Suspects

by David Thomson

  One day in 1969, he was picked up by Anne Alexander, a resident of Malibu and the impresario for a ring of call girls. She had heard of this taxi stud, and she was impressed by his agility and courtliness in the confines of the cab. She took him home and questioned him about his life. Nearly twenty years his senior, she was more attracted to him than she could understand. Born in France, she was surprised by his fluent French, albeit in a slightly dated idiom that marked Max’s days in Paris. Anne told him he was wasting his talent. Taxi trade was bound to be quick and cheap. Once she slept with him in the greater ease of a bed, she added that a cab could not let his range and diversity show. She proposed to manage his career. She would advertise him discreetly, and then send him out on assignments. She would take 20 percent of his earnings, and she would provide a new wardrobe for him. For the next three years they were lovers. On those rare nights when Julian needed anything like a home, he stayed with her in Malibu.

  But in 1973, they ended their personal ties and settled for business. Julian had enough money to buy an apartment in Westwood. He branched out, and worked for other agents. His reputation as a hired lover increased. He took on a few missions in New York, and one in Rome. But he preferred L.A. He knew its attitudes and the spiritual bliss in skin and pleasure; and he had the California patter by heart.

  Then in 1979, he drove out to the Palm Springs home of a couple named Rheiman. He relaxed the tense wife, and brought her to seven climaxes as her husband watched from behind an ivory-hued net curtain. But Judy Rheiman was found butchered, sexually abused, and Rheiman himself had an impregnable alibi. Just as Julian met Michelle Stratton, lovelorn wife of the California senator, just as he thought of marriage and happiness, he found himself under suspicion of murder.

  The stress finished the Stratton marriage: Michelle could only save Julian by giving him an alibi—that they had been together. The scandal raged, but Julian acted like its press spokesman. He never hid or scurried; he let the cameras see his face. He gave short, lucid statements to reporters and he thanked them. By the time he was cleared, he was famous.

  He and Michelle married. They live in Laurel Canyon and they run the Kincaid Gallery on Doheny—one of the most reputable purveyors of art objects for the home. They own a restaurant and a small art-movie house, the Dissolve on La Cienega, where they specialize in foreign films and do a Bresson festival every winter. They are a favorite couple around the town, and there is every prospect of their interests and power rising.

  Is there no sure way of raising our young? Is parenting the tragedy that tears us from our hopes? “I am your father,” you nag, talking to yourself.

  WALTER NEFF

  Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, 1944,

  directed by Billy Wilder

  He was an easygoing kid, liked by most people, a boy strangers were ready to give a nickel to if he had any small talk. Walter Huff had all kinds of talk, and everyone agreed he would go far. “Out of Moline, anyway,” said Walter one day when he was eleven. He spent a lot of his time watching the river’s inexhaustible flow southward, imagining the places it led to. He put any bit of wood or paper on the water just to see it being carried away from Moline. He thought of the Mississippi as a glossy, gray road on which he might glide into his future.

  He had been born in Moline in 1901, his father a doctor, his mother a music teacher. She taught him piano, and he took to the banjo and the cornet of his own accord. When he was in his teens he used to go over the river to Davenport where he knew a younger kid, Leon Beiderbecke. They both played cornet, and Leon was the better of the two. But Walter didn’t mind that. He learned from the kid, and he got into the habit of slurring notes together. It was lazy but it made the girls look up. Leon called him “Skid” because of it, and the name stuck.

  In 1919, he got a job on a riverboat, and after a year he made it all the way to New Orleans. That had been his dream. He listened to all the jazz he could find, and he bummed around when he was out of work. Then, in 1922, he got a job on a liner going around the Caribbean, to Panama, and on to San Francisco. He was a year playing dance music on the boat when he dropped off in Panama for a vacation. Music began to bore him on the boat, and so on a whim in Panama he joined the Army and did a three-year hitch there as a sentry on the Canal.

