The Black Dahlia

P.S. Do you still think about Elizabeth Short? I think about her constantly. I don’t hate her, I just think about her. Strange after all this time.

I kept the letter and re-read it at least a couple of hundred times. I didn’t think about what it meant, or implied about my future, or Kay’s, or ours together. I just re-read it and thought about Betty.

I dumped the El Nido master file in the garbage and thought about her. H.J. Caruso gave me a job selling cars, and I thought about her while I was hawking the 1950 line. I drove by9th and Norton, saw that houses were going up on the vacant lot and thought about her. I didn’t question the morality of letting Ramona walk or wonder whether Betty would approve. I just thought about her. And it took Kay, always the smarter of the two of us, to put it together for me.

Her second letter was postmarked Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was written on stationery for the Harvard Motor Lodge.

9/11/49

Dear Dwight—

I’m still such a liar, proscrastinator and chicken heart. I’ve known for two months, and I just got up the courage to tell you. If this letter doesn’t reach you I’ll actually have to call the house or Russ Millard. Better to try this way first.

Dwight, I’m pregnant. It had to have happened that one awful time about a month before you moved out. I’m due around Christmas and I want to keep it.

This is the patented Kay Lake retreat advancing. Will you please call or write? Soon? Now?

That’s the big news. Per the P.S. on my last letter, something strange? Elegiac? Plain fu

I kept thinking about Elizabeth Short. How she disrupted all our lives, and we never even knew her. When I got to Cambridge (God, how I love academic communities!) I remembered that she was raised nearby. I drove to Medford, stopped for di

I didn’t call or write. I put Lee Blanchard’s house on the market and caught a flight to Boston.

Chapter 37

On the plane I thought of all the things I’d have to explain to Kay, evidence to keep a new foundation of lies from destroying the two—or three—of us.

She would have to know that I was a detective without a badge, that for one month in the year 1949 I possessed brilliance and courage and the will to make sacrifices. She would have to know that the heat of that time would always make me vulnerable, prey to dark curiosities. She would have to believe that my strongest resolve was not to let any of it hurt her.

And she had to know that it was Elizabeth Short who was giving us our second chance.

Nearing Boston, the plane got swallowed up by clouds. I felt heavy with fear, like the reunion and fatherhood had turned me into a stone plummeting. I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer. The clouds broke up and the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love.