Fowley for the discovery of the body.
“Now that we know Beth Short wasn’t pregnant,” I said, “I’m much less a viable suspect.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that she told you she was pregnant,” Lou reminded me, “and tried to blackmail you.”
“If she’d been pregnant by me,” I said, “there was a good chance she could’ve told some girl friend or other, or a doctor, or even another boy friend. But since she was lying to me, scamming me, chances are strong nobody knew about her calling me from the Biltmore… but me.”
“And me,” Lou said. “But I ain’t tellin’ a soul. We’ll talk about my raise, later.”
“Fuck you very much. Don’t you see, Lou? If she’d really been pregnant, a whole battery of men might have been suspects. They now have been turned into a meaningless bunch of former boy friends, whose tales of never having sex with the girl suddenly make sense.”
“So the suspect field is narrowed,” Lou said.
“Considerably.”
I did not tell Lou about Watterson, because Eliot had requested I keep the lid on that; but, like a new Rosemary Clooney tune, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run had just jumped back to the top of my personal Hit Parade.
“On the other hand,” Lou said, “maybe one of those boy friends killed her-you know, flew into a murderous rage when he discovered she could not be fucked.”
“Jesus, yeah-that does make a terrible kind of sense.”
Another humorless laugh. “Poor kid was the only prick tease on earth who didn’t want to be.”
After hanging up, I just sat there on the couch in that bungalow, afternoon sun filtering in lazily through sheer curtains, my interview notepad in hand, and I paged through it as I mentally sorted through every fact, every facet, every suspect, every supposition, every rumor, every seeming coincidence, viewed through the new prism of Beth Short’s disability.
Perhaps half an hour later, a frantic knocking at the bungalow door jarred me, as if I’d been sleeping and got jolted awake, and I went quickly to the door and opened it. Perhaps I had been in a trancelike state, but seeing Eliot Ness’s uncharacteristically excited expression made me instantly alert.
“I have some incredible information,” he blurted.
“You may want to hear mine, first,” I said.
I sat on the couch and he pulled up an armchair, tossing his fedora on the coffee table, and listened to my retelling of Lou Sapperstein’s bizarre news. Midway he got up and helped himself to some Scotch from the wet bar.
Visibly shaken, Eliot said, “It’s all beginning to make sick, tragic sense.”
“Parts of it are coming clear, but I have to admit, most of it is still pretty goddamn murky from where I sit.”
“Wait-just wait.” He gulped at the Scotch, then unbuttoned his suitcoat, set the drink on the glass top of the coffee table, and for several long moments sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands; that unruly comma of brown, graying hair hung almost to his eyebrows.
“Are you all right, Eliot?”
“Where shall I start?” He sat suddenly straight. “All right, the beginning… I spent two hours with Detective Hansen, wasting time retreading the Butcher inquiry, making the case for this probably not being the same perpetrator. He seemed to buy it well enough. Then I asked Hansen if anyone was exploring abortionists in the city-and he told me, yes, but that he personally thought that was a blind alley.”
“Considering his knowledge of Beth Short’s deformity, that’s not surprising.”
Eliot nodded, and pressed on. “But I pushed him, saying that in Cleveland we believed the Kingsbury Run Butcher was a doctor or perhaps ex-doctor, due to the medical precision of the dismemberments. The Black Dahlia’s corpse showed similar medical knowledge and the same sort of surgical skill.”
“And,” I said, “you naturally told Hansen that if he’s really trying to see whether the Kingsbury Run Butcher committed this crime, then this is a logical path to go down.”
“Yes. He put me with a young vice squad sergeant, Charles Stoker, and left us alone. I asked Sergeant Stoker for a list of known and suspected abortionists. Stoker gave me one, but Dailey’s name wasn’t on it…”
“Of course. Dailey’s protected.”
Eliot nodded. “So I told the young detective that I’d heard about a doctor named Dailey, who was originally from Massachusetts, same as Elizabeth Short.”
I winced. “Dangerous sharing that…”
He raised a palm, as if getting sworn in on the stand. “But necessary to get the information-and, anyway, I can play it down, if it gets back to Hansen. Stoker started looking around the bullpen furtively, then finally, uneasily, admitted that certain local doctors suspected of abortion were not ‘bothered’ by the LAPD. He said it rubbed him the wrong way, but the policy in the department was that abortion was a fact of life and a few of the more responsible practitioners were given a blind eye.”
“And he admitted Dr. Dailey was one of these.”
“Yes, a very respectable retired Chief of Staff of Los Angeles County Hospital, after all, retired USC professor. But Stoker had some other interesting information about Dr. Dailey-he was very much aware of Dailey’s failing mental condition.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Eliot smiled tightly, nastily. “Seems Dailey’s estranged wife has been trying to arrange a commitment for her errant hubby-it’s been something of a minor scandal. Apparently Mrs. Dailey thinks this woman, Dr. Winter, is ‘exerting undue influence’ over her husband, using her ‘feminine wiles.’
“As in, stealing the doc away from her.”
Nodding again, Eliot said, “Yes, and changing his will to favor Dr. Winter.”
“It’s not a new story.”
“But in the context of the death of Elizabeth Short, it makes a very interesting story.”
I shook my head, confused. “How in hell could the Short girl’s murder have anything-”
Eliot held up a traffic-cop palm. “Wait. Just wait. After Sergeant Stoker and I were finished, I came back here to the hotel and made a few phone calls… first to the main branch of the L.A. public library, to see if they had Harvard yearbooks on hand.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to see if Lloyd Watterson’s father and Dr. Dailey really were classmates. A librarian on the research desk said she would be happy to look into it for me, and she called me back, not half an hour ago. Both men did attend Harvard, just not at the same time-Lloyd’s father graduated the year before Dailey enrolled.”
“What does that mean to you, Eliot?”
The Untouchable leaned forward, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “It means Lloyd was lying to us about at least one thing. Getting the job with Dailey had nothing to do with him being a friend and classmate of dear dead dad.”
“And why would he lie about that?”
A tiny shrug. “Possibly to make himself look better to us-make it look as if he really was trying to make a clean start, with his family’s help… rather than going to work for an abortionist, through the efforts of some lowlife criminal acquaintance.”
“This is all very interesting, but-”
“Nate.” Eliot twitched a smile, sat back, hands on his knees. “Do you have a phone book?”
Huh?
“Well, sure,” I said. “It’s right there, in that drawer.” I pointed to the nearby endtable where the phone sat. “Why?”
“Because I did one of my most effective if accidental pieces of detective work today just by looking up a number, and checking the address that went with it. Get the phone book, Nate- get it.”
I got it.
“From what Stoker told me,” Eliot said, “I thought it might be interesting to have a talk with Mrs. Dailey. Possibly not worth a trip to her house, but a phone call surely wouldn’t hurt. Look up her number, Nate. It’s under her husband’s name-until two and a half months ago, when he moved out, that was where the doctor lived.”
