So the brass girl took the heat for her family and I took it for myself. My farewell to the Spragues was a front-page photo in the LA Daily News. Matrons were leading Madeleine out of the courtroom while Emmett wept at the defense table. Ramona, hollow-cheeked with disease, was being shepherded by Martha, all good strong business in a tailored suit. The picture was a lock on my silence forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A month later I got a letter from Kay.
Sioux Falls, S.D.
8/17/49
Dear Dwight,
I didn’t know if you’d moved back to the house, so I don’t know if this letter will reach you. I’ve been checking the library for L.A. papers, and I know you’re not with the Department anymore, so that’s another place where I can’t write to you. I’ll just have to send this out and see what happens.
I’m in Sioux Falls, living at the Plainsman Hotel. It’s the best one in town, and I’ve wanted to stay here since I was a little girl. It’s not the way I imagined it, of course. I just wanted to wash the taste of L.A. out of my mouth, and Sioux Falls is as antithetical to L.A. as you can get without flying to the moon.
My grade school girlfriends are all married and have children, and two of them are widows from the war. Everyone talks about the war like it’s still going on, and the high prairies outside of town are being plowed for housing developments. The ones that have been constructed so far are so ugly, such bright, jarring colors. They make me miss our old house. I know you hate it, but it was a sanctuary for nine years of my life.
Dwight, I’ve read all the papers and that trashy magazine piece. I must have counted a dozen lies. Lies by omission and the blatant kind. I keep wondering what happened, even though I don’t really want to know. I keep wondering why Elizabeth Short was never mentioned. I would have felt self-righteous, but I spent last night in my room just counting lies. All the lies I told you and things I never told you, even when it was good with us. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many I came up with.
I’m sorry for them. And I admire what you did with Madeleine Sprague. I never knew what she was to you, but I know what arresting her cost you. Did she really kill Lee? Is that just another lie? Why can’t I believe it?
I have some money that Lee left me (a lie by omission, I know) and I’m going to head east in a day or so. I want to be far away from Los Angeles, someplace cool and pretty and old. Maybe New England, maybe the Great Lakes. All I know is that when I see the place, I’ll know it.
Hoping this finds you,
Kay.
P.S. Do you still think about Elizabeth Short? I think about her constantly. I don’t hate her, I just _think_ about her. Strange after all this time.
K.L.B.
I kept the letter and re-read it at least a couple of hundred times. I didn’t think about what it meant, or implied about my future, or Kay’s, or ours together. I just re-read it and thought about Betty.
I dumped the El Nido master file in the garbage and thought about her. H.J. Caruso gave me a job selling cars, and I thought about her while I was hawking the 1950 line. I drove by 39th and Norton, saw that houses were going up on the vacant lot and thought about her. I didn’t question the morality of letting Ramona walk or wonder whether Betty would approve. I just thought about her. And it took Kay, always the smarter of the two of us, to put it together for me.
Her second letter was postmarked Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was written on stationery for the Harvard Motor Lodge.
9/11/49
Dear Dwight-
I’m still such a liar, proscrastinator and chicken heart. I’ve known for two months, and I just got up the courage to tell you. If this letter doesn’t reach you I’ll actually have to call the house or Russ Millard. Better to try this way first.