A Cast of Killers (11 page)

Vidor continued: “Back at home, Taylor changed his clothes and called Mabel Normand on the phone. Her maid took the message, and told Taylor that Normand was out shopping, and would be returning at suppertime. Taylor dispatched his chauffeur to deliver his gift to the Normand residence. Or was that a cover? Was something else being delivered?

“Taylor then walked to his regular dance class on Orange Street. He was learning to dance the Tango. The press later reported that he danced with a Mrs. Waybright, his regular dance instructor, but I seem to remember that Taylor liked to practice with his instructor’s assistant, a young man named Duncan.

“He returned to his bungalow at six-fifteen, where he spoke again with Marjorie Berger, this time over the telephone. Taylor was upset, but we don’t know why. Berger, of course, was not only Taylor’s accountant, but also Mary Miles Minter’s and Mabel Normand’s. Around this same time he talked to Tony Moreno on the phone ... but you’ll have to wait to find out about what was said.”

Vidor finished his second glass of champagne and, allowing Moore to assume the honor of pouring another, went on.

“It was nearly dark, dusk, when a limousine pulled up in front of the bungalow court. A beautiful woman got out carrying a bag of what appears to be peanuts. Mabel Normand. As she approached Taylor’s open front door, she saw the director inside talking on the phone. She waited outside until he hung up, then went inside. Taylor greeted her with a kiss, and offered her a drink.

“Then, a short while later, at seven-forty-five, Taylor walked her back to her car. On the back seat, along with peanut shells, was an issue of
The Police Gazette
and a book,
Inhibition, Symptom, and Desire
, by Sigmund Freud. Taylor affectionately chided her on her choice of reading material, then kissed her good-bye. As the limo pulled off, Taylor walked back into his bungalow and shut the door behind him.

“Neighbors heard something which sounded like a car backfiring. They saw a figure, or figures leaving. A man? A woman? One person or two different people? No one seemed to be sure.

“The next morning, Taylor was found dead.”

When he finished, Vidor looked at each of his friends, their nods and thoughtful expressions telling him that they had indeed been captivated by the story. A good sign, he thought, and smiled at his producer. Moore returned the smile and raised her champagne glass in toast.

“I think it’s a real mystery,” Artie Shaw said, clicking his glasses with the others.

“Especially when we see what the police discover in the morning,” Sarnoff added, puffing on a large Cuban cigar.

14

In the cab from Los Angeles International Airport, Vidor imagined the confrontation that awaited him at home. It was February 4, 1967, two weeks since he’d left his wife Betty the curt note informing her he was going to New York, and he wondered what her first words would be when he walked in the door.

She was sitting on the front porch when he arrived. Vidor paid the driver, forgetting even his customary receipt, and made his way inside. He deposited his bag, as well as his trenchcoat and hat, in the living room, then stepped out a side door to where Betty was waiting.

“Toby’s dead,” she said in a weak voice. She set aside her
Better Homes and Gardens
and turned toward her husband, a single tear, thick with mascara, slowly marking one side of her pale face. Toby was Betty’s German shepherd, a vicious animal Vidor had never liked. The dog had once bitten Vidor’s grandson and was the reason that Vidor’s own dog, Nippy, was forced to live in the guest house. Still, Betty’s crying, not an unfamiliar sight the past few years, filled Vidor with sympathy. He felt even worse than he had imagined on the ride from the airport. He knelt beside Betty, took her hand.

“She was a good protector,” Betty said, the sudden defensiveness in her voice betraying, along with her sorrow, an anger that Vidor knew was directed toward him.

Vidor walked into the house. He unpacked, showered, and put on a pair of corduroys. He dreaded the inevitable confrontation that had only been postponed.

Walking down to the guest house, he could hear Nippy barking inside. Thelma Carr opened the door to let him out, and showed mild surprise at her employer’s unannounced return.

“So,” she said, “just dropping by for a visit?” Her electric-green sweater, she remembered, was one of Vidor’s favorites. She quickly turned back into the office. “Or do you think you might want to do a little work today?”

Vidor followed her inside.

“What kind of work do you have in mind?” Obviously in no mood for a round of suggestive cat-and-mouse, Carr handed him the last two weeks’ mail and started reading from a numbered list on her stenographer’s pad.

“You have a speech at the Toastmasters Club on Monday, which by the way is your wife’s birthday; UCLA coming to pick up whatever papers and scripts you’re donating to them on Tuesday; a Directors Guild symposium to moderate on Thursday, which is your sister’s birthday; and a poker game at Dick Marchman’s on Friday night.”

Vidor sat at his desk and sorted his mail. Tax forms,
Christian Science Monitor,
Directors Guild Retirement Fund, Dodgers Season Ticket Office. He opened first a large manila envelope whose contents he already knew. It was his biographical screenplay,
Cervantes,
returned by Spanish producers who said the failure of their last movie had inspired them to abandon cinematic pursuits and rechannel their capital into a retail chain.

Not good news.

Next, a letter from his lawyer, John Chapman, informed him that under the homicide division of the California Public Records Act #6254, all police records concerning the Taylor case—because it involved a capital offense that had never been solved—were closed to public inspection. What Vidor had planned to use as a primary source of information, including, he hoped, photographs of Denis Tanner and Edward Sands, was unavailable to him.

