Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Read online

  “I asked her to dress a little less casually when my son was in the house,” Mrs. French said. “Cory’s at that impressionable age—a beautiful half-naked girl wandering about the house, flaunting herself in front of a teenage boy, well . . . it’s hardly ideal.”

  Unless you were a teenage boy. Hardly.

  “She turned my living room into her bedroom,” Mrs. French said, shaking her head. “Then Beth tried to sweet-talk Cory into giving her his bedroom, suggesting he sleep on the couch, which he was more than willing to do . . . but I forbade that—things would’ve never got back to normal! That girl was treating my son like a damn coolie—pardon my French—sending him out after scented stationery and movie magazines and, excuse me, sanitary napkins. My son!”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “why didn’t you just throw her out on her pretty behind?”

  She sighed more smoke. “Beth and Dorothy had become good friends, and Cory just loved her; she did these imitations of stars on the radio that made him laugh . . .”

  Plus she walked around half-naked.

  “. . . and me, well, the two of us would sit at the kitchen table and talk about our husbands who’d died in the war. She still loved her pilot, she said, so much so that it had kept her from falling in love again, no matter how many men she dated. She said if ‘fate had been kinder’ she might be living with her major in a little house somewhere, right now . . . a nice little house like ours.”

  “She never did get a job?” Fowley asked.

  “No, not at the Naval hospital or that airline office or anywhere else—she took a certain number of interviews, or at least pretended to. But that’s all. I started to get fed up, toward Christmas—I mean, here I am, tiptoeing around my own house, getting ready for work, not wanting to wake this lazy girl, who should have been up and dressed and out looking for her own job. I mean, particularly when you consider how badly she said she needed money.”

  “Considering the low overhead,” Fowley said, “what did she need money for?”

  “She didn’t say—just that she needed to save up for ‘something special.’ ”

  Like an abortion. Going rate, in Hollywood—for a first-rate rabbit-puller, anyway—was five hundred bucks.

  “All I know is,” Mrs. French was saying, “Beth never said no to somebody else paying her way, and while she was with us, she kept wiring people, boy friends and family, for money. She got a one hundred dollar money order from one of her servicemen boy friends, right before Christmas, and another twenty-five dollars from some actress friend in Hollywood.”

  Fowley asked, “And she didn’t spend any of this money, that you know of?”

  “No—she hoarded her cash. Well, she did give us small presents at Christmas—trinkets to ‘repay our kindness.’ Dorothy thought Beth might have been saving for some special wardrobe for her screen test.”

  “What screen test is that?”

  “Oh, probably no screen test. She was full of big Hollywood talk, how when the strikes were over she’d go back and move from ‘bit parts’ into bigger, better movie roles. She claimed a Hollywood celebrity had promised to help her—some famous director.”

  Fowley sat forward, perked by this concept. “She didn’t mention anybody by name?”

  “No—well, maybe. She referred to this celebrity as ‘George,’ or ‘Georgie,’ a few times.”

  “Again,” I said, “why didn’t you just ask her to leave?”

  Her eyebrows hiked. “You can’t tell someone to go away, once you’ve asked them to stay! Finally I gave her the address of a temporary employment agency, and she said she’d call them, but I told her it would be better to apply in person . . . Eventually she got dressed and went out, but she looked more like she was going out on a date, in gloves and a hat with a veil. That was one of the few times she went anywhere by herself, and not with Dorothy, or one of those men of hers. It was almost like she was afraid to leave the house, alone.”

  “Afraid?” I asked “Really afraid?”

  Mrs. French nodded. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now . . . now that she’s suffered this awful fate . . . it does seem to me Beth was . . . skittish. Whenever anyone came to the door, she’d act . . . nervous.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Frightened—she didn’t say anything very specific, for as much as we talked about her late husband and her Hollywood aspirations and all, Beth could be . . . secretive. Always polite, but private. I did ask her what she was frightened of, and she said there were a lot of crazy, dangerous people in ‘Tinsel Town.’ As an example, she told me about a woman chasing her down Hollywood Boulevard, threatening her life.”

