The Red Dahlia Read Online Free PDF Page B

killer lay crumpled in a ball in his office bin.

Chapter Three
    Langton chucked the newspaper into the bin in his kitchen.
    He snapped angrily into the phone. ‘Yeah I just read it. No! Do nothing about it. I’ve never heard of this Black Dahlia woman, have you?’
    Lewis said that he hadn’t either.
    ‘Doesn’t really have anything to do with us, seeing as it was in the forties and in the bloody USA!’
    Lewis wished he had never made the call. ‘Right, just thought if you hadn’t seen it.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah; look, I’m tired out, sorry if I bit your head off. See you in the morning.’ Langton was about to replace the receiver when he remembered. ‘How’s your son?’
    ‘He’s terrific; got over that bug, and he’s got rows of teeth now,’ Lewis said, affably.
    ‘Great; goodnight then.’
    “Night.’
    It was after eleven. Langton retrieved the paper from the bin and pressed it out flat on his kitchen counter.
    Elizabeth Short, though aged only twenty-two, had been a jaded beauty with raven-black hair, white face and dark-painted lips. The flower in her hair might have been a dahlia, but it wasn’t black. In comparison, Louise Pennel looked younger and fresher, even though they were about the same age. Louise’s eyes were dark brown and Elizabeth’s green but, eerily, the dead girls had a similar expression. The half-smile on their pretty lips was sexual, teasing, yet the eyes had a solemnity and a sadness, as if they knew what fate had in store.
     
    DAY EIGHT
     
    The next morning, Anna stopped off at a bookshop to buy her daily Guardian. Next to the till, there was a bookstand of half-price paperbacks, one of which was The Black Dahlia. Blazoned across the cover were the words ‘TRUE LIFE CRIME’. She bought it. By the time she got to the Incident Room, the phones were jangling; the press release was in all the papers, as was the photograph of Louise with the red rose. Numerous other tabloids had picked up on the Sun’s article and were also now calling Louise the Red Dahlia. A couple of articles referred to the original case in LA but most of them concentrated, as Langton had hoped they would, on the fact that the police were trying to trace the tall dark-haired stranger.
     
    Eight days into the enquiry, for all Langton’s snide remarks about Morgan he had got no further in tracing Louise’s killer himself, though at least he did now have more facts to give the press. Although they had not been given all the details, the brutality of the murder, even tempered down, made shocking reading.
    All the calls to the Incident Room regarding the Red Dahlia enquiry had to be monitored and checked out, so extra clerical staff had been shipped in. Of the many calls, seventy per cent were from either jokers or perverts; thirty per cent still needed investigating. It was a long day, with half the team interviewing Louise’s friends, such as they were, or trying to trace the male companions pictured in her photograph albums. Meanwhile, forensics had removed all the dirty laundry and bed linen from Louise’s flat to test for DNA. Langton was covering all areas but still felt like a headless chicken. He decided to go to Stringfellow’s with Lewis to make enquiries. Barolli was checking out the other two clubs that Sharon had said Louise often went to, hoping that someone would be able to identify their tall dark stranger, or that someone would have witnessed Louise leaving the club. Taxis also had to be checked out; it was an endless, tedious slog, but it had to be done.
    The officers who had been scouring the coffee bars local to Louise’s workplace had various sightings of her confirmed; she was often alone, though she would sometimes pick someone up and go to the cinema in Baker Street. No one questioned could give a name or recall ever seeing her with the same person twice, let alone a tall dark stranger. She was always friendly and chatty; no one thought she was on the game, more that she needed company