The movie dragged on interminably; I shivered from icy sweats. Then the end titles rolled, “Filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A.,” and the “What if’s” fell like tenpins.

I left the theater, shaking from the blast-oven heat outside. I saw that I’d left the El Nido without either my service revolver or off-duty .45, took side streets back and grabbed the handcannon. Then I heard, “Hey, fella. Are you Officer Bleichert?”

It was the next-door tenant, standing in the hallway holding the phone at the end of its cord. I made a running grab for it, blurting, “Russ?”

“It’s Harry. I’m up at the end of B-B-Beachwood Drive. They’re tearing down a b-bunch of b-bungalows, and t-t-this patrolman f-f-found t-this shack all b-b-b-bloodstained. T-T-There was an FI card filed up here on the twelfth and th-th-thirtenth and I-I-I—”

And Emmett Sprague owned property up there; and it was the first time I’d heard Harry stutter in the afternoon. “I’ll bring my evidence kit. Twenty minutes.”

I hung up, took the Betty Short print abstract from the file and ran down to the car. Traffic had slackened; in the distance I could see the Hollywoodland sign missing it’s last two letters. I hauled east to Beachwood Drive, then north. As I approached the park area that bordered Mount Lee, I saw that all the excitement was contained behind ropes guarded by a cordon of bluesuits; double-parking, I glimpsed Harry Sears walking over, badge pinned to his coat front.

His breath was now rife with liquor, the stutter gone. “Jesus Christ, what a piece of luck. This foot hack was assigned to clear out the vagrants before they started the demolitions. He stumbled onto the shack and came down and got me. It looks like tramps have been in and out since ‘47, but maybe you could still forensic it.”

I grabbed my evidence kit; Harry and I walked uphill. Wrecking crews were tearing down bungalows on the street paralleling Beachwood, the workers shouting about gas leaking from pipes. Fire trucks stood by, hoses manned and pointed at huge rubble heaps. Bulldozers and earthmovers were lined up on the sidewalks, with patrolmen shepherding the locals out of potential harm’s way. And up ahead of us, vaudeville reigned.

A system of pulleys was attached to the face of Mount Lee, supported by high scaffolding sunk into the ground at its base. The “A” of Hollywoodland, some fifty feet high, was sliding down a thick wire while cameras rolled, photographs snapped, rubberneckers gawked and political types drank champagne. Dust from uprooted scrub bushes was everywhere; the Hollywood High School band sat in folding chairs on a jerry-built bandstand a few feet from the pulley wire’s terminus. When the letter “A” crashed to the dirt, they struck up “Hooray for Hollywood.”

Harry said, “This way.” We veered off on a dirt hiking trail circling the foot of the mountain. Dense foliage pressed in from both sides; Harry took the lead, walking sideways on a footpath pointing straight up the slope. I followed, scrub bushes snagging my clothes and brushing my face. After fifty uphill yards, the path leveled off into a small clearing fronted by a shallow stream of running water. And there was a tiny, pillbox-style cinderblock hut, the door standing wide open.

I walked in.

The side walls were papered with pornographic photographs of crippled and disfigured women. Mongoloid faces sucking dildoes, nudie girls with withered and brace-clad legs spread wide, limbless atrocities leering at the camera. There was a mattress on the floor; it was caked with layers and layers of blood. Bugs and flies were laced throughout the crust, stuck there as they feasted themselves to death. The back wall held tacked-on color photos that looked like they were torn from anatomy texts: close-up shots of diseased organs oozing blood and pus. There were spray and spatter marks on the floor; a small spotlight attached to a tripod was stationed beside the mattress, the light fixture aimed at the center of it. I wondered about electricity, then examined the gizmo’s base and saw a battery hook-up. A blood-sprayed stack of books rested in one corner—mostly science fiction novels, with Gray’s Advanced Anatomy and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs standing out among them.

“Bucky?”

I turned around. “Go get ahold of Russ. Tell him what we’ve got. I’ll do a forensic here.”

“Russ won’t get back from Tucson till tomorrow. And kid, you don’t look too healthy to me right—”

“Goddamn it, get out of here and let me do this!”

Harry stormed out, spitting crushed pride; I thought of the proximity to Sprague property and dreamer Georgie Tilden, bum shack dweller, son of a famous Scottish anatomist. “Really? A man with a medical background?” Then I opened up my kit and raped the nightmare crib for evidence.

First I examined it top to bottom. Aside from obviously recent mud tracks—Harry’s tramps probably—I found narrow strands of rope under the mattress. I scraped what looked like abraded flesh particles off them; I filled up another test tube with blood-matted dark hair taken from the mattress. I checked the blood crust for different color shadings, saw that it was a uniform maroon and took a dozen samples. I tagged and packed the rope away, along with the anatomy pages and smut pictures. I saw a man’s bootprint, blood-outlined, on the floor, measured it and traced the sole treads onto a sheet of transparent paper.

Next it was fingerprints.

I dusted every touch, grab and press surface in the room; I dusted the few smooth spines and glossy pages in the books on the floor. The books yielded only streaks; the other surfaces brought up smudges, glove marks and two separate and distinct sets of latents. Finishing, I took a pen and circled the smaller digits on the door, doorjamb and wall molding by the mattress headboard. Then I got out my magnifying glass and Betty Short’s print blow-up and made comparisons.

One identical point;

Two;

Three—enough for a courtroom.

Four, five, six, my hands shaking because this was unimpeachably where the Black Dahlia was butchered, shaking so hard I couldn’t transfer the other set of latents to plates. I hacked a four-digit spread off the door with my knife and wrapped it in tissue—forensic amateur night. I packed up my kit, tremble-walked outside, saw the running water and knew that was where the killer drained the body. Then a strange flash of color by some rocks next to the stream caught my eye.

A baseball bat—the business end stained dark maroon.

I walked to the car thinking of Betty alive, happy, in love with some guy who’d never cheat on her. Passing through the park, I looked up at Mount Lee. The sign now read just Hollywood; the band was playing, “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

I drove downtown. The LA city personnel office and the office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service were closed for the day. I called R&I and got goose egg on Scotland-born George Tildens—and I knew I’d go crazy if I waited overnight to make the print confirmation. It came down to calling in a superior officer, breaking and entering or bribery.

Remembering a janitor cleaning up outside the personnel office, I tried number three. The old man heard my phony story out, accepted my double-sawbuck, unlocked the door and led me to a bank of filing cabinets. I opened a drawer marked CITY PROPERTY CUSTODIAL—PART-TIME, got out my magnifying glass and powder-dusted piece of wood—and held my breath.

Tilden, George Redmond, born Aberdeen, Scotland,/4/1896. 5 foot 11, 185 pounds, brown hair, green eyes. No address, listed as “Transient—contact for work thru E. Sprague, WE4391.” California Driver’s license # LA 68224, vehicle: 1939 Ford pickup, license 6B119A, rubbish-hauling territory Manchester to Jefferson, La Brea to Hoover—39th and Norton right in the middle of it. Left- and right-hand fingerprints at the bottom of the page; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine matching comparison points—three for a conviction, six more for a one-way to the gas chamber. Hello, Elizabeth.