“On the other hand,” Lou said, “maybe one of those boy friends killed her-you know, flew into a murderous rage when he discovered she could not be fucked.”
“Jesus, yeah-that does make a terrible kind of sense.”
Another humorless laugh. “Poor kid was the only prick tease on earth who didn’t want to be.”
After hanging up, I just sat there on the couch in that bungalow, afternoon sun filtering in lazily through sheer curtains, my interview notepad in hand, and I paged through it as I mentally sorted through every fact, every facet, every suspect, every supposition, every rumor, every seeming coincidence, viewed through the new prism of Beth Short’s disability.
Perhaps half an hour later, a frantic knocking at the bungalow door jarred me, as if I’d been sleeping and got jolted awake, and I went quickly to the door and opened it. Perhaps I had been in a trancelike state, but seeing Eliot Ness’s uncharacteristically excited expression made me instantly alert.
“I have some incredible information,” he blurted.
“You may want to hear mine, first,” I said.
I sat on the couch and he pulled up an armchair, tossing his fedora on the coffee table, and listened to my retelling of Lou Sapperstein’s bizarre news. Midway he got up and helped himself to some Scotch from the wet bar.
Visibly shaken, Eliot said, “It’s all beginning to make sick, tragic sense.”
“Parts of it are coming clear, but I have to admit, most of it is still pretty goddamn murky from where I sit.”
“Wait-just wait.” He gulped at the Scotch, then unbuttoned his suitcoat, set the drink on the glass top of the coffee table, and for several long moments sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands; that unruly comma of brown, graying hair hung almost to his eyebrows.
“Are you all right, Eliot?”
“Where shall I start?” He sat suddenly straight. “All right, the beginning… I spent two hours with Detective Hansen, wasting time retreading the Butcher inquiry, making the case for this probably not being the same perpetrator. He seemed to buy it well enough. Then I asked Hansen if anyone was exploring abortionists in the city-and he told me, yes, but that he personally thought that was a blind alley.”
“Considering his knowledge of Beth Short’s deformity, that’s not surprising.”
Eliot nodded, and pressed on. “But I pushed him, saying that in Cleveland we believed the Kingsbury Run Butcher was a doctor or perhaps ex-doctor, due to the medical precision of the dismemberments. The Black Dahlia’s corpse showed similar medical knowledge and the same sort of surgical skill.”
“And,” I said, “you naturally told Hansen that if he’s really trying to see whether the Kingsbury Run Butcher committed this crime, then this is a logical path to go down.”
“Yes. He put me with a young vice squad sergeant, Charles Stoker, and left us alone. I asked Sergeant Stoker for a list of known and suspected abortionists. Stoker gave me one, but Dailey’s name wasn’t on it…”
“Of course. Dailey’s protected.”
Eliot nodded. “So I told the young detective that I’d heard about a doctor named Dailey, who was originally from Massachusetts, same as Elizabeth Short.”
I winced. “Dangerous sharing that…”
He raised a palm, as if getting sworn in on the stand. “But necessary to get the information-and, anyway, I can play it down, if it gets back to Hansen. Stoker started looking around the bullpen furtively, then finally, uneasily, admitted that certain local doctors suspected of abortion were not ‘bothered’ by the LAPD. He said it rubbed him the wrong way, but the policy in the department was that abortion was a fact of life and a few of the more responsible practitioners were given a blind eye.”
“And he admitted Dr. Dailey was one of these.”
“Yes, a very respectable retired Chief of Staff of Los Angeles County Hospital, after all, retired USC professor. But Stoker had some other interesting information about Dr. Dailey-he was very much aware of Dailey’s failing mental condition.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Eliot smiled tightly, nastily. “Seems Dailey’s estranged wife has been trying to arrange a commitment for her errant hubby-it’s been something of a minor scandal. Apparently Mrs. Dailey thinks this woman, Dr. Winter, is ‘exerting undue influence’ over her husband, using her ‘feminine wiles.’
“As in, stealing the doc away from her.”
Nodding again, Eliot said, “Yes, and changing his will to favor Dr. Winter.”
“It’s not a new story.”
“But in the context of the death of Elizabeth Short, it makes a very interesting story.”
I shook my head, confused. “How in hell could the Short girl’s murder have anything-”
Eliot held up a traffic-cop palm. “Wait. Just wait. After Sergeant Stoker and I were finished, I came back here to the hotel and made a few phone calls… first to the main branch of the L.A. public library, to see if they had Harvard yearbooks on hand.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to see if Lloyd Watterson’s father and Dr. Dailey really were classmates. A librarian on the research desk said she would be happy to look into it for me, and she called me back, not half an hour ago. Both men did attend Harvard, just not at the same time-Lloyd’s father graduated the year before Dailey enrolled.”
“What does that mean to you, Eliot?”
The Untouchable leaned forward, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “It means Lloyd was lying to us about at least one thing. Getting the job with Dailey had nothing to do with him being a friend and classmate of dear dead dad.”
“And why would he lie about that?”
A tiny shrug. “Possibly to make himself look better to us-make it look as if he really was trying to make a clean start, with his family’s help… rather than going to work for an abortionist, through the efforts of some lowlife criminal acquaintance.”
“This is all very interesting, but-”
“Nate.” Eliot twitched a smile, sat back, hands on his knees. “Do you have a phone book?”
Huh?
“Well, sure,” I said. “It’s right there, in that drawer.” I pointed to the nearby endtable where the phone sat. “Why?”
“Because I did one of my most effective if accidental pieces of detective work today just by looking up a number, and checking the address that went with it. Get the phone book, Nate- get it.”
I got it.
“From what Stoker told me,” Eliot said, “I thought it might be interesting to have a talk with Mrs. Dailey. Possibly not worth a trip to her house, but a phone call surely wouldn’t hurt. Look up her number, Nate. It’s under her husband’s name-until two and a half months ago, when he moved out, that was where the doctor lived.”
Humoring Eliot, wondering what the hell had got into him, I looked up Dr. Wallace A. Daily in the phone book. The phone number was meaningless, but the street address was not.
Dr. Dailey-or at any rate, his estranged wife-lived at 3959 South Norton.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s…”
“One block from a certain vacant lot.”
I tossed the phone book on the carpet with a thud.
“What the hell does it mean?” I asked, trembling.
“I’m not sure,” Eliot said. “Presumably Doc Dailey and the Winter woman do their abortions at the clinic, not his private residence. But it is one hell of a… coincidence.”
Detectives do not believe in coincidence.
“Now I have one more item to share with you,” Eliot said, with a self-satisfied sigh, “and it makes all of the rest of these revelations… perhaps even that of Elizabeth Short’s unfortunate physical condition… pale to insignificance.”
I leaned back on the couch, wondering how much more I could take; I felt as if I’d been pummeled.
“Remember I said the name ‘Arnold Wilson’ rang a bell? And you said it was an ordinary name-unlikely that it would make any more connection in my mind than ‘John Smith.’ But we were in the presence of Lloyd Watterson at the time, weren’t we? The new improved mentally balanced Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run? And you may remember, prior to leaving for Los Angeles, I had just spent several hours with the thousands of pages of the Torso file.”