The Black Dahlia

The soldier bolted out the door, half dressed. Madeleine, slipping into her tight black gown, was an easy target. I drew a bead; a last flash of her nakedness made me empty the gun into the air. I kicked the window in.

Madeleine watched me climb over the sill. Undaunted by gunshots and flying glass, she spoke with soft savoir faire: “She was the only thing real to me, and I had to tell people about her. I felt so contrived next to her. She was a natural and I was just an imposter. And she was ours, sweet. You brought her back to me. She was what made it so good with us. She was ours.”

I mussed up Madeleine’s Dahlia hairdo, so that she looked like just another raven-clad floozy; I cuffed her wrists behind her back and saw myself in the sand pit, worm bait along with my partner. Sirens bared down from all directions; flashlights shined in the broken window. Out in the Big Nowhere, Lee Blanchard reprised his line from the Zoot Suit riot:

“Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”

Chapter 35

We took the fall together.

Four black-and-whites responded to my shots. I explained to the officers that it was a lights and siren roll to Wilshire Station—I was booking the woman for Murder One. At the Wilshire squadroom, Madeleine confessed to the killing of Lee Blanchard, concocting a brilliant fantasy—a lovers’ triangle of Lee/Madeleine/Bucky, how she was intimately involved with both of us in the winter of 1947. I sat in on the interrogation, and Madeleine was flawless. Seasoned Homicide dicks bought her tale hook, line and sinker: Lee and I rivals for her hand, Madeleine preferring me as a potential husband. Lee going to Emmett, demanding that he “give him” his daughter, beating the man half to death when he refused. Madeleine revengestalking Lee in Mexico, axing him to death in Ensenada. No mention of the Black Dahlia murder case at all.

I corroborated Madeleine’s story, saying that I only recently figured out that Lee had been murdered. I then confronted Madeleine with a circumstantial run-though on the snuff and coerced a partial confession out of her. Madeleine was transported to the LA women’s jail, and I went back to the El Nido—still wondering what I was going to do about Ramona.

The next day I returned to duty. At the end of my tour a team of Metro goons was waiting for me in the Newton locker room. They grilled me for three hours; I ran with the fantasy ball Madeleine started rolling. The grit of her story and my wild departmental rep carried me through the interrogation—and nobody mentioned the Dahlia.

Over the next week the legal machinery took over.

The Mexican government refused to indict Madeleine for the murder of Lee Blanchard—without a corpse and backup evidence extradition proceedings could not be initiated. A Grand Jury was called up to decide her fate; Ellis Loew was slated to present the case for the City of Los Angeles. I told him I would testify only by deposition. Knowing my unpredictability only too well, he agreed. I filled up ten pages with lies on the “lovers’ triangle,” fantasy embellishments worthy of romantic Betty Short at her best. I kept wondering if she would appreciate the irony.

Emmett Sprague was indicted by a separate Grand Jury-for health and safety code violations stemming from his mobfronted ownership of dangerously faulty property. He was given fines in excess of $50,000—but no criminal charges were filed. Counting the $71,000 that Madeleine stole from Lee, he was still close to twenty grand in the black on the deal.

The lovers’ triangle hit the papers the day after Madeleine’s case went to the Grand Jury. The Blanchard-Bleichert fight and the Southside shootout were resurrected, and for a week I was big-time local stuff. Then I got a call from Bevo Means of the Herald: “Watch out, Bucky. Emmett Sprague’s about to hit back, and the shit’s about to hit the fan. ‘Nuff said.”

It was Confidential magazine that nailed me.

The July 12 issue ran an article on the triangle. It featured quotes from Madeleine, leaked to the scandal rag by Emmett. The brass girl had me ditching out on duty to couple with her at the Red Arrow Motel; stealing fifths of her father’s whiskey to see me through nightwatch; giving her the inside lowdown on the LAPD’s traffic ticket quota system and how I “beat up niggers.” I

I was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department on grounds of moral turpitude and conduct unbecoming an officer. It was the unanimous decision of a specially convened board of inspectors and deputy chiefs, and I did not protest it. I thought of turning over Ramona in hopes of pulling a grandstander’s turnabout, but kiboshed the idea. Russ Millard might be compelled to admit what he knew and get hurt; Lee’s name would get coated with more slime; Martha would know. The firing was about two and a half years overdue; the Confidential exposé my final embarrassment to the Department. No one knew that better than I did.

I turned in my service revolver, my outlaw .45 and badge 1611. I moved back to the house that Lee bought, borrowed $500 from the padre and waited for my notoriety to die down before I started looking for work. Betty Short and Kay weighed on me, and I went by Kay’s school to look for her. The principal, eyeing me like a bug who just crawled out of the woodwork, said that Kay left a resignation letter the day after I hit the newsstands. It stated that she was going on a long cross-country automobile trip and would not be returning to Los Angeles.

The Grand Jury bound Madeleine over for trial on Manslaughter Three—”premeditated homicide under psychological duress and with mitigating circumstances.” Her lawyer, the great Jerry Giesler, had her plead guilty and request a judge’s chambers sentencing. Taking into account the recommendations of psychiatrists who found Madeleine to be a “severely delusional violent schizophrenic adept at acting out many different personalities,” the judge sentenced her to Atascadero State Hospital for an “indeterminate period of treatment not to subscribe below the minimum time allotted by the state penalties code: ten years of imprisonment.”

So the brass girl took the heat for her family and I took it for myself. My farewell to the Spragues was a front-page photo in the LA Daily News. Matrons were leading Madeleine out of the courtroom while Emmett wept at the defense table. Ramona, hollow-cheeked with disease, was being shepherded by Martha, all good strong business in a tailored suit. The picture was a lock on my silence forever.

Chapter 36

A month later I got a letter from Kay.

Sioux Falls, S.D.

8/17/49

Dear Dwight,

I didn’t know if you’d moved back to the house, so I don’t know if this letter will reach you. I’ve been checking the library for L.A. papers, and I know you’re not with the Department anymore, so that’s another place where I can’t write to you. I’ll just have to send this out and see what happens.

I’m in Sioux Falls, living at the Plainsman Hotel. It’s the best one in town, and I’ve wanted to stay here since I was a little girl. It’s not the way I imagined it, of course. I just wanted to wash the taste of L.A. out of my mouth, and Sioux Falls is as antithetical to L.A. as you can get without flying to the moon.

My grade school girlfriends are all married and have children, and two of them are widows from the war. Everyone talks about the war like it’s still going on, and the high prairies outside of town are being plowed for housing developments. The ones that have been constructed so far are so ugly, such bright, jarring colors. They make me miss our old house. I know you hate it, but it was a sanctuary for nine years of my life.

Dwight, I’ve read all the papers and that trashy magazine piece. I must have counted a dozen lies. Lies by omission and the blatant kind. I keep wondering what happened, even though I don’t really want to know. I keep wondering why Elizabeth Short was never mentioned. I would have felt self-righteous, but I spent last night in my room just counting lies. All the lies I told you and things I never told you, even when it was good with us. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many I came up with.

I’m sorry for them. And I admire what you did with Madeleine Sprague. I never knew what she was to you, but I know what arresting her cost you. Did she really kill Lee? Is that just another lie? Why can’t I believe it?

I have some money that Lee left me (a lie by omission, I know) and I’m going to head east in a day or so. I want to be far away from Los Angeles, someplace cool and pretty and old. Maybe New England, maybe the Great Lakes. All I know is that when I see the place, I’ll know it.