The Ticket Out

by Helen Knode

He was on a different track. “You’re saying ‘transcripts,’ as opposed to the memos you found in Mr. Phillips’s garage.”

  “Transcripts of interviews about the blacklist at MGM. So transcripts and memos—both related to the old MGM, and possibly containing the same information about Jules Silverman. If the transcripts exist, that is, and Lampley isn't just making it up for some reason. Does Barry have an alibi for the night of Greta’s death? Does Scott Dolgin?”

  I slipped those questions in, not really hoping. But Lockwood said, “I wondered when you’d get to that. Yes, they do.”

  “Which are?”

  “After the party they took separate cars to Melling’s and discussed business until late. Mr. Dolgin had too much to drink and stayed overnight instead of driving home.”

  I went, “Woooo.”

  Lockwood said, “Our thought exactly. Now, while you were tailing Melling, did he stop at the Sony studio lot?”

  “No. I would have said so.”

  “Did he visit Progressive Properties and Artists?”

  “No. I told you everything.”

  There was silence at Lockwood’s end of the line. McManus sipped his ginger ale and watched me.

  Lockwood said, “Go ahead, sorry. I needed to think.”

  I switched phone ears, and plugged the other one. “You already knew it was Jules Silverman in that spanking picture, didn’t you? How long have you known?”

  “Since last week.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I won’t discuss that at this point. I want you to read the Bauerdorf file—I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  “How did you find out about her?”

  “Miss Stenholm went to Sheriff’s Unsolved to ask about the murder. I found out from the detectives who worked the Abadi case. They were keeping tabs on her.”

  “Is there any chance I could see the Abadi file?”

  “That’s not my department. But if you want something out of Sergeant McManus and Deputy Gadtke, I suggest you soften them up—offer to buy them a nice meal. Put Sergeant McManus back on, if you would.”

  I handed the phone to McManus. He said, “Yes, Doug ... No, there’s no problem.... No, we didn’t refile the material.... I’ll warn them.... Fine, yes, you’re welcome.... I’ll tell her.”

  McManus hit a button and folded up his cell phone. “Detective Lockwood says he’ll see you later.”

  “Did he say where?”

  McManus just put the cell phone away. I didn’t push. I said, “Are you and Deputy Gadtke free for dinner?”

  Gadtke smiled and sat forward. McManus looked at me. I said, “You pick the restaurant and the newspaper buys.”

  McManus smiled. “How about the Pacific Dining Car?”

  I’D TRIED very hard to talk them out of the Dining Car. I suggested a dozen other places, including Stevens—but the detectives ate at Stevens all the time. I wouldn’t agree to the Dining Car until I’d called to make sure Father wasn’t there and wasn’t expected. The maitre d’ told me that he and Sis had been in for lunch. So much for my advice to stay away from him, I thought. My sister was hopeless.

  I arrived at the restaurant ahead of the detectives. They’d gone back to their office for the Bauerdorf file. I’d asked if they would bring the Abadi file, too. They said no, categorically. They said they’d never show an active case file to a journalist.

  While I waited for them, I ordered mineral water and worried about time. Arnold Tolback had said to go to Whitley Heights after 8:30 P.M. I didn’t know how much later than 8:30 I could be.

  I heard Gadtke’s laugh before I saw him. He appeared at the table and pointed his finger:

  “You wrote that on my burro, didn’t you? ‘I hope he’s better than Sheriff Baca!’”

  I shook my head. Gadtke winked and flopped down across from me. McManus took the seat beside him. Gadtke laid his plastic vomit on the tablecloth, snagged the wine list, buttonholed a waiter, and ordered a double whiskey and a two-hundred-dollar bottle of red wine. I winced, even though it would go on expenses.

  McManus was embarrassed by his partner; he looked it as he handed me the Bauerdorf file. The folder was tan and scuffed up, and the contents were an inch thick. I moved my silverware to clear space for it.

  I said, “If the LAPD sucks donkey dick, why are you cooperating with Lockwood?”

  Gadtke flagged another waiter. “Food first.”

