The following Monday I called Richardson and told him I was heading back to Chicago, midweek, and wouldn’t be available to work on the Dahlia story any longer. I did hope to get that puff-piece interview about the A-1, “Hollywood’s detective agency to the stars,” wrapped up before I left.
“Stop by tomorrow morning,” Richardson said on the phone, a twinkle in the eye of his voice. “Something may turn up to change your mind about goin’ home.”
There was nothing ominous about the way he said it, but considering I alone knew that the Dahlia case had been privately solved, and would remain (if I had any say in it) publicly unsolved, the city editor’s words made me uneasy.
I spent much of Sunday and Monday leading the L.A. A-1 staff of operatives (including Fred) in looking for Arnold Wilson, checking out the twilight world of the various skid rows of their city, of which there was no shortage.
The primary skid row was Main Street, with its low-end burlesque houses and stripper bars, and a platoon of B-girls who made Elizabeth Short seem innocent, in joints like the Follies Village, the Waldorf Cellar, and the Gay Way. Fred checked out the taxi-dance halls, Roseland (owned by Mark Lansom, incidentally) and Dreamland; and Teddy Hertel scoured the neighborhood around East 31st, where Lloyd had been living, and of course fine-tooth-combed Lloyd’s shabby flat.
Me, I worked Fifth Street from San Pedro to Main, where winos sold their blood to buy booze and slept it off in all-night movies, and where you could see more soldiers and sailors than on your average military base or aircraft carrier. Finally, late Monday morning, the guy behind the counter at the cigar store at 5th and Gladys-a corner where you could buy anything from a policy slip to a reefer to a chippie-recognized Wilson’s distinctive description (we didn’t have a photo). By Monday afternoon I found the flophouse on Main where Arnold Wilson had been living.
He had cleared out Saturday, around noon-leaving no forwarding address.
On Tuesday morning, I told Fred what I wanted done. We would contact agencies with whom we had reciprocal arrangements and have Wilson looked for in both San Diego and San Francisco, two prior known haunts of his (according to Patsy Savarino). Concentrate on skid rows, I said, and bars catering to sexual deviants. Fred thought that was a good plan-but what did I want done if somebody finds him?
“Sit on the son-of-a-bitch,” I said, “and call me. I’ll fly in from Chicago, immediately.”
Fred had a sick expression. “We’re kinda asking for them to… you know, abduct the bastard.”
“There’s a five-grand bonus for the man that finds him.”
“Five grand?”
“Not out of the business funds, Fred-my personal money.”
“… Okay. But a slimeball like this-knowing somebody’s after him, as he’s gonna gather when he learns about Lloyd-is gonna make every effort to disappear.”
I knew Fred was right. A guy who moved in criminal circles, whose private life was down among the human dregs of big cities, could surely find some sewer to vanish into.
“You heading over to the Examiner?” Fred asked.
“Yeah-gonna see if I can finally shake that p.r. article out of ’em.”
“D’you see the morning paper?”
“No.”
“Better take a look.”
The Examiner ’s front page told quite a story. Seemed Jim Richardson had been working late, Sunday night, when he received a phone call at his desk.
“Is this the city editor?” said a voice that Richardson described as “silky.”
“This is Richardson.”
“Well, Mr. Richardson, congratulations on the excellent coverage the Examiner has given the Black Dahlia case.”
“Thanks.”
“But things seem to be getting a little… bogged down.”
“Beginning to look that way.”
“Maybe I can be of assistance… Tell you what I’ll do. Watch the mail for some of the things the Dahlia had with her when she… disappeared.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things she had in her handbag.”
And the phone had clicked dead.
So Richardson said.
In the conference room at the Examiner, Bill Fowley and several other reporters were standing around an array of material spread out like a banquet before them. At the head of the long table, Richardson-in shirtsleeves and suspenders, his cigarette angling upward-cast his fish-eye on me as I entered. Oddly, a scent of gasoline was in the air, mingling with cigarette smoke.
“Heller! Nate!” Richardson gestured grandly from the head of the table. “Come right in, come right in, and see what the Postal Service brought us.”
Fowley, grinning, gestured at the table. “It’s goddamn Christmas!”
Yes, it was, and the presents (all of them reeking with gasoline) included:
Elizabeth Short’s birth certificate.
Her social security card.
A Greyhound Bus Station claim check for two suitcases and a hatbox.
A newspaper clipping about the marriage of an Army Air Force major named Matt Gordon with the name of the bride scratched out and “Elizabeth Short” written in, in ink.
