Meeks opened up a safe built into his desk and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He studied them, then swiveled his chair and spoke to the wall. “I got a tip on Burt Lindscott, a producer at Universal. I got it from a guy who hated Lindscott’s pal Scotty Bennett. Scotty was a pimp and a bookie, and he gave out Lindscott’s home phone number in Malibu to all the good-looking young stuff who applied at the Universal casting office. The Short girl got one of Scotty’s cards, and she called Lindscott.

“The rest, the dates and so forth, I got from Lindscott himself. On the night of January tenth, the girl called from the Biltmore downtown. Burty had her describe herself, and he liked what he heard. He told the girl he’d give her a screen test in the morning, when he got back from a poker session at his club. The girl said she didn’t have any place to go until then, so Lindscott told her to come over and spend the night at his place—his houseboy would feed her and keep her company. She took a bus out to Malibu, and the houseboy—he was queer—did keep her company. Then, the next day around noon, Lindscott and three buddies of his came home drunk.

“The guys thought they’d have some fun, so they gave the girl this screen test, reading from a screenplay Burt had lying around. She was bad, and they laughed her out, then Lindscott made her an offer: service the four of them and he’d give her a bit part in his next picture. The kid was still mad at them for laughing at her screen test, and she threw a tantrum. She called them draft dodgers and traitors and said they weren’t fit to be soldiers. Burt kicked her out around two-thirty that afternoon, Saturday the eleventh. The houseboy said she was broke and that she said she was gonna walk back downtown.”

So Betty walked, or hitched, twenty-five miles downtown, meeting Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby six hours or so later. I said, “Meeks, why didn’t you report this? And look at me.”

Meeks swiveled around; his features were smeared with shame. “I tried to get ahold of Russ and Harry, but they were out in the field, so I called Ellis Loew. He told me not to report what I’d found out, and he threatened to revoke my security clearance. Later on I found out that Lindscott was a Republican bigwig, and he’d promised Loew a bundle for his run at DA. Loew didn’t want him implicated with the Dahlia.”

I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the man; Meeks copped pleas while I ran pictures of Betty hooted at, propositioned, kicked out to die. “Bleichert, I checked out Lindscott and his houseboy and his buddies. These are legit depositions I’ve got—the megillah. None of them could have killed her. They were all at home and at their jobs from the twelfth straight through Friday the seventeenth. None of them could have done it, and I wouldn’t have sat on it if one of the bastards snuffed her. I’ve got the depositions right here, and I’ll show you.”

I opened my eyes; Meeks was twirling the dial of a wall safe. I said, “How much did Loew pay you to keep quiet?”

Meeks blurted, “A grand,” and backed off as if fearing a blow. I loathed him too much to give him the satisfaction of punishment, and left with his price tag hanging in the air.

I now had Elizabeth Short’s missing days halfway filled in:

Red Manley dropped her in front of the Biltmore at dusk on Friday, January tenth; she called Burt Lindscott from there, and her Malibu adventures lasted until 2:30 the following afternoon. She was back at the Biltmore that evening, Saturday the eleventh, met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the lobby, tricked with Johnny until shortly after midnight, then took off. She met Corporal Joseph Dulange then, or later in the morning, at the Night Owl Bar on 6th and Hill—two blocks from the Biltmore. She was with Dulange, there and at the Havana Hotel, until the afternoon or evening of Sunday, January twelfth, when he took her to see his “doctor buddy.”

Driving back to the El Nido, some missing piece of legwork nagged at me through my exhaustion. Passing a phone booth it came to me: if Betty called Lindscott in Malibu—a toll call—there would be a record with Pacific Coast Bell. If she made other toll calls, at that time or on the eleventh, before or after her coupling with Johnny Vogel, P.C.B. would have the information in its records—the company saved tallies of pay phone transactions for cost and price studies.

My fatigue nosedived once more. I took side streets the rest of the way, running stop signs and red lights; arriving, I parked in front of a hydrant and ran up to the room for a notebook. I was heading for the hallway phone when it foiled me by ringing.

“Yes?”

“Bucky? Sweet, is that you?”

It was Madeleine. “Look, I can’t talk to you now.”

“We had a date yesterday, remember?”

“I had to leave town. It was for work.”

“You could have called. If you hadn’t told me about this little hideaway of yours I’d have thought you were dead.”

“Madeleine, Jesus Christ—”

“Sweet, I need to see you. They’re tearing those letters off the Hollywoodland sign tomorrow, and demolishing some bungalows Daddy owns up there. Bucky, the deeds lapsed to the city, but Daddy bought that property and built those places under his own name. He used the worst materials, and an investigator from the City Council has been nosing around Daddy’s tax lawyers. One of them told him this old enemy of his who committed suicide left the Council a brief on Daddy’s holdings and—”

It sounded like gibberish—tough guy Daddy in trouble, tough boy Bucky the second choice for consolation duty. I said, “Look, I can’t talk to you now,” and hung up.

Now it was real detective shitwork. I arrayed my notebook and pen on the ledge by the phone and emptied a four-day accumulation of coins from my pockets, counting close to two dollars—enough for forty calls. First I called the night supervisor at Pacific Coast Bell, requesting a list of all toll and collect calls made from Biltmore Hotel pay phones on the evenings of January 10, 11, and 12, 1947; the names and addresses of the called parties and the times of the calls.

I stood nervously holding the receiver while the woman did her work, shooting dirty looks to other El Nido residents who wanted to use the phone. Then, a half hour later, she came back on the line and started talking.

The Lindscott number and address was there among the 1/10 listings, but nothing else that night registered as hinky. I wrote all the information down anyway; then, when the woman got to the evening of 1/1 1—right around the time Betty met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby—I hit paydirt:

Four toll calls were made to obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills. I took down the names and numbers, along with the numbers for the doctors’ night answering services, and the immediately following toll call listings. They produced no sparks—but I copied them anyway. Then I attacked Beverly Hills with an arsenal of nickels.

It took all my change to get what I wanted.

I told the answering service operators it was a police emergency; they put me through to the doctors at home. They had their secretaries drive to the office to check their back records, then call me at the El Nido. The whole process took two hours. At the end of it I had this:

On the early evening of January 11, 1947, a “Mrs. Fickling” and a “Mrs. Gordon” called a total of four different obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills, requesting appointments for pregnancy testing. The after-hours service operators made appointments for the mornings of January 14 and 15. Lieutenant Joseph Fickling and Major Matt Gordon were two of the war heros Betty dated and pretended to be married to; the appointments were never kept because on the fourteenth she was getting tortured to death; on the fifteenth she was a mutilated pile of flesh at9th and Norton.