Playland (59 page)

It had. Captain Benedict admitted to having had sexual relations with Meta Dierdorf the evening of her death, saying he had lied only to protect her good name. He was the source, he said, of the two Sheik-brand prophylactics in the wastebasket, but not of the semen in the victim’s mouth. It was, he said, the first time they had intercourse, although she had masturbated him on two prior occasions, and she seemed experienced and precise in her tastes. Asked if she had demanded money, Captain Benedict said she was not a prostitute, but came from what he called “a good family,” the basis for this assumption being the luxury of her surroundings and her conversation about well-to-do people she seemed to know in the business and motion picture communities. He was unable to remember any names of the people she said she knew, although he did remember her saying she had gone to a party that day for some sailors or marines who were going to be extras in a new movie, and he had asked if she knew how he might get assigned to that detail, it would be a way for him to see her more often, and it might keep him out of the invasion of Japan everyone thought was coming up, he had done his share in North Africa and Italy and he was not looking forward to going back into combat. The captain claimed he left Meta Dierdorf’s at nine-thirty the night of the murder, a claim backed up by the trip tickets of the cab company he had called from her apartment and by the cabdriver who had driven him to the air corrp base at El Segundo. In his separate interrogation, the driver, Arnold Toledano, stated that as the captain was getting into his cab a young woman he later was able to identify as the victim from her photographs ran from the apartment. She was carrying a camera and the pilot’s wings
from the captain’s uniform, which she had apparently been playing with during the course of the evening. She pinned on his wings, then posed him for a photograph in front of the apartment building, after which, the driver reported, they had kissed in the street, and “a nice looker she was, she didn’t seem to be wearing any brassiere.” The driver had then taken the captain to El Segundo, where according to military flight manifests he had boarded a ten-thirty flight to Mather Field. The film in Meta Dierdorf’s camera developed by the police lab contained the photograph of Captain Benedict that the victim had taken, although the picture was somewhat indistinct because of the fading light. It was the last photograph on the roll of film, and none of the other exposures, all of which were shots of the marines at the luncheon earlier that day at Chloe Quarles’s house, were of any use in the investigation. As the medical examiner had fixed the time of death as no earlier than eleven-thirty
P.M
., Captain Benedict’s alibi seemed airtight, and he was removed from the list of suspects.

There was no official complaint from the judge advocate general in the police file about the bullying nature of Lieutenant Spellacy’s interrogation.

Meta Dierdorf’s green 1939 Dodge coupe was found abandoned the day after the murder in what the
Los Angeles Times
called “a Negro section of Los Angeles,” its gas tank empty and the key still in the ignition. There were fingerprints on the key and on the door handles, but they were too smeared to be of use to the authorities. According to Cletis Rivers, the janitor at the El Coronado apartments, Meta Dierdorf was in the habit of leaving the key in the ignition when her car was in the garage and often when it was parked in the street outside the building, in spite of his repeated warnings that she was running the risk of theft. Lieutenant Spellacy was convinced, however, that the theft of the automobile was a coincidental matter unconnected with the murder itself. There was no way of knowing if the car keys were in the apartment or had been left in the car when she
parked it in the basement garage. Had it been a simple case of someone burglarizing Meta Dierdorf’s apartment, the thief would have stolen not only the car keys but also the nearly three hundred dollars in cash as well as the jewelry on her dresser, which had an insured value in excess of $7,500. Had the victim come upon the burglary unexpectedly, she might have been raped or killed by the thief, but the postmortem said she had not been raped, and in any event she had engaged in sexual intercourse with two different men after returning to her apartment, leading to the conclusion that she had been there throughout the evening.

Along with his written reports, Lieutenant Spellacy had included some handwritten notes and speculations about the course of his investigation that, against department regulations, he had stuck into the casebook, as only official documents and transcribed interrogations were supposed to be in the department file. It was as if he knew that one day someone might come along, find his jottings, and be able to give them a fresh interpretation.

QUESTIONS
, Lieutenant Spellacy had written, and then he had ticked them off:

I did a Nexis search of Lieutenant T. J. Spellacy on my computer and ultimately found a small obituary in the
Los Angeles Times
. He had died of coronary artery disease in 1984, at the age of seventy-eight, and was buried in Twenty-nine Palms, California, beside his younger brother, the Right Reverend Monsignor Desmond Spellacy, a Catholic priest and former chancellor of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, who retired to become the pastor of a small parish in the Mojave Desert. T. J. Spellacy seemed to have had the kind of attitude problem with which I could identify, an earlier generation’s Maury Ahearne, and I would have liked to have asked him who had ordered him to lay off Blue Tyler and I would equally have liked to have shown him the photograph of the nude Meta Dierdorf that Blue Tyler had kept for fifty years. Like most good detectives I have known, he seemed to sense instinctively when someone was lying to him, and I would have bet that, like the better ones, he thought he was being lied to all the time, not least by the people with whom, and especially for whom, he worked. He was certainly right in his surmise that Blue was less forthcoming than he had claimed in his carefully neutral official report of their meeting (“Subject … could add nothing pertinent to the investigation.… Subject said she knew of no friend of deceased called Vida.…”), but I suspect his hunch was equally the result of an inbred antagonism toward Lilo Kusack and others like him who would have thought he was a not-overly-bright
flatfoot, and who would have made little effort to conceal it, given their access to echelons in the department to which he was not privy. Had he known, as I did, that Meta Dierdorf was or had been the mistress of J. F. French, he would have taken enormous pleasure, I expect, in bringing the boom boom into the open and watching the squirming of the principals and their attendants, even if it brought him no closer to solving the murder itself.

Lieutenant Spellacy was nothing if not thorough. He questioned every tenant in the seventeen apartments at the El Coronado as to their whereabouts the night of the murder and what they might conceivably have seen or overheard that could add a piece to the puzzle, and all he discovered was that Dr. Otto Ress in B-2 was so addicted to morphine that the state of California had lifted his license to practice medicine, and that Mrs. Hedda Flintoff in E-1 had suffered a broken nose and two black eyes earlier that week at the hand of her estranged husband, Samuel, but was unwilling to press charges; upon further investigation, it was found that Samuel Flintoff was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital the day of the murder, having undergone an operation for testicular cancer. Mrs. Sarah Gabler in F-2 told Lieutenant Spellacy that Hendrik Nixon, the fourteen-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Nixon in F-1, exhibited unnatural sexual tendencies—Mrs. Gabler said she had to keep telling the boy not to finger her female Airedale; Mr. Nixon in turn replied that Mrs. Gabler had for three years been a patient under psychiatric care for delusionary tendencies at a private hospital in Pacific Palisades, a charge that was in fact true. Lieutenant Spellacy also learned that the option of Mr. Archie Sullivan in H-2, a director of second-feature Westerns, had not been picked up by Republic Pictures, and to make ends meet he was working for an escort service and as an adagio dance instructor at the Biltmore Hotel downtown until he could get back into directing.

A Mrs. Fredella Humble of Altadena, California, wrote to “Detective in Dierdorf Case, Los Angeles, California,” and in due course the typewritten letter found its way to Lieutenant Spellacy: “I am not a crank,” Mrs. Humble wrote. “I am a simple housewife who has a God-given gift of clairvoyance and I am duty-bound to tell you that the murderer in this case is a Negro, perhaps a chauffeur of someone living in the same building, or a handyman or someone like that. I am a woman of sixty-five years and during my long life I have had many such clairvoyant experiences.” Another letter, from a Mrs. Grace Prosper of Los Angeles: “May I call your attention to the fact that we dames lead the field in detective fiction, and I sometimes think that police departments could do with more women operatives, and I am
not
referring to female flatfoots, political appointees, or tough matron types (if you get my meaning).” Mrs. Jack Mills, of West Hartford, Connecticut, wrote: “Upon reading of the death of Meta Dierdorf in the
Hartford Courant
, I feel it is my duty to tell you what I know about her past. Meta and I were classmates (I was Georgette Duffy then) at the Saybrook School in Holmby Hills (Los Angeles) before she transferred to that school at the movie studio, which I think was a mistake and a bad thing, because it put her in contact with many people not of the Christian religion, with all their different customs, et cetera. This crime would not have happened if Meta had stayed at Saybrook with her co-religionists. I can truthfully say I charge and blame her father Matthew Dierdorf with the death of his daughter. Indirectly he is the murderer because of the lack of parental guidance and attention he gave her, giving her a big allowance instead of a father’s love. I think it was his idea that Meta mix with those people, even though she was not pretty enough to be a star, and bit her fingernails, because he thought people of the Hebrew persuasion might invest in his business and it is well known that they have a gift for making money.” Dorothy Estrella of 3218 Hollywood Boulevard wrote: “My boyfriend Harold Eustis is a sex maniac and his organ is so big it tears me some times, especially if he is
drunk, and if that girl was torn, you should question Harold Eustis, because he was drunk and didn’t come home that night. Please do not use my name as my husband is in the service of his country.” Harold Eustis had in fact been drunk the evening of July 26, 1945. He was arrested in Cahuenga Pass at 9:30
P.M
. by Officer D. D. Hilliard of the California Highway Patrol, charged with violation of PC Section 367D, driving under the influence, and placed in the lockup at the Glendale police station. The following morning, he pleaded guilty in Glendale Municipal Court to violation of PC Section 367D, was given a thirty-day sentence in the county jail, sentence suspended, and fined twenty-five dollars. There was no mention in either the arrest record or charge sheet of the dimensions of his member.