Blood Sisters

We moved to L.A. when I was eight; into one of those one-story, stucco, tile-roofed houses springing up from all the weedy, vacant lots along Norton Avenue. Construction was booming seven years after the war ended; all those GIs with their pretty wives and chubby-cheeked children filled the beige boxes on Norton, lined in front with sidewalks we scratched our names in with Popsicle sticks before the cement dried, and in back with miles of sky-high telephone poles, like giant soldiers in a row, marching all the way to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. I pouted about moving; I didn’t want to leave my old friends in San Francisco, but my mother told me stories about movie stars gliding along Hollywood Boulevard in Reef Blue Roadmaster Skylarks to restaurants with white tablecloths and no prices on the menus. Just after we moved, my father drove us downtown to ride the funicular, Angel’s Flight. Your heart feels like a freed bird when you look around from up there at the ziggurat buildings jutting even higher than you are, doves strutting on the windowsills. After that, we grabbed a chili burger at Tommy’s on Rampart and walked around a little. I liked the flowery smells surrounding all the beautiful women we passed, their silk summer dresses swooshing as they sashayed and smiled into the faces of their handsome men. It didn’t take me long to love the City of Angels.

I met Anne Bersinger at the end of the school year. She lived next door to us, and we were in the same fourth grade class. She and some kids on the other side of the street were playing hopscotch, the numbered squares drawn on the sidewalk with pink chalk, smudging a little each time they hopped and chanted:

A bad man’s gonna Cut you in two, Baby Dahlia's Comin' for you!

Anne was standing off from the giggling girls and boys, her head bowed, quiet tears wetting her pink cheeks, her silky blond hair sticking to the wet. Her fists were balled like she wanted to punch somebody.

“Shut your traps! You are all big creeps, creeps, creeps!” Anne yelled.

I asked what the matter was, but Anne didn’t answer. She was gulping air and had begun to sob, her whole face now pink as she wiped her nose, the snot smearing her shirtsleeve. Why is she crying, I asked the boy closest to me, the one they called Juney, a little bigger than the others, with a cellophane-wrapped Hostess Twinkie poking from his pocket. Junie giggled behind his hand and pointed at Anne. In sing-song voices, the girls repeated the chant. You’re making her cry, I told them. Why don’t you just stop it? I spoke an octave higher and my throat felt tight, so I figured they could tell I was getting pretty cheesed off.

Juney hopped back and forth from one foot to the other, like he had to go to the bathroom. “Because, because, because,” he sang in Wizard of Oz fashion. “Because she’s Baby Dahlia…she’s Baby Dahlia! She found the famous murdered lady. She found the Black Dahlia!” Junie screamed, the sun glinting off his braces like some maniacal inner light aimed at Anne.

“Morons!” I called to them, and walked Anne home, where her mother poured us Cokes and made us little sandwiches cut into triangles of Wonder Bread and deviled ham. I told Mrs. Bersinger why Anne was crying. Then I asked her who the Black Dahlia was.

“I forgot that you are new here,” she said. “Let me show you.” Mrs. Bersinger rose from the sofa next to me, where she had draped her mink coat while she dressed, getting ready to take it to cold storage for the summer. I leaned over and petted it. It smelled like a kitten and felt just as soft. On tiptoes, she rifled through books stacked on a hall closet shelf, pulling down a greenish vinyl album that she handed to me. The album was lettered PHOTOS in gold, and I opened it to yellowed 1947 newspaper clippings carefully gummed and stuck to the black construction paper pages. The headline over the first clipping from the Los Angeles Examiner screamed GIRL TORTURED, SLAIN Hacked Nude Body Found in L.A. Lot. On the jump page, I found a photo of Mrs. Bersinger looking like Grace Kelly, talking on a black Bakelite telephone, her honey hair teased and coiled into a chignon, her earrings sparkly like stars, wearing the same mink coat that smelled like a kitten next to me on the sofa. She and three-year-old Anne had found the girl’s body that cold and dreary January fifteenth morning as they walked down South Norton toward the shoe repair shop in the Leimert Park shopping center. Anne had pointed to what looked at first like an unclothed mannequin broken in two, its face sliced from ear to ear into a clown-like smile, its dark hair curling and spilling over shoulders as white as the moon.

“Mommy, a big white doll. Uh oh, it’s broke,” Anne had said.

It turned out to be Elizabeth Short, 22 years-old and beautiful once, before the ruthless cuts to her cheeks and torso, the rigor setting her face into a ghoulish, perennial, ear-to-ear smile. She had been beaten, drained of blood, and sliced in two, her legs spread as if waiting for a lover. The Herald Examiner had dubbed her the Black Dahlia.

When I finally broke the silence, the light-filled stillness in the room made my voice seem louder. “There must have been so much blood,” I said to Mrs. Bersinger.

