A Cast of Killers (28 page)

“Are you sure about that?” Vidor asked.

“Look it up,” Sanderson said. “It’s a matter of public record. Fitts had his own private army of union busters and anticommunists he ran during the Red scare. That’s what the union members were aimed at stopping.”

This altered Vidor’s thinking about Fitts. Perhaps Fitts hadn’t been merely covering his tracks during their one-sided conversation but had been trying to lead Vidor astray, as though he were hiding something other than merely classified information.

“What sort of odd things seemed to have been going on in the D.A.’s office?” Vidor asked, adding before Sanderson could answer, “Did they have to do with Charlotte Shelby and Mary Miles Minter?”

“That was quite a family, wasn’t it?” Sanderson said.

“Always taking each other to court and everything. I’ve never known a family that loved to sue everybody so much. If it wasn’t their accountant, it was each other.”

“They sued Marjorie Berger?” Vidor asked. This was the first he had heard of this.

“No, Charlotte’s Shelby’s accountant, Les Henry. Marjorie Berger was Minter’s accountant. Shelby said Henry was misappropriating funds. But even that one wasn’t as crazy as when they started suing each other.”

“What did they sue each other over?”

“Oh, this and that,” Sanderson said. “It’s all on the public record, too. I thought you were interested in Taylor.”

“I am interested in Taylor,” Vidor said. “When I asked you if what was going on in the D.A.’s office concerned Shelby and Minter, what I really wanted to know was whether you discovered the reason Woolwine didn’t indict them. And whether that might be the reason Fitts took you off the case, because you found out something that would reflect badly on the D.A.’s office.”

“Why Woolwine didn’t indict Shelby and Minter,” Sanderson said very slowly, as though thinking it out as he spoke.

“Right,” Vidor said. “It couldn’t have been just because Woolwine and Shelby were friends. The evidence he had against her and Minter, circumstantial though it might have been, wasn’t exactly something he could just sweep under the table. It was in the police records, and should have at least been investigated. But as far as I’ve been able to learn, it wasn’t. So something must have happened. And I was hoping that that might have been what Fitts’s announcement might have been about: that Woolwine had discovered something new, or that some surprise witness had appeared with testimony that blew the evidence against Shelby and Minter right out of the water. And I was hoping that maybe that was what you found out that inspired Fitts to take you off the case. Something that would allow Woolwine to ignore damn good evidence, and something that, for whatever reasons, has eluded investigators since. Do you know what that thing is?”

He waited as patiently as he could for Sanderson to respond. It wasn’t easy. Finally Sanderson said, “I have no proof, Mr. Vidor.”

“But it means nothing without proof, Mr. Vidor. You know that. If you didn’t know it you wouldn’t be talking with me. You know more than enough to make a movie about this case already, and I believe you’d get the story just about right, too. But I don’t make movies. My job was to solve crimes, and for that, it isn’t good enough to get the story just about right. You have to hit it square on the nose.”

“Wait a minute,” Vidor said. “You said I’d got it just about right. Are you saying that Shelby and Minter are guilty? What about this person that came forward?”

“I just said this person came forward, not, you’ll remember, that this person saved Shelby and Minter.”

“This person didn’t save Shelby and Minter,” Vidor said, as if repeating it might help him understand its meaning. “That doesn’t make sense, Sanderson. If this person had such strong evidence, how can you say it didn’t save them? They were exonerated. Now why was that?”

Vidor stood up from his desk and walked nervously around it, as far as the telephone cord would allow.

Sanderson said calmly, “This person’s evidence was indeed strong, Mr. Vidor. If anyone had such evidence right now, this case could be closed forever. No one does. But I believe it’s out there, and if anyone can find it, you’re the one. I have a phone call to make right now, business to attend to, but keep in touch. Bring me that proof, and we’ll give Fitts a little prize for mentioning my name.”

Sanderson hung up. Vidor thought of calling him back immediately, but decided against it. Sanderson was obviously not going to tell him who it was that came forward with new evidence. But two things Sanderson did tell him stuck in his mind: that Vidor had the story of the murder “just about right” and that the evidence that Woolwine discovered was out there for Vidor to find.

Vidor tore a page from his pocket notebook. With a ballpoint pen he printed the word FACTS boldly inside the left-hand margin. Beside it he filled in the “facts” he had concerning Woolwine’s treatment of Shelby and Minter:

This sequence did not make sense to Vidor. One fact did not stem logically from the preceding one. How could new evidence supplant the old evidence and not save Shelby and Minter from indictment? The only explanation Vidor could think of was that the new evidence, rather than clearing Shelby and Minter from suspicion, nailed them, proved once and for all that they killed Taylor. Evidence such as that would certainly take precedence over the circumstantial evidence Woolwine already had. But the fact remained that Shelby and Minter were all but exonerated. So that theory didn’t work either.

Vidor tried looking at these five facts from every possible angle, and in every possible order. Any four of the five could be fit into a logical sequence, but the five together made no sense at all. Vidor had convinced himself some time ago that two separate and distinct series of activities had been going on after Taylor was murdered, one involving the studio, and the other involving Woolwine’s investigation. But he had not considered that the latter might have been just as underhanded and self-centered as the former. Now he felt that that must have been the case: Woolwine hadn’t prosecuted because, for whatever reasons, he didn’t want to prosecute. And in covering his own tracks, Woolwine had seen to it that nothing reached the police files that might incriminate him. No wonder there were holes in the files. No wonder the evidence that had originally existed—nightgown, hairs—had disappeared through the years. No wonder no one after Woolwine had ever been able to crack the case. And no wonder Sanderson had been taken off the case—he found out exactly what Vidor had: that the true villains of this story were not only whoever pulled the trigger that killed William Desmond Taylor, but also the studio that distorted facts in an effort to hide Taylor’s big “secret,” and the district attorney, who ignored evidence, hid evidence, probably destroyed evidence, so that the killer would go free.