  He ordered two shrimp cocktails, the porterhouse-and-lobster combination, and a chocolate sundae for dessert. He wanted chocolate soufflé but had to settle for ice cream. McManus ordered filet mignon and rice. I ordered a salad. The waiter was brilliant about the vomit: he ignored it.

  The whiskey and wine arrived together. Gadtke shooed the wine steward off before he could serve a taste. Smacking his lips, Gadtke made a grab for the bottle. McManus beat him to it and held the bottle out to me. I put my hand over my glass. He shrugged, poured himself half a glass, then poured for Gadtke.

  Gadtke tipped the bottle to make sure he got filled to the top. He wrapped one hand around the wineglass and drank his whiskey with the other. He smacked his lips again. He said, “We’re cooperating with Detective Lockwood because he’s a righteous white man. LAPD are shitheads and gloryhounds—”

  McManus set the wine down. “Let’s just say they don’t like to share information or credit. Whereas Detective Lockwood is an excellent investigator who’d rather catch bad guys than promote himself.”

  Gadtke said, “And he was jobbed on that siege.”

  I said, “What do you know about the siege?”

  Gadtke waved his whiskey. “What don’t we know—we had it in umpteen training bulletins. We know all about sight lines, ingress and egress, disposition of counters and booths. Who was where, when, for how long.”

  I said, “I’d like to see those bulletins.”

  McManus said, “Why?”

  Gadtke laughed. “Yeah, why? So you can job him some more? Your newspaper would never defend a cop.”

  He slurped his drink for punctuation. I looked at McManus. His face told me that he thought the same.

  I opened the Bauerdorf folder. McManus said, “Start at the end. The paperwork is entered chronologically.”

  I flipped to the bottom of the file. It smelled like mildew and six decades of hand soap. It contained official correspondence, interview transcripts, mug shots, teletypes, and detective reports on yellow, pink, and blue paper. There were fingerprint cards, stray notes, anonymous letters scrawled by obvious psychos, and a letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover.

  I started reading. The paperwork was chronological but the facts were all over the place. As I strung them together, I thought of Greta and her script. The file was packed with character and drama.

  Georgette Bauerdorf was born in New York and spent her early years in a Long Island convent. Her father was an oilman and Wall Street figure named George Bauerdorf; she had a stepmother and a widowed sister named Connie. When or why the family moved to L.A. wasn’t said, but Georgette graduated from Bel Air’s ritzy Westlake School for Girls in 1942. Except for a housekeeper and a chauffeur, she’d lived alone for most of her senior year. Her school friends thought Georgette was lonely and unhappy—a “poor little rich girl” who lacked parental guidance and a proper home life. But she wasn’t wild or boy crazy; she was quiet and hard to know. She also smoked too much and bit her nails.

  In October 1944 Georgette was twenty and living by herself in the family’s apartment at Fountain and La Cienega. Her father, stepmother, and sister had gone east on business in August; they were staying at a hotel in New York City. Georgette was driving her sister’s ’36 Oldsmobile and devoting her time to war work. She was a registered member of the Hollywood Canteen, the Volunteer Army Canteen Service of Beverly Hills, and other soldiers’ aid societies. She also corresponded with twenty-four servicemen on active duty. Her only other interest was flying. She took expensive flying lessons in the desert outside L.A.

 
Wednesday, October 11:

  Georgette had lunch with her father’s secretary. After lunch she got a scalp treatment and a manicure. At 2 P.M. she went to a tea party at Pickfair—Mary Pickford’s home in Beverly Hills. She left the party at 5 P.M. with a female friend and two Marine privates. The Marines were up from San Diego to work as movie extras at Twentieth Century Fox. Georgette dropped them off somewhere east of Beverly Hills.

  6:30 P.M.:

  Georgette met her friend Nance Carter at the Hollywood Canteen. They talked in Georgette’s car while Georgette knitted. Georgette wanted Nance to read some letters from Private Joseph Allen—a soldier stationed in El Paso, Texas. Georgette was going to fly to El Paso on Friday. She was engaged to marry Private Allen, but she didn’t want her family and other friends to know. Georgette seemed tense and asked Nance to spend the night at her apartment. Nance declined: she didn’t understand what Georgette could be nervous about.