  The very day he got out of the service he met a blonde, Maggie King, a hairdresser on a liner. He showed her around and they got talking so that she missed her boat and moved in with Skid and a pal of his, a piano player named Harry Butterworth. They were soft on each other, and Maggie told Skid he should work as a musician again. She said she was a singer and that encouraged him. And she had a fair voice, soft and clear, but sultry. Together they got work at Murphy’s, the best club in Panama, and they did a number together that was a sensation, she standing inside the curl of his arm, singing to his muted accompaniment.

  They got married, and most of 1928 was as good as it gets. But Skid caught fire with happiness: agents from New York came down to check on him, and other women kept after him. There was a dancer at Murphy’s, Anita Alvarez, who was hot for him, and first she took a New York offer and then six weeks later Skid got the call. It was what Maggie wanted for him, and they agreed that he could save money until they had enough for her passage.

  It was a reasonable plan, but there are marriages that may need the remoteness of a Panama. Skid was a hit in the city. Everyone wanted to buy him a drink, and Anita slid into the empty place in his arm. Maggie came to New York on her own money, and she found that Alvarez answered Skid’s phone. They broke up. Once they got back together for a radio show, when Skid’s lip was going—he had given up practising. They did their old number that once, and it was a heartbreaker, but Skid kept slipping. By 1932 he was on the street, selling pretzels.

  Then, instead of folding up, Walter Huff realized that he was back where he started—no worse than that. His ease returned. He hitched west, and as he went he read a book about insurance. It seemed like a snap, and he knew he was good with people. So he went all the way to California, to Los Angeles, and the General Fidelity offices with Keyes, head of the claims department.

  “You look used up,” said Keyes.

  “Yeah, but I’m resilient,” Walter told him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Huff. Walter Huff.”

  “Huff? That’s no kind of a name.”

  “No one told me.”

  “Makes people think you’re in a bad mood.”

  “But I come as a pleasant surprise.”

  “Have to change it.”

  “Do I get the job?”

  “Who do you want to be?”

  “I kinda like the two f’s.”

  “I can see you might. Griffith?”

  “That’s a park. Cuff?”

  “Could be ragged. Neff?”

  “You got it.”

  “No, you’ve got it.”

  Keyes could tell he could talk, and he liked his quick grin—it was amiable, but it knew insurance was a play on weak nerves. Walter Neff was hired, and he worked hard to please Keyes. The two men never had a conversation when they weren’t telling each other off, but they took it for granted they were friends and the point didn’t need to be stated directly. Walter got in the habit of having vestas for Keyes’s pipe whenever he seemed to have mislaid his. Walter rented a little bungalow in the Los Feliz hills.

  It was February 1935 when he drove over to the Spanish-style house in Hollywoodland about a renewal and met Phyllis Diedrichson. She was wearing blue pajamas, and she kept him talking. She asked if Walter handled accident insurance, too—her husband was at the office—and that’s when Walter started to get the chills from her sidelong look. That was the start. Walter was always impressionable, and Phyllis Diedrichson got to him in ten minutes.

  They fell into this torrid affair. Walter set up life insurance for the husband, with a double indemnity—twice the coverage if the death was by accident—and Phyllis knew already how it was going to be a
ccidental. The husband signed it one night with a mass of papers. And they killed him; Walter was in the back of the car and he broke the guy’s neck. Walter, a gentle man, agreeable too: that was the measure of Phyllis Diedrichson and what she could make you imagine.

  Walter got on the train to San Francisco, pretending to be Diedrichson. Then he jumped off the train, and together they put the body on the tracks, as if the man had had a drink or two and fallen off the observation platform. It worked out fine, and General Fidelity was set to pay up. But Keyes knew it smelled wrong. He asked Walter what he thought, and Walter had to give back his ordinary professional skepticism. “Could be,” he said.

  Keyes worked it out. But Walter was shuffling snakes by then: that was Phyllis for you. He got scared of her, and he fell for Lola, Diedrichson’s daughter. Then there was Lola’s Italian boyfriend. Then there was the rendezvous in Griffith Park, and Walter picking up a bullet. He’d meant to get rid of Phyllis, but he’d never thought that you could spell Phyllis with two f’s.

