Private Eyes



A fiction inspired by true events, and with Acknowledgements due to the true crime works of two authors, Severed by John Gilmore; and The Black Dahlia Files by Donald H. Wolfe

CHAPTER ONE
Dilo!
--
When Bright Eyes and I first took up digs together, it was in an apartment not a five minute walk from the imposing alabaster façade of the Florentine Gardens, a night club with intimate associations to the infamous matters that are here soon to be disclosed. Our place, De Mille Manor, two blocks west of the Gardens along Hollywood boulevard and up a couple more on North Argyle, was itself quite the vintage stuff of classic Jazz Age flair, what with the spaciousness it afforded, from no more than one room with bath and kitchenette, stove and Frigidaire.

Or was it optical illusion, that sense of space; a trick in the architect's lines, deftly drawn to tease the eye toward a vanishing point of Grand Hotel scope by that ten foot vault from floor to ceiling? It's quite like what they did for the Florentine Gardens, with those Grecian columns of the Ionic style--in bas relief. Illusion! Ever so much a part of this Ralph Edwards dream called This is Your Life. And the windows--what windows! I speak once again of windows, with casements so tall that a person could go bankrupt just trying to hang some curtains or drapes.

But the view was swell, of the palms, of the courtyard across the way, and the sage brush growing rife from cracks in the bottom of the swimming pool. The place had a lot of that wonderfully decadent Hollywood atmosphere, or 'ambiance' you might even say, what with the faux European palatial splendor of it all; our concierge up in the front apartment ever keeping a watchful eye on things, he and his unnervingly flirtatious wife, those two with their spooky weekly Satanist Sabbaoth meetings up on the second floor. And what's more? Romeo and Juliet! Next door, in the bungalow court with their howling midnight agonies of love unquenchable, waking all the dogs and stray Cahuenga Canyon coyotes to high dudgeon, setting the termites and the cucarachas to an all night fiesta of the Mexican Hat Dance behind the plaster that came down on our heads . . .

It was just our little piece of paradise over there only one block east of Vine street and we were happy to have it, even if our entire suite of furniture at first consisted only of the Murphy bed, which, once it was swung out and down from behind the double doors to the floor also served very well--with a flattened cardboard box--for a dining room table, and so long as you had a couple of suitcases up-ended and drawn up close for chairs, you had it good.

You understand how it was, what with every penny the two of us had saved over the past few years having gone into the fund for renting and furnishing the office, why then the creaturely comforts of home and hearth just simply have to be put on hold. The office, and the agency of the two of us was everything, and it couldn't be handier, right within easy walking distance a few blocks down Vine Street.

Our clientele would soon begin to show up, of this we were sure, due to all the dough we'd put into advertising, with the match-books and cocktail glass coasters boasting our distinctive logo with the "Private Eyes" caught as a reflection in a pair of dark glasses. They tried to sell us the swizzle sticks to go with the rest of those favors but Bright Eyes said we'd have to put the foot down somewhere, and we did. Still, there was hardly a cocktail lounge on Hollywood boulevard where our firm was not lighting your cigarette or soaking up some of your scotch and water while we gaily waited for those calls to start coming in.

So that was good; we'd soon be able to afford a sofa for me to sleep on. That's right, Bright Eyes had the bed, not me. We were not living as man and wife, nor for that matter, "in" (what they call) "sin" like monkeys in the zoo, or perverts in the park. That's just not the way it was with Bright Eyes and I. Because here was a guy and gal who had known each other from the cradle and play-pen, growing up together as the second cousins which we were, like brother and sister. As a couple of merry 'rug-rats', so described, we came scrambling together into the world up out of the charge of doting parents to the day we'd put down first and last month's rent, plus a security deposit on that Argyle street crib--together.

It should not, in view of this be so hard to understand just how it was between us, Bright Eyes and I, such that the very idea of getting it on with each other in *that way* was enough to--well, see for yourself . . .

Bright Eyes will say, "Can you imagine it, though, Johnny?"

"What?" I must wonder.

"Doing it to me?"

And then, with my breathlessness allowing me no chance to speak, her eyes are grown wide as two Blue Willow saucers. "Eeeeeeee!" she'll be screaming; her teeth clenched and gleaming as she mounts to ride me piggy-back, making as if to lose her breakfast all over my head.

It's just real hard to explain the way it is when you grow up together like that, a guy and gal, as buddies and pals, how it makes the whole idea of the erotic between you . . . well, less than just superfluous, but just sort of . . . violently subliminal.


By the time 1974 had rolled around, we were both approaching our mid-twenties, and weren't horsing around out on the lawn or on the street, throwing up on each other like that so much anymore, and most especially ever since that time we got shown the door at Musso & Frank's for it. But I still say, and Bright Eyes agrees completely, that if it hadn't been for that big bruising butch babe in an Elvis haircut who came over to punch me out for "woman abuse" I doubt that we ever would have paid any attention to how other people might look at it.

So, that's just a lot of strawberry soda over the fountain, or frozen daiquiris over the igloo, as they say. And it just serves to bring us right along to the crux of the whole thing, which is the way we happened to get involved in the infamous business of which I am about to tell . . .



CHAPTER TWO
Bright Eyes and I
--
It had been about two weeks since we'd finally been able to dig up something in the way of a sofa to fill some of that space around the Murphy bed at DeMille Manor--and . . . but, Cecil B.? The same, as indeed the place was built by said grand mogul of the movies to purpose of holding back an ever-looming depression era Red Sea of expenses for some of the up-and-comers in his legions of screen talent--but where were we? The sofa. Right. Finally, we had a sofa!

Not many days later, of a warm Sunday autumn afternoon, we were out for one of our leisurely walks off across the town, strolling westward under the towering palms of Yucca street. And if it should be that we were harboring hopes deep within the holy of holies of our heart of hearts, that given a wink from Dame Fortune, we'd come upon a couple of chairs to match the sofa, just as we'd found it, sitting out on a curb, on just such a street--then who would be first to deny that stranger, more arcane things have enlivened the hopes of the ever hopeful? And seeing that it wasn't really so much a couch as a loveseat we'd found that day, then having a chair to shove up next to it would be just the thing to get me good and stretched out for a decent night's sleep for a change. It was not too much to ask from a town like this of so many gilded old fortunes, if even, from so close at hand as just a few blocks west of Cahuenga, where suddenly, what to our wondering eyes should we behold but utterly the loveliest curb-borne bounty of "another man's treasure" in a great heap the likes of which only the wildest dreams of a Hollywood bag-lady are made of . . .

Walking reverently up to it, Bright Eyes said, "Gee, Johnny."

"Woo," I marveled. I looked around to check if we were being watched. And seeing there was no one who seemed to care less, I took a step closer, toward something that glowed with a soft antique patina in the late afternoon sun. With a sheen of gold it lay in folds that crested over the top of a large cardboard box. I moved to touch it, then to feel my hand being enswathed by a sleek smoothness so rare to be felt that I just had to say to Bright Eyes, "It looks like the real deluxe stuff."

She had come down to a knee, pulling the fabric forth into her arms. She shot a look up at me and then further upward at the building above us. "Somebody real fancy up there had the luxury to drop dead with something like these on her windows." Her eyes flashed to mine: "Do you realize, babe, that this is pure silk?"

Of a certainty, I'd no idea, and much as I enjoyed the sense of her awe becoming one with mine, something else had caught my eye, something of a metallic glint flashing from the pile. I was letting the rich stuff whisper back down through my hand when I heard a squeal: I had draped my dear girl's head in golden silk, which, as she arose, flowed off over her shoulders to fall away and reveal her as a newly sculpted marble Venus--holding a hatbox. "Just look!" she breathed. It was of black velvet for the cover, over a burgundy-rose red satin for the rounded case. Gently, she was shaking it. "It's got stuff inside," she declared.

It was all just too much, such riches! I held in my hands none but the smoothest looking Martini shaker and matching seltzer bottle you'd ever want to see; both vintage Art Deco. And there was ever more that yet waited to be revealed for the stuff that was under the stuff!

Bright Eyes was motioning me over where she had bent down to a knee. "Look what I found, Johnny!" She held a pair of fairly common looking salt and pepper shakers, and saw I'd no idea of what I was looking at. "It's pink Depression Glass, dummy!" I was trying to think of the best words to defend my idiocy, when she interrupted my train of thought. "My God!" she said, still rummaging. "Here's an antique Peek-Frean biscuit tin, and . . . boxes full of old letters or something, who knows what all!" She was down to both knees and scrambling around the heap like some pious penitent on the Via Dolorosa.

I was putting that fancy cocktail set back when I heard, "Holy Cow!"

I turned to look and saw two more finely adorned, very jazzy hat boxes, one hexagonal, the other round, held up in her fingers by their strings. She set one down and came to her feet with the other. As I approached, she handed that to me. "Unh!" I remarked. "You'd be pounded down into a dwarf with this for a hat." I started to open it, but she stopped me.

"Not now," she said, taking it back. She crooked a finger at me. "Co'mere." I followed her around the stuff till she stopped to set the hat box down, and came back up displaying the length of truly the most sumptuous men's garment; a robe of deep red wool Gabardine with lapel of maroon, and a fringed sash to put the sensibilities of even a Noel Coward to shame. Out from behind that, she produced in her hands a pair of tan, soft-leather, fancy men's "opera slippers" of a style you don't hardly see anywhere but on the feet of Nick Charles in The Thin Man--William Powell or no William Powell. She pressed it all, robe and slippers both into my arms saying, "For all we know, these belonged to Gershwin." She saw that I looked skeptical as she was yet trying to hand them to me against some resistance.

"Well? Is this Hollywood, or not?"

With thumb and forefingers, I took the slippers from her hands.

"I tell ya, Johnny, *Rhapsody in Blue* was composed in those. Treasure them!"

"Okay, but shouldn't we . . . ?"

"Oh fuss! You never heard of Dr. Scholl's anti-fungus spray?"

I was taking a few gingerly sniffs of a slipper, when like a shot in the park from a mugger in the dark, I was grabbed by the arm. "Say!" she said, her eyes arcing their emerald fire into mine, "How fast you think you can hoof it back to DeMille Manor and get the car?"

"Oh . . ." I looked back down the avenue.

"But on second thought, don't think, darling, it'll take you too long. Move!"

"But . . ."

"I'll stay here and guard the stash." She gave me a push. "You just go!"

I was gone.

It was six city blocks, including a couple of big concrete islands at the approaches to the overpass of Highway 101 between that spot near North Cherokee and home on Argyle. At the pace of a brisk trot, it took all of fifteen minutes till I'd got to the lot at DeMille Manor and had the door of our bronze Mustang open. Sliding into a cocoa-crème Naugahyde bucket seat, I was ready to ride. Ten minutes is what it took to get back to the scene of the heist, due to the way I had to go one block further, so as to come back on the south side of the street. I threw the floor-shift into Park, leaned over to spring the passenger side door and with the engine running, sprinted around to pull forward the front seat. Bright Eyes was already coming with the first arm-load.

Once we had it all stashed in back, upon a scream of smoking rubber, we were off into the traffic to merge with the ever surging stream. "Strike up the bank job music, Baby!" I shouted as I brought a red hot lighter coil to the tip of my Lucky Strike. With a big slutty grin she jammed an 8-track tape of "Stompin' at the Savoy" home to the dash. And you never saw no two-door Ford Mustang ever do the Lindy Hop to Benny Goodman so fine, as we killer-dillered it across the intersection of Yucca and Vine.

Getting the loot past the Satanic concierge and his ember-eyed wife was the tricky part. They were the kind of people who always want to know what somebody has got in their stuff. They are the type to come right out and go like, "Hey! Where did you get all that?" So, the last thing you ever want to tell them is you found it in a pile on the sidewalk, because then they figure it's share and share alike. So they might as well dig in and get what's coming to them.

"So where'd you get it?" asked Darryl, as he and Melinda got around in front of us while we tried to make our way down the corridor with the second load. The cute little thing in her faded old pink print blouse, her bangs all a-bounce over her brow already had her hands in those drapes.

Bright Eyes flipped me a wink, as she said, "We inherited it."

"Omigod!" Melinda's forearm bumped up from beneath her bulbous bounty of explicitly bra-less boobs, trying for another feel of those satiny drapes. "Who croaked?"

"A distant relative," I proffered, whilst digging out my keys.

"Very distant, but very dear," said Bright Eyes, thinking undoubtedly of the distance we'd be removed as relatives to the deceased on the family tree for the Descent of Man. No sooner had I got the door cracked than Bright Eyes slipped in with her arm-load, leaving me alone to face the heavy metal music. I looked at Darryl's black t-shirt with the deep purple logo of a goat-face under the legend that said in blood dripping red, "Satan Wants You."

"Well," I said, "It was a thrill running into you guys again, but . . ."

"Yeah, I know," said Melinda, "You're pretty fancy, you two."

"No . . .no way!" I said, handing off my load to Bright Eyes. "Just busy right now, but let's the four of us go out for dinner some night. What do you say?"

"You buying?" asked Darryl, scratching his goat.

"Soon as we possibly, possibly can," I promised while waving and slowly closing the door.

"I like the hot beef sandwich, Man. And cherry pie a la mode for dessert!" So was the final pronouncement of Melinda as the latch clicked. I stood, waiting for the sound of their feet thudding in the corridor, before I threw the deadbolt, and turned to feast my eyes upon the heap of stuff on the floor.


CHAPTER THREE
Stuff!
--
"Say! Aren't you the cat's pajamas?" She stood back a little, still tucking the folds of a silky red-violet with black diamonds ascot behind the lapel of that 40's vintage gabardine lounging robe she had on me.

"Well, I don't know, really." I said, looking down over myself, all the way down to those too fancy for words opera slippers which--pending any scandal or gossip I might dig up from Hedda Hopper by library microfiche, on Gershwin and athlete's foot--would be worn with two pair of stockings, just as I had on. I looked back up to Bright Eyes, to the red-netted lady's porkpie she had just finished setting at a rakish angle over the blonde waves of her hair.

She posed. "How do I look?"

"Like a million, baby. What did you suppose?"

"Listen, buster!" She said, "I don't know about you, but first thing tomorrow, I'm going out to comb every thrift store on Melrose till I can find one of those nice tailored suits, you know . . ."

"A la Veronica Lake, with the padded shoulders!"

"See if I don't!"

I'd been carefully inserting a cigarette into the long ebony-handled holder I'd found rattling around in the bottom of one of those boxes. "But what, dear girl, do you suggest we use for the shopping money?"

"Are you kidding?" She had gone to her knees, digging around till she'd turned around with that pair of pink depression glass salt shakers. "I could buy two or three of those suits for the moolah we'll get out of these, Cousin. Just leave everything to me."

"Well . . ."

"Sure!" She jumped up, came over and took me by the chin. "Don't you want your little ol' Bright Eyes to be the most stylish looking private eye in town, Baby?"

"Well . . ."

After a quick peck to the tip of my schnoz she said, "Sure you do!" She gestured toward the loveseat. "Now you just sit down, Sweet, enjoy your cigarette, lounging around in your lounging robe and slippers while I see what more we can find in this all too marvy hoard of stuff!" She shot a finger suddenly straight into the air. "In fact, do sit down!" She gave me a shove, right along with no choice in the matter, and as the springs in the loveseat beneath my buns still sung, I watched her clicking across the room in her brand new, but pretty old, peep-toed, ankle-strapped patent leather Norma Shearer era sandals. Passing through the archway into the dinette she said, "I'm just going to mix you a wee Martini. Don't argue!" She had disappeared from sight, her voice gaining an echo: "I know it's not the weekend, but if ever we had cause to celebrate, it's tonight, Johnny-Boy."

What could I do? Through all these times now gone past two decades of being forever together, in bassinette, play-pen and the sand-box, her every wish remained to my command.


