“Where was this?”

“At the Yorkshire House Bar, 6th and Olive Streets, near my office.”

“Go on.”

“Well, that was the Thursday or Friday before Miss Short’s demise. I gave Corporal Dulange my card—injudiciously, as it turned out—and I assumed that I would never see the man again. Sadly, I was wrong.

“I was in poor shape financially at that time, owing to the ponies, and I was living in my office. On the early evening of Sunday, January twelfth, Corporal Dulange showed up at my door with a lovely young woman named Beth in tow. He was quite drunk, and he took me aside, pressed ten dollars into my hand and told me lovely Beth was hipped on being pregnant. Would I please give her a quick examination and tell her it was so?

“Well, I obliged. Corporal Dulange waited in my outer office, and I took lovely Beth’s pulse and blood pressure and informed her that yes indeed, she was pregnant. Her response was quite strange: she seemed sad and relieved at the same time. My interpretation was that she needed a reason to justify her obvious promiscuity, and child bearing seemed like the ticket.”

I sighed. “And when her death became news, you didn’t go to the police because you didn’t want them nosing around your dope racket?”

“Yes, that’s correct. But there’s more. Beth asked to use my phone. I acceded, and she dialed a number with a Webster prefix and asked to speak to Marcy. She said, ‘It’s Betty,’ and listened for a while, then said, ‘Really? A man with a medical background?’ I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, and Beth hung up and said, ‘I’ve got a date.’ She joined Corporal Dulange in my waiting room, and they left. I looked out the window, and she was giving him the brush-off. Corporal Dulange stormed away, and Beth walked across 6th Street and sat down at the westbound Wilshire Boulevard bus stop. That was about seven-thirty, Sunday the twelfth. There. You didn’t know that last part, did you?”

I finished up my shorthand version of it. “No, I didn’t.”

“Will you tell the Parole Board that I gave you a valuable clue?”

Patchett opened the door. “He’s clean, Bleichert.”

“No shit,” I said.

Another piece of Betty’s missing days revealed; another trip back to the El Nido, this time to check the master file for Webster prefix phone numbers. Going through the paperwork, I kept thinking that the Spragues had a Webster number, the Wilshire bus passed within a couple of blocks of their place and Roach’s “Marcy” could be a mistaken “Maddy” or “Martha.” It didn’t follow logically—the whole family was down at their Laguna beach house the week of Betty’s disappearance, Roach was certain about the “Marcy” and I had squeezed every ounce of Dahlia knowledge out of Madeleine.

Still, the thought simmered, like some buried part of me wanted to hurt the family for the way I’d rolled in the gutter with their daughter and sucked up to their wealth. I threw out another hook to keep it going; it fell flat when confronted with logic:

When Lee Blanchard disappeared in ‘47, his “R,” “S” and “T” files were missing; maybe the Sprague file was among them.

But there was no Sprague file, Lee did not know that the Spragues existed, I kept everything pertaining to them away from him out of a desire to keep Madeleine’s lesbian bar doings under wraps.

I continued skimming the file, sweating in the hot, airless room. No Webster prefixes appeared, and I started getting nightmare flashes: Betty sitting on the westbound Wilshire bus stop, 7:30 P.M., 1/12/47, waving bye-bye Bucky, about to jump into eternity. I thought about querying the bus company, a general rousting of drivers on that route—then realized it was too cold, that any driver who remembered picking up Betty would have come forward during all the ‘47 publicity. I thought of calling the other numbers I’d gotten from Pacific Coast Bell—then jacked that chronologically they were off—they didn’t jibe with my new knowledge of where Betty was at what time. I called Russ at the Bureau and learned that he was still in Tucson, while Harry was working crowd control up by the Hollywoodland sign. I finished my paper prowl, with a total of zero Webster prefixes. I thought of yanking Roach’s P.C.B file, fixing the notion immediately. Downtown LA, Madison prefix to Webster, was not a toll call—there would be no record, ditto on the Biltmore listings.

It came on then, big and ugly: bye-bye Bleichert at the bus stop, adios shitbird, has-been, never-was, stool pigeon niggertown harness bull. You traded a good woman for skunk pussy, you’ve turned everything that’s been handed you to pure undiluted shit, your “I will’s” amount to the eighth round at the Academy gym when you stepped into a Blanchard right hand—pratfalling into another pile of shit, clover that you turned to horse dung. Bye-bye Betty, Beth, Betsy, Liz, we were a couple of tramps, too bad we didn’t meet before9th and Norton, it just might have worked, maybe us would’ve been the one thing we wouldn’t have fucked up past redemption—

I bolted downstairs, grabbed the car and rolled code three civilian, peeling rubber and grinding gears, wishing I had red lights and siren to sanction me faster. Passing Sunset and Vine, traffic got bottlenecked: shitloads of cars turning north on Gower and Beachwood. Even from miles away I could see the Hollywoodland sign dripping with scaffolding, scores of antlike people climbing up the face of Mount Lee. The lull in movement calmed me down, gave me a destination.

I told myself it wasn’t over, that I’d drive to the Bureau and wait for Russ, that with two of us we’d put the rest of it together, that all I had to do was get downtown.

The traffic jam got worse—film trucks were shooting straight north while motorcycle bulls held back east- and westbound vehicles. Kids walked the lanes hawking plastic Hollywoodland sign souvenirs and passing out handbills. I heard, “Keystone Kops at the Admiral! Air-cooled! See the great new revival!” A piece of paper was shoved in my face, the printed “Keystone Kops,” “Mack Sennett” and “Deluxe Air-Cooled Admiral Theatre” barely registering, the photo on the bottom registering hugely loud and wrong, like your own scream.

Three Keystone Kops were standing between pillars shaped like snakes swallowing each other’s tails; a wall inset with Egyptian hieroglyphics was behind them. A flapper girl was lying on a tufted divan in the right-hand corner of the picture. It was unmistakably the background that appeared in the Linda Martin/Betty Short stag film.

I made myself sit still; I told myself that just because Emmett Sprague knew Mack Sennett in the ‘20s and had helped him build sets in Edendale, this didn’t mean that he had anything to do with a 1946 smut film. Linda Martin had said the movie was shot in Tijuana; the still unfound Duke Wellington admitted making it. When traffic started moving, I hung a quick left up to the Boulevard and ditched the car; when I bought my ticket at the Admiral box office the girl recoiled from me—and I saw that I was hyperventilating and rank with sweat.

Inside, the air-conditioning froze that sweat, so that my clothes felt like an ice dressing. Final credits were rolling on the screen, replaced immediately by new opening ones, superimposed on papier máché pyramids. I balled my fists when “Emmett Sprague, Assistant Director,” flashed; I held my breath for a title that said where the thing was shot. Then a printed prologue came on, and I settled into an aisle seat to watch.

The story was something about the Keystone Kops transplanted to biblical days; the action was chases and pie throwing and kicks in the ass. The stag film set recurred several times, confirmed by more details each showing. The exterior shots looked like the Hollywood Hills, but there were no outside-inside scenes to pin down whether the set was in a studio or a private dwelling. I knew what I was going to do, but I wanted another hard fact to buttress all the logical “What if’s” that were stacking up inside me.