by Mary Miley
“Whaddya do?” Brickles continued.
“I’m an assistant script girl. Sort of a girl Friday.”
“You said you met the deceased last night. Where?”
“At a party.”
“Whose?”
“Bruno Heilmann’s. She was serving—” I almost said champagne but caught myself just in time. No point adding kindling to the fire. “Beverages. She recognized me.”
“She recognized you from twenty years ago? That musta been some trick.”
“I’m twenty-five. I’d have been five or ten when she knew me. But I think it was really my mother that she recognized. I look a lot like her.”
“You know of any reason anyone would want to kill her?”
“No, sir.”
A doctor puffed up the stairs, followed by a man with a stretcher. He didn’t waste a word on us, but headed straight to Esther. I couldn’t bear to watch. A few minutes later he came out into the hall, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Death caused by a blunt instrument,” he told the policemen. I rolled my eyes. Brilliant deduction, Sherlock, with the bloodied horse statue lying beside the body. “About nine or ten hours ago, I’d estimate.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. That ought to be enough to get me off the hook.
Brickles started knocking on every door on the third floor. It being Sunday, most of the tenants were home, but no one had heard anything alarming in the middle of last night.
“Where were you last night at two o’clock?” Delaney asked me.
“Home in bed. I left the party at quarter past midnight to catch the last Red Car. I don’t know how long it went on, probably a couple more hours.” I realized that Esther must have finished working the party and just gotten home when she was attacked.
“Is there anyone who can support your story?”
“My friend Myrna Loy was with me. We went home together.” Delaney asked for the spelling. I hated to get Myrna involved in this mess, but I needed an alibi.
“There’s something that puzzles me. There’s no telephone here. After you discovered the body, you went all the way down to the first floor to knock on doors looking for a telephone. What’s wrong with these doors right here?”
I hadn’t thought how odd that would look. But years on the stage had trained me to think fast under pressure and to ad-lib in a confident manner without fumbling for words.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I guess. I saw the old lady in her window when I came into the building and instinctively went back to someone I knew was home. She wouldn’t open the door, so I went across the hall. Look, if I had killed Esther in the middle of the night, would I come back the next day to find her and call the police?”
“Let’s go,” Delaney said, motioning me toward the stairs. My heart galloped. I wasn’t sure if he meant he was taking me to jail or the front door. And I worried about the letters in the tray that wouldn’t be picked up until tomorrow. Delaney followed as I led the way down the stairs, and I gave a sigh of relief as he passed the mail tray without checking its contents.
Out on the sidewalk, the inevitable crowd had gathered. Lots of people come out on a Sunday morning when an undertaker’s car pulls up. A man with a Chaplin moustache spoke for the throng, “What’s wrong, Officer?”
“Anyone here know Esther Frankel?” People looked at one another as if they were deciding how to respond. “Fifties. Gray hair. Heavy build.”
“I know her. What happened? Is she dead?” asked a big-breasted woman holding a baby on her hip.
“I’m afraid so. Murdered. Anyone see or hear anything in the middle of the night? Doc says it happened about two o’clock. She was just getting home after working a party.”
More murmurs and head shaking and nervous glances.
“No one was up at two or three o’clock? No one saw anything unusual?”
“I was letting my dog out at about six this morning and I saw a stranger leaving this building,” said an ancient man with a bent back and a bald head. “I remember it because he had a droopy mouth like my Edna. Hey, Edna, come here and let the officer see your face.”
Before poor Edna could be put on display like a carnival freak, Delaney shook his head. “Too late. Doc says it was about nine or ten hours ago.” The old man looked dejected.
No one else in the crowd spoke until a thin boy wearing an undershirt and dungarees volunteered, “Yesterday I saw a red McLaughlin circle the block three or four times. It was a touring car. Not from around here.”
“Did you get a license number?”
“Naw.”
Delaney jotted down the description anyway. A couple others mentioned having seen it, too. Such a creature would be easy to find—red McLaughlins weren’t exactly dime a dozen, even in Hollywood.
Then a woman separated herself from the crowd and approached Officer Delaney. She was about forty, dressed in a beige suit with a matching hat and gloves, and I guessed she had just come from church. “Officer,” she said in a low voice. “There have been two break-ins in my building just in the last month.” She pointed to an apartment building across the street and a little east of Esther’s. “In both cases, no one was home. The burglaries were reported to the police, but no one’s been caught yet.”
“And you’re wondering if this could be the same burglar who was robbing Miss Frankel’s home, thinking she was gone for the night?”
“Exactly. He thinks the place is empty because he doesn’t know she works late. She comes home, surprises him in the act, and in a panic, he kills her.”
Several residents were close enough to overhear the exchange, and three chimed in with more information.
“The thief took money and jewelry,” volunteered one.
“He picked the locks,” said another. Officer Delaney scribbled furiously, then asked for their names and addresses.
He was wasting his time. Even I could see that the three crimes were not related. Esther was not killed by a thief who had broken in to steal valuables. Esther’s killer had stolen nothing. Her apartment hadn’t been ransacked. He hadn’t been surprised in the act; he had surprised her. Judging from the blow and the location of the body, Esther had been absorbed in her playbills and hadn’t even heard the man come up behind her. But I kept quiet.
