American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (9 page)

In Los Angeles, Billy Burns had examined the suitcase bomb that had been found in the shrubbery outside Felix Zeehandelaar’s house. A New Haven Clock Company alarm clock and a No. 5 Columbia dry battery were fastened by a copper wire to a small board. One piece of brass had been soldered to the alarm key on the clock, and another was fastened by a screw and a bolt to the board. These were the two contact points. When the alarm rang, the current would shoot from the clock to the battery and ignite the dynamite. It was a simple but lethal device. The explosion would have been devastating.

As powerful, the detective realized with a sudden intuition, as the blast that had rocked the Peoria train yard earlier last month.

The next day Billy sent a telegram to his son Raymond in the agency’s Chicago office. He wanted the operatives who had worked on the Peoria investigation to come immediately to Los Angeles. They were to bring with them the package containing the evidence gathered at the train yard.

He waited impatiently for Raymond’s response. When no telegram arrived, Billy assumed that the operatives were on their way; they had left Chicago in too much of a rush to pause to send a telegram. But on the third day a telegram arrived at the Alexandria Hotel. Its message was terse and utterly demoralizing: The Peoria evidence was missing.

PART II

______________________

MANHUNT

TWELVE

______________________

B
ILLY BURNS LIFTED
his water glass high into the air as if to make a toast. But rather than offering up a conventional salute, he leaned across the dining table at the Alexandria Hotel, fixed his district manager with a steady, thoughtful stare, and shared another of his often-recited maxims. “Find the motive,” he lectured Malcolm MacLaren, “and in due course the criminal will be revealed.”

It was January 1911, just three months after the destruction of the
Times
Building. The detective, after a quick business trip to New York to work on a murder case and then home to Chicago for the Christmas holidays, had been back in Los Angeles for little over a week. While he was away, there had been another bombing in the city. Early on Christmas morning a series of explosions had rocked the Llewellyn Iron Works. A night watchman had been injured, and the plant had been severely damaged. His men had searched the ruined building but had not been able to find the remnants of a bomb. He did not know if this latest blast was tied to the
Times
explosion. Perhaps it was the work of someone inspired by that disaster, acting for unknown and very personal reasons. These questions reinforced Billy’s growing sense of urgency. He feared there would be more explosions, more deaths. But he had no answers. All he could do was to sift through a thicket of possible clues and intriguing rumors, trying, as he put it, “to unravel the mystery.”

It was a frustrating time. Throughout the nation prominent figures were voicing many deeply believed—as well as many self-serving and politically inspired—theories about who was to blame for the blast. But there was little hard evidence. Billy had suspected the Peoria bomb might reveal a promising lead, but until it could be found—and he still had hopes it would be located—he had no choice but to pursue other inquiries.

For weeks he had been stymied, but now at last he felt that one investigative avenue loomed with a measure of promise. “A possibility,” he said with a careful guardedness. Still, he felt confident enough to try it out on MacLaren; after all, Mac was the L.A. native and would have a first-hand appreciation of the stakes—and whether they could lead a man to commit murder. Or more accurately, the detective realized, twenty-one murders.

So he had summoned his district manager to dinner in the Alex’s grand dining room. Not even waiting for the meal to begin, Billy rushed into his presentation. He kept his glass high and, always full of theater, let the glow of the dining room’s crystal chandelier reflect on it as though it were a spotlight. “The motive,” he then suggested to MacLaren, “might very well be in this glass—water!”

In arid southern California, water was the elixir of fortunes, Billy began, as if at last delivering his lecture to the bankers. It was a commodity as rare and as precious as gold. And the future—as well as a robber baron’s treasure—belonged to those visionaries who could manipulate Nature and bring the revitalizing flow of water to the vast hot, sandy California wastelands.

Harrison Gray Otis was driven by such ambitions, the detective told Mac as he settled into his story. And Otis’s and his partners’ attention was focused on a sun-baked strip of land 250 miles northeast of Los Angeles, close to the Nevada line—Owens Valley.

