Silent Murders (16 page)

Someone else was dead. And it had been no accident.

I pulled the car over to the curb and leaped out, leaving it idling. “Wait here. I won’t be a moment,” I cried to Mildred, and before she could protest, I was hurrying toward the entrance, past cowboys, a princess, several women in bathrobes, a couple knights in armor, dozens of technicians, one director—you can always tell directors by their tall boots and riding breeches—and a handful of cops. Finally I spied a familiar face. Standing apart from the crowd in the shade of an orange tree with his hat on backward was a young cameraman I knew from a couple of parties.

“What’s happened, Bob?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was something over at the
Cobra
set. They’re saying two people are dead.” He looked above my head at someone inside the gate. “Look, there’s Sylvie Baxter. She’s Henabery’s script girl.” Bob didn’t have to tell me that Henabery was the director of
Cobra
. We all knew who was directing every film at every major studio in Hollywood.

Bob and I pushed toward her through the crush and, in the confusion, I got past the Paramount guards. Sylvie looked dazed. Tears had streaked her cheeks with kohl. Bob patted her shoulder in a brotherly way. “There, there, Sylvie. Buck up, girl. What is all this about? Who has died?”

At that moment, a black car rolled by us and I could see Rudolph Valentino and his wife, Natacha Rambova, in the backseat. The chauffeur tooted his horn until the guards at the gate parted the crowd enough to let them pass through it. Bob didn’t have to tell me that Valentino was starring in
Cobra.
We all knew who was starring in every film at every major studio in Hollywood.

The sight of Valentino uncorked Sylvie’s tears, and Bob let her sob a moment on his shoulder. When she regained her voice she said, “I told the police, I just walked in to get another cup of coffee for Mr. Valentino, and I saw them on the floor. I thought they were both dead.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Faye Gordon. Paul Corrigan.” She swallowed hard.

My hand flew to my mouth in dismay. I’d been eating dinner with them just last night! And both had attended Bruno Heilmann’s party last weekend. I remembered that Faye had spoken about having a small part in
Cobra,
not the starring role she wanted—that had gone to twenty-seven-year-old Nita Naldi—but a part nonetheless. I wasn’t aware that Paul Corrigan had had a role at all. At least, he hadn’t mentioned it last night.

Sylvie claimed my attention again. “I screamed and everyone came running. The Paramount doctor rushed over and said Corrigan was dead, but Miss Gordon was still alive. She was able to tell them that the coffee tasted odd. The police took the coffee. It must’ve been poisoned. And I almost … I mean, I almost filled a cup for Mr. Valentino. Dear God, I almost poisoned Rudolph Valentino!” She swayed on her feet until Bob pulled her up against his chest. “I should have known!” she wailed. “I saw a woman wearing a hat with a peacock feather in it just this morning!”

Peacock feathers. The unluckiest of omens for theater folk. Worse than wild birds flying into windows. No actress would have worn a hat with a peacock feather into the studio; it had to have been a visitor. Why the gate guard hadn’t stopped her, I couldn’t imagine. Someone would lose his job over that.

Outside the gate, policemen and directors were urging everyone to return to their sets. I made my way back to the car where Mildred Young was waiting.

“Has someone been hurt?” she asked.

“Dead.”

“Another Hollywood murder?” she said primly. “I’ve been reading the newspapers. No need to distress yourself telling me about it. Doubtless I’ll hear more than I want to know soon enough.”

I flashed her a grateful smile and steered the car left on Santa Monica toward the green gates of Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, my mind churning faster than the engine gears.

The moment I had delivered Mildred Young to Frank, I went searching for Douglas Fairbanks. He was not filming this morning, and I found him in his office in the long, low building that fronted on Santa Monica.

“I need to see Mr. Fairbanks at once,” I said to his secretary, a capable matron who knew me well after my stint as Douglas’s assistant.

“He’s on the telephone, and he’s expecting some—” she began, then, taking stock of my agitation, changed her mind. “Go on in.”

Douglas set down the receiver and stared at me like a defendant waiting for a jury verdict. I blurted out the news. He paled. “As far as I know,” I finished, “Paul Corrigan is dead. I’m not sure about Faye Gordon.”

