Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (38 page)

The powder crunched under his feet as he walked bare-ass-but-for-his-Borsalino into the bedroom, where—after pausing to bend and pet and exchange sloppy kisses with Tuffy (none of which was pretty to see)—he took the hat off, set it on the top of the dresser, and from a drawer selected a pair of monogrammed silk shorts.

“The rumor,” Cohen said, climbing into them, “is Mark Lansom was trying to get the Short kid in the sack and havin’ no luck whatsoever. So he loses his temper and kills her gorgeous ass. Now, at the same time, Fat Ass Brown is supposedly into Lansom for five grand—and agrees to help cover up the crime, if Lansom wipes the money slate clean.”

“Is that what you think happened, Mick?”

Cohen shook his head. “Sounds like horseshit to me. First, Lansom don’t got the balls. Second, the bastard is swimmin’ in quality tail, so why’s he chasin’ some little cock tease? But, anyway, that’s what I’m hearin’, so maybe you should know.”

Soon he was in gray silk socks and a white silk shirt with a red silk tie. He curled a finger for me to follow him into a walk-in closet smaller than New Jersey where he selected a blue-gray modified zoot suit with wide, long lapels and tapered trousers, from hundreds of similar suits of various shades hanging there.

“I never wear a suit after it’s been dry-cleaned,” he said, with a little shudder, leading me out of the closet, me carrying his suit on a hanger for him. “Makes me itch. . . . After a while, I give ’em to poor people.”

“Mick, I still want to hear Dragna’s version of this.”

Cohen smiled tightly, put a hand on my shoulder. “You go see Dragna, if you like, talk to him about this, but Heller, I guarantee you one thing:
you’ll
be dead in a vacant lot. No fancy cut job, just a bullet behind the ear, which will do the fuckin’ trick, don’t you think?”

“I can handle myself with gangsters, Mick.”

He hacked one more laugh, as he stepped into his trousers, then looped in a black leather belt. “This ain’t Chicago, Heller. These people got no history with you, no respect for you or dead Frank Nitti.”

From a drawer he removed a snub-nose Colt .38 in a small holster, which he snapped onto the back of his belt, so that the gun rode his spine. Then he tapped my chest with two fingers; for some strange reason, he smelled strongly of talcum powder.

“You start sniffin’ around Jack Dragna, tryin’ to connect him with the worst, most fiendish murder since Jack the Ripper
slashed them limey sluts, and
you’re
gonna be Jim Richardson’s next juicy headline. . . . Help me on with my coat.”

I did.

“Speakin’ of juice, wait’ll you taste my fresh-squeezed. Gotta apologize, though, we yammered so much, I don’t have time for breakfast. I’ll have Johnny show you to the kitchen—just tell the chef you want my special lox-and-onion omelet.”

“I think maybe I lost my appetite, Mickey.”

The natty little ape glanced over his shoulder at me, snugging the Borsalino back on. “Don’t offend me, Heller. I don’t like that.”

It was delicious.

21

For a change Jim Richardson wasn’t pacing, that manic engine of his apparently having finally run down. He sat slumped at the head of the conference room table at the
Examiner
—he and I were alone in the narrow chamber—a cigarette drooping from slack lips. The city room editor was staring woefully at me with both eyes, even the slow one.

“This fuckin’ story is runnin’ out of steam,” he said.

I had just reported what I’d learned from my conversations with Granny and Mark Lansom at the Florentine Gardens, including Lansom’s missing address book. I also passed along what Harry the Hat had told Eliot and me about the sorry state of the LAPD’s investigation, all of which Richardson already seemed to know. Anything of value I’d learned, yesterday, I of course withheld—the McCadden Cafe group’s connection to Elizabeth Short, in particular; and certainly nothing about Welles, or Jack Dragna, who I had decided—on Mickey Cohen’s sage advice—not to bother seeing. Dragna seemed not only a dead end, but a potentially deadly one.

“There’s a lot going on,” I said, shrugging. “Should be plenty of legs left in this thing.”