“If anyone remembers anything from the middle of the night, call the station,” said Delaney, then he turned to me. “Do you want a ride home, Miss Beckett?”
“No, thanks, Officer. I’ll go home the way I came, by streetcar.”
“I insist. You’ve had a bad shock.”
Further arguments might have looked like I had something to hide, so I climbed into the Buick touring car and directed him across town to my house. He probably wanted to check the address and my alibi with Myrna.
Wrong. He wanted to ask me to dinner.
“I been thinking…” he began as we pulled up in front of my house. I should have sensed what was coming, but Esther’s death had knocked the intuition clean out of me. “When this investigation is over in a day or so, would you like to have dinner with me?”
“Um, I … uh … geez, I guess that means you don’t think I did it?”
“I never did. Women don’t kill like that. Besides, small as you are, I don’t think you could have reached the top of her head if you’d tried. We’re looking for a man, that’s for sure. Someone strong. I knew right away you weren’t the type to kill someone.”
“Honored, I’m sure, Officer.” I gulped, thinking fast. Seeing a policeman, even for dinner, sounded like a tiptoe through a minefield considering the life I’d led. On the other hand, offending a policeman—especially the one investigating this particular crime—might be worse. The only policemen I ever wanted to see were those slapstick Keystone Cops.
“The name’s Carl, by the way. Carl Delaney.”
“Right. Honored, Carl. But I, uh, feel a little awkward about this, considering the murder and everything.”
As if on cue, Myrna
stuck her head out the front door and yelled, “Jessie? Jessie, Mr. Fairbanks is on the telephone. Says it’s urgent. What shall I say?”
Rescued in the nick of time by Douglas Fairbanks—just like in the pictures. I scrambled out of the police car. “Tell him I’m coming.”
“Never mind, you go on,” said Carl, convinced now, if he hadn’t been earlier, that I really did work for Fairbanks. “Only I hafta tell you not to leave town until this is cleared up.”
“Right. And thanks for the ride home!” I dashed up the walk and into the house, so relieved to have sidestepped the invitation that I wasn’t even wondering why Douglas Fairbanks, who had never telephoned me once during the weeks I worked directly for him, would do so on a sleepy Sunday afternoon.
Men who install telephones mount them too high. I held the receiver cone to my ear and stretched up on my toes to get my lips near the mouthpiece. “Hello? Jessie Beckett speaking.”
“Jessie,” he said tersely. “Thank God you’re home. I need your help. There’s been a murder.”
I nearly dropped the receiver. “How on earth did you know about it already?”
“Zukor called me.”
“Adolph Zukor?” I repeated stupidly. The head of Paramount, the largest studio in the world. “Why?”
“Fear. He can’t afford another scandal. His people, his company, hell, the whole film industry will suffer from this. He wants to keep it out of the newspapers until he can figure out how to minimize the scandal, so almost no one knows about it yet—”
“Yes they do! I called the police.”
“You what? How did you—”
“I found the body. I’ve just come from there. One of the cops brought me home.”
“You were there?”
“Yes, I had gone to see her, and when I arrived, the door was ajar and her body was on the bedroom floor. It was horrible. So I called the police.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The murder!”
“Whose murder?”
“Esther Frankel, of course.”
“Who the hell is Esther Frankel?”
The spiraling tension at both ends of the line snapped as we reached the same appalling conclusion at the same moment.
“Esther Frankel was murdered last night after the party,” I explained quietly.
“So was Bruno Heilmann.”
7
The cop guarding the Heilmann house watched as a short, brown-skinned washerwoman made her way up the middle of the walk, a gimpy leg giving her steps the cadence of a slow heartbeat. Her baggy clothes were faded and worn, and a hank of black hair had escaped the yellow bandana that wrapped her head. In one hand she carried a tin pail full of rags and scrub brushes. The guard must have expected her to veer right or left at the fountain toward one of the other houses, because when she continued around it toward the center house, he stood up from his chair on the porch and peered down at her with a suspicious squint.
“I come to clean the blood,” I said, looking at his shoes so he wouldn’t wonder why my blue-green eyes didn’t go with my dark complexion.
For an answer, he drew a last, long lungful of cigarette smoke and threw the butt at my feet. Then he swaggered down the stairs, planted his boot heel on the butt, and ground it against the flagstone walk. Subtlety was not his strength.
I stood my ground. “The manservant, he send me. He say he not going back in till the blood is washed up.”
“I don’t give a goddamn about any servants. No one’s going in there until the detective comes and says so.”
“But he tell me—”
“Beat it,” he said, drawing back one arm to backhand me. It was not an empty gesture. I ducked out of his reach, retreated, and hobbled away. At every step I could feel his hostile eyes burning into my back.
Once out of sight, I lost the limp and circled around to the back of the houses on the service road until I reached the rear of the Heilmann home. Last night the adjacent houses had appeared empty. Today the two I passed were occupied, but while I heard voices coming from one and a radio blaring at the other, I saw no one. If anyone had glanced out a window, they’d have seen nothing but a Mexican servant on her way to work. The residents didn’t worry me. The guard did.
