Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (41 page)

By now, King had heard enough stories about Charlotte Shelby to be fully aware of her intense dislike and suspicion of Taylor. The strong-willed woman had thought the director was corrupting her daughter and was afraid he might lure away her golden goose. She also had a ferocious temper. She’d verbally assaulted and threatened Taylor more than once.

And her gun—given to her by Woolwine himself after she’d expressed fears over her family’s security—was a .38, the same type used in the killing.

King ached to inspect Shelby’s gun. One of the best known gunsmiths in the country, a man who had devoted his life to the study of firearms, had identified the bullet extracted from Taylor’s body as an older type of ammunition that had not been manufactured for twelve or fifteen years.
“As a matter of fact,” the
Los Angeles Examiner
reported, “there perhaps cannot be found one pistol in thousands in Los Angeles loaded with the ancient brand of ammunition which was taken from Taylor’s body.”

If the bullets in Shelby’s gun matched, King was certain they’d have their killer.

There were rumors now that Shelby and Mary were feuding. Did their quarrel involve Taylor? King knew that mother and daughter had fought about the director before. If Mary had discovered that her mother had killed the man she loved, she might break down and talk.

So, behind closed doors with Winn, King cooked up a plan.

Shelby was shrewd. She’d kept a low profile since Taylor’s death, and expertly stonewalled them when they’d tried to interview her before. So they needed a scheme to draw her out, to make her talk. And King had a doozy of an idea.

Soon the two detectives were zigzagging through downtown Los Angeles on their motorcycles, heading into the theater district. Nick Harris, private detective, kept an office on the top floor of the Pantages Theatre at Seventh and Hill Streets. Harris was an old friend of King’s, and a longtime collaborator with the police department. When the cops were unable to catch a man named James “Bluebeard” Watson, who’d married eighteen women and killed at least seven of them, Harris had been the one to nab him. He’d also worked closely with King in solving the celebrated Wetherell kidnapping case, winning a gold badge from the department for his efforts.

Sometimes an outsider like Harris was needed—especially when unorthodox action was called for. That was precisely why King and Winn had come calling this day.

Sitting down with Harris, the detectives asked him for a favor. They wanted him to call the editor of the
Los Angeles Times
and tell him that
“a funny thing had just occurred.” Harris was to make up a story about a spiritualist phoning his office—on a day when, by sheer coincidence, King and Winn just happened to be there.

Harris had many spiritualist sources, so it was a believable story. The private dick was very superstitious himself: he always put his left shoe on first and would never handle a pen after it had been used by someone else. But what was this spiritualist supposed to be calling about?

King told Harris to say that the spiritualist had had a vision of the murderer of William Desmond Taylor. The murderer, the spiritualist claimed, was “a woman with a very beautiful daughter.” And the motive for the murder was that Taylor had been “too familiar with the daughter.” In desperation, the mother had killed him.

It was a simple enough ruse, and Harris was willing. But King had a further twist to add. It wasn’t enough to simply make Shelby nervous; they had to prod her into acting. Without any action on her part, King would have no reason to go after her.

So he told Harris to add that the spiritualist was giving the mother two weeks’ notice to come forward on her own. The mother needed “to explain to the public that she was the murderer of Taylor, and why she had committed the murder.” If the mother failed to come forward after two weeks, however, the spiritualist would take matters into her own hands and announce the name of Taylor’s killer herself.

Harris picked up the phone and rang the newspaper.

If this worked, King might be able to make an arrest before Halloween.

Of course, there were kinks in King’s theory, and he knew it. Charlotte Shelby did not in any way match the description Faith MacLean had given of the person she’d witnessed leaving Taylor’s house. With her aristocratic features and luxurious copper hair, Charlotte Shelby was hardly the rough “motion picture burglar” type Maclean described seeing. But what if the man was actually a woman dressed in men’s clothes?

MacLean had used a phrase that kept running through King’s mind. She’d described the man she’d seen as “funny looking”—as if he wasn’t what he seemed. The answer to the riddle had struck King all at once.
“Wasn’t that person a woman disguised as a man?” he had asked a gathering of reporters. Many had started to nod, as if to say, “Aha! Of course!”

