Silent Murders

by Mary Miley

  “What do they have in common? Besides the fact that they were both at Heilmann’s party.”

  “This isn’t very nice to say, but they’ve both passed their prime.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “Paul wasn’t working much and the parts he got were minor. And Faye lost several parts to younger actresses—Lorna for one. That’s what brought on their quarrel at Heilmann’s party, when Faye slapped Lorna. Mary says Faye and Paul were lovers once, some years ago. She thought they had reunited.”

  Ever since yesterday, thoughts of Faye Gordon had pestered me from the blurry edge of consciousness. Her fight with Lorna, her inability to get help when the poison struck Paul, her own mild reaction to the poison. It wasn’t much, but the thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone.

  “Do you think Faye could have been angry enough at Lorna to kill her?”

  Douglas didn’t bat an eyelid. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. That brawl at the party must have left some pretty hard feelings.”

  “And if,” I said, “Faye and Paul had reunited, she could have been there with him when he received the telephone call from Lottie. Or he could have telephoned her to share the news. If Faye knew about Heilmann’s and Esther’s murders, she could have decided it was an opportune moment to kill Lorna and make it look like another witness being eliminated.”

  Douglas picked up my train of thought. “And as for Paul Corrigan, maybe he suspected what she’d done and threatened to go to the police. If she knew he was coming to see her at Paramount, she could have planned to poison him to keep him quiet, and … Oh, for heaven’s sake, it really is rather far-fetched, isn’t it? Where would she get the bichloride of mercury? The police checked all the sales in Los Angeles for the past month and found nothing suspicious.”

  “Unless … what if she didn’t buy it in Los Angeles?”

  “You can’t check every pharmacy in the state.”

  “But I might be able to check the ones in Bakersfield. At your house, Faye was talking about having missed a yachting party the previous weekend because she had to visit her sick mother in Bakersfield, and Paul made a snide remark to our end of the table about how that was just an excuse to distract from the fact that she hadn’t been invited.”

  “I remember. But that puts her in Bakersfield long before the first murders.”

  “True. Maybe she was planning something before the murders, and when they occurred, she altered her plans to fit the circumstances.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I could go to Bakersfield and check the drugstores there. It’s a long shot, but we haven’t any other leads to follow.”

  “I don’t know that it is such a long shot, now that I think about it. I’m sure Bakersfield is Faye’s hometown. I’ve heard her mention it before. Let’s not say anything about this to Mary, though, at least not until we know more. I’ll let them know at the studio that you won’t be in tomorrow. And don’t worry about the cost. I’ll pay any expenses.” He took out his wallet and handed me twenty-five dollars, brushing aside my protest that it was far too much. “You take this and I don’t want to see any change.”

  “I’ll need a recent photograph of Faye.”

  “I’ll telephone Paramount and ask for a publicity shot from Cobra.”

  39

  The next morning I stopped by the Paramount office for the photo on my way to the station. There I hopped a northbound train. Several hours later I stepped off in Bakersfield, a small city known to most of us in vaudeville as a friendly place. Sizing up the taxi drivers waiting out front, I hired the bald one with the big belly because he had a sincere smile. His name was Charlie.

  “First stop, the public library, please,” I said, introducing myself.

  “You’d be wanting the Beale Library. That’s not far, just over to Seventeenth.”

  “I plan to visit all the drugstores in Bakersfield today, and I think the city directory would be the place to start, don’t you?”

  “Yes siree, Miss Beckett. I know where some of ’em are, but with a list, we’d miss nary a one.”

  I was prepared to explain my quest in brief terms but Charlie showed no curiosity, only a helpful enthusiasm, so I left the subject alone. The library wasn’t far. Nothing in Bakersfield was far. I left him waiting at the curb while I went inside to ask for the current directory.

  I’d have ripped out the page I needed and been done with it had it not been for the steely-eyed librarian who could read minds. She fixed her stare on me when I sat down and never once blinked. Outfoxed, I took out a pencil and copied all eleven drugstore names and addresses to a piece of paper.

