A Cast of Killers (25 page)

“But you knew whose love letters were found, and whose nightgown.”

“Whose,” Cato agreed. “We did, it’s true, know whose those things were. But what we couldn’t be certain of was whether they bore any importance to Taylor’s being killed, or whether they were even in the bungalow before Taylor was killed. It would have been just as easy for something to have been put into the bungalow before we arrived as for something to have been taken out.”

“Planted evidence?” Vidor said, thinking out loud. It hadn’t occurred to him before that Eyton and the others hadn’t merely overlooked the nightgown in their search of the bungalow, but might have purposefully placed the nightgown there. That possibility would certainly be consistent with a studio effort to hide Taylor’s having been homosexual. By filling the bungalow with women’s underthings, and then publishing love letters written to Taylor by women, the studio could have ensured that anyone looking into Taylor’s death would have naturally assumed Taylor was not only heterosexual, but quite a ladies’ man.

“It’s possible,” Cato said, pulling Vidor from his reverie. “Of course, we didn’t know anything was planted, but by the same token, we didn’t know anything wasn’t. Which was just one of the things that made this such a difficult case.”

Vidor consulted the list of questions he had written in his pocket notebook. “What about the mysterious doctor who said Taylor had had a stomach hemorrhage?”

Cato nodded enthusiastically, as though Vidor had said exactly the correct thing. “Another stick in the spokes of justice, and another supposedly unexplained mystery. But let’s think about it. I pull up in the coroner’s truck. We go inside, see all these people, and then discover a bullet hole in the body. Eyton takes off, comes back a few minutes later and says, ‘Hey, we didn’t know he was murdered, this doctor who was here just a few minutes ago said he had a stomach hemorrhage.’

“ ‘What doctor?’ I ask him.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Just some doctor.’

“Just some doctor,” Cato said to Vidor. “Some doctor who just happened by, whom no one claims ever to have seen before, who takes a quick look at the front half of a fully clothed body, says ‘Stomach hemorrhage,’ and then disappears forever.”

“I thought the doctor came after the police arrived,” Vidor said.

“Uh-uh,” Cato said. “No policeman saw him. No policeman even heard about him until I turned over the body. Then all of a sudden we got this story about this doctor who was here just a few minutes ago!”

Some of the pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place. Paramount Pictures didn’t know Taylor had been murdered, simply that he was dead. They were informed by a phone call from Taylor’s own bungalow, and wanting to ensure that no one find out about Taylor’s having been homosexual, they dispatched Eyton and a crew to strip the bungalow of evidence. But then the police arrived and discovered that Taylor had been murdered, which made the studio’s presence in the bungalow doubly suspicious. So Eyton walked outside when the bullet hole was found, then came back with the story about the mysterious doctor, a story that made the studio employees’ being in the bungalow less suspicious. “We were told he died of a stomach hemorrhage.”

Obviously, there never was a mysterious doctor. “So,” he said to Cato, “do you think the questionability of the evidence found at the scene of the crime was the primary reason this case was never solved?”

Cato didn’t have to think to answer the question. “It was a good enough reason we didn’t jump to any immediate conclusions about who killed Taylor. But the deeper the investigation went, obviously, the less bearing this questionability, as you call it, would have on things. By the time I was taken off the case, I had a feeling there were other reasons that kept this case on the books.”

“What were those reasons?”

Cato grinned. “Just conjecture. Nothing I could really tell you.” Cato stood up, began walking around the room. Late-afternoon sun sliced through the blinds on the windows in bright, dust-filled strips. “I’d been running down leads on Edward Sands. You see, Sands was a pretty good suspect. Had already robbed Taylor, knew all about Taylor’s secret past, and was also obviously on the run. I found a girlfriend of his down around Forty-sixth and Figueroa. I was also the one who dug up the details of Sands’s military career.”

