 The Big Black Dahlia
This is the city, Los Angeles, California. Ed's city. He owned it lock, stock, and barrel for a while there in early forty-seven. Sixty light years ago. The people there were and are just mad for horticulture and Ed was the biggest, brightest bulb of them all. Yes, it's flower. Yes, that's Liz in the center. Yes, those are G.I. dahlia paperweights. You may have recoiled in horror.
I'll get beat up for the jokes, I always do, but if you lose your sense of humor, this esoteric stuff can drive you nuts. Lot's of people have turned the Dahlia into a sexual icon, however misplaced that sort of thing is. I'm sure it's the last thing she would have wanted. The cops had to trash her reputation to explain what happened to her because they failed to catch her killer. Rather than repeat those mistakes, I've decided to lay it out the way Ed intended it. He did it. He got away with it. He wants recognition of the mogul scale of his many, many mutilating achievements. His Big Black Taj Majal.
Elizabeth Short, on the other hand, was seemingly just a good kid with some shit-awful bad luck, and not a particularly interesting character to my mind. She never was. She hadn't had time in her mere twenty-two years to do even a tiny fraction of the things legend and various authors would have her. Too young. She wasn't even the type. With a sunny disposition and an unflagging optimism, she was searching for the good in the people she encountered. Ripe for pruning, in sunny southern California.
Try alias Maurice Clement, that's a likely type, according to the DA in forty-nine. But, what has he to do with Big Ed's story? The only story left to tell in this supposedly unsolved murder is the truth. Modern technology and enlightened lawmakers have given us the tools to finally begin to tell it. We know quite a lot about Edwin F. Burns it seems, that he dug on maps for instance. We know that he was drafted in L.A. in 1942, but was born in New York City, in 1909. We know he was discharged in 1945 with a section 8, and returned to the the big dump.
Admittedly, that research has been greeted with much hooting and derision in Black Dahlia circles. I won't be backing off anytime soon, though. They're the ones who have fixated upon Miss Short and her grizzly mutilations to the exclusion of any possible ratiocination. They're some Big Black Holes themselves, but I digress. Now and then gaze down in wonder upon the graven giant, silent Black Dahlia. A rose by any other colo, wouldn't be nearly so huge. Truly, it is the biggest annual the annals of L.A. post-war crime-noir. The rippers cross. The subdivided beauty of N. Leimert Park. Now we know the meaning of Clement Junction, so named for the great railroad surveyor Louis Meltzer Clement. Now we know the story of early cinematographer Clement-Maurice, and Dr. Eugene Doyens supernal surgical skills...or do we?
7:55:20 AM 
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