Tommy shook his head. “No. But that was when Beth became so loose with servicemen. She thought they were her saviors, that they could give her a child, a little girl to be a great actress in case she never made it. It’s sad, but the only place I heard Beth was a great actress was in bed.”

I stood up. “What happened with you and Beth then?”

“We lost touch. She left Medford.”

“You’ve given me a good lead, Tommy. Thanks.”

The blind man tapped his cane at the sound of my voice. “Then get who did it, but don’t let Beth get hurt anymore.”

“I won’t.”

Chapter 32

The Short case was hot again—if only with me.

Hours of Medford pub crawling gave me promiscuous Betty, East Coast style—a big anticlimax after Tommy Gilfoyle’s revelations. I caught a midnight flight back to LA and called Russ Millard from the airport. He agreed: Frenchman Joe’s “roach doctor” was probably legit, independent of Dulange’s DTs. He proposed a call to the Fort Dix CID to try to get more details from the discharged loony, then a three-man canvassing of downtown doctor’s offices, concentrating on the area around the Havana Hotel, where Dulange coupled with Betty. I suggested that the “doctor” was most likely a barfly, an abortionist or a quack; Russ concurred. He said he would talk to R&I and his snitches, and he and Harry Sears would be knocking on doors inside of an hour. We divvied up the territory: Figueroa to Hill, 6th Street to 9th Street for me; Figueroa to Hill, 5th to 1st for them. I hung up and drove straight downtown.

I stole a Yellow Pages and made a list: legitimate MD’s and chiropractors, herb pushers and mystics—bloodsuckers who sold religion and patent medicine under the “doctor” aegis. The book had a few listings for obstetricians and gynocologists, but instinct told me that Joe Dulange’s doctor ploy was happenstance—not the result of his consciously seeking a specialist to calm Betty down. Running on adrenaline, I worked.

I caught most of the doctors early in their day, and got the widest assortment of sincere denials I’d ever encountered as a cop. Every solid citizen croaker I talked to convinced me a little bit more that Frenchy’s pal had to be at least a little bit hinky. After a wolfed sandwich lunch, I hit the quasi types.

The herb loonies were all Chinese; the mystics were half women, half squarejohn lames. I believed all of their bewildered no’s; I pictured all of them too terrified by the Frenchman to consider his offer. I was about to start hitting bars for scuttlebutt on barfly docs when exhaustion hit me. I drove “home” to the El Nido and slept—for all of twenty minutes.

Too itchy to try sleep again, I tried thinking logically. It was 6:00, doctors’ offices were closing for the day, the bars wouldn’t be ripe for canvassing for at least three hours. Russ and Harry would call me if they got something hot. I reached for the master file and started reading.

Time flew; names, dates and locations in police jargon kept me awake. Then I saw something that I’d perused a dozen times before, only this time it seemed off.

It was two memo slips:

With Betty’s movie mania fresh in my mind, the memos looked different. I remembered Russ telling me that he was going to query Meeks, the Hughes security boss and the Department’s “unofficial liaison” to the Hollywood community; I recalled that this was during the time when Ellis Loew was suppressing evidence on Betty’s promiscuity in order to secure himself a better prosecuting attorney’s showcase. Also: Betty’s little black book listed a number of lower-echelon movie people—names that were checked out during the ‘47 black book interrogations.

The big question:

If Meeks really had checked around, why didn’t he come up with at least a few of the black book names and forward them to Russ and Harry?

I went out to the hall, got the Hughes Security number from the White Pages and dialed it. A singsong woman answered: “Security. May I help you?”

“Buzz Meeks, please.”

“Mr. Meeks is out of his office right now. Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Detective Bleichert, LAPD. When will he be back?”

“When the budget meeting breaks up. May I ask what this is in reference to?”

“Police business. Tell him I’ll be at his office in half an hour.” I hung up and leadfooted it to Santa Monica in twenty-five minutes. The gate guard admitted me to the plant parking lot, pointing to the security office—a Quonset hut at the end of a long string of aircraft hangars. I parked and knocked on the door; the woman with the singsong voice opened it. “Mr. Meeks said you should wait in his office. He won’t be very long.”

I walked in; the woman left, looking relieved that her day’s work was over. The hut was wallpapered with paintings of Hughes aircraft, military art on a par with the drawings on cereal boxes. Meeks’ office was better decorated: photos of a burly crewcut man with various Hollywood hotshots—actresses I couldn’t place by name along with George Raft and Mickey Rooney.

I took a seat. The burly man showed up a few minutes later, hand out automatically, like someone whose job was ninety-five percent public relations. “Hello there. Detective Blyewell, is it?”

I stood up. We shook; I could tell that Meeks was put off by my two-day clothes and three-day beard. “It’s Bleichert.”

“Of course. What can I do for you?”

“I have a few questions about an old case you helped Homicide out with.”

“I see. You’re with the Bureau, then?”

“Newton Patrol.”

Meeks sat down behind his desk. “A little out of your bailiwick, aren’t you? And my secretary said you were a detective.”

I closed the door and leaned against it. “This is personal with me.”

“Then you’ll top out your twenty rousting nigger piss bums. Or hasn’t anyone told you that cops who take things personal end up from hunger?”

“They keep telling me, and I keep telling them that’s my hometown. You fuck a lot of starlets, Meeks?”

“I fucked Carole Lombard. I’d give you her number, but she’s dead.”

“Did you fuck Elizabeth Short?”

Tilt, bingo, jackpot, lie detector perfect as Meeks flushed and fingered the papers on his blotter; a wheezing voice to back it up: “You catch a few too many in the Blanchard fight? The Short cooze is dead.”

I pulled back my jacket to show Meeks the .45 I was carrying. “Don’t call her that again.”

“All right, tough guy. Now suppose you tell me what you want. Then we settle up and end this little charade before it gets out of hand. Comprende?”

“In ‘47, Harry Sears asked you to query your movie contacts on Betty Short. You reported back that it was a washout. You were lying. Why?”

Meeks picked up a letter opener. He ran a finger along the blade, saw what he was doing and put it down. “I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did.”

“Convince me, or I call up Hedda Hopper and give her tomorrow’s column. How’s this sound: ‘Hollywood hanger-on suppressed Dahlia evidence because blank, blank, blank’? You fill in those blanks for me, or I fill them in for Hedda. Comprende?”

Meeks gave bravado another try. “Bleichert, you are fucking with the wrong man.”

I pulled out the .45, made sure the silencer was on tight and slid a round into the chamber. “No, you are.”

Meeks reached for a decanter on the sideboard by his desk; he poured himself a bracer and gulped it. “What I got was a dead-end lead, but you can have it if you want it so bad.”

I dangled my gun by the trigger guard. “From hunger, shitbird. So give it to me.”