Besides, King added, “That act of rearranging the body, the clothes, was characteristic of a woman moved to show a final tenderness after the death shot.” But Shelby—tender? To Taylor?

No, not Shelby. Mary.

King believed that Shelby had walked in and discovered Mary in Taylor’s apartment. He didn’t believe Mary’s story that she was home reading from a book to her sister and her grandmother on the night of the murder. She had gone to Taylor’s, and Shelby had followed her, concealing her gun, just as she had done once before, according to her secretary. And when she had caught the two lovebirds together, she’d shot and killed Taylor, just as she had always threatened to do. That left Mary to lovingly tend to the body before Shelby rushed her out of the house.

But Faith MacLean had seen only one person leave Taylor’s apartment. One more inconsistency in King’s theory.

The detective admitted he didn’t have all the answers yet. But he was certain he was on to something. The first step, he knew, was to draw Charlotte Shelby out of her seclusion and make her act. Then he could zero in and start asking her the questions he needed to get the full truth.

Only by gathering enough information could King force Woolwine into supporting an indictment. His boss’s opposition was based on more than just his friendship with Shelby, King suspected. Woolwine also feared a tearful Charlotte Shelby or Mary Miles Minter on the witness stand would prevent him from winning his case. Convicting a woman was notoriously difficult in 1922. Woolwine had just failed spectacularly to get a conviction against Madalynn Obenchain, who had murdered her fiancé. Juries had taken pity on the pretty young woman, and deadlocked repeatedly. Woolwine couldn’t risk another high-profile failure—not if he wanted to win the governor’s race.

But King was a detective, not a politician. Those weren’t his worries. All he cared about was justice for the dead man on the floor.

On October 4, the morning after Nick Harris’s phone call to the
Los Angeles Times
, Charlotte Shelby sat comfortably in her newly refurbished mansion at Seventh and New Hampshire, which she’d grandly dubbed Casa Margarita. But her peaceful morning was about to be shattered. Shelby looked down at the headline in the newspaper and her blood ran cold.

S
PIRIT
H
AS
R
EAL
D
OPE ON
K
ILLING

She read on.
“Yesterday afternoon an unknown medium telephoned to the office of Private Detective Nick Harris, declared that Taylor’s murderer was a woman, the mother of a girl who Taylor had wronged, and that the spirits were determined to have the mystery cleared up. Harris himself vouches for the authenticity of the telephone call, as do three [
sic
] police detectives, who were in his office at the time.”

The spirits went on to say “that William Desmond Taylor was not murdered by a man but that he was shot by a woman disguised as a man and who is prominently known in Los Angeles.”

The prominent Mrs. Shelby picked up the phone to call her lawyer.

King was in his office at the Hall of Records when an attorney came bursting in, newspaper clippings in his hand. The city’s afternoon paper, the
Los Angeles Record
, had repeated the story of the spiritualist’s call to Harris, adding the fact that
“E. C. King, on the district attorney’s staff, has been working on a similar theory since the killing.”

Striding directly over to King, the attorney demanded answers to several questions. He wanted to know the name of the spiritualist, where she was located, and if she had mentioned
“the name of the woman with the beautiful daughter.”

“I explained to him,” said King, “that all I knew about it was merely what had happened while we were in Mr. Harris’ office.” That wasn’t enough to satisfy the attorney, and he returned the next day to ask more questions. Again, detectives had nothing to tell him.

Not once did the attorney mention any client. But it was easy enough for King to confirm their suspicion—that the outraged fellow was one of Charlotte Shelby’s personal lawyers.

“There was no one else,” King said, “who ever made inquiry about this news item.”

To King, this case was solved.

Los Angeles City Hall straddled Second and Third Streets like a crouching old woman, shrinking against the taller, newer structures rising all around. Gibby was once again passing under the building’s arched entrance. Last time she’d been there, she’d been forming her own company, filled with optimism, convinced her dreams were finally coming true. Now, in the fall of 1922, her business at City Hall was decidedly less hopeful.

The good news was, she’d found new partners for her independent venture. Tom Gibson (no relation) and Elmer Dyer were far more honest and aboveboard than James Calnay. But that hadn’t made them any more successful. And so the three partners had come to City Hall to hock the picture they had just made—the picture into which they’d each poured considerable blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention every last penny they had.

