The Black Dahlia

Where’s your sketch pad?” I asked. … “I gave that up,” Kay said. “I wasn’t very good, so I changed my major.” “To what?” “To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history.” “I like a woman who knows what she wants.” Kay smiled. “So do I, but I don’t know any.

Don’t be so goddamn proper. Don’t be such a fucking saint.

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them

Sometimes I felt connections begging to be made, sometimes I cursed myself for not having ten percent more gray matter, sometimes the report carbons just made me think of Lee.

I got an alibi, just in case you think I did it. Tighter than a crab's ass, and that is air tight.

Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

I told lies and wondered where I would go if my own past was all I had left.

Pulling away, I realized I had no place to go and nothing I wanted to do except satisfy my curiosity about a woman who was coming on like gangbusters and a big load of grief.

Silverlake-Echo was several miles due est of Mount lee, a hilly area with lots of twisting streets, greenery and seclusion, the kind of terrain a necrophiliac might find soothing.

That a man could care so deeply yet put it aside so casually amazed me. I asked him about it; he said, “I will not let brutality rule my life.

I got in the car and headed home, wondering if I would ever tell Kay that I didn't have a woman because sex tasted like blood and resin and suture scrub to me.

green leather chairs arranged around low tables and settees; huge stone fireplace; small Oriental throw rugs, multicolored, placed together at different angles, so that just the right amount of oak floor bordered them. The walls were cherrywood, and featured framed sepias of the family and their ancestors.

I had chewed a big steak two hours before, swallowing the juice and spitting out the meat, and I could smell animal blood in my sweat.

A great people, the Germans. Hitler was a bit excessive, but mark my words that someday we’ll regret not joining forces with him to fight the Reds.

Hollywood will fuck you when no one else will.

I noticed a stuffed spaniel poised by the fireplace with a yellowed newspaper rolled into its mouth. Madeleine said, "That's Balto. The paper is the LA Times for August 1, 1926. That's the day Daddy learned he' d made his first million. Balto was our pet then. Daddy's accountant called up and said, "Emmett, you're a millionaire!" Daddy was cleaning his pistols, and Balto came in with the paper. Daddy wanted to consecrate the moment, so he shot him. If you look closely, You can see the bullet hole in his chest.

I was terrified because the good guys were really the bad guys.

He was wearing an American Legion poppy on his lapel – probably purchased from the wino legionnaire who slept in the Hall of Records parking lot – a man he had once vigorously prosecuted for vagrancy. The