I would have committed mass murder to get out. “Tommy, you said you know the reason Beth was promiscuous.”
Tommy sighed. “When Beth was sixteen or seventeen, these two thugs assaulted her, somewhere in Boston. One actually raped her, and the other was going to, but a sailor and a marine came by and chased them away.
“Beth thought the man might have made her pregnant, so she went to a doctor for an examination. He told her she had benign ovarian cysts, that she’d never be able to have children. Beth went crazy, because she’d always wanted lots of babies. She looked up the sailor and marine who’d saved her, and she begged them to father her child. The marine turned her down, and the sailor . . . he used Beth until he was shipped overseas.”
I thought immediately of Frenchman Joe Dulange–his account of the Dahlia hipped on being pregnant, how he fixed her up with a “doctor buddy” and a bogus exam. That part of Dulange’s story obviously wasn’t as booze-addled as Russ Millard and I had originally thought–it was now a solid lead on Betty’s missing days, the “doctor buddy” at least a major witness, maybe a major suspect. I said, “Tommy, do you know the names of the sailor and marine? The doctor?”
Tommy shook his head. “No. But that was when Beth became so loose with servicemen. She thought they were her saviors, that they could give her a child, a little girl to be a great actress in case she never made it. It’s sad, but the only place I heard Beth was a great actress was in bed.”
I stood up. “What happened with you and Beth then?”
“We lost touch. She left Medford.”
“You’ve given me a good lead, Tommy. Thanks.”
The blind man tapped his cane at the sound of my voice. “Then get who did it, but don’t let Beth get hurt anymore.”
“I won’t.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Short case was hot again– if only with me.
Hours of Medford pub crawling gave me promiscuous Betty, East Coast style–a big anticlimax after Tommy Gilfoyle’s revelations. I caught a midnight flight back to LA and called Russ Millard from the airport. He agreed: Frenchman Joe’s “roach doctor” was probably legit, independent of Dulange’s DTs. He proposed a call to the Fort Dix CID to try to get more details from the discharged loony, then a three-man canvassing of downtown doctor’s offices, concentrating on the area around the Havana Hotel, where Dulange coupled with Betty. I suggested that the “doctor” was most likely a barfly, an abortionist or a quack; Russ concurred. He said he would talk to R&I and his snitches, and he and Harry Sears would be knocking on doors inside of an hour. We divvied up the territory: Figueroa to Hill, 6th Street to 9th Street for me; Figueroa to Hill, 5th to 1st for them. I hung up and drove straight downtown.
I stole a Yellow Pages and made a list: legitimate MD’s and chiropractors, herb pushers and mystics–bloodsuckers who sold religion and patent medicine under the “doctor” aegis. The book had a few listings for obstetricians and gynocologists, but instinct told me that Joe Dulange’s doctor ploy was happenstance–not the result of his consciously seeking a specialist to calm Betty down. Running on adrenaline, I worked.
I caught most of the doctors early in their day, and got the widest assortment of sincere denials I’d ever encountered as a cop. Every solid citizen croaker I talked to convinced me a little bit more that Frenchy’s pal had to be at least a little bit hinky. After a wolfed sandwich lunch, I hit the quasi types.
The herb loonies were all Chinese; the mystics were half women, half squarejohn lames. I believed all of their bewildered no’s; I pictured all of them too terrified by the Frenchman to consider his offer. I was about to start hitting bars for scuttlebutt on barfly docs when exhaustion hit me. I drove “home” to the El Nido and slept–for all of twenty minutes.
Too itchy to try sleep again, I tried thinking logically. It was 6:00, doctors’ offices were closing for the day, the bars wouldn’t be ripe for canvassing for at least three hours. Russ and Harry would call me if they got something hot. I reached for the master file and started reading.