Vidor’s next step was to check into all those lawsuits. That would be easy enough to do, and they might reveal something that would give him clearer understanding of what the Shelbys were like. Adela Rogers St. Johns might have been right when she had summed it up, using Minter’s initials: Millions, Murder, Misery. Charlotte Shelby loved her Millions above everything else, and committed Murder when she feared that Taylor was a threat to them, sending Mary into Misery.

35

South Hill Street was jammed. Construction and the lunch-hour rush had traffic stalled for blocks in either direction. Near the corner of Sixth Street, Vidor got out of the car. He walked to the Sugarman Building and waited in the lobby while Dick Marchman found a place to park. The Sugarman Building was one of many buildings in the downtown neighborhood that housed various offices of the Los Angeles County government. On the third floor were the county archives, where the records were kept of all lawsuits filed with the Los Angeles County Courthouse. When Dick Marchman walked in, Vidor pressed an elevator button and watched the clockhand floor indicator start its descent.

In the archives all criminal and civil suits were indexed by dates and the names of the principal parties involved. Vidor pulled two volumes, starting with 1922, from the shelf and handed one to Marchman.

“Remember,” he said, “everything will be listed under their legal names—not Charlotte Shelby and Mary Miles Minter, but Pearl Miles Reilly and Juliet Reilly.”

Within minutes, they had found page after page of case numbers, all cross-referenced so many times they could have filled an entire ledger themselves. Between 1925 and 1943, Lily Pearl Miles, AKA Charlotte Shelby, and Juliet Reilly appeared in court nearly 150 times, with seven separate ongoing lawsuits and over a dozen various court injunctions. The first suit began with Mary suing her mother for money she said Charlotte owed her, and the final one nearly twenty years later, with Charlotte suing the estate of her recently deceased daughter Margaret. Each case in between also concerned claims against family members and their accountants over disputed amounts of money. Marchman and Vidor had not anticipated such voluminous files concerning one family’s legal problems. What they had thought would be an easy afternoon’s read became a two-day delve into twisted tales of Millions and Misery that to their surprise also shed light—to those who could recognize its illumination—on the other M, Murder.

The case of
Lily Pearl Miles vs. Les Henry
and the brokerage firm of Blythe Whitter began in 1931 and was settled two years later. Charlotte Shelby sued for $750,000 claiming her accountant, Les Henry, had stolen the amount from family accounts between 1920 and 1931. Henry was convicted of falsifying the Shelby books and making improper financial transactions—but not of stealing the three quarters of a million dollars.

The case began when Shelby received a statement from the Internal Revenue Service demanding she pay $198,000 in taxes owed from a figure of $750,000 that Shelby had failed to claim as income. Shelby denied any knowledge of the $750,000 and accused Les Henry of stealing the money from her and her daughters.

Called to the floor by Blythe Whitter executives, Les Henry admitted to having made improper transactions with Shelby’s money. But, he said, all transactions had been done with Shelby’s knowledge and consent. On a regular basis beginning in 1922, he had transferred sums from Shelby’s account into negotiable bonds and stock certificates that he had then given, minus his own fee, to Shelby. Asked for records of the transactions, he said that Shelby had insisted there be nothing in writing.

Henry could not understand why Charlotte Shelby, with whom he had done mutually profitable business, would turn on him like this. But he knew he looked bad. That night before leaving the office, he left a suicide note on his secretary’s desk.

The next morning, the secretary discovered the note and phoned Shelby to tell her about it. “Serves him right,” Shelby said. An hour later, when Henry, having changed his mind, arrived for work, the secretary called Shelby again. Shelby said, “I had a lot of respect for him when I thought he was going to make good on my losses by killing himself, but I have no respect for him now.”

At noon Henry called Shelby himself, to tell her he would fight her in this matter. Shelby calmly gave him “until two to go through with the letter” or she would “lay the cards on the table.”

But when they met in court, it was Henry who dealt the decisive hand; his plan of defense was to prove that he and Shelby had worked hand in hand with the Shelby family monies, manipulating them in Shelby’s favor since the day in 1920 when Henry had replaced Marjorie Berger as Shelby’s personal accountant. In establishing proof, Henry revealed that he had been personally involved with Shelby—intimate both professionally and physically—from the beginning. He testified that he had witnessed Shelby’s relationship with Minter grow physically and emotionally violent at Paramount, and finally disintegrate entirely following the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

He claimed that Shelby had once put a sudden stop to an affair Minter was having with James Kirkwood, and that Minter’s 1920 suicide attempt had been spurred by an argument with Shelby over Taylor. Both stories were corroborated by subsequent witnesses.

The Taylor murder, Henry said, caused a complete separation between the mother and daughter, with Minter eventually moving to New York. Minter’s only correspondence with Shelby from New York was a series of letters begging for some of the money she had earned and entrusted to Shelby for investment. Shelby refused every request.

Then, based on a complete disclosure of all his own personal financial records, Henry offered evidence that suggested that the money Shelby was accusing him of stealing had never found its way into his personal accounts. He admitted that he had taken money from her account, but said that the money had been transferred to Shelby and to others upon Shelby’s orders.

Did he know what Shelby was doing with the money? he was asked.

Henry answered that Shelby was using the money to buy protection from the police and the press during the Taylor murder investigation. Whenever there was a flare-up in the investigation, he said, Shelby asked for more money.

One specific incident he related was a conversation in 1923 when Shelby asked him to transfer an unusually large amount of money into negotiable bonds because the new district attorney, Asa Keyes, would require “a great deal more money than Woolwine” had.