Silent Murders (30 page)

I forced myself to sound calm. I didn’t need Lottie to get defensive and start lying to me. “Oh, it’s nothing, really. I just wondered … can you remember, by any chance, about what time it was when you talked with Paul?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A little after lunch maybe.”

“And do you remember the conversation?”

“Gee whillikers, let me think … I was upset. I told him Bruno had been shot dead. Paul had been at the party, too, you know, though he wasn’t a great friend of Bruno’s, but he was horrified. Very much. So we talked about that for a while. Who could have done it, and so forth and so on. Paul had lots of ideas—he was good at thinking.”

“Did you happen to mention the waitress who was killed? Esther.”

“Sure, I told him like Douglas told me, that the waitress must have seen the murderer at the party, and so he had to kill her or she’d have identified him to the police. We talked about that some, about wondering if we had seen the killer, too, and not even known it, and wondering if anyone else would get killed. And boy, did they ever!” She gave her shoulders a shake. “It’s enough to give a person the creeps. Oh geez, there’s Lily and I’m still in rags.” She waved to a smart young woman across the set and called, “I’ll be there in a jiffy, darling!” Then to us, “We’re going shopping in Lily’s new Packard Roadster, and I’m driving. It’s the top-of-the-line custom Packard, and if I like it, I might buy one myself. In a different color, of course. Ta-ta!”

With the usual frown he wore when his sister-in-law was around, Douglas watched her flit away. “I want to apologize for Lottie—”

I held up one hand. “Thank you, but it’s not necessary. That’s just the way Lottie is. I understand.”

“You understand a lot.”

“I’ve known plenty of vaudeville performers like Lottie. It’s part of show business.”

“Sit down a minute.” He indicated the canvas chair with
LOTTIE PICKFORD
stenciled on the back. “Where do we go from here?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. Just when the list of potential murderers was shrinking, it opens up wide. Paul Corrigan could have told anyone in Hollywood. In fact, he could have told several people and they could have spread the word further.”

“Someone was quick to grasp the possibilities. Someone knew that the waitress had been killed and why, and that person figured a subsequent murder would be construed the same way. If and when someone was apprehended for the murders of Heilmann and the waitress, he’d deny killing Lorna McCall and Paul Corrigan, but who would believe him?”

“Maybe we’re going about this backward. We’ll never know now who Paul Corrigan might have told, but if we knew the killer’s motive, we might figure out a likely suspect. Why would anyone want to kill Lorna?”

Douglas played with his moustache as he considered the possibilities. “Envy over her success. A romance gone sour. Something in her past we know nothing about.”

All reasonable possibilities, but no bells rang. “What about Paul Corrigan and Faye? Who’d want to poison them?”

“We don’t really know that anyone was trying to kill them both. The murderer may have intended to kill one of them, and the other was unavoidable.”

“What do they have in common? Besides the fact that they were both at Heilmann’s party.”

“This isn’t very nice to say, but they’ve both passed their prime.”

“I gathered that.”

“Paul wasn’t working much and the parts he got were minor. And Faye lost several parts to younger actresses—Lorna for one. That’s what brought on their quarrel at Heilmann’s party, when Faye slapped Lorna. Mary says Faye and Paul were lovers once, some years ago. She thought they had reunited.”

Ever since yesterday, thoughts of Faye Gordon had pestered me from the blurry edge of consciousness. Her fight with Lorna, her inability to get help when the poison struck Paul, her own mild reaction to the poison. It wasn’t much, but the thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Do you think Faye could have been angry enough at Lorna to kill her?”

Douglas didn’t bat an eyelid. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. That brawl at the party must have left some pretty hard feelings.”

“And if,” I said, “Faye and Paul had reunited, she could have been there with him when he received the telephone call from Lottie. Or he could have telephoned her to share the news. If Faye knew about Heilmann’s and Esther’s murders, she could have decided it was an opportune moment to kill Lorna and make it look like another witness being eliminated.”

Douglas picked up my train of thought. “And as for Paul Corrigan, maybe he suspected what she’d done and threatened to go to the police. If she knew he was coming to see her at Paramount, she could have planned to poison him to keep him quiet, and … Oh, for heaven’s sake, it really is rather far-fetched, isn’t it? Where would she get the bichloride of mercury? The police checked all the sales in Los Angeles for the past month and found nothing suspicious.”

