The sweetness of it lingered well after she was again in my arms, turning bitter only when she asked me once more if we couldn’t “wait” to have our first child. Things were going to be so perfect here, she assured me dreamily, with her landing her first film role, and me landing such an incredible, important case.
I held her face in my hands and I looked into those lovely violet eyes and I said, “We’re going back to Chicago, as soon as you’ve shot your little movie and I’ve solved my big case. We’re going home and we’re having our kid, and then we’ll decide where we’re going to live and work… I promise you I will abide by your wishes on that score, Peg. If you want to come back here and be in the movies, well, I’ll work here, too, and we’ll hire a nanny or whatever the hell and we will have it all-yes, we will. But if you ever suggest aborting our child again, I will fucking kill you.”
With a yelp of fright, she bolted from my arms and ran naked to the bedroom, where she shut the door, though that didn’t keep me from hearing her crying in there, as I tried to sleep on the reassembled couch.
Dumb little bitch.
Stupid bastard.
8
The prints the Examiner sent by wire to the FBI were too blurred to be identifiable; but one of Richardson’s staff photographers suggested sending 8” by 10” negative blowups. Within minutes the prints were identified as those of Elizabeth Short, who had-four years before-applied for, and landed, a civilian job at an Army base near Santa Barbara, working at the post exchange at Camp Cooke.
A description derived from the job application was as follows: weight, 115 pounds; height, five feet five; race, Caucasian; sex, female; hair, brunette; eyes, blue-green; complexion, fair; date of birth, July 29, 1924; place of birth, Hyde Park, Massachusetts.
In addition, the FBI had cross-referenced an arrest in 1943, Santa Barbara, California; a minor, Elizabeth Short had been picked up for drinking in a bar where she’d been with a girl friend and two soldiers. To her description were added these telling details: an I-shaped scar on her back from a childhood operation, a quarter- size brown birthmark on her right shoulder, and a small tattoo of a rose on her outer left thigh. The girl had been sent by bus back home to Medford, Massachusetts, to be given over into the custody of her mother, Mrs. Phoebe May Short.
“Look at this little beauty,” Richardson said, gesturing to a police mug photo, side and front, of Elizabeth Short. With her dark hair tousled, translucent eyes sullenly blank, wearing none of the China doll makeup at all, under the unyielding gaze of a police photographer, she was as lovely as a movie queen’s soft-focus, airbrushed glamour portrait.
Richardson was standing at the head of the scarred wooden conference table; he and I and Fowley were in the glassed-off editorial chamber where we’d confabbed yesterday with a whole gaggle of reporters. This morning it was just the three of us.
“She does look better than in the shots Heller took yesterday,” Fowley said. Wearing a light brown checkered sportcoat and a darker brown tie with yellow horses prancing across it, he was seated to Richardson’s right and I was across from the reporter, on the editor’s left.
“A living doll,” Richardson said, managing to fix both his eyes on the photo, “or at least she used to be-and that gives us a genuine star for our ‘A’ picture.”
The editor-in shirtsleeves and suspenders-was giddy as a schoolgirl. Yesterday, when the competition’s afternoon editions appeared with the “Werewolf Slayer” story, it was two hours after the Examiner ’s extra hit the street, in a sold-out press run second only to VJ Day.
“You want us to hit Camp Cooke, boss?” Fowley asked.
“Sid Hughes is already on his way up there,” Richardson said, lighting up a cigarette, waving out a match.
“We could check out that Santa Barbara arrest,” I suggested.
“I got two men on that.” Glee was coming off Richardson like heat off asphalt. “Right now we’re so far out in front of the pack-they’re never gonna catch up. I’ve had crews out digging since five o’clock this morning, and the other papers didn’t even know Elizabeth Short’s name till they read it in our morning edition.”
Fowley shifted in his hard chair; his tone vaguely irritated, he said, “So what’s left for the first string, if you’ve emptied the bench covering every lead the FBI gave us?”
“The best lead of all… Get your notepad out, Mr. Fowley.” Richardson turned his eerie stare on me, his slow eye playing catch-up. “Nate, you’re the best interrogator in house at the moment.”
I frowned. “Gee whiz, thanks-but what are you getting at?”
His left eye was still swimming into place as he fixed his gaze on me. “Plus, you were a cop for a lot of years.”
“What’s on your mind, Jim?”
“You’ve had to break bad news before, I mean.”
I’d grabbed a bacon and eggs breakfast at a diner on my way over here; the greasy remains were turning in my stomach. “What exactly do you have in mind?”
“Also, you know how to work a phone.”
That was self-evident: private detectives spent most of their working day on the phone. “What the hell do you-”
“Just a second…” Richardson went to the door, opened it, and yelled for a copy boy to bring him in two phones. Then he looked at me again, one eye at a time, and unleashed a smile almost as ghastly as his gaze. “… I want you to locate Mrs. Phoebe May Short, in Medford, Massachusetts.”
“That’s the news you want me to break? Her daughter’s death?”
He strode back to the head of the table, nodding. “Unlikely she’s heard yet, unless the cops got right on it… and I don’t think Hansen even gets in till nine or nine-thirty.”
I sighed. “All right. It’s gotta be done.”
“Yeah… but gracefully… you know, let her down easy. First, tell her that Elizabeth won a beauty contest.”
“What?”
He shrugged elaborately, held his palms up. “If you just flat-out tell the poor woman that her little girl’s dead, she’s gonna go to pieces on you, Heller-you know that. We need to get all the background, before you inform her of, you know, the tragic event.”
“You are one sorry son of a bitch.”
“True, but if you don’t make this call for me, Heller, you won’t be working for this sorry son of a bitch any longer. You and Fred Rubinski will be on the outside of this case, as well as this newspaper, and you can pony up some real dough for a real press agent, which you will sorely need, considering the bad ink we will drown you in.”
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Like a dead baby. Anyway, you got the skills for this, Nate. You can do it. I know you can.”
“That show of confidence just sends me soaring. Why don’t you have Fowley here do your dirty work? He oughta be used to it by now.”
Fowley leaned back in the chair, raised his eyebrows, and his hands, like he’d just touched both burners of a hot stove.
Richardson, his left eye floating, said kindly, “He’s going to be taking notes while you work your magic.”
“Fuck you.”
“By ‘fuck you,’ I take that to mean, yes, you’ll do it.”
“Yes, fuck you. Yes, I’ll do it.”
Soon two phones on long wires had been plugged into the wall, one each in front of Fowley and me. The switchboard connected us, so that Fowley could listen in.
It took a while to track the woman down. No Medford telephone was listed for the Shorts, but by sweet- talking an operator, I was able to find my way to the next-door neighbor, who told me the Shorts rented out a flat