Nearly ten miles wide and one hundred miles long, the valley would have been simply another scorched stretch of desert if not, Billy explained, for one redeeming and fateful bit of geology. Running through its center was the Owens River, an icy, permanent stream of clear mountain-fed water. Over the generations, a series of prosperous towns had popped up on both banks of the river, and the valley bloomed.

In the early 1900s the good life in the valley promised soon to get even better. The U.S. government had come to help. J. B. Lippincott, the smooth-talking chief engineer of the U.S. Reclamation Service, arrived and went from ranch to ranch explaining that the government was determined to bring water to over 200,000 acres of adjacent desert land. This land would be irrigated at government expense by government engineers. It would be, he conceded, a complex undertaking involving an intricate network of canals and sluices. But in time this tract of desert would bloom, too. And best of all, Lippincott told the ranchers, when the construction was finished, they would be able to buy back the irrigated land from the U.S. government at the bargain price of $23 an acre. There was one small catch: To avoid delays, Lippincott urged the valley residents and their municipal water companies to turn over their rights and claims to the undeveloped desert land and to the Owens River water. The government, he promised, would protect their interests. The transfer of ownership was merely a legal technicality. The land and the water rights would be returned to the original owners once the project was completed.

What a deal! the ranchers thought. They would sign over worthless desert land, and then after it was improved at the government’s expense, they would buy it back for a song. With no investment of their own, a valueless asset would be transformed into something substantial. The trusting ranchers eagerly complied, and the government survey of the valley began. The fieldwork dragged on for several years, producing a flurry of maps and charts and stream measurements.

Unknown to them, a bemused Billy went on, the real hub of activity was down in Los Angeles—in the offices of a cabal of politicians and businessmen. And a deal too good to be true would prove to be just that.

Lippincott was a fraud. He did work for the federal government, but he was also receiving a salary from the city of Los Angeles. And he had known that the Owens Valley reclamation project would never happen because all along another, grander plan was covertly taking shape.

The well-coordinated plot proceeded on several fronts simultaneously, said Billy. In Owens Valley, as the government engineers scurried about, two men appeared. The one who did all the hail-fellow talking was Fred Eaton, a former mayor of Los Angeles. The other, scholarly and taciturn, was William Mulholland, chief of the Los Angeles Water Department. Eaton introduced himself as Lip-pincott’s agent, and using the government-funded surveys of the valley as his guide, he began buying additional land.

But Eaton wasn’t purchasing land for the government. He was the front man for a group of Los Angeles businessmen—Otis prominent among them—who had other plans for the Owens River. They wanted to bring its water to Los Angeles.

Their intention was to construct an aqueduct into the river and then divert this stream of water to the city 250 miles away. It would be a complex engineering feat and a costly one. Under Mullholland’s supervision, however, the plan for the world’s longest aqueduct was secretly formulated.

Once Eaton had acquired all the necessary land, the government officially announced that it was no longer interested in developing Owens Valley. On cue, with the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
leading the way, the plan for the aqueduct was revealed in 1906 to the city’s citizens. And with this front-page story, a public relations campaign began.

The
Times
hammered away, relentless in its doomsday fervor. Without the aqueduct, the city’s future would be dire. A single drought would ruin Los Angeles. Expansion, prosperity—all would be impossible. The bustling metropolis would revert to the parched desert town it had once been. The city had only one hope: The voters would have to approve $22.5 million in bonds to build an aqueduct from the Owens River to Los Angeles.

Concerned, even frightened, the voters dutifully fell into line, Billy explained. The sale of the bonds was approved. And the release of the bond money allowed the first part of the scheme to be realized. Eaton and his clique of money men—including the publisher of the
Times—
resold, at an enormous profit, the land they had acquired along the Owens River to the city of Los Angeles. They made a fortune. But only a small fortune. The truly big money, Billy noted with genuine awe, would be earned once the aqueduct was completed, and the rest of their insiders’ plot could come to fruition.