“Well, I found out about it. I also found out that, despite what all the newspapers and everybody was saying, there wasn’t any evidence at all that Sands had been blackmailing Taylor. In fact, there wasn’t any evidence at all that Sands had had anything at all to do with Taylor’s death. He certainly didn’t fit the description that what’s-her-name, MacLean, gave us of the person she saw leaving Taylor’s place the night he was killed. Yet, for some reason, Sands was given top priority as a suspect.”

“By Woolwine?” Vidor interjected.

“Woolwine gave the orders,” Cato said. “And when I asked him one time why we were putting so much time and effort into chasing someone who didn’t seem to have anything to do with the murder, the next thing I knew I was taken off the case. After that, we stopped looking for Sands altogether, though according to all the papers, Sands was still Suspect Number One.”

“Is Woolwine the one who kept telling the press Sands was the main suspect?” Vidor asked.

Cato raised the window shades, filling the room with light. “I don’t know what Woolwine told anybody,” he said. “But I know what he didn’t tell anybody. He didn’t tell anybody that just before he took me off the case I saw a report in his office from a police department in Darien, Connecticut, that said that a body was found in the Connecticut River with a self-inflicted bullet wound in the head, and that the body had been positively identified as that of Edward Sands.”

Cato turned to face Vidor just as he finished the sentence. Vidor could barely respond.

“Sands was dead?”

“Six weeks after Taylor,” Cato said. “And Woolwine knew about it. But that didn’t stop us from carrying on a nationwide manhunt for him, in the press at least, for months afterward.”

“Why do you think Woolwine hid the fact of Sands’s death?” Vidor asked.

“Why do you think he did?”

Vidor stood up and seconds later realized that he was pacing the floor like a movie detective. He wondered if he’d ever done that before without noticing it.

“He obviously wanted everyone to believe he was still searching for Sands, to draw their attention away from whatever he was really doing,” Vidor said.

“Which was?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it was, wouldn’t the truth about Sands have done an even better job of distracting public attention? I mean, a man linked to a murder killing himself would have been quite a story.”

“Yes, it would,” Cato said, “but as I just told you, there wasn’t really anything linking him to the murder. If something as definite and real as Sands dying were found out, and Woolwine were, as you suggest, using Sands to distract attention from himself, then Woolwine would have had to find something else for the press and the public to latch onto. That is, if there is anything to this theory of yours.”

“What do you mean, theory of mine?” Vidor asked.

“You must have a theory of your own. You can’t tell me your superior, a high-ranking public official, just sitting on important information relating to a scandalous murder case was something you didn’t give a second thought to.”

“I told you,” Cato said coolly. “I was taken off the case. At that point, any theories I might have had concerning it became irrelevant.”

“Why were you taken off the case?” Vidor asked rhetorically. “Because you knew too much, that’s why. Because you found out that Sands was not only innocent, but he was dead. Because you knew that Woolwine was up to something. Surely you must have given some thought to what that something was.”

“And surely you, Mr. Vidor,” Cato said, “must realize that I am in no position even to be discussing this case with you. It is an open case, and I have already told you more than I should have.”

“Taylor was killed forty-five years ago,” Vidor said. “Wouldn’t you like to see this case solved?”

“I’d love to see it solved. But I don’t see how my theorizing about something my superior may or may not have done nearly half a century ago is going to do that.”

“Then how about if I theorize?” Vidor said.

Cato opened his arms in a be-my-guest gesture. Vidor continued pacing. He said, “Woolwine had good strong evidence against two people, Mary Miles Minter and Charlotte Shelby.”

He looked at Cato, whose stone expression betrayed nothing at all.

Vidor continued, “Yet he did nothing with that evidence. I believe the reason he did nothing was that he discovered more, stronger evidence—evidence that superseded what he had on Minter and Shelby. I don’t know what that evidence was, but I believe that Woolwine kept the supposed manhunt for Sands alive to hide what he was really investigating. How’s that theory sound?”

Vidor was impressed with Cato. Just like Cahill, he had mastered the art of conveying information without really saying anything. Covering his tracks. By not questioning Vidor’s cold statement that Woolwine had had evidence against Minter and Shelby, Cato had silently, innocently, corroborated it. And now, he had not denied Vidor’s theory about his former superior, but had simply told Vidor what Vidor already knew: that there were still holes in his story.

