Silent Murders (7 page)

“There was only one guard when I drove by a little while ago,” Douglas had told me over the telephone, “and he was hugging the front porch shade.” It had given me an idea.

Douglas’s plan for a frontal assault hadn’t worked—bluffing cops isn’t easy, even for an accomplished actress like me—but I had a backup plan of my own. I thought I could sneak inside through one of the rear windows.

At last night’s party, all the windows had been open. Most people around here leave windows open, day and night, or else the house heats up like a bake oven. If Bruno Heilmann had been killed last night at the conclusion of the party, the murderer would certainly not have gone about afterward closing windows before he fled. Nor would the shocked valet have thought to do it that morning after he arrived; nor would the policemen who first reported to the scene. I figured there was a good chance I could climb in an open window without being seen.

The patio looked smaller in daylight than it had last night. Dead torches still ringed the edge; paper lanterns still bobbled in the breeze … and I had badly misjudged the police. They had closed all the back windows on the first floor, leaving open only those on the second floor. I gave one of the ground-floor window sashes a push but it was locked from the inside. No doubt the rest were, too.

“I know this is a huge thing to ask, Jessie,” Douglas had said on the telephone, “and I want to make it clear that your job isn’t on the line if you refuse. I’d do it myself but I can’t go to a damned drugstore without attracting photographers. Neither can Mary. And Lottie is hysterical. All she does is huddle in the corner and whimper about her career. I couldn’t care less about Lottie—the press can drag that little tramp through the mire with my blessing—but I’d do anything to protect my Mary. If the newspapers get hold of Lottie’s affair with Heilmann, she’ll be caught up in the murder scandal and ten minutes later it will spill over to Mary. Mary’s always protecting Jack and Lottie from their own idiocy, and she takes the brunt of it. It’s only been five years since Olive’s ‘accidental’ death in Paris … My God, a second Pickford scandal coming on top of Fatty Arbuckle’s rape trial and Wallace Reid’s drug overdose! The public is fed up with the wild lives of Hollywood, with the Pickfords in the fore.”

Douglas was not exaggerating. Fatty Arbuckle had descended into a severe depression; his career, friends, and fans had vanished during his trial, never to return, even after the second jury found him innocent and apologized for the whole ordeal. The scandal caused serious financial panic in New York, with Paramount’s stock dropping to less than half its value. Studios went bankrupt. Actors were thrown out of work. And not long afterward, the public read about the death of popular young Wallace Reid from a drug overdose. Fans were livid when a superficial investigation into the illegal dope trade failed to identify any of his suppliers. Reputations were fragile commodities, and even Little Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” was vulnerable.

Beneath an old oak tree at the edge of the patio, I made up my mind. Examining the drooping branches, I found the one I wanted. I had not spent a year of my life in the Circus Kids act for nothing. Although I hadn’t swung on a trapeze or dangled from a rope in a dozen years, I was still quite limber, and I had always had a good sense of balance, so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to step out of my baggy skirt, kick off my shoes, and scramble up that tree as if it were a stage prop. Climbing from branch to branch, I soon reached the one closest to an open second-story window.

The branch was as high as the roof, but it was slender. I tested it by inching out toward the tip until I could see how far down it would bend with my weight. Hanging from both hands put me at eye level to the windowsill—lower than I would have preferred, but from there it was a simple maneuver to jackknife my legs to the sill and arch my back until I slid inside.

The branch swooshed back as I let go.

I found myself in a sparsely furnished back bedroom. There was no time to waste. Douglas had told me what to look for.

There were four bedrooms, all with beds neatly made, of course, since Bruno Heilmann had been killed last night before he’d had time to tuck in, alone or with companions. I didn’t have many details about his death, but I gathered from what Douglas said that the valet had arrived for work this morning to find Heilmann on the living room floor, dead from a single bullet wound in the back of the head. The horrified valet had the sense to call Adolph Zukor, Heilmann’s boss at Paramount, rather than the police. Zukor hadn’t attended the party but he knew Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had been there, so he called Douglas to ask what the hell had happened, who could have done such a thing, and did he think it could be covered up somehow or passed off as a heart attack? Zukor was terrified of bad publicity. All three of the sensational Hollywood scandals in the past few years had involved Paramount actors. There was a limit to the public’s loyalty, and Zukor figured he’d finally reached it with Heilmann’s murder.