CHAPTER FOUR
Vaseline Green
--
No sooner had Bright Eyes brought me that Martini all freshly a-fizz from her classy 'new' silver-plate shaker, than she was down to her knees and back at the pile of stuff. It was swell just to be lounging there with my drink and my cigarette so elegantly fitted to its holder, and as I live and breathe (and sometimes cough nearly to death) I was thinking how grand it would be to have something other than a tuna can for an ashtray, when what should my dear girl come whirling about with, to have glittering in her hand but just that--an ashtray! I caught it on the slide over the hardwood floor.

"Say!" I said.

"Check it out," said she.

It was of depression era glass, the particularly eye enthralling blend of hues known as 'Vaseline Green'.

"Oo--ee!" I said, so commonly as I did, in expression of my kind of appreciation. Turning it in hand, I soon saw that it was stolen goods. "What's the Florentine Gardens?" I asked.

She was thumbing through one of those shoeboxes full of envelopes when she paused to settle back on her heels. "Florentine . . ." she blew a blonde curl away from one eye and squinted the other. "I've seen that on a sign somewhere . . ." Next thing, she was pointing toward the door, or a little east of it at that corner. "There!" she said.

"Where?" I looked at the corner, and then down toward the bare floor. "What?" I fully expected to see some out-size cucaracha with a purple Satanic pentangle on its carapace.

"Down there on Hollywood boulevard, silly boy!"

"Oh!" I searched my memory. "Hm!" I was drawing a blank. "Never noticed. But what is it?"

She pulled a plain manila envelope from the box. "Some old supper-club or ballroom. I don't know." She shot me an eye. "I don't know everything, Johnny." She pulled something out. "These are negatives," she said.

"No prints?"

"Huh-uh." She put that back and pulled another envelope to peek inside. She cast me a glance. "Looks like this whole box is a file of thirty-five millimeter negatives." She pushed it off her blue-jean clad thighs to the floor and replaced it with the other box which contained larger envelopes about five inches square. I watched as she removed a large black sheet of celluloid, which then she held up to the light. You should have seen her eyes, and the way her lips parted into a big round . . ."O-my-God!"

I set the pretty ashtray aside on the cushion, stabbed the cigarette out, to see how good it worked for an ashtray, put the holder in my pocket and the martini in its Daffy Duck jelly glass on the floor. By the time I'd settled down beside Bright Eyes, she'd already returned that negative to its sleeve. She slapped my hand as I'd reached for it there on her thigh. "Don't go there, baby."

I sat back on my heels. "Well, c'mon!" My hand really stung. "What gives?"

"Dirty pictures!"

I stared into the wide open wells of her eyes. "No!"

"Yes." She was looking at another. "Boy, you ain't just a kiddin'." I watched her as she sat there looking at that, and all the time not letting me see anything. "I wonder," said she, "where you'd have to go to find stockings like that these days."

"Well, c'mon Brook," I called her by her real name which is what I do when "Bright Eyes" would not be exactly a propos to my mood. I made a quick grab for the 35mm box and was about to make off with it, when in one smooth move she made her lunge. Before I even knew what was happening, she had me on the floor, face down, the envelopes dumped from their upturned box, and she was laid out right on top of me. "This is ridiculous!" I shouted.

She sat up. "Are you going to be good?"

"No!"

She started bouncing up and down with her butt on my butt "What did you say, Johnny?" She kept it up. "Did you say you'd be good?"

It was really too enjoyable to say, 'yes!' so I said, "No!"

That's when she caught me by the short-hairs. "No?" She gave another yank.

"Yes! Okay. Uncle! I give." It really hurt! So don't think Bright Eyes didn't know how to get her way with me; she always had. She took her butt off my butt and sat beside me, while I crept away across the floor back over toward my Martini. "It's for your own good, Johnny. If you start looking at filthy, nasty dirt like that, it'll disease your brains."

Sitting there, raising my Daffy Duck glass of gin and Vermouth, I tipped her a toast and said, "How do you know they aren't already diseased?" I took a sip, gauging her reaction, which was for her to sit there giving me the old 'cold greenies'; what I've come to call that particular Bright Eyes stare.

"Well," she said, "I'm supposed to be looking out for you, just like I promised Aunt Bessie."

"Aunt Bessie!"

"Rest her soul."

"Well, I hate to tell you, Brookie, she may have been your dear old Aunt Bessie, bless her, but she was my Grandma, who I personally happen to know used to be a high-stepping flapper of the Roaring Twenties who always did have a big smokin' stack of *Police Gazette, Confidential, and Screen Secrets* magazines stashed about two feet high under her bed."

"I never saw that!"

"You were never under her bed."

"Well . . ."

"Believe you me, kiddo: dirty pictures are nothing new to me. I'm just a chip off the old . . ."

"Hotsy-Totsy? Blackbottom?" She was back up to her feet and her mood was a little cross. "Where did you put that one hatbox?"

"Which?"

"The heavy one!"

I pointed. "Look under the drapes." She picked up the box she'd been going through before the big tumble, which now she was setting down on the loveseat. "Knock yourself out while you can, Mr. Pervert, because tomorrow all that trash is going down into the incinerator."

That didn't give me much time, so I didn't waste any, and pulled the box over close-by. These were the big four-by-five Graphlex press camera negatives, so it was pretty easy to make out the image, holding it to the light. The first was standard cheese-cake of the era with the stockings and lingerie. The second, of the same model was topless. The next slipped right through my fingers as something heavy bounced on the cushion. "Man!" I said, recognizing the missing hatbox.

"Could be one of those big two foot tall tropical fruit chapeaux that Carmen Miranda used to wear," said Bright Eyes, with one hand to her stomach, the other in the air as she started to Rumba around in a circle. 'Whaddaya think?"

I thought it was swell! "You'd knock 'em all dead, kid."

I watched as she untied the cord holding the cover in place. "Yeah," she said, "A girl could do a lot worse than going around in public with a pineapple on her head." She had her eyes on that box of negatives. "For a career, I mean." That cord of hers was fairly well-knotted, so I got bored and returned my attention to those negatives, the next of which was quite a bit naughtier than the first two of the series; the sort of thing that would have been outright obscene for its time, and strictly illegal--not to mention "explicit".

"Oh, no!" Bright Eyes had the hatbox cover off and she had just parted the tissue. I bent over to look at a super shiny, truly mint condition black enameled Nazi S. S. helmet.

"Would you get a load," I said, watching it rise from the box to my dear girl's head. And she being Jewish, and all. "Christ!" I said. "It's dirty pictures you don't want your little Johnny to be looking at?"

"How do I look?"

"Strictly Obscene. Please remove that from your pretty head, immediately."

After we'd shared a good long stare, she notwithstanding remained obstinate. When she tried a shot at shooting her arm up in a Nazi salute, that took the cake. I set the box off my lap and made a grab for her hat. She jumped up off the cushion; the hatbox bounced and went for a dive to the floor, landing with a clang. Our eyes glued together. Bright Eyes took off the helmet and set it on the floor. She picked up the box, and batted the tissue aside. She had it tilted so I could see. "Empty, right?"

"Here!" I reached, she handed it over. I set it on my lap, took out all the tissue to bare the bottom. It was empty, alright. But when I shook it, we could hear that something was still knocking around inside.

"Either it's the ghost of Topper's dog dish in there or it's got a false bottom!" She took it from my hands. "Give me your pocket knife. There's a pasted seam on the bottom here, all the way around." I did as commanded per her wish, gave her the knife, and watched as she made a nice, smooth cut all the way around. She removed the bottom.

Our heads bumped together, but we didn't care. I was already talking: "Sixteen millimeter by the look of it." Brook had that gray, baked enamel film can in hand and out of the box, which I took and set on the floor. She had it on her lap and as she was trying to get the top off, I moved to stop her hand. "We better not."

"What? Why?"

"It's old, it's celluloid. If it's anything of value it has to be handled by an expert. If we expose it to the air, who knows/"

"It might be like letting the sun shine on a vampire?"

"Exactly," I said.

"Poof! It just crumbles to dust."

"But then," I mused, "dust or ashes, what's the diff?"

"Whaddaya mean?"

"If you're serious about burning all this stuff?" I started digging around in my pocket for the cigarette holder. "I mean, okay, I agree that it's trash, but you know what they say . . ."

"What?"

"One man's trash another man's . . ." I could see she wasn't going for it, so I tried harder. "Look, Brook! These aren't just 'dirty pictures', they are vintage dirty pictures. Can you imagine the value?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Well, c'mon. It isn't even illegal to put 'em on the market anymore. Why, there might be tens of thousands of dollars worth in this stash of trash."

"Okay," she said, and suddenly she had scooped that SS helmet off the floor to jam it back on her head. "So how 'bout this? Must be a swell market in Nazi memorabilia out there. Why should we, a couple o' Jews have any scruples about picking up some quick scratch on a hat like this?"

Somehow, I had the feeling that my rhetoric or whatever, was starting to fail me. "You see the two things as being somehow related?" I asked.

"Related? The same."

"Nah." I pushed a fresh cigarette into my holder.

She put the helmet at a jaunty angle. "Pornographic pictures, or Nazi war paraphernalia, they both depend on one thing for their currency, Johnny. Ask me what."

"Sure. What?"

"Trade in human suffering."

This girl could really make me suffer sometimes, she could be such a pain. "I guess you didn't notice the smiles on some of these girls' faces?" I inquired.

"Sure they're smiling during the shoot. Sex is fun--while it's still going on, but when the sex is over, so is the fun--that's when the regret comes in."

"Nah! Not always. Depends on who you're talking about."

"Sure. Times change?"

"That's right."

"Times change, people don't." She pulled a negative and held it to the light for us both to see. "Look at this girl who pulled up her skirt for the camera; here we are looking at the most private thing she's got, namely her fuzzy little tw . . ."

"Alright, already!"

"And now this has gone out to the world, which includes everyone who ever knew her; her brothers, her father, the boys she knew at school, and someday maybe her husband? Tell me that fathers and brothers and mothers have changed along with the times. Or how about the School Board where one day she wants a job as a third grade teacher? Say!"

"What?"

"Do you think Von Sternberg made the Blue Angel for nothing? Look how those school boys acted toward him once they found out." I had to at least give out with a shrug to that--but it wasn't enough. "I'll tellya how times change, Cousin. They change in people's heads, with our big liberated ideas, but in our hearts we'll always be slaves to instinct, where times don't change for a millions years. That's what." She had her eye on me. "Well? Say something!"

"Oh, I was just thinking about that thing by Thomas Wolfe . . ."

"What thing?"

"That book he wrote, *You Can't Go Home Anymore*."

"You wouldn't call that suffering?"

"Yeah. I would. But face it! Most of these women are dead by now!"

She pulled the helmet off her head and threw it in my lap: "So are most of the Jews who had to look at that."

I had decided to shut up and get busy stashing the stuff in the large closet to the left of the Murphy bed so we could pull that down and get her turned in for the night. When Bright Eyes came out in her shortie pajamas from the bathroom off to the right of that alcove back there that stores the bed, she saw I still had that box of big negatives on the loveseat. She pointed. "Why is that still out?"

"You said we had till tomorrow to check 'em out, didn't you?"

"But why?"

"I'm curious!"

"About what? Boobs are boobs. Want to see mine?"

"Yours!"

"How curious are you?"

"God. Brookie!"

"You want a naked woman, I'll show you one." She took and flipped a little bit of her shortie top up to reveal her tummy.

"Stop that!" I was truly upset. "We're second cousins, twice removed!"

She threw herself, fanny down, on the bed laughing, kicking, and bouncing like there was no end of it soon in sight. Finally, she said, "Okay. Bring them over and we'll check 'em out together." I just stared at her, still astonished over the way she had flashed me a shot of her belly button like that. "C'mon! We haven't got all night."

We didn't bother with the 35mm because they were too small. We turned on the light in the alcove behind the bed, both laying there with our heads on the pillows, side by side looking up through the celluloid. We were about a third of the way through the box, when I looked to find Bright Eyes staring, not at a negative but at a finished print. Handing it over to me she asked, "Do you know who that girl is?"

It was a brunette, early twenties. There was a white gardenia pinned behind one ear, and except for the stockings, their black lacy rigging and heels, she was not clothed. I turned to look at my pal and I said, "Deanna Durbin?"

"No." She had whipped the photo from my fingers for another look. "Just no question about it."

"Well, c'mon! Who is it?" I snuggled closer so I could see too. But when she turned to face me, her hand descended to the hair on my head to give it a toss. "Such a child it is." She loved to pull seniority on me, by those three measly years between us. "Darling, we'll have to turn these over to LAPD."

"No!"

"Yes!"

"But why?"

"This is the Black Dahlia."


CHAPTER FIVE
Points East
--
We were just finishing a big Saturday morning breakfast of toast and eggs with a bowl of Wheaties on the side, when I decided, for once, to put my foot down with Bright Eyes. I arose from that up-ended suitcase on my side of the cardboard-plus-Murphy bed table, and put it down, so firmly as one can with his foot inside the sleek, soft folds of an opera slipper. I said, "Baby, it's like this: I'm perfectly willing to do as you say and turn those pictures over to the cops--but no sooner than I can find out exactly what it is I'm turning over, here."

She had been getting up with the plates, now taking pause before turning to the kitchenette. "How's that?"

"I want to go over to the library and read up on this stuff."

"Okay!" She headed toward the archway in the wall opposite the alcove, which was east toward the Florentine Gardens, Palm Springs, New York and Rome. "Fine!" she declared. "Then I'll just take those pink shakers and that Peak-Frean box down to Melrose and see about that dress."

"Or dresses!" I watched her disappear into the kitchen with nary an argument. I was so god-awful grateful that I followed her in, offering to do the dishes, I even said, "You can take the ashtray, too!"

"Listen Buster," she was turning to me, hands on hips. "There's just just one thing I expect out of you . . ."

"Yeah?"

"Get out of here and give my regards to the Broadway."


CHAPTER SIX
Who Knew?
--
That's on the corner of Hollywood & Vine, the Broadway, and I gave it a nice pat as I walked by. I didn't say anything to it, thus to join the choir of those you find on the Boulevard every day talking right out loud in their regard to the brown and gray stones of the buildings. Just a nice pat was enough to make it good by the Broadway, and on the favor.

The Frances Howard Goldwyn branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, named after Sam Goldwyn's second wife is just a block west of Vine on Ivar, about halfway down on the west side of the street. It's a good library as your average branch library goes, better than most, if for no other reason than that the book you take out, for all you know is something that was once taken out, and to bed, by Veronica Lake or Marilyn Monroe. So, there was that potential advantage (or thrill connected) to any book you took out from the Goldwyn library in Hollywood.

I wasn't finding much about the Black Dahlia murder, other than a fairly fat file they'd kept in the reference department containing crisp, yellowed clippings from the former L. A. Examiner, the L. A. Times and a few others. But, that was just about enough to keep me good and nauseated till well after noon, over what they quite rightly kept calling the 'unspeakable' nature of this crime. It wasn't hard to see why as of that day in October of 1974, nobody in the writing profession had yet managed to suck up the guts to tell the story to the extent of publishing a book on the subject. That would have to wait for another, later, more jaded decade and generation of writers, publishers and readers.

Aside from a few true-crime anthologies containing articles cribbed from the pages of *Startling Detective* and whatnot, I was drawing a blank. There was one among those which did contain some of the same photos of the murdered girl, Elizabeth or "Beth" or "Bette" or "Betty" Short as appeared in the clippings, so I took that one out, and went out, under a gold and lowering (if not glowering) California sun, down the steps out front to Ivar Avenue.

When I got to Hollywood & Vine, I stopped in to Howard Johnson's and ordered a large cup of coffee to go with me, back across the Boulevard and down Vine street to the Taft building, and up to our office, via the elevator, on the 4th floor. It being Saturday, I hadn't really planned on it, but this was good a place as any to sit down and look into this matter. A comparison of photos, the one I had out from my vest pocket, lain down on a page next the pictures in the book, left very little doubt but that the woman's face was indeed the same.

