My Dark Places

Hancock Park by night was another separate world.

Darkness made colors recede. Corner streetlamps put out a nice glow. Houses became backdrops for window lights.

I stood out in the darkness and looked in. I saw draperies, blank walls, blips of color and passing shapes. I saw girls in private-school uniforms. I saw some beautiful Christmas trees.

Those late-night walks were spooky and enticing. Darkness reinforced my claim on the turf and pumped up my imagination. I started prowling backyards and looking in back windows.

The prowling was a thrill in itself. Back windows gave me intimate views.

Bathroom windows were the best. I saw half-dressed women and women and girls in robes. I liked to watch them putter in front of their mirrors.

I found a catcher’s mitt on a picnic table. I stole it. I found a real leather football behind another house. I stole it and cut it open with a pocket knife to see what was inside.

I was still preadolescent. I was a thief and a voyeur. I was headed for a hot date with a desecrated woman.

8

She came to me in a book. An innocent gift burned my world down.

My father gave me the book for my eleventh birthday. It was a nonfiction ode to the Los Angeles Police Department. The title was The Badge. The author was Jack Webb—the star and brains behind the Dragnet TV show.

The show derived from LAPD case files. The cops talked in monotones and treated suspects with brusque contempt. The suspects were cowardly and bombastically verbose. The cops bought none of their bullshit.

Dragnet was the saga of dead-end lives up against authority. Suppressive police methods insured a virtuous L.A. The show talked a stern game and oozed subtextual self-pity. It was the epic of isolated men in an isolating profession, deprived of conventional illusions and traumatized by their daily contact with scum. It was ’50s-style male angst—alienation as a public-service announcement.

The book was the TV show unchained. Jack Webb detailed police procedures and whined about the LAPD’s white male burden at great length. He compared criminals to Communists without irony. He served up real-life anecdotes to illustrate the terrors and prosaic satisfactions of police work. He ran down some snappy LAPD cases —free of TV censorship strictures.

The Club Mecca firebomb job was a scorcher.

Four creeps were ejected from a neighborhood tavern on April 4, 1957. They returned with a Molotov cocktail and torched the joint to the ground. Six patrons died. The LAPD tracked the killers down within a few hours. They were tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

Donald Keith Bashor was a pad burglar. He hit small apartments in the Westlake Park District. Two women interrupted his pad crawls. Bashor beat them dead. He was captured, tried and convicted. He went to the gas chamber in October ’57.

Stephen Nash was a gap-toothed psychopath. He was pissed off at the world. He beat a man to death and slashed a ten-year-old boy under the Santa Monica Pier. The LAPD nabbed him in ’56. He copped to nine more murders and tagged himself “the King of the Killers.” He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

The stories were deadpan horrific. The villains looked stupid and nihilistically inclined.

Stephen Nash killed on impulse. His murders lacked a quality of calculation and were not perpetrated with an eye for full-blown horror. Nash did not know how to harness his rage into symbolic gestures and inflict them on a living human being. He lacked the will or inclination to commit murders that inspired great public fascination.

The Black Dahlia killer knew what he didn’t. He understood mutilation as language. He murdered a beautiful young woman and thus insured his anonymous celebrity.

I read Jack Webb’s account of the Black Dahlia murder case. It sent me way off the deep end.

The Black Dahlia was a girl named Elizabeth Short. Her body was found in a vacant lot in January 1947. The dump site was four miles due south of my apartment.

Elizabeth Short was cut in two at the waist. The killer scrubbed her body clean and left her naked. He placed her two inches off a city sidewalk with her legs spread wide.

He tortured her for days. He beat her and sliced her with a sharp knife. He stubbed cigarettes out on her breasts and cut the corners of her mouth back to her ears.

Her suffering was horribly attenuated. She was systematically abused and terrorized. The killer probed and rearranged her internal organs postmortem. The crime was pure misogynist insanity—and thus ripe for misinterpretation.

Betty Short died at twenty-two. She was a flaky kid living out flaky kid fantasies. A reporter learned that she dressed solely in black and named her “The Black Dahlia.” The tag nullified her and vilified her and turned her into a sainted lost daughter and a slut.

The case was a huge news event. Jack Webb steeped his twelve-page summary in the ethos of the time: Femme fatales die hard and are complicitous in attracting death by vivisection. He didn’t understand the killer’s intentions or know that his gynecological tampering defined the crime. He didn’t know that the killer was horribly afraid of women. He didn’t know that he cut the Dahlia open to see what made women different from men.

I didn’t know those things then. I did know that I had a story to run to and run from.

Webb described the Dahlia’s last days. She was running to and from men and stretching her mental resources schizophrenically thin. She was looking for a safe place to hide.