A Cast of Killers (17 page)

22

Vidor couldn’t place the voice.

It was Mary Miles Minter. Vidor had called her the week before, after his talk with Adela Rogers St. Johns, but had only spoken with her maid, Emma. She had informed him that Minter, who now answered only to the name Mrs. Brandon O’Hildebrandt, permitted no interviews.

Perhaps she had changed her mind.

“Mrs. O’Hildebrandt,” Vidor said, reaching across his cluttered desk for his notebook. “How are you? I was sorry to hear about your husband. I hope everything’s all right with you.”

“Thank you, dear boy. I’m as well as can be expected, I suppose. But tell me about yourself. Are you making a new picture?”

“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “Right now I’m just doing research. About the old days. It might turn into a movie, or a book, or something, I don’t know. There aren’t many of us left from the old silent picture days, you know.”

Mrs. O’Hildebrandt giggled. “No, there aren’t. And it’s gratifying to see that those of us who are still around are still keeping themselves busy. I’m a writer, too. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“No, I didn’t.” All Vidor had seen of her writing were the love letters to Taylor reprinted in newspapers, and her denial of involvement in the murder.

Vidor led her through a general discussion of early Hollywood, very slowly and carefully steering toward the subject of Taylor. He didn’t know how willing she would be to talk about Taylor. But she surprised him with an eagerness to discuss her friend. It seemed as though she had been waiting for the opportunity.

“Do you remember all that trash they wrote after Mr. Taylor was killed? About how I did it? Or Mother did it?”

“I remember.”

“It was all yellow-bellied muckraking trash. I should have sued every last newspaper that said it. Maybe I still will one day. Them and the police, too. They were the real criminals, all of them. They knew who really did it; they just had it in for us and Mabel.”

“They couldn’t find him. So rather than look incompetent they went after us. And it was all lies. Guns! Silk underthings! I never had any such things in my life! My mother bought everything for me, and believe me, she wasn’t about to buy silk underthings with my initials monogrammed on them! When we told the police to either show us this so-called evidence or leave us alone, they said they didn’t have anything, and they cleared our names.”

Vidor’s immediate thought was of the nightgown Adela Rogers St. Johns claimed to have seen: if Mary never had such a thing in her life, where did it come from? But he kept the thought to himself.

“Who killed him?” he said.

She responded almost before he even finished the question.

“There was a petrol station down at the bottom of the hill on Alvarado. Right on Wilshire. I used to fill up the red roadster there that my mother gave me. The night Mr. Taylor was shot, three boys tried to rob it, but the owner pulled out a gun he kept in a cigar box and started firing. The boys scattered. One of them went running up Alvarado, and he must have seen Mr. Taylor outside talking to Mabel and sneaked inside to hide. He went upstairs, into the dark little bedroom.

“When he figured it would be safe to leave, he sneaked downstairs and tried to crawl past Mr. Taylor, who was at his desk doing his taxes. Mr. Taylor must have seen him, and the boy panicked. He pulled out his gun and
Bang!
He shot him.”

She paused. She had gotten so involved in telling the story that she had to catch her breath. Then she concluded, “That’s why the bullet traveled up instead of down. The boy was on the floor.”

This was another entirely new scenario to Vidor. He jotted down enough notes to make a follow-up easy. If there had been a robbery the night of the murder, it would be a matter of public record.