Through his contacts in the world of speakeasies, Willy Maxwell had learned that Franklin and Loretta, notable figures in the movie business, had been customers at Blue Mood in San Diego on Saturday, September 6. One of the performers that night was unconventional for the venue, a young freak who appeared onstage nearly naked. Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild were said to have “bought out the freak’s contract” from her promotor, Captain Forest Farnam, and taken her away into the night. Maxwell was sold that information by a Blue Mood employee on Sunday morning, September 7. By that afternoon, he located Farnam and, without revealing what he had learned about the Fairchilds, he determined that Captain had never taken—and never allowed to be taken—photographs of the freakish girl, because no one would pay to see what they had already seen in one publication or another. That was a calculation common to carnies who owned a ten-in-one or a hootchy-kootchy show. Maxwell concluded, as would most men like him, that the Fairchild couple brought the freak into their lives for decadent purposes. He became excited by the prospect of an unusually creepy scandal that would be highly profitable for an entrepreneur of his boldness—if only he could gain access to the girl. Among his sources for stories was Connor Sizemore, who took a sawbuck or two in return for tipping off Maxwell where private parties in progress would present an opportunity to photograph a few celebrities who were inebriated or drugged past the point where they might make fools of themselves. Of the contacts in the photographer’s black book, only Connor would be able to help Willy learn details about the layout of the Bram. His sister was on the household staff.
When Loretta had first sat on the library sofa, she’d plucked a small decorative pillow from it to give her more room. She held the pillow on her lap during the story she and Franklin had to tell. Now her handstightened on it as if it were the throat of someone into whom she meant to choke some common sense. “That Monday evening when you and I were still at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Maxwell and Connor were already badgering Anna May in her apartment, trying to persuade her to cooperate. They knew we were bringing you home. They wanted to develop a floor plan of the Bram so Maxwell could find his way to your room. They wanted to know how to get into the house at night with the least risk of being caught. Maxwell intended to come here with a woman as bad as he is, someone to overpower you, perhaps with chloroform, and keep you quiet while he ... got his pictures.”
Loretta did not say that the woman would have stripped me out of my pajamas so that I could be photographed naked. However, I had no doubt that was the intention.
“Week after week,” Loretta continued, “month after month, they kept digging at Anna May. She wouldn’t give them what they wanted. She insisted there was nothing different about you, you were just a kid like the other kids. She thought they would give up on the idea sooner or later. She didn’t tell us because she worried Connor’s drug running would come to light and he would go to prison.”
“Connor had always been trouble,” Franklin said. “He and Anna had never been as close as a brother and sister ought to be. But she felt she should be loyal to him, protect him from himself. Then a week ago, Connor and Maxwell said, ‘All right, okay, forget about it, maybe it was a screwy idea all along.’ Anna May believed they had given up on the scheme. Then on Thanksgiving Day, Mrs. Symington phoned each of her girls to wish them a happy holiday. In passing, she mentioned that Rafael escaped poisoning by some unknown vile person who had thrown contaminated meat over the estate wall. Anna May knew at once that Connor and Maxwell were going ahead with the operation if by one means or another they could eliminate the danger posed by Rafael.”
“Which means,” said Loretta, “somehow they got a floor plan and a way into the house.”
In those days, even the grandest mansions rarely had alarms. Those security systems available at the time were problematic and frustrating, issuing false alarms or ceasing to function without warning. Usually, little more was needed to guard against a home invasion than good deadbolt locks.
If Willy Maxwell and Connor Sizemore had developed a floor plan and other useful information about the Bram, there was one likely source. I said, “Imogene Blackthorn.”
Loretta grimaced. “We can’t know, but weknow.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Not an option,” Franklin said. “They can’t make arrests on the basis of intentions that aren’t provable. Besides, if this ends up in court, the trial becomes not about the criminals and the crime. It becomes about you. The defense attorneys and the scummiest of the tabloids will see to that. Sweetheart, we aren’t going to let you be dragged into this. Never. Maxwell thinks we’re pigeons. We’re not.”
“We can handle him,” Loretta said.
I didn’t doubt that they could handle Willy Maxwell. I just wondered, “How?”
And even if the current threat was dealt with effectively, Captain was still out there. If Maxwell had found me, so had Farnam—and with what intention?
