A Cast of Killers (16 page)

“Maybe Taylor gave them to her,” Vidor said. “He could have kept them for her at his bungalow.”

“Could be,” Florence agreed. “He wouldn’t have been the only older man around with a yen for young girls. But you have to remember also that there was never what you would call a shortage of young girls around who were more willing to satisfy just such cravings; young girls far more experienced, not to mention available, than Mary.”

Vidor nodded and stepped to the large picture window. Florence had further convinced him that there must have been two distinct, even opposite sides to Mary Miles Minter: the virginal little girl she wanted everyone (especially her overbearing mother) to see; and the precocious young woman who lied and sneaked around behind her mother’s back with the likes of Marshall Neilan and William Desmond Taylor. The letters to Taylor and the nightgown were difficult evidence to dismiss, and yet one thing about them bothered Vidor. The police and the press saw them as evidence linking Mary or her mother to Taylor’s murder. But, Vidor wondered, if either Mary or Charlotte had been involved in any way in Taylor’s death, wouldn’t something as damning as the letters and the nightgown have been the first things they would have removed from the scene of the crime?

21

The suspect list was shrinking. Vidor had eliminated Mabel Normand and he was now convinced that neither Mary Miles Minter nor Charlotte Shelby could have killed Taylor. And there was nothing suspicious in anything he read about Taylor’s houseman, Henry Peavey, other than his arrest shortly before the murder on a morals charge. The fact that Taylor was scheduled to stand up for Peavey in court suggested that the two men were on good, friendly terms. It did raise again the question of whether Taylor himself was homosexual—and had perhaps more than a friendly relationship with Peavey—but Vidor didn’t believe that Peavey was the murderer. In fact, he didn’t yet have any prime suspects. It was far easier to surmise who did not kill Taylor than to guess who did. But it became more apparent with each new chapter in his investigation that there was a lot more to the case than he had expected. Every answer led to new questions; each solution opened up a new mystery. Who was Edward Sands, and where did he disappear to? Was he Taylor’s brother? Whatever happened to the court-martialed soldier who promised revenge against Taylor? Or the hitchhikers with the gun and the story of “Captain Bill”? And what about the theories that revolved around narcotics and blackmail?

All of these questions, and so many more, had been raised at some point in Vidor’s investigation, as they had been by the police forty-five years earlier. Yet everything Vidor read, and everyone he talked with, seemed only concerned with the original list of suspects and theories that he—and the police—had started out with. It was as though, once raised, all subsequent questions were merely forgotten, dismissed without proper consideration. And Vidor was beginning to understand why. As with anything else that becomes a part of the public record, whether it be the private life of a celebrity or a historical event (and the Taylor scandal filled both bills), every detail of this mystery had been played out and embellished on the pages of newspapers and magazines. And yet, hungry as the press has always been for anything scandalous it could sink its teeth into—and there were scandals enough for a feast surrounding Taylor—all the newspapers and magazines kept returning to the original core of people who had been linked to the mystery from the beginning, the same people Vidor was now systematically eliminating from his own suspicions. Now Vidor knew that celebrities made good copy, but why, he wondered, would the press continue to maul Normand and Minter and Shelby long after police had stopped investigating them, and while other possible leads to the solution to a capital crime were sloughed off like unneeded filler?

Obviously the press could print only what information it had. And Vidor thought it unlikely for the police to have investigated all the short-lived theories about the murder and neglected to tell the press about them. So its single-minded press coverage of the murder must not have come from a lack of other information but from a continual source that fed only stories concerning those people who had starred in the proceedings from the beginning. And Vidor knew of only two sources that could so influence what appeared in print: the police and the studios.

As Herb Dalmas had said, the press printed only what the studios wanted them to; and they might well have wanted these three women ruined and out of their hair once and for all. So every story about the murder was so filled with Normand, Minter, and Shelby that the real killer might have simply walked away unnoticed. Which would make the studios guilty of aiding a criminal’s escape.

Vidor was excited. He felt he was onto something that might be even bigger than the murder itself: a large-scale inadvertent hindrance of a major criminal investigation. Perhaps the mystery could have been solved long ago if everyone’s attention hadn’t been continually diverted to Normand, Minter, and Shelby. Vidor wouldn’t know for sure until he found out who the real killer was, but he had a new outlook on the press, something new to think about when he met with Adela Rogers St. Johns, who had been one of the most important reporters who covered the story.

St. Johns had once been among the most powerful of Hollywood journalists, the star reporter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and was still, in her seventies, an active novelist, columnist, and frequent guest on television talk shows. More than any other single writer, her work on the Taylor case seemed to Vidor to be fresh, alive, and most important, authoritative, as though her interest in it were more than simply exploiting the latest sensation. She met Vidor in her year-round bungalow suite at the Ambassador Hotel. She’d been waiting eagerly. Taylor’s was indeed a favorite story of hers.

“All they said was that they saw someone leaving the bungalow,” Vidor said. “They couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. Faith MacLean kept going back and forth from one to the other.”

“I read all that, too,” St. Johns said, waving it off with her hand. “Both women had perfect views of Taylor’s front door from their living rooms. Gillon told me she saw a woman leaving the apartment directly after hearing the gunshot. And Faith MacLean told me who the woman was.”

“Wait a minute. Faith MacLean told you it was Charlotte Shelby who left the bungalow, dressed as a man?”

St. Johns nodded with such self-assurance that Vidor knew she was not lying. What she was saying didn’t corroborate anything he had already come up with, but he knew that St. Johns believed it to be true.

