A Cast of Killers (27 page)

“You see, Mr. Vidor, I’ve heard every theory imaginable about Taylor, and they all amount to the same thing: nothing without evidence. From our telephone conversation I got the impression you might know something more ... substantial.”

“Well, I know Edward Sands didn’t do it,” Vidor said, deciding to reveal his hand and see how “substantial” Fitts found it. “And I know Thomas Woolwine knew Sands didn’t do it, although Woolwine kept insisting he was looking for Sands even after he knew for a fact that Sands was dead.”

Vidor could tell by Fitts’s facial expression that the man was surprised by Vidor’s knowledge.

“And I also know, as did Mr. Woolwine, that not only did Mabel Normand not kill Taylor, but she wasn’t at the bungalow the morning after, as all those reports that ultimately ended her career said she was. She was no more guilty than, say, the mysterious doctor who showed up the next morning, who, by the way, I know never even existed. Does any of this strike you as the least bit ... substantial?”

Fitts hesitated as the waiter served their drinks, then said, “I assume there’s more?”

“Plenty,” Vidor said. “I know that all the evidence found in Taylor’s bungalow, evidence Woolwine said he hoped would lead to Taylor’s killer, either never even existed, or was selectively planted in the bungalow not to lead anywhere, except to the conclusion that Taylor was having affairs with Normand and Mary Miles Minter, and other women you might care to name. And I know that Woolwine, while paying public lip service to all this evidence, also knew it was bogus. Taylor wasn’t sleeping with Normand or Minter or any other woman you might care to name. Young boys and men were more to his taste, a fact, too, that Woolwine was well aware of.”

Vidor sipped his drink. Fitts, pouring his martini over the rocks, said, “This is very interesting, Mr. Vidor, your attributing so much knowledge to one of my predecessors, a man I don’t believe you ever met yourself, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” Vidor said.

“I see. Well, what else did Mr. Woolwine know?”

Vidor decided this was it. “He knew that neither Mary Miles Minter nor her mother, Charlotte Shelby, had legitimate alibis for the night Taylor was killed. He knew that Minter was in love with Taylor, and that Shelby had threatened Taylor unless he left Mary alone. He knew that Taylor, even though he did leave Mary alone sexually, went out of his way to help the girl, who—God knew, as well as Mr. Woolwine—needed help, with her crazy, jealous mother haunting her like a living nightmare.

“He knew Shelby didn’t believe for a second that Taylor’s attentions to Mary could be anything but lustful, a situation that doubly angered her because she was attracted to Taylor herself and could think of no other reason for Taylor to have snubbed her advances than that he was already having an affair with her daughter.”

Vidor realized this last statement was still conjecture, but it made sense to him, and he voiced it to see if it sparked any different reaction from Fitts than anything else he was saying. Fitts’s expression remained fixed, fascinated.

“Woolwine knew,” Vidor continued, “that Shelby, though she claimed the whole family had been at home together all night, was actively looking for Minter the evening Taylor was shot. And Shelby certainly knew enough to look for her at Taylor’s, because Mary had told her that she was going to marry Taylor. It wasn’t true, of course, just something Mary said in retaliation for Shelby’s ordering her never to see Taylor again. But Shelby didn’t know this; as far as she knew, Taylor was actually going to take her daughter away from her. Or should I say her meal ticket? And Woolwine must have known how this would make Shelby feel—the man she’d told her friends was in love with her turning around and marrying her daughter.”

“Must have known?” Fitts said, his trained prosecutor’s ear picking up the speculation in Vidor’s speech.

Vidor conceded the point by tipping his glass.

“I guess I’m attributing intelligence as well as knowledge to your predecessor,” he said. “Either way, Woolwine knew of Shelby’s, shall we say, ambivalence toward Taylor, calling him a class-A gentleman on the one hand while threatening his life on the other. And he also knew that Shelby owned a gun, and knew how to use it, as well as the fact, substantiated by her own secretary, that she had had the gun with her and had sworn her intentions to use it one night when she stormed Taylor’s place only to find Minter not there.

