overnight, but I didn’t expect ’em to mount their horses and gallop off in all directions.”
“She was a good-looking girl who got around town-sorting out her life and loves could take a year.”
“Meanwhile, my readers get their asses bored off.”
I rose from the hard chair. “Well, I’m takin’ the rest of the day off. You can let me know Monday morning if you still want me in on this thing.”
The editor nodded. “Thinkin’ about headin’ back to Chicago with that good-lookin’ bride of yours?”
“Yeah. Maybe you could sit down with Fowley or somebody and do that puff piece, first-give my agency that boost you promised.”
“Sure thing. Of course, it would be a better story under a headline about how you found the Black Dahlia’s killer.”
I was at the door, now. “I’ll see what I can do, over the weekend.”
“You do that. And I’ll see if maybe I can figure out a way to goose this thing in the ass.”
“That’s the best place to apply a goose.”
Richardson snorted a laugh.
Just as I went out, I glanced back and he was an oddly pitiful figure, sitting there alone in the big room, staring into nothing, one eye going this way, the other that, his bald head wreathed in cigarette smoke.
Back in the Beverly Hills hotel bungalow, I found a note from Peggy. She was going out shopping with Cathy Ross, for the afternoon-“while I still can.” I knew this to be a reference to her time of the month-tomorrow, or later today, if the flow got really heavy, she’d be bed-bound. She had really hard periods, sometimes accompanied by blazing headaches.
Couldn’t blame her for wanting to get in a little relaxation before the menstrual onslaught, but I felt helpless and as alone as Richardson had looked. For a case with so many leads, I was fresh out, particularly since Cohen had scratched Dragna off my list.
I walked the hotel’s manicured, flower-flung grounds and slipped inside the lobby, and grabbed lunch at the Fountain Coffee Shop. When I was strolling past the front desk, an assistant manager called out to me, and handed me a note from my mailbox.
Lou Sapperstein had been trying to call, all morning-six little slips of paper represented as many attempts.
That put some spring in my step, and back in the bungalow I called Lou at his home number, and got him on the first ring.
“You found something,” I said.
“I found something,” Lou said.
“Well, it better be good, ’cause as we speak, Sergeant Finis Brown of the LAPD is in town-that is, the town you’re in, partner, Chicago? And Sergeant Brown and I are not good friends.”
“How unfriendly are you?”
“Well, if he finds his way to our offices, Lou, you’ll notice a bandage on his nose.”
Lou sighed. “You broke his nose. You broke the nose of one of the investigating cops.”
“Why, doesn’t that sound like me, Lou?”
“It sounds exactly like you, Nate,” he said wearily. “Now I want to ask you something, before I share my tidbit of information, which by the way only cost the A-1 three hundred bucks-”
“Three hundred!”
“Yeah-this comes from a doctor in Hammond, Indiana, a rabbit-puller who does not want the attention of the cops or the press, which being the Black Dahlia’s doctor would certainly bring.”
I frowned. “Black Dahlia? You know the nickname, so the case has hit the Chicago papers.”
“Yeah, no pics of her yet. Just small, juicy articles; but with a moniker like that-”
“Right. So spill, Lou-what did this Hammond Dr. Kildare give you?”
“Let me ask you my question, first. Have you run across any men who say they slept with her? Who actually screwed this girl?”
“No. She went down on her share, though.”
“And didn’t you tell me you didn’t remember screwing her, yourself? That you were drunk on your ass that night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My love life is a regular Cole Porter tune, isn’t it?”
“Nate, there’s a reason for this girl, this slutty girl, never fucking anybody. She couldn’t. ”
I sat up. “What the hell do you mean? She was pregnant, wasn’t she?”
“No. She was not.”
I was shaking my head, as if not sure my ears were hearing right. “Then what was she going to an abortionist for?”
Another sigh. “Like a lot of those guys, this quack in Hammond is also a gynecologist. The problem the Short girl had was not that she had your, or anybody’s bun, in her oven. She requested a colposcopy.”
“Talk English, Lou.”
“A vaginal exam. But she couldn’t have one. You see, Elizabeth Short had a physical abnormality that made even a routine vaginal exam impossible. The doc called it… let me check my notes… ‘vaginal atresia.’ ”
“What the hell does that mean?”
There was a shrug in Lou’s voice: “She had something the doctor said happens maybe once in a million births: an undeveloped vaginal canal.”
“Undeveloped. You mean, like a… kid’s?”
“Like a child, a female child-Nate, your beautiful Black Dahlia did not have fully developed adult genitals.”
I just sat there, phone against my ear, staring at a vase of cut flowers on a stand across the room-lovely pink flowers, feminine, delicate. Dead.
“Nate? You still there?”
I nodded, then realized Lou couldn’t see that, and said, “Still here. It’s just… so many things make sense now. Of course she satisfied her boy friends orally-it’s all she had.”
“Sorry for the crudity,” Lou said, “but she probably couldn’t let them in her back door, either, without showing herself-without them seeing that she was… like a child, down there.”
So Harry the Hat’s third piece of information, gathered in the autopsy, was not that the Dahlia was pregnant-but that she was physically incapable of having normal intercourse with a man!
Something clicked. “Lou-the money she was raising… It wasn’t for an abortion. It was for an operation-she wanted to be a normal woman!”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lou said. “I guess that’s why you’re the president of this outfit.”
Her physical abnormality was why she had gone to Dr. Dailey-her old family friend-whose partner, Dr. Winter, was a gynecologist. The money she was saving up-that five hundred dollars she was scrambling after, blackmailing me and others for-was so she could become a complete woman.
Bobby Savarino had been talking marriage, and Elizabeth Short-like so many women, like so many men, in these sad, hopeful postwar days-wanted the cottage and the picket fence and the whole married American megillah. I’d been right, when I told Fowley that I figured Beth Short wanted to be a wife more than a movie star.
And so, after years of thinking about it, and dreaming about it, and after discovering that a doctor from back home was practicing in Los Angeles-a doctor specializing in “woman troubles”-she finally had taken the step, to arrange for an operation. An expensive one.
“What are you going to do with this information, Nate?”
“The cops already have it,” I said, “or anyway the key cop does.” And I explained how the Hat was keeping this and two other only-the-killer-knows items under wraps. “But it means I have to rethink every piece of information I’ve gathered, every individual I’ve spoken to.”
Lou laughed humorlessly. “Whole new ball game.”
“Different game entirely-though this one also starts with a butchered girl in a vacant lot.”
We discussed Brown’s presence in Chicago, and I told Lou to play it straight down the middle, should Fat Ass show up at the office with questions about me. Soon, perhaps today, I would tell the Hat about having known Short briefly in Chicago, and explain my reticence to come forward, due to the coincidence of having been along with
