by Mary Miley
I made myself comfortable and glanced over the newspaper collection on the coffee table. Alongside today’s Times was the San Francisco Examiner, various trade weeklies, and dailies from the smaller cities of San Diego, Sacramento, and Bakersfield. Every front page blared Hollywood death and debauchery.
Today the Examiner went a step further, claiming that Bruno Heilmann had been homosexual. The accusation made my eyes pop. According to the reporter, Heilmann had been murdered and “disfigured” by his homosexual valet, who promptly skipped town. But it was not the ridiculousness of the story that shocked me; it was the bold use of the most terrifying word in the motion picture industry: “homosexual.” The word simply did not exist in the Hollywood lexicon; one could be pardoned for thinking it had been deleted from every dictionary in town. The faintest whiff of sodomy would have turned actor into leper and driven legions of American families out of motion picture palaces forever. No, in Hollywood, every actor was manly and had chaste relationships with scores of lovely maidens.
I tossed the paper aside in disgust and picked up the Times where I learned the latest suspect was Mary and Lottie Pickford’s mother, Charlotte. Charlotte, for crying out loud, was supposed to have been avenging her youngest daughter’s honor. Seems someone saw Charlotte lurking about the Heilmann house that night. Another piece fingered the butler who had found the body—he had purportedly shot Heilmann and stolen a large amount of cash from a safe, then returned the next day to pretend to discover the body. I hoped no one would pay too much attention to this theory, as it came uncomfortably close to something I could be accused of at Esther Frankel’s. I sighed. Sooner or later, everyone in Hollywood was going to be dragged into the mire of these murders.
I nearly missed the article at the bottom of the front page. TWO DETECTIVES SHOT IN THE LINE OF DUTY, it read. Idly, I looked at the first paragraph, then gasped aloud.
“What is it?” The secretary looked up from her typewriter.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was just shocked at this article.”
Assuming I meant the one about Charlotte Pickford, she nodded. “Aren’t we all, dearie? I ask you, what’s the world coming to when innocent old ladies are accused just for meanness’ sake?”
Quickly I scanned the piece about the shootings, then went back and read it again, slowly this time, trying to see through every word to the truth behind it. Details were few. Two detectives investigating a dope-smuggling ring had been ambushed Thursday afternoon—yesterday—in some remote desert gully northwest of Hollywood. The smugglers were bringing heroin into the country from Mexico, and the detectives received a tip that led them to the rendezvous point. A fierce gun battle had left the two detectives and three smugglers dead. An unknown number had escaped with the bulk of the dope.
The names of the martyred heroes were Tuttle and Rios.
29
“Sit down, Jessie,” began Douglas Fairbanks. “I wanted you to see these newspapers that just came in from New York.” On the desk were several back issues of Pulitzer’s World. I said good morning to Mary Pickford, then breezed through the headlines. If anything, the East Coast stories were more scurrilous than the West.
“These are absurd,” I said, glancing up from an article that screamed about a pink silk nightie found at Heilmann’s home, tracing it to a young actress who hadn’t even attended his party, and another that implicated the homosexual valet. “And I saw the Times story claiming your mother killed him,” I said to Miss Pickford.
“Hearst would say his own mother shot Heilmann if it would sell papers,” growled Douglas. “Publicity agents are working round the clock, trying to protect their clients. Still, New York is panicking.” Most of the financial and business people involved in the motion picture industry worked out of New York, a five-day train ride from California. By and large, Hollywood liked the arrangement—it kept the big bosses at a safe distance where they couldn’t meddle in day-to-day affairs. But today, New York seemed like the moon.
Miss Pickford spoke for the first time. “Most film company stocks have lost half their value.”
“Has yours?” I asked, my concern showing plainly in my voice.
She gave a wan smile. “United Artists is owned by the three of us: Douglas and Charlie Chaplin, and me, with help from a few others like Buster Keaton and Joe Schenck. Our company isn’t public so we don’t sell stock on Wall Street. Nonetheless, this isn’t good news for anyone in Hollywood.” I’d heard it said that Mary Pickford had a head for business and now I believed it. My only brush with the stock market came from vaudeville joke books.
