Max Collins - Angel in black

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.”

She frowned, truly puzzled. “Why would he do that?”

“Since Arnold Wilson’s relationship with Lloyd was a secret one-a pact between human malignancies, a relationship acted out in the depths of human society, skid row bars and flophouses and the like-should Beth Short’s murder ever be traced back to Lloyd, it would be Lloyd-a known psychopathic murderer-who would take full blame.”

“Why wouldn’t this… ‘Lloyd’… tell the police about his friend, Arnold Wilson?”

“Because Lloyd likes to take full credit for his depravity. He has an ego as big as it is bizarre, which for example compels him to send taunting postcards to the detective tracking him. Wilson was suspected as Lloyd’s apprentice in those torso murders in Cleveland, ten years ago-but Lloyd steadfastly refused to implicate his friend… either out of loyalty, or a desire to hog all the ‘glory.’ ”

That was why Wilson-who obviously had recognized me and remembered my role in the original Butcher case-had maneuvered my wife into that abortion clinic today. Wilson had no doubt heard from Watterson that Eliot and I had cornered him-and released him, supposedly believing Lloyd’s story-but Wilson would easily have guessed that we’d be keeping Lloyd under surveillance, and that I would be informed immediately when Peggy went into that clinic.

The diabolical bastard knew, too, that I was likely to kill Watterson, if I burst in on him either aborting my child or butchering Peggy (didn’t matter to Wilson which), thereby closing off any investigatory avenue that might have implicated Arnold Wilson in the murder of the Black Dahlia.

“But, Patsy,” I said to the lovely pregnant redhead, “you didn’t just suggest this murder-you hired it done. Lucky devil, that Arnold Wilson: a murder he had been thinking about doing anyway, and somebody pays him to do it!”

She had a glazed expression, now. “What… what makes you think I paid Wilson to kill her?”

“Well, hell, that’s where your money went, your husband’s share of all that Mocambo heist loot. It was the Ringgold brothers who paid Bobby’s bail, after all. And yet you and Bobby were willing to tell a stranger anything he wanted to know, for a lousy hundred bucks.”

She mustered up a sneer. “And that makes me somebody who hired a murder? Is that what you call detective work?”

“Actually, it was Mickey Cohen who got me thinking like a detective again… What did Elizabeth Short do to deserve her fate? Not a damn thing, he said-if a gangster like Dragna wanted to send your husband a message, he’d have hit another member of the McCadden Group, some deserving crook, not a civilian dame who happened to be somebody’s mistress. So-why Beth Short? Who would benefit from her death? How about Bobby’s wife-Bobby’s pregnant wife.”