“So you see, Woolwine knew there was both motive and opportunity for Shelby to have killed Taylor. When she couldn’t find her daughter that night, she started making calls. She called Marjorie Berger, Minter—and Taylor’s—accountant. Berger knew she was on a rampage. So Berger called Taylor to warn him. And she called Marshall Neilan to tell him what was going on, which was why he later asked Minter if she knew about the murder.

“Then Shelby went to Taylor’s place, but instead of Minter, she found Mabel Normand there, and thought Taylor was sleeping with Normand as well as Minter. So Shelby hid behind the bungalow until Normand left, at which time Minter came downstairs from where she’d been hiding in Taylor’s bedroom. That’s why Taylor’s door was open when Normand arrived: Minter had just arrived also, and didn’t want Normand to find her there.

“So when Shelby saw Minter come down the stairs, all her suspicions were confirmed. She had caught Taylor and Minter together. So she walked inside and made good on her threat to kill Taylor if he didn’t leave Minter alone.”

“The same way I know that he pulled Ray Cato off the job when he started closing in on what was really going on. The same way I know there never were any pornographic pictures. The same way I know Woolwine had in his possession three hairs taken off the jacket Taylor was killed in, hairs Woolwine knew came from Mary Miles Minter’s head. Should I go on?”

Fitts shook his head. “I get it,” he said. “You’ve been talking with Sanderson.”

Vidor hoped his face didn’t reflect his absolute wonder at Fitts’s casual statement. He decided immediately, though, that if everything he’d just said to Fitts made Fitts think of Sanderson, then Sanderson would be the next person he would try to interview.

“I’ve talked with lots of people,” Vidor said, still covering his tracks. “But there’s one question no one’s been able to answer for me, and I thought you, having been district attorney working on this case yourself, might be able to help.”

“What’s the question?” Fitts asked.

“Just this. Woolwine had the goods on Shelby and Minter. But he didn’t indict them. He barely even questioned them. I want to know why.”

Fitts signaled a passing waiter for another martini. “What makes you think I can answer that question? You’re the one who seems to know so much about Woolwine.”

“Yes,” Vidor said. “But you’re the one who took over his job, who put his immediate successor Asa Keyes behind bars, the district attorney who raised the office’s conviction rate to eighty-two percent, and you’re also the man who once claimed to have new developments in the Taylor investigation but never mentioned them again after being ambushed one night in your driveway.”

Fitts looked away, and Vidor knew he had hit a nerve.

“What were those developments?” Vidor asked. “What’s the one missing link in my story? Were Shelby and Minter innocent? Did someone come forward with new evidence that I don’t know about? Why has this case remained unsolved after all these years despite all these apparently uninvestigated loose ends?”

Fitts continued looking past Vidor into the dining room, as if looking anxiously for the waiter to bring their food.

“As I told you at the beginning, Mr. Vidor, I have heard a lot of theories concerning this case. And yours is certainly interesting. No doubt it would make a wonderful movie. But as I also said at the beginning, theories are worthless. Only proof has any value.”

“Absolutely,” said Vidor. “And that is exactly what I’m asking if you can provide me with. You must know something that would help me. I don’t imagine you were gunned down for nothing.”

“All I can say is what I’ve already said. You give me proof,” Fitts said, “and I’ll see that it is dealt with accordingly. But I can’t give you anything. As long as this case is on the books, I am sworn to reveal nothing about it to anyone. I’m sorry.”

Fitts sat back as lunch arrived. His exaggerated attention to the waiter told Vidor he had said all he intended to say. But as far as Vidor was concerned, the interview had been successful. Fitts might have been sworn not to give out information on open police cases, but he had given Vidor a name, Sanderson. Vidor didn’t know how much Sanderson knew about the case, but he apparently knew as much as Vidor. But whether he would talk was one question; and what Vidor would tell him was another.