Richardson shook his head mournfully. “Too many goddamn leads—too many boy friends, too many bars she frequented, too many lovesick letters she wrote to too many nobodies.”

“None of your newshounds have turned up anything interesting?”

“Best thing we got lately is the Dahlia was seen at numerous joints in the company of a big ‘bossy’ blonde.” He crushed out his cigarette in a glass tray, started up another one, then added archly, “If you can believe the cab drivers and bartenders and lushes who shared this hot information.”

The bossy blonde was probably Helen Hassau.

“When was this,” I asked, “that she was seen with a blonde?”

“Just two days before the body turned up. I hear the cops are starting to think Miss Short was a lesbian, and are hitting the dyke bars. The Hat tell you as much?”

“That he didn’t mention.” Didn’t surprise me that Hansen was holding out on me like I was holding out on him.

“Fowley’s still chasing soldiers up at Camp Cooke,” Richardson said, shaking his head. “So many leads, and none of ’em cough up a clue.”

“It’s still early, Jim.”

“Our readers are getting bogged down in this unproductive crap. I didn’t want the cops to solve this overnight, but I didn’t expect ’em to mount their horses and gallop off in all directions.”

“She was a good-looking girl who got around town—sorting out her life and loves could take a year.”

“Meanwhile, my readers get their asses bored off.”

I rose from the hard chair. “Well, I’m takin’ the rest of the day off. You can let me know Monday morning if you still want me in on this thing.”

The editor nodded. “Thinkin’ about headin’ back to Chicago with that good-lookin’ bride of yours?”

“Yeah. Maybe you could sit down with Fowley or somebody and do that puff piece, first—give my agency that boost you promised.”

“Sure thing. Of course, it would be a better story under a headline about how you found the Black Dahlia’s killer.”

I was at the door, now. “I’ll see what I can do, over the weekend.”

“You do that. And I’ll see if maybe I can figure out a way to goose this thing in the ass.”

“That’s the best place to apply a goose.”

Richardson snorted a laugh.

Just as I went out, I glanced back and he was an oddly pitiful figure, sitting there alone in the big room, staring into nothing, one eye going this way, the other that, his bald head wreathed in cigarette smoke.

Back in the Beverly Hills hotel bungalow, I found a note from Peggy. She was going out shopping with Cathy Ross, for the afternoon—“while I still can.” I knew this to be a reference to her time of the month—tomorrow, or later today, if the flow got really heavy, she’d be bed-bound. She had really hard periods, sometimes accompanied by blazing headaches.

Couldn’t blame her for wanting to get in a little relaxation before the menstrual onslaught, but I felt helpless and as alone as Richardson had looked. For a case with so many leads, I was fresh out, particularly since Cohen had scratched Dragna off my list.

I walked the hotel’s manicured, flower-flung grounds and slipped inside the lobby, and grabbed lunch at the Fountain Coffee Shop. When I was strolling past the front desk, an assistant manager called out to me, and handed me a note from my mailbox.

Lou Sapperstein had been trying to call, all morning—six little slips of paper represented as many attempts.

That put some spring in my step, and back in the bungalow I called Lou at his home number, and got him on the first ring.

“You found something,” I said.

“I found something,” Lou said.

“Well, it better be good, ’cause as we speak, Sergeant Finis Brown of the LAPD is in town—that is, the town you’re in, partner, Chicago? And Sergeant Brown and I are not good friends.”

“How unfriendly are you?”

“Well, if he finds his way to our offices, Lou, you’ll notice a bandage on his nose.”

Lou sighed. “You broke his nose. You broke the nose of one of the investigating cops.”

“Why, doesn’t that sound like me, Lou?”

“It sounds exactly like you, Nate,” he said wearily. “Now I
want to ask you something, before I share my tidbit of information, which by the way only cost the A-1 three hundred bucks—”

“Three hundred!”

“Yeah—this comes from a doctor in Hammond, Indiana, a rabbit-puller who does not want the attention of the cops or the press, which being the Black Dahlia’s doctor would certainly bring.”