  “Here.” I handed the list to Charlie. “We won’t have to go to all of them, just until I find the one I’m looking for. With luck, it will be our first stop. Where do we start?”

  Charlie drove around the block to a corner building on Nineteenth and Chester where a large sign proclaimed KIMBALL & STONE: DRUGS, LUNCHEONETTE, PRESCRIPTIONS, and pulled up to the entrance.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you stopped a block away, so I can walk up to the door.” I didn’t want the taxi to raise any suspicions about why a girl would come from a distance to buy poison.

  Charlie grunted his assent and moved forward.

  “I won’t be long.”

  It took only a few minutes to find what I wanted: a box of Rough on Rats. Living in cheap hotels and boardinghouses had acquainted me with the virtues of this fine product early on in my career, and my eye picked out the familiar package with its comforting image of a dead rat on his back, his little paws in the air. I went to the counter and waited my turn. Sixteen cents. The druggist rang up, then pushed a ledger toward me to sign.

  I took my time. I opened it to the wrong page and turned slowly, looking not in the names column but at the dates until I found Saturday, April 4, the day Faye Gordon had last been in Bakersfield. Then I checked to see what poisons were sold that day. I was looking for a drugstore that had sold a woman some bichloride of mercury on April 4. The name wasn’t important—she almost certainly would have used a false one—it was the poison and the date that mattered.

  There were no entries at all on April 4. I signed the ledger, thanked the proprietor, and left the store.

  I saw a good bit of Bakersfield that day, more than I had seen when I played here in years past. It seemed like a good place to call home. The town had long been a regular stop on the Big Time vaudeville circuits—Keith-Albee and Orpheum—and I had been there a few times, once with my mother and later when I was with Kid Kabaret and Kids in Candyland. We passed one theater that looked particularly familiar.

  “Oh, there’s the Opera House!” I said to my driver. “My mother played there years ago.”

  “In vaudeville, was she?”

  “Chloë Randall. She was a singer. We were on the circuit for years.”

  He was kind enough to pretend he had seen her. “I think I remember a Chloë Randall singer from years ago. Yeah, a pretty woman, beautiful voice. That old Opera House just got a new name. Now it’s the Nile Theater, see?” I couldn’t miss the large vertical letters. “Fancy you remembering that place.”

  “Performers remember enthusiastic audiences.”

  “Coming up, Globe Drug Store, ahead on your right.”

  Globe Drugs was the old-fashioned sort with two parallel counters stretching from front to back and virtually all the stock on wall shelves behind them. It was a popular place and there were several customers ahead of me. When it came my turn, I asked the clerk for rat poison. He pulled down two red and white tins, one large, one small, both with prominent skull and crossbones, and set them on the wood counter. “This will do,” I said, picking up the smaller one. “What do I owe you?”

  “Fifteen cents,” he said. “And wait a minute, you need to sign the book.” He crossed the room and pulled out a heavy red-bound volume that he set before me. I handed him the money and took my time finding the place to sign. Someone had purchased a poison
on Saturday, April 4, but it wasn’t bichloride of mercury and the signature looked very masculine. I thanked the man and left.

  “Two,” I announced as I got back in the taxi. “Next?”

  Charlie and I hit three drugstores before my stomach demanded a break. “I’m hungry. What’s next and do they have a luncheonette?”

  We ate chicken potpie and cherry phosphates at Kahler’s soda counter and, since lunch was on Douglas Fairbanks, ice cream sundaes for dessert. Charlie waited as I bought another box of Rough on Rats, scanned the poison book for April 4 entries—there were two but not for bichloride of mercury—and signed my name. If he was curious about what I was doing, he didn’t show it.

  “Back to the salt mines,” I said as we left Kahler’s. “What’s next on the list?”