Vidor thanked Cato for his time. As they walked to the front door, he turned to the former detective as though one final thought had just occurred to him.

“I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Was there any talk or anything in those days of Taylor’s having been homosexual?”

“Homosexual?” Cato said, following it once again with his boisterous laugh. “Hell, you wouldn’t think so from all that stuff about nightgowns and panties and everything, would you? But who knows? I’m all the time surprised to learn someone I never suspected is a queer. He could have been, I guess. But who could really say for sure?”

32

Vidor knew he should have come to George Hopkins earlier. The idea had crossed his mind many times since it first occurred to him in New York, but he had always set it aside, hoping something would turn up in his research that would make it unnecessary. He feared the interview would be far more uncomfortable than any he’d ever conducted, and also that it might prove to be a complete waste of time, but sitting in his T-Bird on a quiet Hollywood side street, he could think of no one else who might be able to answer his question about William Desmond Taylor’s sexuality.

It was Gloria Swanson who had told Vidor that George Hopkins had been a close friend of Taylor’s. “Taylor gave him his first big job in pictures,” she’d said. And Vidor, who worked with Hopkins in 1949 on
Beyond the Forest,
knew well that Hopkins was homosexual. He also knew that Hopkins’s having been close to Taylor was not evidence that Taylor himself was homosexual, but he hoped their friendship had been such that Hopkins would know one way or the other.

But how was Vidor going to go about asking him? With no clear plan in mind, he walked to Hopkins’s apartment.

“King.” Hopkins welcomed Vidor with a friendly hug. “It’s good to see you again. Come in. I have some wine on ice.”

Hopkins’s apartment reflected his years as a set designer. The man who had co-created Rick’s Cafe in
Casablanca
knew what he was doing. There was no unused space, and yet no feeling of clutter. Over a living room mantel were his three Academy Awards for set decoration and art direction—
A
Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady,
and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
--along with a total of nine framed announcements of Oscar nominations. Atop a brightly polished piano sat a collection of silver-framed photographs, each perfectly in its place. Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, James Dean. Set apart from the others in a magnificent enameled art deco frame was a portrait that drew Vidor’s attention immediately. The inscription on the photo read: TO MY FRIEND GEORGE HOPKINS, WHOSE FRIENDSHIP I VALUE AND WHOSE WORK I ADMIRE, SINCERELY, WILLIAM D. TAYLOR.

“The victim,” Hopkins said, as he stepped up beside Vidor with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

“I’m sorry?” Vidor said, missing Hopkins’s meaning. Hopkins indicated the Taylor photograph. “The victim. Of this mystery you’re writing.”

“Oh, yes,” Vidor said, accepting one of the wine glasses.

“A great Sauvignon blanc from Mendocino County,” Hopkins said, pouring. “Like to sit down?”

They sat facing each other over an ornately hand carved coffee table. Hopkins set the wine on an otherwise empty silver serving dish.

“So tell me about your story,” Hopkins said.

Vidor tasted the wine, found it precisely to his liking. He set the glass on the silver dish and told Hopkins more than he had intended to tell him, including his theory about the studio’s having actively engaged in a cover-up of some kind—he specifically did not mention the word “homosexual,” wanting to draw Hopkins into his trust before dropping that bomb—and Woolwine’s having not acted upon the evidence against Minter and Shelby.

Hopkins sat silent when he finished. He poured himself a second glass of wine. “Well,” he said, “I certainly knew nothing of this evidence, but I’m certainly not surprised by it. Hardly anything would surprise me about those two. Especially the mother.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I think she dreamed up the whole idea of the stage mother. Wouldn’t let little Mary out of her sight. I don’t think Mary even existed, for all practical purposes, without Charlotte stuck to her side. Charlotte was like a vampire bat, sucking her life right out of little Mary’s veins. I never did put it past her to kill Bill. Mary really loved him, and just like everything else—acting, stardom, money—everything Mary got, Charlotte had to have for herself.”