by Mary Miley
Passengers bound for California changed trains in Kansas City where we joined up with the westbound Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe train. Lady Luck brought us a brand-new Pullman car with shiny brass handles and upholstery so spanking fresh it looked like it had been cut from the bolt hours ago. The luxury of first-class travel was spoiling me forever. I settled back into the privacy of my compartment and looked forward to the next meal in the dining car. Fred Harvey food was always reliable. When night fell, my colored porter made up my berth and did everything but sing me a lullaby. And I’m sure he’d have done that if I’d asked.
I lay awake for some time thinking about Kit and devising a way to test my theory that her deafness was a pose, then, should that prove wrong, another way to test whether she could read lips. No way could I just ask … she’d fix me with that vacant stare that made people think she had nothing inside her head. It was not until the next morning that I realized I was unlikely to get the chance to put either scheme into play. By the time I got home on Thursday night, the Rileys would be long gone. Rose Ann would surely have come to pick her up by then. I hoped the singer had found a decent-paying job in San Francisco.
I couldn’t be too hard on Kit or Rose Ann, knowing, as I did, how hard it was for a mother in show business to raise her daughter alone, without a husband or any relatives to help. Many a time, my mother had left me alone in our hotel room for long hours, and I hadn’t always obeyed her orders to stay put. How much more miserable had it been for Kit, being deaf and dumb – for by now I was regretting my suspicions and concluded the lawyer’s black horns were a coincidence. After all, what reason would Rose Ann have to mislead Helen about her daughter’s deafness?
As our train sped west, each stop brought me closer to Navajo Springs and Holbrook, Arizona, where the awful events of last summer had taken place, and soon I wasn’t remembering so much as reliving those terrifying hours when I’d been prisoner of the bootleg thieves.
In Holbrook, our porter said the train would stop for longer than the usual ten minutes, so I climbed down to take a short walk. It was much cooler than it had been last summer, when David and I had walked this street and boarded the train for home. I had changed so much since then, I expected the town to have changed with me, and it had not. There was the ladies’ fashion store where David had bought my new clothes; there was the corner hotel with the sky blue ceiling where we had slept. Hurting, I turned back to board the train, pausing only to buy a Los Angeles newspaper to read on the way home. It was two days old, but it was new to me, and reading it would take my mind off David.
No sooner had I resumed my seat and flopped open the paper than my eyes fell on the story in the lower right corner of the local news page. ‘Pickford-Fairbanks not tied to felon,’ read the headlines. My heart stopped.
‘A press release from Pickford-Fairbanks Studios has denied any connection to convicted felon David Carr,’ read the article. The statement claimed ‘Carr was a minor investor in an earlier film, but Mr Fairbanks and Miss Pickford are not well acquainted with the man and have had no contact with him for many months.’ I skimmed to the bottom paragraph where the last sentence kicked me in the gut.
‘Miss Jessie Beckett, who testified at the trial on behalf of Mr Carr in relation to his murder charge, worked briefly at the studio in a minor capacity. She is no longer employed at the studio, having left California for parts unknown.’
It’s hard reading in the newspaper about being fired.
The only drawback to first-class travel is its lack of vaudeville performers. No one, save the occasional uppity headliner, bought first-class tickets, which meant traveling like this cut me off from other people like me. And the loss of the job I had loved so much made me crave familiar company. So each time I went to the dining car, I asked the waiter to seat me at a table with theater people, if he knew any were there. It really wasn’t that hard to tell.
I was pleased that my very next meal found me seated across from Madge and Nalla Frisco, a sister act on their way to Phoenix. We quickly discovered a few friends in common and stretched our meal to a pleasant two hours, during which time I could avoid thinking about David and my troubles. The sisters had brought their own flask of gin, which they generously offered to share. I asked the waiter for three glasses of ice and some sliced limes, sugar, and a little fizzy water and we made cheerful gin rickeys at the table … carefully so other diners wouldn’t notice and complain. It paid to be cautious: you never knew if you were sitting next to someone from the Anti-Saloon League who would have a heart attack and turn you over to the nearest lawman.