“Unless … what if she didn’t buy it in Los Angeles?”

“You can’t check every pharmacy in the state.”

“But I might be able to check the ones in Bakersfield. At your house, Faye was talking about having missed a yachting party the previous weekend because she had to visit her sick mother in Bakersfield, and Paul made a snide remark to our end of the table about how that was just an excuse to distract from the fact that she hadn’t been invited.”

“I remember. But that puts her in Bakersfield long before the first murders.”

“True. Maybe she was planning something before the murders, and when they occurred, she altered her plans to fit the circumstances.”

“It’s possible.”

“I could go to Bakersfield and check the drugstores there. It’s a long shot, but we haven’t any other leads to follow.”

“I don’t know that it is such a long shot, now that I think about it. I’m sure Bakersfield is Faye’s hometown. I’ve heard her mention it before. Let’s not say anything about this to Mary, though, at least not until we know more. I’ll let them know at the studio that you won’t be in tomorrow. And don’t worry about the cost. I’ll pay any expenses.” He took out his wallet and handed me twenty-five dollars, brushing aside my protest that it was far too much. “You take this and I don’t want to see any change.”

“I’ll need a recent photograph of Faye.”

“I’ll telephone Paramount and ask for a publicity shot from
Cobra.
”

39

The next morning I stopped by the Paramount office for the photo on my way to the station. There I hopped a northbound train. Several hours later I stepped off in Bakersfield, a small city known to most of us in vaudeville as a friendly place. Sizing up the taxi drivers waiting out front, I hired the bald one with the big belly because he had a sincere smile. His name was Charlie.

“First stop, the public library, please,” I said, introducing myself.

“You’d be wanting the Beale Library. That’s not far, just over to Seventeenth.”

“I plan to visit all the drugstores in Bakersfield today, and I think the city directory would be the place to start, don’t you?”

“Yes siree, Miss Beckett. I know where some of ’em are, but with a list, we’d miss nary a one.”

I was prepared to explain my quest in brief terms but Charlie showed no curiosity, only a helpful enthusiasm, so I left the subject alone. The library wasn’t far. Nothing in Bakersfield was far. I left him waiting at the curb while I went inside to ask for the current directory.

I’d have ripped out the page I needed and been done with it had it not been for the steely-eyed librarian who could read minds. She fixed her stare on me when I sat down and never once blinked. Outfoxed, I took out a pencil and copied all eleven drugstore names and addresses to a piece of paper.

“Here.” I handed the list to Charlie. “We won’t have to go to all of them, just until I find the one I’m looking for. With luck, it will be our first stop. Where do we start?”

Charlie drove around the block to a corner building on Nineteenth and Chester where a large sign proclaimed
KIMBALL & STONE: DRUGS, LUNCHEONETTE, PRESCRIPTIONS
, and pulled up to the entrance.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather you stopped a block away, so I can walk up to the door.” I didn’t want the taxi to raise any suspicions about why a girl would come from a distance to buy poison.

Charlie grunted his assent and moved forward.

“I won’t be long.”

It took only a few minutes to find what I wanted: a box of Rough on Rats. Living in cheap hotels and boardinghouses had acquainted me with the virtues of this fine product early on in my career, and my eye picked out the familiar package with its comforting image of a dead rat on his back, his little paws in the air. I went to the counter and waited my turn. Sixteen cents. The druggist rang up, then pushed a ledger toward me to sign.

I took my time. I opened it to the wrong page and turned slowly, looking not in the names column but at the dates until I found Saturday, April 4, the day Faye Gordon had last been in Bakersfield. Then I checked to see what poisons were sold that day. I was looking for a drugstore that had sold a woman some bichloride of mercury on April 4. The name wasn’t important—she almost certainly would have used a false one—it was the poison and the date that mattered.

There were no entries at all on April 4. I signed the ledger, thanked the proprietor, and left the store.

I saw a good bit of Bakersfield that day, more than I had seen when I played here in years past. It seemed like a good place to call home. The town had long been a regular stop on the Big Time vaudeville circuits—Keith-Albee and Orpheum—and I had been there a few times, once with my mother and later when I was with Kid Kabaret and Kids in Candyland. We passed one theater that looked particularly familiar.

