I staggered to the corner pay phone, gave it a nickel and dialed my own number. Ten rings, no Kay, WE-4391 without thinking. Her voice: “Hello, Sprague residence.” My stammers; then, “Bucky? Bucky, is that you?” The wino weaving toward me, sucking his bottle with bloody lips. Hands inside my pockets, pulling out bills to throw him, cash on the pavement. “Come over, sweet. The others are down at Laguna. It could be like old—”
I left the receiver dangling and the wino scooping up the better part of my last paycheck. Driving to Hancock Park, I ran, just this one time, just to be inside the house again. Knocking on the door, I had myself convinced. Then Madeleine was there, black silk, upswept coiffure, yellow barrette. I reached for her; she stepped back, pulled her hair loose and let it fall to her shoulders. “No. Not yet. It’s all I have to keep you with.”
IV. Elizabeth
Chapter 29
For a month she held me in a tight velvet fist.
Emmett, Ramona and Martha were spending June at the family’s beach house in Orange County, leaving Madeleine to look after the Muirfield Road estate. We had twenty-two rooms to play in, a dream house built from immigrant ambition. It was a big improvement over the Red Arrow Motel and Lee Blanchard’s monument to bank robbery and murder.
Madeleine and I made love in every bedroom, tearing loose every silk sheet and brocade coverlet, surrounded by Piscassos and Dutch masters and Ming Dynasty vases worth hundreds of grand. We slept in the late mornings and early afternoons before I headed for niggertown; the looks I got from her neighbors when I walked to my car in full uniform were priceless.
It was a reunion of avowed tramps, rutters who knew that they’d never have it as good with anyone else. Madeleine explained her Dahlia act as a strategy to get me back; she had seen me parked in my car that night, and knew that a Betty Short seduction would keep me returning. The desire behind it moved me even as the elaborateness of the ruse elicted revulsion.
She dropped the look the second the door shut that first time. A quick rinse brought her hair back to its normal dark brown, the pageboy cut returned, the tight black dress came off. I tried everything but threats of leaving and begging; Madeleine kept me mollified with “Maybe some day.” Our implicit compromise was Betty talk.
I asked questions, she digressed. We exhausted actual facts quickly; from then on it was pure interpretation.
Madeleine spoke of her utter malleability, Betty the chameleon who would be anyone to please anybody. I had her down as the center of the most baffling piece of detective work the Department had ever seen, the disrupter of most of the lives close to me, the human riddle I had to know everything about. That was my final perspective, and it felt bone shallow.
After Betty, I turned the conversation to the Spragues themselves. I never told Madeleine that I knew Jane Chambers, broaching Jane’s inside stuff in roundabout ways. Madeleine said that Emmett was mildly worried about the forthcoming demolitions up by the Hollywoodland sign; that her mother’s pageantry and love of strange books and medieval lore were nothing but “Hophead stuff—Mama with time on her hands and a snootful of patent medicine.” After a while, she came to resent my probes and demanded turnabout. I told lies and wondered where I would go if my own past was all I had left.
Chapter 30
Pulling up in front of the house, I saw a moving van in the driveway and Kay’s Plymouth, top down, packed with boxes. The run for clean uniforms was turning into something else.
I double-parked and bolted up the steps, smelling Madeleine’s perfume on myself. The van started backing out; I yelled, “Hey! Goddamn it, come back here!”
The driver ignored me; words from the porch kept me from going after him. “I didn’t touch your things. And you can have the furniture.”
Kay was wearing her Eisenhower jacket and tweed skirt, just like when I’d first met her. I said, “Babe,” and started to ask “Why?” My wife counterpunched: “Did you think I’d let my husband vanish for three weeks and do nothing about it? I’ve had detectives following you, Dwight. She looks like that fucking dead girl, so you can have her—not me.”
Kay’s dry eyes and calm voice were worse than what she was saying. I felt shakes coming on, bad heebie-jeebies. “Babe, goddamn it—”
Kay backed out of grabbing range. “Whoremonger. Coward. Necrophile.”
The shakes got worse; Kay turned and made for her car, a deft little pirouette out of my life. I caught another scent of Madeleine and walked into the house.
The bentwood furniture looked the same, but there were no literary quarterlies on the coffee table and no cashmere sweaters folded in the dining room cabinet. The cushions on my couch-bed were neatly arrayed, like I’d never slept there. My phonograph was still by the fireplace, but all Kay’s records were gone.
I picked up Lee’s favorite chair and threw it at the wall; I hurled Kay’s rocker at the cabinet, reducing it to glass rubble. I upended the coffee table and rammed it into the front window, then tossed it out on the porch. I kicked the rugs into sloppy piles, pulled out drawers, tipped over the refrigerator and took a hammer to the bathroom sink, smashing it loose from the pipes. It felt like going ten rounds full blast; when my arms were too limp to inflict more damage I grabbed my uniforms and my silencer .45 and got out, leaving the door open so scavengers could pick the place clean.
With the other Spragues due back in LA anyday, there was only one place to go. I drove to the El Nido, badged the desk clerk and told him he had a new tenant. He forked over an extra room key; seconds later I was smelling Russ Millard’s stale cigarette smoke and Harry Sears’ spilled rye. And I was eyeball to eyeball with Elizabeth Short on all four walls: alive and smiling, dumbstruck with cheap dreams, vivisected in a weedy vacant lot.
And without even saying it to myself, I knew what I was going to do.
I removed the file cases from the bed, stacked them in the closet and ripped off the sheets and blankets. The Dahlia photos were nailed to the wall; it was easy to drape the bedding over them so that they were completely covered. The pad perfect, I went prowling for props.
I found a jet-black upswept wig at Western Costume, a yellow barrette at a dime store on the Boulevard. The heebiejeebies came back—worse than bad. I drove to the Firefly Lounge, hoping it still had Hollywood Vice’s sanction.
One eyeball circuit inside told me it did. I sat down at the bar, ordered a double Old Forester and stared at the girls congregating on a matchbook-size bandstand. Footlights set in the floor shined up at them; they were only thing in the dump illuminated.
I downed my drink. They all looked typical—hophead whores in cheap slit kimonos. Counting five heads, I watched the girls smoke cigarettes and adjust their slits to show more leg. None was anywhere near close.
Then a skinny brunette in a flouncy cocktail dress stepped onto the bandstand. She blinked at the glare, scratched her pert button nose and toed figure eights on the floor.
I hooked a finger at the bartender. He came over with the bottle; I held a palm over my glass. “The girl in the pink. How much to take her to my place for an hour or so?”
The barman sighed. “Mister, we’ve got three rooms here. The girls don’t like—”
I shut him up with a crisp new fifty. “You’re making an exception for me. Be generous with yourself.”
The fifty disappeared, then the man himself. I filled my glass and downed it, eyes on the bartop until I felt a hand on my shoulder.