The Frisco girls began telling me all about their brother, who was – I should have seen this coming – a ventriloquist new to Big Time on the Orpheum circuit. I hadn’t thought about ventriloquists in ages, and now they were following me around, plotting to keep me awake at night. In self-defense, I turned the conversation to some of the odder novelty acts we’d known.
‘Olga Myra was the most amazing act I ever saw,’ said Nalla Frisco, shaking her head in wonder. ‘She was a violinist who did acrobatics while she played – and played very well, mind you. She billed herself as a “vio-tortionist” and did backwards walkovers like she was made of rubber, touching her head to the floor, never using hands to balance because they were playing the violin.’
‘Remember that strong man act in Atlanta?’ said Madge. ‘They harnessed two teams of horses out in front of the theater to pull in opposite directions against the strong man – I forget his name, Bernard or Bernardo maybe. It seemed a miracle that he wasn’t torn in two. Of course, the teams were actually pulling against each other, due to some gimmick I never quite figured out …’
‘I have a friend,’ I said, ‘Les Hope, a hoofer, who used to do a dance act where he and his partner danced with the Siamese twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton. I never saw ’em but I can imagine that was a real draw.’
‘That doesn’t count, Jessie. You have to have seen the act. What’s the strangest act you’ve seen yourself?’
I thought a bit. ‘Well, the most unusual was probably Helen Keller when she played Big Time for a year or two. It was an act that wasn’t an act.’
‘We know about her,’ said Madge, mixing another gin rickey.
‘But we never saw her on stage,’ said Nalla.
‘I did. She gave a talk with her teacher beside her. She talked, but it was hard to make out what she was saying. Her teacher said that when you can’t hear, it’s next to impossible to learn to speak.’ Suddenly I was thinking of Kit again. ‘She would touch people’s lips to “hear” what they were saying. It was astonishing. Like a magic act but the magic was real.’
‘Last year,’ Madge recalled, ‘we shared a billing with Birdie Reeves. She can type three hundred words a minute. Not a mistake on the page. And it was no gimmick, I can tell you. She typed one speech while she recited a completely different speech out loud. The kid was only about sixteen years old. I wonder what happened to her …’
Nalla spoke up, ‘I know the funniest act we ever played with – it was that Tarzan act, remember Madge? Tarzan and another fella who dressed up like an ape. It was a really good costume, and some people thought he really was an ape. So when he broke away and started rampaging down the aisles and over the seats, the audience went all hysterical. Then he took off his mask.’
I chuckled. It was all so familiar. Like reliving my childhood.
Later, back in my seat and feeling drowsy from the gin, I fell to thinking about my mother and some of the acts that had performed alongside hers in the early years of the century. As a child, I remembered her entertaining me with stories about some of the really strange novelty acts she knew: the Indian opera singers, the candle jumper, the snowshoe dancers. And Fulgora. Robert Fulgora, the transfigurator, a friend of hers when I was too young to take notice of such things. I had never known him myself, but when he popped into my head, I had the sense that he’d been there all along, waiting for me to welcome him like an old
friend.
Suddenly, a spotlight blazed on the Serbian murders. I didn’t know who had killed the men. I didn’t know why. I had only recently learned how. But now I knew what.
The killer was a transfigurator.
SEVENTEEN
‘A trans-a- … what?’
‘A transfigurator.’
Carl Delaney had met my train at La Grande depot that evening in a police car and driven me home. I hadn’t expected to see him there, but Myrna had tipped him off as to my arrival. It was late. Myrna was still awake, but the other girls had gone to bed, so Carl and I sat on the patio in the cool night air, talking in hushed tones while I spilled everything I’d learned in St. Louis.
‘Transfigurators are rare in vaudeville. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on stage. Some people call them quick-change artists, others call them proteans, but proteans are not really the same thing. Proteans perform a sketch with a plot where one person plays all the characters. Transfigurators make quick changes with maybe a word or two of patter, but the gimmick is their speed. Some do it in front of the audience, others during a stroll behind a curtain or a folding screen.’
‘Why do you say rare?’
