Playland (58 page)

The file said that two used rubber prophylactics wrapped in Kleenex were found in a bedroom wastebasket, the foil wrappings indicating they were of the Sheik brand, and a third prophylactic wrapped in Kleenex, this one identified by its foil as a Rameses brand, was found in another bedroom wastebasket. In the medical examiner’s autopsy, it was discovered that the victim was also wearing a latex pessary. According to the prescription bottles in her bathroom medicine cabinet, Meta Dierdorf’s gynecologist was Milton Heifitz, M.D., of 321 South Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, and Dr. Heifitz told officers he had written the prescription for the pessary two years earlier. There were multiple semen stains on the blanket and bed sheet as well as several dried semen spots on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. The postmortem report said that while there was evidence of semen both in the victim’s mouth and on the exterior of her buttocks, the specimen on her buttocks was probably the result of ejaculation and not anal intercourse, as there appeared to have been no penile penetration of her anus. Chemical analysis of the semen indicated that it came from two different donors. The autopsy also indicated that the absence of bruising or edema in the vaginal passages supported the conclusion that Meta Dierdorf had not been raped either prior to or subsequent to her murder.

Miss Anita Rose, secretary to Matthew Dierdorf, the victim’s father, told police she had cabled her employer in Bahrain about the death of his daughter, but that he had already checked out of his hotel, leaving as a forwarding address a poste restante in Ankara, and there had been no response to a cable she had sent there. Checking the records at the El Coronado Apartments,
Lieutenant Spellacy discovered that Meta Dierdorf’s apartment was leased to Carlisle Properties, a company incorporated in Panama whose listed president was Matthew Dierdorf. Ten weeks before Meta Dierdorf’s death, the trading of Carlisle stock was suspended on the American Stock Exchange when the company and its directors were cited for stock manipulation, with criminal charges pending. Matthew Dierdorf’s listed home address was in Reno, Nevada, with a postal drop in Los Angeles, a one-room office in the Bradbury Building, where Anita Rose took his messages. Matthew Dierdorf had left the country via Mexico in April, gone to Brazil, and then allegedly to Bahrain, and rent on the apartment at 8497 Fountain Avenue had been in arrears since the April payment.

Anita Rose made all the arrangements for Meta Dierdorf’s funeral. Expenses for the undertaker and the funeral service were paid out of her private bank account. There was a solemn high requiem mass at St. Ambrose’s in Hollywood, attended by several tenants at the El Coronado apartments, a delegation from the Hollywood Stage Door Canteen, and a platoon of the curious, as well as by four homicide detectives, on the chance that the killer might choose to pay his (or less likely her) final respects. Interment was at Forest Lawn in Burbank. Atop the casket was a spray of lilies with a card that said, “Daddy.” The florist who provided the bouquet told Lieutenant Spellacy that it had been personally selected by Anita Rose, who had signed the card herself and paid for the flowers in cash.

Lieutenant Spellacy’s efforts over the years to contact Matthew Dierdorf were unavailing. These efforts came to an end in January 1951, when Matthew Dierdorf, according to a newspaper clipping from the New York
World-Telegram
included in the casebook, jumped, fell, or was pushed from the roof of the St. Moritz Hotel in New York. His body, the story said, landed on top of a mounted patrolman on the Avenue of the Americas. Matthew Dierdorf was killed, as were both the policeman and his horse, a red gelding whose name was Oscar.

Meta Dierdorf’s address book, her daily diary, and her photo albums (the photographs mainly snapshots of servicemen identified on the black album pages only by first names written in white ink) were included in the case file. Her handwriting was childlike, all in block letters, both the periods and the dots over the letter
i
perfect little circles. The entries in the diary were mainly banal—hair appointments and manicures and pedicures and lunch dates and dinner dates and monthly references to “C,” which I assumed, as I expect Lieutenant Spellacy had also, was the curse, that benighted word so in disuse in this more enlightened time. She was irregular, or at least had a dramatic tendency to think she was—“C should have started today???”—and then a day or so later—“C & cramps, whew!” There was not a single mention of Blue Tyler in her diary nor any pictures of her in the photo albums. I suppose Arthur French would have said this lent credence to his dismissal of their putative friendship as little more than an invention of the Cosmopolitan publicity department, but then Arthur had also said he had not recognized the young woman when I had showed him her photograph. Her address book, however, did contain Blue Tyler’s change of address when she moved in March that year from Linden Drive in the Beverly Hills flats to Tower Road north of Sunset, as well as each new unlisted telephone number every time the studio changed it, sometimes as often as four times a year. Checking Pacific Bell, Lieutenant Spellacy found that the last of Blue Tyler’s unlisted numbers had been changed just ten days before Meta Dierdorf was killed, and was recorded in the victim’s book, suggesting that at least indirectly the two young women had been in contact.

