THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy

It was the nude, mutilated body of a young woman, cut in half at the waist. The bottom half lay in the weeds a few feet away from the top, legs wide open. A large triangle had been gouged out of the left thigh, and there was a long, wide cut running from the bisection point down to the top of the pubic hair. The flaps of skin beside the gash were pulled back; there were no organs inside. The top half was worse: the breasts were dotted with cigarette burns, the right one hanging loose, attached to the torso only by shreds of skin; the left one slashed around the nipple. The cuts went all the way down to the bone, but the worst of the worst was the girl’s face. It was one huge purpled bruise, the nose crushed deep into the facial cavity, the mouth cut ear to ear into a smile that leered up at you, somehow mocking the rest of the brutality inflicted. I knew I would carry that smile with me to my grave.

Looking up, I felt cold all over; my breath came in spurts. Shoulders and arms brushed me and I heard a jumble of voices: “There’s not a goddamned drop of blood–” “This is _the_ worst crime on a woman I’ve seen in my sixteen years–” “He tied her down. Look, you can see the rope burns on her ankles–” Then a long, shrill whistle sounded.

The dozen or so men quit jabbering and looked at Russ Millard. He said calmly, “Before it gets out of hand, let’s put the kibosh on something. If this homicide gets a lot of publicity, we’re going to get a lot of confessions. That girl was disemboweled. We need information to eliminate the loonies with, and that’s it. Don’t tell _anyone_. Don’t tell your wives, don’t tell your girlfriends, don’t tell any other officers. Harry?”

Harry Sears said, “Yeah, Russ,” palming his flask so the boss wouldn’t see it. Millard caught the act and rolled his eyes in disgust. “No reporters are to view the body. You photo men, take your pictures _now_. You coroner’s men, put a sheet over the body when they finish. You patrolmen, stake up a crime scene perimeter from the street all the way to six feet in back of the body. Any reporter who tries to cross it, you arrest immediately. When the lab men get here to examine the body, you move the reporters over to the opposite side of the street. Harry, you call Lieutenant Haskins at University Station and tell him to send over every man he can spare for canvassing.”

Millard glanced around and noticed me. “Bleichert, what are you doing here? Is Blanchard here, too?”

Lee was squatting beside the stiff, writing in a pocket notebook. Pointing north, I said, “Junior Nash is renting a garage in back of that building over there. We were shaking it down when we saw the hubbub.”

“Was there blood on the premises?”

“No. This isn’t Nash, Lieutenant.”

“We’ll let the lab men be the judge of that. Harry!”

Sears was sitting in a black-and-white, talking into a radio mike. Hearing his name, he yelled, “Yeah, Russ!”

“Harry, when the lab men get here have them go up to that green building on the corner and test the garage for blood and latent prints. Then I want the street sealed–”

Millard stopped when he saw cars swinging onto Norton, beelining for the commotion; I glanced down at the corpse. The photo techs were still snapping pictures from all angles; Lee was still jotting in his notebook. The men milling around on the sidewalk kept looking at the stiff, then averting their eyes. On the street, reporters and camera jockeys were pouring out of cars, Harry Sears and a cordon of blues standing at the ready to hold them back. I got itchy to stare, and gave the girl a detailed eyeing.

Her legs were spread for sex, and from the way the knees buckled I could tell that they were broken; her jet-black hair was free of matted blood, like the killer had given her a shampoo before he dumped her. That awful death leer came on like the final brutality–it was cracked teeth poking out of ulcerated flesh that forced me to look away.

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