by Janet Dawson
Blood. Who would have thought he had so much blood in him? I thought, recalling the line from Macbeth. Tarrant was dressed in what appeared to be gray slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, both stained with his own blood. He wore a tie. According to what I’d read about the case, he was due to meet friends for dinner at eight o’clock that evening. So he was getting dressed when his killer arrived. He hadn’t yet put on his jacket, or his shoes. Instead, on his feet were socks and bedroom slippers. I consulted Detective Mulvany’s report. No sign of forced entry, so Tarrant evidently opened the door to whoever killed him. It was a good bet he knew his killer.
I looked up from the photos. “Why wasn’t the body burned in the fire?”
“Something odd about that,” Lopez said. “If I was trying to hide a murder, I’d have torched the body first. But the fire started near the fireplace, probably to make it look like an accident. It burned that section of the room and jumped to the curtains. That’s when the neighbor spotted it and called the fire department, and they showed up and put it out. So the flames hadn’t even reached the body.”
Yes, it was odd. It was as though whoever started the blaze wanted to cover up the murder, but couldn’t bear actually setting the victim on fire.
In subsequent shots, the photographer got close enough to detail the powder burns from each of the five bullets and the spots of gore at each entry wound. There were also close-ups of Tarrant from several angles, including his wrists and the cuffs of his shirt, now stained with blood.
“Why would the photographer have taken so many shots of Tarrant’s wrists?” I asked Lopez. “I can see photographing the palms of the hands, to see if the killer had left any evidence in the murder victim’s hands. But why the wrists?”
“I wondered that myself, when I got the file,” Lopez said. “Mulvany and Partin wanted pictures of the shirt cuffs. If you’ll look closer, you’ll see why.”
I took a small magnifying glass from my purse and held it to the photographs of the cuffs, both with dark smears of blood. On both cuffs, the slots where a cufflink would have been inserted looked frayed and torn. I glanced up at Lopez. “He was wearing cufflinks. But someone ripped them out, and tore the cuffs doing it.”
“Yeah,” Lopez said. “Mulvany and Partin were really curious about that. Everything else in Tarrant’s closet was shipshape. He was always well-dressed, according to witnesses, so he didn’t seem like a guy who’d put on a shirt with torn cuffs. Unless he’d just noticed it and hadn’t taken off the shirt yet when the killer arrived. The detectives figured Tarrant was wearing cufflinks and that the killer took them and tore the cuffs in the process. A couple of people who were interviewed said Tarrant usually wore fancy gold cufflinks and he had several pairs. All of the victim’s jewelry was stolen the night he was killed. So it could have been a murder in the course of a robbery.”
“Robbery?” I shook my head. “Tarrant was shot five times at close range. That says personal to me. What if the killer was the person who gave him the cufflinks, and wanted them back?”
Lopez nodded in agreement. “It’s possible. Mulvany and Partin explored that. But they never found out if someone had recently given him jewelry. Could be he’d had the cufflinks all along. Anyway, take a closer look at the right cuff. There are several strands of hair. Nowadays we could do DNA analysis and match the hair to a possible suspect. But back in the forties, they didn’t have the kind of technology we use now.”
I squinted through the magnifying glass, looking for the hair Lopez had mentioned. Indeed, there were three strands of hair on the right-hand shirt cuff, near the seam. The strands looked like gossamer filaments, about two inches long, pale against a bloody splotch. Tarrant had dark brown hair, but the hair on his right cuff was blond, curly and short. It could have come from a man or a woman.
I gathered up the crime scene photographs and slipped them back into the envelope. Then I burrowed deeper in the file, finding a batch of fingerprints with numbers, one over the other, so that it looked like fractions written over them. A notation told me that they were Tarrant’s prints, taken for comparison purposes.
“Is this how they identified prints back then?” I asked Lopez.
“Yeah. No fingerprint computers. They visually identified the prints, looking at the loops, whorls, tented arches, that kind of thing. Then they’d assign numerical classifications for searching. That’s what these numbers are. I’ve heard it was fairly accurate.”