“Not by the time we saw her. Someone had bathed her and shampooed her hair. Imagine that. Soaping and rinsing her. Cleaning the gore out of her hair. It was some grotesque act of care,” she replied.

***

A few mornings later, Anne and I ran into Juney walking to school. We were skipping along and singing Glowworm when he pushed Anne from the back and continued taunting her, “Baby Dahlia, Baby Dahlia, a deee-ranged killer is gonna folla ya!” He turned on me with equal glee. “Ginger, Ginger, I’d rather be dead than red in the head.”

Anne didn’t cry this time. She planted her hands on her hips and shouted to Juney,”Shine kookie Juney worm, glimmer, glimmer. Your stupid brain is gettin’ dimmer and dimmer.”

Finally, finally, Juney shut his trap.

“There’s only one thing for us to do about this so they all shut up for good,” I told Anne.

We started our detective agency that summer of ‘52, vowing to find Elizabeth Short’s killer. The week before, my father had taken Anne and me to the Studio Drive-In for a Thin Man movie marathon, and we fell in love with Nick Charles, a private detective, his wife Nora, their son Nicky, and Asta the dog. I was fond of imitating Nora, with Anne as my audience, pretending to flit around the Charles’ San Francisco mansion. “Anne, Anne, put on your patent leather Mary Janes and fetch your mink muff. We’re going to walk Asta. And take this martini to your father when you pass his study.”

We settled on CHARLES DETECTIVE AGENCY. I ordered office supplies from the back of my mother’s Modern Screen magazine, a glamourous photo of Betty Grable gracing its cover. I thought that was some sort of omen that we would find Elizabeth’s killer; Betty Grable’s name was the same as Anne’s mother’s, the same as one of Elizabeth Short’s nicknames. I clipped an ad from the back pages, filled out the information and sent the three dollars I had saved from my allowance to buy pencils and notepads, postage included. The note paper arrived embossed in black with our agency’s name. Six pencils were stamped in gilt letters GINGER CHARLES and six ANNE CHARLES. I rubbed my finger over and over my gold detective name.

“I guess that makes us sisters,” Anne said.

“Always!” We sealed our sisterhood by poking the tips of our index fingers with a sewing needle until they bled a little. Then we pressed them together. “Blood sisters forever,” we said in unison.

My mother hired us for our first job; finding my little brother, who liked to toddle around the house, diaper dragging, and then find a hiding spot for a nap. She had looked everywhere she could think of with no luck. She handed Anne two quarters as our fee, and Anne in her best cursive hand wrote a receipt with her new detective pencil. We found him on a lower shelf in my parents’ liquor cabinet, curled around a bottle of gin, fast asleep.

A couple of days later, Anne and I sat at her kitchen table doodling on our notepads with our gilded pencils. “Do you know how we’re ‘sposed to start detecting Elizabeth Short’s killer?” she asked.

“I think we’re supposed to gather facts. That’s what Nancy Drew does,” I said with some authority, having just read the girl detective’s latest adventure The Mystery at the Ski Jump.

We beelined to the hall closet, where Anne stood on a dining room chair to reach the shelf with the vinyl photo album. She carefully unfolded the creased and delicate papers, spreading them for us to read across the table.

Elizabeth Short’s father abandoned his wife and five daughters when Elizabeth was six. In 1942, she left Medford, Massachusetts to live with her father in Vallejo, California. He kicked her out in 1943 because they argued. She lived with an Army Air Force sergeant who beat her. She moved to Santa Barbara, then back to Medford, then Florida. She became engaged to Major Matthew Gordon Jr., but in 1945, he died in a plane crash. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a waitress. Her boyfriend was an Army Air Force lieutenant named Joseph Fickling, who abandoned her in 1946. She lived in a rented room behind Hollywood Boulevard. She lived in a room behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub, owned by mob-connected Mark Hansen, who kicked her out over an argument about sex. She lived in a seedy flophouse, the Aster Hotel. A married man named Red Hanley helped her store her meager belongings in a Greyhound bus station locker. Among those meager belongings, police found white candles she had used to fill the cavities in her rotting teeth. She had been raped anally before her death.

“Hey, listen to this,” Anne said to me, smoothing a page from the Los Angeles Examiner. The byline belonged to the city editor, Jimmy Richardson. ‘Elizabeth Short was a pitiful wanderer, ricocheting from one cheap job to another and from one cheap man to another in a sad search for a good husband and a home and happiness.’ It’s very sad, Ginger. Very, very sad. Nobody loved her.” Anne began to cry. We sat silently for a minute.

“You should grow up to be a reporter, my ‘ole sob sister,” I said, trying to make her smile while I scanned the front pages again, looking for a name. “I have an idea! Let’s call one of the detectives mentioned in the stories. Here, this one! Harry Hansen. He seems to know a lot.” Anne nodded and I dialed the L.A. Police Department. The operator patched me through.

