A Cast of Killers (18 page)

He was about to ask another question when she spoke up again.

“It was really quite a shock, the whole thing. Mr. Taylor and I were going to be married. I hadn’t known of course that he had been married once before. I guess he didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to hurt me. I was so innocent, you know.”

So I’ve been told, Vidor thought.

“What about Edward Sands?” he said. “Did you know him?”

“Well, enough, I suppose. Certainly well enough to know he didn’t look anything like the man the neighbor, Faith Cole MacLean, rest her soul, saw leaving the bungalow that night. She saw the boy from the robbery, thin and small. Sands was a big galoot.”

“Was he Taylor’s brother?”

Minter giggled like a schoolgirl. “He wasn’t any more Mr. Taylor’s brother than I am Emma’s sister.”

“Then you think,” Vidor said, choosing his words very carefully, “that the whole thing could have been solved very quickly, but the police chose you and your mother ... “

“And Mabel,” she interrupted.

“And Mabel to implicate because they didn’t want people to think they were baffled?”

“That’s right. We were all close to Mr. Taylor, you know. And, if I do say so myself, we all had quite newsworthy names. But to think that we would have done anything like that was absurd. Why would I kill the man I was planning to marry? And then even if I did, why would I become friends with his daughter?”

“You knew his daughter?”

“I met her in New York a few years after the murder. She looked exactly like her father. It was amazing. And she knew right off I didn’t kill him. Especially after I told her about the last time I saw him. It was at the funeral home. I gave an attendant a few dollars to let me see him, alone. I leaned over and kissed him good-bye, and left a rose with him. He was buried with my flower.”

Vidor didn’t know what to believe. Whoever was responsible for the crime, Vidor was now convinced, was cruel and powerful enough to pull off the most heartless, destructive scam in the history of Hollywood, and cunning enough never to get caught. And for the first time, Vidor asked himself if he actually thought he was any match for the killer.

He thanked Mary O’Hildebrandt for talking with him and made plans to meet with her soon, to continue their conversation in person. Then he hung up and sat at his desk, silent and motionless, for the rest of the day. He had a lot of thinking to do.

23

Vidor’s favorite game was poker. He likened the game in many ways to his chosen profession. Betting a promising hand was like investing in a motion picture, always a risk, but carrying the possibility of great profit. He had in fact, as a teenager in Galveston, financed his first film project with winnings from a game at the Rice Hotel in which his own stake had been perhaps the greatest of his gambling career: he had “borrowed” his father’s shotgun, his sister’s typewriter, and a hidden stash of cash his mother was saving for a trip to Pike’s Peak, and put them all on the line. Luckily, for both his hide and his future career, he had won. He no longer risked more than he could afford as he had in Galveston, and as he had in his early Hollywood days at the Sunset Casino, but he still enjoyed regular Friday night games at his brother-in-law Dick Marchman’s house. Tonight, however, April 18, 1967, an off-night invitation, he wasn’t sure he wanted to play. It had not been a good month for him, professionally or personally.

It had taken Vidor weeks to investigate the story Mary Miles Minter had told him of the night Taylor had been murdered, and what he finally learned just left him more confused than ever. According to real estate records he had finally been able to locate in a basement archive at the California State University at Northridge, there hadn’t even been a filling station at the corner where Minter had said a station was robbed. The nearest station to Taylor’s bungalow was Hartley’s, whose owner, as Vidor had already known, had been interviewed at length about a mysterious stranger he’d claimed had asked directions to Taylor’s.

Further interviews he had conducted with newspaper journalists who had covered the Taylor story didn’t help clarify anything. One reporter, speaking from his bed in an Encino nursing home, claimed with no doubt whatsoever that Edward Sands had killed Taylor.

“I saw the pawn tickets,” he said with an authority that made him no less believable than anyone else with a theory about the mystery. “They were signed by Sands and made out to William Deane Tanner. Obviously, Sands knew who Taylor really was and was blackmailing him.”

