Richardson retired and eventually died; Fowley retired, wrote novels, and is still alive, at this writing. Hearst promoted Aggie Underwood to managing editor, to shut her up about the Bauerdorf killing. In 1949, Jack Dragna finally got somebody to hit Mickey Cohen, or try anyway, at Sherry’s restaurant, with Fred Rubinski and me nearby-but that’s another story. Barney and Cathy remarried, of course, very happily, Barney never needing the needle again. Barney lost a bout, to cancer, in 1967.
Most of the rest of them, cops and crooks, I lost track of over the years. A bail-bondsman named Milton Schaeffer sent his people after Savarino and Hassau and brought them back, from San Francisco, and they got sentenced to thirty years, not twenty. What happened to them after that, I have no idea. I always kind of hoped Savarino made it out on Good Behavior in, say, ten and picked back up with Patsy and their kid and went straight. But that is, of course, ridiculous Polly-fucking-anna thinking.
Peggy and me? We had our beautiful son-Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr.-on September 27, 1947. We had by that time moved to a brick bungalow in the Chicago suburb Lincolnwood, and she had already asked me for a divorce. We’d struck a truce, in those last few days at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and there had been no recriminations or accusations from either of us-we had even screwed each other silly, proclaiming our undying love and looking forward to the first of many babies. We didn’t quite make two years.
Our relationship, postmarriage, remained stormy. We almost got back together a couple times, and for patches we were friendly, and there were stretches where we weren’t. For a long time my son-who lived with his mom-believed all the terrible things she told him about me. When he got older, we started to get along better, but maybe if he reads this book, he’ll know his mother wasn’t perfect… and that without his dad, he might’ve ended up a few teaspoons of slippery, slimy cells floating in water in a metal basin.
The search for Arnold Wilson ended later in ’47, in San Francisco. One of criminal lawyer Jake Ehrlich’s investigators spotted our man in a second-floor saloon called Finocchio’s that catered to the gay set. The investigator tracked him to a Grant Avenue flophouse in Chinatown, called me, and I flew out that night.
The next morning, in Chinatown, I found the hotel had burned down and sixteen people had died, mostly transients. A tall charred corpse was found in Wilson’s room. God or kismet or somebody had seen to it that the Butcher’s apprentice had met a fitting hellish fate.
But as I stood looking at the smoldering building, firefighters doing their job, I felt cheated somehow; then after an hour, I turned my back on it, and flew home, doing my best to leave my smoldering hatred for that son-of-a-bitch behind.
In February 1982 I made a trip to California. I had retired long ago, and my second wife and I lived in Florida, in Boca Raton. A healthy, spry old S.O.B., I was still chairman of the board of the A-1 Detective Agency, but my son was the president of the firm now, and had been for quite a while. He was working out of the Los Angeles office and I had traveled alone, to visit him, since he and my wife didn’t get along.
Also, I’d been contacted by a writer named Gil Johnson about the Black Dahlia case. He was working on a nonfiction book about the murder, and my name had turned up in his research. He wanted to talk. At first I’d been reluctant, but then he caught my interest.
“I’ve solved the case,” he said. His voice over the phone was a mellow, actorly baritone.
I was sitting on the patio of our house on the causeway, watching boats go by, sipping lemonade. “Really?”
“I’ve come across this old guy who knew the killer.”
“Is that right?”
“He says the killer was named Al Morrison.”
Now I was less interested. “Is that so?”
“Yes… but to tell you the truth, I have a feeling this old geezer… he’s an alcoholic, skid-row type… may have been a sort of accomplice in the crime.”
And now I was very interested. “What’s his name, this geezer?”
“Smith. Arnold Smith.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Emaciated as hell. Bad acne scars. Maybe six four… walks with a limp. Says he got it in the war.”
“Well, I might be able to talk to you about the case.”
“Oh! That’s great! I’d been warned you didn’t give interviews… I heard you were writing your own book…”
“I’m working on my memoirs, but I’m years away from the Dahlia. I don’t mind giving another writer a helping hand. I’ve been wanting to get out to the Coast to see my son, anyway. How can I get in touch with you?”
Three days later we were sitting with draft beers in front of us in a booth in Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, that no-nonsense dark-wood-paneled meeting place where actors, agents, and surly waiters converge.
Johnson was in his mid-forties, smooth, intelligent, leading-man handsome with a full head of silvering brown hair, wearing a brown sportjacket and a yellow sportshirt and looking, well, Hollywood. He had already explained that he was a former actor, occasional screenwriter and that he’d written a true crime book about the Manson family that had led to more work in that vein.
“I stumbled onto this character quite by accident,” Johnson said. “A girlfriend and I were visiting this couple in Silver Lake, where I was living at the time. It was a little party, maybe half a dozen people, some of them fairly rough characters-I know my girl told me later she’d felt uneasy.”
The host of the party had taken all his guests out to the garage, to see if he had “anything they wanted.”
“It was full of stuff-stereo equipment, TVs, golf clubs, you name it-guy was a thief, obviously, or a fence. Anyway, as the night wore on, we were listening to old records from the ’40s and ’50s, and this tall, thin, sick-lookin’ character starts reminiscing about Los Angeles in the ’40s, after the war. I mentioned I was working on a book about that period. He asked me what the subject was, and I said the Black Dahlia murder… And he said he knew her.”
“Did you take this seriously? It was a party, you were all drinking…”
“I took him seriously-there was something… intense and, frankly, creepy about his manner. He said he used to know Elizabeth Short when she hung out at a cafe on McCadden. He said he knew one of the members of a heist crew who hung out there, too, a Bobby Savarino.”
“Really.”
“Anyway, he asked me if I was willing to pay him for information, and I said yes, if it proved of value. Imagine my surprise when, over time, this developed into him saying he knew the killer, and that the killer had confessed to him.”
“Have you checked up on this guy?”
“Shit, yes. He’s got a five-page rap sheet and a dozen AKAs-burglary, theft, vagrancy, intoxication, lewd conduct. He’s gay, or anyway, bi. Served a couple short stretches.”
“What do you want from me?”
Johnson leaned forward, his passion for the subject palpable. “You worked on the Black Dahlia case-hell, you found the body.”
I shrugged. “I was there when the body was found. I did background investigation for the Examiner.”
“Here’s where I’d like to start. I’d like to go over with you what Smith told me, and see if it gibes with what you know.”