Calmly he picked up the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Get me the hospital.” In three minutes he had his answer. “Someone poisoned the coffee. Corrigan died. Faye is hanging on.”

I had to ask. “Do they know yet what sort of poison it was?”

Our eyes met over the words neither of us dared voice aloud. “Not yet,” he said finally. But we both knew what they would find.

Bichloride of mercury. The words fairly danced in the air between us.

A popular choice for suicides, bichloride of mercury was commonly prescribed by doctors treating syphilis. In such cases, it was taken in minuscule doses or by injection. I knew it was odorless and colorless and supposedly had a metallic taste, but that could easily have been masked by the flavor of strong coffee.

I also knew as well as Douglas what would happen after the laboratory had determined mercury bichloride to be the poison. Headlines around the world would scream, and all thoughts would leap to Jack Pickford and his late wife, Olive Thomas, who had died in Paris under such suspicious circumstances after drinking bichloride of mercury. Then they would speed straight to Mary Pickford. She was entirely innocent and uninvolved, but that counted for nothing. Fatty Arbuckle had been innocent, too, and he’d been ruined, his movies banned by his own studio. I felt sick to my stomach.

The secretary gave a discreet knock and cracked the door. “Excuse me, Mr. Fairbanks, but Mr. Schenck and Mr. Keaton are here.”

“Mary…” said Douglas feebly. “Find Mary and let her know. She and Faye are … well … and tell her ‘by the clock.’”

19

The gang fight was in full swing when I reached the
Little Annie Rooney
alley. As I watched America’s Sweetheart leap on the back of a young tough and flail away with her fists, director Beaudine talked through the scene, a megaphone at his mouth so the actors could hear him over the grinding racket of the Mitchell cameras.

“Move in closer, Spec. Add a little more life there! Throw something else. Okay, Joe, pull her off now. Get ready for the cops—look left on three. One, two, three. Good. Cut.” A man holding the tail slate recorded the scene number and the cameras stopped.

I approached Beaudine for permission to interrupt. When he learned I brought a message from Mr. Fairbanks, he nodded me onto the set. Miss Pickford motioned me over to a crate in front of a slapdash fence in the tenement alley. The gang children flopped to the ground for a quick game of jacks. As I picked my way over broken plaster of paris bottles, felt bricks, and balsawood clubs, someone turned off the fan, and the laundry above our heads, which had been flapping like pennants in the wind, hung limp.

She was dressed like a scarecrow in a pompom hat, with the usual whiteface makeup to prevent skin from looking too dark on film. I apologized for the interruption, told her what I knew about Paul Corrigan and Faye Gordon, and repeated Douglas’s private code, “by the clock.” I didn’t know what it meant, but it meant something significant, that was clear. She sat motionless for a long moment, her face like alabaster, but I could feel her grief at the loss of her friend. Too much the professional to react publicly, she thanked me for bringing the information, then signaled to Beaudine that she was ready to resume filming. I stepped out of the way and nearly collided with the picture’s collaborator.

“I just heard,” David said grimly.

“Bad news always travels like fire in the wind.”

“You look like you could use a stiff drink.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Come over to the commissary with me before you go back to work; I’ll buy you some coffee—er, maybe something else.” And before I could protest that I didn’t have time, David had me by the elbow and was escorting me behind the tenement set through the back lots toward the studio commissary.

“They’re going to be all over her by tomorrow,” he said, ordering two cherry crushes. “Tell me what you know.”

I did. I was brief. Honestly, it wasn’t much.

“Thanks for the drink,” I said. “No hard feelings about last night?”

He shrugged. “Somehow a bruised ego seems pretty trivial when people you just ate dinner with are getting bumped off. Besides, we’re going to see each other now and then in this town. There’s no sense in nursing grudges, is there?”

“None at all,” I said, a little irked at how fast he’d recovered from my rejection. “But I have to go now, really. I need to drive the new makeup assistant to her hotel and then get back to work.”

We left the commissary together. “You going to Heilmann’s funeral tomorrow?” David asked.

“I thought I would.”

“You were a friend of his?”

I listened for a note of jealousy in his question but couldn’t hear it. “Only an acquaintance. I just thought I might learn something by being there.”

“Can I offer you a ride to the cemetery? I’m escorting Mary and Lottie for Doug. He can’t go.”