Or let me see if I can put that in another way: it was the same face! The thing started to creep me out so that I couldn't stay sat down. I had to walk around and try to get used to the idea of this superlative obscenity that had so profanely come into our possession. As my heart kept beating faster, I lit a cigarette and began pacing around the desk till I got dizzy, and sat down on the blotter, facing the door. That's when I found myself thinking, "Is this a detective agency we're running here or not?" The answer being obvious, led to the next question: "If the regular cops downtown hadn't solved this crime till now, then why not somebody else, like Bright Eyes and I?"

But only speak of the Bright Eyes and what shall appear?

"Bright Eyes!" said I, as she pivoted on a heel, closing the door behind. I was amazed. "Just look at you!" She'd found herself a perfectly powder blue "Lady in the Lake" style skirted-jacket suit, and not only that but the azure netted hat to match.

"Woo-woo-woo!" What could I coo, what could I care, if all I could do was sit there and stare to see the way she looked in that adorably authentic forties-style pompadour swept up from her temples to a bang of permed curls--why! I could hardly get my stuff up from the desk quick enough to drop to my knees and zoom in for a close-up on the blue polish that showed through black nylon at the fore of her peep-toed blue pumps!

Just as she was in the midst of doing a smart little twirl, fingers up-turned to show off the sheen of her nails, she stopped short at about 60 degrees to get a load of me sitting back down with that 4 x 5 Girlie shot of the Black Dahlia poised in my hand at the right knee.

"Say!" said she, clicking across the little white hexagonal tiles to snatch it from my grasp. "What's the idea of sneaking up here all by yourself on a Saturday afternoon with something like this? I thought you were over at the library!"

"Don't start with me, Doll," said I, sliding away from the desk, going round, and putting that between us, before she could get at me. "From the looks of it, it's you who's got some explaining to do--not that I'm about to complain, mind you--but how? How could you have done all this with no more than just . . ."

"Some pink glass and a tin box?" She just kept giving me the sly eye, so I had to ask, "Really?"

"Natch!" Upon a snap of the fingers, she whirled to come down; putting her own tightly tailored derriere to where I'd been keeping it warm for her.

I came around in wonder. "And you didn't have to skinny a single penny from . . ."

"No! And that ain't all." She raised to my attention the shopping bag in her hand. "Two more suits." She pulled up a box. "And another pair of shoes."

"Damn!" I said, feeling the kind of intoxication that only highway robbery might induce, and I just stood there in mute awe of her; it was as if I'd stepped for a moment into the grease-spotted shoes of the mythological "C. W. Moss" at the moment when the movieland "Bonnie Parker" had just deadpanned her *sotto voce*, "We rob banks."

"So!" she said, coming off the desk to set her bag down in the as yet to be for a first time occupied client's chair. "What, if anything profitable or wholesome, have you been up to all day?"

I sat down behind the desk and proceeded to bring my partner up to date on my thinking as to those treasures of found art yet in our possession. Her response soon followed . . .

"Why, you rascal!" She cast a glance up toward the blades of the ceiling fan. "Surely, you can't be serious."

"Why not?"

"Because withholding evidence of a crime from the cops is a crime."

"But," said I, smugly swiveling just a tat in the chair, "what if it means getting a reputation for our agency that no few pennies left in an advertising budget can buy?"

"Oh, just like that!" She stalked over to the as yet empty filing cabinet by the door to the inner office, turned and leaned on it. "Okay, sure. I get the picture. It's just that you'll be sleuthing the oodles of cases we get, while you're serving five to ten in the slammer."

That brought me out of the chair, to a position where I could start thinking on my feet. "Okay!" I took a few steps. "But who's to say that either you or I were able to recognize this dame in the pictures, for the Black Dahlia?"

"Me! Because I did."

"Not me, because I didn't." Since she saw that her chair was free (the inner office held my desk and chair), she hurried over and took it, sat right down in it, and said, "Okay just say we play dumb. For me, that would be a difficult performance but maybe I can just follow your act."

"Uh, well now . . ."

She talked right through my feeble attempt at a self-defense. "So! We claim we never recognized her for who she . . . was. There's that. Now what?"

"Okay, so here's what we do . . ."


CHAPTER SEVEN
Private Dick and Private Jane
--
The edifice of the building, a place called the Fontenoy Apartments at 1811 Whitely Avenue, was pretty daunting, the way it towered there so monumentally gray in all its Art Nouveau nobility, so aloof from our puny Johnny-Come-Lately designs of private dick & jane intentions--it was really something to look up at. Bright Eyes had a hand on my shoulder as she balanced on one foot to exchange the sneakers she'd worn on the uphill hike, for her powder blue pumps. "Look!" she whispered. "Someone's coming out."

We both heard a buzz as the door went shut behind a very little, very old, little old lady. We watched breathlessly as she came about the curve in the walk, out to the drive, pulling one of those cute little collapsible shopping carts that are always so perfect for little old ladies to have, especially around Hollywood, where the Safeway, Mayfair or Ralph's is never much further than about six blocks from anywhere in town. Bright Eyes set down her foot, sliding her hand to my upper arm. "Let me do the talking."

"You bet." I was glad. I waited, while she squared her shoulders, touching a stray wisp of hair back into the folds of her coiffure. It took her just a few smart steps down the walk to the drive to head the lady off with a "Lovely autumn afternoon, isn't it?"

The woman stopped, looked up and swept a hand toward her heart. "My stars!" She threw that hand out toward my girl, who deftly caught it, to give it possibly one of the nicest squeezes it had enjoyed in some time. As the lady was catching her breath, she kept returning her eyes to Brook, looking her up and down. She took her hand back to her own use and put it up near the side of my girl's head. "Just look at you!" she exclaimed. "Why, if I didn't know better, I'd think . . . Gee! You look just like me back in the day when I was dancing as a Goldwyn Girl."

"How sweet!"

"Oh, my!" She looked about, espied me, and pointed. "Is that your beau?"

"Him? Oh no, he's just a distant relative, twice removed."

"Ah! Not worth bothering about then I suppose."

But there is only so much of that a fellow can rightly stand for, so I came forward; I bowed, extended a hand, and what but she took it! I raised hers and made as if to kiss it, only to say, "Charmed."

"Well!" said the little old Goldwyn Girl. "Isn't he elegant?" She pushed her hand to my lips and finished the job.

"For somebody twice removed, he'll do. But listen dear, we hate to be barging in on your day like this, but . . ."

"Oh!" She pulled her hand from mine. "Now is when I get mugged?"

"Not on your sweet life, Madame," said I, making a smooth, magician-like move to present my card.

"What's this?" She tipped her glasses, took it and looked. "Oh!" She turned her eyes to my face for a piercing inspection. "Now since you're a talent scout for that old lecher, you can tell him I don't soon forget!" She returned the card.

"But, how's that?" I tried to disguise my pleasure over the extended mileage I could now get on that card.

"Why," she said, dropping one eye to a wink. "That damned randy Jew chased me around backstage the whole time we were shooting *Duck Soup*."

Bright Eyes gave me a nudge. "It's the nose and mustache glasses."

"And that fuzzy-haired brother of his, he was after me too--they worked as a team, you know!" She grabbed my arm, "Not that I'm prejudiced, mind you."

"Oh, no."

Bright Eyes snapped the card from my fingers and raised it to the lady's sight. "See here, Dear? It says *Private Eyes*?"

"Well, for landsakes, why didn't you say so!" She took a couple steps forward, putting her wheels in motion. "Come along then; we've got plenty to talk about. But we have to get down to Mayfair before it gets too late."

"The pleasure will be all ours," I opined.

"Don't tell me!" said the lady. "You're here to look into this business about Rene Germaine, the way she passed away, all alone as she was." She turned to Brook and motioned toward me. "Say! Is he one of her distant relations?"

"If he was, believe me, he'd be the last to hear of it."

"Oh dear." She touched my arm. "Isn't that just the way of it?"

"As it happens, we are partners in the same detective agency he and I," said Bright Eyes.

"My! Isn't that cute."

"But do tell," said Bright Eyes, "did they just come and clean out the poor lady's apartment; throw all her things out on the street the way they do?"

"Oh, it was awful. A lifetime of cherished possessions just dumped to the curb like so much trash."

"Speaking of curbs," I said, coming around to take her right arm.

"My! He is a gentleman, isn't he?"

"Yes," said Bright Eyes, "but he means well."

"So that was about three weeks ago, when they cleaned out her apartment like that?" I asked.

"Well," she said. "Hm." We waited. "That was . . . well, yes! Just about three weeks."

"And did you know her well?" I pried.


CHAPTER EIGHT
The Devil May Care
--
As it turned out, we'd have to wait till we'd got done with the shopping before receiving the least sort of decent answer to my question, beyond, "Goodness! But, how well does one girl ever really know another?"

By such as that, it soon became clear that so long as Gladys Swanson (what name more perfect for a Goldwyn Girl?) had a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon and a bunch of asparagus on her mind, there was little room for anything else, other than a frivolity of light banter bubbling with happy memories of those bliss-filled fourteen hour workdays at Warner Bros., on the set for Busby Berkeley, with whom--wouldn't you like to know--the backstage escapades were ribald enough to make those frolics from Duck Soup days seem like a Saturday afternoon Yeshiva picnic. Thus, anything requiring so laser-like a focus of attention as the question of how well one person might actually know another had to be put on hold; as then of course we were tickled to pieces to receive her invitation to walk back to her apartment and come up for tea.

Some might say that if you've seen the apartment of one sweet old Hollywood chorus girl, you've seen them all. But, I'll let the chorus girls be the judge of that. The walls were not loaded with autographed photos of all the big stars and starlets of the screen--those she was keeping safe from the smog, and smoke of her own Pall Malls in a bookcase full of albums. There was the old wind-up Victrola, along with those gorgeous hand-painted urns and vases displaying their bouquets of ostrich plumes and peacock feathers. I must admit to having been somewhat taken aback by the autographed, framed and colorized 8 x 10 of Groucho, with cigar, painted mustache, and big leering smile that sat on a table beside her window chair. And that put the whole pastiche in none but the best of perfect Goldwyn Girl taste and style. Oh, the autograph? Sure. It said, "To the Tastiest Duck in the Soup, What's Good for the Ducky is Good for the Ducker! All My Most Memorable Regards, Groucho."

Bright Eyes was setting her blue fluted eggshell-china cup back to it's saucer when she said, "Do tell me, darling, as to the dearly departed deceased . . ."

"That dead Germaine dame, you mean?"

"Uh--"

"Fire away. Ask me anything."

"Alright. Um, did you say she'd been living here with a husband?"

As Gladys had finished lighting her Pall Mall, she rocked back in her cozy recliner to once again cross her legs. "Yes, well . . ." she picked a tobacco shred from her tongue. "That was Maurice, but . . ."

"Maurice, did you say?" That name rang an alarm from something I'd seen in those clippings.

"Well, I never really thought they were married, but I could be mistaken so don't quote me. Just an old hunch of mine, don't you know."

Bright Eyes turned her cup. "And Maurice, is he still . . ."

"Well, that's a funny thing." She elegantly flicked her long fuchsia nail over a large amber ashtray. "I wondered why he hadn't come around soon after she'd bit the dust like that, because some of those things that were thrown out were his belongings. And he wasn't there at the funeral."

"Hm," said Bright Eyes. "So just when was this, that he did show up?"

"Oh . . ." she turned to look out over that Hollywood skyline off her left shoulder. "Well, it could have been the very night or the evening after those things were picked up, but . . . I can't keep exact track of such things. Anyway, when he finally does show up, he's going around knocking on all the doors up and down the building here, inquiring if anybody would know what happened to those things. Well! They'd been thrown out. That's what happened to them. And that's exactly what I told him. My! Such a state he was in over it--as you can well imagine."

I heard a cup rattling in its saucer where Bright Eyes now had it balanced on a knee. I thought I'd better get over there, and leaping from my chrome-armed, modernist chair, where it sat at the end of the coffee table and divan, I squeezed in to find her sitting so stiff that if the throw of a switch could send her to straight into orbit, she'd be gone. "Let me help," I said, taking the cup that was nearly frozen in her grasp, and then the saucer."

"Oh dear!" Gladys had come to her feet. "Anything I can do?"

"I'll be alright! Gosh! Please!" Bright Eyes had a hand to her stomach, and she was swallowing hard.

I couldn't let Gladys get the right impression from this, so I was thinking fast. "It's the falling sickness," I mentioned, off-hand, while putting down the china. "Petite mal, what it's called, comes and goes, a noble malady, as you must know." I'd reached around my girl to enfold her in my arms. "Hold on tight, toots," I said, rising up off the couch with her in my grip, all the time lying loudly like a Wilshire district lawyer, "Mark Antony, as you may know, had to do this for Cleopatra, quite a lot--but all I have to do is bounce her up and down a few times like this . . ." I demonstrated, while dragging her out by the heels from behind the table till we had the better room for it, and could get my arms around her waist for the bounces, "One, two, three . . ."

"Okay! Okay! Put me down, Johnny!"

"Did it pass, my darling; is it gone?"

"Natch!" she said upon a feeble attempt at a finger snap. Having set her feet back down to the floor, I let go to give her a good look-over, and as she sought to straighten her hair, her suit, an ankle strap on a shoe, I went back to sit down.

"Why, that was nearly the most marvelous thing, I ever got to watch!" said Gladys, coming across to pick up the tea-pot. "Let's have some more tea."

"Why, that's a swell idea," said I, but Bright Eyes put a hand over her cup:

"Thank you, but I'll wait a little . . ." she shot me a look. "My stomach's just a bit bounced-off just now."

I swallowed my sip of tea and said, "So tell me, Miss Swanson, this . . ."

"Oh, screw the formality, young man! Just call me Gladys."

"Don't worry, darling," said Bright Eyes, "He's an old screwer of formality from way back."

"Ah, that's swell," said Gladys. "I can see we're all going to get along just fine."

"So, how 'bout it," asked Bright Eyes. "How long had it been since you'd seen Maurice, I mean previous to his latest visit?"

"Isn't that odd, and good you should ask. It had been years!" She was lighting another cigarette from the end of her last. She puffed. "Let me think." She puffed a few more times, and as she moved to snuff the one out in the ashtray, said, "They'd been a non-item for just ages--oh, he'd show up from time to time, but if it was once in two or three years, that was a lot." She held her cigarette straight up in the air balancing in hand her smoking elbow to keep that warm and cozy Pall Mall nice and close by. "She was an awfully close-mouthed sort who just wouldn't let you get very far into her business, so it left you guessing about her, and my guess is that things had gone pretty sour between them, long ago."

"But things had been good, I mean there was a time when they did live together, and . . ."

"Oh, my yes! But then after he was arrested that time in connection with that awful murder case--must've been . . . it was a couple, three years after, around 1950, I think . . ."

"God!" said Bright Eyes, flashing a white hot glance at me.

I cleared my throat: she got the message and turned back to Gladys who looked concerned asking, "What is it, dear?"

"Oh! Well, I think . . . I mean I was wondering--ah, you . . ."

"You've been living here in the Fontenoy all these many years?" I interrupted.

"Oh, listen!" said Gladys. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to get into a first class building like this?"

All I could think to say was nothing; I gave her a shrug. She smiled, and vainly observed the nails of one hand. "Some few of us own these apartments, don't you see."

"Oooooooh," said Bright Eyes.

"Why, of course. Now, I've had this place ever since the end of the war, got it in '46 and as for that Germaine woman, I think she was here before I came--but, it's hard to recall . . . maybe two or three years? You see, she moved in an entirely different circle, with that Florentine Gardens crowd, and . . ."

"Florentine Gardens, you say?" I'd felt a shock to think of what I'd seen in connection with that place, and the man that owned it, who according to the newspapers had been a major suspect in the case.

"Listen," said Bright Eyes. "I think it's time we were getting along . . ."

"Baby!," I was aghast. "She's just about to tell us . . ." I watched her point to her watch so emphatically that it struck me dumb.

"We would like so very much to visit with you again soon, Gladys," said Bright Eyes.

