“Goddamn it, Ellis–”
“No. Just listen to me. Before, I wanted to downplay the girl as a floozy. The way I see it now is that it’s too far out in the open already to sit on. We know what she was, and we’ll get it confirmed a couple of hundred times by the men in that little black book. We keep our men questioning them, I’ll keep feeding the names to my newspaper contacts, we’ll keep a head of steam on this thing until we get the killer.”
“It’s a sucker play, Ellis. The killer’s name probably isn’t in the book. He’s a psycho, and he’s showing us his backside and saying, ‘Make something out of it.’ The girl’s a gravy train, Ellis. I’ve known it from the beginning, just like you. But this has got to backfire on us. I’m working a half dozen other homicides with skeleton crews, and if the married men in that book get their names in the paper, then their lives will be shot to shit because they copped Betty Short for a quick piece of tail .”
There was a long stretch of silence. Then Loew said, “Jack, you know I’ll be DA sooner or later. If not next year, in ’52. And you know that Green will be retiring in a few years, and you know who I want to replace him. Jack, I’m thirty-six and you’re forty-nine. I may get another shot at something this big. You won’t. For God’s sake take the farsighted view on it.”
More silence. I pictured Captain Jack Tierney weighing the pros and cons of selling his soul to Satan with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a hard-on for the City of Los Angeles. When he said, “Okay, Ellis,” I tore up my transfer request and walked back to rejoin the circus.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Over the next ten days the circus turned into wholesale farce, with an occasional tragedy thrown in.
No other leads were gleaned from the “Death Letter,” and the 243 names in the book were divvied up between four detective teams, the low number of cops Jack Tierney’s ploy aimed at padding that part of the investigation into extended newspaper and radio juice. Russ Millard argued for twenty teams and a fast, clean sweep; Captain Jack, backstopped by the DA Satan, refused. When Big Bill Koenig was deemed too combustible to work the questionings and was given clerical duties, I was paired with Fritz Vogel. Together, we questioned fifty-odd people, mostly men, about their association with Elizabeth Short. We heard predictable stories of them meeting Betty in bars and buying her drinks and dinner, listening to her fantasies of being the bride or widow of war heros, bedding or not bedding her. A number of the men did not even know the notorious Dahlia–they were “friends of friends,” their names passed on out of pussy hound camaraderie.
Of our parcel of names, sixteen of the guys were what Fritzie labeled “Certified Dahlia Fuckers.” They were mostly lower-echelon movie minions: agents, talent scouts and casting directors who hung out at Schwab’s Drugstore chasing gullible would-be starlets, empty promises on their lips, Trojan “value packs” in their pockets. They told proud or shamefaced casting couch stories every bit as sad as Betty’s tales of bliss with studs in uniform. Finally, the men in Elizabeth Short’s little black book had two things in common–they got their names in the LA dailies and they coughed up alibis that eliminated them as suspects. And word filtered back to the squadroom that the publicity eliminated more than a few of them as husbands.
The women were a mixed bag. Most were just pals–girl talk acquaintances, fellow cocktail lounge cadgers and aspiring actresses heading nowhere. A dozen or so were hookers and semi-pro B-girls, instant soulmates that Betty met in bars. They gave us leads that petered out on follow-up investigation–basically, the word that Betty sold herself freelance to conventioneers at several lower-class downtown hotels. They hedged that Betty rarely peddled it, and could not identify any of her tricks by name; Fritzie’s canvassing of the hotels got him an angry zero, and the fact that several other women–R&I confirmed as prostitutes–couldn’t be located, pissed him off even more.