A Cast of Killers (30 page)

Vidor pulled off the freeway in Oxnard, some fifty miles north of Los Angeles. He followed the detailed directions he had written in his pocket notebook, through large strawberry and celery fields to a quiet shaded street where he parked in front of a newly built white frame house. Two Doberman pinschers surveyed the car without barking from behind a chain-link fence.

Vidor let himself out, then opened Colleen’s door. They stepped to the gate in the fence. From the house a voice said, “They won’t bite.”

A man stood in the shadowed door frame. He called a single command to the Dobermans, who happily backed away. Vidor opened the gate, and he and Colleen walked toward the house.

The man in the door frame stepped onto the porch. He was a big man dressed in coarse chinos and a lumber-jack’s flannel shirt, the sleeves cut well above the elbow. Vidor looked at him, then stopped in his tracks. On the man’s thick left arm was a familiar tattoo.

“You’re the man I met the day they tore down Taylor’s bungalow,” Vidor said.

The tattooed man was just as surprised to see Vidor. “And you’re the man with the doorknob,” he said. He stepped off the porch to greet his visitors. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Mr. Vidor. I’m Leroy Sanderson.”

“Call me King,” Vidor said as they shook hands. He introduced Colleen, then marveled with Sanderson at all that had happened since the day they had made strangers’ small talk over the rubble of Taylor’s bungalow.

“I could have saved myself five months’ work,” Vidor said with a laugh, “if I’d known who you were that day.”

“I wondered who you were that day,” Sanderson said, leading them inside. “You didn’t look like just a souvenir hunter.”

Sanderson’s wife, Rosalie, had prepared a cold-fried-chicken lunch for them. They sat at the kitchen table, trading stories of Hollywood and criminal investigation. Many of Sanderson’s stories covered both topics, involving such names as Jean Harlow and Errol Flynn. The subject of William Desmond Taylor came up only after they had moved to the living room for coffee.

“After I talked with you,” Vidor told Sanderson, “I looked into some of the things you said were matters of public record. You were right, the Shelbys were quite a family.”

“Yes, they were. Did you find what you were looking for?”

Vidor noticed that both Sanderson and his wife were staring at him, as if equally interested in his answer.

“I found out it was Margaret who spilled the beans that her mother murdered Taylor. But I didn’t find out why Buron Fitts didn’t go after Shelby.”

“And you think I can answer that for you,” Sanderson said.

“Well, I thought that might just be what you were looking into when Fitts took you off the case. Those odd things you said were going on in the D.A.’ s office.”

Sanderson picked up a humidor from an end table. He offered his guests a cigar. They passed. He lit one himself, then spoke.

“When Margaret came to us, we didn’t know what to think at first. But she had so many details, so many little facts that fit so perfectly with what other people—the chauffeur, the secretary, the cook, others—had told us, that we had to believe she was telling us the truth. Even though some of it was pretty fantastic. Do you know, for example, about Minter and Kirkwood?”

“Jimmy Kirkwood?” Colleen Moore said.

Sanderson nodded, puffed his cigar. “He was Mary’s first love. She was fifteen, he was thirty-five. One day he took her into the hills outside the Flying A Studios up in Santa Barbara and performed a mock wedding ceremony. He said that that made them officially married in the eyes of God, so there wasn’t any reason not to consummate their relationship. Mary got pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” Neither Vidor nor Colleen had ever heard even a suggestion of this.

“Did she have the baby?” Colleen asked.

“No. Charlotte figured out what was going on. Mary was gaining weight, feeling sick all the time. Shelby finally intercepted a letter from Kirkwood and figured it out.”

“And she threatened Kirkwood,” Vidor guessed. “With the pistol.”

“That was one of the reasons she bought the pistol. The first of many of her threats. Hell,” Sanderson began to laugh, the laugh turning into a cigar-smoke cough, “she even threatened to kill a dog once that sniffed around Mary too much. But after she threatened Kirkwood, she immediately got Mary an abortion and then gathered all of Kirkwood’s and Mary’s letters together and put them in a safety deposit box.”

“It’s very possible,” Sanderson said. “Of course, that’s something we may never know for sure. But we do know that Margaret was telling the truth about him and Minter. We checked out Shelby’s safety deposit box. Kirkwood’s letters were all there. And Mary’s. Along with such other interesting items as canceled checks written to Carl Stockdale.”

“What did Margaret say about Taylor?” Colleen asked.

“That Minter was in love with him, just as she’d been with Kirkwood. She had to sneak out of the house to see him, and whenever Charlotte found out about it, or even suspected something, she locked Minter in her room. That’s why Minter tried to kill herself that time. The day Taylor was killed, Shelby overheard her talking to Taylor on the phone, saying she wanted to run away. Shelby thought she and Taylor were planning to run away together so she locked her up.”

“How’d she get out?” Vidor said.

“The grandmother. And as soon as she was out, she hightailed it to Taylor’s. She was there, near as we could figure, before Mabel Normand even arrived.”

Colleen and Vidor glanced at each other. Vidor had been right about Minter’s being in the bungalow during Normand’s visit.

“You know another sad thing,” Sanderson said, then added to Vidor’s dossier on Charlotte Shelby’s wickedness. “For the rest of the grandmother’s life, Shelby blamed her for Taylor’s death. Her own mother! Said if she hadn’t let Minter out of her room, it never would have happened.”

