“I fired her.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“Mark’s misconduct wasn’t the only factor. She contributed to her own dismissal.”
“How so?”
He gazed at me; the avuncular mask was gone-there was a lumpy, unforgiving quality to those previously pleasant features, now. “The Short girl did not have what it took to make it in this town. Oh, she had the beauty, the sex appeal; and she had the ambition, or said she did. But she… wasn’t discriminating in the friends she made, the companions she chose.”
“Like Mark Lansom?”
“That’s not who I’m referring to.”
“Who are you referring to?”
“She had a hoodlum boy friend.”
I frowned. “An Italian, by any chance?”
“I believe so, yes. At any rate, I think you may recall, from Chicago days, my attitude toward my girls cohabiting with gangsters.”
Granny-like anybody in show business, particularly in the nightclub game-had worked for his share of underworld figures. But ever since one of his Ziegfeld girls got notoriously involved with Legs Diamond, Granlund had let his chorines know that if they got in bed with a hoodlum, they would be asked to leave the show.
“Who was this boy friend?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know his name. But I received the information from a source I trust, a source close to Mark.”
“Who would that be?”
“One of the actresses living in Mark’s house. Don’t ask for her name. Why don’t you walk over there, and ask around? You should find Mark on the premises.”
“All right-I’ll do that.” I shifted gears. “Word is you and Lansom encourage your girls to entertain celebrity guests, and special customers.”
Granlund gave me a sharp look. “I won’t deny that’s done… but it’s not prostitution!”
“I didn’t say it was… exactly. Who did Beth Short ‘entertain’?”
“If by ‘entertain’ you mean a euphemism for sexual intercourse, I don’t know that she ‘entertained’ anybody. But she was friendly with Mark Hellinger, the producer.”
Hellinger had passed away a few months ago, heart attack.
“Who else?”
“Franchot Tone, the actor-I believe he went out with her a time or two. Also, Arthur Lake.”
“Who, the guy that plays Dagwood in the movies?”
“The same.” He pressed his cigarette out in a powder-blue tray. “And, of course, she was particularly friendly with Orson.”
I blinked again; he was pitching fast, and they were all landing like beanballs. “Welles?”
“Oh yes. Apparently they’d met before-several times. Orson was generous with performing his magic act on army bases-she was working at one, I understand. I believe they knew each other from the Hollywood Canteen. She was a waitress there; it was one of her references.”
Welles certainly fit the bill for that “famous director” who’d been promising Beth Short a screen test. I asked, “Did they date?”
“I don’t know. They were friendly.”
I was trying to make this work in my mind. “Jesus, Granny, Welles is married to Rita Hayworth.”
“Married men have been known to stray, Nathan.”
“Married men married to Rita Hayworth?”
He was lighting up another cigarette. The girls were moving on to their next number, stretching, getting limber. “Orson and Rita have been on-again and off-again, over the last year or so. Of course, you know… no, that’s probably nothing.”
“What?”
The choreographer counted off, and the piano player started up “Ac-cent-tchuate the Positive,” to which the girls bounced delightfully.
“Well,” Granny was saying, “it just occurred to me-in his magic act, the one Welles would perform for servicemen, Rita was often part of it. Magician’s assistant sort of thing, usual corny routine.”
I took my eyes off the girls and looked at Granlund. “Yeah?”
“Yes-he sawed her in half.”
12
Round windows glared through exotic foliage and grillwork grimaced as I approached the off-white two-story Spanish Colonial behind the Florentine Gardens. The big house on San Carlos, a residential street between Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset, was a sprawl of towers and intersecting wings and tile-roofed verandahs, protected by palms and column evergreens and pepper trees. Richardson hadn’t been kidding when he described Mark Lansom’s digs as a castle.
I could also see how the near-mansion could serve as a sort of apartment house, and-I discovered when I made my way through an archway back to a walled-in pool-those wiseguy reporter remarks about Lansom’s harem turned out to be the real stuff, as well.
On rattan beach chairs and loungers, on spread-out towels on the brick patio that the shimmering blue of the pool interrupted, half a dozen young women in bathing suits sunned themselves. Three blondes, two brunettes, and one redhead-their straps undone, in pursuit of a more perfect tan-lay stretched out, as perfectly arranged as Elizabeth Short in that vacant lot, and almost as nude.
The Black Dahlia had been one of these girls, not so long ago, alive and lounging here… and in one piece.
My shadow fell across the brown-as-a-berry back of the nearest brunette, and I was just admiring the way tiny beads of sweat were pearling along the tiny wispy hairs of her neck, when she turned to look up at me, her breasts spilling out of the white-with-red-polka-dots bikini top, the whiteness of the pink-tipped flesh against the brown rest of her almost as startling as their swollen perfection.
And me on my honeymoon.
Her eyes were hidden behind white-framed, orange-lensed sunglasses, her hair pinned up in a bun, her lipsticked mouth making a scarlet O. “You’re not Mark,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” I said, taking off my hat.
She was just a little prettier than Susan Hayward.
Casually, with neither indignation nor shame, she returned her breasts to their polka-dot sheath, like a western gunfighter his sixguns to their holsters. She tried to tie the strap behind her, but had trouble.
“Do me,” she said.
That was the best offer I’d had all day.
I did her-that is, I got down and fastened the bikini and then she rolled over and looked up at me, kneeling over her. She was a shapely five foot five (lying down) with just enough plumpness to give her a ripe lush look.
“You have a nice face,” she said.
“Yours wouldn’t stop a clock.”
“You’re not an actor, though.”
“No?”
“You’re not in show business.”
“Not a flashy enough dresser?”
She took off her sunglasses and showed me her mahogany eyes and her well-tweezed ironically arching eyebrows and chewed the earpiece with tiny perfect teeth. “You dress all right. That’s a nice enough sportcoat.”