“Are the police making any headway?”
“They still have their sights trained on Lottie,” said Douglas.
“Lottie didn’t do it. I know who did now. At least, I know who murdered Bruno Heilmann and Esther Frankel. A hired killer from Chicago.”
Douglas and Mary exchanged startled looks. “Go on,” Douglas said.
I took a deep breath and plunged into my story. “First of all, did you know there was a dope bar upstairs at Bruno Heilmann’s on Saturday night?” He and Mary said no, and I continued. “Well, that’s why so many people were going upstairs. When I was searching for Lottie’s things on Sunday, I came across a guest bedroom full of dope. Looked to me like cocaine and heroin, more than you would ever buy for a party. Drawers full. Many, many pounds of it. I remember you said you had long thought Heilmann was the one who supplied Wallace Reid, and I believe you were right. I think he had been selling dope to a lot of people in Hollywood. A friend of mine who knows about these things says the stuff crosses the Mexican border and goes to gangsters here that don’t appreciate outsiders moving in on their territory. The gangsters wanted Heilmann out of their business, and they hired a professional from Chicago named Sal Panetta to handle the job.”
“How…?”
“Here’s what I think happened. Panetta came to Los Angeles on Saturday, hung around the Heilmann house until the last guests had gone home, and then came in the front door to shoot Heilmann. Esther was gathering up the last of the glasses and ashtrays or wiping the tables, and saw him enter. He was wearing a striped suit, not proper party clothes like the rest of the men, and she would have noticed that and known he wasn’t a guest. Heilmann was in the living room, alone—since he had thrown Lottie out—and was facing the patio with his back to the front hall. Esther saw Panetta, and that doomed her. She returned to the kitchen and went out the back door to the Cisneros Catering truck.”
“And why do you think he was a professional killer?” asked Douglas. “Why not the father of some poor debauched girl avenging his daughter’s virtue, like the newspapers are saying?”
“The newspapers haven’t said anything true yet! Panetta killed Heilmann with one well-aimed shot to the head, and he used a silencer. Which is why no one heard the gunshot. Not a lot of fathers can shoot like that and no regular people own silencers. That’s what convinced me it was a paid killer in the first place.”
Douglas looked rather dazed.
“Panetta followed the Cisneros truck across town, watched Esther get out, and figured out which apartment was hers by watching for the lights to come on. He went upstairs and used a skeleton key or something like it to open the lock—it broke off. Esther didn’t hear anything because she was hard of hearing, and anyway, she was back in her bedroom looking through her trunk. He came up behind her and hit her over the head with a metal statue that was handy.”
“Why not just shoot her?”
“I guess he figured even a silencer was too noisy in the dead of night in such close quarters. I was in that apartment building twice and the walls are paper thin. I don’t think Esther knew a thing. For that matter, I don’t think Bruno Heilmann did, either. This man was a professional killer.”
“Why haven’t the police figured this out?” Miss Pickford took over the questions now.
“They assumed Esther’s killer immediately fled the scene of the crime. I’m sure it’s what criminals usually
do, but not in this case. He didn’t leave until about six o’clock in the morning, at least three hours later. A neighbor saw Panetta while he was letting out his dog. The neighbor noticed a stranger with a droopy mouth—he reported it to the police while I was there, but they dismissed it because the timing was off. I only remembered it because it seemed odd to me at the time that no one in the crowd spoke up to identify the man. The fact that no one knew a man with a droopy mouth who lived in that neighborhood told me he had to be a stranger. And a stranger sneaking around at six o’clock in the morning didn’t sound right.”
“Why would the killer stay put for more than three hours?”