“Did she tell that to the police?” he asked.

“You would have to ask the police that.”

“She couldn’t have, or I would have heard about it.” Vidor was thinking out loud, trying to reconcile Faith MacLean’s identifying Charlotte Shelby with everything he had read, learned from interviews, or surmised on his own. “Why wasn’t she indicted? Why wasn’t it in the papers?”

“I don’t know, King. Obviously, someone didn’t want her indicted, didn’t want it in the papers. Or maybe they thought an eyewitness wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment.”

St. Johns laughed, coughed, then killed the cough with a sip of black coffee.

“But an eyewitness plus Mary’s love letters and monogrammed nightgown should have been plenty of evidence,” Vidor said. “If Charlotte did it, why did she leave all that stuff behind?”

“I don’t know that, either. Maybe she wasn’t aware that they were there.”

“Or maybe they weren’t there,” Vidor said. He stood up and nervously paced the hotel carpet. “I’ve read hundreds of articles mentioning that nightgown, but never seen one picture of it. Maybe it never existed. That might explain why years later, when Charlotte and Minter demanded that the police make public anything they had tying them with the murder, the police ostensibly said, in not so many words, that they didn’t have anything. Even with Faith MacLean’s identification, maybe they needed some hard evidence that they didn’t have. There have been so many other things that I simply took for granted when I started researching this that I’ve learned weren’t what they were made out to be—maybe that nightgown is another one. I haven’t met one person who actually laid eyes on the thing.”

“Yes, you have,” St. Johns said. “Me.”

Vidor stopped in his tracks. “You’ve seen it?”

“My husband Ike brought it home one night. He had worked for the previous mayor. Knew everyone in the office. Apparently it went though a lot of curious, though unofficial hands. Kind of a hush-hush conversation piece.”

Vidor sat back down. He had expected his talk with St. Johns to help him ascertain the plausibility of his theory of the studio’s bungling of the investigation. Instead, she had him, once again, right back where he started. Just days ago, he had scratched Charlotte Shelby and her daughter from his list of suspects. And now, if what St. Johns was saying was true, he had another reevaluation in store. If indeed it was true. If she had remembered correctly. The Hearst News Syndicate didn’t win many awards for its journalistic integrity.

“The story of poor Mary’s life. The millions was money, and the fanatical need that Charlotte had for it. Everything she did centered on it. Did you know that she took thirty percent of every cent Mary ever made in her life? Called it her manager’s fee. Not bad for a career that consisted of signing a total of four contracts for Mary. And the rest of Mary’s money she invested, in her own name and that of her older daughter, Margaret. Mary finally had to sue Charlotte, and then only got a fraction of what she had earned. Charlotte didn’t want anything to come between her and the millions she loved so much. Not Mary’s own wishes—she never wanted to be an actress, especially later on, that’s why her pictures started getting so bad: she hated acting, even tried to kill herself once, I’ve been told, to get out of it. And you know what she tried to kill herself with?”

St. Johns grinned at the irony.

“Charlotte’s gun. The same one she killed Taylor with. So Charlotte personally escorted Mary to the studio every day and made sure she carried out her contract. Then at home, she often had to lock Mary in her room to keep her from running away or, worse, getting involved with some man. There was no way she was going to let Mary fall in love and get married and move off with all her money. I remember Jimmy Kirkwood, rest his soul, telling me horror stories about trying to go out with Mary. Charlotte threatened to kill him when she found out, and I don’t think it was an idle threat. And I hear Monte Blue, that American Indian actor, had some stories of his own to tell. And you’ve heard all about Henry Peavey, Taylor’s houseman. Try finding out what happened to Shelby’s maid and cook.”

“Do you think Charlotte suspected Mary and Taylor were involved?” Vidor asked.

St. Johns poured herself another steaming cup of coffee, sipped it immediately.

“Even better than that,” she said with a smile. “I think Charlotte was interested in Taylor herself. What more could she want from a man? Good looking, sophisticated, good income. And when she found out, or came to believe, that Taylor’s designs were on her daughter instead of herself, it was a personal affront as well as a threat to her millions. So she solved the problem once and for all with the second M in the monogram: Murder.”

This entire scenario was completely new to Vidor. In itself, forgetting everything else, it would make for a good screen story, but he knew he would have to weigh it heavily against all his other evidence and questions before he could know just how believable it was.

“What about the third M?” he said.

“Misery. That’s what Mary’s life has been since the murder. Her career died, she lost most of her money, her beauty. She was a virtual pariah in Hollywood. All because of that ogre of a mother, who for all we know is still haunting the poor woman. I read all about Charlotte dying a few years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that too wasn’t one of her scams, trying to cheat even the devil out of his due. She’s probably still alive, still making Mary’s life miserable.”

St. Johns stood up, stepped across the room to a small writing table. She took a book from a drawer, flipped it open, then set it back in the drawer. She quickly scribbled something onto a notepad, tore off the top sheet, and stepped back to the sofa.

“Still not convinced?” she said.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Vidor answered. “I’ve never looked at it quite this way before.”

“Well,” St. Johns said, “I didn’t just make all this up out of the blue, about Mary and Taylor or the Shelby millions. It all came from a highly reliable source. Including the fact that Charlotte was really in love with William Desmond Taylor.”

She handed Vidor the slip of notepaper. “Mary’s done a lot of talking,” she said. “This is her phone number. Why don’t you give her a call? Ask her who killed the man she loved.