Twenty-Six
Willy Maxwell lived in a rented Art Deco bungalow on a residential street not far from Charlie Chaplin Studio. He was a man of the night, always on the prowl for celebrity cocaine parties and drunken revelers and middle-aged married directors squiring sixteen-year-old girls into or out of dens of iniquity. He wanted photos for which he could write stories that would sell toGraphiC, a Bernard McFadden rag located in New York, which paid him a thousand dollars for a piece that could support a headline likeWeekend Orgies of Silver Screen StarsorYoung Starlet Warns of Celluloid road to ruin. Many of his “young starlets” were girls who had come to Los Angeles to be famous, began to pay their bills by selling more of themselves than their acting talent, but nonetheless still dreamed of being the next Janet Gaynor. Having possessed innocence and lost it, some of them could break your heart—if you were not Willy Maxwell; for him, they were nothing more than material. He worked seven nights a week because he took so much pleasure in his profession, especially when a shocking photo and the accompanying story humiliated the subject and damaged a major career. He usually rose at eleven o’clock in the morning and took his breakfast shortly after noon at the Vine Street Diner. At half pasteleven on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, before he could set out from home, he answered the doorbell and found two Los Angeles Police Department detectives. They were holding their ID for his inspection, as if they didn’t have time to waste in the niceties of an introduction. Their names were Shamash and Astarte.
They were big men, about six feet four, as physically imposing as Gene Tunney, the boxer. Tunney was as handsome as any actor, but not these two. They were so hard looking that even if they played thugs that the hero beat into pulp, no audience would believe any hero ever born could survive an encounter with them. Their suits were top of the line—wide in the padded shoulders, trim-cut in the waist—and their shoes looked Italian. They wore fedoras with style, at a slightly rakish angle. Quality wristwatches. Pinkie rings. Had they been wearing cheap suits, they might have scared the hell out of Willy, but he was shrewd enough to know them for what they were—cops on the take, his kind of people. Whatever they wanted, whatever trouble they laid on him, there would be a deal to be made.
They wanted to know where he’d been between midnight and 3:00 a.m. He said he’d been around and about, here and there, wherever he heard the action was, making a living from the sadly sinful behavior of his fellow Angelenos in the entertainment business. He gave them a few addresses, but they weren’t satisfied. They asked if he knew a girl named Marion McMurray, and he said he didn’t, and they said his business card was clutched in her hand when she was found stabbed to death, and he calmly said that perhaps he had known her by another name. People in the motion-picture business often changed names, sometimes more than once. Shamash and Astarte didn’t want to come into his house for a look around, nor did they suggest he accompany them downtown to the Robbery/Homicide Division, which was a relief. However, they asked that he take a ride to the apartment of Marion McMurray to help them interpret a few odd things about the crime scene. Shamashassured him that he didn’t need a shyster. Astarte said there was a deal to be made that would be beneficial. Willy had already tumbled to the fact that they were bent. He had often done profitable business with dirty cops. He was in a line of work where, if you wanted to prosper, you took chances that most people avoided.
And so Willy Joe Maxwell got into the back seat of the unmarked sedan. Shamash drove, and Astarte sat in the front passenger seat. Their destination was an upscale apartment building at the west end of Wilshire Boulevard, the kind of place where a girl who made a good living in a bad profession welcomed men who would never hire her for a role in a movie but appreciated the conviction with which she faked orgasms. The apartment was elegantly furnished, although the bed was blood-soaked. Willy was impatient to learn why they had brought him there. The stench of gore made him eager for fresh air.
They explained that Marion McMurray wore monogrammed panties. They suggested that, when he went home, he should conduct a search of his house to find his collection of five pairs, including one caked with blood. They invited him to spend an hour searching this apartment to see if he could locate the dead woman’s client book. His name appeared in it with notes about his kinky preferences. They suggested that he ought to examine the shoes in his closet at home to find the pair with Marion’s blood on the soles. It was a setup. Willy had not been her client. These bulls weren’t going to pin this on him, but they meant for him to understand they could send him to death row for another case whenever they wished. “Or,” said Shamash, “it could work the other way. You do what we’re going to ask, and if one day you knock off somebody, we make sure you’re not the sucker who takes the fall for it.”
