A Cast of Killers (31 page)

Colleen took a deep breath. “I didn’t think it was necessary. You told me everything I wanted to know when we went straight to the Sandersons without even stopping to talk. I figured if anything had changed with her, you would have told me right off.”

“I didn’t know what to say,” Vidor said.

“Maybe you just said it all,” she said. “It’s not nineteen twenty-two any more.”

She slid across the seat, closer to Vidor. He held her hand tightly and looked out at the vacant lot, thinking not of everything that happened there on that fateful night forty-five years earlier, but of everything that had happened since.

37

King Vidor slept late. When he awoke, he could hear Thelma Carr already at work in her office. He stood up, stepped around the boxes he had brought from the Hollywood Ranch Market the night before, and started his morning shower. He didn’t mind Carr’s hearing his personal ritual this morning; after his weeks of living full-time in the office he knew she wouldn’t comment on it now.

From the top of the largest market box he took his favorite suit, light nut-brown wool. He topped it off with a John B. Stetson wide-brim hat the suntanned color of a bay pony.

“My,” Thelma Carr said from her file cabinet as Vidor stepped into the outer office. “You look nice today.”

“So do you,” he said, with an admiring glance.

It had been some time since Carr had had to deal with the Vidor leer. It caught her a little off guard. She quickly sat behind her desk.

“Oh.” Carr didn’t ask what the appointment was. She had learned that meetings Vidor arranged himself, such as his meetings the past few months with “producer” Colleen Moore, were meetings she would just as soon know nothing about.

Vidor stepped outside. Nippy looked up at him from his shaded resting spot on the porch. It was a sunny morning, hotter than normal for so early in the summer. As Vidor walked to the T -Bird, Nippy followed.

“No, you’re going to have to stay here,” Vidor told him. He commanded Nippy back to the porch. He felt his meeting this morning would be awkward enough without having his dog along for the ride. It had been nearly fifty years since he had laid eyes on Mary Miles Minter. Back then, he’d only played a bit role in one of her films. Now, he had to ask her if she’d been a party to the murder of the man she loved.

He drove out of Beverly Hills, west on Sunset. As he cruised through the affluent foothills of Westwood, Bel Air, Brentwood, he couldn’t help but think of how they, like everything else, had changed so much in what seemed like such a short time. When he had arrived in Hollywood in 1915, Sunset was a dirt road winding through citrus groves and evergreen canyons, passing through neighboring towns that had since all spread out and melted together into one sprawling city that extended all the way to the sea. Once distinct, autonomous communities were now distinguished only by the road signs bearing their names.

In Santa Monica he turned onto Ocean Avenue, then climbed up Adelaide Drive. He could see the steep sandy cliffs and clean white beaches below him. It was necessary to his project for Vidor to see Mary Miles Minter, but that knowledge did nothing to cease the discomfort he felt as he parked in front of Minter’s red-brick house.

He rang the bell. There were no sounds from inside, no sign of life at all. He rang again, then heard something above him. Stepping back from the door, he saw a window opening on the second floor. A face appeared, indistinct behind the window screen.

“Yes?” Mary Miles Minter’s voice said. “Is that King Vidor? Is that you, King Vidor? Oh, good, I’ll be right down.”

Vidor watched the window close again, then stepped back to the door. He found this greeting odd. He had arrived at exactly the time agreed upon. Why had Minter taken so long responding to his ring?

After another full minute, Vidor was about to ring the bell again when he heard footsteps behind the door. A lock sounded. Then another. A chain rattled. Finally the door opened, revealing a woman Vidor did not recognize at all.

“King, my dear boy,” she said, unlatching the screen door.

Vidor was stunned. Throughout the past months he had always pictured Minter as he had known her, the beautiful, white-skinned, blonde-haired little Mary. He had expected her to have aged in the past decades, but was not prepared for the obese figure who stood before him now, her thin hair curled into mouse-gray wisps.

“Come in, dear boy,” Minter said, pushing open the screen door.

Vidor stepped inside, squinting his eyes to focus in the darkness of the room. The only light in the house filtered through the thick curtains that hid the windows. Walking in from the midday brightness of the oceanside neighborhood was like walking into a summertime movie matinee. Minter grabbed Vidor’s hand with short thick fingers and led him into the living room. Antique furniture, mostly from the 1920s, filled the center of the room while the walls were lined with shelves, tables, and an elegant bureau, all stacked with leather-bound books, newspapers, and the knickknacks of a house long occupied. The air in the room, though, was still and stale, like the air of a house not occupied at all.

“The servants are gone today,” Minter said. “It’s just you and I.”

She showed Vidor to a chair. “I’ll let some light into the room,” she said.

She pulled back the curtains from a window, revealing through long-unwashed glass the contrast between the gloomy interior of the house and the neighborhood outside. In the light Vidor could see the layer of dust that lay untouched atop everything in sight.

Minter lowered herself onto a love seat.

“King Vidor,” she said, looking him over. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. Are you still making Westerns ?”