I cleared my throat, and in my best Nora Charles voice, said, “Hello, Detective Harry Hansen. Ginger Charles here; Charles Detective Agency. Do you have a minute?”

“Well, I’ll be damned. A dame detective. Hey, you sound like a kid!”

“My husband says I sometimes act like one, but I assure you, I am old enough.”

“Does your old man know you’re playin’ cops ‘n robbers? Shouldn’t ya be home ironin’ his skivvies?”

“He doesn’t wear those.”

“Good one, kiddo, you’re all right. Whadda ya want with me?”

“My partner and I are reviewing the Black Dahlia case, and we wondered if you could tell us anything more about Elizabeth Short. She had a lot of boyfriends. Did you talk to everybody? If she was a prostitute, there might be more men.

“Whoa, whoa! There’s no record of prostitution in any shape or form. She didn’t slink around back alleys and didn’t take money to have sex, ever. She’d bait a guy, sure, and take what she could get, then move on. But never prostitution. As a matter of fact, the autopsy report says she had some kind of condition that made having sex very, very difficult, maybe impossible. Her family confirmed that. Yeah, that Elizabeth was many things, but not a whore.“

I asked him if he had a theory about the murder.

“I always took this skittish restaurant worker for the perp. One of her boyfriends. Disappeared early in the investigation. They got sharp knives and those stainless steel troughs in restaurants; perfect for cutting up a body and flushing the blood down the drain. Nobody took me serious; but that’s still my hunch.”

We chatted a little longer. I told him my parents owned a detective agency in San Francisco, and he said he thought he’d heard of them. I hung up and turned to Anne. “Do you know what a skivvy is?” She just shrugged.

“Ginger, I think maybe we are just not old enough yet to understand Elizabeth’s life. About all the boyfriends and sex and how they treated her. I don’t think we can find the killer if we don’t understand. Maybe when we’re older.”

I nodded my head, relieved.

***

On the tenth anniversary of the day Anne and her mother found Elizabeth Short’s body, Anne and I pooled our allowances and bought a pretty bouquet from the florist in the Broadway-Crenshaw Shopping Center. Anne snuck a Camel cigarette from the pack in her father’s jacket pocket, along with a book of matches from that new restaurant, Sunset Grill. I cracked a bottle of my father’s Ballantine beer and poured it into my school Thermos, then dropped it in a brown paper grocery bag with the flowers. We walked to the vacant lot on South Norton without saying much.

“That’s where it was. Right THERE,” Anne said, pointing, her hand shaking a little. We placed the flowers where Elizabeth’s upper torso would have been. Perhaps her tortured ghost would gather them in her angled arms for comfort. We sat in the weeds about ten feet away. I drew out my Thermos, splashed some of the cold beer in the cup and offered it to her. I put my arm around her. The vacant lots were fewer now, more houses teemed with family life, the smell of bacon fat and coffee drifting now on a cold gust of wind.

Anne took a slug of beer and made a face. “That tastes like old Easter eggs!” she said. We both laughed a little. She dug the cigarette out of her jacket pocket. It was bent, and crumbs of tobacco dusted the ground like dirty snow at her feet. She lit it and took a drag, passing it to me. I took one too.

“You know, maybe we’re still not old enough, but I keep thinking about how complicated boys are. That creep Juney asked me to the spring dance, but the thing is, I’m not sure I still think he’s a creep. But I’m also not sure I want to be grown up,” Anne said, pausing the cup halfway to her mouth. All that stuff about sex. My mother has sex with my father and she gets a nice house and a mink coat. Elizabeth doesn’t have sex and she gets kicked around and murdered.”

“Elizabeth couldn’t have sex,” I said.

“What do you think that detective meant when he told us that?” Anne asked me.

“I’m not sure. I think it means that if she hadn’t died, she would still never get the chance to be a tramp like the papers made out, even if she wanted to be one. She would never get to be somebody’s lover or wife or mom. You have to have sex for those jobs. She acted like she wanted all those things from men, but all she ever really wanted was to be loved for herself,” I said.

“I don’t know, Ginger. I hope we like sex when we’re grown up. It seems like a girl has a better life if she can have sex.” Anne handed me a rolled magazine that had been stuck in her jacket pocket with the cigarette. It was her father’s January issue of Playboy. Anne flipped the pages to the centerfold, a beautiful lady named June Blair. “I think we are supposed to look like that someday,” she said.

An explanatory quote from Hugh Hefner accompanied the photo spread. “The Playmate is a girl with no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.”

