I pointed to the door. “What about those guys outside?”

“Don and Harold? They both dated Betty. Harold called you because they knew you’d be looking for clues. Who’s that man yelling at them?”

I ignored the question, sat down beside Marjorie Graham and got out my notebook. “What can you tell me about Betty that I don’t know already? Can you give me facts? Names of other boyfriends, descriptions, specific dates? Enemies? Possible motives for somebody wanting to kill her?”

The woman flinched; I realized I was raising my voice. Keeping it low, I said, “Let’s start with dates. When did Betty live here?”

“Early December,” Marjorie Graham said. “I remember because there was a bunch of us sitting here listening to a radio program on the fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor when she checked in.”

“So that was December seventh?”

“Yes.”

“And how long was she here?”

“No more than a week or so.”

“How did she know about this place?”

“I think Linda Martin told her about it.”

Millard’s memo stated that Betty Short spent most of December in San Diego. I said, “But she moved out shortly afterward, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Graham? Betty lived in three places that we know of last fall—all in Hollywood. Why did she move around so much?”

Marjorie Graham took a tissue from her purse and fretted it. “Well, I don’t really know for sure.”

“Was some jealous boyfriend after her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Miss Graham, what do you think?”

Marjorie sighed. “Officer, Betty used up people. She borrowed money from them and told them stories, and… well, a lot of pretty hard-nosed kids live here, and I think they saw through Betty pretty quick.”

I said, “Tell me about Betty. You liked her, didn’t you?”

“Yes. She was sweet and trusting and sort of dumb, but… inspired. She had this strange gift, if you want to call it that. She’d do anything to be liked, and she sort of took on the mannerisms of whoever she was with. Everybody here smokes, and Betty started smoking to be one of the kids, even though it was bad for her asthma and she hated cigarettes. And the funny thing is that she’d try to walk and talk like you, but she was always herself when she was doing it. She was always Betty or Beth or whatever nickname for Elizabeth she was going by at that moment.”

I kicked the sad dope around in my head. “What did you and Betty talk about?”

Marjorie said, “Mostly I just listened to Betty talk. We used to sit here and listen to the radio, and Betty told stories. Love stories about all these war heros—Lieutenant Joe and Major Matt and on and on. I knew they were just fantasies. Sometimes she talked about becoming a movie star, like all she had to do was walk around in her black dresses and sooner or later she’d get discovered. That sort of made me mad, because I’ve been taking classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, and I know that acting is hard work.”

I flipped to my notes from the Sheryl Saddon questioning. “Miss Graham, did Betty talk about being in a movie sometime in late November?”

“Yes. The first night she was here she was bragging about it. She said she had a co-starring role, and she showed around a viewfinder. A couple of boys pressed her for details, and she told one of them it was at Paramount, another that it was at Fox. I thought she was just fibbing to get attention.”

I wrote “Names” on a clean page and underlined it three times. “Marjorie, what about names? Betty’s boyfriends, people you saw her with?”

“Well, I know she went out with Don Leyes and Harold Costa, and I saw her once with a sailor, and I…”

Marjorie faltered; I caught a troubled look in her eyes. “What is it? You can tell me.”

Marjorie’s voice was stretched thin. “Right before she moved out I saw Betty and Linda Martin talking to this big older woman up on the Boulevard. She was wearing a man’s suit, and she had short hair like a man. I only saw them with her that one time, so maybe it doesn’t mean—”

“Are you saying the woman was a lesbian?”

Marjorie bobbed her head up and down and reached for a Kleenex; Bill Koenig stepped inside and hooked a finger at me. I walked over to him. He whispered, “Them guys talked, said the stiff peddled her twat when she got strapped bad. I called Mr. Loew. He said to keep that zipped, ‘cause it’s a better caper if she’s a nice young cooze.”

I bit off an urge to spill the dyke lead; the DA and his flunky would probably quash it, too. I said, “I’ve got another quick one here. Get statements from those guys, okay?”

Koenig giggled and walked outside; I told Marjorie to sit still and moved to the rear of the lobby. There was a registration desk, an open ledger on top of it. I stood at the counter and leafed through the pages until I saw a childishly scrawled “Linda Martin,” with “Room 14” printed across from it.

I took the first-floor corridor back to the room, knocked on the door and waited for an answer. When none came after five seconds, I tried the knob. It gave, and I pushed the door open.

It was a cramped little room containing nothing but an unmade bed. I checked the closet; it was dead empty. The nightstand held a stack of yesterday’s papers folded open to “Werewolf Murder” brouhaha; suddenly I knew the Martin girl was a lamster. I got down on the floor and ran a hand under the bed, brushed a flat object and pulled it out.

It was a red plastic change purse. I opened it and found two pennies, a dime and an identification card for Cornhusker High School, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The card was made out to Lorna Martilkova, DOB 12/19/31. There was a photo of a beautiful young girl below the school’s crest; in my mind I was already typing out an all-points juvie runaway warrant.

Marjorie Graham appeared in the doorway. I held out the ID card; she said, “That’s Linda. God, she’s only fifteen.”

“Middle-aged for Hollywood. When did you see her last?”

“This morning. I told her I called the police, that they’d be coming by to talk to us about Betty. Was that the wrong thing to do?”

“You couldn’t have known. And thanks.”

Marjorie smiled, and I found myself wishing her a speedy one-way trip out of movieland. I kept the wish silent as I smiled back and walked outside. On the porch, Bill Koenig was standing at parade rest and Donald Leyes and Harold Costa were sprawled in lounge chairs with that green-at-the-gills look that comes with taking a few rabbit punches.

Koenig said, “They didn’t do it.”

I said, “No shit, Sherlock.”

Koenig said, “My name ain’t Sherlock.”

I said, “No shit.”

Koenig said, “What?”

At Hollywood Station I exercised the Warrants cops’ special prerogative, issuing an all-points juvenile runaway warrant and a priority material witness warrant on Lorna Martilkova/ Linda Martin, leaving the report forms with the daywatch boss, who told me the APBs would hit the air within the hour, and that he would send officers over to 1611 North Orange Drive to question the tenants on Linda/Lorna’s possible whereabouts. With that taken care of, I wrote my report on the series of questionings, stressing Betty Short as a habitual liar and the possibility that she acted in a movie sometime in November of ‘46. Before finishing it up, I wavered on whether to mention Marjorie Graham’s lead on the old dyke. If Ellis Loew got ahold of the dope he would probably quash it along with the skinny on Betty as a part-time prostie, so I decided to omit it from the report and give the information verbally to Russ Millard.

From a squadroom phone I called the Screen Actor’s Guild and Central Casting and inquired about Elizabeth Short. A clerk told me that no one by that name or any diminutive of the name Elizabeth was ever listed with them, making it unlikely that she had appeared in a legit Hollywood production. I hung up thinking of the movie as another Betty fairy tale, the viewfinder a fairy-tale prop.