Johnson was in his mid-forties, smooth, intelligent, leading-man handsome with a full head of silvering brown hair, wearing a brown sportjacket and a yellow sportshirt and looking, well, Hollywood. He had already explained that he was a former actor, occasional screenwriter and that he’d written a true crime book about the Manson family that had led to more work in that vein.
“I stumbled onto this character quite by accident,” Johnson said. “A girlfriend and I were visiting this couple in Silver Lake, where I was living at the time. It was a little party, maybe half a dozen people, some of them fairly rough characters—I know my girl told me later she’d felt uneasy.”
The host of the party had taken all his guests out to the garage, to see if he had “anything they wanted.”
“It was full of stuff—stereo equipment, TVs, golf clubs, you name it—guy was a thief, obviously, or a fence. Anyway, as the night wore on, we were listening to old records from the ’40s and ’50s, and this tall, thin, sick-lookin’ character starts reminiscing about Los Angeles in the ’40s, after the war. I mentioned I was working on a book about that period. He asked me what the subject was, and I said the Black Dahlia murder. . . . And he said he knew her.”
“Did you take this seriously? It was a party, you were all drinking. . . .”
“I took him seriously—there was something . . . intense and, frankly, creepy about his manner. He said he used to know Elizabeth Short when she hung out at a cafe on McCadden. He said he knew one of the members of a heist crew who hung out there, too, a Bobby Savarino.”
“Really.”
“Anyway, he asked me if I was willing to pay him for information, and I said yes, if it proved of value. Imagine my surprise when, over time, this developed into him saying he knew the killer, and that the killer had confessed to him.”
“Have you checked up on this guy?”
“Shit, yes. He’s got a five-page rap sheet and a dozen AKAs—burglary, theft, vagrancy, intoxication, lewd conduct. He’s gay, or anyway, bi. Served a couple short stretches.”
“What do you want from me?”
Johnson leaned forward, his passion for the subject palpable. “You worked on the Black Dahlia case—hell, you found the body.”
I shrugged. “I was there when the body was found. I did background investigation for the Examiner.”
“Here’s where I’d like to start. I’d like to go over with you what Smith told me, and see if it gibes with what you know.”
“Be glad to.” I checked my watch. “But, uh . . . let’s make it another time. I need to catch up with my boy.”
Johnson smiled; handsome guy, should have made it big as an actor. “Mr. Heller, your son’s got quite a reputation. What’s it feel like, having your kid take over the family business?”
I shrugged again. “He’s good at it.”
“Are you two . . . close? Or is there competition?”
“We get along.” I finished my beer. “I just wish he weren’t such a cynical, skirt-chasing wiseass.”
That seemed to amuse him, for some reason. Then he said, “Well, uh—let’s set up a meet.”
“Sure. How about tomorrow afternoon, same place—say, two o’clock? Maybe I should talk to this Smith. Where’s he live, anyway?”
“Dump called the Holland Hotel. But let’s have our meeting, first. Get you grounded in the basics. Then I’ll put you two together.”
I nodded. “Probably a good idea.”
The Holland Hotel was at 7th and Columbia, near downtown L.A. I had called ahead to get the room number—Arnold Smith was in 202—and, just after dark, I went in through a rear, service door, carrying a bottle of bourbon in a paper bag. The place was just a step up from a flophouse, and when I knocked on the door marked 202, brown flakes of paint fell off, like dark dandruff.
“Who the fuck is it?” a raspy, reedy voice called.
“Gil Johnson asked me to drop by,” I said, raising my voice. “Got a bottle for you!”
“It’s open!”
I went in. The room was a glorified cubicle that reeked of urine, which was about the color of the decaying, water-damaged plaster walls. There wasn’t much room for anything but a scarred old oak dresser, a well-worn armchair, a metal single bed, and a battered oak nightstand with a gooseneck lamp, a pink-and-black plastic clock radio from which emanated staticky country-western music, a couple paperbacks, a bathroom glass, a box of kitchen matches, and a half-empty pack of Chesterfield cigarettes.
