Millard, Fritzie’s cop antithesis, exerted his own pull on me. He took to using Room 204 at the El Nido as his field office, going there at end of watch to read Lee’s superbly cross-filed collection of paper. With Lee gone, time weighed heavy on me, so I joined him most evenings. When he looked at the Dahlia horror pictures, he always made the sign of the cross and murmured “Elizabeth” with reverence; walking out, he said, “I’ll get him, dear.” He always left at 8:00 on the dot, to go home to his wife and sons. That a man could care so deeply yet put it aside so casually amazed me. I asked him about it; he said, “I will not let brutality rule my life.”

From 8:00 on, my own life was ruled by two women, a crossfire of their strange, strong wills.

From the El Nido, I’d go to see Kay. With Lee gone and no longer footing the bills, she had to find full-time work, and she did—getting a job teaching sixth grade at an elementary school a few blocks off the Strip. I’d find her grading book reports and perusing kiddie artwork stoically, glad to see me, but caustic underneath, like maintaining a business-as-usual front would keep her grief over Lee’s absence and her contempt for my reluctance at bay. I tried denting the front by telling her I wanted her, but would only move on it when Lee’s vanishing act was resolved; she answered with overeducated psychological claptrap about our missing third, turning the education he bought her around, using it as a weapon against him. I exploded at phrases like “paranoid tendencies” and “pathological selfishness,” coming back with “he saved you, he made you.” Kay’s comeback for that was, “He only helped me.” I had no comeback for the truth behind the jargon and the fact that without Lee as a centerpiece, the two of us were loose ends, a family sans patriarch. It was that stasis that drove me out the door ten nights running—straight to the Red Arrow Motel.

So I brought Kay with me to Madeleine.

We’d rut first thing, talk later. The talk was always of Madeleine’s family, followed by fantasies that I concocted so as not to feel impoverished in the wake of her tales. The brass girl had robber baron Daddy, the Emmett Sprague, confrere of Mack Sennett in the Hollywood salad days; art poseur and elixir-guzzling Mommy, a direct descendant of the California land grant Cathcarts; genius sister Martha, hotshot commercial artist, rising star on Ad Agency Row downtown. For a supporting cast there was Mayor Fletcher Bowron, public relations-minded thug Mickey Cohen, “Dreamer” Georgie Tilden, Emmett’s former stooge, the son of a famous Scottish anatomist and wastrel nickolodeon artiste. The Dohenys and Sepulvedas and Mulhollands were also close friends, as were Governor Earl Warren and DA Buron Fitts. Having only senile Dolph Bleichert, the late Greta Heilbrunner Bleichert, the Japs I snitched off and fight acquaintances, I spun yarns out of thin air: scholastic medals won and proms attended; bodyguarding FDR in ‘43. I dissembled away until it was time to rut again, grateful that we always kept the lights off between bouts, so Madeleine couldn’t read my face and know I was coming from hunger.

Or from the Dahlia.

The first time it happened accidentally. We were making love, both of us close to peaking. My hand slipped off the bed rail and hit the light switch on the wall, illuminating Betty Short below me. For just a few seconds I believed it was her, and I called out for Lee and Kay to help me. When my lover was Madeleine again, I reached for the switch, only to have her grab my wrist. Moving hard, springs creaking, light glaring, I made Madeleine Betty—made her eyes blue instead of hazel, made her body Betty’s body from the stag film, made her silently mouth, “No, please.” Coming, I knew it could never be that good with just plain Madeleine; when the brass girl whispered, “I knew she’d get to you sooner or later,” I dry sobbed that all my pillow stories were lies and poured out the nonstop true story of Lee and Kay and Bucky, straight through to Mr. Fire’s fix on the dead girl and his jump off the face of the earth. When I finished, Madeleine said, “I’ll never be a schoolteacher from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but I’ll be Betty or anyone else you want me to be.” I let her stroke my head, grateful not to have to lie anymore, but sad that she—and not Kay—was my confessor.

So Elizabeth Short and I were formally joined.

Chapter 19

Lee stayed gone and Madeleine stayed Betty, and there was nothing I could do about either transformation. Heeding the Metro goons’ warning, I kept my nose out of their investigation, constantly wondering if Mr. Fire took his powder pre-planned or accidentally. I did check his bank records, finding an $800 balance with no recent withdrawals, and when I heard that a nationwide and Mexico APB had been issued on Lee and his ‘40 Ford, yielding goose egg, my instincts told me he had fled way south of the border, where the Rurales used gringo police bulletins as toilet paper. Russ Millard told me that two Mexican men, both well-known dope traffickers, had been arrested in Juarez for the murder of Bobby De Witt and Felix Chasco, which eased my mind on Metro making Lee for the job—but then scuttlebutt filtered down from high, high brass circles. Chief Horrall had rescinded the APB and decreed, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Thad Green’s secretary told Harry Sears that she had heard Lee was going to be dismissed from the LAPD if he did not show up within thirty days of the time he vanished.

January dwindled out, rainy days with only one spark of excitement. An envelope arrived by mail at the Bureau. It had a clipped word address, with a clipped word letter on plain bond paper inside:

Taped to the page was a photograph of a short, heavyset man wearing a business suit, his face scratched out. No prints or other forensic leads were gleaned from the snapshot or envelope, and since the servicemen pics from the first letter had been withheld from the press as a suspect elimination device, we knew letter number two was legit. The Bureau consensus was that the photo was of the killer, symbolically eliminating himself from the overall “picture.”

With the death letter and stag film leads ground to dust, a second consensus took over: we were never going to get the bastard. The odds on “Unsolved” dropped to even money in the squadroom pool; Thad Green told Russ and Captain Jack that Horrall was going to pull the chain on the Dahlia mess on February 5, returning a large number of officers to their normal duties. Rumor had it that I would be one of the returnees, breaking in Johnny Vogel as my partner. Bad Breath Johnny rankled, but going back to Warrants came on as Paradise regained. Betty Short would then exist the only place I wanted her to—as the spark point of my imagination.