Vidor helped himself to a coffee refill. “So Shelby went looking for her,” he said.

Sanderson continued his story. “She made some phone calls first. Marshall Neilan, Marjorie Berger. Then she went off looking for Mary. Her first stop was Berger’s office. Mary wasn’t there.”

“Then Berger called Taylor,” Vidor said. “Moreno too. Only he had called about Taylor’s appearance on behalf of Peavey.”

“I don’t know about Moreno,” Sanderson said, flicking the ash from his cigar. “But while all of this was taking place at Taylor’s bungalow, Margaret said her mother went to the basement and came up with her long coat and muffler, and her pistol. Then she took off. An hour later, Minter came home hysterical. She climbed into bed with Margaret and told her what had happened, even though the two sisters rarely even communicated. After Normand left the bungalow, Minter walked down from the bedroom, and Shelby was already there. She had waited back behind the MacLeans’ place for Normand to leave.”

“That’s who their maid heard,” Vidor interjected.

“Right. Shelby walked in while Taylor was walking Normand to her car. Chances are she had no idea Minter was even there until she came walking down the stairs. That was all the proof Shelby needed that something was going on between Minter and Taylor. So when Taylor came back, she killed him.”

Just at that moment something occurred to Vidor that he had not thought of before. “You know,” he said, “this explains the different descriptions eyewitnesses gave of the person they saw leaving the bungalow. The woman dressed as a man that Faith MacLean saw was Shelby in her long coat. And the other neighbor, Hazel Gillon, who said she definitely saw a woman, must have seen Minter. Both their descriptions were right on target; they were just describing two different people.”

“So now that you knew all this, why didn’t Buron Fitts go after Shelby? Did she get to him? Was Margaret’s testimony not enough? Did they still need some kind of hard evidence?”

“They had hard evidence,” Sanderson said. “Along with the check stubs to Stockdale and finding out that Shelby’s other alibi, Jim Smith, was one of Woolwine’s own men—Margaret showed us shells from Shelby’s gun. The very shells the chauffeur unloaded and hid in the basement after Minter’s suicide attempt.”

Sanderson set his cigar in an ashtray. “Here’s where it really gets interesting,” he said. “In August of that same year, nineteen twenty-two, the grandmother, Julia Miles, took the gun with her back to Louisiana and threw it into a bayou near her house. Margaret gave us the name and address of neighbors, a doctor and his wife, who would know where she threw it.”

But Vidor could tell by Sanderson’s expression that this wasn’t the explanation. It took him only seconds to arrive at an alternative.

“If Shelby didn’t get to Fitts, maybe Fitts used all the evidence he had to get to Shelby.”

Sanderson leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You see, Mr. Vidor—King—D.A. Fitts had worked for Woolwine back in nineteen twenty-two. He knew damn well Shelby killed Taylor, but he kept his mouth shut, probably protecting his job. He did the same thing through the Asa Keyes administration. Then when he became top man himself, he wanted a little action from Shelby’s bank accounts like his predecessors had been getting. So he let Shelby know he could put her behind bars, and got himself a little extra income. In exchange, he took care of the evidence for her.”

“That’s why the police files are so incomplete,” Vidor said. “That’s what happened to the nightgown and everything. Fitts got rid of anything Woolwine and Keyes hadn’t.”

“Once and for all,” said Sanderson. “That was his deal with Shelby.”

Vidor sat back in his chair. Finally, the entire picture was clear to him. Every question had been answered, every mystery solved dawn to its smallest detail.

“Think about it. The gun’s gone. So are the shells, the nightgown, the hairs from Minter’s head, the Stockdale check stubs, every piece of hard evidence that ever popped up in the case. All carefully disposed of. What’s the only thing that could solve this case once and for all?”

“I don’t know if she would or not. But she certainly won’t tell the police. When Thad Brown found out you were looking into the case, we decided you might be the last chance at ever solving it. You knew Minter. You were part of her world. You knew Taylor, too. We thought maybe, just maybe, she would say something to you. And without her, well, you’d have one hell of a time trying to tell your story. Buron Fitts isn’t about to sit still while you destroy his career.”

Colleen saw the pained look in the face of her companion. “He’s got a point, you know, King.”

Vidor nodded grimly.

It was late afternoon when Vidor and Colleen left. Vidor honked the T-Bird’s horn at the Sandersons and pulled away. He felt a heavy burden on his shoulders. He would have to confront Mary Miles Minter about what happened on the evening of February 1, 1922.

He drove south on the San Diego Freeway. On the seat beside him, Colleen Moore rode in silence. When they reached Los Angeles, Vidor drove past the Sunset Boulevard exit that led to Beverly Hills. He turned east on the Santa Monica Freeway, heading toward downtown. Still Colleen said nothing. Finally, Vidor exited from the freeway, drove along Wilshire Boulevard for a while, then turned up a steep dark street. He stopped before a vacant lot. He turned off the car.

Colleen looked at the lot, a smooth expanse of fresh asphalt.

“Taylor’s bungalow,” she said. A sign in one corner promised a supermarket coming soon. “Sure looks different than it did in nineteen twenty-two.”