“At first I thought it was because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. The train station is closed that time of night, so he couldn’t go back there. But I learned something on my second trip to the apartment that made me understand he was trapped at Esther’s, because he couldn’t get out without being seen again. There was a young couple sitting in the hall after about three o’clock, newly engaged so who knows what they were doing, but they were directly across the hall from Esther’s door. The killer would have heard them talking. And Esther’s door must have been closed tight at that point … I think the couple would have noticed if the door had been ajar like it was when I arrived the next morning.”
“So the murderer sneaks up to the third floor, clobbers your friend, and gets ready to leave only to find this couple has settled in for the long haul,” said Douglas.
“Exactly. He holds the door closed, maybe leans up against it to keep it shut, and waits until they leave.”
“Which may have been a couple hours.”
“It was really the safest place for him to be. He’s not from these parts, and he doesn’t have anywhere to go at three in the morning that wouldn’t arouse notice, and he wants to remain unnoticed. He needs to get out of town as soon as possible. He was seen leaving Esther’s around six. Do you know what opens at six-thirty? The train station. So I went to La Grande and found a couple Harvey Girls who remembered serving breakfast to a man in a striped suit with a droopy mouth, and I knew my suspicions were correct.”
Douglas whistled quietly.
“There’s more. One of the Harvey Girls thought he caught the seven-ten Chicagoan. So I gambled that he rode all the way to Chicago. That would have put him in the train station Tuesday evening. A vaudeville friend of mine is playing Chicago this week, and I managed to get a telegram to her asking if she could meet that train and see if a man with a droopy mouth got off. She did, and he did.”
“And how did you learn his name?” asked Douglas.
“I have a friend with unsavory connections in Chicago who telephoned long distance and asked if there was a Chicago gangster with a droopy mouth. Bingo. Panetta.”
“Who hired Panetta?”
“I don’t know for sure, but my friend thinks the local gangsters must have been spitting mad that someone had barged into their drug business.”
“Wait a minute,” said Miss Pickford. “This Panetta must have had an accomplice. How else could he get around Hollywood in the dead of night, from Heilmann’s to Esther’s to the depot?”
“I asked myself the same question. He couldn’t call taxis—they’d remember him. Red Cars and buses don’t run that late at night, and it’s way too far to walk. He stole a car at the station when he arrived on Saturday and returned it when he left on Sunday morning.”
“How the dickens do you know that?” asked Douglas.
“I posed as a girl reporter and asked at the Central Division police station about stolen cars. A man reported his car missing from the La Grande station parking lot when he returned from a business trip on Saturday. When the police visited the station Sunday to check his story, the car was there, but not in the place the man says he left it. The police think he was drunk or forgetful or stupid. I think the man from Chicago stole the first car he found with keys inside, used it that night, returned it to a different parking place early Sunday morning, and left town on the earliest eastbound train.”
Both Douglas and Mary looked at me with frank astonishment. “What made you think of that?” he asked.
I shrugged. “There weren’t any other possibilities, not really.”
“You realize, don’t you,” he said at last, “that this Chicago assassin will have a hundred witnesses—”
“Ready to swear he was in some restaurant near the Loop Saturday night and couldn’t have been in Hollywood. Yes, I know.”
“Still, better to know who committed the crime, even if he can’t be touched,” said Miss Pickford. “Maybe now the hysteria will die down.”
“‘Jessie Beckett, Girl Detective.’ Sounds like a feature film, doesn’t it, Mary? Too bad women can’t be policemen. When this gets out, you’ll be a heroine.”
I squirmed. Here was the issue I couldn’t get past.
“I can’t tell the police. Everything starts with the packages of dope I saw at Bruno Heilmann’s house on Sunday when I sneaked in to get Lottie’s things.”
“That’s no problem. Just say you saw them Saturday night while you were at the party.”
I shook my head. “Two detectives searched the house shortly after I saw those packets. But their report doesn’t mention finding any dope, just liquor.”
His eyebrows rose with comprehension. “Ahhh. They confiscated it.”