  Fowley asked, “When was this?”

  “Right before she came down to San Diego, I gathered. Oh yes, and she made reference to having an ‘Italian boy friend,’ who she seemed . . . if not afraid of, wary of. I even wondered if maybe she hadn’t come down to San Diego to get away from him, even to hide out.”

  I asked, “Did she mention this Italian boy friend’s name?”

  “No. But there was this one unusual incident—right before she left.” She blew out some smoke, gathering her thoughts. “A tan coupe pulled up outside our house, and two men and a woman came up to the door, and knocked, and waited. Beth peeked out the front window at them, careful not to be seen. They knocked again, and—waking me, I’d been napping—I stumbled out of my bedroom and over to answer the door, but Beth stopped me, wild eyed, and shaking her head, no, no, no.”

  I asked, “Did you get a look at these people?”

  “Not a good one. One of the men was taller than the other one—they were in topcoats, what-do-you-call-them, trenchcoats, with hats snugged down. Like gangsters in a movie. The woman was a blonde—I barely glimpsed her, but she was in a fur coat and seemed to have a nice figure, but her face was kind of hard looking.”

  “How old were these people?”

  “Late twenties, early thirties. I didn’t get a good look, to be honest—I could never identify them, except maybe the woman. Anyway, when they didn’t get an answer to their knocking, they ran back to their car . . . Isn’t that strange? Ran back to their coupe and squealed off.”

  “Did Beth say who they were?”

  “No—she was terribly upset, and refused to talk about them.”

  “When was this?” Fowley asked. “Can you give us even an approximate date?”

  “Oh, I remember exactly. It was the day before she left—that would make it January seventh. You see, finally I just got fed up and asked her to leave—as you can see, our place is small, and I said to her it was just getting too crowded.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “Graciously, I must say. And, actually, to be fair—she did give me a gift before she left. Would you like to see it?”

  “Sure.”

  The slender housewife arose, leaving her mostly smoked Camel in the glass ashtray, and went to a closet near the front door. From a shelf above the hangers she plucked a hat—as she stretched for it, the denim pedal pushers were nicely tight across her firm fanny. She walked over and displayed the hat to us.

  “It’s a Leo Joseph number,” she said. “I’d admired it, and Beth gave it to me, as a way of thanking me for letting her stay. You see, she used to work as a hat model in Chicago.”

  Fowley perked again. “Chicago?”

  Oh shit.

  “Yes, she’d been there in the fall, I believe. So that’s one job, at least, that she held. Oh, and you’ll want the name of the man she left here with.”

  Fowley might have been goosed, he sat up so straight. “What? Yes!”

  “Do you have another cigarette, Mr. Fowley?” she asked, as she sat, crossing her legs. She was, in her quiet way, a real dish. Her husband had been a lucky man—except for the part where he died in the war.

  Of the blur of men Beth had dated, while she stayed with them, only one had been a “repeat admirer,” as Mrs. French put it.

  His name was
Robert “Red” Manley, and he’d been to the Frenches’ home picking Beth up, several times; he worked at Western Airlines (he said) and had met Beth when she applied for that job she didn’t get. They had dated every night for about a week, in mid-December; then, when Mrs. French had informed Beth her stay at the little house on Camino Pradero was drawing to close, he had come around to pick her up in the late afternoon.

  I asked, “And you remember the date?”

  “It was a red-letter day around here, the day I got my living room back—January eighth. He picked her up at six p.m., loaded her two suitcases and a hatbox in his light-colored coupe.”

  “What does this Red Manley look like?”

  “Kind of cute—lanky, red-haired as you might guess . . . little jug-eared, maybe. Maybe twenty-five. Sharp dresser—he was wearing a brown pin-striped suit when he picked Beth up.”

  Fowley asked, “What was she wearing when she left?”

