had been placed over her pubic symphysis, a peculiar daintiness, I could not help thinking, considering the circumstances of her death. Perhaps the real obscenity, however, was that I found myself getting a little turned on by the pictures, especially by the one with the handkerchief over her bush.
In spite of that, in spite of the blood and the bruises and the blackened eyes and the shit and all the detritus of violent death, I recognized almost immediately that the body in the bathtub was that of the naked young girl in those postcard-sized photographs Maury Ahearne had stolen from the refrigerator in Melba Mae Toolate’s recreational vehicle at the Autumn Breeze trailer park in Hamtramck, Michigan. The photographs Blue Tyler had kept for nearly half a century. The photographs she had spilled on a Greyhound bus platform in Kansas City. The photograph I had shown Arthur French on my first trip to Nogales. And whose subject Arthur had claimed he was unable to identify.
I remembered:
I knew my father, I knew his tastes.… The younger they were, the younger he felt.… She was perfect.… She didn’t know anyone we knew. Except Blue. And that was just a friendship the publicity department dreamed up. I don’t think I ever heard Blue mention her …
And Blue:
This girlfriend I had at the studio school. She wasn’t in the business …
Arthur again:
Lilo just hated surprises. And he was also Blue’s lawyer. He was watching out for her, too …
Why was Lilo watching out for Blue?
I knew it was not because of any studio publicity pictures of Blue and Meta Dierdorf that might be floating around. Not even at my most gullible would I have believed that. Lilo wouldn’t have told me, even if he could; he died of acute uremic poisoning in 1980, after he was mistakenly transfused with the wrong blood type after a prostate operation at the J. F. French Medical Center in Palm Springs.
Rita Lewis might have told me, but in 1964 she was strangled while waterskiing off Acapulco in the company of a beachboy that she had, as she had prophesied, bought as her toy. As she was trying a complicated backward turn, the ropes got caught around her neck, and broke it.
And Arthur seemed to be lying.
Why?
The file said that two used rubber prophylactics wrapped in Kleenex were found in a bedroom wastebasket, the foil wrappings indicating they were of the Sheik brand, and a third prophylactic wrapped in Kleenex, this one identified by its foil as a Rameses brand, was found in another bedroom wastebasket. In the medical examiner’s autopsy, it was discovered that the victim was also wearing a latex pessary. According to the prescription bottles in her bathroom medicine cabinet, Meta Dierdorf’s gynecologist was Milton Heifitz, M.D., of 321 South Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, and Dr. Heifitz told officers he had written the prescription for the pessary two years earlier. There were multiple semen stains on the blanket and bed sheet as well as several dried semen spots on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. The postmortem report said that while there was evidence of semen both in the victim’s mouth and on the exterior of her buttocks, the specimen on her buttocks was probably the result of ejaculation and not anal intercourse, as there appeared to have been no penile penetration of her anus. Chemical analysis of the semen indicated that it came from two different donors. The autopsy also indicated that the absence of bruising or edema in the vaginal passages supported the conclusion that Meta Dierdorf had not been raped either prior to or subsequent to her murder.
Miss Anita Rose, secretary to Matthew Dierdorf, the victim’s father, told polic
e she had cabled her employer in Bahrain about the death of his daughter, but that he had already checked out of his hotel, leaving as a forwarding address a poste restante in Ankara, and there had been no response to a cable she had sent there. Checking the records at the El Coronado Apartments, Lieutenant Spellacy discovered that Meta Dierdorf’s apartment was leased to Carlisle Properties, a company incorporated in Panama whose listed president was Matthew Dierdorf. Ten weeks before Meta Dierdorf’s death, the trading of Carlisle stock was suspended on the American Stock Exchange when the company and its directors were cited for stock manipulation, with criminal charges pending. Matthew Dierdorf’s listed home address was in Reno, Nevada, with a postal drop in Los Angeles, a one-room office in the Bradbury Building, where Anita Rose took his messages. Matthew Dierdorf had left the country via Mexico in April, gone to Brazil, and then allegedly to Bahrain, and rent on the apartment at 8497 Fountain Avenue had been in arrears since the April payment.
Anita Rose made all the arrangements for Meta Dierdorf’s funeral. Expenses for the undertaker and the funeral service were paid out of her private bank account. There was a solemn high requiem mass at St. Ambrose’s in Hollywood, attended by several tenants at the El Coronado apartments, a delegation from the Hollywood Stage Door Canteen, and a platoon of the curious, as well as by four homicide detectives, on the chance that the killer might choose to pay his (or less likely her) final respects. Interment was at Forest Lawn in Burbank. Atop the casket was a spray of lilies with a card that said, “Daddy.” The florist who provided the bouquet told Lieutenant Spellacy that it had been personally selected by Anita Rose, who had signed the card herself and paid for the flowers in cash.
