by Guy Bolton
Craine understood. In the unending battle to avoid scandal, he was the crucial pawn.
“Yes, Captain,” he said as he stood up and straightened his jacket. “I understand perfectly.”
Chapter 4
Any type of crime scene involving a celebrity is almost immediately a public stage. The stakes are higher, the exposure greater, the scrutiny all the more intense. Everyone involved in this little play was putting their reputation on the line. Craine had promised himself he’d no longer work studio cases and it didn’t matter what Simms said about staying in the background. By being there at all Craine was putting his name into the hat. I want no part of this, he told himself. This has to be the last time.
The road swept around the green foothills of Herbert Stanley’s hillside estate on Easton Drive. It was still raining, and Craine tried to focus on holding his car in the center of the road. He stifled a yawn. He found himself following the rhythm of the rain drumming on the roof of the car and his mind began to wander. He’d found himself dreaming increasingly during the day, struggling to concentrate on simple tasks yet still unable to sleep at night. The white nights kept the nightmares out, though, something could be said for that. Daydreams, his imagination, memories: these could be controlled. But nightmares? There was no telling what the Sandman offered if you let him in.
A mob of photographers was gathered outside Stanley’s gates, flashbulbs popping beneath black umbrellas. Craine sank in his seat and tipped his hat low. He was spotted by Whitey Hendry, head of M.G.M.’s private police force, who quickly ordered the cameramen away from the gates.
“Out of the way! Get them gates open. L.A.P.D. is here. Get them gates open!”
Hendry was a bulldog of a man with a fierce allegiance to M.G.M. He was there at every M.G.M. crime scene, barking orders and beating photographers who dared to expose the scandal on celluloid.
“Oh, come on! Jesus!” one cameraman protested as he was pushed to the floor. He stood up and picked up his umbrella, frowning when he saw Craine through the driver’s window.
“Hey, that’s Celia Raymond’s husband,” he said, darting in front of the car. He lifted up his camera. “Hey you—Detective!”
Craine quickly accelerated through the open gates before he could push his camera against the glass.
Stanley’s driveway curled round a circular lawn. The house was dull white, with a red tile roof and a wrought iron finish in the Californian style. Craine parked outside the garages and stepped out into the rain. He narrowed his eyes against the drizzle and put on his hat.
“How are you, Craine?”
He turned to see Russell Peterson standing on the stone steps leading up to the front door, an umbrella held firmly above his head.
Craine studied his ever-ready smile and wondered what he wanted. He had never had much time for Peterson, M.G.M.’s Head of Publicity. It was always Peterson who was there waiting at the scene of the crime, ready to launch himself at Craine with a list of demands. Maybe it was his canine obedience to Louis Mayer that bothered him. Or maybe it was because he was a shameless manipulator with a superficial charm. But then again, maybe it was their similarities that troubled Craine the most. With his well-coiffed hair and rigid grace, Peterson was the shinier side of the same coin.
“I’m fine, Mr. Peterson.”
Peterson strode over to the car and covered them both with his umbrella. They walked slowly to the front door. “I hope you weren’t held up at the gate.”
“I wasn’t expecting so many photographers here.”
“The story was leaked,” he said quickly. “It doesn’t bother us, we’re well prepared.”
“Do you need me to bring more uniforms?”
“We’ve got plenty of studio police here. We’d like to keep this an internal affair as much as possible.” Craine noticed he’d lost his usual sangfroid. There was an anxiety in Peterson that he hadn’t seen before. His forehead was wet. It could be rainwater. “And what about the L.A.P.D.? Will you be holding a news conference anytime soon?”
“Later today.”
“What time?”
“Six.”
“And I trust Miss Goodwin’s police statement will be adequate?”
“It will be.”
Peterson leaned in closer. “East Coast publications will have their own perspective on events, they always do, but that isn’t of real concern. We’re not anticipating much trouble with the press.” That didn’t surprise Craine. Most print articles were provided to newspapers by outside sources. With a publicity department of over one hundred staff, Peterson had more than enough resources to control the flow of information to the general public.