***

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day Anne and her mother found Elizabeth Short’s body, Anne and I decided to meet at the Biltmore Regal bar, where Red Manley had dropped Elizabeth at the last place she was seen before her murder. I still lived in L.A.; I figured there’s plenty of crime here to keep a young deputy district attorney busy. I had helped Vincent Bugliosi successfully prosecute Charles Manson and his gang. Hearing that jury’s verdict was as good as good sex. I was married to my job, and it was a good marriage. Anne had moved about 100 miles away, where she worked as a feature writer for the Santa Barbara News-Press. I guess she really was my sob sister, although nobody used that term anymore. I could tell in our monthly phone calls by what she didn’t say that she had married the wrong guy, but she loved the job. I was excited to see her after so much time apart.

I took a seat at the bar to wait. I wondered if Elizabeth had met her murderer sitting where I am now -- her feet perched on the brass footrest or dangling impatiently above the travertine floor, her elbows propped on the just-wiped bar as she stared at the carved and frescoed ceiling, waiting for a man to say hello. She was six years younger than Anne and I are now when she died. For all the bar’s opulence, I liked the two carved angels best. Bare-chested, gold, existential warriors, they flanked the glass-shelved liquor cabinet, guarding the precious jewel-colored liquids and blessing their consumption.

Anne hugged me from behind, and I launched from my padded stool to turn and hug her too. She had dressed carelessly-- her cloth coat was worn tissue-thin, her hair straggly and clumped, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Her makeup looked like she had applied it with a spatula: her face a buttercream cake and her makeup the icing, but even that didn’t hide the smudges beneath her eyes and the greenish blossom on her jaw.

We sat and studied the drink menu. “He hit you, didn’t he?” I asked.

“Yes,” she finally said. “He tells me frequently that I’m good for only one thing, and not very good at that.”

“That bastard,” I said and squeezed her hand. “What can I do?”

“Just love me, Ginger. Just be there. I am going to leave him.”

The menu proved to be an irony; we ordered two Black Dahlia cocktails, a mixture of vodka, Kahlua and black raspberry liqueur. Anne took a sip and wrinkled her nose, “Bitter,” she said.

I did the same. “Sweet,” I said.

***

On the forty-fifth anniversary of the day Anne and her mother found Elizabeth Short’s body, Anne and I decided to fly to Vero Beach, Florida and visit Elizabeth’s mother, Phoebe.

I had married Prince Charming when I was thirty-eight and we were living happily ever after, even though I had recently traded my princess gowns for more comfortable elastic waist pants. Anne did divorce the wrong guy in a whirlwind of restraining orders, threats, and empty promises to change. She remarried about five years ago, to a man who made her giggle and convinced her to love herself again.

Mrs. Short was an elfish 94, her blue-white cap of curls slightly too big for her weathered face, but her smile made you forget the many unkind decades she had traipsed through. She never remarried after Elizabeth’s father left his family in 1930. She invited us to sit on a very old, red velvet settee, placing in front of us a large tray of iced tea, tall glasses, and little triangle egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off. “So, you are interested in my Betty!” she said, clapping her ancient hands.

“I am the one who found her, Mrs. Short, and she has been with me all these years,” Anne said.

“I wish with all my heart that you don’t remember her…like that,” Mrs. Short said, retrieving a photo album from the table by the chair she had pulled close to us. “Elizabeth always wanted to be an actress like Deanna Durbin. She was ambitious and beautiful and full of life.” Mrs. Short smiled, turning the pages. There was Elizabeth on the side porch of the sunny yellow house in Medford Massachusetts, performing in a movie scene with her sisters. “She loved the movies. And she could sing. She knew all of Miss Durbin’s songs. Her favorite was “Love is All.” There was Elizabeth, standing by her mother, dressed in a fur jacket and cocktail dress, radiant after coming home from a date. “She was a very affectionate, sweet girl and if she was out at night she always stopped by my bedroom to talk. And she would talk and talk and tell everything that she had done and everything she was dreaming her life would be.” There was Elizabeth in a bikini, posing under a palm tree on Miami Beach. “Everyone told her how beautiful she was. She won beauty contests in high school.” There was Elizabeth. “She always tried so hard to please everyone. I sometimes thought she tried too hard after my husband left us.”

Mrs. Short died six weeks after our visit. The Black Dahlia’s murderer has never been found.

***

Anne and I never forgot Elizabeth. She continued to remind us that life is like the movies she so desperately loved. There are good guys and bad guys, although today they are indistinguishable by the color of their cowboy hats. The good guys love you because you are smart, and kind, and flawed. They love you even though you don’t look at all like Deanna Durbin or Grace Kelly; they celebrate your triumphs and comfort you during defeats. The good guys are the ones you pick to grow old with. The bad guys, well, they expect you to be forever beautiful, newly washed and lying naked with legs spread, waiting anywhere they say to please them, silent, unchallenging, and with a smile from ear to ear.