I opened my eyes; Meeks was twirling the dial of a wall safe. I said, “How much did Loew pay you to keep quiet?”
Meeks blurted, “A grand,” and backed off as if fearing a blow. I loathed him too much to give him the satisfaction of punishment, and left with his price tag hanging in the air.
o o o
I now had Elizabeth Short’s missing days halfway filled in:
Red Manley dropped her in front of the Biltmore at dusk on Friday, January tenth; she called Burt Lindscott from there, and her Malibu adventures lasted until 2:30 the following afternoon. She was back at the Biltmore that evening, Saturday the eleventh, met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the lobby, tricked with Johnny until shortly after midnight, then took off. She met Corporal Joseph Dulange then, or later in the morning, at the Night Owl Bar on 6th and Hill–two blocks from the Biltmore. She was with Dulange, there and at the Havana Hotel, until the afternoon or evening of Sunday, January twelfth, when he took her to see his “doctor buddy.”
Driving back to the El Nido, some missing piece of legwork nagged at me through my exhaustion. Passing a phone booth it came to me: if Betty called Lindscott in Malibu–a toll call– there would be a record with Pacific Coast Bell. If she made other toll calls, at that time or on the eleventh, before or after her coupling with Johnny Vogel, P.C.B. would have the information in its records–the company saved tallies of pay phone transactions for cost and price studies.
My fatigue nosedived once more. I took side streets the rest of the way, running stop signs and red lights; arriving, I parked in front of a hydrant and ran up to the room for a notebook. I was heading for the hallway phone when it foiled me by ringing.
“Yes?”
“Bucky? Sweet, is that you?”
It was Madeleine. “Look, I can’t talk to you now.”
“We had a date yesterday, remember?”
“I had to leave town. It was for work.”
“You could have called. If you hadn’t told me about this little hideaway of yours I’d have thought you were dead.”
“Madeleine, Jesus Christ–”
“Sweet, I need to see you. They’re tearing those letters off the Hollywoodland sign tomorrow, _and_ demolishing some bungalows Daddy owns up there. Bucky, the deeds lapsed to the city, but Daddy bought that property and built those places under his own name. He used _the_ worst materials, and an investigator from the City Council has been nosing around Daddy’s tax lawyers. One of them told him this old enemy of his who committed suicide left the Council a brief on Daddy’s holdings and–”
It sounded like gibberish–tough guy Daddy in trouble, tough boy Bucky the second choice for consolation duty. I said, “Look, I can’t talk to you now,” and hung up.
Now it was real detective shitwork. I arrayed my notebook and pen on the ledge by the phone and emptied a four-day accumulation of coins from my pockets, counting close to two dollars–enough for forty calls. First I called the night supervisor at Pacific Coast Bell, requesting a list of all toll and collect calls made from Biltmore Hotel pay phones on the evenings of January 10, 11, and 12, 1947; the names and addresses of the called parties and the times of the calls.
I stood nervously holding the receiver while the woman did her work, shooting dirty looks to other El Nido residents who wanted to use the phone. Then, a half hour later, she came back on the line and started talking.
The Lindscott number and address was there among the 1/10 listings, but nothing else that night registered as hinky. I wrote all the information down anyway; then, when the woman got to the evening of 1/1 1–right around the time Betty met Sally Stinson and Johnny Vogel in the Biltmore lobby–I hit paydirt:
Four toll calls were made to obstetricians’ offices in Beverly Hills. I took down the names and numbers, along with the numbers for the doctors’ night answering services, and the immediately following toll call listings. They produced no sparks–but I copied them anyway. Then I attacked Beverly Hills with an arsenal of nickels.