Kay nodded. “A little.”
“Have you read the papers?”
“I’ve avoided them.”
“Well, the girl is being played up as the hottest number since the atom bomb. There’s a hundred men working a single homicide, Ellis Loew’s looking to get fat off of it, Lee’s cuckoo on the subject–”
Kay disarmed my tirade with a smile. “And you were front page news on Monday, but you’re stale bread today. And you want to go after your big bad robber man and get yourself another headline.”
“Touché, but that’s only part of it.”
“I know. Once you got the headline, you’d hide out and not read the papers.”
I sighed. “Jesus, I wish you weren’t so much smarter than me.
“And I wish you weren’t so cautious and complicated. Dwight, what is going to happen with us?”
“The three of us?”
“No, us.”
I looked around the living room, all wood and leather and Deco chromium. There was a glass-fronted mahogany cabinet; it was filled with Kay’s cashmere sweaters, all the shades of the rainbow at forty dollars a pop. The woman herself, South Dakota white trash molded by a cop’s love, sat across from me, and for once I said exactly what was on my mind. “You’d never leave him. You’d never leave this. Maybe if you did, maybe if Lee and I were quits as partners, maybe then we’d have a chance together. But you’d never give it all up.”
Kay took her time lighting a cigarette. Exhaling a breath of smoke, she said, “You know what he’s done for me?”
I said, “And for me.”
Kay tilted her head back and eyed the ceiling, brushed stucco with mahogany wainscoting. Blowing smoke rings, she said, “I had such a schoolgirl crush on you. Bobby De Witt and Lee used to drag me to the fights. I brought my sketch pad so I wouldn’t feel like one of those awful women buttering up their men by pretending they liked it. What I liked was you. The way you made fun of yourself with your teeth, the way you covered up so you wouldn’t get hit. Then you joined the Department, and Lee told me how he heard you informed on those Japanese friends of yours. I didn’t hate you for it, it just made you seem more real to me. The zoot suit thing, too. You were my storybook hero, only the stories were real, little bits and pieces here and there. Then the fight came along, and even though I hated the idea of it I told Lee to go ahead, because it seemed to mean the three of us were meant to be.”
I thought of a dozen things to say, all of them true, and just about the two of us. But I couldn’t, and ran to Lee for cover. “I don’t want you to worry about Bobby De Witt. When he gets out, I’ll lean on him. Hard. He’ll never come near you or Lee.”
Kay took her eyes off the ceiling and fixed me with a strange look, hard but sad underneath. “I’ve given up worrying about Bobby. Lee can handle him.”
“I think Lee’s afraid of him.”
“He is. But I think it’s because he knows so much about me, and Lee’s afraid he’ll let everyone know. Not that anyone cares.”
“I care. And if I lean on De Witt, he’ll be lucky to talk at all.” Kay stood up. “For a man with an up-for-grabs heart, you are such a hardcase. I’m going to bed. Good night, Dwight.”
When I heard a Schubert quartet coming from Kay’s bedroom, I took pen and paper from the stationery cupboard and wrote out my report on the questioning of Elizabeth Short’s father. I included mention of his “air tight” alibi, his account of the girl’s behavior when she lived with him in ’43, the beating she got from a Camp Cooke soldier and her parade of nameless boyfriends. Padding the report with unnecessary details kept my mind most of the way off Kay, and when I finished I made myself two ham sandwiches, chased them with a glass of milk and fell asleep on the couch.
My dreams were mug shot flashes of recent bad guys, Ellis Loew representing the right side of the law with felony numbers stenciled across his chest. Betty Short joined him in black and white, full face and left profile views. Then all the faces dissolved into LAPD report forms rolling out endlessly as I tried to jot down information on Junior Nash’s whereabouts in the blank spaces. I woke up with a headache, knowing I was in for a very long day.