Tom took it, nodding, expecting to open the same Evening Herald he had grabbed on his way downtown earlier from a newsboy hollering with even more fervor than usual. Hays To Clean Up Hollywood, the headline spanning the front page. Beneath it, Phil Olsen’s byline, and photographs of Will Hays and Zukor over columns declaring, Exclusive: Studios to appoint czar to save movies from censors. And: Sweeping reforms in wake of Arbuckle, Taylor. This was the goods all right, a humdinger of a scoop. Olsen had it all mapped out: how Zukor had strong-armed every major studio boss into accepting his plan to draft in Hays to censor the industry from inside rather than risk the federal government imposing something from without. For now, Zukor was refusing to comment. Hays, too, although Olsen’s sources claimed it was because he’d quibbled over the salary offered – a staggering $100,000 a year. Tom stared at Hays’s photograph again, judged him every inch the rat he looked, a pocket-filling politician to the core, and felt deeply uncomfortable about his own role in the affair. So much so that he’d flung the rag in the first trash can he passed.
To his surprise, though, the newspaper he unfolded now was not the Herald. Instead, he found himself staring uncomprehendingly at the densely inked advertising columns at the back of that morning’s San Pedro Star.
‘What is this, Thad?’
Sullivan flipped the paper over in his hands and stabbed a finger at a three-paragraph stub in the Late News section in the bottom corner of the back page, its bold headline ringed in pencil: Point Fermin Mystery.
Still it held out no meaning for him.
‘Just made it into the late edition,’ Sullivan said. ‘They’re going wild about it in Central.’
Tom skimmed the story: a report of the discovery of a body on the rocks under the cliffs beneath the lighthouse at Point Fermin, round the bay from Los Angeles port, so shattered by the fall as to render identification difficult, though perhaps not entirely impossible. It was as if the mass of people pushing past, elbowing their way to the door and the procession behind the hearse outside, were no longer present. Tom was instantly alone as the final sentence hit him with full force: Local sources speculate that the remains are those of deputy port police chief Aloysius Devlin, reported missing two nights ago.
‘Christ. Is this for real?’ Tom stared blankly at his friend, certain that most of the blood in his face had just drained down into his boots. He steadied himself, grabbing at Sullivan’s arm. A gesture mistaken for quiet jubilation and responded to in kind.
‘I thought you’d be glad to hear it,’ Sullivan said. ’The word from San P is it’s him for sure, but the body’s a mess. Looks like sharks got at it. They’re waiting for a statement from the county coroner to confirm it. Seems he for one is dumb enough to think it could have been an accident. But I know which wop bootlegger my money would be on. And yours, I’m guessing. Not that I’m gonna help anyone out on this, mind. Let the fat pig roast in hell and have the justice he deserves, eh?’
‘With Mikey Ross there, too, on a spit beside him, right?’
A residual anger flared up in Tom but subsided just as quickly. He couldn’t help wondering what horrors Cornero’s men had subjected Devlin to before they finished him off. And what they’d done with Ross’s shattered body. Dumped him in the sea, too? Or left him in some remote canyon for the coyotes and buzzards to pick apart? Questions Tom found it easy enough to put away again unanswered. Sullivan would not bring it up again.
‘Amen to that … with bells on,’ Sullivan said, looking up into the cathedral’s vaulted roofspace. From the tower a plangent peal of bells was resonating down into the church, joined by carillons from all across the city.
‘If there’s one thing this town does well,’ Sullivan added, ‘it’s giving a man a send-off as big as he could ever dream of. You can be sure Taylor never would’ve guessed he’d be so honored.’
Making his way outside, Tom leaned with both hands against the carved wood balustrade at the top of the steps, felt a fresh breeze on his temples and breathed in a lungful of cool Los Angeles air. He thought of Fay at home in her apartment awaiting his return, the windows open to the balcony, knowing that she too would be feeling the warmth and hope of this beautiful Californian day.
Below him, the crowd was already withering away. The show had moved on. Only true mourners would follow the hearse six miles out along Santa Monica Boulevard to the Hollywood Cemetery where Taylor would be interred among more celebrated peers. Inside St Paul’s, only a small cluster of people remained, circled around a tiny seated figure, her weeping echoing in the great empty drum of the nave, too distressed and exhausted to go on.
‘Poor woman,’ Sullivan said, joining Tom outside. By now even he was convinced Mabel Normand was not putting on an act. ‘I hope she has someone at home to take care of her.’
Tom knew she had, but whether they or anyone else had the means to heal as bruised a soul as Normand’s he doubted very much. But he was free of her, and her friend Sennett, now. Her concerns were no longer his.
‘This will all be gone a month from now,’ Tom said, waving a hand at the boarded-up shop fronts, office buildings and rooming houses lining Olive on the west side of the square. ‘They’re tearing this whole block down. That requiem was as much for St Paul’s as it was for Taylor. The wrecking crews are moving in this week.’
‘And they say the devil hasn’t got the upper hand in the City of Angels,’ Sullivan grinned. ‘C’mon, let’s go get a drink. We deserve one.’
Tom shook his head. ‘I’d love to, but I have to see a man about a job.’
‘Yeah?’ Sullivan said, giving him the eye. ‘You kept that very quiet. Things looking up for you again, are they?’
‘A big storm’s about to hit the movie business, Thad. And this city with it. The studios, they’ve got all the connections they need at the top. But men like you and me, working the low end, we’re what they’ll need more than ever. Men who know the worth of keeping their mouths shut.’
Sullivan frowned at him as though he was talking in riddles. ‘Well, you be sure you don’t go bringing any of it to my door. I’ve had enough to last a lifetime.’
‘All I’m saying is that change is coming. Someone’s got to benefit. Might as well be us.’
And with that, Tom Collins tipped a hand to his hat in salute, and made his way down the steps into the clear bright dazzle of the morning.
THE END
AFTERWORD
A century on, the murder of William Desmond Taylor remains unsolved. Theories abound but none could ever be proved, the waters were so muddied from the outset by vested interests. But the crime sparked a US-wide obsession that continued for decades. Mabel Normand’s health, career and personal life went into a tailspin that ended with her early death in 1930. Mary Miles Minter could not escape the taint and was quietly dropped by Zukor, never to work again. Of those implicated, Sennett alone soldiered on until the talkies put him out of business. Within weeks, Will H. Hays, the Harding administration’s chief political fixer, was confirmed in the new post of ‘movie czar’. Hays’s solution to avoid state-controlled censorship was to impose an industry-wide reign of terror that eventually evolved into the infamous Hays Code of the 1930s – a system that suited autocratic studio bosses very well, and kept Hollywood in check for the next forty years. The silent-era’s age of innocence and excess was over.
The Long Silence Page 28