Several photos of the beautiful black-haired girl with flowers in her hair and this serviceman or that one, on her arm.
A small leather item with the name “Mark Lansom” embossed on the cover-the fabled stolen address book.
Plus the oversize envelope these goodies had arrived in, a three-by-eight white number pasted with odd-sized letters cut from newspapers and magazines to form the following address and message:
To Los Angeles Examiner
Here is Dahlia’s belongings
Letter to follow.
“Do the cops know about this?” I asked Richardson.
My less than gleeful tone seemed to make the gaggle of reporters nervous-a few even had embarrassed expressions. But not Fowley, and certainly not the boss.
“Of course they do,” Richardson said. “Donahoe himself is on the way over, and so is Harry the Hat… This opens up whole new avenues. There’s seventy-five names in that address book.”
“You been handling this stuff?”
“Carefully, with a handkerchief… but there’s no prints.”
“How do you know?”
“The, uh, fiend who sent this apparently was well versed in contemporary police science, and knew soaking that stuff in gasoline would wipe out all traces of fingerprints.”
I nodded, and turned to head toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Fowley asked.
“I’m off this case. I’m tired of pretending I’m a newshound, and I don’t have any desire to get in the thick of it with the cops, either.”
Richardson hustled around the big conference table and cornered me at the door. His right eye stared at me while his left eye dogpaddled into position. “What about that interview?”
“Talk to Fred. You can call me at my office in Chicago. Glad to give you anything you need.”
“This story is heating back up.”
Very softly, I said, “You heated it back up, Jim.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I nodded toward the table. “That stuff is evidence you withheld from those suitcases at the bus station that you beat the cops to. Or did you find that Express office trunk?”
“Fuck you! That came in the mail-”
“You sent it to yourself, Jim, just like you imagined that phone call you got Sunday night-or did you have Fowley or somebody call you from a booth?”
The left eye had caught up in time for him to glare at me. “What’s got you so high and mighty all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know. Something about this town-it’s a turd dragged through glitter, all nice and shiny, but Jim, it’s still shit. I’m ready to go back to Chicago-it’s shit, too, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.”
The Examiner got several more front-page weeks out of the story, including a few fake letters, some of which Richardson may have sent to himself; but the cops didn’t make any headway with the new evidence, even the address book. Between dead ends and LAPD cover-ups, the investigation fizzled out.
On the gray morning of January 25, 1947, a graveside service was held for a murdered young woman, on a hillside in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery. Half a dozen family members were present, but her father, Cleo, did not attend. The stone was pink-Beth’s favorite color, her mother said, not black-and bore this inscription: DAUGHTER, ELIZABETH SHORT, JULY 29, 1924- JANUARY 15, 1947.
In 1949 a Grand Jury investigation into a notorious call-girl scandal-the top madam in L.A. had been working hand-in-hand, so to speak, with LAPD vice-invoked the botched Dahlia investigation when its report spoke of “deplorable conditions indicating corrupt practices and misconduct by some members of the law enforcement agencies in the county.”
Thus ended the eight-year regime of Chief Horrall, and began a shake-up and reorganization in the department that would soon lead to the sixteen-year reign of Chief William Parker, who would bring a new attitude to the LAPD-Parker was, after all, the man who had invented that dreaded self-policing unit known as Internal Affairs.
The Dahlia case did result in one notable contribution to society: the California state legislature passed a Sex Case Registry. The murder of Elizabeth Short had led to the creation of the nation’s first required registration of convicted sex offenders.
I stopped in to see Harry the Hat before I left town, and told him about my having known Elizabeth Short, and apologized for having withheld the information.
“It was a coincidence,” I said, “and detectives don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Actually,” the Hat said, seated at his desk in his pearl-gray fedora and a loud green-and-red silk tie, “I do… If it wasn’t for coincidence, most murders wouldn’t get solved.”
“You mean, a guy runs a red light, gets pulled over, and suddenly Jack the Ripper’s been arrested.”
“That’s how it usually happens,” the LAPD’s top homicide expert said. “But don’t quote me.”
Harry the Hat continued to work the Dahlia case, off and on, until he retired to Palm Desert, California, in 1968. He became known as the detective obsessed with the Dahlia, and was frequently quoted in newspaper “nostalgia” pieces; he consulted on a TV movie about the case. He died at age eighty, a stroke mercifully ending a battle with lung cancer. His three cabinet files of Dahlia evidence shifted from detective to detective at the LAPD over the years, including the legendary “Jigsaw John”-John St. John.