“No, thanks, I’m going to walk over with one of the girls who lives with me. But what’s your interest in all this, anyway? You didn’t know Heilmann, did you?”

“You’re kidding me, right? I got a hundred thousand clams sunk in
Little Annie Rooney
and you’re asking why I care about the Pickford reputation? If the fickle public spurns this picture, I’ll be joining the drugstore cowboys on the corner of Gower Gulch waiting for work.”

He gave me a grin, and I couldn’t help but match it. I could picture him strutting about in sheepskin chaps and spurs, chewing tobacco with the other hopefuls who congregated every day at Sunset and Gower, hoping to be picked up for a bit part in a western.

“You’d get work. You’ve got that cowboy look.”

We worked late that night on the cantina scene, and when Frank finally dismissed the crew, I practically flew home. Would there be a telegram from Angie waiting for me?

Much was against it. There were many Chicagoans—eight, ten, twelve trains a day went in each direction, depending on the day of the week and the season—and Angie could have met the wrong one. She could have missed the telegram at the Riordin and received it at the Majestic Theater too late. She could have met the right train but missed Droopy Mouth in the crowd. By the time I reached the house, anticipation was eating me alive.

“Hi, Jessie,” called Lillian when I came through the front door. “Boy brought you a telegram. In the mail basket.”

Taking a deep breath, I ripped open the yellow sheet.

SAW DROOPY TAKE CAB SOUTH MARRIED WALTER JULY ANGIE

Exactly what I needed to know! Finally, things were starting to make some sense. I counted the words and laughed out loud. Trust Angie to keep it under ten for the cheapest rate. And she’d managed to get Walter to marry her, had she? Good old Walter. I’d have to send them a present.

In all the excitement, I almost forgot about my mother’s playbills. But there was the unstamped envelope I’d mailed from Esther’s, safe and sound in the bottom of the basket, returned to sender for lack of postage. I ran upstairs to my room where I could open it in private. I didn’t want the girls to see me cry.

A minute later, I heard quick steps on the front porch. The screen door banged open and slammed shut, and Myrna came pounding up the stairs two at a time. I smiled as she burst into my room.

“I got the part! I got the part!” she sang, throwing herself into my arms for a congratulatory hug. “I got the part!” Twirling on her toes, she chanted the magical words several more times before collapsing on my bed in peels of laughter.

I laughed just to see her pleasure. “Catch your breath, now, and tell me about it.”

With a grin as big as a rainbow, she sat up and folded her shapely legs beneath her. Not for the first time, I was struck by her artless sexuality. No question in my mind, Myrna had enough of “It” to be an actress. Maybe even a star.

“The company is Western Compass Studios. It’s small but decent. It’s over in Culver City, and they’ve made a few pictures.”

“Which ones?”

“I forgot to ask. This one’s about Greek mythology, a story about Zeus. I’m one of his romantic interests named Io. There were a dozen girls testing Monday when I was there—and I don’t know how many others on other days—but I got the part on the spot. Not an extra, a real part, with sixty dollars a week and my name in the credits!”

“In letters as big as the Hollywoodland sign, I hope! Seriously, sixty dollars? That’s terrific, Myrna. I’m thrilled for you. What did your mother think?”

“She’s very, very happy for me.” Her grin faded. “Daddy wouldn’t have been … all entertainment was burlesque to him. He didn’t approve of California.”

“Then how did your family come to move—”

“When I was a child, Mother got pneumonia, and Montana winters are so cold that Daddy sent her south with me and my brother to recuperate. Mother hated the cold, and she loved Los Angeles. We had a darling house in Ocean Park, and we moved back and forth between Montana and California for a few years, always wintering here. Then, after my father died, we returned to California for good and moved to the little house on Delmas Terrace.”

“Will you go back there now that you’re going to be working in Culver City?”

She shook her head. “Not if I can help it. I’m a grown woman; I don’t want to be a burden on Mother. Besides, I haven’t been signed to a studio contract or anything like that. This is just one part in one film. It’ll be over in a few weeks. But Johnnie Salazar told me it could work into others if I’m good enough.” She paused and gave me a sideways glance, as if to gauge my reaction to her next question. “How about you? What made you leave vaudeville and come to Hollywood?”