  Fortune was frowning that day. Doggedly, Charlie and I tracked down Baer Brothers, Eastern Drugs, Riker’s, and Proctor’s, paused for a soda at Elgin’s, and resumed the routine. In an odd way, it reminded me of the vaudeville circuit: repeat performances at each stop with a jump in between. At the ninth shop I found someone had purchased bichloride of mercury on April 3, but it was a man’s name and a man’s bold signature, not to mention the wrong date. Meanwhile, arsenic was piling up on the floor of Charlie’s taxi and the afternoon shadows were growing longer. If I missed the last train back to Los Angeles, it was no catastrophe—I had enough money to spend the night in a decent hotel and finish tomorrow—but I much preferred my own bed. I was tired and discouraged. My hunch wasn’t playing out.

  The sign on the tenth drugstore read PIPKIN DRUGS AND SODAS. I heaved a sigh and got out of the taxi, walked the block to Pipkin’s, and went inside.

  The soda fountain was crowded with lively young people, making me suspect there was a school nearby. In the back of the store, however, the pharmacy counter was deserted. The familiar package of Rough on Rats called to me, and I picked up the smallest size and took it to the druggist.

  “Fifteen cents,” said a grandfatherly pharmacist as he peered at me over the top of his spectacles. Taking the poison book out of a cabinet, he set it on the counter for me to sign. I handed him a dollar … I had the correct coins but making change took attention away from me and gave me a couple extra seconds to peruse a page of entries.

  And there it was. April 4 in the date column. Bichloride of mercury beside it. A carelessly scrawled name in a feminine hand next to that. That’s what I’d come to Bakersfield for. That’s what I’d been searching for all day. I was so startled, I almost forgot what to do next.

  I had spent a lot of effort trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why a young woman was investigating poison sales, with absolutely no success. Everyone knew there was no such thing as a female detective or a female policeman or a female Pinkerton, and the reporter act just didn’t play well here. I was left with no other recourse than the flimsiest justification of all—the truth.

  “Here you are, miss,” said the man, handing me my change. He must have seen the surprise on my face, for he said, “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am, I just, I mean … I wonder, were you here on Saturday, April 4, when a woman purchased some bichloride of mercury?”

  Now it was his turn to look startled. “I’m here every Saturday,” he said cautiously.

  I pulled the publicity photograph of Faye Gordon out of its envelope. “Would you happen to remember the woman who came in that day and bought it? Was it this woman?”

  He looked at the photograph without showing a flicker of recognition. Then he looked sternly down at me. “Why do you want to know about such things, young lady? You’re not the police.”

  “I’m Jessie Beckett and I work for Douglas Fairbanks. We are investigating the murders that took place last week in Hollywood. The police believe that one person murdered all four people, and since that person is now dead, they have closed the case. Mr. Fairbanks and I think there’s a strong possibility that the woman who bought this bichloride of mercury from you”—and I tapped the page—“killed two of them.”

  I’m afraid I lie better than I tell the truth. My story sounded feeble even to my own ears. The man’s expression didn’t change one whit. I tried again.

  “The police checked all the drugstores in Los Angeles for sales of bichloride of mercury in the past month, and they didn’t find anything suspicious. They didn’t think to check here in Bakersfield, which is where this woman was on April 4. And here is a purchase on that very day. I can’t read the signature, can you?”

  Without looking down he said, “No.”

  I wilted. He wasn’t going to help me. I couldn’t blame him. Why should a medical man discuss such things with a young woman from out of town who had no official status? I gave it one last try. Holding up the photograph once more, I said, “I figure she made it illegible on purpose. And I’ll bet it’s a phony name anyway.”

  The pharmacist seemed to look through me for a long moment, then his eyes shifted to the photograph. “It was the same woman. Her hair was dark, but it could have been a wig or hair dye.”

  My pulse leaped. “You remember her well enough to be sure?”

  “I tend to pay attention to strangers who come in and buy poison. And I remember looking at the book after she had left and noting that I couldn’t make out her name. That made me uneasy, and I don’t mind saying so. It was my own carelessness that she got out the door before I noticed and could call her back. Is this about the murder of that director and the people who came to his party that was in all the papers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what makes you think this woman had anything to do with it? There are honest reasons why people buy bichloride of mercury and those people don’t deserve to be bothered by nosy reporters.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said, relieved that I hadn’t attempted that impersonation. I couldn’t explain what had really made me suspect Faye Gordon—the inexpressible fear that came over me as Mary Pickford and I drank tea at her house and the malevolent look in her eyes that made me think she could read my thoughts. I couldn’t explain that, but I could tell him the facts, and I did so as succinctly as possible.

  “And people who buy bichloride of mercury for honest reasons don’t disguise their signatures and come into out-of-town drugstores in wigs. I think there were two different killers in these deaths, one a Chicago gangster and the other this woman,” and I tapped the page again, “who planned to kill a rival, a young actress, and she bought your bichloride of mercury to do it. And then she used it to kill someone else, another actor.”

  “That young actress was the girl named Lorna McCall, wasn’t it?”

  “Right. She thought that if she killed Lorna immediately after the other deaths, it would be blamed on someone else. The police would see it as the death of another witness. And she was right. That’s exactly what the police think. I believe Faye went to Lorna’s apartment, sweet-talked her way inside with the intention of pouring some poison into Lorna’s coffee. She may have done so, or she may not have had the chance, but something made Lorna start to feel sick, and she went to the bathroom to throw up. Faye followed and pushed her head in the toilet, drowning her quickly.”

  “I read about that, too. A gruesome way to die.”

  “I don’t think Faye planned that in advance; she couldn’t have known that opportunity would present itself. But it worked out well for her. Since Lorna died from drowning, no one ever considered that she might have been poisoned first. Some even thought it was an accident or suicide. Which it may have been, but I doubt it.”

  The pharmacist shook his head. “I wish I were more shocked, but I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime. Sad to say, I’d believe just about anything.”

  “I think Faye was the one who put bichloride of mercury in the coffee at Paramount. To make it look good, she drank some of the coffee herself, not much, but enough to make sure the doctors found traces in her stomach.”

  “A little of the stuff won’t kill yo
u,” he said. “In small doses it’s good for treating anemia or tonsillitis. It’s only dangerous in larger amounts.”

  “And the victim, Paul Corrigan, drank at least two cups of coffee.”

  “What are you going to do with this information?”

  “I’m going to go back to Hollywood and tell an honest cop I know. He can come up here and have a look at your book, and if he agrees with me that it’s suspicious, he can arrest Faye.”

  He closed the book with a bang. “I’ll keep this safe right here until then, little lady.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your help.” Euphoric, I turned and nearly floated toward the door. I had done it! I had found the proof we needed to implicate Faye Gordon in both murders. I couldn’t wait to tell Douglas.

  “Miss Beckett!” I turned. “If you’re right and this woman killed two people, she isn’t going to take kindly to you making the information public. You take care.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m going back to Los Angeles right now and straight to the police.”

  40

  The return trip to Los Angeles took longer than the one to Bakersfield, and it was dark when the train pulled into La Grande. Most of the seats in my car were occupied, but the entire ride was eerily silent, as if no one knew anyone else in the car. We were slowing into the station when out of the blue, the young woman beside me, who hadn’t uttered a word since she sat down, suddenly remarked that if her husband wasn’t able to meet her, she was supposed to take a taxi. Did I know where they waited?

  “They line up out front.”

  She settled back into silence, and I looked out the window. There wasn’t much to see.

  I was famished. There was no dining car on the train. The “Blue Plate Special” was calling me from the Harvey House, and it wouldn’t have taken fifteen minutes to gobble it up. But no, I told my stomach sternly, I needed to get to the police station as quickly as possible.

  I followed the flow of passengers that surged from the platform through the station where it parted into streams, some to the restaurant, some to the main exit, some to the luggage lockers. The potted palms had been righted and the dirt and blood cleaned up, making what had happened last Saturday seem like a bad dream. The smell of fresh bread and roast beef wafting out of the Harvey House nearly mugged me, but I trailed toward the exit where taxis congregate.