Murder by Magic

by Rex Baron

  “I know. We got five or six leads, including the little actress and her mother. We've got Mabel Normand, the last to see him alive before seven-thirty, the disappearing chauffeur and three bags full of confessions from the general public.”

  “So, what do you make of the nudie photos of that male picture star he had in his hand when they found him?” Brown asked in confusion. “If he was such a lady’s man, just what the hell is that all about?”

  “Search me,” Sanderson answered with a sigh of frustration. “Maybe it’s one of those times when there are just too many clues and too many suspects.”

  They had spent an entire day reading the fan mail this murder had attracted. It was bizarre the way people admitted guilt so freely for a crime they did not commit.

  It was perhaps a need for celebrity, a brush with immortality, regardless of the vehicle. The confessions poured in from brothers who had killed Taylor for “spoiling “ their sisters, or husbands who claimed their own bodies would be floating in the ocean, after making the villain “pay dearly” and turning a gun on themselves.

  Most of the confessions were from thrill-seekers who never even met the man. But several of the letters were of interest to District Attorney Woolwine — those from the drug dealers who had threatened Taylor for querying the deals with Mabel Normand, or the letter from someone who claimed to have known William when his last name was Tanner, the same name that his brother had also changed from when he masqueraded as William's Chauffeur, Edward Sands.

  “How's the little actress doing in the hospital?” Sanderson asked.

  “Well enough, nothing serious. Can't tell whether she was scared because she did it, or crazed because her mother did. At any rate, when she recovers she's got a story to tell.”

  “And what about her gun? Does it check out as the murder weapon for Taylor?”

  “Nah… so, we’re back to square one,” Brown replied, as he shook his head in frustration.

  The door opened and a secretary poked her head in.

  “We've got Mrs. Shelby's statement. She's out here if you want her for any questions.”

  Lieutenant Sanderson nodded.

  Charlotte entered the room, dressed in a bright and colorful floral dress, clearly underscoring the fact that she was by no means in mourning for Bill Taylor. She took possession of a chair before it was offered.

  “I believe you have something to ask me, some questions. I shall tell you from the start I am in a hurry. As you know, my daughter is in the hospital because of this filthy business, and I deem it of far greater importance to be with her than here, satisfying the curiosity of the police.”

  “Yes, we can appreciate that,” Thad Brown said, stubbing out his cigarette.

  “What we need to know is, where were you and Mary the night of the murder, between seven o'clock and eight-thirty? It says here, on the report, that you were both at home.”

  “That's right.” Charlotte drew her head up with aristocratic immunity. “I was at home with my two daughters and my mother. Mary was reading aloud to us that evening. As I recall, it was Crime and Punishment, a great favourite of mine.”

  “Too close to home for my taste,” the detective replied. “Was there anyone else there, who is not a member of your family, who might corroborate this?”

  “I am not in the habit of gregariously entertaining, Lieutenant. We prefer to have our evenings quietly at home.”

  “Have you any idea why Mary tried to kill herself, or why she said those things about you being the murderer?” Sanderson asked, taking a seat on the edge of his desk.

  Charlotte stopped for a moment and watched the young woman taking down what she was saying in shorthand.

  “It's rather nice that a woman might have a job like that, isn't it,” she said.

  She returned her gaze to the lieutenant and the matter at hand.

  “I have my suspicions that Mary truly feared I might have done it,” Charlotte replied. “We argued about Mister Taylor only a few days before. I'm afraid I was angry, not wanting Mary to be mixed up with someone like that, and I suppose it was overheard by the crew.”

  Thad Brown nodded a yes.

  “I feel oddly justified in quarreling with her about her unsavory dependence on him. After all, he was obviously not someone a mother wants her daughter running about with. The murder proves that if nothing else. Mary has no father, you see, so she supplanted her affections on Mister Taylor.”

  “We have reason to believe that it was more than a fatherly interest Taylor had in Mary.” Sergeant Brown offered the information gingerly, as if offering food to a rabid dog.

  “We have a note from Mary with a butterfly drawn on it and the phrase, I love you, repeated over and over. Also, there is the matter of the nightgown found at the scene.”

  Charlotte flew into a rage.

  “You have no idea how that got there,” she said, raising her voice. “Kindly do not assume. We had been missing that slip for several days. It was obviously stolen and planted at the scene to incriminate the poor child.”

  “Well, where was it taken from? Has your house been broken into and robbed? You say yourself you have very few houseguests. Who might have come in and taken it, since you insist on all those evenings alone?”

  “I don't know how it could have been taken,” Charlotte snapped.

  “Why would anyone want to incriminate poor Mary, as you say,” Sanderson asked, shifting his weight uncomfortably on the narrow edge of the desk.

  “Anyone who was jealous of Mary could have done it.” Charlotte tried to sound clear and rational. She leaned forward in her chair and offered the solution. “Even the studio could have done it. Her films have not done well in the last year. They would just love to break her contract and drop her. They'd stop at nothing. One of them would have access to her dressing room or car. They could get her clothing if they wanted to.”