‘Probably just out of fashion. Or maybe because it’s such a tough act to create. My mother had a transfigurator friend, the Great Fulgora, when I was very young. I don’t remember him, but I do remember her telling me about him. He used to take months just to break in a coat, taking it off and putting it on a hundred times a day. Whenever Mother wanted me to get dressed or undressed quickly, she’d say, “Hurry now, fast as the Great Fulgora!”’
I was bone-cracking stiff from three days on the train but could not have slept a wink until I spilled everything to Carl. My thoughts raced like electric current through the wires. ‘Fulgora would open his act in street clothes and make ten or twelve changes in front of the audience. Then at the end, he’d walk off stage in woman’s clothes and in four seconds flat, he’d stroll back on dressed in full evening clothes. Some people thought it was a trick, that he had a twin brother, but Mother swore he didn’t.’
‘So you think the killer was one of these transfera … quick-change artists, and that the same man shot all three.’
‘That or gangster executions. Maybe the killer was a professional button man hired to dispose of each Serb for some reason having to do with bootleg hooch. Like, maybe they stiffed their boss, and he was getting revenge in the showiest way possible to intimidate anyone considering future larceny.’
Carl was never one to waste a word when a look would do. His eyebrows arched in silent skepticism. No matter; I’d only begun.
‘But – oh, I just realized how unlikely that is. If those three men were on the run from a gangster boss, the first thing they’d do is change their names. And none of them did. I mean, they changed or shortened their first names, but they made no effort to hide behind a new last name. They were all working and living openly, and for a year or longer, so they couldn’t have been worried about someone coming after them.’
‘And gangsters looking for revenge don’t wait around for four or five years before sending out a killer. Jovanovitch and Petrovitch had worked in their jobs for at least that long.’
He was right. I returned to my original idea about the transfigurator.
‘You know, there was something about these murders that struck me from the start as excessively theatrical. Remember the red coat and the mustache and beard? Details people would notice and remember, sure, but also a way to point suspicion away from himself when he appeared without those items. Like a magician’s use of misdirection, he was forever making you look over there while the trick was happening over here. I never heard of a hired killer doing anything quite that showy.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Didn’t you wonder why the killer didn’t just shoot his victims in some deserted street? I’ll tell you why: because no one would see. He was a performer. He needed an audience. That’s why each man was killed at his work place, not at his home or in the streets. A button man shoots and scrams. He doesn’t want to attract notice. This fella stuck around to enjoy the audience’s reaction.’
‘So he pulled the trigger and then changed clothes to escape?’
‘Exactly. He shot Joe Petrovitch in the projection booth, then walked up to the balcony, stashed the gun, whipped off his outer layer of clothes, and strolled out of the theater as a different person. But the other two murders were even bolder than that. Genuine Big Time performances. They had me fooled completely, until tonight. Remember the cook in New York?’
‘Jeton Ilitch.’
‘Yes. He was shot in the restaurant kitchen by a patron. A man who calmly ate his dinner, paid the bill, then walked into the kitchen and shot the cook.’
‘He didn’t change clothes. He escaped out the back door into an alley.’
I shook my head. ‘That was the misdirection. He whisked off his top layer and had female clothes underneath. Then he stood by the door to the kitchen and screamed that someone had shot the cook and run out the back. It might have looked suspicious if the woman who witnessed the crime had disappeared minutes later, so, with amazing sang-froid, he waited around for the police, gave his statement – or “her” statement – and then waltzed out the front door. Once I figured out what happened at Moon Motors in St. Louis, I looked back at the murders in New York and Hollywood and saw his actions as performances.’
I told Carl about my visit to the newspaper office, the church, and the automobile factory. ‘When the killer shot Jovanovitch in the factory, he ran into the WC and opened the window. Then he whisked off his top layer and transformed himself into the cleaning woman. It wouldn’t have taken him three seconds to stuff the discarded clothing into his pail of water and exit the WC screaming in falsetto that a man with a gun had jumped out the window.’
‘But they knew the cleaning woman.’