There were a number of references in the diary to someone named “Vida” or “Vide”—the uncertainties of Meta Dierdorf’s penmanship making each possibility plausible—and sometimes simply to “V.” On close reading, one could infer (as did Lieutenant Spellacy) that she had some sort of financial arrangement with V, Vida, or Vide, to whom it appeared she lent her apartment for what seemed to be romantic trysts, perhaps
even for cash. The notations were often in bad schoolgirl French: “V demain—$$$$$—bon pour le docteur,” or “Vide—ici avec Monsieur Pepe La Moko, ooo la la, peut-être cinquante dollars pour Plein???” or “Vida—quelle surprise, beaucoup l’argent au médecin pour ma silence!!!” Her address book yielded several people whose first or last names began with the letter
V
—two Virginias, a Vergil and a Vincente, a Van Sant and a Vandergrift, but one Virginia was a hairdresser who had left Los Angeles in January 1945 for a defense job at Boeing in Seattle, and the other was a maiden great-aunt of eighty-one confined to an institution in Montecito; Vergil Harper and Vincente Simeon, decorators who shared Apartment D-2 in Meta Dierdorf’s building, were at a party in Hillsborough, down the peninsula from San Francisco, the night of her murder, a party that upon investigation turned out to be a drag ball. Lemuel Van Sant, a brigadier general in a federalized unit of the California National Guard, died on Okinawa in June of acute amoebic dysentery, and Mrs. Florence Penn Crowell Persico Margolis Vandergrift had been residing in Reno for five weeks prior to the murder, attending to her fourth divorce.

As I read her diary, it sometimes seemed as if Meta Dierdorf, that last year of the war, was a one-woman USO, with lunches and dinners and tea and drinks with soldiers and sailors and marines and coastguardsmen, both officers and enlisted men, no branch of the services scanted. On the evening of her murder, Meta Dierdorf had gone to the Stage Door Canteen at six and had stayed less than an hour, jitterbugging with several servicemen; then she had left, saying she was not feeling well, telling another hostess, Miss June Holt, that she had drunk too much punch at a luncheon earlier that day at Chloe Quarles’s house for the marines assigned as extras to J. F. French’s production of
Ready, Aim, Fire
. June Holt said she had walked Meta Dierdorf to her car and she appeared in good spirits, not unwell, leading Miss Holt to speculate that she had another engagement rather than actually being ill, as she had claimed. “Meta was always
mysterious about who she saw,” Miss Holt said in her statement to Lieutenant Spellacy. Although the rules of the Canteen stipulated that hostesses were not supposed to date the servicemen they met there, addresses and telephone numbers were routinely exchanged. Miss Holt also said that she was unaware of anyone named Vida or Vide that Meta Dierdorf might have known, or indeed of any friend whose first or last name began with the letter
V
.

For a period of time immediately after the murder, the leading suspect was someone identified in Meta Dierdorf’s day book only as “Tommy.” The entry on the day she was killed said “Tommy—7:30 chez moi, C fini!!!” Cross-checking all the names in her address book and her photo albums, Lieutenant Spellacy was finally able to track Tommy down to Mather Field, outside Sacramento, where as Captain Thomas Benedict, USAAF, he was assigned as a flight instructor to an A-20A light bomber training squadron. Lieutenant Spellacy went to Mather Field, and in the presence of a recording secretary and a Major Anders from the judge advocate general’s office, he questioned Captain Benedict. The captain at first denied knowing Meta Dierdorf, then said he had stood her up the evening in question, leading Lieutenant Spellacy to lay out the seriousness of his situation and the possibility that he could end up in the gas chamber. As an interrogator, Lieutenant Spellacy did not beat around the bush. From the official record, August 3, 1945: