Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 (46 page)

“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.”

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.

I have also interwoven elements of other key Black Dahlia theories, in an effort to make this novel an all-encompassing view of a compelling but convoluted case. Nonetheless, numerous fascinating aspects have been played down and even eliminated, in an effort to keep this narrative down to a (somewhat) manageable length.

Three book-length works were of tremendous value to me in the writing of this novel.

The aforementioned
Severed
took the first serious book-length look at the murder of Elizabeth Short, boasting landmark research, including Gilmore’s discovery of the identity of a major player in the murder of the Dahlia, the man I refer to as Arnold Wilson (just one of his aliases). For anyone interested in this case,
Severed
is essential reading. Gilmore—his autobiography,
Laid Bare
(1997), contains more Dahlia material—is so key to the case that it became necessary for me to represent his role via a fictional character, Gil Johnson.

The previously mentioned
Childhood Shadows
by Mary Pacios is a compassionate, in-depth look at Short’s short, tragic life, from the point of view of a childhood friend. Pacios did extensive research and explores all of the previous major theories and then proposes her own. Pacios is the source for the theory that Orson Welles is a Black Dahlia suspect—a notion I frankly find absurd,
though Pacios makes a good enough case for me to justify the inclusion of the great filmmaker as a character, here.

Also helpful was
Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer
(1995) by Janice Knowlton with true crime expert Michael Newton. The theory proposed in this work does not seem terribly compelling to me, based as it is on latter-day “remembering” of suppressed traumatic memories; however, the material on Elizabeth Short—separated from the story of Janice Knowlton’s homicidal father, her Black Dahlia suspect—is well researched and skillfully presented.

I am a big admirer of Jack Webb and his classic 1950s television series,
Dragnet
. Webb wrote an excellent (if typically laudatory) nonfiction work on the LAPD,
The Badge
(1958), with a section devoted to the Black Dahlia case. Reading Webb’s version of the Dahlia case as a young teen sparked my interest in Elizabeth Short.

Angel in Black
is a sequel of sorts to a 1984 Nathan Heller short story, “The Strawberry Teardrop,” which dealt with the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, and introduced the character Lloyd Watterson. That story was expanded into the Eliot Ness novel,
Butcher’s Dozen
(1988), which represented in-depth research that George Hagenauer and I did into the Torso murders on site in Cleveland; at Case Western Reserve Library, among the long-forgotten Ness papers, we discovered the taunting postcards sent to the Untouchable by the Butcher from a mental institution. Prior to our research, the closest thing to an in-depth examination of Eliot Ness’ role in the Butcher case was a single chapter of Oscar Fraley’s
Four Against the Mob
.
Butcher’s Dozen
was the first book-length work on Ness and the Cleveland Torso killings, and every nonfiction (and fictional) work since—as well as television treatments of the case—has used our research, uncredited, as a foundation.

Lloyd Watterson is a fictional character, but he has a real-life counterpart, identified as Dr. Frank Sweeney in Marilyn Bardsley’s excellent article, “The Kingsbury Run Murders,” available on the Internet at Dark Horse Multimedia’s Crime Library (Bard-sley, incidentally, does list
Butcher’s Dozen
as a source). Also,
Bardsley’s Internet article, “The Black Dahlia,” is an excellent Gilmore-slanted overview of the Short murder.

Other Internet articles of interest include “The Undying Mystery of the Black Dahlia” by Lionel Van Deerlin (San Diego Online); and “An Original Black Dahlia Article” by Russell Miller, which is a part of the excellent Black Dahlia Web site (www.bethshort.com) maintained by Pamela Hazelton. Hazelton’s Web site is a thoughtful, fact-filled tribute to the murder victim.

With few exceptions, the characters in this novel appear with their real names, despite receiving varying degrees of fictionalization.

Bill Fowley is a fictional character, a composite of Will Fowler, Sid Hughes, Bevo Means, and numerous other reporters active on the case, and is not meant to represent any one of them, though superficially the character’s background resembles that of Fowler, whose excellent memoir
“Reporters”
(1991) was a helpful reference for this novel. Jim Richardson, however, was a real city editor, and my portrait of him is based on material in Fowler’s book and Richardson’s autobiography,
For the Life of Me
(1954).

While Bobby Savarino is a real person (portrayed in a fictionalized manner), his “wife” in this novel is a wholly fictional character. I do not know whether Savarino was married in real life but, if he was, it certainly wasn’t to the fictional ex-stripper, Patsy, who I invented.

The unflattering portrait of Finis Brown in this novel is drawn from material in several sources, primarily Pacios (where Brown’s supposed status as a bookie/corrupt cop is stated by several witnesses); but in fairness it must be stated that in various other sources, including Jack Webb’s
The Badge
, Brown is depicted as an honest and effective detective. For the purposes of this narrative, the positive opinions were ignored and the negative opinions coalesced into my fictionalized portrayal of Brown, which in no way should be viewed as a portrait of the real man.

“Mark Lansom” is based upon Mark Hansen, whose name was changed to avoid confusion with Detective Harry Hansen. Fred Rubinski is a fictionalized Barney Ruditsky, the real life P.I. whose restaurant, Sherry’s, was a Mickey Cohen hangout.