Peterson smiled. He had large white teeth. “We are, however, uncertain as to what angle The Hollywood Enquirer will take. Our relationship with the paper is a little strained at the moment. We’re renegotiating the terms of our advertising costs. There’s a chance they may use this opportunity to embarrass us.”
“I’ll wait until tomorrow. If the headlines aren’t favorable, I’ll go speak to them personally.”
“Much obliged, Detective Craine. We’ll be using all our own resources to make this situation easier. I’ve already made calls to City Hall. The District Attorney is fully aware of the situation. You’re not working alone on this.”
No, Craine thought, I could never claim to work alone. I’m merely one of hundreds of people positioned to maintain harmony in the motion picture industry. The newspapers, the City Mayor, the Chief of Police—all of them recognize that the seed that grew this prosperous town has to be protected at all costs. Without the motion picture industry, there would be no Los Angeles.
“I’ll keep you informed,” Craine said. “If this is a suicide as you say, the D.A. shouldn’t need any further involvement.”
“Good,” Peterson looked visibly relieved. “I should mention that Louis Mayer would like to offer his appreciation for your contribution to the case. M.G.M.’s fifteen-year anniversary is a few days away. There’s a celebratory evening planned at Loew House. He’d be very grateful if you’d accept his invitation. It’s the least we can do.”
“The invitation isn’t necessary,” Craine replied. “Where is Stanley’s body?”
“The study is at the end of the corridor to your left. You’ll see the double doors.”
“Thank you,” he said, reaching for the front door.
“One last thing.” Peterson held his arm across the doorjamb. “That young detective, O’Neill. Can we rely on him as we can rely on you?”
Craine the reliable. The mention of the word threw him back five months to when he’d stood with Peterson outside the doors to the L.A.P.D. press briefing room. “No one needs to know,” Peterson had said. “They’ll think it’s an accident. Forget about the pills. She took one or two too many, she fell asleep and she drowned. Why make a storm in a teacup? Let the whole thing blow over. It’ll be better for you and better for us. Let her memory be of pictures and awards. Don’t let her be remembered for a weak moment of hysteria.”
Yes, Craine was reliable; reliable to the end. Relied upon to cover up his own wife’s suicide.
He pushed Peterson’s arm away and stepped inside. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Herbert Stanley’s lifeless body hung rigid from the ceiling fan of his study. He was in the early stages of rigor mortis, his arms stiff by his sides and his socked feet pointing toward the floor below him. A leather belt was wrapped tight around his neck, angling his head to one side. His face was swollen and cyanotic through lack of oxygen, and although his eyes were closed, his mouth was wide open, twisted into an awkward grin with his gray tongue protruding from between his teeth.
Detective Patrick O’Neill stood in the shadow of the dead man, making notes on a small pad. He circled around the body, careful to avoid stepping on a pair of Stanley’s slippers and a wooden desk chair lying on its side as he tried to log every detail of the crime scene. He’d lost track of how long he had been here. Maybe t
wo hours, maybe longer.
“Watch your eyes, Detective,” said Crickley, the ruddy-faced crime tech photographing the scene. Closed French shutters covered both of the study’s windows so the tech was using flashbulbs to get the right exposure. O’Neill was tempted to open the shutters to light up the room but he didn’t want to disturb the crime scene any more than he had to. Experience had taught him that you only ever get one chance at a crime scene and it deteriorated very quickly. The body would remain there untouched until the morgue wagon took it away, but the crime scene itself was vulnerable as soon as the first person entered the room.
“Shall I get one with the slippers, Detective?”
“I’m sorry? Oh, um, yes, yeah—if you can.”
Crickley steadied his camera. “Patrick O’Neill. Any relation to Quinlan?”