"Why, you've been such nice company! Of course."

"So kind of you," said Bright Eyes, "and that's why next time, we'd like to take you for breakfast, or lunch and . . ."

"If we could afford dinner," said I, "we'd take you out for that, in a hot heartbeat!"

"Oh, my." She turned to Bright Eyes. "He is the sweetest thing, isn't he?"

"You have no idea," said my girl. "But you do understand, dear, that all this conversation of ours must be kept strictly on the Q.T.?"

"Well!" she blew our her smoke. "If it must, it must."

"Particularly, when it comes to Maurice." Bright Eyes took her purse into her lap. "Would you expect him to be showing up again, around here at all?"

"Again?" I asked, before I started to get it, what Bright Eyes was getting at.

"Listen," said Gladys. "I never cared for the looks of that man, and as I say, that Germaine hussy, she and I, we were never close. Sure, we talked; sat in the lobby together time and again, but you just get a sense about some people that puts you off and so you never really get chummy--you know what I mean."

"Oh, don't you just know it!" Bright Eyes had come to her feet, and she was headed for Gladys with one of our cards. "Please take this Gladys and keep it very secret, because . . ."

The lady took the card. "Of course I will!" She pushed it down into her poor dear withered old bosom. "I can see you're on a case, investigating the doings of that unsavory lot and I'm happy to do all I can to help." She arose from her chair. "Count me in." Bright Eyes closed in for a hug. Gladys sniffed a little and said, "You can trust me." The hug got bigger.

"Aw, y'know, that's just swell!" I said, nudging Bright Eyes to move aside so I could get a big hug, too. We each got nice hugs, standing before that grand scene from the 9th floor of the Fontenoy with all of Hollywood displayed beyond the glass of what a hyperbolizing devil may care to call a cinemascope sized window, framed by its valenced curtain of scarlet velvet drapes.

We got another nice hug and kiss at the door, and when that at last it went closed, Bright Eyes grabbed my arm. "Think we should go down by the stairs?"

"No!" I said.

"But, what if . . ."

"If what?"

"Somebody might have seen us out there digging around in that stuff, and told him! Gave him our description."

"Aw, g'wan," I had to laugh as I gave her a quick pinch on the cheek. "I'll protect you, babe."

She took a swat at my arm. "With what? You haven't even got a gun!"

"All right," I took her arm. "Remind me to get one, first thing." I tried turning her toward the elevator, down the hall.

She stopped me. "For all we know, he could be parked down there right now! Yeah, just waiting out there with his pockets full of big knives, watching for us to come out!" She stopped me when I started to move again. "Now look, Johnny! We have to be smart about this."

"Well, ya . . ."

"And it's got nothing to do with being scared. Smart is smart and scared is scared, and reckless is stupid."

"Well . . ."

"So we go down the stairs and look for a back way out of here, right?"

I stood there till I felt myself nodding, and then heard myself saying, "Right." We went looking for the stairs.



CHAPTER NINE
Night and Day in Dreamland
--
Her high-heeled, ankle-strapped pumps were red to match her purse; the nylons were seamed and black beneath a hemline that, in keeping with the war-time pinch on cotton for airplane canvas, barely covered a knee. And the skirt was black like the cardigan jacket that went with it, in a suit chosen to match the neckline sweep of her hair worn with a one curl bang that bobbed as she walked that walk which was the talk of the town from Hollywood boulevard all the way down Gower to Brittenham's on Sunset boulevard; her blouse was ruffled and a bright, clean white, so little of it as showed beneath the warm tan tones of an expensive three-quarter length camel hair coat.

Only thing was, as it happened that night, her hair had been hennaed and not so recently as to hide the blacker than midnight roots from which the 'red' had not grown, and what's more she was nowhere near her favorite café, that watering hole to many a star of the CBS studios down Gower at Columbia Circle. No, much as she cared to be sipping a hot cup while shucking the jive in that familiar, up-beat atmosphere; after nearly two months of lying low, out of town, just now, for one real hard reason, she was still on the lam, in downtown L. A., and couldn't be farther away from those bright, sunshiny days and starry nights in Dreamland which little could she know, as of this night were over, forever.

She'd walked out of the lobby of the Biltmore to Olive street just around 10:00 p.m., heading south, this pert and lithesome young lady of five-foot-three and a hundred fifteen pounds, whose oddly girlish, yet somehow sultry, and strikingly photogenic image at 22 years would--in just six days--be so hideously rearranged as to merit a world class glut of ink on the front pages of newspapers for two weeks running--above the fold, in pictures drastically cropped from a long shot, and otherwise strictly textual description: it was that textually sexual, that even words were mostly too graphic to be exposed, really one for the books; what had been done to the girl.

At ninth street, she stepped in through the door of the Crown Grill. Inside at the bar were the red cushioned stools that had been destined to uphold--over course of the past few months, each in it's turn--the contours of this dame's derriere, now once again downtown on the vamp, swinging a torso that was still as yet ever so much attached, both fore and aft, from head to rose tattoo; that one she had so torridly posed just above a nylon knee, where it turned to the darker shade.

A flash of recognition in the bartender's eye was quickly shifted against notice by anyone's gaze other than hers, and if the welcoming wink of greeting had been seen, none would have been any the wiser. That is unless the guy who'd moved in next this doll had for some reason thought to snatch a quick sip of the Martini pushed across the bar for her, as per his, "And another for the lady." One sip from that and he would have tasted the truth of the trick, between the 'very dry' and the 'very very wet'. That is how it worked for her to pick up a few fast bucks, shilling on the sly for the chiseler on duty behind the bar. This is the profession of the B-girl, profiting by a percentage on the price of her own watered down to sopping wet cocktails, so many as she could drill from the well in some dumb sucker's wallet by oiling him up all night; get her own palm greased on the side.

It was not always such a safe game, playing on the affections of men, 'depending on the kindness of strangers' like that. But then, for a frail the like of Liz Sharp it can come as a talent, or a trick; something a girl may like to practice from a very early day in her life: being attractive, it's an asset that can be taken advantage of, for whatever a girl might like to make of it for herself, living the high life, and it can take on the sheen of something like glamour, when its all done up in a high couture of fine gowns, great hair and browsing at first light along a sparkle of diamonds at Tiffany's. But, it all too often winds down to a most inelegant escape out the bathroom window, and a harried few minutes of the chase down dangerous streets on a broken heel through that neon-lit gloom of a false dawn's cheap gaudy . . .
--
I stopped typing. I looked up--what was this? Closing the door behind him was a man in his mid-fifties, straight from the heavies division at central casting. His complexion was pock-marked and swarthy, the cheeks were sunken. No hat-in-hand sort was this; that stayed on a head of close-cut, tightly curled mostly black hair. As he strode across the office toward me, I had to admire the hat; it was a gray Italian raffia with a wide pleated light blue band. His suit was gray and it looked like silk. He wore a black polo shirt, and when he stopped at the desk, it was in the vapors of an after-shave that smelled like a blend of English Lavender and Absorbine Jr. Towering there, he tipped his sunglasses just enough to reveal eyes of a dull, yellow-flecked green--and if I ever saw somebody who looked like they could use the services of a private eye, this was *not* the guy.

A business card fell fluttering from his fingers to the desk. "I believe this is yours?" Something not American or English nor even European to that inflexion--I thought of Tangiers or Algeria, something French/North African. His gaze followed my hand through every motion as I moved to pick up the card, raise it to the light of the window behind.

"Sure is." I stood, making a gesture toward the client's chair, then to offer my hand. "Won't you have a seat?"

"Not just yet." he said, to leave my hand hanging there. Well! As I began to pull it back, his finally came up but only to go on past mine till like a cobra it struck at my shirt and tie. "Please," he said, ever so softly, "Why don't *you* have a seat?" The force of the push from that wiry looking guy had me near to flying till I hit the chair, and went on the roll to a big slam against the window sill.

"Say!" I said, raising my hand to a sharp pain at the back of my neck. "If this is whiplash, you'll be hearing from my insurance agent."

"I'll be hearing from a lot more than that, shamus, soon as you start talking about what you wanted with that old Swanson broad--up at the Fontenoy?"

I blinked. I blanched. I would have blushed, had there been any blood not down in my shoes to do it with. I took hold of the card he'd tossed to my desk and noticed how it looked like it had been recently kept in a warm, moist place. "Mind telling me where you found the card?" My voice was mostly drowned out by the complaint of the client's chair scraping over the tiles. I watched him sit, very delicately taking hold of his trouser seams to facilitate the crossing of his legs.

He looked up. "She gave it to me." Unbuttoning his suit jacket, he moved to straighten a lapel; a holster flashed momentarily into view.

I got so scared, it made me mad. "What you do, to get that card?" I demanded, watching that cruel, thin-lipped smile cleave the sheen of that olive skin: it was like seeing the ground crack in an earthquake, and it showed no teeth. "Did you pistol whip her? Pour acid in her eyes? Drive fiery flints under her sad old polished fingernails? Poor Gladys!"

He took off his shades. "That broad and I go way back. So, she's doing just fine." There was a further implication in that which was not so pleasant and it worked, howsoever belatedly, to put my mind clicking into gear: I wasn't going to tell this thug anything he didn't already know. "Okay," said I. "You've got my card, and big deal! If I was visiting with some old Goldwyn Girl at the Fontenoy, so what? I fail to see what that has to do with . . . whoever you may be, whatever you want?" He started to say something, but I interrupted. "And it's a lucky thing for you I don't have a gat under my belt or your balls might be blasted off and rolling around on the floor by now."

"Really?" He looked up from cleaning his shades with a handkerchief.

"Yeah! You could be down on the floor scrambling around after your balls, and maybe you'd get lucky--if I gave you a set of jacks to start bouncing 'em up and down with." I was trying to iron the wrinkles out of my shirt and tie with the flat of my hand. "You'll get a bill from my dry cleaners for this."

"Are you done?"

I raised a hand, soundlessly, which is one way to say nothing.

"But you don't have a piece, smart guy, so suppose you let me be the one asking the questions?" He was pulling a cigarillo from his breast pocket. "So . . ." he lit his little cigar, and blew a big blue cloud in my face. "Mind if I smoke?"

CHAPTER TEN
A Dangerous Stranger
--
The door opened and Bright Eyes walked in. She looked at our guest whose gaze was glued to her, as she took a sniff of the air, and shot a glance directly to what was smoking in his hand. "How do you do?" said she, already having smacked those cool greenies on me. "I am sure, Johnny that your guest will enjoy his smoke immensely more in your office than in mine?" I had opened my mouth, but the words I sought were nowhere in there. The man in the chair sat observing the whirl of my girl's hand through the smoky air--like a cat watches a circling bird. "Excuse me!" She gave me a bump, going around behind the chair; I turned to find her struggling to get the window open.

Seeing this for my chance to whisper something furtive and quick, I got up to join her effort, but it was countered by the sense of those olive and ochre Levantine eyes burning into my back. Throwing the window open, I turned to find him gone from the chair, and waiting at the inner office door, where he was motioning to usher me in.

I wanted to say at least something to Bright Eyes about this, but feeling this guy's hand on my shoulder and the pressure of forward motion that came with it, the desire soon became moot. Once the door was shut and I was standing behind my desk, I said, "Somehow or other buddy, you've got the wrong idea about all this." I'd decided to try playing a long shot on the outside chance that our new pal up at the Fontenoy had not tipped all the cards in her hand--and ours. I sat down. "I suppose the old dame must have told you that my partner and I were there on a mission from Groucho Marx?" He had pocketed his dark glasses to browse among the vintage movie posters on the wall. Pointing at one of the figures in Hitchcock's *The Man Who Knew Too Much*, he turned to me. "Amazing resemblance, isn't it?"

"What?"

"Reggie Nalder, the actor and myself."

He was right! Why hadn't I seen that. It was spooky. "It's almost spooky," I said.

He came over with that classic, rueful Reggie Nalder smile and put a hand on the client's chair. "Yes. Well, she told me all about that." He pulled the chair, to sit down. "But then I told her I didn't believe it, seeing how well you match the description of the people who made off with my--ah, dead lady's goods?"

"I made myself look totally clueless, which was hardly any work at all. "What dead lady, and what goods?"

He fired his forefinger at me, and though, naturally speaking, it had a silencer on it, it got the point across: "You know what I'm talking about, because that Swanson dame told you all about it." A shift in the focus of his eyes told me he was lying, testing me.

"No," I said. "This is all nuts. We met ol' whats-her-name on the street out in front of the Fontenoy one afternoon. It turned out she was a Goldwyn Girl, a real movie star! She says to come grocery shopping with her; so naturally we did. Later she even invited us up for tea--but that's it, we sat there, looked at her portrait from Groucho Marx and talked about old times."

"So she said." He'd pulled the ashtray over to tip an ash. "But she had your card?"

"I always give people our card. Probably half the up and coming cuckolds in Hollywood have it."

He inhaled from that cigar. It was amazing. "Listen," he said, leaning a lot closer. "When I told her I knew all about the two of you being up there with her, and how I'd tailed you after you'd snuck out the back door of the Fontenoy that night . . ."

Yikes! I had to talk fast. "Now wait! Who was sneaking out--from what?"

". . . tailed you over to your place on Argyle, and then I paid her a visit. I let fall how it would be a lot better for everybody concerned if she'd save me the trouble of chasing you all over L.A. to find out who you are, what you're up to."

"So that's when she gave you our card, after such a threat to the well-being of us all?"

"That's right." He blew, and watched the smoke rise. "I saw no agents on business from no Groucho Marx, but a couple private dicks out sneaking around." He butted out the cigar.

"Say!" I said, "That was all her own notion from the Groucho Marx, and as to this sneaking around . . ."

"Yeah, I guess she did say you claimed to have nothing going on that end, but she doesn't believe you, and neither do I."

"I got nothing to do with Groucho Marx!"

"That's not what I mean."

The door opened. "Pardon the interruption!" Bright Eyes was coming in with a tray. "I thought you fellows might like some coffee."

I pointed at the man. "This is a friend of Gladys."

"How nice!" Bright Eyes set down the tray. "Then I'll bet he knows Groucho as well?" I had to answer fast before the grinding sound from his teeth should startle her into spilling the coffee:

"No baby. She gave him our card and he thinks we can help him . . . keep an eye on his wife, who is out running around on him, all over Sherman Oaks."

"And Northridge," he added.

Bright Eyes gave him a sorrowful look. "Why, that's terrible!" She shook her head. "Northridge! Can't people think of a better place than that to do it in?" Seeing that his stare was fixed unmoving on me, and there was nothing but that tight bloodless gash cutting a downward arc, where a sociable mouth was not, she headed for the door, stopping on her way out to say, "Just go ahead and pour out your breaking heart, Mister." She shut the door. It opened again "That's what we're here for--a shoulder to cry on, a cheating spouse to spy on. That's our motto!" I happened to notice the mop bucket in the corner by the file cabinet as the door went shut again.

Bang, snap! An idea flew into my head like a bat out of hell. "Let's just clear one thing up," I said. "When we left the Fontenoy that night, the janitor was down there in the foyer with the lobby roped off--there was no sneaking going on at all. We had one way out of there and we took it."

He shrugged, only to say, "But you do know who I am, don't you?"

I lied like a wall to wall shag carpet. "Not an idea in the world."

He had torn open a packet of sugar. "So you'll sit there and pretend she didn't tell you how my old girlfriend died up there, how they came and threw her things out on the street?"

Oh, I knew who he was, sure enough and all about that too, so all I could say was, "My deepest, most heartfelt condolences, but what would I know or care about that?"

"Some of those things were mine. And I care."

"I see." I hammered a fist on the desk and stood up in full confidence of the cleanup I'd just gained from the mop bucket. "So, you want some help in finding your stuff!"

"Now, wait a minute . . ."

"Sure you do!" I said. "And pal, you've come to the right outfit."

He eyed me narrowly, and with a smile twisted by a lick of his tongue he said, "Yes, I believe I have, seeing how much you look like the one who was seen out there--finding my stuff." He reached for a spoon. "You're in your mid-twenties, medium height, medium build."

