Elizabeth Short tried to run. She knocked her unconscious and made Georgie strip her and gag her and tie her to the mattress. She promised him parts of the girl to keep forever. She took a copy of _The Man Who Laughs_ from her purse and read aloud from it, casting occasional glances at the girl spread-eagled. Then she cut her and burned her and batted her and wrote in the notebook she always carried while the girl was passed out from the pain. Georgie watched, and together they shouted the chants of the Comprachicos. And after two full days of it, she slashed Elizabeth Short ear to ear like Gwynplain, so she wouldn’t hate her after she was dead. Georgie cut the body in two, washed the halves in the stream outside the shack and carried them to her car. Late at night, they drove to 39th and Norton–a lot that Georgie used to tend for the city. They left Elizabeth Short there to become the Black Dahlia, then she drove Georgie back to his truck and returned to Emmett and Madeleine, telling them that soon enough they would find out where she had been and finally respect her will. As an act of purging, she sold her Gwynplain painting to the bargain-loving art worshipper Eldridge Chambers down the street–making a profit on the deal. Then it was days and weeks of the horror that Martha would find out and hate her–and more and more laudanum and codeine and sleep potion to make it go away.
o o o
I was looking at a row of framed magazine ads–award-winning Martha artwork–when Ramona stopped talking. The silence jarred me; her story rolled on in my head, back and forth in sequence. The room was cool–but I was sweating.
Martha’s 1948 Advertising Council first prizer featured a handsome guy in a seersucker suit walking on the beach, ogling a blonde dish sunbathing. He was so oblivious to everything else around him that he was about to get creamed by a big wave. The caption at the top of the page read: “Not to worry! In his Hart, Shaffner & Marx Featherweight he’ll be dried out and crisp–and ready to woo her at the club tonight!” The dish was sleek. Her features were Martha’s–a soft, pretty version. The Sprague mansion was in the background, surrounded by palm trees.
Ramona broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”
I couldn’t look at her. “I don’t know.”
“Martha mustn’t know.”
“You told me that already.”
The guy in the ad was starting to look like an idealized Emmett–the Scotchman as a Hollywood pretty boy. I threw out the one cop question Ramona’s story inspired: “In the fall of ’46 someone was throwing dead cats into cemeteries in Hollywood. Was that you?”
“Yes. I was so jealous of her then, and I just wanted Georgie to know I still cared. _What are you going to do?_”
“I don’t know. Go upstairs, Ramona. Leave me alone.”
I heard soft footfalls moving out of the room, then sobs, then nothing. I thought about the family’s united front to save Ramona, how arresting her would blow my police career: charges of withholding evidence, obstruction of justice. Sprague money would keep her out of the gas chamber, she’d get eaten alive at Atascadero or a women’s prison until the lupus got her, Martha would be ravaged, and Emmett and Madeleine would still have each other–withholding/obstruction beefs against them would be too second-hand to prosecute on. If I took Ramona in I was shot to shit as a policeman; if I let her go I was finished as a man, and in either case Emmett and Madeleine would survive–together.
So the patented Bucky Bleichert advance, stymied and stalemated, sat still in a big plush room full of ancestor icons. I looked through the packing crates on the floor–the Sprague getaway if the City Council got uppity–and saw the cheap cocktail dresses and the sketch pad covered with women’s faces, no doubt Martha sketching alter egos to plaster over ads huckstering toothpaste and cosmetics and cornflakes. Maybe she could design an advertising campaign to spring Ramona from Tehachapi. Maybe without torturer Mommy she wouldn’t have the guts to work anymore.