THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy

III

Kay and Madeleine

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Time passed. Kay and I worked and played at being a young married couple.

After our quickie San Francisco honeymoon, I returned to what remained of my police career. Thad Green talked turkey to me: he admired what I did with the Vogels, but considered me useless as a patrol cop–I had earned the enmity of rank and file blues, and my presence in a uniformed division would only create grief. Since my year of junior college showed straight A’s in chemistry and math, he assigned me to the Scientific Investigation Detail as an evidence technician.

The job was quasi-plainclothes–smocks in the lab and gray suits in the field. I typed blood, dusted for latent prints and wrote ballistics reports; scraped ooze off the walls at crime scenes and examined it under a microscope, letting the Homicide dicks take it from there. It was test tubes and beakers and clinical gore–an intimacy with death that I never became inured to; a constant reminder that I wasn’t a detective, that I couldn’t be trusted to follow up on my own findings.

From various distances I followed the friends and enemies the Dahlia case had given me.

Russ and Harry kept the El Nido file room intact, continuing to work overtime hours on the Short investigation. I had a key to the door, but didn’t use it–per my promise to Kay to bury “that dead girl.” Sometimes I met the padre for lunch and asked him how it was going; he always said, “Slowly,” and I knew that he would never find the killer and never quit trying.

In June of ’47, Ben Siegel was shot to death in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room. Bill Koenig, assigned to 77th Street dicks after Fritz Vogel’s suicide, caught a shotgun blast in the face on a Watts street corner early in ’48. Both killings went unsolved. Ellis Loew was soundly trounced in the June ’48 Republican primary, and I celebrated by cooking up beakers of moonshine on my Bunsen burner, getting everyone in the crime lab fried.

The ’48 general election brought me news of the Spragues. A slate of reform Democrats were running for seats on the LA City Council and Board of Supervisors, “City Planning” their basic campaign theme. They asserted that there were faultily designed, unsafe dwellings all over Los Angeles, and were calling for a grand jury probe on the contractors who built the structures back during the ’20s real estate boom. The scandal tabloids took up the hue and cry, running articles on the “boom barons”–Mack Sennett and Emmett Sprague among them– and their “gangster ties.” Confidential magazine ran a series on Sennett’s Hollywoodland tract and how the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce wanted to lop the L-A-N-D off the giant Hollywoodland sign on Mount Lee, and there were photographs of the Keystone Kops director standing beside a stocky man with a cute little girl in tow. I couldn’t quite tell if it was Emmett and Madeleine, but I clipped the pictures anyway.

My enemies;

My friends;

My wife.

I processed evidence and Kay taught school, and for a while we reveled in the novelty of living a squarejohn life. With the house paid off in full and two salaries, there was plenty of money to spend, and we used it to pamper ourselves away from Lee Blanchard and the winter of ’47. We took weekend trips to the desert and the mountains; we ate in restaurants three and four nights a week. We checked into hotels pretending to be illicit lovers, and it took me well over a year to realize that we did those things because it got us out of the pad the Boulevard-Citizens bank job paid for. And I was so heedless in my pursuit of pampering that it required a live-wire shock to spell it out.

A floorboard in the hallway came loose, and I pulled it all the way off so I could reglue it. Looking in the hole, I found a cash roll, two thousand dollars in C-notes secured by a rubber band. I didn’t feel joyous or shocked; my brain went tick, tick, tick, and came up with the questions my rush into normal life had quashed:

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