“It’s a Leo Joseph number,” she said. “I’d admired it, and Beth gave it to me, as a way of thanking me for letting her stay. You see, she used to work as a hat model in Chicago.”
Fowley perked again. “Chicago?”
Oh shit.
“Yes, she’d been there in the fall, I believe. So that’s one job, at least, that she held. Oh, and you’ll want the name of the man she left here with.”
Fowley might have been goosed, he sat up so straight. “What? Yes!”
“Do you have another cigarette, Mr. Fowley?” she asked, as she sat, crossing her legs. She was, in her quiet way, a real dish. Her husband had been a lucky man-except for the part where he died in the war.
Of the blur of men Beth had dated, while she stayed with them, only one had been a “repeat admirer,” as Mrs. French put it.
His name was Robert “Red” Manley, and he’d been to the Frenches’ home picking Beth up, several times; he worked at Western Airlines (he said) and had met Beth when she applied for that job she didn’t get. They had dated every night for about a week, in mid-December; then, when Mrs. French had informed Beth her stay at the little house on Camino Pradero was drawing to close, he had come around to pick her up in the late afternoon.
I asked, “And you remember the date?”
“It was a red-letter day around here, the day I got my living room back-January eighth. He picked her up at six p.m., loaded her two suitcases and a hatbox in his light-colored coupe.”
“What does this Red Manley look like?”
“Kind of cute-lanky, red-haired as you might guess… little jug-eared, maybe. Maybe twenty-five. Sharp dresser-he was wearing a brown pin-striped suit when he picked Beth up.”
Fowley asked, “What was she wearing when she left?”
“What she called her ‘traveling clothes’-a black collarless suit, nicely tailored, a white frilly blouse and white gloves… oh, and she had a black clutch purse and black suede shoes and, of course, seamed black stockings. Beige camel’s-hair coat over her arm… Is there anything else I can tell you?”
Mrs. Elvera French had told us plenty. Fowley asked if we could take her picture, and she consented, if we would wait for her to put on some makeup.
“Frankly,” I said, “you look like a million bucks without it.”
“Give me two minutes,” she said, with a tiny smile, “and I’ll give you an extra million.”
So I took her photo in the kitchen, at the table where she had so often shared coffee and sandwiches with her houseguest.
“We’d like to talk to your daughter,” Fowley said, as we were heading out, “if we could.”
“She’s working,” Mrs. French said, “but I’m sure she could spare a few minutes…”
The Aztec Theater was a second-run house on Fifth Street in San Diego; the Mission-style building, with its Mexi-Moderne touches, must have been the cat’s meow in 1924. The marquee boasted an Alan Ladd double bilclass="underline" O.S.S. and Blue Dahlia, two pictures I’d managed to miss first time around.
Dorothy French-trimly shapely in her red bolero jacket, white blouse, and blue slacks with a red stripe down the side-was working the concession counter. She was a pert, pretty blonde in her early twenties, very much the image of her mother, perhaps even prettier, her eyes bigger and lighter blue, her lips more full and brightly red-lipsticked. Her hair was a well-organized tumble of curls set off by a little red usherette’s hat, more suitable for an organ grinder’s monkey than a doll like her.
It was midafternoon and halfway through one of the features, and the half hour we spent talking to Dorothy was uninterrupted by any patron. Throughout our conversation, she leaned casually against the glass top of the display case of candy bars, and chewed (and occasionally snapped) her gum; nonetheless, she answered our questions solemnly, giving the tragic death of her friend the grave respect it deserved.
She had been expecting us: her mother had called ahead.
“I don’t know if I’ll have much to add to what my mother told you,” she said.
When the Aztec’s houselights had come on, at 3 A. M. on the morning of December 9, Dorothy had found the black-haired sleeping beauty in one of the theater’s threadbare seats. Confused when Dorothy awoke her, Beth Short had stuttered that the sign outside said the moviehouse was open all night.
“We’d just had a change of management,” Dorothy said, “and the sign hadn’t been painted over, yet. I apologized, and Beth said that was all right, and started coughing. I got her a paper cup of water and we began talking, and she told me how she’d come from Hollywood and was supposed to meet a friend, but they hadn’t connected up… and she was really in a jam, starting with, she was out of money.”
“Did she hit you up?” Fowley asked.
“No.” White teeth flashed as she chewed her gum. “She did say she’d been an usherette and a cashier, in moviehouses back east, and wondered if we needed any temporary help here at the Aztec. Funny thing is, later, after she’d been staying with us a few days, I tried to get the manager to hire Beth… and that’s a funny one in and of itself.”
“What is?”
“She came by for a job interview and ended up going out on a date.”
Fowley frowned. “With the theater manager?”
“Yes. They went out on a couple of dates, and Beth claimed he’d gotten fresh, and refused to hire her because he was in love with her and didn’t want other men looking at her!”
I asked, “Do you think that’s true?”
“It’s probably malarkey, but I’m not positive. Not that it would be hard imagining Beth making a boy friend jealous.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Beth was a beautiful girl.” Dorothy said this wistfully, as if longing to be that beautiful herself, seemingly unaware of her own comeliness. “When we’d ride the bus together, guys would just sit and stare at her. She had a sort of… glamour quality she radiated, partly the way she dressed, partly the way she was always all made up, and how she kind of… preened. Guys were always trying to date her.”
Fowley asked, “How close did you and Beth get?”
“We were friends. She would kind of swing between being very talkative, and gay, with her Hollywood stories, and melancholy, in a sort of-I don’t know, calculated way-when she was talking about her war-hero husband dying, especially. Like she was in a movie, acting. Other times, she’d be real quiet. There was a sadness about her, like deep down she was somebody with nobody to turn to.”
Dorothy had been impressed with Beth’s expensive, elegant wardrobe.
“She had these sweaters with such delicate embroidery work, tiny loops and circles around sequins and beads and pearls. She’d dress up for dates and twirl for me, saying, ‘What do you think?’ What I thought was, I could never wear clothes like that… but she sure could.”
Fowley said, “Your mother mentioned a screen test…”
“Yes. She was looking forward to that. Some big director.”
“But she never mentioned a name?”
“No. I don’t know if there was a name to mention. All of this Hollywood talk, I don’t know if there was really anything to it-she’d go on and on, like she was trying to believe it herself, like if she said it enough times, it would be true.”
I asked, “You don’t think she really worked in the movies-that it was just a pipe dream?”
Her brow furrowed. “You know, I’m not convinced she really cared about Hollywood. For all her movie talk, what really seemed to matter to her was finding the right man… That was her dream, far as I’m concerned. You know what she said to me once? ‘If I could only find some handsome Army officer, or sailor, or Marine, or airman, who would love me like I know I could love him… then tomorrow could be something wonderful.’ ”
Fowley smirked. “That sounds like acting, too.”
“No-it was how she really felt.” Chewing her gum, Dorothy gazed dreamily at nothing. “You could see it in her eyes. Those beautiful blue eyes.”
This was coming from a girl with eyes as blue as a summer sky.