  “I see,” Thad Brown said, lighting a cigarette. “Is there anyone else you can think of who might want to kill William Desmond Taylor?”

  Charlotte thought for a long minute, watching the girl frozen in place, waiting to continue her shorthand.

  “Everyone and no one,” she said. “He meddled in so many people's lives. That Mabel Normand bought liquor from him, I think. Ask her about him. Other than that, I cannot say. I should think he would have many enemies, one at least far more serious than I.”

  “Do you know Paulo Cordoba, the actor?”

  “No,” Charlotte answered. “Those sort of young womanizers have no place around my girls.”

  “He's been missing for two days. He wasn't available for questioning. He and Taylor were good friends, I hear. I thought you might know something about it,” Sanderson said, rising from his uncomfortable seat on the edge of the desk.

  Charlotte Shelby rose to her feet to prevent the lieutenant from having the opportunity of looking down on her.

  “Then I suggest you find him and ask him,” she replied curtly. “Who knows, if you're able to find him, you might even have your murderer, and you can leave me and my family in peace.”

  •••

  Graveyard, Los Angeles

  “What an odd place to want to meet,” David grumbled in annoyance, as he gouged the leather of an expensive pair of shoes against the sharp stone edge of a grave marker.

  Helen laughed and took his arm as they walked.

  “When I was little, I loved to look at statues made of marble and bronze. But the only people who could afford such luxuries were the rich and the dead... and I was neither. The closest I could get was to come here. It made me feel like Isadora Duncan. I still love to come here on a beautiful sunny day like this.”

  “But couldn't we have just had lunch somewhere?” David asked, looking down at his damaged shoe with a sigh.

  “I wanted to meet you somewhere where we wouldn't be seen together,” Helen replied. “I know that Lucy, for one, doesn't like me much and I wouldn't want to cause problems.”

  They ap
proached a stone bench, cast in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Helen dusted off one side and sat down. David noticed that the bench was a memorial to Cecil Finch, whose face had been engraved on the seat above a quaint Victorian rendering of the bird of the same name. Almost without being aware of it, he computed the dates carved in the stone and noted, in his head, that the man had died at an age three years younger than he was now. He remained standing.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the opera,” Helen continued. “I was wondering when you might be going away, back East.”

  “Whenever Lucy's commitment here is finished, I suppose,” he answered.

  “But your wife is already there. Surely you must miss her.”

  David coughed nervously into his hand and nodded, making a low sound in his throat.

  “I was hoping it would be sooner,” Helen said. “It's only that I'm so excited about getting a chance to be in your opera. You have no idea how much I have wanted to be a singer... all my life,” she said with as much exuberance as she could muster.

  “Now remember, my dear, it is only a small part. The theater takes seasoning.”

  Helen rose to her feet, as if in reverence to the very subject. Once again, she took his arm and squeezed it tight. “I'll work like mad, and if I'm lazy, I promise you can beat me.” She laughed and planted a tiny grateful kiss on his cheek.

  David patted her hand.

  “What about your film career? Won't you mind leaving that all behind?”

  Helen's rouged mouth drooped into a cynical sneer, giving her a more worldly and somewhat exciting appearance than David had ever seen on her before.

  “The films are infantile in comparison to the true art of the theater... a mere titillation, nothing more,” she said echoing his own opinion, which she had made a point of finding out. “I would exchange the most dazzling career in the picture plays for one triumphal night on a New York stage.” She looked off reverently into the distance, as if staring at her own destiny… an expression she had copied from Constance Talmadge in Lessons in Love.

  David was amused and charmed by her theatrical flair.

  “I wouldn't go as far as all that,” he said with another pat to her hand. “After all, you might be giving up quite a lot for very little.”

  “The pictures mean nothing to me,” she said with a sincerity that made him smile. “That's why, if I had my way, we'd leave at once. Oh David, it's all so thrilling.” Once again, she settled onto the likeness of Mr. Finch and eyed David from under her dark lashes.

  “What about your friends, your contracts?” he asked.

  “I'm still a bit player. I haven't any contracts to break, and as for the people... they are all shallow and really rather thoughtless.” She pushed her lip out in a child's pout, just as she had so often seen Mary Minter do to get what she wanted. “I'd especially like to get away from that vile Claxton,” she said with a slight gasp of alarm at the mention of his name. “He's been just horrid, forcing his attentions on me. You must promise that if we leave by the end of the week, you won't tell him where I've gone. I'll be rid of him in New York, and by the time he finds out, it will be too late.” Helen smiled at the plan she had just verbalized aloud. “You will promise to rescue me, won't you David?” she asked with an entreating look.

  David nodded. “Of course.”

  Helen leaped to her feet and took the lapels of his coat in her hands. She drew him near and beamed up into his face. Her fingers, at the back of his neck, touched the ribbon of the medallion that she had made for him.

  “Then, we can go by the end of the week.” she said confidently. “Thank you David. I knew I could count on you.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Lucy’s villa, Los Angeles

  Lucy noticed, as she closed the door behind her, that the flowers in the hallway were dead. A quick glance through the drawing room door, at the far end of the hallway, told her that the ceremonial lilies had withered everywhere she had placed them. A shudder of anxiety ran through her, the slight tremor of a great truth, exploding into a consciousness that made her body tremble.