Lieutenant Spellacy’s efforts over the years to contact Matthew Dierdorf were unavailing. These efforts came to an end in January 1951, when Matthew Dierdorf, according to a newspaper clipping from the New York World-Telegram included in the casebook, jumped, fell, or was pushed from the roof of the St. Moritz Hotel in New York. His body, the story said, landed on top of a mounted patrolman on the Avenue of the Americas. Matthew Dierdorf was killed, as were both the policeman and his horse, a red gelding whose name was Oscar.
Meta Dierdorf’s address book, her daily diary, and her photo albums (the photographs mainly snapshots of servicemen identified on the black album pages only by first names written in white ink) were included in the case file. Her handwriting was childlike, all in block letters, both the periods and the dots over the letter i perfect little circles. The entries in the diary were mainly banal—hair appointments and manicures and pedicures and lunch dates and dinner dates and monthly references to “C,” which I assumed, as I expect Lieutenant Spellacy had also, was the curse, that benighted word so in disuse in this more enlightened time. She was irregular, or at least had a dramatic tendency to think she was—“C should have started today???”—and then a day or so later—“C & cramps, whew!” There was not a single mention of Blue Tyler in her diary nor any pictures of her in the photo albums. I suppose Arthur French would have said this lent credence to his dismissal of their putative friendship as little more than an invention of the Cosmopolitan publicity department, but then Arthur had also said he had not recognized the young woman when I had showed him her photograph. Her address book, however, did contain Blue Tyler’s change of address when she moved in March that year from Linden Drive in the Beverly Hills flats to Tower Road north of Sunset, as well as each new unlisted telephone number every time the studio changed it, sometimes as often as four times a year. Checking Pacific Bell, Lieutenant Spellacy found that the last of Blue Tyler’s unlisted numbers had been changed just ten days before Meta Dierdorf was killed, and was recorded in the victim’s book, suggesting that at least indirectly the two young women had been in contact.
There were a number of references in the diary to someone named “Vida” or “Vide”—the uncertainties of Meta Dierdorf’s penmanship making each possibility plausible—and sometimes simply to “V.” On close reading, one could infer (as did Lieutenant Spellacy) that she had some sort of financial arrangement with V, Vida, or Vide, to whom it appeared she lent her apartment for what seemed to be romantic trysts, perhaps even for cash. The notations were often in bad schoolgirl French: “V demain—$$$$$—bon pour le docteur,” or “Vide—ici avec Monsieur Pepe La Moko, ooo la la, peut-être cinquante dollars pour Plein???” or “Vida—quelle surprise, beaucoup l’argent au médecin pour ma silence!!!” Her address book yielded several people whose first or last names began with the letter V—two Virginias, a Vergil and a Vincente, a Van Sant and a Vandergrift, but one Virginia was a hairdresser who had left Los Angeles in January 1945 for a defense job at Boeing in Seattle, and the other was a maiden great-aunt of eighty-one confined to an institution in Montecito; Vergil Harper and Vincente Simeon, decorators who shared Apartment D-2 in Meta Dierdorf’s building, were at a party in Hillsborough, down the peninsula from San Francisco, the night of her murder, a party that upon investigation turned out to be a drag ball. Lemuel Van Sant, a brigadier general in a federalized unit of the California National Guard, died on Okinawa in June of acute amoebic dysentery, and Mrs. Florence Penn Crowell Persico Margolis Vandergrift had been residing in Reno for five weeks prior to the murder, attending to her fourth divorce.
As I read her diary, it sometimes seemed as if Meta Dierdorf, that last year of the war, was a one-woman USO, with lunches and dinners and tea and drinks with soldiers and sailors and marines and coastguardsmen, both officers and enlisted men, no branch of the services scanted. On the evening of her murder, Meta Dierdorf had gone to the Stage Door Canteen at six and had stayed less than an hour, jitterbugging with several servicemen; then she had left, saying she was not feeling well, telling another hostess, Miss June Holt, that she had drunk too much punch at a luncheon earlier that day at Chloe Quarles’s house for the marines assigned as extras to J. F. French’s production of Ready, Aim, Fire. June Holt said she had walked Meta Dierdorf to her car and she appeared in good spirits, not unwell, leading Miss Holt to speculate that she had another engagement rather than actually being ill, as she had claimed. “Meta was always mysterious about who she saw,” Miss Holt said in her statement to Lieutenant Spellacy. Although the rules of the Canteen stipulated that hostesses were not supposed to date the servicemen they met there, addresses and telephone numbers were routinely exchanged. Miss Holt also said that she was unaware of anyone named Vida or Vide that Meta Dierdorf might have known, or indeed of any friend whose first or last name began with the letter V.
