A Cast of Killers (23 page)

Vidor was considering once again Herb Dalmas’ s theory about Normand and Minter when he heard the others returning from their outing. He looked up and noticed for the first time that it was dark outside.

He leaned back and waited until, on cue, the door behind him opened and Nippy bounded in with a playful bark. Then Vidor heard Colleen’s voice, speaking from the doorway.

“Are you still at it?”

“I’m about to call it a day.”

“I should think so,” Colleen said, stepping inside and putting her hands on his shoulders. Vidor welcomed her loving touch. “You’ve been at it all day long. You’ll wear yourself out. You should take a break now and then, King. It’s only a screenplay.”

Vidor closed the files in front of him, thinking, “You’re wrong, it’s not only a screenplay. And it’s not only a mystery either. It’s three mysteries, all unsolved, and all entwined. And who killed William Desmond Taylor is the least of the three. Beyond that is the mystery of where all the information printed about the case came from. Most important is the third mystery: why the Los Angeles Police Department seems to have directed its investigation of the case in every imaginable way except the one that would have led them directly to the killer.

28

Vidor arrived back in Beverly Hills shortly before midnight. The drive from Paso Robles had taken nearly five hours, including a short stop in Buellton for a bowl of Andersen’s pea soup—a treat Vidor gave himself on every trip to or from the ranch—and another twenty minutes seeing Colleen off on the red-eye to Washington, D.C. After dropping Cassie and Dick at their home and buying dog biscuits for Nippy at the all-night Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street, he could think of nowhere else to go but home, where he knew Betty would still be awake after a Sunday night bridge game.

As he turned up his steep tree-lined driveway, he could see Betty in the living room apparently cleaning up from the game. She did not look up as the T-Bird’s headlights hit her through the large picture windows.

Vidor parked, took his briefcase from the trunk, and walked Nippy to the kennel behind the house. Just as Vidor was reaching the chain-link kennel gate, Nippy began snarling.

Vidor put his briefcase down. He opened the refrigerator for a cold drink. He had expected his homecoming to be uncomfortable, but he hadn’t expected Betty’s silence. A confrontation of some kind he was prepared for, but not this.

Soda in hand, he walked into the living room. Betty was seated at her bridge table, separating two decks of cards.

“How was the game?” No answer. Vidor sighed.

The cards separated and shoved into their boxes, Betty stood up. She walked to a desk and took a postcard from a leaning stack of mail. She handed the postcard to Vidor and walked back into the hallway.

The postcard pictured black natives posing before a collection of ivory tusks:
Welcome to Nairobi.
It was from Colleen and had obviously arrived while Vidor was at the ranch, postal service being slow from Africa to the United States. Vidor knew the confrontation with Betty could be put off no longer.

Betty looked at him for the first time since he walked in the door, her eyes burning into him with a fire he hadn’t seen in some time.

“We’re working on a project together,” he said. “It’s only a screenplay.” Only a screenplay. He nearly laughed to hear himself repeat Colleen’s words from earlier in the evening.

“Come on, King,” Betty said. “Give me more credit than that, would you? ‘Only a screenplay.’ If you’re not going to be honest with me, then we have nothing to talk about.”

Betty’s eyes remained on Vidor, adding to his discomfort.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Just tell me what’s going on. Are you in love? Are you just having a fling? Are you ever going to direct another movie, or are you just going to spend the rest of your life working on projects like this ‘screenplay’ of yours? Are you ever going to be King Vidor again, the man I married, the man who was a vital part of this house and Hollywood, or are you just going to go on being this stranger who spends his time staring into mirrors and picking through all his old papers, and running around God knows where with God knows who all, trying to act like he’s not seventy-two years old and like all the people out there in Hollywood even remember who he is?”

Vidor could see Betty’s lips trembling, but not a single tear formed in her burning peppercorn eyes. He didn’t know what to say. This could be the moment he’d been imagining since his fateful reunion with Colleen, the moment he would make up his mind once and for all what he was going to do about his marriage and about Colleen. But he was at a loss for words.

“Do you ever intend to stop this gallivanting around the world, trying to prove whatever it is you’re trying to prove to yourself? And settle down and just be King Vidor?”

“I don’t know,” Vidor said softly, truthfully.

Betty stood up. “Well, when you do know, tell me. Because I’m here, and your home is here, and we’ll still be here if you decide to come back to us. But until you decide, I think you’d better find a new home.”

Vidor sat perfectly still, staring at his soda as Betty’s final words sank in. Then he looked up at his wife, whose eyes, still fixed upon his own, had lost their heat, becoming the cold, vacant eyes of someone deeply hurt.

Vidor packed a suitcase, took Nippy out of the garage, and walked down to his office to spend the night.

There, as Nippy slept on the floor beside him, he lay on a cot thinking long into the night, finally reaching his decision just as the first hint of dawn gave shape to the shadows outside his window.