  “Of course they are dead. Whatever did you expect?” she asked herself aloud, as she placed her front door key on the silver tray on the hallway table.

  Perhaps she had secretly hoped that they would continue to bloom as a sign that her efforts that night in the chapel, to stop the advance of evil, had been successful.

  Perhaps there was no evil at all, unless trying to hold on to what must change, or what must inevitably be given over to something or someone new could be called evil. She sighed with frustration. She was just tired, she told herself.

  She had come from Paulo's house in the valley, near the legions of orange and yellow fruit trees, but he was not there. The canvas palette where he took his color lay covered in red dust from the desert wind that had blown in the morning of the murder.

  His housekeeper had wrung her hands and talked of dreadful things that might have befallen him in the two days since she had last seen him. She was too distraught to even offer the courtesy of asking Lucy in. So, the young singer consoled the woman as best she could and then left the premises, worrying herself about what might have happened to him.

  She could not think of where he might be. She knew so little of his life except the mythology of his past in Portugal, which he had invented and strategically revealed to her so that she might find him more romantic and colorful. She knew none of his friends except David and William. And she presumed it was the agonizing loss of the later that had sent him into reclusion.

  She had desperately wanted to see him that afternoon, not only to tell him how sorry she was about that tragic loss, but also to determine if he was still under the medallion's spell. She had imagined that once she had torn it from his neck and thrown it out into the fields, it would be rendered powerless. She had hoped that the terrible, angry scene they had in the orchard had been merely the effects of Helen's dastardly enchantment, and that once her spell was broken, he would come back to her as her lover. It had been two days since William’s death and he had not chosen to come to her.

  Lucy felt helpless. She wanted to be near him, to speak with him and allow him forgiveness for the unkindness he had shown her. It was not his fault, she rationalized to herself as she rode home. He had been as much a victim as she.

  The closest she could get to finding him was to buy a ticket to see The Bull Ring, his new film. She sat in the dark of a small neighborhood theater and watched his beautiful face, happy one moment, then torn with the pain she knew he must be genuinely experiencing somewhere in his isolation. Tears of sympathy and frustration ran down her face.

  She had offered her feelings to him as new sensations, things that she had never felt before. They were, perhaps, what one referred to as love, and yet, love was meant to be overpowering, so irresistible that even the forces of evil could not divert it from its course. Like a great river of passion, the waters of love were meant to cleanse and heal, to re-baptize the Soul in the purity and singleness of union with another. But she had found her submersion in love had only frightened her, bringing to mind the nightmarish images of her dreams, of suffocation and drowning in black water.

  “You must not allow your emotions to paralyze your thinking,” her grandmother had said. “Fear is an emotion to be watched like a pet snake. But love is the true destroyer.”

  She had fallen in love, as the expression goes. Truly it was a fall, a fall from sanity and grace, paralleled only by that of the angels, cast out from Heaven. She felt as if by loving she had lost everything.

  As they changed the reels of the film, she noticed that the theater was nearly empty and people were restlessly milling about or leaving long before the end.

  It was only a matinee, but surely his clamoring fans must be more than willing to pay their dime to see Paulo make love to Claire Windsor.

  There was something wrong. These were surely not the same people who had screamed and nearly torn him to pi
eces at the premiere. They seemed indifferent as they watched him gored by the bull and left to die in the arms of some sobbing young woman with curls down her back. The magic she had seen that night at the opening, as young women threw themselves in front of his limousine, clearly had no effect in the musty darkness of this unembellished movie house. Lucy wondered what would be left in Paulo's life if he, like poor little Mary, were ever stripped of his fame.

  •••

  How she hated this picture business, Lucy thought as she turned on the lights of the drawing room at the villa. How it twisted the emotions, making one feel sorry, even to the point of tears, for someone on the screen who you will never meet, whose painful circumstance is nothing more than the contrivance of a studio writer intent on the money he will make to buy a swimming pool for his backyard. They whip up the emotions, inventing reasons for them, paralyzing the masses with their stories of tragic love.

  David, reacting to the explosion of bright light in the room, sat up from a sleeping position on the sofa and rubbed his eyes. He glanced toward the violet twilight sky, out the drawing room window, and then up at Lucy.

  “I must have dozed off,” he said, straightening his tie and swinging his shoes off the sofa cushions to the floor. “One of the little perks of not having Celia about,” he said with a sheepish grin. “I can put my feet up without a withering look from the world's most fastidious housekeeper.”

  Lucy took off her coat and draped it over an adjacent chair, then perched herself on its arm.

  “Have you heard from her?” she asked.

  David nodded.

  “Actually, I rang her to tell her that we would be coming back on the train in a few days.”

  Lucy's mouth dropped open in surprise.

  “A few days,” she repeated his words in bewilderment. “What about the two other picture plays I’m contracted to make? Surely, Mr. Lasky…”

  David interrupted her.