I shrugged. “Me, I don’t know what I believe, other than I know that most of us are sinners, but that now and then you run into somebody who’s… wrong to the bone. Evil the way the Bible would define it. The psychologists call these people ‘sociopaths.’ ”
“Do they.” Her eyes tightened. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Let me finish, Patsy-if you don’t mind. I mean, you don’t have supper to fix, now that your man flew the coop.”
She granted me a sarcastic smirk. “Since I can’t seem to stop you-and you have a gun-please continue.”
“Thanks. So, anyway, Arnold waltzes into my bungalow at the hotel when I’m not around, convinces my wife he’s an old buddy of mine, that we were in the war together. Now, my wife has been around and she knows a criminal type when she sees one-and she knows I number criminal types among my acquaintances and even friends. In the course of conversation-he must have been waiting there for me, a good hour-she asks him a question. ‘Suppose I had a friend who was in trouble, and needed help?’ ‘What kind of trouble?’ Arnold asks. Well, to make a long story short, Wilson helped out my wife’s ‘friend’… which is to say, my wife… and arranged for her to get an abortion.”
That got her attention. “I thought you were on your honeymoon…”
“I know, it disappoints me, a little, too, that my wife wanted to start out our married life by killing our kid. But we’ve worked that out-we’ve decided to have him, or her. The thing is, your husband’s friend Wilson-manipulative weasel that he is-sent my wife to a specific abortionist because a special friend of his worked there-a very sick individual named Lloyd.”
And, finally, I hit home. She couldn’t hide the reaction: wincing, gritting her teeth as if a red-hot poker had been placed against her flesh, she turned away from me.
I remained casual, chatty in tone. “None of that is important-it is, after all, a kind of… coda to the real story, here. The real story begins with a pair of sick psychopaths, who have known each other for many years, and have visited all kinds of hellish torture and perversion and murder upon women and men, usually striking the nameless, forgotten souls who litter the skid row of any major city. Arnold and this friend of his named Lloyd share a secret bond, as well as any number of unspeakable interests. Were you even aware that Arnold Wilson is a homosexual?”
The green eyes widened. “What?”
“That’s not really accurate-Wilson’s a bisexual. Gate swings, as they say, both ways… and that doesn’t offend me. I mean, whatever wets your wick, I always say. It’s just that both of the ways that Arnold’s gate swings are, well, a bit crooked. Arnold would quite naturally hide the homosexual aspect of his appetites from the all-male likes of your husband and the McCadden Group. He had to be one of the boys, right down to his war wound.”
Her red hair flounced as she shook her head. “You’ve gone wacky-Arnold is no queer…”
“Let me ask you this, where does Wilson live?”
That froze her. “I… I don’t know.”
“I’ll wager you have the phone number and address of every other friend your husband did business with, certainly the entire McCadden crew.”
She said nothing, but that was a confirmation of sorts.
“Late last summer and for part of the fall, Elizabeth Short was hanging around the McCadden Cafe. She and your husband became involved… Don’t bother denying it, don’t try to look surprised. Beth Short even became friendly with Hassau’s wife Helen-the girl became sort of a mascot to the McCadden Group, a little more than that to your husband.”
Staring at the wall again, her face hardened back into that blank mask.
I continued, saying, “Wilson was working for Al Green at the cafe as a cook, as well as being a member of the heist crew. So of course Wilson got to know Elizabeth Short, was friendly with her. But he also considered her a kind of… loose cannon. Wilson knew the Short girl was trying to raise money, for some kind of operation she was planning to get-he figured it was possibly an abortion, since she was consulting with a doctor who Wilson knew ran one of L.A.’s highest-class, most protected abortion mills.”
She gave me a glance, and a flinch of a frown. “Why are you telling me this? What the hell does this have to do with me?”
Outside the windows, magic hour was over-the darkness of night carried with it muffled traffic noise from nearby Hollywood Boulevard. I got up, switched on the overhead light, which bounced off the varnished wood floor. She winced, preferring the darkness. I sat beside her again.
“Wilson knew the Mocambo heist was going to be a big score. He also heard about the Short girl’s surprise when Beth discovered her new friends at the McCadden Cafe were a bunch of armed robbers. Wilson feared she might go to the cops, or otherwise sell them out, raising money for that supposed abortion. So he convinced his buddy Lloyd-who had been using his medical training to work for various abortionists on the West Coast-to apply for a job at that same abortion clinic where Elizabeth was enrolled as a patient. Fortuitously for Wilson, this was the perfect time for Lloyd to get work at the Dailey clinic: the chief doctor was failing mentally, slipping into senile dementia, and his female partner, a woman named Winter, could really use a good physician’s assistant about now, particularly one trained in the abortionist’s art.”
Patsy had turned away again. “You must like the sound of your own voice. I’m not even listening.”
“With Lloyd in place at the abortion clinic, the Short girl could be taken out, in a manner that-as a sick bonus-would allow these old pals in perversion to have a good old-fashioned debauched time. But Beth Short got spooked, with the Mocambo heist coming up, not wanting any part of a crime of that magnitude, and she fled to San Diego, where-typically-she freeloaded off a new friend she made. Several weeks later, before the heist, your husband and Helen and Hassau went down there to try to encourage Beth Short to come back to L.A.”
Her sharp glance indicated the latter was news to her.
“And, a month or so later, after the heist had been successfully pulled, Bobby and the McCadden Group apparently getting away clean, Beth decides to come home to the City of Angels, where she gets back in touch with Bobby and Helen. She decides to keep a low profile, since she now knows her ‘fiance’ already has a wife, a very pregnant one at that.”
Patsy closed her eyes; she might have been asleep.
“Now, all through this time, Beth Short is still actively trying to raise that money-perhaps with visions of running off with your Bobby-and Arnold Wilson may have seen her as a blackmail threat. But Wilson wasn’t the one, of course, who initiated the murder plan. That is where you come in, Mrs. Savarino.”
Her head swiveled on a dime, green eyes flashing. “Me? You’re a fucking lunatic!”
“Hey, it got me out of the Marines. We’re up to where Bobby and his pal Henry are arrested, and Bobby starts shooting his mouth off about Dragna trying to hire a McCadden Group hit on Cohen. Your husband wanted to make a deal with the cops, but all he succeeded in doing was spurring Dragna’s rage-that’s when the onslaught of death threats began. You and the rest of the McCadden Group and their families were targets for mob retaliation, if your idiot husband did not shut up, and soon. That’s when you went to Arnold Wilson with your plan.”
“My plan to do what? I did no such thing.”
“You suggested to Wilson that if Elizabeth Short were to turn up dead, in an apparent mob-style execution, Bobby would read it as a warning… and, at the same time, your competition for your husband’s affections would be eliminated.”
“That… that ‘Black Dahlia’ wasn’t a gangland killing; she was murdered by a sex fiend!”
“It was both those things, Patsy. You see, when you expressed an interest in having Beth Short removed, Arnold Wilson already had his friend Lloyd in place-settled in as a good little physician’s aide at the abortion mill, the very clinic where Beth Short was a patient. As I said, Wilson is a conniving sociopath of the first order: everything he did had sinister layers. He and Lloyd gleefully committed a sick sex crime that would send the police down the wrong road, even as the informer’s ‘smile’ they gashed in the girl’s face sent your husband a message. Then Wilson had the body dumped in a place where both Dragna and the abortion doctor could be implicated.”