The Hollywood Murders-The Gretch Bayonne Action Adventure Series-Book 3

by Steven M. Thomas

“It is not polite to ask a man about his finances,” Bela said.

  “No, it is okay that she asks,” I replied. “I haven't seen a dime.”

  Lillian looked at me confused as Bela stood up from the table. “It's time to take a ride in my new automobile,” he said. “Come, my dear.”

  “Children of the night,” I said.

  “Now you listen to Patty and stay home tonight,”Bela told me as they walked towards the front door.

  “And just what the hell am I supposed to do here all alone?” I asked. “Stare at that painting of Clara Bow?”

  “I don't know!” Bela shouted from the driveway. “Read your mail! You have a stack of letters on my desk! Then go to sleep!”

  I made my way to Bela's library, and sure enough, there was a box full of letters addressed to me. I was too exhausted to open them all. I opened enough of them to get the idea. They were requests for me to write about the Hollywood murders.

  Hollywood Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The New Movie Magazine, Silver Screen, Photoplay, Modern Screen, Screen Weekly, Screen Book, Street & Smith's Picture Play, Screen Land, Movie Mirror, and Motion Picture, etc ...

  Chapter Fifteen

  I got another unexpected call on the set of Dinner At Eight.

  “Take a message,” I said.

  I was about to shoot my first scene in the film. It was to take place in a bedroom with my friend Jean Harlow and I was a bit nervous.

  Jean looked stunning in a see-through white negligee. For all intents and purposes, she might as well have been buck naked.

  “Relax,” Jean said. “You've seen me naked before.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “but not on the set of a movie with twenty people standing around watching.”

  In the film, I play an unscrupulous doctor who is having an affair with Jean's character. At the end of the scene, I embrace and kiss her.

  “Cut!” Director Cukor yelled after the first take.

  “I think we should try that again,” I said. “I don't think I got it quite right.”

  “No!” he said. “That was perfect! You can take the rest of the day off.”

  Dammit! I thought as I walked off the set. Since I wouldn't be kissing Jean Harlow again anytime soon, I decided to take the Packard to the police station. I wanted to talk to Detective Bannon again.

  “Bay!” he greeted me. “So you changed your mind about writing a book with us?”

  “No,” I replied. “What do you mean by us?”

  “Wolf and I,” he said. “You just missed him. He is definitely interested in writing a book with me on the murders. You really should join us!”

  “Sorry, Bannon,” I said. “But that would be too many names on a jacket cover.”

  “If you say so,” Bannon replied. “Then what brings you here?”

  “I broke down and read a few news stories,” I said. “Is it true you still haven't charged this man in the murders?”

  “You know I would like to help you out,” Bannon said. “But all of this information is classified.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked. “This story has more leaks than the Titanic. There's not a Hollywood rag that hasn't run a cover story on it, complete with crime scene photos!”

  “If I could keep that from happening, I would,” Bannon said. “If you're not keen on writing a book with us, why are you so interested?”

  I sat down and looked Bannon dead in the eyes. “I'll level with you,” I said. “I wasn't interested in writing a book on this mess. But then I met a young girl who is. She writes stories for her high school newspaper.”

  “And you would rather partner with a school girl than Wolf and me?” he asked. “Are you mad?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But her motivation is clean and genuine. She's not doing it for the money or fame, Bannon.”

  “How do you really know that?” he asked. “What do you think her clean motivation is?”

  “It's the best kind,” I answered. “It's real and emotional. You see, she is Alma Rubens' niece.”

  Bannon froze in his tracks and shot me a look like I'd just sucker punched him.

  “Perhaps we can work something out,” he said.

  “Will you at least agree to meet with her?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered. “I would like that. What is her name?”

  “Nancy,” I replied.

  Bannon scribbled his home telephone number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. “You tell Nancy to call me,” he said.

  “I will,” I replied. “But you have to promise me something.”

  “What's that?” he asked.

  “Don't jerk this girl around,” I replied. “Don't try to use her for your book. Either help her or leave her alone.”

  Bannon smiled and nodded his head. “I have an advantage over you,” he said.

  “Of course you do,” I said. “You are sitting on all the information.”

  “That's not what I meant,” Bannon replied. “I mean I trust you. I know you are not lying. But you don't trust me.”

  “How is that an advantage?” I asked.

  “Well, I don't have to worry about you being deceitful,” he said. “But you don't take me on my word, so that burden is on you.”

  I wasn't sure what to make of that, but Bannon was right. I didn't trust him. He had all the eggs in his basket. Well, all but two. And ten eggs don't make a dozen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It's hard to trust anyone anywhere, let alone in Hollywood. The damned place was built on making up dreams and stories to distract us all. Hell, the only people I trusted in Hollywood were Bela Lugosi, Jean Harlow, and now Patty Albright. But when I walked in on Patty making a phone call at Bela's house, I even questioned that.

  “Yes, dear,” Patty said. “I will see you soon…of course I love you…”

  I backed out of the room before Patty could see me and continued eavesdropping on her conversation.