He looked edgy about me being near the door, so I came closer to him. "Oh, that's me to a 'T' alright; me and about 10 million other guys in this town. Are you serious?"

"Brown hair," he said gesturing somewhat uncertainly. "Only the girl, she looks different from what they said, the hair was down instead of up like hers, and . . ."

I took him from behind by the neck, and immediately jammed a hand in across his chest toward that holster.

"Say! What is this?" He struggled to get free. "Let go!" I had the harness of the thing under my hand, but I couldn't feel anything like a heater.

"Where's your gun!" I growled.

"Gun?" he gasped. "Are you nuts?"

"Then what's this?" I got hold of his lapel and tore it open. I stood back. I didn't get it. "What you got on there, if it's not a pistol holster?"

He'd jerked himself up to his feet. "It's a back brace, you idiot!"

"Well, you could've fooled me!"

He stood there straightening his clothes. "All right," he said. "Either I'm the one being fooled, or you're on the level." I was pouring my coffee, just black the way I take it, while he talked: "But maybe I can afford to humor you for a while. Say I put down your retainer--what is it? What do you get?" While I was giving him the old narrow eye to size him up for what he might be good for, he said, "I'll put down a grand."

'Woo,' I thought, considering I would have asked about fifty bucks. "Go on," I said.

"And then, if you can lead me to my things or the people who took them . . ."

"Uh-huh?"

"Two grand more."

"Well . . ."

"No. That's it." He was still trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his suit coat. "And you can forget about any stinking dry cleaning bills. Get me?" When I looked down through the steam from my cup, I saw a hand, for the first time extended. "Call me Maurice," he said as I went for the shake. I knew it! Well, what could be more obvious?

"Deal," I said. "But is that all? Maurice?"

"That's it." He reached into his coat. I licked my lips so he wouldn't notice how I was salivating over the width of that wallet. He pulled some bills. "Here's five hundred for now, and tomorrow . . ."

I took the dough and said, "Tomorrow, it is. In the morning, come up with an itemized list of everything you lost--we'll get on it."

He straightened up after taking his hat from the floor, and as he was brushing his sleeve over that fancy band, he said, "You don't want to be scamming me."

I held out both hands to say, "Hey . . ."

He stopped me by a tap with that hat, "I may not have the heat on me, but I have plenty of friends in this town that you don't want to get on the hot side of. Eh?"

"Trust me," I said, giving him a good hearty slap on the shoulder as I turned him toward the door. "You've made the right choice to go with us, Maurice."

As he walked across the outer office, I stopped at the desk to drop those five bills in front of Bright Eyes, whose lips were silently forming around that name, she'd just heard. Rejoining the man at the outer door, and opening it for him I said, "If there's any outfit in town suited to the job of getting hold of your things, that's us."

Bright Eyes was sitting there looking kind of pale, with all that money in her hand, waving it. She watched me as I stepped out in the corridor to call, "You can count on us, pal!"


CHAPTER XI
Jungle Red
--
When the door had closed after our 'new client', I turned to Bright Eyes who sat with our new money dangling from her fingers like it was the famous lettuce with the fungus that ate the carpet at Howard Johnson's. I asked her, "Something wrong?"

"Oh, what? No, no, don't mind me." She gave the money a jiggle. "I'm sure I couldn't have got you right." She laughed. "I thought I heard you call that man 'Maurice'!" She threw her fingers to her breast. "Hoo-hoo! Oh my." She took the money to fold and point it right at me. "Five hundred bucks." She smiled. "And did you say his name was 'Horace', or was that 'Morris'?"

Having successfully lit my Lucky, despite the shaking of my hands, I said, "You did hear right, darling. That was Maurice."

"You don't mean, the Maurice of the Black Dahlia murder case, though."

Turning to her from where I'd been looking out the window I said, "That's the one."

She let the money fall to the desk. She reared back in her chair staring, like it was a tangle of snakes.

I thrust some smoke at the desk. "That's just half the retainer. He's coming with the rest tomorrow morning."

This was causing her to slide all the way down in her chair; her arms gone limp.

"So," I said, "What the deal is, is . . .

"Don't!" she cried.

"But . . ."

Having recovered her posture, she raised a stiffened finger. "Don't speak."

"But . . ."

"Don't!" She stood up; she grabbed her purse.

"Aw, c'mon, Baby, it's not so bad as it looks. Listen now . . ."

"Are ya nuts?" She had whipped her sweater off the back of the chair and was now headed for me.

"I can explain!" She gave me a shove as she went by, straight for the door. By the time I got to the rack for my hat, she'd already gone out, leaving an open door. I threw the button on the lock, switched off the light, and then remembered that five bills on the desk.

It nearly shattered, the pane of hobnail glass as the door slammed, and I sprang into a sprint down the corridor. Thankfully the elevator is slow and she was still waiting.

"Golly, Brooke!" I panted. "What is it you think I've done?" I was just shoving the money into my pocket.

She pointed. "You took that money, from that man in order to . . . no! I can't even think it . . ." The elevator door slid open, and I followed her in. She pulled the gate shut; I hit "L" for Lobby.

Having the car to ourselves, I raised my hands to form what I had to say into a nice round package but she was now going at the speed of a news-service teletype: "You took a thousand dollars from a person to track down some stuff of his that we have stashed in our closet, hanging from our windows, walking around on our feet . . ."

"Not one thousand, darling . . . but three. It's three thousand." I said.

"Uh!" She teetered so on Maurice's girl-friend's heels that I had to catch hold of her.

"Unhand me, sir!" She threw down my arm, but then moved in real close, going on tip-toes to put her face near enough to give me the nose to nose resuscitation. "My God, Johnny! Have you even the slightest conception of the danger you've placed us in?"

I refused to back off by even an inch. "It's the same as the danger we were already in, my dear girl detective . . ." I rubbed her an Eskimo Kiss, but the way she flinched, you'd think a blue spark had leapt the nose gap. She huddled in the corner, and from there, over her shoulder she said:

"And you . . . and he . . . Jeepers! I can't even . . ." The elevator bumped to a stop. I threw back the gate and we walked out together over the polished slabs of pink granite.

On the street, she paused to poke my chest with the steel-like intensity of a long sharp nail, Jungle Red adorned, and deadly: "You better not spend one penny of that money, my friend, because tomorrow morning you're going to give it back to that man." She linked with me at the crook of my elbow and we began to walk the half block up toward Hollywood Boulevard. "Now just tell me you will do as I say!"

"Bright Eyes," I said, "You know that your every wish is my . . ."

"If wishes were horse-feathers, beggars could fly. I am not begging. I am commanding you Johnny to . . ."

"Darling, if, by this time tomorrow, after I've explained my strategy . . ."

"No!"

"But, you will have whatever is your desire in any event!" I stopped her. "Sweetheart!" I pointed across the street. "Look: this is Hollywood; over there is the legendary Vine street Brown Derby, let's just cross here, go in for a cup of coffee and a nice pastrami sandwich so we can both simmer down and consider the whole thing from the most professional, if not even what you might call the moral or ethical perspective."

She was actually allowing me to guide her across through the traffic, all the while insisting, "It is not the morals of the Brown Derby that concern me, but the money for the pastrami. We can't afford it--" her eyes fell to my pocket. "And I won't let you use . . ."

"If I eat nothing but rice and sardines for a week, we can do this!" We stepped up to the curb. "Believe me. There is no sacrifice that is too much to keep my Bright Eyes happy." As the doorman had the portal open and waiting, the poor girl was just too charmed to refuse.

Inside, seated in our booth, we sipped our Martinis as we waited for the coffee and pastrami to arrive. I was leisurely enjoying a smoke and addressing her concern over the matter of just who this man, our client, Maurice was, and how he figured in the horrible affair which we had thoroughly managed to mix ourselves up in. I was filling her in on some of the things I'd managed to dig up to date; I was saying, "So, that was in July of '46 when she arrived here from back east by way of Chicago, for the last time. And . . ."

"What was in Chicago?"

"For one thing, three men who admitted, upon questioning to have had, in the words of the police report, 'intercourse' with her, over the two week duration of her stay. So that was before she boarded the train for Long Beach where, according to her mother, she was to be married to . . ."

"Holy Cow!"

"What?"

"Just hold the white lace and rice here for a moment, babe, while I try to get a handle on this."

"Sure," I said, pulling the olive from it's pick with my teeth. "Let it all kind of take its time to sink in."

"Okay," she put a hand to her throat as she swallowed. "I've read a few things over the years about this case, and if there's one thing I recall, it had to do with something being haywire with her female parts and . . ."

"The 'female trouble'. Right. She had a lot of that."

"See? I knew that I knew something about this case. So how could she have been messing around with three different guys in just two weeks if . . ."

"Well, that's merely the three who were willing to 'fess up, of quite a few more, married men among them, who admit to having met her at that press bar where she hung out . . ." I addressed the question knit in her brow. "It was a cocktail lounge situated near one of the major newspapers where reporters, photographers, editors and such would gather."

"Photographers," she said, raising a brow. I raised my glass to that, and she said, "But what about the female trouble?"

"The female trouble is that she was always getting knocked up and -- " I snapped my fingers. "Ah! Why hadn't I thought of this before?"

"What?"

"You asked what was in Chicago?" I lit my cigarette, snapped the lighter shut. "A doctor was in Chicago, or that is in Hammond, Indiana, not far across the Illinois state line, a little south of East Chicago."

"You're saying that the Dahlia's 'female trouble' was nothing other than a constant need for abortion--and not what they were saying about her having a teeny-tiny little t . . ."

"Tut-tut!"

"Call it what you like!" She was reaching into her purse for something.

"Okay. According to one of the known abortion doctors, of the two or three whose names were found in her address book, this one, a certain Dr. Faught, claimed that he'd found it necessary to go in up there and lance her, what they call, bartholin gland, because . . ."

"Her what?" She snapped open the clasp on a compact.

"Well, it's the gland for . . . um, okay, what her problem was, was like, I raised my empty Martini glass. "How dry I am," I sang, "How dry I am," I turned it upside down to show, "Nobody knows how dry . . ."

"I get the picture." She'd reached across to bring my hand down, as others had come to take notice. "Okay, so she couldn't lubricate."

"That's only if you take the doctor's word for it. I say that's just his cover. When she finally did get out there to Long Beach, she stayed shacked up for a little over a month, in various motels and hotels with her soldier-boy fiancé, a guy name of Fickling."

Bright Eyes shrugged. "How do you know they weren't just playing pinochle all that time, sorta like in *Irma la Douce*?"

"Well," I said, motioning to the waiter. "All I can tell you is that it was in Long Beach where she picked up the "Black Dahlia" handle. The people who identified her by that said her boyfriend was the real jealous type, who wasn't too broad-minded about the way she was always flirting around with other guys, whether he was with her at the time, or not. And sometimes they'd be seen as a trio of two guys to one girl, and him looking very foolish and unhappy."

"Hm!" said my girl as she watched the waiter take the empty glasses.

"Your order will be ready, shortly," he said, putting her drink down. "Soon as we kill and pickle the cow." He smiled at my girl.

"Does it have to be in that order?" asked Brooke.

After setting my drink, he said to her, "I'll consult with the chef. We do aim to please."

"Thank you," I said. "Then why don't you just beat it before I get jealous?"

"Why, yes sir!" He said. "I understand perfectly."

I had to smile and say, "Man to man, I knew you would."

And when he was gone, I turned to my girl. "Where were we?"

"My, but that was rude!" she said.

"I know, baby, but if you don't want to wind up like the Gordon Ficklings of this world, well, you know how it is."

"Wish I didn't."

"Ain't it awful. So . . ."

She thought for a moment, and then in a voice chilled to about the temperature of that fresh Martini, said, "We were at the question as to whether the doctor was on the level or not."

"Yes!" I savored the bouquet of the Tanqueray. "Well obviously, any abortionist of the day would be using a dodge like that to cover for what the operation actually amounted to--and that's how the whole myth of the 'female trouble', and the icon of the Virgin Black Dahlia got started." I settled back. "And it's a lot of pure rot, if I may dare suggest it."

Bright Eyes was tapping that scarlet nail on the stem of her Martini glass, till she shot me that beam of the cool greenies. "In other words," she said, not straight up, but with ice, "You're saying that she was some kind of cheap tramp who on occasion would sleep with three or more different men within a two week period, while she was engaged to be married, no less, and all the time, keeping a roster of abortion doctors handy in her address book in order to further her career of flagrant, libertine, sluttery as she whored her way across the nation . . ."

"Well . . ."

"Yeah! And leaving a long line of drained, exhausted, panting men on her trail--and for this she deserved to be beaten, tortured, stripped naked, sawed in half and left on public display in some field in South L.A. for all to come and see, and there arrive upon the mood of the killer's moral judgments concerning this sort of woman?"

"Migod, Brooke!"

"Okay, something you said earlier is bothering me." She was looking in the mirror of her open compact and with a pinkie, she was touching up that Jungle Red line at the corner of her mouth. She looked across at me as she snapped it shut. "Now I remember," she said, closing her purse. "You said this was her last visit to L.A., indicating it was not the first?"

"For certain, she'd come out once before, late in '42 to live with her father in Vallejo, and then for a few weeks in South L.A. after moving down here together, but that was just a little over a month--both locations included--before he threw her out, after which . . ."

"Slow down!" She moved her purse aside. "Let's get the whole picture here. Why did her old man give her the gate?"

"According to him, she wouldn't touch a dish, or look for work; that she was always out catting till the wee hours, all the time with some different guy, mainly soldiers and sailors, till he was fed up with it; told her to take her act out on the street."

"Sheesh!"

"I guess."

"Well, how old was she, then?"

"Legal age, nineteen. She'd quit school at sixteen to go south, winters for her health, or so some said, in Miami; stayed there with friends of the family. The story she gave her mother when she'd move back north for the summer was that she'd worked as a waitress down there, which did not do well to explain all the expensive hats, shoes, dresses and fancy lingerie she'd be coming home with. The people in her home town couldn't get over it, the way she dressed, how she walked like something off the fashion show runway."

"Okay! Obviously a trollop of the first water-- the hats, gloves and fancy lingerie is the tip-off every time. So, that's why her daddy threw her out in a hail of tumbling hat-boxes and a hurricane of brassieres. Then what?


CHAPTER XII
The Drummer and the Dahlia
--
"Then?" I drained the last of my coffee.

"Yes! What else can you dig up to convince me that the sleazy little harlot got just what she deserved?"

I set down my cup, and was pleased to see how she was hailing the waiter with her empty Martini glass: it looked like my ruse was working. "You sure you want another? That is your third, darling."

"Darn tootin!" She lightly banged her pretty little fist on the table. "Because ya know why?"

"No idea."

"Cuz now you've got me committed to the vindication of this woman, and I'm gonna see it through."

I sat back. "No more giving the dough back to Maurice?"

"No way. I'm not scared, see? Why, just have a look at me. I'm a private eye, aren't I?"

"One for the lovely Lady Sam Spade!" said the waiter, having taken the empty, to set down the full. "And one more for the gent." He straightened up.

I looked at him. "Well? What you want--a hot tip on the horses?" He turned on his heel and was gone.

"Meanie!"

"Yes."

From behind half-closed lids, narrowly she surveyed me. "Johnny, you act like you're jealous over me, or something."

"Hm! Fancy that!"

"But, why?"

I gestured an open-handed confession of my complete cluelessness. "I am not one to question my instincts, Bright Eyes, I simply obey them."

"I think there's more to this than meets the eye," she said, savoring that first sip.

"I thought you wanted to hear more of the story."

"Please, do go on." Nonetheless, she sat there eyeing me with an odd sort of interest.

"But try to understand that I have no reason to judge this girl, as you would so accuse."

"Sure sounds like it to me."

"Nothing of the sort. Facts are facts, and they have to be faced. If you try to gloss them over you can't form a clear picture of the victim, which is exactly what you must have to get an idea of where to look, and who to look at, for the face of her killer."