For a period of time immediately after the murder, the leading suspect was someone identified in Meta Dierdorf’s day book only as “Tommy.” The entry on the day she was killed said “Tommy—7:30 chez moi, C fini!!!” Cross-checking all the names in her address book and her photo albums, Lieutenant Spellacy was finally able to track Tommy down to Mather Field, outside Sacramento, where as Captain Thomas Benedict, USAAF, he was assigned as a flight instructor to an A-20A light bomber training squadron. Lieutenant Spellacy went to Mather Field, and in the presence of a recording secretary and a Major Anders from the judge advocate general’s office, he questioned Captain Benedict. The captain at first denied knowing Meta Dierdorf, then said he had stood her up the evening in question, leading Lieutenant Spellacy to lay out the seriousness of his situation and the possibility that he could end up in the gas chamber. As an interrogator, Lieutenant Spellacy did not beat around the bush. From the official record, August 3, 1945:
Q: You want it straight?
A: Yes.
Q: You fly airplanes, right?
A: Yes.
Q: A combat hero, right?
A: I flew in combat.
Q: Well, excuse me if I don’t stand up and salute and say the country owes you a debt of gratitude.
MAJOR ANDERS OF THE JAG: I don’t think that tone is necessary, Officer.
Q: Oh, you don’t, do you? Well, listen, soldier boy, let me lay it out for you. This is a civilian offense, violation of Articl
e 187 of the California penal code, the unlawful killing of a human being, to wit, Miss Meta Dierdorf, that this hero flyboy here says he don’t know, only he can’t explain how his picture just happened to show up in the photo album of this chick, unless maybe he’s got a twin, for all I know, you got a twin brother, ace?
A: No. I am an only child.
Q: Well, your parents should’ve had a daughter then, ace, because I already got enough to arrest you, and as for you, Major whatever your name is, I got a warrant for that arrest here in my pocket, and I can dance him right off this post in cuffs, and there is nothing you can do about it, because you don’t fart around with civilian authorities in a capital crime involving nonmilitary personnel. What I do is I bring him down to L.A., I charge him with violation of PC 187 and throw his ass into the county jail. Oh, will they love you in there, ace. Here comes the flyboy, they’ll say, and they’ll be lining up outside your cell to fly their peckers right up your brown trail, you know where the brown trail is, ace?
A: I think so. Yes.
Q: A weekend in the county jail, and the gas chamber will start looking good, so stop jerking me off, ace, and begin talking, or I’ll go over to the PX there and buy you some lipstick and eyeliner and dress you up for your weekend in county.
MAJOR ANDERS: Rest assured, Officer, I will report this to the JAG.
Q: Major, rest assured, you can go fuck yourself and I’ll sleep tight tonight. Or I’ll arrest your ass for obstructing justice. Now where were we, flyboy, your memory improved?
It had. Captain Benedict admitted to having had sexual relations with Meta Dierdorf the evening of her death, saying he had lied only to protect her good name. He was the source, he said, of the two Sheik-brand prophylactics in the wastebasket, but not of the semen in the victim’s mouth. It was, he said, the first time they had intercourse, although she had masturbated him on two prior occasions, and she seemed experienced and precise in her tastes. Asked if she had demanded money, Captain Benedict said she was not a prostitute, but came from what he called “a good family,” the basis for this assumption being the luxury of her surroundings and her conversation about well-to-do people she seemed to know in the business and motion picture communities. He was unable to remember any names of the people she said she knew, although he did remember her saying she had gone to a party that day for some sailors or marines who were going to be extras in a new movie, and he had asked if she knew how he might get assigned to that detail, it would be a way for him to see her more often, and it might keep him out of the invasion of Japan everyone thought was coming up, he had done his share in North Africa and Italy and he was not looking forward to going back into combat. The captain claimed he left Meta Dierdorf’s at nine-thirty the night of the murder, a claim backed up by the trip tickets of the cab company he had called from her apartment and by the cabdriver who had driven him to the air corrp base at El Segundo. In his separate interrogation, the driver, Arnold Toledano, stated that as the captain was getting into his cab a young woman he later was able to identify as the victim from her photographs ran from the apartment. She was carrying a camera and the pilot’s wings from the captain’s uniform, which she had apparently been playing with during the course of the evening. She pinned on his wings, then posed him for a photograph in front of the apartment building, after which, the driver reported, they had kissed in the street, and “a nice looker she was, she didn’t seem to be wearing any brassiere.” The driver had then taken the captain to El Segundo, where according to military flight manifests he had boarded a ten-thirty flight to Mather Field. The film in Meta Dierdorf’s camera developed by the police lab contained the photograph of Captain Benedict that the victim had taken, although the picture was somewhat indistinct because of the fading light. It was the last photograph on the roll of film, and none of the other exposures, all of which were shots of the marines at the luncheon earlier that day at Chloe Quarles’s house, were of any use in the investigation. As the medical examiner had fixed the time of death as no earlier than eleven-thirty P.M., Captain Benedict’s alibi seemed airtight, and he was removed from the list of suspects.
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