The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

The first story, of course, was Rona Jean Hancock’s murder. The minute he got the word, Charlie had picked up his camera and raced for the scene of the crime, where he’d managed to snap a half-dozen photos before the sheriff—the new sheriff, Buddy Norris—showed up and told him to knock it off. He couldn’t print the photos in the Dispatch, which was a family newspaper. But he could use them in his Constitution piece or sell them to one of the wire services, which had recently run those dramatic death photos of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde had been ambushed and shot to death six weeks before, over in the piney woods of Louisiana. The crowd that had gathered got quickly out of control and the scene turned into a circus. A woman whacked off bloody locks of Bonnie’s hair and pieces of her dress to sell as souvenirs. A man tried to cut off Clyde’s trigger finger, and others pulled off pieces of the stolen Ford V8 that the pair had been driving. Photos of the bullet-riddled bodies of the notorious pair were plastered across newspapers and magazines coast to coast.

Rona Jean was no gun moll (or if she was, that fact had not yet come to light), and her murder wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as the death of Bonnie Parker. But the photos that Charlie had taken were sensational, to say the least. Not to be insensitive about it, but the fact that the girl—a telephone operator—had been strangled with her very own silk stocking would make for excellent copy. Charlie could see the headline now: Hello Central, Give Me Heaven.

And with this story, Charlie was going to break a Darling rule. Up until now, the Dispatch would not have dared to report to its readers the news that Doc Roberts’ autopsy had revealed that the unmarried victim was pregnant. (Yes, his sister, Edna Fay, who was married to the doctor, had let him in on the secret.) “Only the news that’s fit to be read—by your mother,” Charlie’s father used to grumble, when he couldn’t print everything he wanted to print. “Or your grandmother. Or your little sister. It’s a curse. It’s an obscene, profane, dad-blamed blasphemy, is what it is. No newspaperman worth his salt ought to put up with it.” With a sigh, he would add, “But I do. ’Cause if I don’t, I get canceled subscriptions from the Baptists and the Methodists and the Catholics and letters to the editor from the rest of ’em.”

But Rona Jean’s murder was the story du jour, and Charlie had decided that it was high time the Dispatch joined the modern newspaper world. It was a true fact, attested to by a reliable physician, that the victim was pregnant. And regardless of the unspoken prohibition against printing the word “pregnant” in the Dispatch, that fact, and that word, was exactly what he intended to print. He wouldn’t put it in the headline, out of deference to tender sensibilities, but it would be there. All by itself, that word would make readers blink and make Rona Jean’s murder a very big story, worthy of a special edition.

But the killing of Rona Jean Hancock wasn’t the only story Charlie had up his sleeve. In fact, the other one might be even bigger, because of its possible national repercussions. It had come to him the week before via a telephone tip from an anonymous source—a woman—who claimed that there was something seriously fishy and definitely illegal going on at Camp Briarwood. The voice sounded familiar, but Charlie couldn’t quite put his finger on who it was. Anyway, he had been in the newspaper business long enough to know that nine times out of ten, an anonymous tip wasn’t worth a plugged nickel.

But then the second tip had come in, from the same source but by mail this time, in the form of a handwritten note. In four sentences, it spelled out what the tipster had said on the phone. It was signed with an obvious pseudonym: Mata Hari. Charlie did a double take when he saw that. Mata Hari was a famous exotic dancer accused of being a spy during the Great War.