I said, “Eliot-a word.”
Looking slightly shellshocked, Eliot followed me up the steps; we spoke at the mouth of the iron stairway, with Lloyd-tied in his chair-staring up at us with those empty blue eyes of his.
“He’s right about the cops,” I said softly. “Dailey is part of an abortion ring that’s protected by the homicide bureau.”
“Christ! I thought you said Hansen was straight.”
“He is, but most of them are beyond bent-including the Hat’s partner, Fat Ass Brown.”
“So we avoid the homicide dicks-maybe get a statement and turn it over to the press-”
“Eliot,” I whispered, “he may not have done this.”
Eliot’s eyes flared. “You have got to be kidding. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run just happens to be working in an abortion clinic where the Black Dahlia was a patient?”
I was shaking my head. “Too many coincidences. One or two I can buy-that I was with Fowley when he caught that police call, okay. Just about everything else… no.”
“What are you saying?”
“Somebody is stage-directing this. All of these things that we’re trying desperately to write off as coincidences… we’re being played for suckers. Hell, man, we’re not even pawns on a chess board-we’re just goddamn checkers.”
He frowned. “Then who’s behind it all?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think Lloyd does, either-although it’s a good bet the person manipulating these events is someone in Lloyd’s life.”
Eliot twitched a nonsmile; he was taking me seriously, anyway. “What do you suggest?”
I took him by the arm and walked him down the corridor a ways-we could still see Watterson sitting on the landing.
“We continue investigating,” I said. “I still look at that corpse in my mind’s eye and see ‘informer’ carved on that pretty face-and I haven’t even explored the Dragna avenue yet, or for that matter Mickey Cohen. You need to deal with Harry the Hat, and you could dig into the background of these abortion clinic players… see if anything turns up. Maybe Dailey isn’t the senile dip-shit he appears to be-maybe the Winter dame is the fucking Dragon Lady. We don’t know yet… Then there’s this guy Arnold Wilson and the rest of the McCadden crew.”
“Arnold Wilson?”
“Tall guy with a war-wound limp-he was in on the Mocambo heist, but unlike Savarino and Hassau didn’t get nailed.”
“Funny… Arnold Wilson-that name sounds familiar…”
“Eliot, that’s like saying ‘John Smith’ or ‘Joe Doakes’ sounds familiar.”
His eyes were tight with thought. “No-I’ve seen it recently.”
“Good, then that’s something else you can check.”
“What exactly are you suggesting, Nate?”
“I’m suggesting we tell Lloyd he’s convinced us of his innocence.”
“What the hell?”
“We apologize for roughing him up. Gee whiz we hope he understands, but we just had to make sure he wasn’t involved. And we make him believe he sold us his bill of goods… which, incidentally, may not be a bill of goods at all. Elizabeth Short may have been cut in half so that smart sleuths like us would play pin the crime on the Butcher.”
Now it was Eliot who looked wild-eyed. “Just let him go? Are you nuts? He’ll run!”
“Of course I’m nuts. I got out on a Section Eight, didn’t I? But I don’t think our twisted friend here will run- if we convince him he’s convinced us.”
“Then what?”
I nodded toward the A-1 office. “We’ll keep this guy tailed day and night-not too hard a job, since he works the fuck next door to my own detective agency. Fred and I have four ops working full-time, who we’ll tap into.”
Finally Eliot was liking this. “And we’ll see who Lloyd intersects with.”
“That’s right.”
Nodding, Eliot said, “Okay. No reason why I can’t haul Lloyd back in a few days… but if any more butchered bodies turn up, I’m not going to sleep so good at night.”
“How are you sleeping now?”
“Not so good.”
Then we walked down the iron steps and apologized profusely to Lloyd Watterson, who wanted to believe us so badly-when (as we untied him) we said we believed him-that he did.
18
It was almost nine by the time Eliot and I made it to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We had followed Lloyd in his prewar Chevy to his rented room in a shoddy two-story wood-frame building on East 31st, and-having called Fred Rubinski to put the surveillance in motion-waited until a fresh-faced A-1 operative named Teddy Hertel showed up to take over for us. We warned Ted that Watterson was a dangerous subject, but I wasn’t too worried-Hertel may have looked like a kid, but he had survived Bloodynose Ridge.
In the airy hotel lobby, with its lush plants and lavish floral arrangements, we seemed to have stepped into a decidedly different world from the one in which the Black Dahlia had been murdered. In the aftermath of our confrontation with the Mad Butcher, these soothing pastel surroundings seemed as surrealistic as Welles’ Crazy House. We stood at the front desk as Eliot checked himself in; the desk clerk assured Eliot that a rental car would be delivered at the hotel, as prearranged, tomorrow morning.
Eliot accompanied me to the bungalow-taking in the well-manicured hedges, flowering shrubs, and colorful gardens of the grounds we wound through, on this cool evening-and I unlocked the door, cracking it open, calling, “Peggy! Are you decent? We have company.”
“Come on in, darling,” she called back, pleasantly. “And we already have company.”
I stepped inside and found, sitting on the sofa, next to a less-than-roaring fire, Peggy-radiant at the end of her long day of filming, in a light blue T-shirt and trimly tailored darker trousers, legs crossed, red-painted toenails peeking through open-toed sandals-seated next to a guest.
“Your old friend Mr. Wilson dropped by,” she said, gesturing to the man seated next to her, “and said it was important. I insisted he wait.”
My “old friend” (who dated way back to this afternoon) was one Arnold Wilson-that cadaverous cook from the McCadden Cafe. In this elegant suite, the shabby short-order jockey was like the non sequitur object in a kid’s “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” puzzle.
“Mr. Wilson was telling me how you were in the war together,” she said.
It was hard for me to believe Peggy had let the acne-scarred, Apache-looking Wilson in, considering he was still wearing the threadbare blue-and-white-striped shirt and faded blue jeans; he’d traded his apron for a ratty brown sportcoat, and was gaping at me with a grin displaying more shades of yellow than a paint-store color chart.
He must have sold her one hell of a bill of goods.
While I stood there giving Wilson a look that would have melted ice in a glass and maybe the glass, too, my wife bounded up, and went over to greet Eliot, hugging him.
They were making small talk-since Peggy and I had eloped, this was the first chance Eliot had had to offer congratulations and kiss the bride-and the tall, twig-thin Wilson was rising from the plush couch, trembling, his grin dissolving into an apologetic pout, his big bony hands open in supplication.
I had a hand on his wiry arm, squeezing, staring up into his narrow eyes, pointed nose poking at me, when he whispered, “Sorry I laid it on so thick, Nate… Mr. Heller. I just knew it was important to talk to you, right away.”
“Why?”
“Bobby Savarino got bailed out-the Ringgolds were good for it, like I thought they might be. He’s home right
