I'd
sold a script to the hour-long Naked City series and spent two weeks in New
Orleans on the Curtis Harrington movie, having changed the setting from San
Francisco to the French Quarter. I'd sold a couple of stories to Seymour Krim
and to another magazine, and I was researching Hollywood's famous unsolved
homicide-the Black Dahlia murder case-for a possible script. The 1947 slaying of
the young, beautiful would-be actress Elizabeth Short, known as the Black
Dahlia, was one of the most grisly murders in the annals of modern crime. The
project, called Who Killed the Black Dahlia?, was being kicked off by actor Tom
Neal, a hell-raiser from World War II movies.
Tom had "brushed shoulders," as he put it, with a
couple of Hollywood con men running a scam to raise financing for a movie on the
murder. They claimed to have gathered secret information from the cops. With a
tidy sum, they ran to Vegas, blew the money, and were arrested.
While not claiming to possess any secret information, Tom had
discovered a private dick who'd independently tracked a suspect at the request
of the victim's family in Massachusetts. Tom also knew a retired police captain
who'd worked the case, as part of the initial task force my own father-an LAPD
cop since 1942-had been pooled into. My father had logged many days and a fair
share of shoe leather on the early stages of the Black Dahlia investigation,
then conducted periodic forays into the case for more than a dozen years.
Tom was on the phone with me almost daily to "get pages
piled," as he'd put it, to sew up a deal with the Palm Springs money he
claimed to have on tap as co-producer. It was Tom's plan to co-star in the movie
as a tough L.A. detective who falls in love with the dead girl-his co-star-but
unlike the movie Laura, this murdered girl doesn't come back from the grave.
Aided by Jack Webb, who was tight with a few LAPD hotshots
thanks to Dragnet, I got my feet wet to the knees in the case. I'd never worked
with Webb, although he'd interviewed me a couple times for parts in his show and
he knew my father.
Though the apples seemed to be sitting in Tom's basket, he
still hadn't secured the financing. I didn't know it at the time, but the
trouble was Tom's failing career and a subsequent warping of his
personality-which added up to a widespread mistrust of Tom's various schemes.
Even armed with files from my father, as well as with information from my inside
contacts with LAPD's Homicide Bureau and from my acquaintances on the other side
of the fence-shadow people that found talking to me easy-Tom couldn't convince
the Palm Springs people to release the front money needed to get the movie
rolling. Another potential investor, an associate of the Palm Springs people
named Gene Harris, was a rich eccentric living in the banquet space of an old
Barstow hotel in the desert. A meeting was arranged, and I rode the big red car
all the way into San Bernardino, and from there a bus north to Barstow.
The desert heat was stifling, and there were a lot of flies in
Harris' banquet room, a large space stuffed with furniture and antique lamps and
sinks. The halls still had World War II posters taped to the wallpaper. Though
Harris wore glasses as thick as the bottoms of Seltzer bottles, he used a
magnifying glass to study the photographs of the dead girl's naked body, severed
in half and laid out in a vacant lot south of Hollywood.
He wanted to know if I'd personally seen the body, and I told
him I'd been eleven years old at the time and hadn't been invited to crime
scenes, though my father had already been a veteran of the force five years by
then. But several times, I said, I'd been to the vacant lot with my dad and
walked around in the weeds where the body had been found. Right across from
there on Crenshaw Boulevard was Rudy's, an Italian restaurant where I'd go with
my father and family, after which we'd swing over to the block and park on the
street to snoop around.
Harris asked if I'd touched the ground. I said, "I stood
on it," and he said no, had I touched it with my hand. I had to think
back-maybe I'd reached down, pulled at some weeds. I could remember finding used
flashbulbs long after the case had dropped from the news. Maybe I'd touched the
ground, I said.
"The exact place where the body was?" he asked. I
said it had probably been the same area-even the most remote detail about that
site had been measured and photographed again and again by the cops. I said the
location was almost certainly exact. He said, "Let me see your hand."
My hand? He wanted to look at it. I reminded him that fifteen
or so years had passed since then. "I realize that," he said,
"but it is still a direct contact between that part of you and the place
where her body was lying . . . As well as the bottoms of your feet," he
added. I told him I would have been wearing shoes.
Placing his fingers on the palm side of my hand, he rubbed
them back and forth several times as though smoothing out a surface. He sat back
sighing loudly, looking strangely distant. Suddenly he began to weep. I'd been
warned he was eccentric but at this point I thought he was nuts.
Distractedly, he excused himself and suggested I go down to
the coffee shop and eat some bacon and eggs. He said he'd join me momentarily,
and as soon as I was leaving the room he was already dialing a number on the
phone.
Since it was evening, I didn't want bacon and eggs but had
chicken-fried steak and a bottle of beer. Harris came down, having changed his
clothes and put on a hat. He drank coffee and spoke in a dry, business-like
tone. "The problem with all of this has to do with Tom Neal," he said.
"You, on the other hand-your father being an actual policeman, and you
doing the work you're doing-you're a credible asset to such a project. But Tom
Neal is not . . ."
I said Tom had brought the project together. "Only as a
vehicle for himself," Harris said, "and frankly, we feel he isn't
right for the part. By 'right,' I mean proper, acceptable. It hardly matters
what Tom has brought together. You're the one writing the story, basically, from
police and private and public information. I personally have interest in this
case, and I see no need to divert my interests or funnel them through a blowhard
like Tom Neal. 
He's reckless and impulsive and will ruin whatever he gets his
hands on. Producers are a dime a dozen. An actor of Neal's standing and
reputation can be had for less than that. Basically," Harris said,
"someone will have to come up with a more imaginative business proposition
than what has been presented by Tom Neal and his cohorts. By that time, of
course, if not sooner, we might all be dead."
He gave me a fifty-dollar bill as reimbursement for my travel
expenses and said he'd have me flown back to Hollywood. Another guy working at
the Barstow hotel was a pilot and flew me to Burbank in a Piper Cub as soon as
I'd finished my chicken-fried steak. Soon I'd see it wasn't the Barstow
eccentric running loose at the leash, but Tom Neal himself. It would be very
clear one beautiful day to come, when Tom would sneak up on his pretty, new Palm
Springs wife as she lay on their sofa and shoot a .45 bullet through her head.
and