A Cast of Killers (24 page)

“Well,” Brown said, “there’s no evidence that they came from Woolwine or any of his men.”

“That’s just it. There’s no evidence they came from anywhere. The only evidence that exists at all says that Shelby and Minter were involved one way or another in Taylor’s death, and that Woolwine knew this and did nothing about it.”

“So what are you going to do next?”

Vidor had been waiting for this question. He hoped Brown would be able to help him. “I thought I might try to talk with some of the investigators on the case, some of the names mentioned in the files.”

Vidor heard Brown’s deep laugh again. “Good luck with that one. Most of the original investigators are dead. Bill Cahill’s out in Arcadia. Ray Cato’s still alive, the one that turned over Taylor’s body and first saw the bullet hole. Of the D.A.s, only Buron Fitts is still around, lives in Hollywood.”

“That’s all of them?”

“Except for maybe some of the cops from later years, Fitts’s administration. Leroy Sanderson’s around somewhere. He’ll probably talk with you. There are others from the Fitts administration but who knows if they’ll say anything. It was all kept very quiet. In fact, I don’t know if you know this, but days before Fitts was going to announce his Taylor investigation findings someone tried to gun him down in his driveway. I couldn’t say there was a connection between the Taylor case and the shooting, but Fitts hasn’t mentioned the case since.”

Vidor thanked Brown for the information, then listed the names Brown had mentioned on a fresh notebook page. He circled Buron Fitts.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any of their phone numbers, would you?”

“As a matter of fact,” Brown said, “I have them right here.”

30

At 10:00 A.M. on May 1, 1967, Vidor turned off Santa Anita Avenue in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia and found a small house at 27 Magna Vista Street. In the front yard flew an American flag, the only one in the neighborhood.

Bill Cahill met Vidor with a toothy grin and a hearty handshake that belied his eighty-one years. A retired L.A.P.D. lieutenant and Arcadia chief of police, Cahill still had the physique of a much younger man.

“I appreciate your seeing me on such short notice,” Vidor said.

“Think nothing of it,” Cahill replied, leading Vidor into the backyard.

They sat on lawn chairs, completely hidden from neighboring houses by rosebushes that climbed trellises nearly as tall as the houses themselves.

“So you’re making a movie about William Desmond Taylor.”

“Right now I’m just trying to get the story together,” Vidor said. “Which isn’t exactly easy. There are so many versions to choose from.”

“How can I help you?”

“Well, there was so much written about the case, and so much of it obviously untrue, that right now I’m trying to weed out what was real and what wasn’t, and even more important, trying to find out where everything that was printed that wasn’t real came from. Did newspapers just make it up? Or was somebody planting stories?”

“Who could have been planting stories?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Vidor said. “But it seems unlikely that some newspaper reporters could invent things like a set of mysterious keys or a monogrammed handkerchief or a couple of hitchhikers in Santa Ana, and the police would simply allow them to do it.”

“In the first place,” Cahill said, leaning forward and punctuating his words with hand gestures, “I imagine that police were more concerned with finding the killer than keeping tabs on what was said in the newspapers. And in the second place, why are you so sure those things were invented? How do you know there was no set of keys, or no handkerchief?”

“I don’t,” Vidor answered quickly. “Those are just examples that came to mind of the many things written about when the case first hit the press. It’s become obvious in my research that many of those things, not necessarily the ones I just mentioned, either led nowhere or were simply dropped later as though they had never existed. And I’m wondering if the reason may be that they were false from the beginning.”

“She was formally interviewed twice,” Vidor said. “The first time by you and Detective Murphy on the afternoon after the body was discovered.”

“That’s correct.”

“She told you that she arrived at Taylor’s bungalow the night before at about seven o’clock and left at seven-forty-five. This was confirmed by her chauffeur and a neighbor who saw her leave and then heard Taylor return to the bungalow alone.”

Cahill said nothing, just continued looking at Vidor with a stare Vidor imagined had dampened the collars of many suspects in Cahill’s long enforcement career.

“The second time Normand was questioned was a week or so later, February tenth. She repeated exactly what she’d told you and Murphy. And yet members of the press, in the years to come, continued to report that she had been at the bungalow the morning they found the body, that she had been searching Taylor’s shelves, that she was a drug addict, all kinds of things that were never brought up either time she was questioned.”

Cahill finally allowed his eyes to drop from Vidor’s. He looked around the yard. “You’ve certainly done your homework, Mr. Vidor,” he said. “I mean, you seem to know every word said during Miss Normand’s two interrogations. Funny, I don’t remember any transcripts of those sessions ever reaching the press.”

“As you say,” Vidor said, “I’ve done my homework. And the question I was hoping you might be able to help me with is why, after Normand’s story was accepted by the police, the press was still permitted to present her as a prime suspect for the next six months.”

Cahill replied quickly, “She was completely exonerated.”

“Not until her career was shot out from under her.”

Vidor thought Cahill was growing nervous. He no longer looked Vidor in the eye. He stood up, pulled on a pair of work gloves from a redwood table, and picked up a pair of garden clippers. As he stepped to a wall of rosebushes, he spoke, his back to Vidor who followed.

“I joined the police force in nineteen-nine. Los Angeles was a rough place in those days.”

Vidor said, “I know. I came here myself not long after.”