  “It's always been about you and me,” she said. “I will never lose sight of that.”

  I walked quietly into the living room and picked up the phone receiver. Apparently Patty had just hung up with whomever she was talking to. All I heard was a dead dial tone.

  Patty could tell I was more than a bit agitated when she entered the living room a few seconds later.

  “Bay,” she said. “You are home early. Is something the matter?”

  I decided to shoot straight from the hip.

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  “Tammy,” she replied. “My sister. Why do you ask?”

  I felt awful for suspecting Patty of having some secret lover and wasn't sure how to squirm my way out of it.

  “It's nothing,” I said, trying to pass it off. “I just needed to use the phone and noticed you were on it.”

  “She is not doing too well today,” Patty replied. “Did you hear how she was crying?”

  “No,” I answered. “I didn't hear anything. I just saw you were on the telephone.”

  Patty sat next to me on the couch and hugged me.

  “It's difficult,” she said. “I am trying to cope with it all, but it is not easy.”

  “I understand,” I said. I had no idea what she was going through, but anytime I don't know what else to say, that is my pat answer.

  “I have some papers here for you,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

  “What kind of papers?” I asked.

  “Nancy left them for you,” she replied.

  She retrieved a small box and handed it to me. Inside the box was a stack of papers. It was Nancy's story about her Aunt Alma. There must have been fifty typed pages or more.

  I was sucked in from the title page, Silent Hollywood: The Birth And Death Of The Movies.

  “Did you read this?” I asked Patty.

  “Yes,” she replied. “But I also lived it. They didn't call them silent movies until talkies came around.”

  I asked her about that title, Silent Hollywood, and she sa
id the use of the word silent is a metaphor for someone who has no voice and cannot speak for themselves. The forgotten.

  I scanned through the pages quickly to get a feel for her writing. It was damned good.

  “I had a good feeling about this girl from the get go,” I said. “And I was right! She doesn't even need me.”

  “She told me that she wants the book to be half about the stars’ lives and half about the murders,” Patty explained. “That is where she needs your help.”

  “If that's the case, she has her half practically finished,” I said.

  “It sounds like you have some homework to do then,” she said as she walked towards the kitchen. “Oh, and Bela wants us to go to a party with him and Lillian tonight.”

  “Who's having a party this time?” I called out. “I am getting tired of these Hollywood parties!”

  “Chaplin,” Patty replied. “He said a lot of the Grafers will be there.”

  I could barely hear her, so I went into the kitchen where she was dragging out pots and pans.

  “Who will be there?” I asked.

  “You know,” she replied. “The Grafers.”

  “Meaning the stars who were on the Graf?” I asked. “Since when did they get that name?”

  “You really don't read the papers, do you?” Patty laughed. “They've been called that for months now! It is a very exclusive club, and there can be no new members. Either you were on the Graf or you were not! You happen to belong to that club, my dear!”

  “Don't get me wrong,” I said. “I admire many of those people and I do feel a bond to them. I guess we all feel that way about each other. But I would rather work with them, not attend parties with them.”

  “Well, I don't fancy the idea of going as the third wheel with Bela and Lillian,” Patty said. “And I agree, I would love to work with any of them, too. Going to this affair tonight might get me work. But if you don't want to go …”

  Patty had me over a barrel. If it weren't for the Grafers, I would be back in Hoboken selling short stories for fourteen dollars apiece. Now I was costarring in films and had more projects lined up than I knew what to do with. All Patty wanted was walk-on parts with speaking lines.

  “I will take you,” I said. “But we can't stay long.”

  “Thank you, Bay!” she said hugging me.

  It seemed strange to me that Patty would be thanking me for taking her to a Hollywood party. I was an orphan from Hoboken who got lucky. She had been a star long before I met her, and now here she was, out of work.

  I didn't really grasp how fortunate I was until Patty pointed it out to me in a round about way. She was right. I was a Grafer. The membership was closed. And once a Grafer, always a Grafer.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hollywood is a damned circus. The only difference is instead of three rings, there are three hundred. The trick is to concentrate on one at a time. I had acts going on in too many rings. And that's when things can get crazy.

  Between trying to get Patty work, I was on the set of my own movie, consulting with Nancy on her book, talking with Wolf about his book with Detective Bannon, and trying to juggle them all together for my portion of the book with Nancy.

  Just when I thought things couldn't get any more complicated, I got a call from Wolf. “What's going on?” I asked.

  “Everything has changed,” he said. “In the last hour, it's all changed.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “They've dropped the murder chargers against Shamel,” Wolf replied.

  “Are you surprised?” I asked. “They didn't really have a hard case against him. I thought he was being railroaded from the beginning.”

  “It's not just that,” Wolf replied. “There's been another murder.”

  “What!” I yelled. “Who now? When?”

  “Alice Lake,” Wolf said. “They found her this morning. It's the exact scenario. Stabbed to death in her home. Bay, everyone is in a panic down at the police station. Hollywood still has a killer out there somewhere.”