  Walter spilled the whole story to Keyes. He assumed that he and Phyllis were set for the death house. But General Fidelity was cautious. They didn’t like the idea of double indemnities getting so much publicity, so they let the two killers go. But they got them tickets on the same boat, going to Mexico. And Walter and Phyllis met on the deck, and it wasn’t so romantic. For the first time in his life, Walter felt ruin. Phyllis was full of death, the same as always. They heard there was a shark following the boat and they waited till they saw its fin in the moonlight and they went over the side. With Walter’s unhealed wound bleeding. Begging the shark to hurry.

  PHYLLIS DIEDRICHSON

  Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, 1944,

  directed by Billy Wilder

  I cannot better the last paragraph of Diane Johnson’s fascinating Phyllis (Knopf, 1983), an investigation carried out nearly fifty years after the event, in which the author was regularly waylaid by intimations of hitherto unheard-of iniquity. The paragraph in question concludes a postscript in which Ms. Johnson reports the discovery that a Phyllis Nirdlinger was registered at the St. Francis Hotel, in San Francisco, over the Labor Day weekend of 1921—the time and place of the prolonged party which brought about the death of Virginia Rappe, and the downfall of silent clown Fatty Arbuckle. This knowledge came in an anonymous letter delivered while Ms. Johnson was correcting the proofs of Phyllis, but when there was still time to give her book a last, prescient shadow:

  “So we are supposed to believe that Phyllis slipped over the side of a steamer bound from San Pedro to Balboa—this ship was called the Miranda—fifty miles or so off Quinones. It would be comfortable to think so. But isn’t it more likely that that was the legend Phyllis wished to establish before she started up as someone else? She was a thirty-two-year-old mass murderess, in her prime. What reason is there to take her sudden remorse and its impetuous suicide on trust? Isn’t it more credible that she let Walter Neff go first and then turned away to a new alias and a fresh man already scouted out? She would be eighty now, a little deaf, perhaps forgetful, but hardly less than dangerous. Even allow that she took to the water, had she forgotten how to swim? The suggestion is that a shark claimed her and the already wounded Walter. I prefer to pity the fish.”

  The woman who officially met this watery death was Mrs. Phyllis Diedrichson, widow and co-slayer of her husband, H. S. Diedrichson. She was on the Miranda with Walter Neff, after they had both been trapped in an investigation spearheaded by Wilson Keyes of General Fidelity’s Los Angeles office.

  His report described how, in 1929, Phyllis Nirdlinger was hired as assistant head nurse at Dr. Bruno Sachetti’s Verdugo Hills Sanatorium. Her credentials were borne out by scrupulous attention to duties. No wonder, then, in 1930, when the head nurse died in an automobile accident—a vacation mishap, in Salt Lake City, so for once Phyllis cannot be implicated—that she was promoted.

  However, in the years 1930 to 1932 there were five deaths at the sanatorium in which Phyllis did appear to have had a part. All five involved elderly victims of pneumonia. Re-investigation traced the hand of the head nurse in every case, and disclosed the modest but touching legacies that went to her from two of the deceased. Of course, people die in clinics and hospitals, and head nurses have the authority of good first officers on ships with captains looking forward to retirement. Too many patients in sanatoriums have no relatives to ask awkward questions or act as likely heirs.

  Dr. Sachetti was neither lazy nor inept. He had an excellent reputation, but it was shattered in 1933 when three children died of pneumonia in one week. In hindsight, we must conclude grimly that two of those deaths—Georgie Trescher and Cara Chacon—were extras to aid the impression of an epidemic, and to crowd the death of Dickie Graff, only four, whose one living relative was a Mrs. Lita Diedrichson. It speaks to the cunning of Phyllis that this Mrs. Diedrichson was so won over by the head nurse at Verdugo Hills that the two struck up a friendship.

