by Rex Baron
It was Taylor who was the beast. It was he, with all of his intellect and appearance of understanding, the champion of the defenseless, who truly manipulated and destroyed those around him.
She knew now why Claxton hated Taylor. Because he recognized the intentions behind the mask of saintly self-sacrifice. It was Taylor who was to blame for what was happening to Paulo. It was he who must be punished.
Helen's mind raced with the motorcar all the way back to her bungalow. She had come up with a plan, and even if it might be too late to save Paulo for herself, it was certain that she would not be made a fool of.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Studio, Los Angeles
“Put some more powder on her. She looks like hell,” the studio photographer whispered to his assistant.
The young man moved in front of the camera and gingerly patted face powder around Mary Miles Minter's eyes as she sat staring moodily into the distance, unaware of his presence.
She was dressed in ruffles, tulle and eyelet embroidery, like an oversized doll. Her cheeks were rouged heavily to give the appearance of a hearty and robust child.
“An English schoolgirl's complexion is what we're going for,” Charlotte Shelby said hovering over Mary.
She touched a handkerchief to her mouth, moistening it and rubbed the rouge on Mary's cheek to even it. She stepped back to admire the effect, but the frown on the girl's face had not improved.
“Mary dear, don't look so despondent,” Charlotte said sweetly, realizing the photographer and his people were within earshot.
“It's odd mother,” Mary answered, “that you don't ask me not to feel despondent, but only that I don't look that way. You don't give a good god damn how I feel. I feel tired.”
“Well, you wouldn't be tired if you didn't sneak around staying up half the night, skulking about with that low life.”
Mary tossed the little parasol she held in her lap across the room.
“Take a ten minute break,” the photographer called out.
Charlotte grabbed Mary by the arm and yanked her from her chair. She dug her fingers into the girl's arm and dragged her behind a freestanding prop wall and threw her against it. The girl's wide eyes blinked in amazement.
“You’re trying my patience Miss,” Charlotte hissed, her face only inches from Mary's white powdered profile.
“Look at me when I'm talking to you,” she said, taking the face in her hand and wrenching it around so that Mary looked at her. “Now, I'm not going to tell you again. You're losing me money. You're losing money for the studio. Two years ago you were the biggest star in this town next to Mary Pickford, and now you're lucky if they put you in as second lead. You're nineteen years old Mary. You have lots of years to work if you pull yourself together.”
Mary twisted her chin free of Charlotte's grasp.
“My name is Juliet. You don't even call me by my real name at home anymore. All I am is someone who makes money for you, so you can pretend to be something you're not.”
Charlotte slapped her hard across the face.
The stagehands stopped what they were doing and listened to the raised voices.
“I'll tell you one time and that's all,” she choked out the words. “You straighten up and do what needs to be done to salvage your career. They're all laughing at you because you're a drunkard and a stupid little fool, humiliating me by taking up with that swine Taylor. He should be shot for taking advantage of a child like you.”
“Bill hasn't done anything. He's nice to me, that's all,” Mary insisted.
“Nice. I've seen his kind of nice, and I won't have his sort ruining our lives for his own amusement. Now you'll do what I tell you. You'll get back in there and look happy, stand on your head or turn yourself inside out, whatever it takes to get back to where you belong.”
She shook Mary by the arm as the girl sobbed quietly, unable to speak.
“Now, get in there and work, and if I hear that you so much as talk to Bill Taylor again, he'll have me to answer to. Do you hear me?”
Mary nodded soberly.
They emerged from behind the prop wall, Mary's eyes wild with confusion. Charlotte poked at the girl's hair with her finger, coaxing the curls back into place.
“There,” she smiled, “isn't that better? You look lovely darling.”
•••
Helen had overheard the argument. She peered out from Mary's dressing room, listening with enjoyment as Charlotte cut a piece out of her ruffled little adversary.
She had come onto the Paramount lot, pretending to be an extra on call for a western, and slipped into Mary's dressing room when they had gone out for the photo session.
Helen looked about the room purposefully, intent on finding just the right thing. A smile came over her face as she spotted a yellow slip with the initials M M M embroidered on the hem, Mary's ridiculous monogram, bringing to mind the painful utterances of a stammering idiot trying to call her names. She crumpled the slip in her hand and shoved it into the pocket of her coat, then crept away, careful not to disturb anything else.
•••
William Desmond Taylor’s home, Los Angeles
William Desmond Taylor had spent the day shopping, buying golf balls and gloves with the fingers missing to help improve his game.
He had grown accustomed to hearing that his life had been threatened by Mary's mother. He shook his head when he was told by one of the studio’s hands that, once again, everyone had overheard that Charlotte was out for his blood.
He felt sorry for Mary, a grown woman with real dramatic abilities, trapped in the costumes and mannerisms of a child.
“Purity seems to be the only virtue that poor Charlotte values,” he had said with a sigh. He struggled to dismiss it from his mind as he drove himself home. He had not yet found a replacement for his chauffeur, and he wondered if any of his stolen belongings would ever turn up.