“I convinced him there was no way to cover up the death of an important director like Heilmann,” Douglas had said to me, “and that the police chief, while generally under Zukor’s thumb, was unlikely to turn a blind eye to murder and pretend it was a heart attack. Zukor was thinking to stall, to keep it out of the papers at least until the killer could be apprehended and the whole mess could come out at once rather than dribble out day by day. He finally called the police.”

It wouldn’t be long before the police connected the two murders and wondered, as I already had, whether Esther Frankel’s death was related to the director’s party. Two people who had been at the same party and were killed at roughly the same time could not be a coincidence.

“Working there at the house until after the last person had left, she would have been present to see or hear something,” said Douglas. “Perhaps she came away knowing something about who was there at the very end. Perhaps she witnessed something that would have allowed her to identify the killer.”

And had been eliminated before that could happen? It seemed logical.

I crept on bare feet into the largest bedroom, the one that overlooked the fountain. This was a man’s room, decorated with the same Prussian angularity as the downstairs with a bare minimum of personal touches: a photograph of an older couple I took to be Heilmann’s parents, a picture postcard of a cathedral stuck in a mirror frame, and a book in German and half a chocolate bar on the nightstand. Shoes were lined up in soldierly precision on the closet floor; even his clothes hung at attention. There was not a speck of dust or an item out of place in the entire room.

I could not see the cop on the porch below, but I could smell him. The air was still and I heard a match strike and a loud exhale, and the smoke from his cigarette wafted up. He was maybe ten feet below me on the other side of the open window and I heard every cough, every creak of the chair, as clearly as if we were sitting side by side on a porch swing.

“What Zukor doesn’t know,” Douglas had informed me, “is that wretched little Lottie has been sleeping with that arrogant Kraut. Lottie’s husband, Allan, doesn’t know, either, naturally. Hell, I didn’t know until she blurted it out today. In any case, her monogrammed negligee and some other personal things are still in Heilmann’s house, waiting for the detectives to discover them and bring the scandal right to our front doorstep.”

And he wanted me to try to get them out of the house before the detectives arrived to search the place.

How could I refuse? Douglas Fairbanks had been nothing but kind to me, and Mary Pickford was my idol. They needed help. I had said yes. And now I was inside the director’s house, searching through bedrooms.

If Lottie hadn’t been so crazy for having her initials etched, painted, embroidered, or stamped on everything she owned, it might not have mattered that her personal belongings were spread about Bruno Heilmann’s bedroom. I came across her pink lace negligee, monogrammed
LPF,
hanging on the bathroom door next to the largest bedroom. I eased open the bureau drawers and found some silk underwear with dainty
LP
s stitched on the edges. On the dressing table were her sterling silver brush and comb set with large
P
s engraved on the backs. A quick check of the bathroom revealed some jars of makeup, all thankfully unmarked, and a sterling-handled toothbrush, engraved. I snatched the toothbrush and left the rest.

A quick tour of the other bedrooms, just in case Lottie had left something identifiable in them, turned up nothing of hers, but I did make one unexpected discovery. The guest bedroom in the front of the house had been set up last night as a dope bar. Several beautifully carved Chinese opium pipes lay on the table. The large drawers of a clothes bureau were full of folded paper packets containing heroin and cocaine and many boxes of what I was certain were more drugs. I’d seen it all before but never so much in one place. It was more than one person could possibly carry. No wonder so many guests were going upstairs last night. Obviously the policemen had reported the body and left the search of the house for the detectives—if they had found this stash, they would surely have confiscated it for themselves.

As I was stuffing Lottie’s clothing beneath my washerwoman’s blouse in preparation for my departure, I heard the sound of chair legs scraping on tile. The guard was getting up.