She considered that as she reached across; I took the flame she offered from my lighter. She watched me inhale and said, "Yes, that makes a lot of sense."

I pulled the ashtray closer. "Okay. But you should see some of those feature articles in the way they bend over backward to maintain an image, not of the Black Dahlia, but of the White! Why, there was even one writer who was so bound and determined to preserve what she wanted to see as the virginal innocence of this--face it--B-girl, that she chose to push away or distort every unpleasant fact. It put her off on such a cock-eyed track that she finally wound up pointing the finger at some poor innocent schmuck of a film director who never had a thing to do with it."

"Who?"

"One of the biggies; can't recall the name, but that reporter does remind me of a girl I knew in third grade who was always piping up in class with some hokum about how there was no such thing as a woman criminal?"

"Well, that's clearly not . . ."

"I wanted to pull her braids so bad I could taste it."

"You never pulled mine!"

"Not that I wouldn't have liked to; couple o' times tonight, anyway."

"Oh, g'wan. I'm not that kind of a complete snot."

"I mean, just because I'm a guy, I should get so conceited over it, that I can see no evil in the members of my own gender?"

"Well, I don't know a lot about the evil in your gender's members but I'm sure some girls do."

"Bright Eyes? Do you want the low-down on this thing, or . . ."

"By all means. Where were we?"

"Okay, here: For some reason that none of the cops or reporters could get puzzled out, just about a month before her body showed up in that field on Norton Avenue, she abruptly left L.A. and went down to San Diego. Only thing is, she was flat broke and wound up spending her first night in town sitting in an all-night movie theatre."

"Well that's . . . kind of . . . "

"Yeah. So the cashier on duty there that night took pity on the girl and invited her to come stay with her and her mother in their home. Well, it wasn't long before she'd worn out her welcome. Just as she'd been doing while she lived with her father, and as her former room-mates around Hollywood would put it, she'd be out with a different guy every night, be sleeping till noon every day so that the mother had to be tip-toeing around in her own house, as not to disturb the princess on the couch in the living room--in short, she never got up to go out and look for work."

"Implication being that this broad was obviously just some kind of . . . bum!"

"Your words, m'dear, not mine."

"More! Give me more."

"So, all the while she's writing for money, to a Florentine Gardens chorus girl she bunked with in Hollywood -- "

"The Florentine Gardens!"

"Uh-huh--to the guy she was shacking with in Long Beach, who sends her a hundred bucks, and she even tried to put the touch on the mother of the dead Army Air Corps captain she'd been engaged to back east . . ."

"Jeeze."

"Yeah, but see, this guy in Long Beach who sends her the hundred bucks, had earlier been jilted by her, for this fly-boy from back East, this Captain Mat Gordon."

"Oh! Sure, so now he's dead, she might as well go back to . . ."

"That's right."

Bright Eyes showed her teeth. "I think there's a name for that kind of a dame that the 'b' in 'bum' is one letter too early in the alphabet to aptly describe."

"Be that as it may, nobody, not even Minnie the Moocher deserves what was done to this poor dame."

"Not even if she was Public Enemy Number One of all moochers--which maybe she was."

"Did I mention the rotten teeth?"

"No!"

"She always carried a candle in her purse for that -- "

"Huh?"

"Yeah, she'd go into the Ladies room, melt a little wax and rub it in to hide the decay."

"That's so sad!"

"But that hundred she got from her Lieutenant Fickling, the flyboy up in Long Beach would have gone a long way in the dentist's chair, or for the grocery bill in the house where she is now strictly from yesterday's fish with these two San Diego women. So, she hooks up with this married guy down from L.A. on business, who picks her up off a street corner in front of the Western Union office one day. This guy is the salesman, Red Manley, a sometime big band drummer and prime fool with a pretty little wife in South Gate who is such a knock-out that every guy who sees her pix in the Examiner is in the mood for a lynching."

"As would only serve him right!"

"Yeah. So Red and the Black Dahlia spend that first night in a motel just outside of San Diego, and next day take the drive back up to L.A. And all the way, according to Manley, she's got the hawk-eye out for every car coming up from behind, for every one that passes. He asks her about it, but she denies that she's doing what she's doing."

"Hm!"

"According to these women she'd lived with in San Diego, one day a car pulled up out front with two men and a woman. The Dahlia didn't want to see them, so she tells Mrs. French to act like nobody was home. Finally the people went away, and it was just a few days later that she pulls up stakes to head north with Manley."

"Any hunches about who those people were?"

"Yeah, and it ties in with the Crown bar, which was known to the police as what they at the time called a "queer" club where much of the female help was either lesbian or bi-sexual, and it was a place where contacts with certain doctors could be made, such as Madame Chang, a lesbian surgeon from San Francisco, but it was also a prime point of rendezvous for ordinary prostitutes and B-girls.

"Well, gads! What is all that?"

"I just don't know yet, but the Florentine Gardens chorus girl, Ann Toth, the Dahlia, and her regular Hollywood room-mate Marjorie were always going downtown to this club. But the thing is complicated by the Crown Jewel Cocktail Lounge at 8th and Olive, just one block north of the Crown Grill Bar at 9th, and you have to get it all sorted out as to which is the robber's roost for the straight action B-Girls and hookers, and which is the queer bar connection to Madame Chang."

"Well, let me know when you get it straightened out, will ya because this is making me dizzier than my little Martini."

"Sure. We'll just stick with what's for certain."

"Go on."

I put out my cigarette. "Okay, back to the highway. When the Dahlia and the drummer get in to Los Angeles, he takes her to the bus depot so she can stow her bags, and then drives her to the Biltmore. That's January 9th, and but for the testimony of a few people who swear they saw her at one or the other Crown Bar later that night, it's the last time anybody saw her alive. The two pieces of her turned up on the 15th. A few days later when they put the collar on Manley, they found out about those bags she'd checked at the Greyhound Depot."

"Which were still there."

"Uh-huh, and what was found in them was a real mystery, the oddest thing of all."

"Well, c'mon! Give!"

"Among all the fancy clothes, and the expensive French lingerie, there were these photo albums."

"What about 'em?"

"They were full of men, I mean snap-shots of men, not just five or ten different men, not twenty-five or thirty."

"Well, fifty or sixty?"

"Not a hundred, nor a hundred and fifty, but . . ."

"What?"

"Two hundred. And the cops were able to identify and contact all but two of them."

"Wait. I'm trying to get, tryin' to see what . . ."

"Yes?"

"I thought you said, 'two hundred'?"

"Two hundred."

She drained the rest of her drink. She set down the glass, looked at it; gave it a turn. "You say that this one girl, had a photo album . . ."

"There were two or three."

"With two hundred snap-shots of just . . . men?"

"Two hundred different men."

"Well that's a lot of pictures!"

"It's a lot of men."

"Well yeah, a lot of both."

"Okay, just let me ask. How many different men do you have in your albums, Brookie?"

"You know how many!"

"Ten?"

"No!"

"Eleven?"

"Less!"

"Five?"

"Less!"

"Two?"

"Less! I've got about a hundred different pictures of one man, a certain pain-in-the-butt distant relative--twice removed."

For the first time in our lives together, all the way up from that crib in a double bungalow in Pasadena, to the one we now shared at DeMille Manor on Argyle, I felt something for my pal that was somehow prettier than the very special affection we'd always shared. And for some crazy reason, blame it on the Martinis, I reached across the table, took her hand and gave it a kiss. You should have seen her! It was the nuttiest thing I ever saw, when a tear dropped from her eye.


CHAPTER XIII
Mad Money
--
Being so hung-over as I was, on any other day, I wouldn't have got to the office before 11:00, but when I saw Bright Eyes rolling out at 7:30 as per usual, I wasn't about to just swoon back down into a big sensuous pillow smooch, to let her face the business of this day all alone. We got in the office door at the Taft building together at 9:00 a. m. schlepping a cardboard tray laden with Howard Johnson's coffee, and being in this manner armed by Brazil for bear, we were ready to face the musical saw music of this morning together.

Our clock ticked it's loud obnoxious talk from that big white face on the wall, till the big hand had gone around twice, with still no show from the dread expected guest. We were starting to interrupt the clock with a little conversation of our own, talking about maybe getting some lunch up at the Pig 'n Whistle on McCadden Place, where shades of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were said to lurk behind the shadows of every stolen kiss. And with such a fine old jukebox loaded with Big Band hits as they had, who knew but maybe Glenn Miller was eternally sitting in his favorite booth there too, having his infinite morning cup of Maxwell House.

McCadden Place is a funny street, the way it comes up from the south at Hollywood Boulevard and then just disappears so that all you see standing in front of the cafe is Las Palmas to the east and Highland to the west. But if you walked a block north of the boulevard on Las Palmas, you'd come to Yucca, and if you turned west and went just a few hundred feet, you'd walk right smack into McCadden again. And then, if you went around the corner and started going back south, you'd see a big building at the dead end that faces Hollywood boulevard. Now, as you drift into this big urban box canyon, coming up on your left, if this were Hollywood after dark in the year 1947, you would see flashing in green neon and pink, "Al Green's Nightlife" a bar and all night cafe, where quite unlike one strangely haunted black-haired girl from Boston, you and a lot of other people might be wise enough not to go in there.


While she was still down in San Diego two days before her last return to L.A, some people associated with this dive, namely, the McCadden Gang, pulled off a big daylight stick-up of the Mocambo, of all places, for one of the biggest jewel heists, of all things, in anyone's memory. And the bums behind the starched white bandanas for this job were all close acquaintances of the Black Dahlia.

I'd come to know about these things from articles I was reading in some old pulp detective magazines from the kind of dusty old stores where you can dig them up out of the stacks and buy them. And these are the same kind of shops that were in business back in the 1930's through the 1950's using that trade mainly as a cover for the illegal, under-the-counter marketing of porno. You can pick up every kind of yellowed copy of the old scandal magazines, *Confidential* and *Top Secret*, *Hush!* and the like, all of which had a stable of free-lance investigative smut reporters, whose main interest it was to go knocking on the doors of people who knew the guy or the doll who knew the one who . . .

You never knew whether it was nothing more than a lot of dirty slander you were reading or maybe something in it was true, but there was enough of it stuffing those yellow rags from cover to cover, to keep those magazines slipping and sliding off the rack till in a later year, the cheap pulp tabloids at a quarter of the price, delivered the coup de grace. I had a whole drawer full of this choice information on the Dahlia case, and Bright Eyes had her own stash of the stuff in her desk too, as clearly we both had our work of research cut out for us.

When the clock hit noon, we hung the "Out to Lunch" sign and made good by it, on the mad money from Maurice by taking that stroll up to McCadden Place. The afternoon without all the racket from Big Ben was quieter, after we'd both taken a hair of the dog at the Pig n' Whistle, so we spent the rest of the day, same as the morning, combing those old magazine articles for every scant rag or bone of a clue that bore the least scent of verity. You pour over enough of it, after a while you do develop an eye for the sort of thing that fits the puzzle as opposed to all the idiot gossip that won't.

Two more days went by like that with no sign or sound of Maurice--and the rest of that retainer. Next morning, what should we see on the other side of the elevator gate when the outer door slammed open, but our sweet little old Goldwyn Girl, shopping cart and all, standing in the corridor in front of the office.


CHAPTER XIV
A Secret Word
--
Happily, we were able to get Gladys scraped off the wall, where she'd been slumped, panting in her relief to see we weren't on crutches and missing a few limbs as we came down the hall. "I didn't tell him anything!" she cried. Her hand had closed to a tight grip on my forearm. "Not till he started making those threats!"

"Sure, baby. Sure." I comforted her, handing the cart off to Bright Eyes as I ushered her in through the door. "You only did as you had to." I was guiding her against some resistance across the room.

She stopped. "Oh, he wanted to know plenty, all right, whether you'd been nosing around about him, or if you had something to do with those things he'd lost." I managed to urge her along through the doorway of the inner office. She stopped again just inside. "But I kept mum on that the whole time, playing it dumb, don't you see?"

"Gladys, you're just the peaches," called Bright Eyes, as she came in dragging a chair from the outer office. "Look," she said, having pushed it up to my desk, "I'll go lock the door, hang up the 'Out for Coffee' sign."

"Oh, don't bother!" Gladys followed her back into the outer office. "He's the one who sent me here with this." From her coat pocket she'd produced an envelope. "So there's no need to be hiding me from him, if that's the plan."

My darling partner had hurried over to snatch the thing before I'd even got done pushing the chair back out there, and all that remained was for me to say, "I'll be a dirty bird." After a look inside, she handed it over to me; one peek showed me the money, plus that list we'd talked about. I shoved it into my vest pocket.

I wound up in the client's chair looking across at our Goldwyn Girl enthroned behind the desk, while Bright Eyes had taken up a cross-legged perch right on it. "No sir," the dear lady was saying, "All he got out of me was your card, and my opinion that you were strictly agents come to see me from . . ."

"Say the secret word, dear," I gave a grandiose tap, tap, tap to my imaginary cigar, "and a duck will come down to give you fifty dollars!" I was still working on making my eyebrows jump when I noticed how Gladys was reaching for that stack of detective magazines filling the 'In' basket.

"Say!" She pulled one off the top. "Police Gazette? Why, I haven't seen one of these in just ages!" She started leafing through it.

"Tell me dear," said Bright Eyes. "The last time we visited, you started to tell us about . . ."

"Oh, my heavens!" Gladys was leaned all the way back, her magazine folded. "This is the story on that frightful business that I . . ." Her eyes shot straight to mine. "Remember? I was telling you about it!"

I was up out of my chair and coming around. "You bet I do! All about Maurice being one of the suspects."

"My stars!" said Bright Eyes. "Just wrestle me down and rope me like a dogie, if I wasn't going to ask about that very thing!"

Gladys was showing me a print of the familiar studio portrait of the girl with the two white dahlias done in her hair, over either ear. She was tapping the picture. "No end of trouble there was between the two of 'em over this one, I can tell you."

Now we were flanking her as Bright Eyes peered over the old girl's shoulder, the better to see.

"Hm!" Gladys looked at my girl and lowered her tone. "You really shouldn't be stirring around in any part of this, if that's what this is all about. Jeepers creepers!" She looked back and forth between us. "Listen you two. As for me, I just kept my nose out of it, even if I did know so much as I told you."

"Which was?" asked Bright Eyes.

"Only what I just mentioned!"

"You mean the trouble between Maurice and his lady over this dame with the dahlias?" I snapped my lighter shut and she inhaled.

"That's right." She blew her smoke. "Because see--she hadn't known a thing about his doings with that doll until the police came and took him downtown."

"So now he had some explaining to do," said Bright Eyes, standing straight up.

"Oh, did he! So that was the beginning of the end for them, right there. Ohhh, it just gives me the heebie-jeebies any time I think of it!"

"Sure," I said, "Why wouldn't it? But if you could just . . ."

Gladys turned a page. "No sir-ee bob!" she said. "I'm staying clear of it, same as before." Suddenly she threw a foot up on the desk, and then she crossed it with the other. "But, I do happen to know a couple old babes out there in West Hollywood who might be able to put you a little further into the know." She thought for a moment. "Or maybe a lot further. 'Course, much as I hate to think of you two kids getting mixed up in it, maybe I shouldn't . . ."

Under the slap of my hand, suddenly on the desk a fifty dollar bill did appear, with the sound of my voice saying, "This is business, Lady."

She looked at that and then she looked around. "Did I hear a duck?" All she saw was the earnest look on my face. She waved a hand over it. "Oh, but I couldn't!" She flinched a little to see me shove it closer.

"Sure you can, doll," I said, "Because this is how it is. We're in it for the money, and if it wasn't for the risk involved, we'd be out of the . . ."

"Post Toasties!" said Bright Eyes, coming toward the desk dunking a bag of tea. "Face it darling, everybody's got to have their breakfast. Did you take it black, or . . ."