  “What she called her ‘traveling clothes’—a black collarless suit, nicely tailored, a white frilly blouse and white gloves . . . oh, and she had a black clutch purse and black suede shoes and, of course, seamed black stockings. Beige camel’s-hair coat over her arm. . . . Is there anything else I can tell you?”

  Mrs. Elvera French had told us plenty. Fowley asked if we could take her picture, and she consented, if we would wait for her to put on some makeup.

  “Frankly,” I said, “you look like a million bucks without it.”

  “Give me two minutes,” she said, with a tiny smile, “and I’ll give you an extra million.”

  So I took her photo in the kitchen, at the table where she had so often shared coffee and sandwiches with her houseguest.

  “We’d like to talk to your daughter,” Fowley said, as we were heading out, “if we could.”

  “She’s working,” Mrs. French said, “but I’m sure she could spare a few minutes. . . .”

  The Aztec Theater was a second-run house on Fifth Street in San Diego; the Mission-style building, with its Mexi-Moderne touches, must have been the cat’s meow in 1924. The marquee boasted an Alan Ladd double bill: O.S.S. and Blue Dahlia, two pictures I’d managed to miss first time around.

  Dorothy French—trimly shapely in her red bolero jacket, white blouse, and blue slacks with a red stripe down the side—was working the concession counter. She was a pert, pretty blonde in her early twenties, very much the image of her mother, perhaps even prettier, her eyes bigger and lighter blue, her lips more full and brightly red-lipsticked. Her hair was a well-organized tumble of curls set off by a little red usherette’s hat, more suitable for an organ grinder’s monkey than a doll like her.

  It was midafternoon and halfway through one of the features, and the half hour we spent talking to Dorothy was uninterrupted by any patron. Throughout our conversation, she leaned casually against the glass top of the display case of candy bars, and chewed (and occasionally snapped) her gum; nonetheless, she answered our questions solemnly, giving the tragic death of her friend the grave respect it deserved.

  She had been expecting us: her mother had called ahead.

  “I don’t know if I’ll have much to add to what my mother told you,” she said.

  When the Aztec’s houselights had come on, at 3 A.M. on the morning of December 9, Dorothy had found the black-haired sleeping beauty in one of the theater’s threadbare seats. Confused when Dorothy awoke her, Beth Short had stuttered that the sign outside said the moviehouse was open all night.

  “We’d just had a change of management,” Dorothy said, “and the sign hadn’t been painted over, yet. I apologized, and Beth said that was all right, and started coughing. I got her a paper cup of water and we began talking, and she told me how she’d come from Hollywood and was supposed to meet a friend, but they hadn’t connected up . . . and she was really in a jam, starting with, she was out of money.”

  “Did she hit you up?” Fowley asked.

  “No.” White teeth flashed as she chewed her gum. “She did say she’d been an usherette and a cashier, in moviehouses back east, and wondered if we needed any temporary help here at the Aztec. Funny thing is, later, after she’d been staying with us a few days, I tried to get the manager to hire Beth . . . and that’s a funny one in and of itself.”

  “What is?”

  “She came by for a job interview and ended up going out on a date.”

  Fowley frowned. “With the theater manager?”

  “Yes. They went out on a couple of dates, and Beth claimed he’d gotten fresh, and refused to hire her because he was in love with her and didn’t want other men looking at her!”

  I asked, “Do you think that’s true?”

  “It’s probably malarkey, but I’m not positive. Not that it would be hard imagining Beth making a boy friend jealous.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Beth was a beautiful girl.” Dorothy said this wistfully, as if longing to be that beautiful herself, seemingly unaware of her own comeliness. “When we’d ride the bus together, guys would just sit and stare at her. She had a sort of . . . glamour quality she radiated, partly the way she dressed, partly the way she was always all made up, and how she kind of . . . preened. Guys were always trying to date her.”

  Fowley asked, “How close did you and Beth get?”