Unhurried footsteps traveled across the porch, the doorknob turned, the front door creaked open and closed tight, and he entered the hall downstairs. I could hear him so clearly it was as if I were standing beside him. If he’d walked around the outside of the house, he’d have seen nothing, since I’d made certain my skirt and shoes were well hidden under a bush. But I hadn’t counted on him coming inside. Had I made a noise?

Instinctively I looked for a place to hide. I couldn’t imagine he was going to search the place, maybe just take a peek in each room to see how the rich director lived, but I couldn’t duck into a closet on the off chance he’d open it to nose around. Under the bed would be safer, and I judged I could fit.

The silence told me he was walking over the living room carpet. The creak of the swinging door said he was going into the kitchen, not toward the stairs, and I let out my breath. Maybe he wanted to raid the icebox or get himself a drink. I heard some faint rattles and clinks, then running water, then the swinging door again. An interminable silence followed when all I could hear was my blood pounding in my ears as if my heart had moved up to the middle of my head.
Don’t come upstairs,
I willed with all my might.

The sharp sound of liquid streaming into liquid brought a thin smile to my face in spite of the danger, and I thanked my lucky stars there was a water closet on the ground floor. The toilet flushed and the front door opened and closed again. I didn’t breathe easily until I heard him settle into his chair and scratch another match on the sole of his shoe.

I took one last glance out the front window and did a double take. Coming through the gate, walking briskly toward the fountain in my direction, were two men in dark suits and fedoras. Two detectives.
Cheesit
,
the cops!

Crossing back to the rear of the house, I peered out to make sure no one was on the service road. The semicircular layout of the houses meant that the adjacent ones were not visible from the patio, so there was no worry that a neighbor would glance out a window and see me crouched there on the sill, gripping the edge with my toes. With all my strength, I sprang up toward the branch that had brought me here, rode the bounce until it settled, then worked my way hand over hand to the nearest sturdy limb and climbed down. Retrieving my skirt and shoes, I made my way along the service road past the other houses, limping in a tired manner toward the main street.

8

Myrna pounded on the bathroom door. “Jessie! Jessie!” I was standing in front of the mirror in my underclothes, slathering cold cream on my face to remove the brown makeup. The shapeless peasant costume was bunched around my ankles. Lottie’s belongings were on my bed. “Jessie! A very, very awful thing! Bruno Heilmann’s dead! The police are here! They want to ask us questions about the party guests! Come quick!”

I felt guilty that I’d left Myrna in the dark about the murders but reasoned that it was probably better for an ingénue like her to face the police without knowing any more than she did. There’s no substitute for honest surprise. And frankly, there hadn’t been time to tell her. I had stepped out of the police car to Douglas’s telephone call and gone from there to my costume trunk and makeup kit for the disguise. After returning from Heilmann’s and sneaking back into my house, I needed only a few more minutes to resurrect wide-eyed, earnest Jessie Beckett who would be more than happy to answer any questions the policemen cared to ask. I whipped off the bandana and rinsed the black dye out of the lock of auburn hair I had let escape.

“I’ll be right there!”

There wasn’t time to report back to Douglas Fairbanks. I would have to wait until the police had gone.

I put on a blue dropwaist dress with a pleated skirt and a pair of smart shoes, composed my face, and joined Myrna who was standing in the center hall with two cops—did they always work in pairs?—wringing her hands and looking up at the ceiling as if the names of the party guests were written on the plaster.

“… um, Raoul Walsh … and Gary Cooper. Let’s see … Catherine Hays was there. Laura Frances, Robert Alexander, Lottie Pickford—oh, but of course Mr. Fairbanks has already given you that name. Have I already said Sara Rutherford? Oh, Jessie, thank heavens you’re here to help me remember!” The policemen turned to me as I came down the stairs. “Officer Giles and Officer … I’m sorry, oh, Blackford, yes, they are working up a list of every single person who was there last night, and I can’t remember very many. One of the guests killed Bruno Heilmann and they’re trying to figure out who was the last to leave.”