“But they didn’t find any prints at the Tarrant crime scene that would point to the killer?” I said.
Lopez shook his head. “No. You’ll see from the next batch of prints that they just found a partial here and there, not enough to classify. Most of the prints belonged to Tarrant. Plus, there was the fire. The firemen tromped all over that living room and probably destroyed some evidence. Mulvany says something about that in one of his reports.”
I turned my attention back to the stack of papers in the Tarrant file. Mulvany and Partin had begun their investigation into Tarrant’s murder by questioning the next-door neighbor. Then they had interviewed anyone who’d had any contact with the murdered man during the entire time he’d been in Hollywood, from his friends to his co-workers to the rest of his neighbors and the woman who cleaned his house once a week.
I thumbed through a couple of reports and found a list of dates, names and addresses—the people that Mulvany and Partin had interviewed in the course of their investigation. The names on the typewritten list weren’t in alphabetical order. Instead, they were listed chronologically, by the dates on which people had been interviewed. I ran my finger down the list. A few of the names I recognized, actors mostly, names that evoked Hollywood in the forties. But most of the names were unfamiliar to me.
Then I saw a name that leapt off the page. Jerusha Layne, and an address in Hollywood. The police had interviewed my grandmother in conjunction with the Tarrant homicide, just as Henry Calhoun had said. The interview took place in late February, a week after Tarrant’s death. Right below Jerusha’s name were two other names, Anne Hayes and Pearl Bishop, listed as living at the same address. So Mulvany and Partin questioned all three roommates, on the same date. And the following day they had questioned Sylvia Jasper and her brother Byron Jasper.
I looked up at Lopez. “Are the interview statements in the same order as they are on this list?”
“They should be,” Lopez told me. “The officers kept notebooks—still do—and during an interview, they’d make detailed notes. Then they would dictate the report to a record clerk who typed as the detective talked. Or the detective would write it out longhand, and then the record clerk would type it. But the first method was faster.”
My fingers moved through the pages, looking for the statements given by Jerusha Layne and her housemates. Mixed in with the witness statements I saw what looked like old employment records from several movie studios—Metro, Columbia, Warner, RKO. When I found the statement Jerusha had given the police, I also found a note saying that that Detective Mulvany had received an anonymous phone tip from someone claiming that Ralph Tarrant was dating a girl named Jerusha Layne. The caller added that Jerusha was at Tarrant’s house the night of the murder, and that she’d driven there in a black Model A Ford owned by her roommate Pearl Bishop.
Jerusha’s statement was brief and matter-of-fact. Since it was raining, it was a good night to stay home, and that’s what she did that evening. She’d listened to the radio while mending a dress. Then she had switched off the program and read a book before going to bed early. Her roommates had gone out. Perhaps her next-door neighbor could vouch for her, because Mrs. Ellison had stopped by the cottage around seven, to bring a letter for Anne that had been delivered by mistake to the Ellison bungalow. No, Jerusha told the police, she wasn’t involved with Ralph Tarrant, romantically or in any other way. She barely knew the man. Of course, she knew who he was, and she saw him from time to time, because they both worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—with a lot of other people
, Jerusha added. But a relationship with Tarrant? No, certainly not, never. In fact, she was engaged to be married, to a sailor named Ted Howard.
Pearl’s statement said she’d been driving her car, the black Model A Ford known as the Gasper. She left the house at six-thirty that evening and had returned at ten, or thereabouts. She met her date at a restaurant and after dinner, they went dancing. Her companion was a soldier she’d met a few weeks earlier. As for tracking him down for corroboration, she thought the guy had shipped out. Yes, she knew who Ralph Tarrant was. She’d met him at Metro, and yes, she saw the actor now and then at the studio. But that was the extent of it. No relationship. But there was a relationship between Tarrant and their former roommate Sylvia Jasper, who had moved out of the bungalow in January. Moved out, Pearl added, because of a dispute. Well, to be perfectly frank about it, the housemates had made Sylvia leave, and there were some hard feelings about that. So they’d been on the outs with Sylvia since.