  The sanatorium had to close: child mortality knows no public relations. Phyllis Nirdlinger looked around for a new position and spent time with Lita and H. S. Diedrichson. The strain had been too much. The two ladies became so close that they went off to Lake Arrowhead in December 1933 for a vacation to plan the coming Christmas break. It was an early and severe winter at Lake Arrowhead. Lita, already suffering from lung trouble, caught cold in the high chilled air. Phyllis Nirdlinger went for help, but she took the long way, trudging twelve miles through snow around the lake. Locals wondered why she had not gone the mile and a half on the ice over the lake. It was strong enough to support a truck. But Phyllis said she had not known the ice was thick enough; she had meant to be safe rather than sorry. Yet she had to be both: Lita Diedrichson was found dead by the rescue party.

  Christmas was a mourning feast, and Phyllis was the natural comforter for H. S. when he collapsed. Used to being looked after and having a comfortable home, Diedrichson proposed to Phyllis in April 1934. The former head nurse accepted, less for herself, she said, than for Lola, Lita’s daughter, so much in need of a mother figure. And so Phyllis Nirdlinger changed her name and moved into the house clinging to the steep hillside beneath the Hollywoodland sign. She may not have been sure what she was waiting for, but Walter Neff decided her.

  Because there was no trial, no one bothered about the facts of Phyllis Nirdlinger’s life before 1929. Not until Diane Johnson undertook her research. She established that Phyllis Nirdlinger was born in Anaheim in 1903, the child of a German manufacturer of ice skates and an American, Anne Belden, who had been a high-school swimming champion. Kurt Nirdlinger died when Phyllis was eleven—of a fit of coughing brought on when a cod bone caught in his throat. Nothing Phyllis had done in the way of offering him bread to chew had averted the tragedy. The mother was away that day, swimming across San Pedro Bay to raise money for the Belgian atrocity victims.

  Phyllis herself was such a swimmer that she became a member of the Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties. It was there she befriended Norma Desmond and Mabel Normand. Dry, too, in one or two one-reelers, Phyllis took on the roles of confidante and cocaine supplier to Miss Desmond. The details are still clouded, but the persevering Diane Johnson has made it clear that the long-held belief in Mabel Normand’s part in the death of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922 might be opened up to include Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis was a demure drug connection for the film community, an active agent in the decline of Taylor, and the last person known to have been with him at 4041/2 Alvarado Street, where he was found shot to death.

  The case was confused. At Taylor’s funeral, another movie queen, Mary Miles Minter, declared undying love for him. And Ms. Minter is alive still, a recluse, eighty-one or so as I write.

  I can understand the wish to solve these old mysteries. Over the years, I have lain awake, a supine detective, sorting through the details. It is so like the approach of a killer planning a crime. But then Mary Miles died yesterday, fat and afraid, I hear, to leave her house. Now the
re is only the picture of her youth left, as white and frilled as a flower, and forever transient.

  WILSON KEYES

  Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, 1944,

  directed by Billy Wilder

  In 1981 in Omaha there was a retrospective of the paintings of Wilson Keyes. It brought satisfaction to those who remembered him. The catalogue with the exhibit spoke of “this unhindered naive, a primitive from the American heartland who had a career of order and prosperity, except for one disaster and the passion evident in these pictures.”

  Odd to think of WK as a naive: he was our model of common sense and the deductive process. Harder still to call him primitive: none of us ever saw a discourteous act, or heard a reckless expression. In Omaha, he was regarded as sophisticated, as clever as anyone we had. But I suppose that’s what the writer meant. There was something he could never let us see, nothing ugly, but an eye for danger. It’s there in the portraits of women, wild smiles resting on folded, blatant legs; California houses with fire-colored roofs and snake-green cypress trees; and the drawings done at Belsen. It’s there in the colors, blues that never dry, bloody skies and screaming yellows; and in the signature on all the canvases, the X, a flourish like crossed swords.

  Keyes was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1890, one of five children, the son of the city’s civil engineer. Young Wilson excelled in math and science at school, and from the age of ten he was helping his father in the execution of technical drawings. Indeed, Arthur Keyes’s classic The Building of Bridges (University of Nebraska Press, 1905) contains a note of thanks to “my son, Wilson … for his splendid illustrations.” In 1908, Wilson Keyes entered the university to study mathematics. He also involved himself in student dramatics, executing backdrops for The Way of the World (a production banned by the authorities after its bawdy opening—and still a legend twenty years later).