In spite of what he had told Paulo, there were love letters he had saved that would incriminate more than one movie lothario. He could only hope that the bundle of letters had been deemed valueless and discarded by his deceitful employee and brother.
He arrived home by seven. It was already dark, something that depressed him about the winter nights. He longed for the summer when the daylight stretched long into the evening, when there were fewer dark hours to feel the loneliness that plagued him in this restless life.
He thought of calling Paulo, but he felt tired and didn't have the energy the boy required, the endless reassurance of his beauty and youth, the little lies that shored up his masculinity when it came under assault from the passions they played out together.
No, he could not face an evening of wanting him and then pay by counseling and stroking his head and lying to him that what they had done had not changed him.
He laid his head back against a cushion and surveyed the empty space around him. His loneliness was broken by a knock at the door. He rose and opened it.
Mabel Normand stood on the threshold, wrapped in a fur coat, incongruously framed in the doorway by the trailing bougainvilleas that stirred in the warm evening air.
“I wanted to see you for a minute,” she explained. “I hope I haven't come at a bad time.”
She crossed the room, uninvited, and settled herself on the sofa. Then, she produced a bag of peanuts from her handbag and casually shelled them, popping the contents of each into her mouth as she spoke.
“I know I usually come to talk to you about my problems, but it's different this time. It's about you. And since you've so often helped me, I thought you might like to know that Charlotte Shelby is on the warpath again, telling everyone that you're a dead man if you lay a hand on Mary.”
Bill laughed. The story had escalated from a personal threat into certain murder. One version of the story that Mabel mentioned even included an eyewitness account of Charlotte waving her chromium pistol around at the studio and shrieking that she would see him dead.
He patted Mabel's plump little fist, occupied w
ith peanuts, and convinced her of the true dimensions of the situation.
“Well, that's not all,” she said, “it's Mary. I went over to see her today, and she's ready to do herself in. She told me personally that if she didn't break away soon, she would lose her mind or kill herself, or Charlotte, or both. If you ask me, she's already gone over the edge.”
Mabel was clearly enjoying the excitement of the developments. She pressed her body forward in her seat and cracked the shells with enthusiasm, relating her story as if it were a cliff-hanging one-reeler at a Saturday matinee.
“Charlotte is truly evil,” she said, munching a mouthful. “I'd watch out for her if I were you, William. There's no telling what either she or Mary might do.”
William felt better. In spite of the silly story blown out of proportion, he was enjoying this visit from Mabel. She was simple and unschooled. He had been lonely only a few moments before, but now, even with the news of threats on his life, he was amused by this dark-eyed girl, who did not even attempt to mask her excitement with a veil of morbid concern.
She was at an age when the whole fabric of life unraveled and mended itself again into order within the course of a single day. He had long since forgotten the thrill such complexities, which could be cast aside with a single kiss or a word of apology, could bring to the young. Theirs was a world that could be made and unmade from morning to night, like a bed, filled with love or the tossing of an angry sleepless night.
“Don't you worry,” he said, once again patting her hand. “I'll look out for myself. Mary will be all right too. There's no reason for Charlotte to be so angry. I'm like a father to Mary, nothing more.”
Almost crestfallen, Mabel accepted the information and nodded.
“I've got to go,” she said. “I'm taking lessons to improve my reading. When I get better at it, I'll come and read some of these pretty poems that I have in a book for you.”
William kissed her lightly on the cheek and waved to her down the path until he saw her safely behind the wheel of her Pierce Arrow.
He closed the door and smiled to himself.
•••
Helen stepped from the red car trolley and proceeded on foot for the two blocks to William's bungalow on Alvarado. She did not want her car to be seen and remembered by any passers-by.
She felt in the pocket of her jacket to be certain that the yellow slip, which she had taken from Mary's dressing room, had not fallen out while on the trolley. She clutched it for reassurance and patted her other pocket containing the thirty-eight-caliber revolver, which she had stolen from one of the tenants of her building.
She had waited until she knew that the retired policeman was asleep, then used her ring to gain invisible entry into his apartment. Finding the gun was easy, her escape was silent and without risk.
But she did not intend to use the ring to come upon William unaware. She wanted to be seen at a distance, to rouse the curiosity of the neighbors, so that when they heard the shot, they would see a man, or a woman in man's clothing running from the scene.
She crept around to the back of the bungalow and peered into the window, to be sure that William was completely alone. She had seen Mabel drive away and entertained the pleasant thought that she might be charged with the murder, since she undoubtedly would be the last to have seen him alive… but she didn’t care.
Through the window, she saw him walk to the butler's pantry and pour himself a glass of wine. She pulled on her work gloves, then stooped into the flowerbed. She gathered some of the moist earth between her fingers and rubbed it on her face to mask her features in the dim light.
When William returned to the sitting room, Helen was standing before him, pointing the policeman's revolver at his chest.
“Well, I see you're still aspiring to act,” he said, recognizing her through the mud.
“I assure you I'm not acting,” she said, cocking the trigger of the gun. “I'd say it was you who deserves all the awards for acting, pretending to befriend everyone and all the while, you're only working out your cheap seductions.”