  “We were friends. She would kind of swing between being very talkative, and gay, with her Hollywood stories, and melancholy, in a sort of—I don’t know, calculated way—when she was talking about her war-hero husband dying, especially. Like she was in a movie, acting. Other times, she’d be real quiet. There was a sadness about her, like deep down she was somebody with nobody to turn to.”

  Dorothy had been impressed with Beth’s expensive, elegant wardrobe.

  “She had these sweaters with such delicate embroidery work, tiny loops and circles around sequins and beads and pearls. She’d dress up for dates and twirl for me, saying, ‘What do you think?’ What I thought was, I could never wear clothes like that . . . but she sure could.”

  Fowley said, “Your mother mentioned a screen test. . . .”

  “Yes. She was looking forward to that. Some big director.”

  “But she never mentioned a name?”

  “No. I don’t know if there was a name to mention. All of this Hollywood talk, I don’t know if there was really anything to it—she’d go on and on, like she was trying to believe it herself, like if she said it enough times, it would be true.”

  I asked, “You don’t think she really worked in the movies—that it was just a pipe dream?”

  Her brow furrowed. “You know, I’m not convinced she really cared about Hollywood. For all her movie talk, what really seemed to matter to her was finding the right man . . . That was her dream, far as I’m concerned. You know what she said to me once? ‘If I could only find some handsome Army officer, or sailor, or Marine, or airman, who would love me like I know I could love him . . . then tomorrow could be something wonderful.’ ”

  Fowley smirked. “That sounds like acting, too.”

  “No—it was how she really felt.” Chewing her gum, Dorothy gazed dreamily at nothing. “You could see it in her eyes. Those beautiful blue eyes.”

  This was coming from a girl with eyes as blue as a summer sky.

  Dorothy smiled—the first time since we’d begun talking about her late friend—and it was a bittersweet smile, at that.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” she said, snapping her gum. “Funny coincidence, I mean.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “You coming to talk to me when The Blue Dahlia is playing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She blinked, batting long lashes. “Don’t you know? Maybe you haven’t heard . . . I guess maybe Mother didn’t know, or didn’t think it was important enough to mention.”

  “What?” Fowley asked.

  “Beth had this nickname, some guys in Long Beach gave it to her, she said, ’cause of her black hair and lacy black dresses, and ’cause she was . . .
this is so silly . . . in ‘full bloom.’ And, anyway, The Blue Dahlia was playing at the moviehouse around the corner from the drugstore where these guys and Beth hung out, so it was a takeoff on that.”

  “What was?” I asked.

  She batted her eyelashes again. “Her nickname—‘The Black Dahlia.’ ”

  Fowley looked at me and I looked at him. Then Fowley jotted that down in his notepad. I had a strong suspicion the days of “The Werewolf Slayer” tagline had just ended.

  “The only other thing I can think of,” Dorothy said, “is her memory books.”

  “Memory books,” I said. “Scrapbooks, you mean? Or diaries . . . ?”

  The usherette shrugged and her blonde curls bounced. “I dunno for sure—I never saw them. Beth just said, one day, she was sorry she’d left them behind, her memory books, wishing she could show us pictures of her late husband, and maybe paste in a few new pics of Mom and me.”

  Fowley pressed. “Left them behind where, did she say?”

  “In her trunk.”

  “Did she say who she left it with—a friend, maybe?”

  “It was in storage.”

  “She say where in storage?”

  “Los Angeles—the American Express office.”

  If a trunk had been sitting awhile, unclaimed, it might be in a nonpayment warehouse by now. That should be easily tracked. I wondered if Beth Short’s “memory books” had any entries about a private detective she’d met in Chicago.

  “What can you tell us about Robert ‘Red’ Manley?” Fowley asked.

  “Not much,” she said, shaking her head, chewing her gum dejectedly. “I really wish I had something more to tell you. Oh, I do know the name of the motel where Red took Beth, after he helped her move out of our place.”

  My mouth dropped open, and two words managed to tumble out: “The motel?”

  “Yes, where he and Beth stayed, the night before he drove her to Los Angeles.” Lashes batted; gum snapped. “Would that help?”