  Georgette and Nance spent the evening together at the Canteen. At one point an unidentified soldier danced a jitterbug with Georgette. He was about twenty-nine, five eight, 175 pounds, with a scar on his left ear. He had black hair combed straight back, dark eyes, and an olive complexion. Nance got the impression that Georgette didn’t want to dance with him.

  11:20 P.M.:

  Georgette leaves the Canteen. Eight other hostesses check out at the same time. Georgette picks up a hitchhiker on her way home. He’s an Army sergeant on fifteen-day furlough. She tells him she’s hurrying home to wait for a phone call from Texas. She picks the sergeant up at Sunset and Vine, and drops him a block east of Laurel Canyon.

  Midnight:

  The caretaker couple in Georgette’s building hear someone walking around Georgette’s kitchen. They recognize the sound of Georgette’s slippers. They hear water in the sink and Georgette drop a tray—

  I looked up from reading. The main course had arrived; the waiter was handing out plates.

  Gadtke dived into his lobster without waiting for McManus or me. He’d already demolished his shrimp cocktails and most of the wine.

  I said, “There aren’t any pictures of her.”

  Gadtke said, “Sickos get into the files. They like famous cases with dead women, especially the mangled ones.”

  McManus pulled a paper out of his pocket. “We copied this off microfilm for you.”

  I took the paper. It was a professional head shot of Georgette Bauerdorf. She looked like a polite young lady. She might have been intelligent or not, pretty or not: her face was still unformed. She had dark hair arranged in the shoulder-length ’40s style. Barrettes held the hair in place.

  Gadtke said, “A Black Dahlia with class.” He dribbled lobster meat.

  I said, “How much more is there on microfilm? The paperwork stops in early ’45.”

  McManus nudged the folder with his fork. “We only showed Miss Stenholm what you have here.”

  I ignored my dinner and went back to reading.

  Her body was found on the morning of October 12. The caretaker saw that Georgette’s front door was open and walked in to clean. She went up to the second-floor bathroom and found Georgette dead. Sheriff’s deputies arrived and radioed in an apparent suicide. The detectives arrived at 11:30 A.M. They saw Georgette’s body resting facedown in the bathtub—

  I shut my eyes a second. A bathtub. Jesus—

  The tub was empty because the caretaker drained it before the cops came. Georgette’s head was resting at the spigot end. Her left foot was resting on the ledge at the opposite end; her right leg was resting on her left. There was a small amount of blood on the bottom of the tub under Georgette’s face. The lower part of her buttocks were bloodstained, and she had bruises on her: she’d fought for her life. She was wearing a pink pajama top and nothing else.

  A coroner’s man removed the body from the tub. He found a piece of cloth sticking out of her mouth. Her teeth were clamped around it. The cloth had thin red borders; it appeared to be torn or cut from a towel end. Deputies searched the apartment but couldn’t find a matching towel or fragments of one.

  Georgette’s bedroom adjoined the bath. Her pink pajama pants were laying on the floor, ripped. The cops found a blood spot on the carpet near the bathroom door. The carpet around it was wet; someone had tried to remove the spot. There was no blood on the bathroom floor or the bed, and no signs of any struggle in the bedroom. They found Georgette’s diary and address book. Her jewelry box hadn’t been touched, but three items were missing from her purse: an amethyst ring, seventy-five dollars in cash, and her car keys. The Oldsmobile was gone from the basement garage.

  How they knew about the ring and the cash, the file didn’t say.

  Detectives questioned Georgette’s neighbors. Some had heard a scream; some hadn’t. Someone heard, “Stop, you’re killing me!” at 2:30 A.M., thought it was a marital spat, and went back to sleep. The detectives read Georgette’s diary and address book, and talked to her girlfriends. They talked to all the hostesses who worked at the Hollywood Canteen on October 11; there were 120 of them, although no movie stars were named. They called in the U.S. Provost Marshall, and Naval and Army Intelligence, and tried to locate every serviceman who knew or corresponded with Georgette. There were dozens and dozens—but her closest friends were fliers.

  They talked to the three servicemen she gave rides to on October 11. They checked out every hospital, canteen, and recreation center where she volunteered. They chased a Navy cook who was barred from the Hollywood Canteen for “abnormal sexual tendencies” and “heckling.”