“Not lately.” Vidor was struck by Minter’s voice. It was high, almost childlike, exactly as Vidor had remembered it, but with that strange English-sounding accent he had heard over the phone.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “I love Westerns. I was in Westerns myself, when I left the stage and started making pictures. I was in lots of pictures, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” Vidor wondered why she was telling him this. It was as though she were speaking to someone she had never met, someone unaware of who she was and all she had done.

“A child actress, that’s what I was. Myself and my sister, also. Margaret was her name. She’s dead now.” When Minter spoke, her eyes seemed focused not on him but on some spot in front of him.

Uncomfortable, Vidor decided to try to channel the conversation in another direction. “Do you remember the picture we made together, Mary?”

“Oh, I surely do,” she said, though her curious expression suggested she was not so sure. Then, as though the question had never been asked, she abruptly sat up straight. “What kind of hostess must you think I am? I’ll serve cake and cider.”

“That’s not necessary,” Vidor said, but she raised herself to her feet and, telling Vidor to remain seated, walked into the kitchen.

Vidor stood up. He walked around the room, looking at the memorabilia it contained: playbills, lobby cards from Minter’s films, faded movie magazines. He wondered what Minter’s mental condition was. All she had talked about since he’d arrived was the past, the early days of her career. And everything in the living room, from the furniture to the books on the shelves, was also a relic from that time. It was normal for people who had not seen each other in a long while to reminisce about past times, but nothing about Minter struck Vidor as normal. He wondered what her reaction would be when he mentioned Taylor.

Vidor watched her eat the cake with motions that seemed almost mechanical; she seemed no more attentive to the activity than she had seemed toward Vidor when speaking to him.

Suddenly Minter stopped eating. She looked around the room, left, then right, everywhere but at Vidor. Her eyes finally came to rest upon the plate in her hand. She set it down on the table.

As she read the poem, Vidor tried at first to follow it, but finally gave up and simply watched her read. The third of Adela Rogers St. Johns’s three Ms seemed to hover over the room like a cloud. Misery. Minter was a miserable woman, a gross caricature of what she had once been. When she finished the poem, she looked at Vidor for approval.

“The funeral man promised me. He let me in after everybody else was gone. I brought roses and gave them to him. He was lying on a stone slab and was cold when I kissed him.” There were tears in Minter’s eyes.

“Do you know who killed him, Mary?”

Minter started rustling her pages again, but absent-mindedly, the way she had eaten the cake.

“I was home that night,” she said, reciting the story Vidor had read in countless newspaper articles and the L.A.P.D. files. “I was reading to the family by the fire.”

“Are you sure you weren’t with Taylor?” Vidor asked.

“Are you sure you didn’t go see him after your mother locked you in your room?”

Minter looked at Vidor with a quizzical expression, as though he were an actor reading lines that appeared nowhere in the script.

“Are you sure your mother didn’t come looking for you, and find you there?”

“No,” she said. “I was reading to the family by the fire.”

She used the exact same words she had used seconds earlier, as though repetition of them through the years had ingrained them in her mind.

“Your sister, Margaret, said that wasn’t true,” Vidor told her calmly. “She said you were gone, and so was your mother, and that when you came home you told her something very bad happened to Taylor.”

“No,” Minter said again. “No. No. You don’t know. You don’t know anything about it. Mr. Taylor was a great man. He helped me. He took care of me. He said I didn’t have to do everything she told me to.”

“Who? Your mother?” Vidor asked.

She ignored the question. She stood up, the tears returning to her eyes.

“I didn’t have to go to my room. Mr. Taylor said so. I didn’t have to do anything. I could stay with him if I wanted to, Mr. Taylor loved me very much.”

She walked aimlessly around the room, sobbing, passing the stacked and crowded mementos of her former life like—the thought sent a shiver up Vidor’s spine—a bloated, exaggerated, real-life Norma Desmond.

With each mention of her mother, Minter sobbed loudly. She walked around in a circle, her hands trembling at her sides. Vidor had no doubt that she was unstable. He wanted to leave. He knew more than enough to write his screenplay, and knew that even if Minter did give a full accounting of what happened that night in Taylor’s bungalow, her mental state was such that she would never erase the shade of doubt, faint though it was, that would hang over her testimony. Vidor started to stand up, then noticed the pages of poetry sitting on the table. He reached for them. What he saw on the top page made him sit back down. The paper was lavender, with pale yellow butterflies printed around the edges. At the top in a very elegant script was written “Twisted by Knaves, by Charlotte Shelby.”

He flipped quickly through the pages. All claimed Shelby as the author. Yet Minter had said she had written them herself, in her little room upstairs. Vidor thought of Minter’s face peering down at him from upstairs when he rang her doorbell, then of the rumors Adela Rogers St. Johns and George Hopkins had said they’d heard, that Charlotte Shelby had never died, that she was still alive and still running Minter’s life as she always had. Vidor wanted more than ever to leave now. Then suddenly Minter stepped toward him and grabbed the poems from his hand. She flipped through them as though making sure they were all still there. Then she stopped and sank once again on her love seat, looking through tear-filled eyes at “Twisted by Knaves.”