Harry and Finis Brown had a falling out, during the call-girl fiasco; but Brown-with the blessing of his beloved brother, Thad, the Chief of Detectives upon whom Raymond Burr based the Ironsides character-continued working the case on his own, and was said to be at least as obsessed with it as the Hat. He chased leads out of state-Florida, New York, and the Great Lakes region-before eventually retiring to Texas.
Brown did discover my connection to Elizabeth Short, and was heartbroken (I was told by an amused Hansen) when the Hat told Fat Ass that he already knew it, and had dismissed it. Brown, bookie or not, did have skills as a detective and on his Chicago trip tracked down the same Hammond, Indiana, abortion doctor that Lou Sapperstein had questioned for me.
In the months that became years following the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s body in that vacant lot, both Hansen and Brown and every other LAPD detective working the case was stymied by a succession of copycat kills, muddying the waters, naked dead women with “BD” carved in their thighs, killers hoping to pass the blame or perhaps claim it.
Robert “Red” Manley’s marriage did not last. Nor did his sanity-about a month after he was questioned, Manley suffered a nervous breakdown and received shock treatments at a private sanitarium. In 1954 his wife Harriet committed him to a state hospital, where he was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. They were divorced shortly after, and once, in the early ’70s-between stays at various psychiatric hospitals-Manley, living in a trailer, used an ax to chase away a researcher inquiring about the Black Dahlia. Manley eventually committed suicide.
Two years after the murder of Elizabeth Short, Mark Lansom was shot, nearly fatally, by one of his dance-hall girls. Photographs of Beth Short were found in Lansom’s possession by the police, though the exact nature of those photos remains undisclosed. Actress Jean Spangler, a former Florentine Gardens dancer who resembled Beth Short, disappeared in the fall of 1949; Lansom was a
suspect in what appeared to be a murder, but was not prosecuted. He died of natural causes in 1964.
Which was more than could be said for Nils T. Granlund. Granny, who finally exited the Florentine Gardens in 1948, took his showgirl-saturated showmanship to Las Vegas, where in 1957 he was hit by a taxicab in the Riviera parking lot, dying hours later of a fractured skull and internal injuries.
Dr. Wallace Dailey died of a heart attack in November of 1947. Dr. Maria Winter and Mrs. Wallace Dailey fought bitterly over the dispersal of the doctor’s estate, half of which (including his medical practice and equipment) had been left by Dailey to his female partner. The spurned wife claimed that his “feminine office partner” had been blackmailing the good doc, having learned certain damaging knowledge concerning Dr. Dailey’s “professional secrets,” keeping him a virtual prisoner during the last months of his life. The struggle was played out in the L.A. papers, and many assumed that the “professional secrets” referred to Dailey’s abortion mill; but I wondered if that cunning olive-skinned amazon had convinced the senile doctor he had indeed killed the Black Dahlia. In any event, the court rejected both their claims, appointing a trust to handle the estate.
Later in 1947, my friend Eliot Ness lost his bid for mayor in Cleveland. He was also voted down as chairman of the Diebold board, and efforts to gain another position in law enforcement never panned out. Quietly suffering with a worsening drinking problem, he remained in the private sector, where his business endeavors were less than stellar. His third marriage, however, was a happy one. In 1957, in the small town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania-where he was trying to make a go of a check-watermarking business-he died in his kitchen, having just returned from the liquor store, shortly after receiving in the mail the galley proofs of The Untouchables, the autobiography that would make him a posthumous household name, as the “man who got” Al Capone.
Capone, incidentally, died in January 1947, finally succumbing to syphilis-related ailments, sharing the front page with Black Dahlia coverage, about a week after I put Eliot Ness and Lloyd Watterson on the Union Pacific bound for a Dayton, Ohio, loony bin.
Which was where Lloyd Watterson died, far too peacefully for my tastes, in 1965. After Eliot’s death, I began receiving Lloyd’s taunting postcards-and it became my job to make sure the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run was still confined in that veterans hospital in Dayton.
Most of the Crazy House sequence was cut from Orson Welles’s Lady from Shanghai, a film Harry Cohn dumped into the second-tier slot of a double-feature release, further damaging the director’s already crippled Hollywood career. In May of ’47 Welles mounted his low-budget production of Macbeth, and in November he and Rita Hayworth were divorced. The next three years of his life were largely spent in Europe, filming Othello in fits and starts and bits and pieces, funded by acting jobs in other directors’ movies, Welles frequently playing a villain. This was to be the pattern for a larger-than-life life that ended quietly in October of 1985. The shadow of Elizabeth Short’s death casts itself over many of his later films, in particular Touch of Evil, in which director/cowriter Welles plays a villainous cop who strangles a victim in a seedy hotel room.