I frowned. “Black Dahlia? You know the nickname, so the case has hit the Chicago papers.”

“Yeah, no pics of her yet. Just small, juicy articles; but with a moniker like that—”

“Right. So spill, Lou—what did this Hammond Dr. Kildare give you?”

“Let me ask you my question, first. Have you run across any men who say they slept with her? Who actually screwed this girl?”

“No. She went down on her share, though.”

“And didn’t you tell me you didn’t remember screwing her, yourself? That you were drunk on your ass that night?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My love life is a regular Cole Porter tune, isn’t it?”

“Nate, there’s a reason for this girl, this slutty girl, never fucking anybody.
She couldn’t.
”

I sat up. “What the hell do you mean? She was pregnant, wasn’t she?”

“No. She was not.”

I was shaking my head, as if not sure my ears were hearing right. “Then what was she going to an abortionist for?”

Another sigh. “Like a lot of those guys, this quack in Hammond is also a gynecologist. The problem the Short girl had was
not
that she had your, or anybody’s bun, in her oven. She requested a colposcopy.”

“Talk English, Lou.”

“A vaginal exam. But she couldn’t have one. You see, Elizabeth Short had a physical abnormality that made even a routine vaginal exam impossible. The doc called it . . . let me check my notes . . . ‘vaginal atresia.’ ”

“What the hell does that mean?”

There was a shrug in Lou’s voice: “She had something the doctor said happens maybe once in a million births: an undeveloped vaginal canal.”

“Undeveloped. You mean, like a . . . kid’s?”

“Like a child, a female child—Nate, your beautiful Black Dahlia did not have fully developed adult genitals.”

I just sat there, phone against my ear, staring at a vase of cut flowers on a stand across the room—lovely pink flowers, feminine, delicate. Dead.

“Nate? You still there?”

I nodded, then realized Lou couldn’t see that, and said, “Still here. It’s just . . . so many things make sense now. Of course she satisfied her boy friends orally—it’s all she had.”

“Sorry for the crudity,” Lou said, “but she probably couldn’t let them in her back door, either, without showing herself—without them seeing that she was . . . like a child, down there.”

So Harry the Hat’s third piece of information, gathered in the autopsy, was
not
that the Dahlia was pregnant—but that she was physically incapable of having normal intercourse with a man!

Something clicked. “Lou—the money she was raising . . . It wasn’t for an abortion. It was for an operation—she wanted to be a normal woman!”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lou said. “I guess that’s why you’re the president of this outfit.”

Her physical abnormality was why she had gone to Dr. Dailey—her old family friend—whose partner, Dr. Winter, was a gynecologist. The money she was saving up—that five hundred dollars she was scrambling after, blackmailing me and others for—was so she could become a complete woman.

Bobby Savarino had been talking marriage, and Elizabeth Short—like so many women, like so many men, in these sad, hopeful postwar days—wanted the cottage and the picket fence and the whole married American megillah. I’d been right, when I told Fowley that I figured Beth Short wanted to be a wife more than a movie star.

And so, after years of thinking about it, and dreaming about it,
and after discovering that a doctor from back home was practicing in Los Angeles—a doctor specializing in “woman troubles”—she finally had taken the step, to arrange for an operation. An expensive one.

“What are you going to do with this information, Nate?”

“The cops already have it,” I said, “or anyway the key cop does.” And I explained how the Hat was keeping this and two other only-the-killer-knows items under wraps. “But it means I have to rethink every piece of information I’ve gathered, every individual I’ve spoken to.”

Lou laughed humorlessly. “Whole new ball game.”

“Different game entirely—though this one also starts with a butchered girl in a vacant lot.”

We discussed Brown’s presence in Chicago, and I told Lou to play it straight down the middle, should Fat Ass show up at the office with questions about me. Soon, perhaps today, I would tell the Hat about having known Short briefly in Chicago, and explain my reticence to come forward, due to the coincidence of having been along with Fowley for the discovery of the body.