“The doctor and I work side by side,” she said. “He is often quite lucid, and-together-we are able to help many patients.”
“I trust the doctor isn’t performing surgery, any longer.”
“He is not… and as for the, uh, procedure in question…”
“Abortions, you mean.”
The eyes tightened in the terrible handsome mask. “Mr. Heller, I’m surprised a man in your line of work would be so indiscreet. Surely I don’t have to tell you that a private office can easily be bugged with dictaphones?”
I smiled, shrugged. “My understanding is that you’re protected.”
She folded her arms over the shelf of her breasts; she looked like an annoyed genie. “Be that as it may, the procedure is performed either by myself or by a physician’s assistant.”
“Not a physician?”
“An assistant with sufficient medical training to safely perform this simple procedure.”
“Skip the hard sell, Dr. Winter. I know you’re good; otherwise you and Doc Dailey wouldn’t be the film colony’s favorite mistake correctors.”
A frown disrupted the perfect smoothness of her face. “Is the referral fee we’ve been paying Mr. Rubinski in your view insufficient? I would hope you stand by the terms your partner and I negotiated, when-”
“No, that’s fine. I’m here about Elizabeth Short. You know-the Black Dahlia.”
Only the slightest twitch around her mouth indicated that what I had said had thrown her in any way. She said, simply, “I read the papers.”
I leaned back in the chair. “Don’t play games, Dr. Winter. I know the Short woman was a patient, or anyway a prospective one-she knew Dr. Dailey back in her hometown. She must’ve heard his name bandied about among her Hollywood girl friends, as the reliable quack to go to for ‘the procedure’… and recognized the name as that of an old family friend.”
Dr. Winter came around the desk, sat on the edge of it, looming over me. Dailey was smiling, giving no indication of whether he was following any of this or not.
She said, “Confidentiality between patient and doctor is a sacred pact, Mr. Heller.”
“Get off your high horse, lady-this is an abortion mill… kindly old doc, respectable offices, and fancy jade collection don’t change that.”
“I’m not going to confirm or deny Elizabeth Short as one of our patients.”
“This a murder case, get it? That alone should be enough to catch your attention; but it’s also not just any murder case. If the Short girl gets connected back to you, and this office… and then the A-1 office… we’re-”
The door opened. A tall, broad-shouldered man in doctor’s whites leaned in and said, “Excuse me-am I needed any longer?”
“Dr. Dailey and I are done for the day, Floyd,” Dr. Winter said, “but I’d like you to finish putting away those supplies, if you haven’t already.”
“Glad to,” Floyd said. Though clearly in his early forties, he had a boyish look, his hair blond, his eyes ice-blue. “That’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Thank you, Floyd,” she said. “Then lock up, would you?”
“Sure,” he said, and slipped out, closing the door behind him.
“Your physician’s assistant?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said; impatience tinged her tone. “Now, Mr. Heller, if I can assure you that Elizabeth Short was not referred to us by the A-1, will that allay your trepidation?”
“Then you’re saying she was a patient?”
Her gaze was withering, her sigh disdainful. “No, I am not. Is that all, Mr. Heller?”
I said for the moment it was, and shook the smiling Dr. Dailey’s hand, complimenting him on his jade collection-he offered to take me over and give me a closer look, but I declined-and nodded to Dr. Winter, who nodded back, icily, and opened the door for me. After that, I found my own way out.
In the corridor, I leaned against the balcony railing, feeling dizzy: it wasn’t vertigo; I wasn’t even looking over the edge. I was still gazing at the frosted glass doorway of the Dailey practice.
Their physician’s assistant, Floyd, had not seemed to notice me, when he interrupted my conference with the two doctors; but I had noticed him.
Only his name wasn’t Floyd, not really: it was Lloyd.
Lloyd Watterson.
Also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
16
Union Station’s courtyard, with its peaceful patio of trees, bushes, benches, and flagstones, provided a less frantic setting for farewells and welcomes than most big-city train stations. With sunset approaching, cool blue shadows touched the low-slung sprawl of red-tile-roofed white stucco buildings, overseen by a formidable clock tower.
I was surprisingly relaxed, and not at all tired, as I moved through the immense ticket room, with its tall, colored-mosaic ceiling, whistling a tuneless tune as I fell in with the flow of the hurrying crowd, passing through the soundproofed elegance of the waiting room with its leather chairs where bums slept and passengers waited. The cavelike, well-lighted passenger tunnel, with its eight ramps feeding sixteen tracks, echoed with footsteps, conversation, and the jolts and screeches of trains lurching in and out of the station. I stopped at the ramp where the Union Pacific had just come in, and saw Eliot Ness in the process of tipping a colored porter who was handing him a single buckled bag.
Eliot looked both older and smaller than I remembered. His freckled, Scandinavian boyishness was largely obscured in a pouchy, puffy face; he was in his mid-forties, but-I was a little shocked to see-looked more like his mid-fifties. Eliot’s gray suit was typically well tailored, with a gray-and-shades-of-blue-striped tie, and a snapbrim fedora of a darker gray, a trenchcoat folded over the arm.
Moving up the ramp, the aging Untouchable spotted me and smiled; but his gray eyes seemed troubled. He’d had a long train trip, which could take it out of anybody; still, I could tell this was more than that-something was wrong.
Me, I was jingling the change in my pocket and whistling my tuneless tune.
“You’re in a pleasant mood,” Eliot said, as we shook hands and I grinned at him.
“Yeah, I’ve had a productive day.”
The troubled gray eyes tightened. “Well, I’m afraid I’m going to spoil it for you. Can we take a moment, before you take me to the hotel? We need to talk privately.”
The best place to talk privately, of course, is in public. The station fronted Alameda Street and I guided Eliot a few steps west, to the Plaza, that beaten-down circular patch of grass, pigeons, and spreading magnolias where Los Angeles was born, with the neighboring shabby relics to prove it. To the east the curio stores and restaurants of old Chinatown lurked; to the north sprawled Olivera Street, where Peggy and I had explored the bazaarlike tourist-trap marketplace; to the west stood the adobe walls of the Old Mission Church, adorned with a marker of historic significance, as well as graffiti (“ KILROY WAS HERE!”); and at the south loomed the twenty-story white tower of City Hall, the present presenting its middle finger to the past.
We sat on a bench with pigeons scavenging at our feet-I had bought some popcorn and a cold bottle of Coke from a street vendor, and Eliot was sipping a paper cup of black coffee into which he’d poured something from a silver flask. Around us, on nearby benches, elderly Mexicans in food-stained shirts and well-worn dungarees sat staring blankly, as if wondering how their city had managed to fall into Anglo-Saxon hands; a few others had abandoned such empty speculation and were curled up and enjoying a siesta. A stone bench, circling the park, seemed the province of bums and winos. Dusk settled a cool, soothing hand on the indigents and on two old friends, about to share secrets.
“My dad would have been comfortable here,” I said.
Eliot blinked at that. “What?”
“Lot of the big labor demonstrations are held in this plaza. Pop would have been in his element.”