  The coroner’s report came in. Georgette died between one and two in the morning. Cause of death: strangulation. The piece of cloth had been pushed down her esophagus until she choked. She’d also been raped.

  The Oldsmobile turned up in a black neighborhood ten miles east of the crime scene. The keys were in the ignition, the tank was empty, the rear license plate had been removed. The cops modified their operating theory. They had wanted a white serviceman. Now they were looking at black men, too.

  They canvassed the black neighborhood and came up with zero. They broadened the investigation. They checked out burglars, rapists, dishonorably discharged soldiers, sex offenders, and general black arrestees. They wrote to the FBI; the FBI ran crosschecks on the latent prints found in Georgette’s apartment. They got fingerprint cards, mug shots, and rap sheets from police departments all over the country. Deserters, drifters, and car thieves were grilled and eliminated. They checked out two female bathtub deaths in New Orleans and New York. A man in San Francisco confessed to the killing. They took a train up there to find out he didn’t do it. He’d blown his inheritance money in Reno and just wanted the gas chamber.

  Every man in Sheriff’s Homicide worked the case. They checked out all the silly tips; everyone knew someone who hadn’t come home the night of October 11. Women squealed on their exhusbands out of spite. One letter accused a Beverly Hills gardener because “he had big hands and liked to look at white girls.”

  They found the soldier who made Georgette dance a jitterbug—and eliminated him. But they never identified one guy, a wounded soldier who claimed to be in love with Georgette. Georgette had told her friends that she was afraid of him. She’d called him psychopathic.

  They finally identified the cloth that asphyxiated her. It was a Tetra Brand elastic bandage, ten inches wide, European made, and obsolete. A Chicago company imported the bandage. They’d only sold five ten-inch rolls in ’42 and ’43—but they were still used in foreign hospitals. Maybe a soldier had brought it home: the possibilities were too numerous to follow up.

  Georgette’s father, stepmother, and sister came back to L.A. after Christmas. Detectives walked them through the apartment and fingerprinted them for elimination purposes.

  Private Joseph Allen wrote to the cops in February 1945. His letter was the last item in the file. He said he was Georgette’s former fiance and wanted to know what progress they had made on her case. He’d misspelled Bauerdorf.
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  I closed the folder and squared it with the edge of the tablecloth. Gadtke had pushed back from the table; he looked flushed and sweaty. McManus was finishing a piece of pie.

  I tapped the file. “Where’s Jules Silverman?”

  Gadtke giggled. I said, “I heard Silverman was a major suspect, but his name’s not in here.”

  McManus put his fork down and looked away from me.

  I said, “Lockwood.”

  Gadtke swirled the ice in his whiskey. I said, “Lockwood had you pull the part about Silverman. You discussed it on the telephone.”

  McManus looked at Gadtke. Gadtke shrugged: “Your call, partner.”

  McManus cleared his throat. “This has to be off the record.”

  I said, “Forever?”

  McManus reached for the file. “Or until Detective Lockwood says otherwise.”

  I nodded.

  McManus flipped pages. He found a summary report dated November 1, 1944, and pointed to a paragraph at the end.

  I’d skimmed right over it. It said that the unit had one major suspect but the information pertaining to him was highly confidential and couldn’t be disclosed at that time. The report was written exclusively for the eyes of Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz.

  I said, “Is that Silverman? They talked to so many people—there’s a million names mentioned.”

  Gadtke nodded his head. “Needle in a haystack. Your worst fucking nightmare.”

  McManus said, “Jules Silverman was a pilot for the Navy and frequented the Hollywood Canteen during a leave in October of ’44. Several hostesses placed him there on the night of the eleventh. He was also seen in the parking lot after 11:20 P.M., talking to the victim. The chief hostess had to caution him and Miss Bauerdorf because the girls weren’t allowed to make dates with servicemen or see them off-premises.”

  I said, “A deranged sexual atmosphere.”

  McManus nodded. Gadtke giggled and nodded; he was pretty plastered. I said, “What’s confidential about a nobody Navy pilot?”

  Gadtke kicked his seat further back. “Silverman had powerful friends even then.”