He sat at his desk and with a ballpoint pen began to write on a yellow legal pad:

When he finished, he put the letter unsigned into an envelope and addressed it to Betty. He would mail it or deliver it himself to her tomorrow before calling Thad Brown about the police files. Lying back on his cot, he felt none of the relief he had long imagined he would feel when he finally made his decision about Betty and Colleen. He stared at the ceiling trying to turn his thoughts to the Taylor case, but couldn’t concentrate. He’d been awake nearly forty-eight hours. In three more, Thelma Carr would arrive and find him on a cot, the first to get the news. But Vidor couldn’t even think about that. He just slipped his letter to Betty under his pillow, closed his eyes, and fell immediately to sleep.

29

Thelma Carr brought lunch from Hamburger Hamlet. When she had arrived for work that morning, Vidor, unshaven and still contemplating the letter to Betty, had immediately sent her off on errands. In her absence, he had shaved, showered, dressed, hidden his suitcase—though Thelma must already have guessed from his appearance that he had slept in the guest house—out of sight in a closet, and decided that the letter was too impersonal a way to put an end to thirty years of marriage. Though the letter was honest and straightforward, Vidor had begun to feel cowardly for having written it instead of telling Betty how he felt face-to-face. Now, as Thelma returned with the hamburgers, he put the letter aside and opened his pocket notebook.

On hold, Vidor looked over his notes from the ranch. “I was wondering when I was going to hear from you,” Brown said. “Learn anything from those files?”

“I know what you mean,” Brown said. “My partner and I had the same reaction when we first read those files. I was hoping you’d feel the same way. What do you make of them?”

Vidor underlined entries in his notebook with a ballpoint. “Well, they raise some obvious questions, the most important one concerning Charlotte Shelby and Mary Miles Minter. Now I’m no expert on our legal system, but there certainly seems to be a lot of evidence pointing toward them, and yet nothing was done about it.”

“I know,” Brown said. “You’d think there was enough by nineteen-twenty-two standards in Woolwine’s files to indict one or the other of them.”

“But they were hardly even questioned,” Vidor finished Brown’s thought. “Then they were virtually completely exonerated. It doesn’t make sense. Unless something happened that isn’t contained in those files. Are you sure you showed me everything the L.A.P.D. has on the case?”

“Everything I’ve seen in the police files, you’ve seen. When I first inherited this case I wondered the same thing. But as far as I’ve been able to find out, that’s it. Which means that through the years, something has obviously been lost or stolen or misplaced or something, because it just isn’t there. Now a lot of hands have gone through those files in the last forty-five years, both police hands and district attorneys’, so I couldn’t say which might have been sticky, but it seems that just as the physical evidence that might have convicted Shelby and Minter disappeared, so did whatever reasons Woolwine had for not indicting them in the beginning.”

“That sounds awfully suspicious to me.”

“Damn right it’s suspicious,” Brown growled. “But what can we do about it? Something must have happened that made Woolwine leave Shelby and Minter alone, something that outweighed all the evidence against them. If I had that evidence now, the famed M.M.M. nightgown or the hairs from Minter’s head, I could reopen the case and even if I couldn’t indict anybody, maybe I could turn up some of the old reasons that they weren’t indicted before. But even that evidence has disappeared.”

Vidor thought about something for a moment, then double-checked his notes. Finally he said, “Whatever happened that convinced Woolwine of Shelby’s and Minter’s innocence disappeared from the files before Asa Keyes took over Woolwine’s job. Otherwise, why would Keyes have, all those years later, re-suspected Shelby and Minter?”

“Go on,” Brown said.

“Which could mean that Woolwine or someone in his administration didn’t want subsequent investigators to know why they turned blind when it came to Minter and Shelby.”

“To hinder the investigation seems the most logical answer,” Vidor said. “I’m not sure why they’d want to do that, but it does seem possible. I mean, they certainly undermined any help they might have gotten from the press or the public by allowing so many rumors and theories they knew were groundless to dominate everyone’s understanding of the case.”

“Do you think they also originated those rumors and theories?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always assumed they came from the studios, who have always had the ability to spread whatever rumors they wanted. And they did have employees at the scene of the crime, apparently tampering with possible evidence. But two things bother me about that. One, if the studios were out to protect Shelby and Minter, why would their people leave behind the most damning piece of evidence of all, the nightgown? And why would they themselves publish Minter’s letters to Taylor? The other thing that bothers me is, if, as someone has suggested to me, the studios were out to dump on Minter, why wouldn’t her nightgown being found in Taylor’s bungalow have been enough? I mean, add those transgressions of logic to the fact that so many of the rumors and theories printed by the press couldn’t have had any effect whatsoever on anyone’s opinion of either Shelby or Minter, and the studios look less and less likely to have started the rumors. Yet they had to come from somewhere.”