And again the commotion froze. Russ Millard, poker-faced, counted the heads and pointed us over to the rear bulletin board. We lined up there; he said, “I don’t know what it means, except I’m pretty sure the killer sent the stuff. The lab boys are going to need more time on the envelope, then they’ll photograph the pages and give us a list of names to do interviews from.”
Dick Cavanaugh said, “Russ, he’s playing with us. Some of the pages were ripped out, and I’ll lay you ten to one his name was on one of them.”
Millard smiled. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he’s crazy and wants to get caught, maybe some of the people in the book know him. Maybe the techs will get latents off the photos or be able to identify some of the men from the insignia of their uniforms. Maybe the bastard will send a letter. That’s a lot of maybes, so I’ll tell you what we’ve got for sure: all eleven of you are going to drop what you’re doing and canvass the area around the mailbox where that envelope was found. Harry and I will be going over the case file to see if any of our previous suspects live or work around there. Then, when we’ve got the list of names from the book, we’ll go at it discreetly. Betty spread herself pretty thin with men, and homewrecking isn’t my style. Harry?”
Sears was standing by the wall map of downtown LA, holding a pen and clipboard. He stuttered, “W-w-we’ll do f-f-foot beats.” I saw my transfer request stamped “Rejected.” Then I heard an argument on the opposite side of the squadroom.
The arguers were Ellis Loew and Jack Tierney, both of them trying to score points and keep it sotto voce. They ducked behind a wall post for privacy, I ducked over to an adjacent phone cubicle to eavesdrop—hoping for skinny on Lee.
It wasn’t about Lee—it was about Her.
“… Jack, Horrall wants to take three quarters of the men off the investigation. Bond issue or no bond issue, he thinks he’s given the voters enough of a show. We can get around him by going at the names in the book a hundred percent. The more publicity the case gets, the more truck we’ve got with Horrall—”
“Goddamn it, Ellis—”
“No. Just listen to me. Before, I wanted to downplay the girl as a floozy. The way I see it now is that it’s too far out in the open already to sit on. We know what she was, and we’ll get it confirmed a couple of hundred times by the men in that little black book. We keep our men questioning them, I’ll keep feeding the names to my newspaper contacts, we’ll keep a head of steam on this thing until we get the killer.”
“It’s a sucker play, Ellis. The killer’s name probably isn’t in the book. He’s a psycho, and he’s showing us his backside and saying, ‘Make something out of it.’ The girl’s a gravy train, Ellis. I’ve known it from the beginning, just like you. But this has got to backfire on us. I’m working a half dozen other homicides with skeleton crews, and if the married men in that book get their names in the paper, then their lives will be shot to shit because they copped Betty Short for a quick piece of tail .”
There was a long stretch of silence. Then Loew said, “Jack, you know I’ll be DA sooner or later. If not next year, in ‘52. And you know that Green will be retiring in a few years, and you know who I want to replace him. Jack, I’m thirty-six and you’re forty-nine. I may get another shot at something this big. You won’t. For God’s sake take the farsighted view on it.”
More silence. I pictured Captain Jack Tierney weighing the pros and cons of selling his soul to Satan with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a hard-on for the City of Los Angeles. When he said, “Okay, Ellis,” I tore up my transfer request and walked back to rejoin the circus.
Chapter 18
Over the next ten days the circus turned into wholesale farce, with an occasional tragedy thrown in.
No other leads were gleaned from the “Death Letter,” and the 243 names in the book were divvied up between four detective teams, the low number of cops Jack Tierney’s ploy aimed at padding that part of the investigation into extended newspaper and radio juice. Russ Millard argued for twenty teams and a fast, clean sweep; Captain Jack, backstopped by the DA Satan, refused. When Big Bill Koenig was deemed too combustible to work the questionings and was given clerical duties, I was paired with Fritz Vogel. Together, we questioned fifty-odd people, mostly men, about their association with Elizabeth Short. We heard predictable stories of them meeting Betty in bars and buying her drinks and dinner, listening to her fantasies of being the bride or widow of war heros, bedding or not bedding her. A number of the men did not even know the notorious Dahlia—they were “friends of friends,” their names passed on out of pussy hound camaraderie.
Of our parcel of names, sixteen of the guys were what Fritzie labeled “Certified Dahlia Fuckers.” They were mostly lower-echelon movie minions: agents, talent scouts and casting directors who hung out at Schwab’s Drugstore chasing gullible would-be starlets, empty promises on their lips, Trojan “value packs” in their pockets. They told proud or shamefaced casting couch stories every bit as sad as Betty’s tales of bliss with studs in uniform. Finally, the men in Elizabeth Short’s little black book had two things in common—they got their names in the LA dailies and they coughed up alibis that eliminated them as suspects. And word filtered back to the squadroom that the publicity eliminated more than a few of them as husbands.
The women were a mixed bag. Most were just pals—girl talk acquaintances, fellow cocktail lounge cadgers and aspiring actresses heading nowhere. A dozen or so were hookers and semi-pro B-girls, instant soulmates that Betty met in bars. They gave us leads that petered out on follow-up investigation—basically, the word that Betty sold herself freelance to conventioneers at several lower-class downtown hotels. They hedged that Betty rarely peddled it, and could not identify any of her tricks by name; Fritzie’s canvassing of the hotels got him an angry zero, and the fact that several other women—R&I confirmed as prostitutes—couldn’t be located, pissed him off even more.
Madeleine Sprague’s name did not appear in the book, nor did it turn up in any of my subsequent questionings. No dyke or dyke bar leads came out of the 243 names, and every night I checked the University squadroom bulletin boards to see if any of the other teams had latched on to her monicker. None of them did, and I started to feel very safe regarding my evidence suppression tango.
While the book queries got most of the headlines, the rest of the circus continued on: tips, tips and more tips wasted thousands of police man-hours; poison phone and poison pen communiques had local squadroom dicks bracing spiteful loonies implicating their enemies for hundreds of major and minor grievances. Discarded women’s garments were sifted through at the Central crime lab, and every piece of size eight black female apparel that was found launched another extensive neighborhood run-through.
The biggest surprise of my little black book tour was Fritz Vogel. Free of Bill Koenig, he possessed a surprising wit, and in his muscle fashion he was as adept an interrogator as Russ Millard. He knew when to punch for information, hitting fast and hard, fueled by personal rancor but capable of putting it out of his mind when the interrogee coughed up what we wanted. Sometimes I sensed that he was holding back out of respect for my nice guy questioning style, that the pragmatist in him knew it was the best way to get results. We became an effective Mutt and Jeff duo fast, and I could tell that I was a restraining influence on Fritzie, a check and balance on his admitted fondness for hurting criminals. He gave me a wary respect for the hurt I’d put on Bobby De Witt, and a few days into the temporary partnership we were bullshitting in broken German, a way to kill time driving to and from questionings. With me, Fritzie spoke less in tirades and came across as one of the guys—with a mean streak. He talked up the Dahlia and his coveted lieutenancy, but didn’t talk frames, and since he never tried to pull any railroad jobs around me and was straight in his FI reports, I got the notion that Loew had either given up the idea or was biding his time. I could also tell that Fritzie was constantly sizing me up, that he knew Koenig wouldn’t cut it as partner to Detective Division brass, but with Lee gone, I would. The appraisal process flattered me, and I kept myself razor sharp during interrogations. I had played second banana to Lee working Warrants, and if Fritzie and I partnered up I wanted him to know that I wouldn’t play stooge—or lacky—like Harry Sears to Russ Millard.