“Oh, there’s the Opera House!” I said to my driver. “My mother played there years ago.”

“In vaudeville, was she?”

“Chloë Randall. She was a singer. We were on the circuit for years.”

He was kind enough to pretend he had seen her. “I think I remember a Chloë Randall singer from years ago. Yeah, a pretty woman, beautiful voice. That old Opera House just got a new name. Now it’s the Nile Theater, see?” I couldn’t miss the large vertical letters. “Fancy you remembering that place.”

“Performers remember enthusiastic audiences.”

“Coming up, Globe Drug Store, ahead on your right.”

Globe Drugs was the old-fashioned sort with two parallel counters stretching from front to back and virtually all the stock on wall shelves behind them. It was a popular place and there were several customers ahead of me. When it came my turn, I asked the clerk for rat poison. He pulled down two red and white tins, one large, one small, both with prominent skull and crossbones, and set them on the wood counter. “This will do,” I said, picking up the smaller one. “What do I owe you?”

“Fifteen cents,” he said. “And wait a minute, you need to sign the book.” He crossed the room and pulled out a heavy red-bound volume that he set before me. I handed him the money and took my time finding the place to sign. Someone had purchased a poison on Saturday, April 4, but it wasn’t bichloride of mercury and the signature looked very masculine. I thanked the man and left.

“Two,” I announced as I got back in the taxi. “Next?”

Charlie and I hit three drugstores before my stomach demanded a break. “I’m hungry. What’s next and do they have a luncheonette?”

We ate chicken potpie and cherry phosphates at Kahler’s soda counter and, since lunch was on Douglas Fairbanks, ice cream sundaes for dessert. Charlie waited as I bought another box of Rough on Rats, scanned the poison book for April 4 entries—there were two but not for bichloride of mercury—and signed my name. If he was curious about what I was doing, he didn’t show it.

“Back to the salt mines,” I said as we left Kahler’s. “What’s next on the list?”

Fortune was frowning that day. Doggedly, Charlie and I tracked down Baer Brothers, Eastern Drugs, Riker’s, and Proctor’s, paused for a soda at Elgin’s, and resumed the routine. In an odd way, it reminded me of the vaudeville circuit: repeat performances at each stop with a jump in between. At the ninth shop I found someone had purchased bichloride of mercury on April 3, but it was a man’s name and a man’s bold signature, not to mention the wrong date. Meanwhile, arsenic was piling up on the floor of Charlie’s taxi and the afternoon shadows were growing longer. If I missed the last train back to Los Angeles, it was no catastrophe—I had enough money to spend the night in a decent hotel and finish tomorrow—but I much preferred my own bed. I was tired and discouraged. My hunch wasn’t playing out.

The sign on the tenth drugstore read
PIPKIN DRUGS AND SODAS
. I heaved a sigh and got out of the taxi, walked the block to Pipkin’s, and went inside.

The soda fountain was crowded with lively young people, making me suspect there was a school nearby. In the back of the store, however, the pharmacy counter was deserted. The familiar package of Rough on Rats called to me, and I picked up the smallest size and took it to the druggist.

“Fifteen cents,” said a grandfatherly pharmacist as he peered at me over the top of his spectacles. Taking the poison book out of a cabinet, he set it on the counter for me to sign. I handed him a dollar … I had the correct coins but making change took attention away from me and gave me a couple extra seconds to peruse a page of entries.

And there it was. April 4 in the date column. Bichloride of mercury beside it. A carelessly scrawled name in a feminine hand next to that. That’s what I’d come to Bakersfield for. That’s what I’d been searching for all day. I was so startled, I almost forgot what to do next.

I had spent a lot of effort trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why a young woman was investigating poison sales, with absolutely no success. Everyone knew there was no such thing as a female detective or a female policeman or a female Pinkerton, and the reporter act just didn’t play well here. I was left with no other recourse than the flimsiest justification of all—the truth.

“Here you are, miss,” said the man, handing me my change. He must have seen the surprise on my face, for he said, “Are you feeling all right?”