A TV stand near the bed stood empty—if a TV had been there, it had long since been hocked. The corner room had two windows, both undraped, with ancient cracked manila shades, drawn. The light green carpet was indoor-outdoor and badly worn. The room was fairly dark but for a pool of light thrown by the gooseneck lamp, hitting the drunk on the unmade bed like a spotlight.
He was in his T-shirt and stained, threadbare brown trousers, a toe with an in-grown nail sticking through one of the frayed socks he wore. His bony frame was covered with loose flesh the color of a fish’s belly, mottled with sores and scars. His left leg was scarred and shriveled and shorter than the other.
His features hadn’t changed that much: same Indian-ish high cheekbones, brown eyes peering out of slits, pointed nose, balled dimpled chin. The Ichabod Crane face was grooved with years, with hard living, but not—I would wager—lines etched by a conscience.
“Jesus Christ,” Arnold Wilson said thickly. “Is that who I think it is?”
He seemed a little surprised, a lot drunk, but not at all frightened or even concerned.
“Hello, Arnold,” I said.
I pulled the armchair up next to the bed where he sat propped up by a flat pillow, using the wall as his headboard. He had an empty bottle of Muscatel limp in his lap.
His grin was yellow and green and black. “Wondered if you’d ever find me.”
“Pretty tough tracing a guy who’s willing to burn fifteen, sixteen people to a crisp, to cover his tracks.”
“Shit—fuckin’ lowlifes. Put ’em outa their misery. . . . So you talked to Gil Johnson, huh?”
I nodded. “He’s researching the Dahlia. Of course he called me.”
“And then he mentioned ‘Arnold Smith,’ and you put two and two together.”
“I’m a detective. I hear about a six-four skid row alcoholic, and I’m able to deduce it might just be my old friend, Arnold Wilson.”
He laughed, once—or was it a cough? “You look good. Christ, how old are you?”
“I’ll be seventy-seven.”
“Christ, I’m just sixty-six and I look like Methuselah!” Shaking his head, he said, “Shit, guy lived as hard as you—you don’t look a day over fuckin’ sixty!”
“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I got good genes. That’s all it takes, Arnold.”
“Funny . . . seein’ you makes me feel good.”
“It does?”
“Remembering those days. Great days. I was in my prime!”
I grinned. “Playing all of us like a cheap kazoo. Sending me in Jack Dragna’s direction, knowing it would get me killed. If it wasn’t for Mickey Cohen, I mighta been.”
He laughed, and coughed, and laughed. “And now I’m set to get out of this dump—finish out my life living a little better, for a change. God, four years of this! Worse than fuckin’ stir.”
“Don’t kid me, Arnold. You and Lloyd always liked skid row—easy pickings, plenty of ass to hustle, male and female.”
Wilson made a farting sound with his lips. “Too old for such foolishness. I wanna retire. Johnson’s gonna pay me to hear all about the murder.”
“And you’re going to tell him about Lloyd?”
His grimace was grotesque; it was as if his face was trying to turn itself inside out. “Of course not! I made up some guy named Morrison. But I’m gonna give Johnson all the good, gory details. Would you like to hear it, Heller? Just how we did it?”
“Sure. Why not? . . . . You mind if I bum a cigarette?”
He no
dded toward the nightstand. “No, help yourself. . . . I thought you didn’t smoke.”
“Not regularly. I smoked overseas.”
“Guadalcanal—I remember. . . . Gimme one.”
I held out the pack of Chesties and he plucked one out; then I lit him up with one of the kitchen matches, asking, “Were you really in the Army, Arnold?”
“Sure.” He sucked on the cigarette, then exhaled slowly. “Got my leg bayonetted overseas; that was no bullshit.”
“I quit the cigs when I got back in the States . . . only, now and then, I get the urge. You know all about giving in to urges, don’t you, Arnold?”
“I guess I do.”
I helped myself to a Chesterfield and lighted it up.