Richardson retired and eventually died; Fowley retired, wrote novels, and is still alive, at this writing. Hearst promoted Aggie Underwood to managing editor, to shut her up about the Bauerdorf killing. In 1949, Jack Dragna finally got somebody to hit Mickey Cohen, or try anyway, at Sherry’s restaurant, with Fred Rubinski and me nearby-but that’s another story. Barney and Cathy remarried, of course, very happily, Barney never needing the needle again. Barney lost a bout, to cancer, in 1967.
Most of the rest of them, cops and crooks, I lost track of over the years. A bail-bondsman named Milton Schaeffer sent his people after Savarino and Hassau and brought them back, from San Francisco, and they got sentenced to thirty years, not twenty. What happened to them after that, I have no idea. I always kind of hoped Savarino made it out on Good Behavior in, say, ten and picked back up with Patsy and their kid and went straight. But that is, of course, ridiculous Polly-fucking-anna thinking.
Peggy and me? We had our beautiful son-Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr.-on September 27, 1947. We had by that time moved to a brick bungalow in the Chicago suburb Lincolnwood, and she had already asked me for a divorce. We’d struck a truce, in those last few days at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and there had been no recriminations or accusations from either of us-we had even screwed each other silly, proclaiming our undying love and looking forward to the first of many babies. We didn’t quite make two years.
Our relationship, postmarriage, remained stormy. We almost got back together a couple times, and for patches we were friendly, and there were stretches where we weren’t. For a long time my son-who lived with his mom-believed all the terrible things she told him about me. When he got older, we started to get along better, but maybe if he reads this book, he’ll know his mother wasn’t perfect… and that without his dad, he might’ve ended up a few teaspoons of slippery, slimy cells floating in water in a metal basin.
The search for Arnold Wilson ended later in ’47, in San Francisco. One of criminal lawyer Jake Ehrlich’s investigators spotted our man in a second-floor saloon called Finocchio’s that catered to the gay set. The investigator tracked him to a Grant Avenue flophouse in Chinatown, called me, and I flew out that night.
The next morning, in Chinatown, I found the hotel had burned down and sixteen people had died, mostly transients. A tall charred corpse was found in Wilson’s room. God or kismet or somebody had seen to it that the Butcher’s apprentice had met a fitting hellish fate.
But as I stood looking at the smoldering building, firefighters doing their job, I felt cheated somehow; then after an hour, I turned my back on it, and flew home, doing my best to leave my smoldering hatred for that son-of-a-bitch behind.
In February 1982 I made a trip to California. I had retired long ago, and my second wife and I lived in Florida, in Boca Raton. A healthy, spry old S.O.B., I was still chairman of the board of the A-1 Detective Agency, but my son was the president of the firm now, and had been for quite a while. He was working out of the Los Angeles office and I had traveled alone, to visit him, since he and my wife didn’t get along.
Also, I’d been contacted by a writer named Gil Johnson about the Black Dahlia case. He was working on a nonfiction book about the murder, and my name had turned up in his research. He wanted to talk. At first I’d been reluctant, but then he caught my interest.
“I’ve solved the case,” he said. His voice over the phone was a mellow, actorly baritone.
I was sitting on the patio of our house on the causeway, watching boats go by, sipping lemonade. “Really?”
“I’ve come across this old guy who knew the killer.”
“Is that right?”
“He says the killer was named Al Morrison.”
Now I was less interested. “Is that so?”
“Yes… but to tell you the truth, I have a feeling this old geezer… he’s an alcoholic, skid-row type… may have been a sort of accomplice in the crime.”
And now I was very interested. “What’s his name, this geezer?”
“Smith. Arnold Smith.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Emaciated as hell. Bad acne scars. Maybe six four… walks with a limp. Says he got it in the war.”
“Well, I might be able to talk to you about the case.”
“Oh! That’s great! I’d been warned you didn’t give interviews… I heard you were writing your own book…”
“I’m working on my memoirs, but I’m years away from the Dahlia. I don’t mind giving another writer a helping hand. I’ve been wanting to get out to the Coast to see my son, anyway. How can I get in touch with you?”
Three days later we were sitting with draft beers in front of us in a booth in Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, that no-nonsense dark-wood-paneled meeting place where actors, agents, and surly waiters converge.
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 nodded 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, “this goddamn case is just filled with coincidences.”