Snatching up the fifty bucks, the Goldwyn Girl said, "A little sugar would be nice."

"Ah!," said Bright Eyes, heading back toward the coffee stand by the water cooler, "One lump or two?"



CHAPTER XV
Tiger Pants
--
"Papah, Sarah! Papaaaaaaaaaah!"

I looked at Bright Eyes, and she at me. I took a step back over the creaking boards. "What the hell was that?" I looked northward over the end of the porch and a narrow strip of lawn, the lilacs, past the drive beside a late-fifties era two-story balconied apartment complex.

Bright Eyes gave the button another push, to no effect. I moved in and knocked while she tried to peer through a large oval of glass in the door, seeing nothing for the white lace curtains, yellow with age.

"Saraaaaaaaaaah, Papaaaaaaah!"

"Jesus!" I was tripping over a loose board on my way toward the end of the porch, where I leaned on the rail for a look around the side. Brooke's hand came to my shoulder as she used me for a post to lean out the further. She looked down, her eyes scanning over the grass. "Are those avocados?" They were all over the ground, fallen from two trees, fifty and sixty feet high, that served to put most of this house, plus a smaller one story cabaña in back, and all of the yard in shade. In the drive for the apartment building next door were five or six giant avocados squashed to green smithereens on the pavement.

Bright Eyes snapped the scrap of paper from my hand for another look, to compare the house number with what Gladys had jotted down for us. Upon the sound of a slamming screen-door from out back, I went to rejoin my partner at the door to give it another knock. We heard some muffled curses, footsteps and then the curtain moved as a pink and blue be-curlered head appeared. Through a pair of blue rhinestone studded cat's-eye glasses we were inspected each in our turn, thoroughly, even twice over before the door jerked loose from being stuck in the jamb.

Pink print rose-bud panels of a housecoat were being haphazardly clutched to close over a fleeting view of deep lavender lace like evening shadows creeping over a mountain range of bosom. An unfiltered cigarette between rouged lips jumped with the words, "You ain't the Mormons, are ya?"

Brooke handed her the slip of paper. And I said, "We're from Gladys."

"We didn't know but maybe you weren't home--or if the doorbell's on the fritz," said Bright Eyes.

"Hm!" she said, taking that Camel from her lips. She spit a particle of tobacco aside and said, "Come on in." When the door was closed behind, she showed us through the foyer into the front parlor. "I was out back bringing the papah to Sarah." She leaned an elbow on her hip. "I take it out to hah every moaning about this time, plus the goddam doorbell hasn't worked for yeeahs, so--why don't you have a seat; sit anywhey-ah. I'll get some coffee."

You get the idea. Strictly from some combination of Boston and Brooklyn this very vintage babe; so from now on, it will be nicer just to imagine the accent rather than having to look at it. And speaking of how things looked--if you've seen the furnishings of one old Florentine Gardens showgirl, you've seen them all. There will be the obligatory poster-size print portrait of "NTG" or i.e. Nils T. Granlund, producer, choreographer and impresario, master of ceremonies for all the Forties-era shows, he who was the Minsky and the Flo Ziegfeld of the Hollywoodland follies.

Atop the upright piano were four loving cups, two of gold and two of silver, awarded for the art of dance from NTG, two for each of the Gillespie twins, Sarah and Clara. Brooke had found a curious little item dangling from a peg on the wall beneath a glossy 8 x 10 black and white print of Sarah in head be-plumed, nearly nude g-string and pasty adorned regalia. She was furtively motioning me over. "C'mon and get a load of this!" She loudly whispered.

I came, I looked, I touched, I felt the weight. "Looks like bronze," I mused.

"Gawd!" said Bright Eyes. "Just like they do with baby shoes, only these are titty-twirlers!"

"Tassels?"

"Yeah!"

"Aren't those just the cutest?" This from Sarah, in blue housecoat, coming in with sister Clara pushing the tray of coffee and tea cakes -- and if you've seen one Gillespie Twin, you've seen them both.

After introductions were had, and Clara had briefed Sarah on the call from Gladys about our visit, everyone was seated, the twins in the loveseat at the bay window, Brooke and I the other side of a low round table, she in a gold brocade, maple armed chair, and I on quite a creaky but comfortably cushioned old rocker. I'd been trying to work gently as possible into the subject of our interest. "And I can assure you both," I said, "that anything you may be able to tell us concerning the . . . ah, matter we've come to inquire of you about will be held in the strictest of confidence." My chair creaked as I rocked forward to present Clara on my left, our card. When she'd passed it on to Sarah, she gave us both an appraising look and said:

"Private dicks, eh?"

"Or janes," said Brooke.

"Well," said Sarah, "What the hell is this all about, anyway?"

"Back in the mid-forties, there was a dancer at the Florentine Gardens, name of Rene Germaine?"

They looked at one another, then Clara said, "Well, she's dead ain't she?"

"Rest her soul," said Bright Eyes.

"Hmph!" said Sarah.

"Reason we ask," I said, "is she was once involved with a man name of Maurice?"

"Hmph!" said Clara.

"What about him?" asked Sarah.

"He's a client of ours who is concerned about having his name kept clear of some rather sticky business that . . ." Bright Eyes froze me with a look. "Or to put it another way, it was . . ."

"We know all about it," said Sarah tapping an ash to a white marble tray on the table big enough for a birdbath, had there been room for a flamingo or two among the heap of Camel butts.

"And we knew *her*, as well." Clara crossed her legs. "I mean the one in two pieces out there in the ground--pushing up dahlias?"

Bright Eyes had jumped forward in her chair. "Personally, you knew her?"

"Personally, no-one knew that one," said Sarah. "We'd see her at the club around the time she was living at Hansen's house up there on Carlos behind the Gardens."

"That's the owner of the place, Mark Hansen," I said.

"Sure he was!" said Clara. "People'd ask, and he'd say she was waiting on a audition for a spot in the next Revue, but so far as any of us knew, she'd never done any hoofing, wasn't no songbird as I know of--none of it."

"They thought maybe she could strip," said Sarah. "But technically that was not going on at the Gardens."

"Hah!" Clara rolled her eyes. "So, what's the diff, whether we came out from the start in a G-string and pasties, or spent ten minutes working down to it on stage? It all comes to the same thing in my book, just boobs and bottoms in the final analysis, as they say."

Sarah pulled a cigarette from her pack on the table. "So, she would've had to go downtown for that. Hansen had a couple ballrooms with a string of taxi-dancers, dime-a-dance and like that, such as down there at Roseland. So, I guess he'd been thinking of farming her out to some of his strip joint pals, as her manager." She swung her crossed leg. "But just let me think." There was an old-fashioned gold elastic garter band holding her stockings just above the knee. "Yeah, that would've been during the fall, September, October of '46 before--what happened to her that winter, after the first of the year."

"On the night of January the 14th," said Bright Eyes.

"So what about that poor bastard, Maurice?" asked Clara.

Sarah threw a hand in a way that might have made a fine serve in tennis. "He didn't have a damn thing to do with it--well, I mean he had plenty to do with her, but not with that."

"Not on yer life!" Clara reached over to the knob on an old mahogany encased radio to turn the Swing Jazz station from West Covina up a little. "Bunny Berigan," she said. "I love it when they play this."

"Oh, he was in love with the broad, all right," said Sarah. "Damnedest thing too, considering he was queer."

"You don't say!" said I.

"That's what made him so good at what he did with that camera," said Sarah, who like Clara was looking a little dreamy-eyed too, over the song. "She was modeling for him, no different than quite a few of the girls--I won't say who else--but . . ."

"Girls from the Florentine Gardens?" Brooke reached for a tea cake.

"Where else?" laughed Clara, as the looks passing between the two sparked with mischief.

"So," I said, "she was posing for . . ."

"Dirty pictures!" Sarah joined the giggle Clara was having over the revelation. "You know," she said, letting her house-coat open upon her thighs behind a rising crossed leg, now held on high. "At first, it's with the cheese-cake--and then . . ."

Clara laughed. "Look out!"

"See, the way it was back in the forties, early fifties," said Sarah, "a lot of that--ahem--'art photography' was being sold strictly on the Q.T. without going through any publishers."

"They'd take the pictures," said Clara, "and sell the prints, just like that, you know, on the small scale the way Maurice was operating. He'd come to the Gardens, or go to the strip joints downtown, just sell the damn things right out of his vest pocket."

"And he was good about it," said Sarah. "If you wanted to see him burn the negatives right before your eyes, you could watch him do that."

"His reputation depended on him being good for it, when he gave you his word that nothing would go into publication . . ." Clara had a finger raised. "He meant it, and was good for it. The way he explained it was that men who bought the stuff never wanted anybody to know they had it--so, nobody would know. You could do it, pick up a few bucks, get away with it, and Mama would never have to find out."

"That's why nothing ever turned up on *her*." Sarah answered the question in my eyes. "The Dahlia or what you want to call her. Mark always called her 'Lizzie'."

"Yeah!" said Clara. "Until she started to take up with those hoods who were down there to beat Maurice out of her trade. That's when Mark started to put the old 'a-r-d' on the end of the 'Liz'."

"Whoa!" It was coming much too fast. "Let me see if I've got a fix on this." Clara had her eye on the little diamond wristwatch she wore. "Time to take my hair down," she said. "Sarah?"

"G'wan!" Mine can wait a little."

Passing through the dining room Clara shouted, "Tell 'em about that Hassau bum and his broad, the Mocambo stick-up and all that."

"Whew!" Bright Eyes was digging in her purse. "Best I start taking some notes."

"Yeah, so it's five o'clock." Sarah was up and off on her way through the dining room. "Who wants a nice bourbon highball?"

"Oh," Bright Eyes looked at me, registered my shrug. "None for me, Sarah, but . . ."

From the kitchen on the other side of the dining room came, "Okay! One big blast for the boy, comin' up!"

"What about that name?" Brooke gave my arm a swat. "Hassau?"

"Yeah." I knew the name and had to think. "Right. Part of the McCadden Gang, him and a hood by the name of Savarino were busted--now get this--I don't know why I never thought of it before, except it's only now that the date of January 14th is fresh in mind since you just mentioned it, but that's the day those two, and the owner of that *Nightlife* cafe, Al Green, or actually Greenberg, all three were caught and thrown in the slammer for the Mocambo robbery."

"Wait." She held up her hand as she jotted things down. "You say that on the very night the Dahlia was somewhere being cut into pieces, these hoods she chummed around with that were trying to beat Maurice . . ."

"Hold on!"

"What?"

"We don't know that yet."

"We don't?"

"No! She just mentioned hoods, didn't she, without any . . ." Sarah was back with the drinks. I said, "Say, Clara?"

"Sarah!"

"Oh! Forgive me, but let me see if we've got at least this straight: Henry Hassau was one of the hoods trying to beat Maurice out of his Black Dahlia blue photography trade?"

She set my drink in front of me, and beamed a hard pair of eyes right into mine: "He was exactly the one." She kept that hard look on me as she went around to sit back down. "He was in the syndicate, or at least connected. You shoulda seen the way that punk dressed!"

"Really!" Bright Eyes was right into it.

"For one thing, he'd be showing up in these crazy looking pin-striped cardigan suits--you ever see such a thing, for men, I mean?"

Something clicked.

"Well!" said Brooke, it's fairly common in women's wear."

"That may be," I said, "But that's what she had on the night she disappeared after stepping out of the Biltmore on the night of January 9th--never to be seen again."

"No goddam lapels!" said Sarah. "On a man?"

"Huh?" I was still transfixed by what well may have meant nothing, but then again . . .

Sarah was still after it: "Like they do today with the long pointy collars--you seen them?"

"Lots o' times," said Brooke.

"But in the forties," said Sarah, "it was with the no lapels on the suitcoat. Nobody but the hoods dressed like that. They'd have a kind of long, low cut to them, only not way down like the Mexicans and Coloreds with the suspenders, big hats and zoot-suits, which I personally got a big kick out of."

"Yeah!" I said. "Wish I had one."

"With a long, slinky cat-chain way down to your knees?" asked Brooke.

"Uh! So I ain't nothin' but a real cool breeze."

"G'wan!" Sarah threw that great Gillespie Twin serve of hers. "D'ya wanta hear about this guy or . . ."

"Yes!" shouted Brooke, "Just be quiet, Johnny."

"Yeah," said Sarah, "keep a button on that flap, Jack."

"Shoot!" Brooke raised her notepad into position.

"All right. Yeah," said Sarah. "Hassau had the mob connections to the publishing end of it back in New York and Indianapolis, which was something none of us wanted anything to do with--and at first, neither did she."

"The Black . . ." I ventured

"Yeah. Whatever." She took a few swallows from that tall, slice of lime decorated glass and set it down with a crack. "But then, before you knew what, it was all the time, the drinkin' and dancin' with the crumb-bums--and Hansen didn't like it. It was one thing to have people like Mickey Cohen showin' up at the club, he had a certain amount of class to his act, and a lot of dough to throw around, but these hard guys she was on the run with, they were strictly from the lower whaddyacallit . . ."

"Echelons." Brooke looked up from her pad.

"That's the word. And the lowest of 'em all. Cheap burglars and stick-up artists--that kinda trade. And if they had the money to make it in the door at the Florentine Gardens it was strictly a crime. Yeah! I mean the one they'd just committed for the price of admission."

"So that's when Hansen decided to throw her fancy dress ass out!" We both wheeled around to see Clara coming across the dining room with a highball of her own, her red-dyed hair all done up tall with spit-curls at her cheeks and the fragrance of powder and perfume was gone before her as a spirit.

"Wow!" said I, wondering how a woman in her late sixties could look like that in tight, tiger-striped toreador slacks and a black cashmere sweater that emphasized the buxom bounty that had been her stock in trade during a heyday that from the looks of the way she was settling down into my lap, was anything but over just quite yet.

"Johnny!" said Brooke. "Are you just going to sit there grinning like that? Say something!"

"What--with my flap all buttoned up like this? Sorry, m'dear. I have been totally overpowered."

"Hah!" said Sarah, now come to her feet. "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

We all watched her pull a curler or two, going through the arch between parlor and dining, taking a two-step now and again to carry her on into the kitchen, and upon the slam of that screen-door, out toward her cabaña under the tall avocado grove.


CHAPTER XVI
Blood of the Sun
--
Amazing, how Bright Eyes had jumped to her feet with, "Johnny! if you don't come out from under that woman immediately and behave yourself like a gentleman, you'll be outside, down in the swimming pool sleeping under the sagebrush tonight--you mark my words!"

But Clara, with her drink in the hand of the arm wrapped about my neck, had made the matter of being dislodged from my lap no mean exercise, and seeing what a valuable source of information we'd found in these two old girls, the last thing I wanted was to be the cause of any insult.

"Johnny!" She kicked me in the ankle--and it really hurt. "I am not going to repeat myself!"

"Aw, gee!" Clara turned to Bright Eyes. "Why don't you just relax, Honey, he isn't hurting anything." She shifted her hips back and forth. "Shoot! if anybody should be complaining it's me, cuz this was a much softer place to sit when I first landed, than what it's getting to be." She wiggled again and said, "Oh, my!"

And now, seeing I've somehow passed over any mention of it earlier; putting things on 'stop-action' for the moment, we may observe that if there was one thing you could say about Sarah and Clara, the Gillespie Twins, it's this: from the moment you laid eyes on either one of them--for if you've seen the one, you've seen them both--even with hair in curlers and hardly any makeup, it was clear that in their day, these gals had been knock-outs, and I mean strictly from the uppercut to the chin of TKO's among redheads, who come built with the figures and blessed with the looks that were born to make for a girl's livelihood through the best years of her life--just as these two had managed it. And--roll film . . .

"Well pardon me!" A sharp glance from Bright Eyes had gone straight as a spear to that wiggle in my lap, "I wouldn't know a thing about the quality of accommodations you might be enjoying there, Lady, but I'll just bet it could beat anything from rock bottom all the way up to Motel 6." She stamped her foot. "So why don't you just stick a quarter in his ear, see what starts shaking, for about ten minutes--before you have to stick in another?" Bang! went the screen-door, and now I could get a load of what the other Florentine Gardens showgirl was going to look like, compared to the one in my lap.