“I don't know what...”
“Don't bother to deny it,” she said calmly. “I'm talking about Paulo.”
William let out a breath.
“I see. Somehow Miss Liluth, I had overestimated you,” he said, as he stared down the barrel of the gun. “I figured you were after more than a famous boyfriend. I never took you for one of Paulo's love-starved fans.”
“You were right in the first place,” she said with a hint of an approving smile, “but there's a bit more to it than that I'm afraid.”
“Then you're threatening to kill me for the sake of revenge, because I supposedly stole Paulo away from you. Don't you see, there was never even a possibility of your having him. He has been with me from the day I brought him here and put him in his first picture. So, you see Helen, there is no point in threatening me. You have nothing to gain. There is no point in killing me.”
“You're right. There is no point in threatening you,” she said. “I'll kill you because you're in my way.”
Carefully, she increased the pressure on the trigger and fired the shot. William toppled backward, an expression of amazement on his face. It was the first time in many years that he had not been able to use his calm, fatherly voice to console any who confronted him and talk them out of their rage or their confusion with his skillful and convincing words.
Helen hurriedly checked to see that he had stopped breathing, then pulled the rumpled slip from her pocket and carried it into the bedroom. She dropped it beside the bed, careful to make it look as if it had been left behind in a hasty retreat. She went to the bathroom and held a washcloth under the tap, then put the wet cloth in her pocket.
She raced to the front door, knowing that she had only a matter of seconds before the sound of the shot might be reported and the police would arrive. But just as she was about to open the door to leave, she remembered that she had planned to kill two birds with one stone and reached into the inside pocket of the man’s jacket that she was wearing, producing the two nude photographs of Richard Barthelmess. Hurrying back to where the body of Bill Taylor lay lifeless on the carpet, she reached down and slipped the photographs under the palm of his hand… When they found him, it would appear that he was enjoying a sordid relationship with yet another of his young and successful devotees.
She bolted from the house, running along the back of the complex to a stand of trees near the road.
She pulled off the trousers and jacket and smoothed the skirt and sweater that she had worn underneath them. She wrapped the trousers and jacket in a bundle and wiped the dirt from her face with the damp washcloth. She pulled her handbag out from its hiding place under her sweater and quickly placed the pistol inside.
Within moments, she stepped from the other side of the cluster of trees, mindful to be out of the light cast by the street lamps, and shimmied down an embankment to the road. She walked along the quiet street for a block, until she happened upon a trash barrel that had been put out for collection.
Unobserved, she pushed the parcel of old clothes down amongst the rubbish and briskly walked away, wiping the wrinkles from her skirt with her hand.
She heard a dog barking from the direction of the apartments. At the corner, she waited only a minute or two before catching the trolley on her way back home.
She needed no alibi. She had no motive that anyone would be aware of, since no one, other than she, knew about the liaison between the two men. The yellow slip, coupled with the verbal threats overheard that afternoon at the studio, more than implicated Mary and placed her mother in jeopardy, as she deserved. The photographs of Barthelmess were left behind as something of a red herring. Helen doubted that he would be a serious suspect in the murder, since so many threats and eye-witness accounts pointed to Charlotte Shelby, but he would certainly have some explaining to do and, who knows, Helen smiled to herself, it might even bring about the end of his career.
CHAP
TER FOURTEEN
Lucy’s villa, Los Angeles
There were no bright patches of reflected light on the tile floor of the hallway when Lucy came down for lunch. It was raining and it seemed as if the enchantment, which caused the sun to shine incessantly had, at long last, been broken. Lucy felt that since the night of conjuration in the chapel, a profound change had taken place in this strange world. The illusion of love had finally fallen away, draining the landscape of color and scents of beauty, leaving behind only the grayness of the sky and the cold rain on the windows.
David was already at the table eating when she entered the dining room. Even from where she stood, she could see the silk ribbon of the amulet disappear into his shirt collar. It would be useless to pursue the subject of dismissing Helen from the New York season. He was blind as far as she was concerned. The charm had made sure of that. The best chance to bring him to his senses, she determined, was to make Celia aware of Helen’s talisman and rely on the double threat of her superstitious nature and her wifely possessiveness to save him from making a fool of himself and to keep Helen out of their world.
She sat across from him at the table. He looked up from the newspaper with a frown.
“William Desmond Taylor has been killed.” He delivered the news with all the solemnity of a presidential assassination.
Lucy was stunned. She tried to imagine William’s face in her mind's eye. The tall, lanky man with the deep-set eyes and prominent chin, now, suddenly, reminded her of Abraham Lincoln. He had always had the look of someone who might be martyred one day, she thought.
“When?” she asked. “What does the paper say happened?”
“It says here that between seven-thirty and eight o'clock, someone came into his house and killed him. They know the time because a neighbor heard a noise and looked out the window to see a small man running from the apartment complex into the bushes. It says here that the woman's dog wouldn't stop barking, so she noted the time as still early, fearing that the neighbors might complain.”