Dudley feigned surprise. “The Dahlia? What Dahlia?”
“Very funny. _The_ Dahlia.”
“Oh. Ahhh, yes. The _Dahlia_. What precisely was it you wanted to know, lad?”
“How far you had to go in your investigation, what you saw, what you had to do.” I turned to give Dudley a look that I hope conveyed equal parts interest and tight-lipped allegiance. He smiled demonically and I felt another little chill go through me.
“Watch the road, lad, and I’ll tell you. You’ve heard tales, have you?”
“Not really.”
“Then hear one now, from the horse’s mouth: I have seen many, many crimes on women, lad, and the crime on Elizabeth Short exceeded them all by a country mile–the atrocities committed on her defied even Satan’s logic. She was systematically tortured for days, and then sawed in half while she was still alive.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, indeed, lad. The investigation was three weeks old when I was called in. I was given a special assignment: check out all the psycho confessors that were being held without bail as material witnesses; the ones the dicks thought could actually have done it. There were thirty of them, lad, and they were the scum of the earth–degenerate mother-haters and baby-rapers and animal fuckers. I eliminated twenty-two of them right away. Breaking an arm here and a jaw there, I confronted them with intimate facts about lovely Beth’s wounds. I gauged their reactions as I hit them and made them fear me more than Satan himself. None of them did it; they were guilty, filthy degenerates who wanted to be punished, and I obliged them. But none of them were guilty of the crime against lovely Beth.”
Dudley paused dramatically and stretched, waiting for me to ask him to continue.
I obliged: “And the other eight?”
“Ahhh, yes. My hard suspects; the ones whose reactions old Dudley wasn’t quite astute enough to gauge. Well, lad, I was astute enough to know that those eight had one thing in common: they were stark raving insane, slobbering, frothing-at-the-mouth lunatics capable of anything, which made them rather difficult to deal with. I was sure their insanity was of such an intensity that they could withstand any degree of physical duress. Besides, they thought they actually _had_ croaked lovely Beth; they’d confessed to it, hadn’t they?
“The dicks I’d talked to told me they figured the killer had hung lovely Beth from a ceiling beam; there were rope burns on her ankles. That got me to thinking. I needed to shock these degenerate lunatics. I needed to break through their insanity. First I rented a friend’s warehouse. A big, grand, deserted place it was. Then I procured a fine-looking young female stiff from a pathologist at the morgue who owed old Dudley a favor. A big one, lad–old Dudley looked the other way for this fellow, and he belonged to old Dudley for life.
“Dick Carlisle and I snuck the stiff over to the warehouse late one night. I dyed her hair jet black, like the Dahlia’s. I stripped her nude, and tied her ankles with a rope, and Dick and I hoisted her up feet first and hung her from a low ceiling beam. Then Dick went and got our eight degenerates from the Hall of Justice jail. We let them view her, one at a time, lad, with appropriate props. One scum was a knife man; he had scores of arrests for knife fighting. I handed him a butcher knife and made him slice the corpse. He could hardly do it. He didn’t have it in him. Another filth was a child molester, recently paroled from Atascadero. His M.O. was asking little girls if he could kiss their private parts. I made him kiss the dead girl’s private parts, smell that dead sex flesh up close. He couldn’t do it. And on and on. I was looking for a reaction so vile, so unspeakable that I would _know_ that this was the scum that killed Beth Short.”
I was stunned. Speechless. I felt my hands gripping the steering wheel so hard that I thought I would push it through the front of the car. My voice was breaking when I finally got it out: “And?”