The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

The last week of April, which would be after Buddy had taken himself out of the running as a potential husband by declining to take Rona Jean to bed. “Go on,” Buddy said. “What did she want to talk about?”


Lassen looked down. The words came slowly at first, then faster, as if a plug had been pulled and it was all spilling out. “She said she was pregnant and wanted money to get rid of it, but I told her nothing doing. I wasn’t giving her a cent to get an abortion. I told her that what we was gonna do was get married, just as quick as we could. Ozzie don’t pay me near enough to support a wife and family, but I could hit him up for a little more, and I figured we’d make it some way or another. Folks do, y’know. My folks did. They never had one nickel to rub against another, but they raised seven kids okay.” His voice cracked. “And I wanted to get married, I really did. I told her I’d be damned if I was gonna let a boy of mine be born without my name on him.”

Buddy felt a tug of compassion for the man before him. No doubt about it, he was hurting. “And she said—?”

“She said that what she really wanted was the money but she’d think about what I said, about gettin’ married, I mean. But a couple days later, she phoned me up here at the boardinghouse and said she was wrong. It was a false alarm—there wasn’t gonna be no baby—and I didn’t need to worry no more about it.” He swallowed. “I was . . . well, I was disappointed, I guess. I’d got my head around gettin’ married and I was likin’ the idea—having a wife to come home to and home cookin’ and all that. So I kinda pushed her on it, but she just kept saying she’d been wrong, it was a false alarm.”

Caught by surprise, Buddy stared at him. Rona Jean had lied to Lassen about being pregnant. But why? Because he had refused to give her money for an abortion and was instead insisting on getting married? Because she had approached the other candidate, Beau Pyle, and gotten money for the abortion from him? Or because she had decided that abortion was too dangerous? It was strictly illegal and often fatal. In fact, he had read somewhere that in 1932 alone, some fifteen thousand women had died from abortions or complications afterward.

Whatever the reason, though, Rona Jean must have decided against an abortion, or maybe she hadn’t been able to find anybody to pay for it, because she was still carrying the baby when she was killed. He thought of the stack of twenties he had found in her room. Maybe somebody had given her the money to get rid of the baby, but she had decided to have it anyway—and was asking for more money. Was that why she had been killed?

Lassen was going on, the words coming faster now, tumbling out in a rush. “I gotta say I was glad we didn’t have to get married right away. But I’d kind of got myself used to the idea, you know?” He looked beseechingly at Buddy. “And Rona Jean, she was right pretty and lots of fun to be with and I figgered she’d make a good wife. But when I asked her to go out with me again, she said no, and that there was no point in me askin’ again. It hurt me like a knife in the gut, but if she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t, and that’s all there was to it.”

Buddy could hear the pain in his voice. Rejection was hard, whoever you were. “You haven’t seen her since?” he asked, and followed that with another of the questions he had come to ask. “Did she . . . did she write you any letters?”