“There was only one guard when I drove by a little while ago,” Douglas had told me over the telephone, “and he was hugging the front porch shade.” It had given me an idea.
Douglas’s plan for a frontal assault hadn’t worked—bluffing cops isn’t easy, even for an accomplished actress like me—but I had a backup plan of my own. I thought I could sneak inside through one of the rear windows.
At last night’s party, all the windows had been open. Most people around here leave windows open, day and night, or else the house heats up like a bake oven. If Bruno Heilmann had been killed last night at the conclusion of the party, the murderer would certainly not have gone about afterward closing windows before he fled. Nor would the shocked valet have thought to do it that morning after he arrived; nor would the policemen who first reported to the scene. I figured there was a good chance I could climb in an open window without being seen.
The patio looked smaller in daylight than it had last night. Dead torches still ringed the edge; paper lanterns still bobbled in the breeze … and I had badly misjudged the police. They had closed all the back windows on the first floor, leaving open only those on the second floor. I gave one of the ground-floor window sashes a push but it was locked from the inside. No doubt the rest were, too.
“I know this is a huge thing to ask, Jessie,” Douglas had said on the telephone, “and I want to make it clear that your job isn’t on the line if you refuse. I’d do it myself but I can’t go to a damned drugstore without attracting photographers. Neither can Mary. And Lottie is hysterical. All she does is huddle in the corner and whimper about her career. I couldn’t care less about Lottie—the press can drag that little tramp through the mire with my blessing—but I’d do anything to protect my Mary. If the newspapers get hold of Lottie’s affair with Heilmann, she’ll be caught up in the murder scandal and ten minutes later it will spill over to Mary. Mary’s always protecting Jack and Lottie from their own idiocy, and she takes the brunt of it. It’s only been five years since Olive’s ‘accidental’ death in Paris … My God, a second Pickford scandal coming on top of Fatty Arbuckle’s rape trial and Wallace Reid’s drug overdose! The public is fed up with the wild lives of Hollywood, with the Pickfords in the fore.”
Douglas was not exaggerating. Fatty Arbuckle had descended into a severe depression; his career, friends, and fans had vanished during his trial, never to return, even after the second jury found him innocent and apologized for the whole ordeal. The scandal caused serious financial panic in New York, with Paramount’s stock dropping to less than half its value. Studios went bankrupt. Actors were thrown out of work. And not long afterward, the public read about the death of popular young Wallace Reid from a drug overdose. Fans were livid when a superficial investigation into the illegal dope trade failed to identify any of his suppliers. Reputations were fragile commodities, and even Little Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” was vulnerable.
Beneath an old oak tree at the edge of the patio, I made up my mind. Examining the drooping branches, I found the one I wanted. I had not spent a year of my life in the Circus Kids act for nothing. Although I hadn’t swung on a trapeze or dangled from a rope in a dozen years, I was still quite limber, and I had always had a good sense of balance, so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to step out of my baggy skirt, kick off my shoes, and scramble up that tree as if it were a stage prop. Climbing from branch to branch, I soon reached the one closest to an open second-story window.
The branch was as high as the roof, but it was slender. I tested it by inching out toward the tip until I could see how far down it would bend with my weight. Hanging from both hands put me at eye level to the windowsill—lower than I would have preferred, but from there it was a s
imple maneuver to jackknife my legs to the sill and arch my back until I slid inside.
The branch swooshed back as I let go.
I found myself in a sparsely furnished back bedroom. There was no time to waste. Douglas had told me what to look for.
There were four bedrooms, all with beds neatly made, of course, since Bruno Heilmann had been killed last night before he’d had time to tuck in, alone or with companions. I didn’t have many details about his death, but I gathered from what Douglas said that the valet had arrived for work this morning to find Heilmann on the living room floor, dead from a single bullet wound in the back of the head. The horrified valet had the sense to call Adolph Zukor, Heilmann’s boss at Paramount, rather than the police. Zukor hadn’t attended the party but he knew Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had been there, so he called Douglas to ask what the hell had happened, who could have done such a thing, and did he think it could be covered up somehow or passed off as a heart attack? Zukor was terrified of bad publicity. All three of the sensational Hollywood scandals in the past few years had involved Paramount actors. There was a limit to the public’s loyalty, and Zukor figured he’d finally reached it with Heilmann’s murder.
“I convinced him there was no way to cover up the death of an important director like Heilmann,” Douglas had said to me, “and that the police chief, while generally under Zukor’s thumb, was unlikely to turn a blind eye to murder and pretend it was a heart attack. Zukor was thinking to stall, to keep it out of the papers at least until the killer could be apprehended and the whole mess could come out at once rather than dribble out day by day. He finally called the police.”
It wouldn’t be long before the police connected the two murders and wondered, as I already had, whether Esther Frankel’s death was related to the director’s party. Two people who had been at the same party and were killed at roughly the same time could not be a coincidence.