“They took it to sell. There are lots of party guests who could say they saw the dope on Saturday night. The detectives who took it would deny it was there Sunday. They would say the killer took it after he shot Heilmann.”
“Couldn’t it have happened that way?”
“No, he wouldn’t have had the time. Believe me, it was more than one person could carry, and Panetta couldn’t have chased after the catering truck if he’d taken the time to search for something to carry it in or taken several trips to his car. Besides, why would anyone in Los Angeles tell him about the dope upstairs? He was hired to kill someone and get out of town, not take their dope.”
I waited in silence as Douglas stroked his moustache. “If the detectives knew you were on to them, you’d be in as much danger from the police as from the gangsters.”
“My thoughts exactly. Until I read this.” I handed him today’s newspaper, folded so that article on the hero detectives was facing up. With a puzzled frown, he took it. I waited until he had read the piece and passed it to his wife.
“Those were the detectives who stole the dope from Heilmann’s. They were the ones who questioned me at the police station. They aren’t heroes; they’re crooks. They weren’t trying to break up a smuggling ring in the desert. They were part of it. They stole the dope from Heilmann’s on Sunday and were trying to sell it to one of the local gangs. Something went wrong—a double cross or an argument—and someone started shooting. Sounds to me like at least one man, one of the gangsters, got away with the car and the dope.”
“And it’s still drifting around somewhere.”
“As far as I can tell.”
“So the crooked detectives are dead. Now you can go to the police with your story, can’t you?” asked Miss Pickford.
“No, she can’t,” Douglas answered for me. “We don’t know how high up the corruption goes. The police captain could be in on it, maybe other detectives. This is what comes from bribing a police force to overlook illegal liquor … they start overlooking all sorts of other crime as well.”
I knew one cop who wasn’t corrupt, but I didn’t want Carl Delaney to play hero and get himself killed for his pains.
We were silent awhile with our own thoughts. Finally Douglas spoke up. “Then the person who killed Lorna McCall and Paul Corrigan and almost killed Faye Gordon wasn’t trying to get rid of party guests who saw something?”
“It doesn’t seem like it. I don’t know who killed the others, but it wasn’t the hired gun from Chicago. We know when he left town and it was before those people were murdered. Besides, you know what Paramount is like, right? It’s
as tight as it is here. Everyone is logged in and out. No stranger is going to waltz in carrying a tommy gun and poison the coffee without someone noticing.”
“To tell the truth, Jessie,” said Douglas, “studio gates aren’t really that effective. There are a dozen back entrances into any studio, including Paramount. The gate is really there to keep outsiders from wandering in—tourists who would get in the way, job seekers who would overrun the place, youngsters who might get hurt. It wouldn’t have been at all impossible for someone who knew the business to get into Paramount.”
“Well, no one broke into Lorna McCall’s apartment like they did Esther’s. There were two cups and plates on the coffee table that her maid washed before the police could dust them for fingerprints. Lorna knew the person who killed her. She invited him in.”
“Besides,” said Miss Pickford, laying her hand on Douglas’s arm. “This information will only fuel the publicity fires, now that dope rings and gangsters are added to the mix. Until Lorna’s and Paul’s murders are solved, the frenzy will continue. We can only hope no one else is killed, and that no one in Hollywood is damaged beyond repair.”
Douglas nodded and squeezed her hand. Then they both looked at me.
30
That night Melva showed me how to toast a cheese sandwich with ham, adding another recipe to my short list of culinary accomplishments. Lillian had made a big pot of vegetable stew and we girls sat down at the little kitchen table to dine in style. Only Myrna was missing. She had not yet returned from Culver City. My ears strained for the sound of her footsteps on the walk. She should have been home by now. I was worrying like a parent.
“Perhaps she stayed over with her mother,” Melva remarked when I voiced my concern.
As if on cue, Myrna breezed through the screen door. “Hi, girls!” she said with a flutter of her fingers. She didn’t pause but continued through the kitchen and up the stairs to her room. I finished eating and cleaned up my dishes before following her.