Oh, but she must have looked like something, judging by the expression on Bright Eyes' face, and by the way she had taken fully two steps back, but as I heard footsteps coming heavy over the hardwood floor, I still couldn't get my head turned for concern of spilling that drink.

"Small world, isn't it?" It spilled, it was down my neck; for there, as I'd turned, all in white; suit, tie and hat, but for a shirt that was black, stood Maurice.

"Oh! I'm so sorry!" Clara pulled her arm away and pushed herself up off my shoulder. "Don't worry, Sweet. I'll get you a towel." But then it was, "Maurice, baby!" And she was off between the chairs, into his arms. O Woman! So inconstant thou art in thy ways, as the very wind wafted flower of . . .

"Why, indeed it is!" said Brooke, winging it into so fine a performance of improvisational melodrama as ever I'd seen. "Just look, Johnny, there is Maurice!" But he wasn't paying the least attention, busy as he was buzzing in our old showgirl's ear, before she was off on her way toward a doorway leading left off the dining room, and calling, "I'll get that towel!"

Our client had come around in front of the loveseat to face us, looking first at Brooke, and then as he removed his hat, sliding his eyes on fluid drive back to mine. He dropped that fine hand-woven fedora with its pleated silk band to the table before taking up his creases to sit down. For many moments he sat there, hands on knees, his gaze shifting between us with sharpening intensity, from beams of infra-red consternation to narrow-eyed rays of ultra-violet rage, lethally fluorescing.

"So!" I said. "There you are, my man."

"Which only makes sense, in the house of my friends," he said. "But for me to say the same of you, makes none at all." His glance lifted to the sight of Clara coming in with the towel; he settled back to watch as she shoved it down behind the collar of my shirt, which I moved to loosen and further unbutton as she worked. She gave it one last push down deep. "There!" She turned to Bright Eyes. "Doll, why don't you just take over while I go get Maurice a drink?"

From no more than a glimpse of what my girl was doing with her teeth, I was moved to say, "That's fine, I'll manage." I reached back to give it a try.

But Brooke was already on her way, meaning not to be left looking cheap. When she got hold of my neck, it had me wishing she'd left it to me.

Maurice had his eyes focused to burn smoking holes right through me.

"Now Maurice," I said, "I know how this might seem, to some ways of . . ."

"Look!" He said, "If you've got any more ideas about giving me the run-around, like its been with you from the gate, forget it." When he saw me opening my mouth, his hand shot up to shut it. "You've got but one recourse here, Gum-shoe, and that is to get level with me, right now.

"We're on your side, Maurice!" That was Bright Eyes, from the back of my neck where she was still working the towel.

"Then what are you doing nosing around in my business, here?"

"Well!" I received the towel as tossed to my lap. "It's sort of a complicated story, but . . ."

"Tell it!" he said. "Starting with the part about what you snooping around here has to do with that list of things I lost?"

As I sat there trying not to look overly like a quivering heap of shredded carrot and lemon Jell-O salad, I realized that I could not tell this man how we already had his stuff, the very stuff he was paying us three grand to find, of which about four hundred bucks had already been spent, on a roll-away bed for me, more than a few hot pastrami lunches, a great buy we'd found on some Artie Shaw 78 rpm records on the Bluebird label, along with a phonograph to play them, some tooth-paste, deodorant, and then in a Hollywood bookstore, Bright Eyes had found this great old Twenties vintage, beautifully illustrated set of the *My Bookhouse* encyclopedia of fairy tales edited by Olive Beaupré Miller, out of six volumes for which only one was missing, the one with the picture of two girls and a bear, "Up One Pair of Stairs"--but considering condition and that we were getting the five at such a steal for only $88.95 we would have been crazy to pass it up--so there was just no going back on any of this. As my foot kept tapping beside the rocker of that chair, I tried to get my imagination shifted into overdrive . . .

"Okay, suppose we start with the part where we find out that your name is Maurice Clairmont--*the* Maurice Clairmont?"

"You get that here or from the old broad up at the Fontenoy?"

"Try the March 1949 edition of *Shocking Detective*." I tried lifting him, á la Groucho, a knowing eyebrow.

"We're wise to you now, Maurice," said Bright Eyes, as her gaze jerked to my left to catch Clara coming in with that highball. She set it on the table, and after one look from Maurice, she nodded.

"I'm going out to the cabaña," she said. "We'll see what's keeping Sarah."

After the door had slammed, Maurice raised both hands and sat back. "Okay, so you know who I am."

Bright Eyes, seated again in the brocade chair bounced a leg over her knee and looked at me. "Give it to him!"

"We know how the cops had you fingered for a suspect in the murder of Liz Sharp."

Bright Eyes switched legs: "And we also know you had nothing to do with it."

"Like the lady says, we're on your side," said I. "But, in our business we just tend to be curious about who the people are that we take for clients. So we've been here and there to find out."

"It was on what they call a 'need to know' basis," said Brooke.

Maurice shook out a match, tossed it in the birdbath; he talked through his smoke: "No, this is just more of the same lousy run-around."

"Oh, the run-around, is it, Mr. Maurice X?" said Bright Eyes. "As you can see, when it comes to that, here we are, all the way out in West Hollywood to Palm avenue--and who would have thought that a case like this could take us any farther than Fairfax, or at worst, La Cienega boulevard?

He shook his head. "That's good. There ought to be an Academy Award for what the two of you do. It's almost like I get to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with the tap-dancing--only with you, it's the fast-step. Yeah," he said, "hoofing a fast one. Best Fast Foxtrot of the Year Award."

"That's cute," said Bright Eyes.

"Almost beautiful," said I. "But suppose we get right down to it. Outside of you, Maurice, who else around town here was using Liz Sharp for a model?"

We both looked across waiting for our answer, and we started to see him in a new light, like black light, as the sunlight from outside had been growing dim, with the sundown coming on, to bring flickerings of things as neon shadows casting, blood red over the face of the man sitting before that bay window on a loveseat. Presently, with eyes still directed upward far from any sight of our eyes, he said, "Now you're stirring in things I don't want to remember." You could just about see the fuse spitting fire and sizzling as it made its way toward his chest.

"Look!" shouted Bright Eyes, now on her feet. "Maybe it's about time that Maurice Clairmont stopped giving the two people that are trying to help him the run-around?" His eyes dropped to hers, and she said, "And what do you say to the fact that we happen to know you were in love with the Black Dahlia, Maurice?"

She had paused in her motion just behind me and I knew it was my turn. "That's right," I said. "And you weren't in love with her in any usual or ordinary way either, you loved her in the way only a man who has never loved any woman before loves a woman, and that's the way you loved Liz Sharp, isn't it Maurice?"

His hands shook on his knees, and like talons his fingers dug in. The olive cast to his complexion was being brightened by his blood as if to bursting, like the sky around the sun blooms red through the blue at its setting. Something splashed beside his hat as he reached to grab it, but not even Charlie Chan could have collected it for the wet salty streak of a clue to a grief beyond speaking--after that table had turned and he'd fled beyond the brocade chair toward the foyer, where his voice came in on an echo that said, "You'll be hearing from me!"


CHAPTER XVII
Black Licorice
--
J. Hubert Wigmore was an aspiring writer, health and fitness aficionado, and gigolo to the married landlady who had set him up as manager of the apartment complex on the other side of the lilacs from the Gillespie twins place. And just as Maurice had noted concerning this 'small world' we inhabit, it happened that J. Hubert next door, had spent some years researching the Dahlia case. No small wonder of a small world then that my explanation of "a sudden case of the sniffles," for which Maurice needed to go someplace and sneeze in private, had been accepted so readily--as we, their invitation, seeing how these girls simply would not hear of our leaving for the night without first having enjoyed at least a few minutes of chat and cheap Chablis with "Hubert", as J. Hubert was called, for short.

The Gillespie twins, Sarah and Clara, seated side by side on Hubert's large beige davenport, now in their matching tiger-striped toreador slacks, black cashmere sweaters, the elegant pair-o'-gold-dice ear-rings, those high, coiling flames of hair-dos, why they could not have set up a more dizzying contrast to the rest of the J. Hubert Wigmore furnishings which were stark, sparse and bland to the extreme of the non-extreme. Not even so much as a movie poster graced the walls, nor vase or peacock feather, nary a pink plume of pampas grass was there to decorate the large unfigured beige urn that held the J. Hubert umbrella near the door, where also on the floor was ensconced his George's Health Spa zipper bag.

Hubert was seated at his desk before a bookcase that took up the entire wall but for an archway to the kitchenette, from which a chair had been taken for me, while Brooke had been courteously shown to the one sleek-lined, chrome and vinyl cushioned chair. In this room, but for the splendorous mid-fifties chic of the Gillespie twins, and that hoard of books there was simply nothing to capture a person's interest, a matter which seemed fully reciprocated toward Bright Eyes and I, with whom it appeared that Hubert could not have been more bored. This you could see by the way his hand kept straying to the keys of his typewriter, his eyes to his desk clock, as we talked. But, so long as he was the one doing the talking, we were not quite so hard to tolerate, as all the time, that level in his Chablis jug kept drawing a lower line. He'd been saying . . .

"No, you're probably wrong about that East Chicago doctor."

"See!" said Bright Eyes. "What I tell ya?"

Hubert's chair creaked as he sat back, crossing ankle to knee and running a hand over those thinning strands of blonde hair to make them cross over the near baldness of his head's mid-region sheen. "She apparently did have something haywire with her female parts," he opined. "A case of vaginal agenesis, or the less likely, imperforate hymen."

"Your hymen is your cherry!" shouted Clara.

"Pop goes the hymen," sang Sarah.

That was boring our host, so Bright Eyes said, "Im--perforate? Like, it can't be penetrated?"

"Strictly un-poppable!" declared Sarah, touching a finger to the fake mole pasted just under her left cheekbone: she'd put that on following my astonishment and then a complaint, upon first seeing them all dolled up together, that I could no longer tell them apart--for Maurice hadn't been gone two minutes before Sarah was back in from her cabaña to amaze us with the fantasy show they could perform by magic of hair, make-up and elastic underwear. So now, just for further reference: as Brooke and I faced J. Hubert's divan, Sarah had sat down to our left, she who now sported the beauty-mark on her cheek, while Clara sat next to her, to our right with no beauty mark--at the end of the couch closest to the desk. So that's Sarah to the left, Clara to the right. And we may have to mention this again for those who are the forgetful type. And don't let anyone ever say there's no such thing as an Alzheimer's enabled detective novel.

"Did she say 'unpoppable'?" I asked.

Hubert scowled. "Was there something you wanted to know about vaginal agenesis, the more likely condition?" With ever so dour an expression he cast a look down upon that page sticking out of his Remington.

"Lay it on us, Hubert!" Clara stuck her glass between her tiger knees and reached for the jug of Chablis on Hubert's desk.

"A-genesis is the opposite of genesis or 'beginning', as it were. It happens in one out of five-thousand female births, that a vagina does not even so much as begin to form, while in a far fewer number of cases, this goes also for the uterus--but oddly enough, the fallopian tubes and uterus are usually normal."

"Then it could have been both!" I exclaimed, jumping up and reaching for the jug that Clara was passing.

"What can you mean? Both--what?" Hubert's tone was rather rude.

"Well, all it would take is for a little bit of the ol' daddy juice to get in there, and if the ovaries are functioning . . ."

"Highy unlikely, seeing how tightly closed the passage so commonly is--if there had been any in her case at all." He cleared his throat. "As it happens however, the full autopsy report, in which any such abnormalities would be noted, has never been declassified."

"After all these years?" asked Sarah.

"Yeah!" said Clara. "Why, for the god-sakes?"

"Standard police procedure," said Hubert. "It's in order that things possibly known only to the killer or a few close friends or relatives can be kept in reserve for identification of the killer from any confession which might let slip those very details, not part of the public record. But from so much as has been released in the autopsy report, there does appear an observation that there was a surprising lack of public hair." He sat forward. "But! That statement is followed by the opinion that it 'may' have been cut off by the killer during course of the whole sadistic orgy of that night."

"So, what's with the 'may have been'," asked Bright Eyes. "Wasn't there some way to tell?"


"Yeah," said Sarah, receiving the jug from Bright Eyes. "How half-assed is that?"

"That also may be by design," said Hubert. "Part of the plan to keep these things under wraps. Certainly, a simple look through the magnifying glass would have established a presence of stubble, a microscope would have shown any evidence of recent trimming."

Brooke was giving me one of those looks, and in this context I knew exactly what it was about, from what we'd both seen to bear--pun entirely intended--all this out from the photo collection of Maurice. I acknowledged the wise eye she was giving me, and then let mine go dumb and dim enough to say, "The press had crime scene photos."

"That they did," said Hubert. "But everything published was massively retouched to make it look like a blanket was covering her, and even now that the Black Dahlia crime scene photos have been showing up here and there, upon close inspection it is obvious that what appears to be pubic hair is nothing of the sort, but . . ."

"Black licorice!" said Sarah, who got a slap on the arm.

"Bad!" said Clara.

"It's line drawing," said Hubert in that handsomely reedy Gene Kelly type tenor of his. "Done in pencil or ink, the work of a police artist." He raised a brow. "So you see how this would give the killer one more thing to reveal, as also you would understand the 'may have been cut' comment from the autopsy report was included only to the purpose of . . ."

"Putting the kibosh on any speculation about vaginal agenesis from the press," said Bright Eyes with folded arms, making a pecking motion with her head to type her exclamation point.

"Exactly!" said J. Hubert hitting his shift key. "Very good."

I didn't much like the way this Ivy League looking gigolo was grinning at her, so I said, "According to this babe who thinks some Hollywood director did it . . ."

He interrupted me: "Not just 'some' director."

"Yeah. Okay, if you must have it: some great Hollywood director--so, according to her, the Dahlia was always schlepping around a big bottle of Lydia Pinkham pills--for the ol' Blue Monthlies?"

"Well, so?" My, but he was getting snotty.

"Sew buttons on your health spa bag, hotshot!" I suggested. "It means she was menstruating, which means she had the uterus for it, and if there was a passage for the discharge to get out, there was one for the ol' love dew to get in."

Clara and Sarah screamed with laughter, which really bugged our host. "Highly unlikely," he said. "Highly, highly unlikely."

"Love dew!" cooed Sarah.

"I'll drink to that!" declared Clara, and as we watched the girls clinking glasses, a loud clearing of the throat came out from behind the Remington, followed by sound of that electric shift key going on and off, whack-whack--whack-whack. It was the perfect tempo in case somebody felt inspired to hum a Louis Prima tune, and since I was just high enough to do it, I did! After a bar or two, I had Sarah snapping her fingers, soon followed by Clara on the off-beat.

Soon, I was on my feet doing the ol' Rumba tummy rub. My eyes lit on Sarah dancing the sitting-down Mambo. I just had to Cha-Cha-Cha my tail all the way around, before I was moved to give out with the old Perez Prado shout, "Di-Lo! (Give It!)" I slithered and back-stepped, and bopped slowly across to offer the old doll my hand, only to ask, "Mama love-a-mambo?"

At the rate she was bumping it, just one hard grind could have lifted her off for a moon landing. She took my hand. The kick in my pants from Bright Eyes came before she was halfway up.

"Hey!" Not moments after dropping the dear old girl's hand, next I knew, my girl had me by the collar.

"Come on!" She yanked--and oh, it was amazing the kind of strength she could muster when she felt she needed it.

Upon being removed most of the way out the door, I did manage to call back to the ladies my thanks and see-you-soon's, and despite all the woman-handling, as we made our way along the veranda toward the stair, I got in a little of this as well . . .

"Just a gigolo
everywhere I go
people know the part
I'm playing.

Paid for every dance
selling each romance
every night some heart
betraying . . . *
--
*Ted Lewis, 1931