“Uh . . . that bottle . . . is that for me?”
“Let’s hear the story first.”
Wilson began to talk, an elderly man sharing precious memories. He told how the girl (he never referred to her by name) had needed a place to stay, since shacking at Hassau’s was awkward with Bobby’s wife downstairs. That had allowed him to lure her to Lloyd’s apartment on East 31st Street, where the fun began.
“But you’re going to be disappointed,” Wilson said.
“Oh?”
“If you want gruesome shit. Hell, most of what we did to her was after she died. All we did before she died was fuck her in the ass and just kind of . . . you know, party. I think she drowned on her own blood—I mean we didn’t strangle her, but she was alive when we cut the smile in her face, and that’s the blood, you know, she choked on.”
I unsealed the cap on the bourbon bottle and screwed it open. I reached for the bathroom glass on the nightstand and poured the dark liquid into it, right to the top.
Arnold was salivating. He held out his hand.
But I didn’t give it to him. Instead I asked, “You and Lloyd didn’t happen to do that other girl, did you? That socialite?”
“Bauer-what’s-it? Yeah, we did her, had her in the tub to cut her up, but we got interrupted and had to duck out the back way. Hell, we did lots of ’em you don’t know about. You bring me a bottle like that every night, and I’ll tell you a new story every night.”
I splashed the bourbon in his face; some of it splashed on the pillow and sheets.
“Hey! You fucker!” He sat up, the liquid streaming down the nooks and crannies of his pockmarked face.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost my temper . . . I’ll pour you another. . . .”
And I emptied the bourbon bottle all over him, down his T-shirt, and his trousers, dumping it everywhere. He was too drunk and weak to do anything—he just lay there, looking at me astounded.
“What are you wasting that shit for?”
I reached for the kitchen matches.
Then he understood . . . and yet he just grinned at me—with those teeth that were yellow, green-caked decayed things, plus a few gaps. “You wouldn’t, you fuckin’ candyass. You don’t have the balls.”
I lit the match.
And now, finally his eyes showed fear—some small fraction of the fear his victims had felt. Soaked with the booze, he began to tremble, as if a chill had overtaken him.
I was holding up the match, flame dancing like a little orange-and-blue demon. “What are you afraid of? You already died in a hotel fire once, Arnold.”
“What do you want, Heller? You want me to come forward? Want me to confess? Well, fuck you!”
He threw the wine bottle and I easily ducked it; it shattered on the wall behind me. I straightened—the match was still burning bright, had burned about halfway down.
“Do you believe in heaven, Arnold? Do you believe in hell?”
“No!”
“I’m not sure about that, either—but I do know you deserve hell.”
The flame was fat now, burning within a quarter inch of my fingers, leaping orange, jumping blue.
“What the fuck are you doing, Heller? We’re just a couple of old men!”
“You’re old enough,” I said.
And tossed the match.
The next morning I received a call from Gil Johnson. I was staying at my son’s house in Malibu; I was out on the deck, watching young women (they apparently weren’t called “girls” anymore) bob around in bikinis down on the beach.
“Mr. Heller,” Gilmore said, his tone grave, “I have something terrible to report.”
“Oh?”
“Seems Arnold Smith was burned to death last night, in his hotel room.”
“Really?”
“No one else was injured—fire was confined to the tiny room that Smith lived in for the last four years. Horrible, horrible. . . . Somebody went up and down the halls banging on doors, yelling fire—over the sound of Smith screaming, apparently . . . Everybody was evacuated.”
“Everybody but Smith?”
“Everybody but Smith. I guess a fire station was just a block and a half away. Only the one room was involved in the blaze, but the whole interior of Smith’s was a charred mess. . . . Must have been a regular inferno.”
“Jeez.”
“The manager of the hotel says Smith was a heavy smoker and of course I knew he was a heavy drinker. But I guess there’d been three or four minor fires already in his room . . . from him falling asleep with a cigarette in his hand. They think maybe he spilled some booze and . . . Still, there definitely will be an arson investigation.”