Suddenly Billy’s narrative came to a halt. One moment he had been going on in his intense, rapid-fire way, poised to reveal to MacLaren the final, audacious component of Otis’s scheme. Then, abruptly, he was distracted. The dining room, he realized, had turned quiet, an unnatural hush descending like an enveloping veil. Curious, he looked up and saw that people had stopped eating and talking. Everyone appeared to be following the progress across the room of a retinue of women. They were young, giggly, a bit flamboyant, and very glamorous. They moved with a confidence, a recognition, that all eyes were on them.

Leading the pack, striding very purposefully as though oblivious to the commotion their presence was causing, was a familiar face. On the other side of the vast room, D.W. Griffith stopped at a table covered with a starched white cloth and set with heavy silver. The director stood very erect, waiting until the ladies were seated. He remained in this position for several moments, motionless and quiet, like a conductor preparing to lead his orchestra into the opening notes. At last, full of ceremony, D.W. took his seat. As if on command, the women at the table immediately turned their attention toward him.

THIRTEEN

______________________

T
HE TROUPE HAD
made their way across the country to Los Angeles in style. They had traveled in reserved coaches with red leather seats on trains renamed in their honor the
Biograph Special.
Conductors eagerly saw to their needs. Stewards hovered attentively in the dining car, and they had a generous three-dollar allowance to spend each day on food. In San Bernardino all the ladies were presented with bouquets of sweet-smelling carnations. When they arrived in Los Angeles the principal players were, to their surprise and delight, booked into the Alexandria, the city’s finest hotel.

Gone were the days of traveling with theatrical stock companies from small town to small town. No more paying with their own money for railroad sleepers and greasy meals. No more finding themselves dropped at the train station at dawn and every hotel in town fully booked. They had been lifted out of the scramble of their previous lives. The movie business was booming, and they were part of it.

That night, sitting in the hotel’s splendid dining room, full of a sense of the glittering enterprise that was their new calling, they listened as D.W., as usual, took center stage. He grew voluble when he had had a few glasses of wine, and it was his practice to use these communal meals to share a bit of what he had in store for the troupe. He was always open to their ideas, as long as he had the final say.

He had plans, he revealed, for “something
grand.
” He wanted them to take a second try at a story he had filmed before, Tennyson’s tale of an ocean voyage and doomed love,
Enoch Arden.
But this time it wouldn’t be shot in a Fourteenth Street ballroom in front of painted studio sets. He’d do it “right,” outdoors, by the sea. And if it took more than one thousand feet of film to tell the story, well, he’d figure out a way to get the exhibitors to accept such an unprecedented length. First thing, though, he needed costumes. There was nothing of any use in Los Angeles, so he announced that he was sending one of the actors in the company, George Nichols, up to San Francisco to check out what was available at Goldstein & Company, the theatrical costume shop.

D.W. had a few less ambitious scenarios in the works for this western trip as well. One of them had been taking shape in his mind for a while, but it might just as well have been inspired by the conversation that was going on across the dining room. Its plot, too, involved the scarcity of southern California’s most precious commodity. He called it
The Last Drop of Water.
D.W. wanted to shoot the film in the desert not far from the city, in a place called the San Fernando Valley.

Billy, meanwhile, had resumed his conversation with MacLaren. When he had first spotted D.W., he had considered walking across the room to tell the director how the murder case on which they had collaborated had unfolded. But then he decided not to disturb Griffith during his meal. He’d corner him later, perhaps in the hotel lobby, where the gentlemen gathered after dinner to smoke their cigars. Besides, he was eager to get on with his story. He wanted Mac to appreciate the brilliance of Otis’s scheme, and the windfalls it promised. And he wanted to know whether Mac believed such a treasure was motive enough for a man to conspire to blow up his own building and kill twenty-one people in the process. Billy quickly picked up his narrative where he had left off—in the heat and dust of the San Fernando Valley.