Meeks picked up a letter opener. He ran a finger along the blade, saw what he was doing and put it down. “I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did.”
“Convince me, or I call up Hedda Hopper and give her tomorrow’s column. How’s this sound: ‘Hollywood hanger-on suppressed Dahlia evidence because blank, blank, blank’? You fill in those blanks for me, or I fill them in for Hedda. Comprende?”
Meeks gave bravado another try. “Bleichert, you are fucking with the wrong man.”
I pulled out the .45, made sure the silencer was on tight and slid a round into the chamber. “No, you are.”
Meeks reached for a decanter on the sideboard by his desk; he poured himself a bracer and gulped it. “What I got was a dead-end lead, but you can have it if you want it so bad.”
I dangled my gun by the trigger guard. “From hunger, shitbird. So give it to me.”
Meeks opened up a safe built into his desk and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He studied them, then swiveled his chair and spoke to the wall. “I got a tip on Burt Lindscott, a producer at Universal. I got it from a guy who hated Lindscott’s pal Scotty Bennett. Scotty was a pimp and a bookie, and he gave out Lindscott’s home phone number in Malibu to all the good-looking young stuff who applied at the Universal casting office. The Short girl got one of Scotty’s cards, and she called Lindscott.
“The rest, the dates and so forth, I got from Lindscott himself. On the night of January tenth, the girl called from the Biltmore downtown. Burty had her describe herself, and he liked what he heard. He told the girl he’d give her a screen test in the morning, when he got back from a poker session at his club. The girl said she didn’t have any place to go until then, so Lindscott told her to come over and spend the night at his place–his houseboy would feed her and keep her company. She took a bus out to Malibu, and the houseboy–he was queer–did keep her company. Then, the next day around noon, Lindscott and three buddies of his came home drunk.
“The guys thought they’d have some fun, so they gave the girl this screen test, reading from a screenplay Burt had lying around. She was bad, and they laughed her out, then Lindscott made her an offer: service the four of them and he’d give her a bit part in his next picture. The kid was still mad at them for laughing at her screen test, and she threw a tantrum. She called them draft dodgers and traitors and said they weren’t fit to be soldiers. Burt kicked her out around two-thirty that afternoon, Saturday the eleventh. The houseboy said she was broke and that she said she was gonna walk back downtown.”
So Betty walked, or hitched, twenty-five miles downtown, meeting Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby six hours or so later. I said, “Meeks, why didn’t you report this? And look at me.”
Meeks swiveled around; his features were smeared with shame. “I tried to get ahold of Russ and Harry, but they were out in the field, so I called Ellis Loew. He told me not to report what I’d found out, and he threatened to revoke my security clearance. Later on I found out that Lindscott was a Republican bigwig, and he’d promised Loew a bundle for his run at DA. Loew didn’t want him implicated with the Dahlia.”
I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the man; Meeks copped pleas while I ran pictures of Betty hooted at, propositioned, kicked out to die. “Bleichert, I checked out Lindscott and his houseboy and his buddies. These are legit depositions I’ve got–the megillah. None of them could have killed her. They were all at home and at their jobs from the twelfth straight through Friday the seventeenth. None of them could have done it, and I wouldn’t have sat on it if one of the bastards snuffed her. I’ve got the depositions right here, and I’ll show you.”