‘They said she’d been employed there for a couple of weeks. Long enough to figure out the lay of the land and to learn which man was Jovanovitch. Like at the New York restaurant, “she” stuck around long enough to give the police the details, then “she” quit the job, pretending to be afraid. I tried to track down an address, but the office had none. Even if they had, I’m sure it would have proved a fake. He took that job only to learn how best to kill Jovanovitch. The same reason he ate at the restaurant several times before he killed the cook. And no doubt, he’d been to the theater several times to check out the exits, the balcony, and the water closets. Any money says he sashayed out in woman’s garb, right under the policemen’s noses.’
Carl was nodding now. I knew I had him. Still, doubt shaded his voice when he asked, ‘He could masquerade as a woman?’
‘Remember, Carl, he wasn’t a big he-man sort of fella. Everyone described him as average in size. No distinguishing features – at least, none that couldn’t easily be removed like the mustache. Who looks twice at an immigrant cleaning woman in baggy clothing? Or a middle-age matron in a restaurant? People see what they expect to see. Magicians use that to their advantage.’
I snapped my fingers. ‘Which reminds me – I realized something else, something that should have hit me sooner. Whenever spectators described the killer, they all used the same words. Like “he vanished”, or “he disappeared into thin air”, or “he appeared out of nowhere”, giving the killer an aura of magic. Well, transfigurators are not unlike magicians in the way they perform.’
I stretched my arms high over my head until my joints popped. Now that I’d delivered my report, I wanted nothing more than to collapse onto my bed like a marionette with its strings snipped.
‘You look beat.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
He grinned and stood. ‘You know I didn’t mean it that way. So what now?’
‘So now I find the transfigurator.’
I led him through the house and out the front door.
‘How?’
‘I write some vaudeville friends and as
k if anyone knows any transfigurators who have performed in the last few years, but who have not performed in the last few months. Someone will know something.’
‘Sounds good,’ he said, ambling down the short sidewalk to the curb where his police car was parked.
I followed him halfway and called softly to his back, ‘Tell your Detective Vogel it may take a while.’
‘Won’t need to,’ he said without turning.
‘Huh?’
‘He’s off the case. It’s my case now. Got promoted to detective last week. Goodbye, uniform.’
I don’t think it was my imagination, but he seemed to walk taller after he said those words.
First thing the next morning, I called Mike Allenby’s law office to ask about his progress in David’s appeal. The coffee-slurping secretary hadn’t yet mounted her guard; she sent my call through to her boss without any attempt to ward off my advance. Not that it did me any good. The lawyer had nothing to say.
‘Appeals take time. This isn’t something that happens in a week. Believe me, hon, you’ll be the first to know when there’s a break in the case.’
‘I want to see David. I know prisoners get to have visitors, so don’t tell me they can’t. And it’s Miss Beckett, if you please.’
He heaved a sigh so deep it sounded like God had inflicted no greater trial on his life than my presence. ‘Miss Beckett …’ he began wearily.
I snapped, ‘No, don’t hand me any excuses. Other people visit prisoners – I can too. I want to see David, and you can fix it. I know you can.’
‘Yes, ma’am, I’ll have my secretary call you as soon as I learn when you can visit the prison.’
I know a brush-off when I hear one. He would not find it that easy to ignore me. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow and see what you’ve arranged.’
I made myself some toast and jam and spread out yesterday’s newspaper. I went straight to the listings for ‘Help Wanted – Women’ to see what jobs were on offer for the fairer sex. There were some secretarial positions, but I didn’t type, and some telephone operator jobs, but I hadn’t a clue how to work a switchboard. The motion picture industry had brought such an overabundance of talent to Hollywood that someone like me, with a singing voice only marginally better than average, would never find work in a speakeasy or cabaret. I’d never been to school, so female jobs like teacher or nurse were out of my league. If I changed my name, I could apply for jobs in other studios, but the only chance of getting one of those was to use my past connection to Pickford-Fairbanks, which meant I couldn’t change my name … which meant they’d never hire someone implicated in the trial of a well-known felon like David Carr. The ‘Girl Friday’ listings were so vague and general that they seemed my best bet.