I looked at Russ, then Harry; they were staring at the girl impassively. Wanting to fill in the blank spaces of my own private lead, I asked, “When did you make the film, Lorna?”
“Around Thanksgiving.”
“Can you give us a description of the Mexican man?”
Lorna stared at the floor. “Just a greasy Mex. Maybe thirty, maybe forty, I don’t know. I was on hop, and I don’t remember too good.”
“Did he seem particulary interested in Betty?”
“No.”
“Did he touch either of you? Get rough with you? Make passes?”
“No. He just moved us around.”
“Together?”
Lorna whimpered, “Yes”; my blood buzzed. My voice sounded weird to my own ears, like I was some ventriloquist’s puppet. “Then this wasn’t just nudie stuff? This was you and Betty playing lez?”
Lorna gave a little dry sob and nodded; I thought of Madeleine and pushed ahead, oblivious to where the girl might take it: “You lez? Was Betty lez? You do any _lez_ pub crawling?”
Millard barked, “Bleichert, can it!” Lorna leaned forward in her chair, grabbed the soft daddy cop and hugged him fiercely. Russ looked at me and brought a flat palm slowly down, like a conductor asking the orchestra for a hush. He stroked the girl’s head with his free hand, then cocked a finger at Sears.
The girl moaned, “I’m not lez, I’m not lez, it was just that one time”; Millard cradled her like a baby.
Sears asked, “Was Betty a lesbian, Lorna?”
I held my breath. Lorna wiped her eyes on Millard’s coat front and looked at me. She said, “I’m not lezzie, and Betty wasn’t, and we only bummed at normal-type bars, and it was just that one time in the movie because we were broke and on hop, and if this gets in the papers my daddy’ll kill me.”
I glanced at Millard, sensed that he bought it, and got a strong instinct that the whole dyke offshoot of the case was a fluke. Harry asked, “Did the Mexican man give Betty a viewfinder?”
Lorna muttered “Yes,” her head on Millard’s shoulder.
“Do you remember his car? The make, the color?”
“I . . . I think it was black and old.”
“Do you remember the bar where you met him?”
Lorna lifted her head; I saw that her tears had dried. “I think it was on Aviation Boulevard, near all those aircraft plants.”
I groaned; that part of Gardena was a solid mile of juke joints, poker parlors and cop-sanctioned whorehouses. Harry said, “When did you see Betty last?”
Lorna moved back to her own chair, clenching herself against another display of emotion–a hardcase reaction for a fifteen-year-old kid. “The last time I saw Betty was a couple of weeks later. Right before she moved out of the Orange Drive place.”
“Do you know if Betty ever saw the Mexican man again?”
Lorna picked at the chipped polish on her nails. “The Mex was a fly-by-nighter. He paid us, drove us back to LA and left.”
I butted in: “But you saw him again, right? There’s no way he could have made a copy of the movie before you all drove back from TJ.”
Lorna studied her nails. “I went looking for him in Gardena, when I read in the papers about Betty. He was about to go back to Mexico, and I conned him out of a print of the movie. See . . . he didn’t read the papers, so he didn’t know that all of a sudden Betty was famous. See . . . I figured that a Black Dahlia stag film was a collector’s item, and if the police tried to ship me back to my folks I could sell it and hire a lawyer to fight my extradition. You’ll give it back to me, won’t you? You won’t let people look at it?”
Out of the mouths of babes. Millard said, “You went back to Gardena and found the man again?”
“Uh-huh. I mean yes.”
“Where?”
“At one of those bars on Aviation.”
“Can you describe the place?”
“It was dark, with flashing lights out front.”
“And he willingly gave you a copy of the film? For nothing?”