Another reporter, who had later become an editor of a major San Francisco newspaper, was just as convinced that Mabel Normand was to blame. Citing officials of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office as his sources, he claimed that Normand, an addict, regularly bought her dope from a peanut vendor, and that was what was in her peanut bag when she arrived at Taylor’s for her short visit.

One man he talked with, a fellow film director, claimed that Charlotte Shelby’s chauffeur had told him that he had seen Shelby remove her pistol from her car the morning after the murder, that Shelby had killed Taylor and then paid off the District Attorney’s Office not to prosecute her. Someone else even spelled out a scenario that Vidor, who thought he’d considered every possibility by now, hadn’t even dreamed of: that Taylor had been killed at Mabel Normand’s house, wrapped in a throw rug, and then taken back to his own bungalow. Vidor didn’t buy that theory, but knew that it was as possible as anything else he’d heard.

The only productive discovery he’d made in the last month was that it had been Allan Dwan who had informed the late Antonio Moreno that Vidor was investigating Taylor.

“I ran into him at a cocktail party,” Dwan said over the phone. “I mentioned Taylor to him because I thought you might be interested in speaking with him.”

“I wondered how he found out what I was doing,” Vidor said. “It was really strange, his calling me in New York.”

Dwan said, “Well, you know Tony and his imagination. I wouldn’t put too much stock in whatever he said. Sounds to me like he wanted to indict all of Hollywood in some grand conspiracy or something.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“The problem with those kinds of conspiracy theories,” said Dwan, “is how are so many people going to keep so quiet about it for so long?”

All in all, Vidor’s project was not exactly proceeding apace. And a call from Sam Goldwyn, Jr., had informed him that another project, a film that was to mark Vid-Mor’s official debut as a production entity, was not going to work out as he had hoped, either. Vidor would still get to direct the picture, as Goldwyn had promised, but only if he directed the version of the script that Goldwyn chose, a version that neither Vidor nor Colleen Moore wanted to make. Since Colleen, who could have provided both professional and personal support, was still touring the Dark Continent, Vidor had declined the offer.

Another unexpected blow to Vidor’s pride struck the very morning that Dick Marchman had invited him to the off-night poker session. In a new history of motion pictures written by one of America’s best-known film critics, Vidor had read that not only was he a relatively unimportant director, but also that he was an unimportant
deceased
director. Vidor begrudged no critic his opinions, but he felt that calling him dead was beyond the critic’s professional realm.

So he was not in the best spirits when Dick Marchman called. Betty had just returned from a shopping trip and, as was becoming her fashion, said nothing at all to Vidor though she walked directly past him in the kitchen.

“Not tonight,” Vidor told Marchman. He thought about taking Betty somewhere, to try to make some domestic peace.

Marchman insisted. “There’s a couple new players I want you to meet.”

So Vidor packed his green visor and custom-made poker chips and drove to Marchman’s, stopping along the way for a six-pack of Budweiser. When Vidor arrived, Marchman greeted him with a grin that told him he was up to something, then introduced him around. One of the new players was an expert gambler. Vidor didn’t like this. He was in no mood to lose. But the other new player was Thad Brown, chief of detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department. He was sixty-four years old, built like a boxcar, and had one secret desire: to solve the William Desmond Taylor case before he retired in a year’s time.

“It was one of the reasons I joined the force in the first place,” he said. “Now I’ve been there forty-one years, and haven’t made an inch headway. But from what your brother-in-law here says, you might be able to offer a little help. Of course, I just might be able to offer you a little help, too.”

Vidor perked up. Dick Marchman had come through. Vidor would finally see the official police records on Taylor.

24

On Friday morning, April 21, 1967, Vidor picked Dick Marchman up at eight and drove downtown. On the way, he filled Marchman in on the main things he was looking for in the police files. In addition to the obvious questions, which Vidor had been trying to answer for months now, there were the following points:

What did investigators know about Taylor’s relationship with Charles Eyton, Antonio Moreno, Marshall Neilan, and James Kirkwood?

