I looked at him, not his reflection. “I don’t think you killed her. But you may be able to help me figure out who did, by answering a few questions.”
“By all means.”
“Was Beth Short a hooker, Orson?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“When did you see her last?”
He stole a look at me, then spoke to my image. “At Brittingham’s-I hadn’t seen her since October. I bought her a sandwich and a Coke. It must have been… a week prior to the… grisly discovery.”
“You just ran into her…?”
“I don’t think it was a coincidence-she was looking for me, hoping to see me-she admitted as much.”
“What did she want?”
“Money. She said she needed an operation.”
“An abortion?”
“That would be a reasonable assumption, considering she mentioned she was going to see a certain Dr. Dailey.”
The back of my neck was prickling. “Why? Who is he?”
“Wallace A. Dailey-a former L.A. County Hospital chief of staff, a retired, respectable physician… and, I’m told, Hollywoodland’s current abortionist of choice.”
Sensing I’d struck gold, I scribbled the name down in my notepad, asking, “Would this Dailey happen to hail from New England, originally?”
This line of questioning seemed to make Welles uncomfortable, and a certain irritability, even impatience, colored his tone, as he replied, “I wouldn’t know. Nor do I have an address on the man, though I presume he would be listed in the yellow pages, though probably not under ‘abortionist.’ ”
“She tried to shake you down, didn’t she, Orson?”
“Not precisely. There… may have been an implied threat of… embarrassment. I gave her what I could-fifty dollars. The child she was carrying was obviously not mine.”
“You weren’t intimate with her at all?”
“Define intimate.”
“I would consider having your dick sucked intimate.”
He winced at that, but admitted, “She did have a gift for fellatio. Children are seldom conceived in that fashion, you realize.”
“She have any other gifts? Did you promise her a screen test?”
“I did. Not a false promise, either-she was very attractive, as I’ve said, lovely, really, and I understand she had a pleasant singing voice. How did you link me with her?”
“Florentine Gardens.”
He nodded and dozens of him nodded in the mirrors. “N.T.G.?”
“Yeah, him and that actress, Ann Thomson. I don’t think they’ll mention you to the cops. The cops don’t even know about her working at the Gardens, yet. And there were a lot of celebrities she came into contact with there- you’d be on a long list. I got a feeling the same is going to prove true of the Hollywood Canteen.”
Now he looked at me-he seemed very young, like a big child with that helpless baby face. “I’d like to engage your services, Nathan.”
“To cover this up?”
Still holding my gaze with his, he said, “I need to know that I was not responsible for this ghastly act. I need to know, Nathan.”
“And if you are responsible?”
Now he spoke to me in the mirrors, again. “One calamity at a time. Let me just say, there is schizophrenia in my family, Nathan-if I in fact suffer from these agonizing Welles clan strains, then the next ‘Crazy House’ I inhabit may not be on a soundstage.”
“You didn’t do it, Orson.”
His most charming smile beamed at me from dozens of mirrors. “Nathan, darling, there is in even the most humane of men an irrational drive to do evil.”
I could only think of the opening of his old radio show: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Now he swiveled on the chair and looked right at me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “The only cover-up I ask is that you not breathe a word of this to the Examiner. If Hearst gets wind of my connection to the Black Dahlia, I’m finished-I might as well have done the crime.”
Welles was right: Hearst would take immense pleasure in finally having his full revenge for Citizen Kane.
“I’ll help you, Orson.”
“Nathan, darling, there’s one other small problem.”
“Another problem?”
“I’m broke.”
“Directing and starring in a Rita Hayworth picture, you’re broke?”
“Dead broke. As a magician, my best act seems to be making money disappear. A horde of creditors, including the IRS, are hounding me, daily.” He gestured to his hall of mirrors. “I’m doing this to repay a fifty-grand advance Harry Cohn wired me when I desperately needed money to pay the costume rental bill for Around the World.”
Orson had recently staged a Broadway show of Around the World in 80 Days, a lavish production with Cole Porter music that had nonetheless tanked. Rumor was Welles had sunk every cent he had into it, and was in hock for hundreds of thousands.
“You can charge me your standard hourly rate against an interest in my next production,” he suggested, as he walked me out onto the soundstage.
“Which is?”
“I’m talking to Herbert Yates about a project over at Republic.”
“Where they make all those B-westerns? You are running out of studios to alienate.”
He was ushering me through the near-darkness of the vast chamber past the endless dragon slide.
“Don’t be cynical, darling Nathan-I’m going to be doing Shakespeare on the same soundstages where Roy Rogers and Gene Autry bring badmen to justice. There is something delightful about that! I’m mounting it as if it were a horror movie, you know, like Universal used to make with Karloff and Lugosi.”
“Which play?”
“ Macbeth — murder in the night, followed by nightmares, guilt and rampant paranoia.”
“Well,” I said, stepping out into the light, “at least you got the research out of the way.”
His expression was blank. “I only hope I haven’t been researching Othello.”
And he slipped back into the darkness.
Then I turned and bumped into Shorty, waiting to show me the way out of Columbia’s backlot, a maze rivaling Welles’ hall of mirrors.
15
The Bradbury Building, on the southeast corner of Third and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, was only slightly less bizarre than Welles’ Crazy House. The five-story turn-of-the-century building’s unremarkable brownstone exterior concealed a baroque secret life: ornamental wrought-iron stairwells and balconies, globed fixtures illuminating the open brick-and-tile corridors; caged elevators, their cables and gears and rollers exposed, like contraptions out of Jules Verne; and an enormous greenhouse-style skylight that bounced an eerie gold-white light off the glazed floor of the huge central court that was the Bradbury’s lobby.
Our offices were on the fifth floor, near an elevator, behind a frosted glass door that said A-1 Detective Agency, Fredrick C. Rubinski, Chief Investigator (both our names, however, were listed on the building directory-we were the only detective agency in a world of doctors and lawyers). In the outer office sat our receptionist-an