Elizabeth Short.

Betty Short.

Liz Short.

The Black Dahlia.

My knees jerked into the steering wheel; my trembling hands hit the horn. The apparition shielded her eyes and squinted into my beams, then shrugged. I saw familiar dimples twitch, and returned from wherever it was I was going.

It was Madeleine Sprague, completely made over as the Dahlia. She was dressed in an all-black clinging gown, with makeup and hairdo identical to Betty Short at her portrait photo best. I watched her sashay into the bar, saw a dot of yellow in her upswept black curls and knew that she’d taken her transformation all the way to the barrette Betty wore. The detail hit me like a Lee Blanchard one-two. On punch-drunk legs, I pursued the ghost.

The Zimba Room interior was wall-to-wall smoke, GI’s and juke box jazz; Madeleine was at the bar sipping a drink. Looking around, I saw that she was the only woman in the place and already creating a hubbub—soldiers and sailors were elbowing the good news to one another, pointing to the black-clad figure and exchanging whispers.

I found a zebra-striped booth at the back; it was filled with sailors sharing a bottle. One glance at their peach fuzz faces told me they were underage. I held out my badge and said, “Scram or I’ll have the SP’s here inside of a minute.” The three youths took off in a blue swirl, leaving their jug behind. I sat down to watch Madeleine portray Betty.

Guzzling half a tumbler of bourbon calmed my nerves. I had a diagonal view of Madeleine at the bar, surrounded by would-be lovers hanging on her every word. I was too far away to hear anything—but every gesture I saw her make was not hers, but that of some other woman. And every time she touched a member of her entourage my hand twitched toward my .38.

Time stretched, in a haze of navy blue and khaki with a jet back center.

Madeleine drank, chatted and brushed off passes, her attention narrowing down to a stocky sailor. Her coterie dwindled out as the man shot them mean looks; I killed off the bottle. Staring at the bar kept me from thinking, the loud jazz kept my ears perked for the sound of voices above it, the booze kept me from rousting the stocky man on a half dozen trumped-up charges. Then the woman in black and the sailor in blue were out the door, arms linked, Madeleine inches taller in her high heels.

I gave them a bourbon-calmed five seconds, then hauled. The Packard was turning right at the corner when I got behind the wheel; gunning it and hanging a hard right myself, I saw taillights at the end of the block. I zoomed up behind them, almost tapping the rear bumper; Madeleine’s signal arm shot out the window, and she veered into the parking lot of a brightly lit auto court.

I skidded to a stop, then backed up and killed my headlights. From the street I could see sailor boy standing by the Packard smoking a cigarette, while Madeleine hit the motel office for the room key. She came outside with it a moment later, just like our old routine; she made the sailor walk ahead of her, just like she did with me. The lights went on and off inside the room, and when I listened outside it the blinds were drawn and our old station was on the radio.

Rolling stakeouts.

Field interrogations.

The Bunsen burner jockey now a detective with a case.

I kept Madeleine’s Dahlia act under surveillance for four more nights; she pulled the same MO every time: 8th Street gin mill, hard boy with lots of confetti on his chest, the fuck pad at 9th and Irolo. When the two were ensconsed, I went back and questioned bartenders and GIs she gave the ixnay to.

What name did the black-clad woman give?

None.

What did she talk about?

The war and breaking into the movies.

Did you notice her resemblance to the Black Dahlia, that murdered girl from a couple of years ago, and if so, what do you think she was trying to prove?

Negative answers and theories: She’s a loony who thinks she’s the Black Dahlia; she’s a hooker cashing in on the Dahlia’s look; she’s a policewoman decoy out to get the Dahlia killer; she’s a crazy woman dying of cancer, trying to attract the Dahlia slasher and cheat the Big C.

I knew the next step was to roust Madeleine’s lovers—but I didn’t trust myself to do it rationally. If they said the wrong thing or the right thing, or pointed me in the wrong/right direction, I knew I couldn’t be held accountable for what I would do.

The four nights of booze, catnaps in the car and couch naps at home with Kay sequestered in the bedroom took their toll on me. At work I dropped slides and mislabeled blood samples, wrote evidence reports in my own exhaustion shorthand and twice fell asleep hunched over a ballistics miscroscope, awakening to jagged shots of Madeleine in black. Knowing I couldn’t hack night five by myself or give it a pass, I stole some Benzedrine tablets awaiting processing for Narcotics Division. They juiced me out of my fatigue and into a clammy feeling of disgust for what I’d been doing to myself—and they gave me a brainstorm to save me from Madeleine/Dahlia and make me a real cop again.

Thad Green nodded along as I plea-bargained him: I had seven years on the Department, my run-in with the Vogels was over two years before and mostly forgotten, I hated working SID and wanted to return to a uniformed division—preferably nightwatch. I was studying for the Sergeant’s Exam, SID had served me well as a training ground for my ultimate goal—the Detective Bureau. I started to launch a tirade on my shitty marriage and how nightwatch would keep me away from my wife, faltering when images of the lady in black hit me and I realized I was close to begging. The Chief of Detectives finally silenced me with a long stare, and I wondered if the dope was betraying me. Then he said, “Okay, Bucky,” and pointed to the door. I waited in the outer office for a Benzedrine eternity; when Green walked out smiling, I almost jumped loose of my skin. “Newton Street nightwatch as of tomorrow,” he said. “And try to be civil with our colored brethren down there. You’ve got a bad case of the yips, and I wouldn’t want you passing it on to them.”

Newton Street Division was southeast of downtown LA, 95 percent slums, 95 percent Negroes, all trouble. There were bottle gangs and crap games on every corner; liquor stores, hair-straightening parlors and poolrooms on every block, code three calls to the station twenty-four hours a day. Footbeat hacks carried metal-studded saps; squadroom dicks packed .45 automatics loaded with un-regulation dum-dums. The local winos drank “Green Lizard”—cologne cut with Old Monterey white port, and the standard pop for a whore was one dollar, a buck and a quarter if you used “her place”—the abandoned cars in the auto graveyard at 56th and Central. The kids on the street were scrawny and bloated, stray dogs sported mange and perpetual snarls, merchants kept shotguns under the counter. Newton Street Division was a war zone.

I reported for duty after twenty-two hours of sack time, booze-weaned off the Benzies. The station commander, an ancient lieutenant named Getchell, supplied a warm welcome, telling me that Thad Green said I was kosher, and he’d accept me as such until I fucked up and proved otherwise. Personally, he hated boxers and stoolies, but he was willing to let bygones be bygones. My fellow officers would probably take some persuading, however; they really hated glory cops, boxers and Bolsheviks, and Fritzie Vogel was warmly remembered from his Newton Street tour years before. The cordial CO assigned me to a single-o foot beat, and I left that initial briefing determined to out-kosher God himself.