What was the final verdict about the keys that fit no locks, the handkerchief that appeared and disappeared, and the mystery doctor who claimed death by hemorrhage of the stomach?

Had pornographic photos actually been found? And what about the nightie and the collection of lacy panties?

Above all, why was it that so many leads—Mabel Normand, Mary Miles Minter, Charlotte Shelby, Edward Sands, and so many others, including hitchhikers, war veterans, and disgruntled studio employees—had all seemed so promising but then simply disappeared as though they had never existed?

Vidor and Marchman hoped that in a few hours many of these questions would be answered. The arrangement that Chief Brown had made for them would allow Vidor and Marchman to be left alone with the Taylor files in an assigned office. Rules were being bent to accommodate them, so they would have to keep a low profile, and would be allowed only this one chance to study the files.

Vidor knew that an enormous amount of material must exist on a case that had been open for so many years, and that one day would barely give him time to read it, let alone to make the kind of detailed notes that he would need for his investigation. So the day before, he visited a friend at a large Hollywood film equipment rental house. The friend was a sound expert who had worked on some of Vidor’s films. When microphones had had to be hidden so that they would not be seen by the camera, this friend had found extraordinary ways to conceal them. Vidor knew he would never be able to copy the police records word for word—but he would be able to read them aloud. And if there were a way to conceal a microphone and tape recorder out of sight inside his briefcase, then he could make his own illegal copy of everything the police files contained. Asking no questions, Vidor’s friend was more than willing to rig the briefcase.

Vidor and Marchman parked on the street and hurried up the granite steps to the Detective Bureau. The office that was assigned to them was small and on an upper floor. The documents were stacked neatly on a desk in the center of the room.

“Try not to lose anything and my conscience will be clean,” Chief Brown told them as he left them alone in the room.

Vidor’s hands began to shake as he opened the first yellowing file. EXHIBIT A. He carefully turned to page one and read the heading: DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, FEBRUARY 7, FIVE O’CLOCK P.M., PRESENT: MR. W.C. DORAN, DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY, MISS MARY MILES MINTER, JOHN G. MOTT, ATTORNEY FOR MISS MINTER, AND G. H. BOONE, SHORT-HAND REPORTER. Vidor was excited. This was the real thing.

Vidor set his briefcase on the corner of the desk, with the handle facing Marchman. He pushed the right-hand latch on the case inward instead of outward, and the tape recorder inside switched on. Vidor nodded to Marchman to begin reading.

Marchman picked up a file marked CONFIDENTIAL. He began reading: “June twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-seven, letter from Alfred A. Wright, 956 Sunbury Court, San Diego, to Chief of Detectives L.A.P.D., regarding Eddie Mason, who confessed to Wright that he had killed a man identified from pictures as Denis Deane Tanner ....”

Vidor could barely contain himself. The files contained letters, confessions, testimony, photographs, suspects, and notes by individual investigators. Typical of the paperwork and potential evidence that accumulated was a file that contained a lock of Taylor’s hair; another that contained three different sets of ballistic reports; a file of fingerprints; one of discredited confessions; one of purported letters from Edward Sands; and another of so-called eyewitness accounts of the murder. And Vidor’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the report by the detective who first entered Taylor’s bungalow on that cold February morning.

The first order of business, he knew, was to get everything he could into the tape recorder. A thorough investigation, like a good film, was built on many small pieces, all intricately woven together and all significant. To miss one was to miss it all. He could analyze it all later, after a complete recording of everything was made and transcribed. And he knew just where he would do it. Colleen Moore was due back next weekend, and what better way to celebrate their reunion than to take her and his precious tapes to his ranch in Paso Robles, three hours north of Los Angeles? They could be alone together, catch up on lost time, and with luck, hone the rough edges off the story that would put them back into the mainstream of Hollywood.