Vidor picked up his knife and fork. While cutting the head off his pan-fried trout, he looked out the window just as his wife Betty stepped onto the seventeenth green, putter glistening in the sun. He watched her line up a long putt as her partner, with whom she played regularly, manned the flagpole. Vidor watched her putt but turned away without seeing whether she had sunk it or not. William Desmond Taylor aside, he had a lot of thinking to do.

34

A month had passed since Vidor had moved into the office. Most of his clothes and necessary belongings were there, crammed into what little storage space yet another rearranging session had created, though he still had to make the occasional walk up the driveway for things, usually when Betty was out. Thelma Carr had accepted the arrangement without comment, but Vidor still felt uncomfortable about displaying personal habits and items in the office. He rose, showered, dressed, and concealed the evidence of his full-time occupancy of the office before she arrived each morning, and conducted business as though things were as they had always been.

This morning, two days after his lunch with Buron Fitts, Vidor sat on the back porch of the guest house and watched as Betty walked her new Toby from the backyard and loaded her into her white Lincoln Continental. He knew she was taking the dog to the Hollywood Dog Training School; Betty had slipped the bill through the mail chute of the office just before Vidor had stepped outside. She got into the car and drove slowly down the driveway, her twenty-year habit of waving to Vidor as she passed his office already broken. Colleen Moore was due in town in just a few days, and Vidor knew he had to do something quickly about the wall of silence that had sprung up between himself and Betty. They hadn’t spoken since she had told him to move out, and yet, though he still had the letter he’d written to her in the top drawer of his desk, he couldn’t bring himself to give it to her. He would have to face her soon; he didn’t want Colleen to arrive and find him still indecisive.

As Betty’s car disappeared between the pines down La Altura Drive, Thelma Carr’s voice rose from inside the office. “I’ve got Leroy Sanderson on the line.”

Vidor stepped inside. He shut the door between his office and Carr’s and sat at his desk. “Mr. Sanderson?” he said into the phone. “This is King Vidor calling from Los Angeles.”

“Ah, Mr. Vidor,” Sanderson’s voice said with an almost “Aha!” tone of discovery. “The man making the movie about William Desmond Taylor. Thad Brown said he gave you my number.”

“Yes, he did. I was wondering if I might take a few minutes of your time, ask you a few questions about the case.”

“Of course, though I’m not sure I could be of any great help. From what Brown told me I’d say you’re already one of the experts on it.”

“I have been doing a lot of research,” Vidor said. “And a couple of days ago, Buron Fitts mentioned your name, and I thought I’d give you a call.”

“You could say that. What did Fitts say about me?” “Nothing. He just mentioned your name, led me to believe you might be able to help with my research.”

“Well, I’d be more than happy to talk with you, Mr. Vidor, and help in any way I can, though I can’t imagine why Fitts would mention my name in relation to the Taylor case. Fitts personally took me off that case.”

“Did that direction,” Vidor said, “lead you to whatever it was Fitts had been planning to announce before the attempt was made on his life?”

“What do you mean, ‘planning to announce’?” Sanderson said.

“Fitts was going to make an announcement about the case, but changed his mind after being ambushed by gunmen in his driveway.”

“No,” Sanderson said with conviction. “Fitts wasn’t going to make any announcement. Or if he was, I never heard anything about it, and to tell you the truth I can’t imagine what it would have been. When he took me off the case, it was because he knew I was looking into some, let’s say, odd things that seemed to have been going on in the D.A.’s office. Not just Fitts’s own office necessarily, but back in the Keyes administration, and the Woolwine. And to my knowledge, which I trust more than anything that ever crossed Buron Fitts’s lips, no one else was actively pursuing any other avenues of investigation in relation to the case. So the only announcement he could have made was either that nothing new had turned up in umpteen years, or that he had decided to stop me from what I was doing before I got a little too close to home. Besides, announcement or not, Fitts’s getting shot didn’t have anything to do with the Taylor case. He was shot by a bunch of angry union members for a riot he and some of his henchmen had become involved in.”