O’Neill covered his eyes as another flashbulb popped. “He’s my father. Was my father. He passed on about a year ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, kid. I worked with him a while back in San Francisco.” Crickley looked at him and frowned. “Can’t say I can see the family resemblance.”
“Yes, thank you,” O’Neill said, not wanting to dwell on it. Patrick had both his father’s eye for detail and his detective’s intuition. He had not, however, inherited his father’s impressive physical stature; he was short and stringy, with his mother’s round, cherub-like face and an astigmatism that forced him to wear thick, horn-rimmed glasses at all times. “Do you mind getting . . . can you get another snap of the slippers with the chair . . . with the chair in there?” He was tripping over his words so he cleared his throat. “I mean, if that’s not too much trouble. Thank you. But please—I mean, please be careful. Don’t touch anything.”
“Are you okay, Detective? You seem a little jittery.”
“Yes, I’m fine. I’m swell, thank you.” O’Neill shifted on his feet. He was sweating. Maybe he was overdressed again. In defiance of the warm Los Angeles climate, O’Neill tended to dress in thick Donegal tweed suits with woolen waistcoats. Today’s humidity only made it worse.
“You seem a little puzzled. Like you’re confused.” Crickley was at his side now, sizing up the crime scene as he unscrewed a flashbulb and placed it in his pocket.
“Sorry,” O’Neill said, unsmiling, “I’m only . . . I’m trying to figure out what happened here.”
“You kidding?” Crickley pointed a sideward thumb at the deceased. “You don’t think this is straight-up suicide?”
“I’m not sure. Looks like it but it’s too early to be certain.”
“I know,” said Crickley, jumping on an idea. “It’s ’cause of those slippers.” Crickley pointed his boot toward Stanley’s slippers. “They’re the wrong way round. He’s got the right one below his left foot, the left one under his right. You’re thinking someone put them there, make it look like he’d done it to himself.”
O’Neill had already considered this. “No. If you didn’t have laces, or if you were wearing slippers, you’d use your feet to slip off your shoes. One heel on the back of the other. Like this. That’d leave your shoes the wrong way round.”
Crickley pondered that, running his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. So what’s the problem?”
O’Neill put his pad in his pocket and folded his arms. Something about this crime scene had irked him from the outset. One small detail that didn’t sit right with him: “There’s no note.”
O’Neill had been working in homicide for just a year and a half and had admittedly only ever seen two other suicides, but in both cases the victims had left a note: one was a drunken apology, and the other was a desperate goodbye, but they were indicators of willing departure nonetheless.
“Huh.” Crickley had stopped taking pictures now. He looked around and pursed his lips in agreement. “I guess you’re right. So you think someone did this to him? Strung him up like that?”
“Forcing a man to—um—hang himself is harder than it sounds. Even if they’d put a bag over his head, he’d have lashed out. They’d have had to restrain him. We’ll get a full autopsy tomorrow but I don’t see any bruises on his face or hands, no marks on his wrist either. Think about it: if you were really going to hang someone, you’d never get them to climb onto a chair or a ladder, not unless he was . . .”
Crickley picked up on O’Neill’s line of thought. “Unless he was drugged?”
O’Neill nodded his head. That was exactly what he was thinking. “Unless he was drugged.”
Crickley packed up his equipment. “I only take the pictures. But you ask me, it’s pretty hard to figure it’s anything but suicide. You always been so suspicious, Detective?”
“Always,” replied O’Neill without smiling. He knew that Crickley was poking fun at him but if anything he took it as a compliment. Maybe being suspicious made him question everything, but being suspicious also made him good at his job.
O’Neill noticed Crickley’s eyes flick toward the door. His face paled.
“Detective O’Neill?”
At the sound of his name, O’Neill turned to see a man in a long coat and hat standing in the doorway. He recognized him as a detective from the Bureau. They hadn’t met yet. Craine, he thought his name was. He was the man whose wife died a few months ago. He was the man they said used to be assigned to studio cases. O’Neill wondered how long he’d been standing there watching them.
