Bobby De Witt’s murder got a half column in the LA Mirror, I got a day off from a surprisingly solicitious Ellis Loew, Lee’s disappearance got a squad of Metropolitan Division cops full-time.

I spent most of the day off in Captain Jack’s office, being interrogated by them. They asked me hundreds of questions about Lee—from the reasons for his outbursts at the stag film and La Verne’s Hideaway, to his obsession with the Short case, to the Nash memo and his shack job with Kay. I played fast and loose with facts, and lied by omission—keeping it zipped about Lee’s Benzedrine use, his file room at the El Nido Hotel and the fact that his cohabitation was chaste. The Metro bulls repeatedly asked me if I thought Lee killed Bobby De Witt and Felix Chasco; I repeatedly told them he wasn’t capable of murder. Asked for an interpretation of my partner’s flight, I told them about beating Lee up over the Nash job, adding that he was an ex-boxer, maybe soon to be an ex-cop, too old to go back to fighting, too volatile to live a squarejohn life—and the Mexican interior was probably as good a place as any for a man like that. As the interrogation wound down, I sensed that the officers weren’t interested in securing Lee’s safety—they were building a case for his LAPD expulsion. I was repeatedly told not to stick my nose in their investigation and each time I agreed I dug my fingers into my palms to keep from hurling insults and worse.

From City Hall I went to see Kay. Two Metro goons had already paid her a visit, putting her through the wringer about her life with Lee, rehashing her old life with Bobby De Witt. The iceberg look she gave me said I was slime for belonging to the same police department; when I tried to comfort her and offer words of encouragement about Lee’s return, she said, “And all that,” and pushed me away.

I checked out room 204 of the El Nido Hotel then, hoping for some kind of message, some kind of clue that said, “I’ll be back, and the three of us will keep going.” What I found was a shrine to Elizabeth Short.

The room was a typical Hollywood bachelor flop: Murphy bed, sink, tiny closet. But the walls were adorned with Betty Short portrait pictures, newspaper and magazine photos, horror glossies from9th and Norton, dozens of them enlarged to magnify every gruesome detail. The bed was covered with cardboard boxes—an entire detective’s case file, with carbons of miscellaneous memos, tip lists, evidence indexes, FIs and questioning reports all cross-filed alphabetically.

Having nothing to do and no one to do it with, I leafed through the folders. The bulk of the information was staggering, the manpower behind it more staggering, the fact that it was all over one silly girl the most staggering of all. I didn’t know whether to toast Betty Short or rip her off the walls, so I badged the desk clerk on my way out, paid him a month’s rent in advance and kept the room like I promised Millard and Sears—even though I was really holding it for Sergeant Leland C. Blanchard.

Who was somewhere out there in the Big Nowhere.

I called up the classified desks of the Times, Mirror, Herald and Daily News, placing a personals ad to run indefinitely: “Fire—Nightflower room will remain intact. Send me a message—Ice.” With that behind me, I drove to the only place I could think of to send him one.

39th and Norton was just a block of empty lots now. No arclights, no police cars, no nighttime gawkers. A Santa Ana wind blew in while I stood there, and the more I pulled for Lee to come back to me the more I knew my hotshot cop life was as gone as everybody’s favorite dead girl.

In the morning I sent the big boys a message. Hiding out in a storage room down the hall from my cubicle, I typed copies of a transfer request letter, one each for Loew, Russ Millard and Captain Jack. The letter read:

Finishing, I read the letter over, deciding that it worked in just the right blend of respect and exasperation, with the half-truth about the Sergeant’s Exam a good closing line. I was signing the copies when I heard a tremendous ruckus coming from the bullpen.

I folded the pages into my jacket pocket and went to investigate. A group of detectives and crime lab techs in white smocks were surrounding a table, looking down at it, jabbering and gesturing away. I joined the throng, muttering “Holy fuck,” when I saw what was jazzing them.

An envelope was lying on a metal evidence tray. It was stamped and postmarked and smelled faintly of gasoline. The front of it was covered with letters clipped from newspapers and magazines, glued to the plain white surface. The words spelled out:

A lab man wearing rubber gloves slit the envelope and pulled out the contents—a little black address book, a plastic-sheathed Social Security card and a thin stack of photographs. Squinting, I read the name on the card—Elizabeth Ann Short—and knew the Dahlia case had blown wide open. The man next to me was talking the delivery up—a postal carrier found the envelope in a mailbox near the downtown library, almost keeled from a heart attack, then grabbed a pair of radio car bulls, who code three’d the booty over.

Ellis Loew pushed his way up against the lab techs, Fritzie Vogel at his heels. The head tech flailed his hands in anger; a cacophony of speculation hit the pen. Then there was a loud whistle, and Russ Millard yelled, “Damnit, back off and let them work. And give them some quiet.”

We did.

The techs descended on the envelope, dusting it with print powder, leafing through the address book, examining the snapshots and calling out their findings like surgeons at an operating table:

“Two partial latents on the back flap, smudged, no more than one or two comparison points, not enough to run a make on, maybe enough to compare to incoming suspects—”

“No prints on Social Security card—”

“Pages of address book readable, but gasoline saturated, no chance of sustaining latents. Names and phone numbers mostly men, not listed alphabetically, some pages ripped out—”

“Photographs are of Short girl with servicemen in uniform, the men’s faces crossed out—”

Stunned, I wondered: Would a letter follow? Was my random snuff theory blown? Since the stuff was obviously sent in by the killer, was he one of the servicemen in the pictures? Was the mailing cat and mouse, or the precursor to surrender and confession? All around me, other officers were running with the same dope, the same questions, talking in knots of two and three, or looking rapt, like they were talking with themselves. The lab techs took off with the plethora of new leads, cradling them in rubber-gloved hands. Then the only calm man in the room whistled again.