Having received—and paid for—many tips from cops regarding the errant behavior of Hollywood glitterati, Willy had considerable respect for police corruption and the benefits that could flow from it.Shamash and Astarte had delivered a threat rather than a tip, but it was a threat that came with a get-out-of-jail-free card. Willy had been born understanding the concept of quid pro quo. He said, “Whatever you want, consider it already done.”
Shamash explained what Willy had been smart enough to agree to. He would never again try to kill the Fairchilds’ dog. He would make no attempt to enter Bramley Hall alone or in the company of anyone else. He would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, photograph the girl being adopted by Franklin and Loretta Fairchild. He’d never come within a hundred yards of her. Furthermore, he would make no inquiry with anyone in the police department or the government regarding Detectives Shamash and Astarte; if he were to do so, they would know, and they would assume he intended to rat them out to Internal Affairs for having been paid under the table to represent the Fairchild family in this matter. Were that to happen, the next time Willy woke, he would be dead and in Hell.
Now that the three of them were players on the same team, full of mutual respect and affection, the detectives took Willy Maxwell home. They collected the five pairs of monogrammed panties that had been planted in his residence, including one that was stiff with dried blood. They showed him which pair of shoes had bloodstained soles so he could dispose of them. Willy offered each man a pint of the finest Scotch from his illegal stash, but they declined because they were on duty and because, in all good conscience, they could not violate the law of prohibition, which they were sworn to uphold.
Although Franklin and Loretta, being talented filmmakers, had created a convincing storyline and had produced it to perfection, the success of it—they admitted—depended in part on Maxwell being less hip to flimflam and bunco games than he thought he was. In Marion McMurray’s bedroom, he couldn’t be faulted for not realizing the bedclothes were soaked in pig blood, not human blood. Few ifany surgeons would have had a sharp-enough olfactory sense to tell the difference. The badges and ID of the LAPD Robbery/Homicide Division, which Shamash and Astarte had presented to the photographer, were so accurate in every detail that any department official would have accepted them without a second glance; in 1930, the title “prop man” was new to the motion-picture business, but some of those who did the job were so talented and obsessed with detail that they could have made a living outside the law as forgery artists. Identical to the make and model that the LAPD provided for detectives in any of its plainclothes divisions, the sedan Shamash had driven was tagged with a reproduction of police department license plates; it had appeared inDarkmoor Lane, and Willy had not for a moment doubted that it was what it seemed to be. Shamash and Astarte, whose real names were Leonard Sharpe and Enzo Valenti, might have triggered Willy’s suspicion if they’d been actors well cast for their roles. However, their faces were too ordinary for movies—not handsome enough to sell a production, not mean enough to be the faces of villains, not quirky enough for roles that provided comic relief. Nevertheless, they possessed solid theatrical techniques and the confidence to masquerade as corrupt cops because they were members of a recently created profession, stuntmen, and for a few years had spent their days on set, watching actors and learning how to pass for them successfully in the hard-action shots. Sad-case Marion McMurray was not dead. In fact, she did not exist. The apartment was owned by a young actress who was having success playing best friends and kid sisters, and who was expected one day to have top billing. Willy Joe Maxwell never had a chance.
Twenty-Seven
As November gave way to December, I marveled that in all the novels I’d read, no character had experienced a more eventful three months than those that I had just lived through. From carnival freak show to Bramley Hall, from resignation to fierce hope, from a life lived in books to a life worthy of a book, from the cold regard of Captain to the love of a warm and happy family.
On the evening of Tuesday, December 2, when I was in bed with a book, Loretta came to my suite to prepare me for Anna May’s return the following day. Anna May had taken a few days of vacation time after discovering that her brother and Willy Maxwell tried to poison Rafael—and why.
“I know you will be kind to the girl,” Loretta told me, “but I want you to understand why kindness is especially warranted in her case. I assume you know nothing of her past.”
“She pretty much keeps herself to herself,” I said, putting my book aside.
Loretta sat on the edge of my bed. “Her and Connor’s mother was distant, self-absorbed. The woman had no interest in her children.Their father was a fiend for rules and a demon for enforcement. The mother never came to their defense.”