Craine addressed Crickley: “Would you give us a minute?”
“No problem, Detective.”
Craine waited for Crickley to leave the room before he approached. He looked up at Stanley’s corpse and waited silently for a moment. O’Neill thought he heard him sigh under his breath.
“You know who I am?” he said, his voice slow and clear. “You know why I’m here?”
“You’re Jonathan Craine. Did Simms send you? I’m the primary detective—”
“Are you all done here?” Craine interrupted. “It looks to me like you’re all done here.”
“Yes, almost. But I haven’t found a note yet. I should really check the house, in case. Seems odd to me he wouldn’t leave a suicide note.”
Craine ran the thick of his palm along his jaw. “Mr. Peterson and his security team have checked the entire house and no one found a note. If they do, you’ll be the first to know, I promise you. I suggest you finish up.”
“I was hoping to talk to the maid at the precinct. I’d like to give her a formal interview.”
“Why?”
“She said she found Stanley’s body a few hours ago. I mean, she didn’t speak English that well but she said she found the body at ten o’clock. Stanley died sometime during the night so I can’t understand why was he found so late in the morning. He had three house staff who live on site—”
“It’s a large house. There are a dozen rooms on the first floor alone.”
“But the double doors to the study were wide open. Anyone could see his body from the foyer or the living room.”
“Does it look like suicide?”
“Well, at first, maybe—”
“Then why are you questioning it?”
The room fell silent. Patrick O’Neill was a good police investigator but had always struggled to assert himself in the presence of others. Although he was twenty-nine years old, thirty this coming September, he had the fresh-faced polish and nervous gait of a much younger man and was rarely taken seriously among other adults.
Craine continued: “If you undermine my efforts to ensure this case passes smoothly I’ll have you removed from the Bureau. You’ll be working auto theft for the remainder of your career. Is that clear?”
O’Neill nodded. Any further investigation into Herbert Stanley’s death was prohibited. There were larger forces at work here.
“This crime scene is closed. Type up your report, put it on my desk. I’ll prepare you a statement to be released to the press this afternoon.”
“But I still have to interview some people.”
<
br /> “I’ll take care of it.”
“What about his wife, Gale Goodwin?” O’Neill was skittish now, the octaves of his own voice unpredictable.
“I’ll take a statement from her myself.”
“But Craine—”
“Finish up here. This crime scene is closed.”
Chapter 5
At thirty-three, Gale Goodwin was increasingly aware that her time as an actress was running short. She stared at herself in the gilt-framed mirror in Joan Crawford’s spare bedroom and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. She’d been crying. Her nose was raw, her eyelids bloated and there were firm prints of crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes. She wondered why anyone had ever found her attractive; why the papers had ever thought of her as a poster girl.
Her thoughts turned to Herbert. She pictured his slack body hanging from his study. She hadn’t seen him, couldn’t bring herself to go to the house or even to the mortuary. She knew she’d have to go and identify the body—his corpse. The chill realization that he was gone made her miss him. She stopped hating him, pitied him, wanted him to be there with her.
Gale heard a man’s voice from downstairs and knew immediately who it was even before the maid came upstairs to find her. She’d thought that another detective had already been assigned but Joan had warned her that they’d send Craine. They’d met briefly a number of years ago at a private screening at Loew House for one of M.G.M.’s first “talkies,” his wife Celia Raymond in her first and only starring role. They’d seen each other in passing since but never shared more than a few polite words. She knew him mainly by reputation, as the inside man at the L.A.P.D., the man mostly seen having a quiet word in the corner. She wondered now whether Craine had had any part in Celia’s death, whether he was involved in some form of cover-up. She’d heard the stories.
Gale stepped out of the bedroom. She took a long, deep breath and composed herself before starting down the stairs, holding the banister lightly with one hand. Above her head a cut-glass chandelier lit the checkered hallway floor. She became aware of another figure in the room and when she turned she saw Craine’s silhouette in the doorway of the living room.