  “Son of a bitch!” I said. “I told Bannon! I told him Shamel wasn't their man! Oh, my god!”

  “I know,” Wolf said. “All hell is breaking loose right now. The Governor is even involved. Bannon has the crime scene sealed off and has only allowing a few people to go inside. He wants you to take a look.”

  “To hell with that,” I said. “Bannon shut me off from getting any information when he found out that I was writing a book about it, and not with him. And now he wants my help?”

  “He's desperate at this point,” Wolf said. “Look, I was not too crazy about going along with him either at first, but how many people get to have access to the scene of the murder? No one, Bay!”

  The murder of Alice Lake changed everything. Hollywood had let out a big sigh of relief when a suspect had been apprehended in the first three murders. They didn't know or care that the case against him was weak. Everyone just wanted to believe that it was over, like the end of a bad movie. Everyone just wanted to roll the credits and get on with the next feature.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I am not great with directions. Can you have someone send a car for me?”

  “There should be a police car there to pick you up in a matter of minutes,” Wolf said. “They dispatched them to retrieve you a while ago.”

  ***

  The first thing you see at such a horrific crime scene is the blood. There was a lot of blood at Alice Lake's house. You have to get past that first and then look for what may not be so obvious.

  “Thank you for coming, Bay,” Detective Bannon said. “It's good to have you here.”

  “That sounds like something someone would say to me at a party,” I replied.

  “This is no party,” Bannon said. “I was just trying to thank you for your help.”

  “I haven't done anything yet,” I answered. “But Nancy said she has tried calling you a half dozen times, and hasn’t got an answer. So I guess we're even.”

  “I told you I would talk to her,” Bannon replied. “But obviously, I have been very busy.”

  I walked through every room in the house. It was the same scene as the previous three murders. The brutal stabbing of the victim took place in the kitchen. There was blood in the bathtub. And there were bicycle tire tracks leading from the kitchen to the front door.

  “Do the tire tracks match the other crime scenes?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Bannon replied. “But Wolf talked to a woman named Garavaglia who was an organizer of the Summer Olympics, and found out that several German made bicycles were stolen. Shamel isn't the only one in the area with a bike like that. So we're back to square one.”

  “I am guessing you are tracking down who stole those bikes and who they were sold to,” I said.

  “We've got ads lined up in all the local newspapers and magazines offering to buy the bicycles,” Bannon said. “We are saying we will pay top dollar for them because we want to use them in a movie.”

  “That's pretty clever,” I said, “but there's just one problem.”

  “What's that?” he asked.

  “If I were the murderer,” I answered, “I would see that set up coming from a mile away.”

  “Do you have a better suggestion, Mr. Bay?” he asked.

  “You might want to check out the blonde hair strands I saw on the kitchen chair,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “In the kitchen,” I said. “The murder victim was obviously killed while sitting in a chair. But if you look, there are signs of a struggle. Alice Lake was a brunette. Even with all the blood, I saw blonde hair on the top of the chair that she was killed in. If you check the body, there will probably be hair between her fingers that match those on the chair.”

  “So we could peg the murderer as being a blonde,” Bannon said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Bannon said he would keep me informed as I walked out of Alice Lake's house. Of course, I didn't b
elieve him.

  ***

  Just before I got into my automobile, I noticed the mailbox in front of Alice Lake's house, with the flag up, indicating she had a letter to send off. On a whim, I opened the box and retrieved the letter inside. It was addressed to William Randolph Hearst Publications, but with no return address. And it was splattered with blood.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I took the bloody letter back to Bela's without even thinking of turning it over to Bannon. I wanted to see what Alice Lake had written that she felt was so important to send to Hearst Publications. And why the murderer would bother putting it in the mailbox.

  No one was home except Bela's housekeeper, Yioko.

  “You got messages,” she said. “I answering phone all day! No time to clean!”

  “Thank you, Yioko,” I said as I hurried into the library.

  I ignored the stack of messages sitting on the desk and carefully opened the letter.

  Dear Readers:

  Credit is being given to the wrong person. It is NOT the man on the bicycle! Detective Bannon is way off. It was I who killed Alma Rubens, Agnes Ayres and Mae Murray. I am going to pay a visit to Alice Lake this evening. And there will be more and no one can stop me. Not even Wolf and Bay. I am far more clever than the lot of them. They think they are protecting these women. I know whom they are protecting and whom they have missed. I have much more work to do.

  The Valentino Killer

  I dropped the letter on the desk in front of me. I could hardly breathe, and there was a tightness in my chest. I'd never felt so horrified about anything in my life. I knew the letter was real. It had been written by the killer. And he wanted credit.

  I copied the letter down into a notebook word for word and put it back into the bloody envelope. By the time I got back to the crime scene, there was a small crowd of reporters out front. I managed to slip the letter back in the mailbox without anyone noticing, then had a policeman escort me into the house.