Gibby was broke again. She’d blown through all the money she’d had earlier in the year. How much dough it must have seemed at the time, and how rapidly it had disappeared. She’d bought herself a car and her mother a fur coat—just a sampling of the nice things they had coming to them. The rest she’d invested in
The Web of the Law
, a five-reel picture she’d made with Gibson and Dyer. But producing her own pictures, Gibby discovered to her great dismay, was far more expensive than she had anticipated.

All wasn’t lost, however, as Gibby’s partners told her.
They’d found a creditor who was willing to loan them $1,800, payable within a year’s time at 8 percent interest, using as collateral a negative of
The Web of the Law
. If they couldn’t pay up, their creditor would own the picture.

Gibby had tried to play by the rules. She had taken her money and formed a company—everything legal, everything accounted for. If producers considered her too old to be a star—Gibby was almost twenty-nine—then she’d prove them wrong by becoming a producer herself and making her own pictures. And she had, following the Hollywood playbook exactly in the process.
The Web of the Law
had everything it was supposed to: action, adventure, great western scenery, love, sex. If it had been a Famous Players film, Gibby was convinced, it would have been a huge hit.

But a picture can’t be a hit if no theaters will show it.
The Web of the Law
—so carefully shot, directed, and edited—languished in its tin can where no one would see it. The exhibition stranglehold held by Adolph Zukor and the others was just too powerful. And so the film’s three producers had come to City Hall like beggars, signing away their ambitions with a promissory note they knew they could never redeem.

Gibby had tried playing by the rules. She really had. Several times now.

But honesty had gotten her nowhere.

Back on Beachwood Drive, she hoped to find other ways to make money.

At the moment, however, Don Osborn’s bunco business was moribund. After their high-flying spring, all of the locusts seemed down in the dumps. In July, Blackie Madsen had gotten nabbed for a scam in Long Beach and
spent some time in the slammer. After that, the gang decided to lie low for a while. And so everyone was in need of some cash as Christmas approached.

Osborn was even more destitute than Gibby. His beloved Rose had turned out to be a rather demanding common-law wife. She wanted new dresses and fancy hats all the time, and Osborn had promised her trips to Cuba and Europe. But the biggest expense in recent weeks had been the cash he’d had to cough up after Rose got pregnant. Abortions didn’t come cheap. Now Osborn had no choice but to get back to work.

So when Blackie was sprung, the team of Osborn and Madsen quickly got back in business. That late fall and winter, Gibby was involved in
“a series of petty bunco jobs” with the two miscreants, according to later federal reports.

Rose Putnam would say that Osborn was
“feeling very confident” that season. For whatever reason, Osborn seemed to think they could get away with anything. And so he went after the biggest pigeon he could find. No more chump change. This time, he told Rose, he wanted a millionaire. And he had one in mind.

In fact, he’d had this sucker in his crosshairs ever since Rose had come to Los Angeles to live. Before falling under Osborn’s sway, his pretty niece had led quite the checkered love life. It was time, Osborn figured, to put that history to good use.

Back in her hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, Rose Putnam had dreamed of life beyond those pastoral hills. Seeing no way out, she’d married a man eleven years her senior, a foreman at the Estey Organ Factory, and had promptly found herself bored to death. While her husband was off fighting the war, the restless Rose had taken comfort in the arms of a neighbor,
wealthy Beatty Balestier, who happened to be the brother-in-law of author Rudyard Kipling. That family connection guaranteed the affair would draw major headlines in the local newspaper after Rose’s husband discovered it, and the errant wife was run out of town on a rail.

Rose fled to Boston. There, at the apartment of another young woman who enjoyed the company of wealthy older men, she made the acquaintance of
John L. Bushnell of Springfield, Ohio. Bushnell was forty-six years old, the son of a former governor, and the president of the First National Bank of Springfield. He was rich—beyond rich—and moved in the highest ranks of society. His Thoroughbred prize horses—with names like The Governor and June Maid—won medals competing against the steppers of Vanderbilts and Astors.