More bad news.

Vidor checked his phone messages. Nothing from Sam Goldwyn, Jr. concerning Vid-Mor’s development project with him. Hoping that no news was, for at least his current endeavors, good news, he set the rest of his mail and his phone calls aside and dug an old address book from the bottom drawer of his desk. He dialed a fifteen-year-old number. A woman answered.

“Hello, this is King Vidor. I’m looking for Tony Moreno.”

There was a short pause, then the woman said, “Tony’s dead, Mr. Vidor.”

Vidor felt himself holding his breath. “What?” His hand, gripping the telephone receiver as tightly as it could, began to perspire.

He hung up. Another potential source of information was gone now. He opened his pocket notebook to his notes on Moreno’s call, wondering if the questions he had planned to ask him would ever be answered. Especially the first two on the list: “Who told him I was working on the Taylor case?” and “How did he find me in New York?”

He closed the notebook and looked around the office, noticing for the first time that Thelma Carr had cleaned and straightened it in his absence. The stacks of loose papers were gone from the top of the piano. His film and news magazines, mostly unread, were neatly arranged on top of his obviously dusted file cabinets. His guitar leaned in a corner outside its case, its blond surface polished shinier than he had ever seen it. Even the top of his desk, except for the clutter he had already made of his unopened mail, had been organized.

“The place looks great,” he called to Carr. “I’ve never seen it this straight.”

“I had to do something in the last two weeks besides fielding your telephone calls,” she said. “You want to sign some checks now?”

“Okay.”

She brought him a dozen prewritten checks. Signing them, he thought of Taylor and Edward Sands, wondering how easily his own signature could be copied.

As Carr returned to her desk, Vidor decided to make one more phone call before catching up on the work he had set aside to go to New York. On the same page of his address book where he had found Antonio Moreno’s was another number he hadn’t called in years, that of Douglas MacLean, William Desmond Taylor’s neighbor on Alvarado Street.

Again, a woman answered, and again, Vidor sat silent as he was told about the man he was calling. MacLean, too, had had a heart attack, and though he was alive, he was paralyzed and unable to talk. Vidor offered his apology and sympathy and hung up, stunned. This was not his day. And he still had to face Betty about New York. He arranged his mail into a neat pile, more fitting with the office’s new look, then searched his desk for something. Finally, he called out, “Where’s my doorknob?”

“In the gray file cabinet,” Carr responded without having to ponder. “With your catcher’s mitt.”

Vidor didn’t know whether she was being sarcastic or just systematic. But he had too much to do to worry about it. He told Carr he’d be back in an hour and left.

Betty was still on the porch as Vidor and Nippy walked up the driveway. She looked thin, not at all the vibrant, buxom script girl he had fallen in love with all those years ago in Hawaii. He wished he had talked with her about New York before the trip, but the fact that he would be meeting Colleen Moore had made him too uncomfortable. He knew he would have to do it soon. Tonight. But first, he had to take care of Toby.

15

Vidor hated pajamas. He never slept in them, only wore them in the morning when he made his breakfast. Every year on Christmas and his birthday he received new pajamas as presents and, after graciously thanking the well-meaning friends and relatives who had given them to him, added them to the plastic-wrapped collection in his bedroom closet. With the use Vidor got out of them, one pair could, and did, last for years.

Vidor was wearing his current pair, very slowly pouring Cream of Wheat into boiling water, when he heard Betty step into the kitchen behind him.

“Good morning,” he said without diverting his attention from the water. Cream of Wheat was his favorite breakfast, and making it correctly (lumpless) required constant stirring and concentration.

“Good morning.” Betty poured a cup of coffee from the pot Vidor had brewed. She held it in front of her, steaming, and looked out the window at the backyard. Nippy was barking at something, already happily at home in Toby’s old kennel.

Betty looked down into her coffee, then padded off to her bedroom. Vidor ate his Cream of Wheat with honey, washed his breakfast dishes, then dressed for the day.

At ten, he taught his film class at the University of Southern California. Afterward, he met with a few of his favorite students and assigned special extracurricular research projects. Then he drove to Paramount Studios, choosing a circular route that took him again to the site that had once been William Desmond Taylor’s bungalow court. The lot had already been cleared for construction, leaving no indication at all that anything had ever stood there.

At Paramount, Vidor pulled up to the DeMille Gate. The security guard recognized him immediately.

“Mr. Vidor,” he said, slipping a visitor’s pass beneath the T-Bird’s windshield wiper. “It’s good to see you. Are you going to be doing another picture with us?”

“I’m working on it,” Vidor said with a smile and drove inside. He parked between twin Mercedes sedans in front of the directors’ building. He wasn’t sure what he would find, but he wanted to see everything in the studio’s files on both Taylor and Mary Miles Minter.

Vidor made his way past a television crew shooting
Mannix
on his way to building L, where he had often used the Research Archives, known as the morgue, in preparing for a film. Inside, rather than the old musty, underlit warehouse filled wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with file cabinets and bookshelves, he found a neat cluster of fluorescent-lighted offices.

“Can I help you?” another guard at a desk asked. “I was looking for the archives.”