 Land O' Cal-rissian
Ex-showgirl Georgia Fronteire is dead. The widow of qambler Carrol Rosenbloom, she moved the NFL Rams from Los Angeles to St. Louis, MO as punishment for the civil unplesantness in South central back in 1991. Bad negroes and hispanics who do riot and loot, then do not get'um no more Nazi football. So there! So, St. Louis is a notorious baseball town. Fort Wood Army Hospital is there. Back in '45 our hero Edwin F. Burns was seconded there for six months treatment for a psychosis brought on by the drowning of his two year old daughter by his wife, and her subsequent suicide. He got the royal treatment, a full and honorable discharge, and disability benefits and ticket back to L.A. No questions asked.
As I see it, there were only two viable clues in the Black Dahlia murder; the location of the corpus delecti and it's condition. In his feverish attempt to shock the world, the killer dreamed of ultimate capture. Perhaps a wild car chase down the Speedway and a shootout at the photogenic foot of Breeze, I don't know. I do know that the savage treatment of Elizabeth Short in the Hirsh Apts. was enough of a diversion of the reality stream, so as to blow away even the most clinically minded observer. There's no cure for it. Once Ed brings you that close to Bette, you must taste and eat his of poisoned fruit, neatly halved for your First Amendment pleasure and his drunken misogynist rage. Some websites are exclusively dedicated to her physical degradation. In film she is invariably seen as a pornographic subject, much as Ed seems to have seen her. Skin flicks.
It's a tough town where a single girl can get herself chopped in two by the right sort of guy, who by using an alibi, can get away with such a famous murder in such a famous place. One can never be far, far away from Hollywood. The truly global village, it's as close as you computer screen, or your favorite Star Wars CD. A very tough town. Maurice Clement? What a joke! The line, and there had to be a line, is that she was being given the fame in death that she (you) so desperately sought (seek) in life. Did she now? The Black Dahlia has it all. Like yours a bit more on the rare side? There's a whole daisy chain of photos of the thing if you know where to look. The objectivization of Elizabeth has become something of an immoral crusade, the victim having her picture taken in mid-twentieth century L.A. having made the trip from, you guessed it, Massachusetts. The death star.
The question is even an open thread at the bethshort dotcom: Why did the Elizabeth wear black all the time? The answer is, of course, because she was a witch. An easy question. There it is, Steve. Sans teets, sheets, streets and insanitation, uncivil engineering, down by the Slauson Cut-off. Maj. Matt Gordon, bless him, was the last man she'd gotten her hooks into, she must've been seen in those wings to mock him. She even put the touch on his mom. He was one of Clair Chennault's boys...A Flying Tiger, an authentic war hero. Like John Wayne. Yep, the devil himself was loose in L.A. and it was only January. Nixon was elected, HUAC was erected, and the commies were rejected by the studios, along with their masters in Russia. Noir, not nyet.
Ed had roamin' hands and rushin' fingers, and she didn't like that. Jabberin' Joe McCarthy would be the next drunken Irish demgogue to arrest the public's dwindling attention spans with wild accusations involving an overarching international communist conspiracy which was not revealed to have been carved into the victim's flesh somewhere, I don't want to know where. So much for the corpus. You can stare at them pictures until your eyes fall out and you won't find a discernable clue, only red herring bone marks. Such was the nature of this particular killing, very well planned and precisely executed by an elusive character of polymath skills, but several things lead me to believe that this case could be could be cracked using a combination of high tech and a distinctly native recall. I love L.A., I grew up there.
The Pleasure Time. Cheap-o thrills, the Original Pike and the NuPike. Liquor makes people crave more booze and attention. Drunks always make the mirror maze mistakes. Numbed insensate by the brain bleach, they always overreach. They will invariably concoct some goofy grand paranoid scheme to utterly humiliate their mind oppressors, the pre-war vintage John Law's, and the squares, the script in progress, the great American novel, or some fantastic yarn about their delicate conditions and that's what will trip them up for a savvy detective. And for his opus major, heavy drinker Ed chooses to demonstrate his really remarkable knowledge of the geography of Los Angeles. He lead me on an elaborate hundred mile chase along the cardinal lines that bisect the LA basin like he'd finished Elizabeth Short, but lines I also know so very well, to finally uncover the answer to the riddle of the Black Dahlia.
 Billy D. Williams
8:21:26 AM 
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