Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 Page 34

  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 ab
out 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.