“Because until you told me,” I said, nodding goodbye, “it was just a hunch.”
13
Aggie Underwood and I both ordered the corned beef hash, one of the Brown Derby’s specialties. We shared a booth in the bustling restaurant, complete with framed movie-star caricatures and signature derby lampshade throwing soft yellow light. It took connections to land a booth here at the height of lunch hour; but my diminutive red-haired companion-schoolteacherly as ever in a white-dotted blue dress-was feared and respected in Hollywood.
We were in the Brown Derby #2, the non-hat-shaped one on Vine Street, and Aggie had already pointed out the irony that two of the four caricatures sharing our booth were Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, stars of The Blue Dahlia.
“I would have sworn Bevo Means cooked that ‘Black Dahlia’ moniker up,” she said, between bites of hash, “really too good to be true-but it keeps turning up.”
“Yeah, we heard it from the French girl down in San Diego,” I said, just poking at my food.
“Tell me why I should have accepted this invitation,” she said, eyes hard and glittering behind jeweled, dark- framed glasses, tiny mouth with tiny teeth smiling like a small predator, “when you’re working for the competition.”
I shrugged, sipped my Coke-no rum this time. “The Examiner, the Herald-Express… it’s all in Mr. Hearst’s family.”
She laughed humorlessly, spoke through a mouthful of hash. “Have you guys interviewed the father yet?”
“Elizabeth Short’s father? No. Have you?”
She nodded. “This afternoon’s edition-guy’s a fourteen-carat crackpot. Was an entrepreneur of sorts, back in the late twenties, building miniature golf courses; then when the depression hit, he went bust, like everybody else. So guess what Cleo Short does when times get hard?”
“That’s his name? A man named Cleo?”
“Yeah, Cleo.” Jaw jutting, she pointed her fork at me. “Guess what he does? Fakes his own suicide, and disappears!”
“Jesus-how’d he manage faking his death?”
“Left his car running on a bridge, with a suicide note, next to those icy waters. Years later, he writes his family and says, ‘Surprise, I’m not dead,’ and invites his daughters to come visit him.”
“Did they?”
“Over time. The mother was less than charmed, never spoke to the son of a bitch again.”
“How about Beth?”
“His daughter Elizabeth came to see him, in ’43, when he was working in the shipyard at Mare Island, and she stayed with him for a while… Deal was, she would keep house for him, and he’d help her look for work. In a few weeks, he threw her out.”
“Why?”
The little reporter waved her fork like a wand. “If I can remember his quote from my article, something like, ‘She was a lazy, greedy, boy-crazy little tramp.’ ”
“Seems pretty broken up about losing his daughter.”
“Says he hadn’t seen her since he tossed her out on her behind in ’43, and had no desire to ever see her again. ‘She went her way, I went mine!’ Even refused to identify the body. Officially Beth Short’s still a Jane Doe.”
I shook my head, pushed my half-eaten plate of hash aside. “The mother can do the unenviable deed-she’s arriving this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I heard-Jim Richardson’s flying her out.” She smiled like a pixie, eyes narrow and twinkling behind the jeweled frames. “You know where the father turned up, Nate?”
“No, Aggie-where did the father turn up?”
“In an apartment house on South Kingsley Drive, near Leimert Park.”
If I’d opened my eyes any wider, they’d have fallen out. “What?”
She was smiling smugly. “Fifteen minutes from that vacant lot.”
“Christ, he’s sounding like a suspect.”
Aggie shrugged. “Harry the Hat’s treating him that way. I don’t buy it, though. Cleo’s a pipsqueak, a mousy little bastard.”
“Yeah, well, still waters run wacky… and as screwed-up as Elizabeth Short was, Aggie, how surprised would you be to have incest show up in her family history?”
“Not very.” She pushed her plate-cleaned-to one side, lighted up a cigarette. “But it’s one thing for a loving papa to sex up his baby girl, and quite another for him to carve her up… You having dessert?”
We ate cheesecake and Aggie asked the obvious.
“So why take me out on a date, Nate, when I look like a munchkin in a Harpo Marx wig, and you’re in a townful of beautiful dames, one of whom you’re newly married to?”
“Well, in the first place, I think you’re a beautiful dame.”
“Right answer.”
“And in the second-Hell, Aggie, you know why. I need the kind of information only the best crime reporter in town might have.”
She grinned, flicking ash onto her cleaned cheesecake plate. “That’s a lovely compliment, you lying son of a bitch, but you could talk to Sid Hughes or half a dozen others at the Examiner, and get what you need, and not come to a rival reporter.”
“Hell, I’m not a reporter-I’m doing some investigative work for the Examiner, yes, but I’m going down some private roads.”
Aggie’s eyes narrowed and she began to look at me differently. “Care to be more specific?”
“Not to a real reporter, I don’t. Look, everybody in town is pursuing the sex-crime angle… understandably… but I’m chasing down a few stray rumors that put Beth Short next to some hoodlums. Nobody but me seems to be looking at that girl’s slashed mouth and coming up with ‘informer.’ ”
This time her smile was like a tiny, enigmatic gash in her face, which opened as she asked, “You do understand why, don’t you, Nate?”
“I think so. The papers like the sex-crime angle-it’s a better story that way. And the cops are so thick with the hoods that they’d rather not look under certain rocks.”
“You’re not wrong.” Aggie was nodding. Her firm jaw lifted and, short though she was, she nevertheless seemed to gaze down at me. “You ever hear of the Georgette Bauerdorf murder?”
“No.”
“Socialite killed a couple years ago-pretty, apple-cheeked girl, kind of wild… she was strangled and raped and her body was found facedown in her bathtub.”
I frowned, leaned toward her. “Are you saying there are similarities to the Dahlia murder?”
“A few. It’s widely assumed Beth Short’s body was dismembered in a bathtub… Perhaps the Bauerdorf girl’s killer was planning to do the same thing, but got interrupted.”
Leaning back again, I mused, “Beautiful dead nude girl, strangled… I can see it. But it doesn’t jump out at me.”
Cigarette in her fingers, she gestured emphatically. “How does this grab you? The Bauerdorf girl and Beth Short were pals-they hung out at the Hollywood Canteen together.”
For a few moments I just sat there, trying to absorb the words; this entire conversation-about grisly murders and their aftermath-seemed oddly abstract in the soft-yellow glow of the subdued Derby lighting.
“Aggie,” I said finally, “that’s major-is that in the afternoon edition, too?”
“No. That story got killed deader than the Dahlia.” She flicked ash onto the plate, adding casually, “As a matter of fact, I’m off the Dahlia story.”
