THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy

Lee disappeared when the Dahlia, Benzedrine and Bobby De Witt’s imminent parole converged on him;

He was last seen in Tijuana at a time when De Witt was heading there and the Short case was centered on the U.S.– Mexico border;

De Witt and his dope partner Felix Chasco were murdered then, and even though two Mexican nationals were nailed for the job, it could have been a railroad–the Rurales wiping an unwanted homicide off their books;

Conclusion: Lee Blanchard could have murdered De Witt and Chasco, his motive a desire to protect himself from revenge attempts and Kay from lounge lizard Bobby’s possible abuse. Conclusion within that conclusion: I didn’t care.

My next step was to study the transcript of De Witt’s trial. At the Hall of Records, more facts sunk in:

Lee named the informants who gave him the dope on De Witt as the Boulevard-Citizens “brains,” then said that they left town to avoid reprisals from Lizard’s friends. My follow-up call to R&I was unsettling–the snitches had no records at all. De Witt asserted a police frame because of his prior dope arrests, and the prosecution based its case on the marked money from the robbery found at De Witt’s house and the fact that he had no alibi for the time of the heist. Of the four-man gang, two were killed at the scene of the crime, De Witt was captured and the fourth man remained at large. De Witt claimed not to know who he was–even though stooling might have gotten him a sentence reduction.

Conclusion: maybe it _was_ an LAPD frame, maybe Lee was in on it, maybe he initiated it to curry favor with Benny Siegel, whose money was clouted by the real heisters, and who Lee was terrified of for good reason–he had stiffed the Bug Man on his fight contract. Lee then met Kay at De Witt’s trial, fell in love with her in his chaste-guilty way and learned to hate Bobby for real. Conclusion within that conclusion: Kay couldn’t have known. De Witt was scum who got what he deserved.

And the final conclusion: I had to hear the man confirm or deny himself.

Four days into my “vacation,” I took off for Mexico. In Tijuana, I passed out pesos and American dimes and showed snapshots of Lee, holding quarters back to barter for “información importante.” I acquired an entourage, no leads and the certainty that I would be trampled if I kept showing coin. From then on, I stuck to the traditional gringo cop–Mex cop one-dollar handout confidential exchange.

The TJ cops were black-shirted vultures who spoke only broken English–but they understood the international language very well. I stopped a score of individual “patrolmen” on the street, flashed my shield and pictures, pressed dollar bills into their hands and asked questions in the best English-Spanish I could muster. The singles quickly snapped up, I got headshakes, bilingual bullshit broadsides and a strange series of tales that rang true.

One had “el blanco explosivo” weeping at a stag film smoker held at the Chicago Club in late January; another featured a big blond guy beating the shit out of three jack rollers, then buying off the cops with double-saws peeled from a large roll. The capper was Lee donating 200 scoots to a leper ministry priest he met in a bar, buying drinks for the house, then driving to Ensenada. That bit of dope earned a five spot and a demand for an explanation. The cop said, “The priest my brother. He ordain himself. Vaya con Dios. Keep your money in your pocket.”

I took the coast road eighty miles south to Ensenada, wondering where Lee got that kind of money to throw around. The drive was pleasant–scrub-lined bluffs giving way to the ocean on my right, hills and valleys covered with dense foliage to the left of me. Car traffic was scarce, with a steady trickle of pedestrians walking north: whole families lugging suitcases, looking scared and happy at the same time, like they didn’t know what their dash across the border would bring them, but it had to be better than sucking Mexican dirt and tourist chump change.

Approaching Ensenada at twilight, the trickle became a migration march. A single line of people hugged the northbound roadside, belongings wrapped in blankets and slung over their shoulders. Every fifth or sixth marcher carried a torch or a lantern, and all the small children were strapped papoose-style onto their mothers’ backs. Coming over the last hill outside the city limits, I saw Ensenada, a smear of neon below me, torchlights punctuating the darkness until the overall fluorescence swallowed them.

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