Cahill started clipping his roses. “We never would have guessed it, but it got even rougher years later, during Prohibition. Those days were something else. Brothels, speakeasies, dope. It was impossible to keep tabs on all the criminal activity going on. The best we in the department could do was to do what we were told. If they said to raid one joint and ignore another one, that’s exactly what we did. Maybe someone had an arrangement with the owner of the place we ignored, or maybe they just chose our targets out of a hat—we didn’t ask questions. Because if we did, and believe me I knew a lot of good officers who asked the wrong questions, we were told to find another line of work.”

“Are you saying someone told you to back off the Taylor case?” Vidor asked.

“I’m just saying I did what I was told.” Cahill stopped clipping and faced Vidor again. “I don’t know what all went on concerning that case. All the high-level meetings went on behind closed doors.”

“Surely you know that from all your homework, Mr. Vidor,” Cahill said. “Just like Normand, they were never charged with any crimes, and just like Normand, they remained suspects in the press.”

“I know that,” Vidor said, choosing his words very carefully, trying to suggest without disclosing outright that he knew information contained only in the official files. “I’m just wondering if the stories the papers printed about them differed as much from what really happened as they did with Normand. Or if maybe the police also knew more about them than they told the press.”

Vidor felt that Cahill got his unspoken message. They stepped back to the chairs. Cahill set his clippers on the ground.

“Well,” he said, “I didn’t question Minter myself. And I never even met her mother. So I can’t really give you any firsthand information about them. But I recall hearing that the mother, Shelby, was a friend of Woolwine’s. Of course, I don’t know that for a fact.”

Vidor grinned. “Of course.” Vidor knew now that Cahill hadn’t been nervous before. He had just been feeling Vidor out.

“All I really know is Mabel Normand, and I guess you’re already aware of everything I know about her that didn’t make it to the press. So you know we had no reason to suspect she had anything to do with killing Taylor. Her alibi was airtight. But there was that one thing that didn’t seem to ring quite right about her testimony. At least five times she told the story of how when she arrived at Taylor’s bungalow that night the door was open and Taylor was talking on the phone. She said she waited outside until Taylor hung up and didn’t hear any of the telephone conversation. But each time she told this story she said that Taylor had received the call. Now if Taylor was already on the phone when she arrived, how did she know Taylor received the call? How did she know he didn’t make it? Only two ways. Either she heard some of the call, or Taylor told her something about the call—both of which she adamantly denied.”

Vidor remembered what Minta Durfee had told him: that Mabel Normand had told her that Marjorie Berger had called Taylor that night. And from Marjorie Berger’s own testimony, Vidor knew that not much earlier in the evening Charlotte Shelby had called Marjorie Berger looking for Minter. Then there was the question of Moreno’s call. No mention of it had appeared in the police records, but it seemed clear from Vidor’s research that there had been at least two conversations Taylor had on the phone in the hour before his murder.

“And another thing.” Cahill interrupted Vidor’s line of thought. “What about the fact that Taylor’s door was open when Normand arrived? We know he wasn’t expecting her. And it was cold that night, far too cold to stand around with the front door open. So he must have been expecting someone else to arrive right about the time Normand arrived. Either that or someone had just left the bungalow or just entered the bungalow, and was there the entire time Normand was.”

“I see,” Cahill laughed. “Well, speaking of Minter, shortly after Taylor’s inquest, Normand ran into Minter in the lobby. They whispered briefly, then walked off together. I followed them upstairs, but they locked themselves in the ladies’ washroom and turned all the faucets on so no one could hear whatever they were talking about. Now I don’t know of any other time when these two were together—they were not exactly known as friends. But they sure had something they wanted to talk about in private that afternoon.”

Vidor thought about this. What could Normand and Minter have talked about? Did Normand know more than she told anyone about other things besides Taylor’s phone call? Or could it have been the phone call itself they talked about? Vidor was trying to arrange a logical scenario, tying Charlotte Shelby’s call to Marjorie Berger, Taylor’s mysterious conversation with Moreno, and Mabel Normand’s and Mary Miles Minter’s carefully concealed conversation in the ladies’ room, when Cahill stood up again. Picking up his clippers, he said, “Are you married, Mr. Vidor?”

Vidor watched him clip a rose from a bush, then stood up himself. He declined Cahill’s offer of the roses and walked back around the house to his car.

31

Ray Cato stood before a wall covered with plaques, citations, and other awards for distinguished law enforcement and public service. Most of the awards were signed by Woolwine, Asa Keyes, or Buron Fitts.

“I rode to the bungalow in the coroner’s truck,” he said. “They told us to park around back so we wouldn’t draw any undue attention to the place. Can you imagine that? The place was already crawling with people and they didn’t want us to draw attention.”

“I don’t know. Somebody must have known something; they’d turned that bungalow inside out before we even got there. But whether it had anything to do with murder I couldn’t say. I tend to doubt it, though. Eyton seemed to be in charge of the studio contingent at the bungalow, and I remember he seemed as shocked as I was when I turned the body over. His mouth fell open, and he shot out of there like a jackrabbit.”

“He left?”

“Not for good. He’d been in and out all morning, as a matter of fact. That’s why, once we found out it was murder, it was so tough to find any usable clues. With people like Eyton going in and out, leaving fingerprints on everything in the place, fobbing off with who knows what all, it was hard to trust anything we found that might have been good evidence. We couldn’t even be sure whose cigarettes were in the ashtrays.”