“Really?”
“Yes. See, I’ve been talking to the cops about this—you’ve heard of that famous detective, John St. John?”
A blonde and brunette came bounding out of the water and flopped onto towels, on their tummies. “Yeah, Jigsaw John, the Dahlia’s his case now,” I said. “You’ve told St. John about Smith, you mean?”
“Yes. I was going to try to get Smith to tell St. John about what this guy Morrison did. But St. John, based on what I’ve told him, thinks Smith may be . . . or I guess now it’s ‘may have been’ . . . the Short woman’s killer. Or, as I suspected, an accomplice. Which makes Smith a suspect in an unsolved murder.”
“Ah. Which means there has to be consideration of the death possibly being something other than accidental.”
“You don’t miss much, do you, Mr. Heller? Plus, the cops are wondering who went through the hotel warning everybody.”
“Was he seen?”
“No, but none of the residents take credit—they all just booked outa there.”
I grunted, studying the brunette, who had turned over onto her back, and whose breasts seemed unlikely. “It’s a puzzle.”
“Sure is. Anyway, I still need to go ahead with this.” He sighed, cleared his throat. “I guess I’m up to us getting together later today, like we planned.”
I sipped my glass of iced tea. “Well, that’s the thing, Gil. I’ve been giving this some thought. I’m thinking maybe I might want to do a Dahlia book myself, someday.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean—”
“I’m afraid it does. I’ve got to save what I know for my own book.”
“Oh. Well. I guess I can understand that. . . .”
“Good.” Now that little blonde down there, turning over; those looked real.
“. . . I have to say, Mr. Heller, it is a strange coincidence.”
“What is?”
“Smith dying in a hotel fire, with you in town, before I could get the two of you together.”
“I suppose. But if you like, there is one thing I can tell you about the Dahlia case—you know, just as one author to another.”
Hopeful expectation colored the writer’s voice. “Any insight you can share, Mr. Heller, any scrap of information, would be appreciated.”
Those girls down on the beach—they were about the same age Elizabeth Short had been, when she died; and they were out here in La La Land, no doubt with similar hopes and dreams. I hoped they’d fare better than the girl from Medford, Mass. But the way the world was going, I had no faith they would.
“Mr. Johnson,” I said, “thi
s goddamn case is just filled with coincidences.”
I Owe Them One
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.
The basic theory of this novel—that Elizabeth Short’s murder was not purely a sex crime, but a mob-style execution designed to serve as a warning to a potential “squealer”—is a new one, never proposed in the many articles and several book-length studies on this famous unsolved murder. Short’s connection to the armed robbers known as the McCadden Group—alluded to in John Gilmore’s Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (1994; revised edition, 1999) and Mary Pacios’ Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia (1999)—has never been linked directly with the motive for her death. No one, until now, has pointed out that the Black Dahlia’s body turned up in that vacant lot the day after Robert Savarino—arrested on the Mocambo robbery—blabbed about Jack Dragna’s people approaching him and other McCadden Group hoods about killing Mickey Cohen.
I believe this theory is the key to the true solution to the murder, including the direct involvement of the self-admitted Mocambo robbery accomplice known variously as Arnold Wilson, Jack Anderson Wilson, and Arnold Smith (among other aliases). Although my pairing of Wilson and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run may seem fanciful, one of Wilson’s aliases is in fact the name of a suspected accomplice of the Kingsbury Run Butcher. Wilson did indeed die in a suspicious hotel fire in February 1982.
This new theory was developed with my friend and research associate, George Hagenauer, who made the connection between the Mocambo robbery and Elizabeth Short’s death by the lucky happenstance of a key newspaper article appearing next to a Barney Ross feature we’d been looking for. Newspaper research continues to be the cornerstone of our approach, and both of us pored over the Los Angeles newspapers of the day, including the Examiner, Herald-Express, and Times. George’s contribution to the shaping of this theory and to the novel itself has been invaluable.
Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 35