“Uh-huh. I mean yes.”

“Why did Betty move out of the place on Cherokee?”

“It was too crowded, and she’d tapped all the girls for a dollar here, a dollar there, and they were mad at her.”

“Were any of them particularly mad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure Betty didn’t move out because of boyfriend trouble?”

“I’m sure.”

“Do you recall the names of any of the men Betty went out with last fall?”

Lorna shrugged. “They were just pickups.”

“What about names, Lorna?”

The girl counted on her fingers, stopping when she got to three. “Well, there were these two guys at Orange Drive, Don Leyes and Hal Costa, and a sailor named Chuck.”

“No last name on Chuck?”

“No, but I know he was a gunnery mate second class.”

Millard started to ask another question, but I held up my hand to cut him off. “Lorna, I talked to Marjorie Graham the other day, and she said she told you the police were coming by Orange Drive to talk to the tenants about Betty. You ran then. Why?”

Lorna bit a hangnail off and sucked at the wound. “Because I knew that if my picture got in the papers as Betty’s friend my parents would see it and make the police send me home.”

“Where did you go when you rabbited?”

“I met a man in a bar and got him to rent me a room at an auto court in the Valley.”

“Did you—”

Millard silenced me with a chopped hand gesture. “You said you and Betty made casting rounds together. Did you ever get any movie work?”

Lorna twisted her fingers together in her lap. “No.”

“Then could you tell me what’s in that film can in your purse?”

Eyes on to the floor and dripping tears, Lorna Martilkova whispered, “It’s a movie.”

“A dirty movie?”

Lorna nodded mutely. The girl’s tears were rivers of mascara now; Millard handed her a handkerchief. “Sweetheart, you have to tell us all of it, from the beginning. So think it all out, and take your time. Bucky, get her some water.”

I left the room, found a drinking fountain and cup dispenser in the hall, filled a large paper container and returned with it. Lorna was speaking softly when I placed the cup on the table in front of her.

“… and I was cadging at this bar in Gardena. This Mexican man—Raoul or Jorge or something—started talking to me. I thought I was pregnant, and I was desperate wicked bad for money. He said he’d give me two hundred dollars to act in a nudie film.”

Lorna stopped, slugged down the water, took a deep breath and kept going. “The man said he needed another girl, so I called Betty at the Cherokee place. She said yes, and the Mexican man and me picked her up. He got us hopped on reefers, I think ‘cause he was afraid we’d get scared and back out. We drove down to Tijuana, and we made the movie at this big house outside town. The Mex man worked the lights and ran the camera and told us what to do and drove us back to LA, and that’s all of it, from the beginning, so will you call my folks now?”

I looked at Russ, then Harry; they were staring at the girl impassively. Wanting to fill in the blank spaces of my own private lead, I asked, “When did you make the film, Lorna?”

“Around Thanksgiving.”

“Can you give us a description of the Mexican man?”

Lorna stared at the floor. “Just a greasy Mex. Maybe thirty, maybe forty, I don’t know. I was on hop, and I don’t remember too good.”

“Did he seem particulary interested in Betty?”

“No.”

“Did he touch either of you? Get rough with you? Make passes?”

“No. He just moved us around.”

“Together?”

Lorna whimpered, “Yes”; my blood buzzed. My voice sounded weird to my own ears, like I was some ventriloquist’s puppet. “Then this wasn’t just nudie stuff? This was you and Betty playing lez?”

Lorna gave a little dry sob and nodded; I thought of Madeleine and pushed ahead, oblivious to where the girl might take it: “You lez? Was Betty lez? You do any lez pub crawling?”

Millard barked, “Bleichert, can it!” Lorna leaned forward in her chair, grabbed the soft daddy cop and hugged him fiercely. Russ looked at me and brought a flat palm slowly down, like a conductor asking the orchestra for a hush. He stroked the girl’s head with his free hand, then cocked a finger at Sears.

The girl moaned, “I’m not lez, I’m not lez, it was just that one time”; Millard cradled her like a baby.

Sears asked, “Was Betty a lesbian, Lorna?”

I held my breath. Lorna wiped her eyes on Millard’s coat front and looked at me. She said, “I’m not lezzie, and Betty wasn’t, and we only bummed at normal-type bars, and it was just that one time in the movie because we were broke and on hop, and if this gets in the papers my daddy’ll kill me.”

I glanced at Millard, sensed that he bought it, and got a strong instinct that the whole dyke offshoot of the case was a fluke. Harry asked, “Did the Mexican man give Betty a viewfinder?”

Lorna muttered “Yes,” her head on Millard’s shoulder.

“Do you remember his car? The make, the color?”

“I… I think it was black and old.”

“Do you remember the bar where you met him?”

Lorna lifted her head; I saw that her tears had dried. “I think it was on Aviation Boulevard, near all those aircraft plants.”

I groaned; that part of Gardena was a solid mile of juke joints, poker parlors and cop-sanctioned whorehouses. Harry said, “When did you see Betty last?”

Lorna moved back to her own chair, clenching herself against another display of emotion—a hardcase reaction for a fifteen-year-old kid. “The last time I saw Betty was a couple of weeks later. Right before she moved out of the Orange Drive place.”

“Do you know if Betty ever saw the Mexican man again?”

Lorna picked at the chipped polish on her nails. “The Mex was a fly-by-nighter. He paid us, drove us back to LA and left.”

I butted in: “But you saw him again, right? There’s no way he could have made a copy of the movie before you all drove back from TJ.”

Lorna studied her nails. “I went looking for him in Gardena, when I read in the papers about Betty. He was about to go back to Mexico, and I conned him out of a print of the movie. See… he didn’t read the papers, so he didn’t know that all of a sudden Betty was famous. See… I figured that a Black Dahlia stag film was a collector’s item, and if the police tried to ship me back to my folks I could sell it and hire a lawyer to fight my extradition. You’ll give it back to me, won’t you? You won’t let people look at it?”

Out of the mouths of babes. Millard said, “You went back to Gardena and found the man again?”

“Uh-huh. I mean yes.”

“Where?”

“At one of those bars on Aviation.”

“Can you describe the place?”

“It was dark, with flashing lights out front.”

“And he willingly gave you a copy of the film? For nothing?”

Lorna eyed the floor. “I did him and his friends.”

“Can you improve on your description of him, then?”

“He was fat and he had a tiny little pecker! He was ugly and so were his friends!”

Millard pointed Sears to the door; Harry tiptoed quietly out. Russ said, “We’ll try to keep this out of the papers, and we’ll destroy the film. One question before the matron takes you up to your room. If we take you down to Tijuana, do you think you could find the house where the movie was shot?”

Shaking her head, Lorna said, “No. I don’t want to go down to that awful place. I want to go home.”

“So your father can hit you?”

“No. So I can get out again.”

Sears returned with a matron; the woman led hard/soft/pathetic/feisty Linda/Lorna away. Harry, Russ and I looked at one another; I felt the girl’s sadness smothering me. Finally the senior man said, “Comments?”

Harry kicked in first. “She’s hedging on the Mex and the pad in TJ. He probably beat her up and screwed her, and she’s afraid of reprisals. Aside from that, I buy her story.”