Anne’s statement was similar. She had gone to a party with two other actresses and they’d picked her up at about six-thirty in a car belonging to one of them, just as Pearl was leaving. As far as she knew, Jerusha was planning to stay in that night. Anne had returned home between ten and eleven. And no, she didn’t know Ralph Tarrant.
She told the detectives that the housemates had parted ways with Sylvia Jasper and told them why: that Sylvia was constantly late with the rent and took things that didn’t belong to her. She’d also told her brother Byron that he could live there in the bungalow and that was unacceptable, so the housemates made them leave in January. There was some vandalism as a result, Anne said, and some jewelry and clothing had gone missing. Most of the property had been returned. However, hard feelings lingered on both sides.
The detectives had asked both the Jaspers about the allegations of vandalism and theft at the bungalow after they had moved out. The hard feelings Anne had mentioned in her statement were quite clear when this subject came up. Sylvia and Byron had portrayed themselves as the aggrieved parties. Their version of the dispute was that they’d simply asked if Byron could stay temporarily at the bungalow until he and Sylvia could locate an apartment of their own. When that request was refused, Sylvia had moved out hastily, without cleaning the back porch bedroom, but that wasn’t vandalism, it was carelessness. And if she took anything that hadn’t belonged to her, well, that was just carelessness, too. She certainly hadn’t intended to take those items, which had of course been returned. It was just a trivial misunderstanding among roommates who’d fallen out.
And no, Sylvia added, she wasn’t living with Ralph Tarrant, although she had dated the actor several times. She and her brother Byron were sharing an apartment in Hollywood.
I wondered what had really happened. If Jerusha had mentioned the incident in a letter to Dulcie, I hadn’t found it yet.
The two homicide detectives decided Jerusha and the others were telling the truth. That appeared to be the extent of my grandmother’s involvement in the Tarrant murder case.
So how did Henry Calhoun, working behind the counter at the movie memorabilia shop, know that my grandmother had been questioned? I was still troubled by the fact that he didn’t have much of a history, at least not one that went back more than a couple of decades, according to my background check. Still, people talk. Gossip and rumors must have been making the rounds about Tarrant and his murder. I suppose that’s how Calhoun could have known. He did imply he had been in Hollywood in the forties.
I found the statements given to the police by Sylvia and Byron Jasper. They had alibied each other, claiming they’d been together all evening in the apartment they shared in Hollywood. And there were no witnesses to prove this, or that they’d been anywhere else. They didn’t have a car, couldn’t afford one, Sylvia said. So how in the world could they have gotten over to Tarrant’s house?
As for a relationship between Sylvia and Tarrant, she admitted that she’d dated him. But nothing more. Why, she hadn’t even seen him since the end of January. Byron said he didn’t know Tarrant, though he’d seen him at the studio.
I read quickly through the other witness statements. The investigating officers, Mulvany and Partin, had asked several of Tarrant’s friends and co-workers if the actor had a set of valuable cufflinks and whether he’d purchased them or received them as a gift. Nobody knew for certain, but two witnesses mentioned cufflinks. One said Tarrant had a pair of diamond cufflinks in a round gold setting. Another described a pair of square gold cufflinks with a ring that matched, both decorated with a cross.
The door opened and I looked up, expecting to see Liam Cleary. Instead, it was a woman wearing a shoulder holster under her jacket. “We’ve got to roll,” she told Lopez. “Shooting over on Sunset.”
“I’m sorry.” As Lopez got his feet he was already gathering up the Tarrant file. “I have to go. Which means I take the file with me. I have to be here while you look at it.”
“May I come back later this afternoon?” I asked, giving him one of my business cards. “Just in case I have more questions?”
Lopez grinned and gave me his card. “Sure. Call me. Now you’ve got me intrigued all over again by the Tarrant murder, even if I do have a more current caseload.”
