In the shadow-crosshatched moonlight, we were on the landing, Lloyd and me-still almost five stories up-and it was as if a little stage had been provided for our modest melodrama. Our intensely interested audience-Eliot Ness-walked slowly down the iron steps, making no move or even uttering a sound to try to stop me, as I pushed the tied-in-the-chair Watterson face first toward and then right up to the edge of the railing. The railing itself was heavy, and about waist high. I lifted the chair and the man in it by the back of the chair and held him up and over the railing so he could see the hard, shiny floor waiting far below.
I was barely breathing hard as I said, “Elizabeth Short was a patient at the Dailey clinic, Lloyd.”
“Please don’t kill me!”
“Don’t say that again or I will. She was your patient, Lloyd, wasn’t she?”
“No!”
“What happened? Did you botch the operation, accidentally, then find yourself with a beautiful young corpse on your hands? And did it just get the old juices flowing, Lloyd?”
“Noooo!” His cry reverberated through the vastness of the Bradbury. “I didn’t kill her! I didn’t even operate on her! She was Dr. Winter’s patient, not mine!”
I leaned him over some more, wondering if that twine would hold, not really caring. “You’re saying Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, just happened to be a patient at a clinic where you work?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Yes, you did it?”
“Yes, it’s just a coincidence!”
Detectives do not believe in coincidence. Some of us believe in fate, a few even believe in God; but none of us believe in coincidence.
I pulled him back, sat him down, in his chair, teeth-rattlingly hard, on the iron floor of the landing. Backing away from him, I found myself sitting on the stairs as Eliot moved in to take over.
“I don’t care whether you admit to this crime or not, Lloyd,” Eliot said, “you’re going back to Ohio, with me.”
Out of breath, shaking his head, eyes rolling wildly, Lloyd yelled, “I’m not! I’m well! I’m cured! I was legally released. I’m as sane as either of you crazy assholes! You have no right, no recourse to-”
Eliot stood calmly, arms crossed. “Your uncle requested I bring you home.”
Watterson’s face tightened, as if he was not sure he’d heard right. “My uncle…?”
“It’s either go home to your uncle, and sign in for some more therapy, Lloyd-or go to the police, and be identified in public as the Kingsbury Run torso killer… and the maniac who killed the Black Dahlia.”
Lloyd thought about that for a while. And then, irritatingly, chillingly, he smiled. “You won’t do that.”
Eliot’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t?”
Watterson shook his head, confidently. “No. Mr. Ness, you would be disgraced, and I know you wouldn’t want that. Besides, the police would never arrest me.”
“Is that right?”
Now Watterson seemed openly amused-even smug. “It would expose Dr. Dailey and his clinic and all the crooked homicide cops involved.”
Eliot laughed humorlessly. “You want me to believe the LAPD would cover up a crime of this magnitude?”
“Why not? You did.”
Eliot staggered back a step.
Then he grabbed Lloyd by the shirtfront and said, “Do you want me to turn you over to my friend, here? He wants to cut off your head and bury you in the desert. And I’m ready to bring the shovel.”
“I didn’t do this, Mr. Ness!” Watterson’s smugness had evaporated, and the terror was back. “It’s all just a coincidence, I tell you-a crazy goddamn coincidence!”
I stood. For a while I was just poised there, on the stairs, as if not sure whether to go up or down.
I thought of Orson Welles on that Columbia soundstage, wandering through a nightmare of his own creation, severed limbs and crazy shadows and clown grins. Was Welles the killer, or perhaps the mastermind manipulating some dupe, like Lloyd here? To me, that still seemed absurd on the face of it. And yet…
… some hand was directing this action. Not the director of Citizen Kane, perhaps-but some sure, sick hand…
I said, “Eliot-a word.”
Looking slightly shellshocked, Eliot followed me up the steps; we spoke at the mouth of the iron stairway, with Lloyd-tied in his chair-staring up at us with those empty blue eyes of his.
“He’s right about the cops,” I said softly. “Dailey is part of an abortion ring that’s protected by the homicide bureau.”
“Christ! I thought you said Hansen was straight.”
“He is, but most of them are beyond bent-including the Hat’s partner, Fat Ass Brown.”
“So we avoid the homicide dicks-maybe get a statement and turn it over to the press-”
“Eliot,” I whispered, “he may not have done this.”
Eliot’s eyes flared. “You have got to be kidding. The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run just happens to be working in an abortion clinic where the Black Dahlia was a patient?”
I was shaking my head. “Too many coincidences. One or two I can buy-that I was with Fowley when he caught that police call, okay. Just about everything else… no.”
“What are you saying?”
“Somebody is stage-directing this. All of these things that we’re trying desperately to write off as coincidences… we’re being played for suckers. Hell, man, we’re not even pawns on a chess board-we’re just goddamn checkers.”
He frowned. “Then who’s behind it all?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think Lloyd does, either-although it’s a good bet the person manipulating these events is someone in Lloyd’s life.”
Eliot twitched a nonsmile; he was taking me seriously, anyway. “What do you suggest?”
I took him by the arm and walked him down the corridor a ways-we could still see Watterson sitting on the landing.
“We continue investigating,” I said. “I still look at that corpse in my mind’s eye and see ‘informer’ carved on that pretty face-and I haven’t even explored the Dragna avenue yet, or for that matter Mickey Cohen. You need to deal with Harry the Hat, and you could dig into the background of these abortion clinic players… see if anything turns up. Maybe Dailey isn’t the senile dip-shit he appears to be-maybe the Winter dame is the fucking Dragon Lady. We don’t know yet… Then there’s this guy Arnold Wilson and the rest of the McCadden crew.”
“Arnold Wilson?”
“Tall guy with a war-wound limp-he was in on the Mocambo heist, but unlike Savarino and Hassau didn’t get nailed.”
“Funny… Arnold Wilson-that name sounds familiar…”
“Eliot, that’s like saying ‘John Smith’ or ‘Joe Doakes’ sounds familiar.”
His eyes were tight with thought. “No-I’ve seen it recently.”
“Good, then that’s something else you can check.”
“What exactly are you suggesting, Nate?”
“I’m suggesting we tell Lloyd he’s convinced us of his innocence.”
“What the hell?”
“We apologize for roughing him up. Gee whiz we hope he understands, but we just had to make sure he wasn’t involved. And we make him believe he sold us his bill of goods… which, incidentally, may not be a bill of goods at all. Elizabeth Short may have been cut in half so that smart sleuths like us would play pin the crime on the Butcher.”
Now it was Eliot who looked wild-eyed. “Just let him go? Are you nuts? He’ll run!”
“Of course I’m nuts. I got out on a Section Eight, didn’t I? But I don’t think our twisted friend here will run- if we convince him he’s convinced us.”
“Then what?”
I nodded toward the A-1 office. “We’ll keep this guy tailed day and night-not too hard a job, since he works the fuck next door to my own detective agency. Fred and I have four ops working full-time, who we’ll tap into.”