Chapter 13
I left the Hollywood Division, feeling as though the truth were there, somewhere, tantalizing me as it danced just out of my grasp. As I walked down the street, I reached for my cell phone and the slip of paper Liam had given me, and called his friend at the Santa Monica Police Department. We set up an appointment for later that afternoon. I grabbed a quick lunch at a nearby restaurant, then retrieved my rental car and drove to Century City. When I was finished interviewing the witness in the insurance fraud matter, I headed for Santa Monica and a look at another case file.
The last time anyone saw Sylvia Jasper alive was Friday, May 15, 1942. She was playing a bit part in a movie being filmed at the RKO lot. When she was finished for the day, she left, and was due to report back to the set Monday morning. Four days later, on Tuesday, May 19, 1942, Byron Jasper filed a missing persons report with the Los Angeles Police Department. A copy of that report was in the Santa Monica Police Department file and I looked through the statement Byron gave to LAPD. He told them he and his sister rented an apartment in Hollywood. He had last seen her on Friday morning, sharing a hasty breakfast before they both left for the day. He was working as an extra at Paramount. He got home late on Friday and Sylvia wasn’t there. At the time he thought nothing of it, assuming she’d gone out.
When she didn’t come home Friday night or Saturday, he decided she’d gone away for the weekend. She’d done it before, he said, without telling him until after the fact. By the time Sunday night came and went, he was getting concerned. When he learned she hadn’t shown up on the set of the movie at RKO on Monday morning, his concern changed to worry. He reported her missing on Tuesday morning. No, he didn’t have any idea where she could be. Although, he added, lately Sylvia had been involved with a rough crowd—heavy drinking, drugs, gambling. Maybe one of these new unsavory friends was responsible for her disappearance. No, Byron didn’t know who these friends were. Sylvia had mentioned first names only, and talked about this nightclub or that, but she wasn’t particularly informative. After all, they were both on their own, in Hollywood, and what his sister did on her own time was her business.
What was left of Sylvia’s corpse had been found on a Saturday in August 1942, on a stretch of beach south of the Santa Monica Pier, the area known as Muscle Beach. The pier, a popular destination then and now, drew lots of soldiers and sailors during the war. A couple of sailors on leave, out for a stroll along the beach with their girls, spotted the hand uncovered by shifting sands and waves, and summoned the police.
According to the autopsy report, Sylvia Jasper had been bludgeoned to death, her skull crushed by a heavy object. Then her body had been buried in a grave scooped out of the sand. She must have been killed during the night, I thought, perha
ps even the Friday she’d last been seen. I pictured that night on the pier, pulsing with lights, noise, and people. And several hundred yards south of the pier, where her body had been found, no lights at all, just darkness, the rhythmic rush of waves, the occasional amorous couple strolling along the shoreline where the Pacific Ocean kissed the sand. Nighttime, and away from the pier. Yes, that would have been a good spot to conceal a crime.
The detective in charge of the investigation of Sylvia’s death interviewed her brother Byron, quizzing him on the information he’d given LAPD when Sylvia went missing. But his statement to the Santa Monica officer was vague, not particularly useful. Again he referred to her new and unsavory friends, but this time he implied Sylvia was involved with mobsters and that they had been responsible for her death. It was true that organized crime had moved to Hollywood in the thirties and forties. The Santa Monica detective had pursued that line of inquiry, to no avail. He had also interviewed the other bit players who’d been working on the movie at RKO. That, too, was a dead end.
Sylvia had few friends or confidantes, it appeared, except her brother Byron. She wasn’t popular. In fact, her co-workers had little to say about her, and most of that unfavorable. A woman who worked in Makeup referred to Sylvia as a nasty, demanding bitch. A fellow actress, another bit player, said Sylvia had a reputation for sleeping around and using the casting couch to get parts. No one on the set of the film at RKO, either in front of or behind the cameras, knew or cared about her plans for the weekend. Only one person, a man who worked as an electrician, was sympathetic or concerned. Sylvia had seemed troubled, bothered by something, he told the detective, as though she were carrying the weight of the world. He hoped she hadn’t committed suicide, he added.
