Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (29 page)

But King wasn’t so sure, and he made his doubts clear to Woolwine. For one thing, Neil Harrington was absolutely certain that neither of the men he’d seen was Sands. Even more critically, King saw no logic in the theory that Sands would harass Taylor. What purpose would it serve? And why would a man wanted for a felony risk returning to Los Angeles? Why, for that matter, would Sands kill Taylor? Greed was Sands’s motivation. If Sands had been the one to pull the trigger, he would never have left behind the $78 in cash detectives found in Taylor’s jacket pocket, or the two-karat diamond ring or platinum watch he was wearing.

To King, this case had “crime of passion” written all over it. Just what sort of passion, he wasn’t yet sure. But he knew it was impulsive. Reactive. Maybe it was motivated by revenge. Or jealousy. Maybe it had happened in the midst of an argument.

Besides, their only eyewitness, Faith MacLean, was also emphatic that the man she’d seen leaving Taylor’s home was not Sands. And she knew the former valet. Even in the darkness, she would have recognized him. He was not as heavy as Sands, she said.

Beyond that, MacLean hadn’t been able to give the detectives much to work with. All she’d been able to recall was that the man she’d seen had been clean-shaven and wearing a plaid or checkered cap. He was stocky, she thought—“not fat but stocky”—and possibly had a prominent nose. He gave off a “rough” sort of appearance, she said. Pressed for more, MacLean said,
“He was dressed like my idea of a motion-picture burglar.” As for his age or his height, the young woman couldn’t say. Only later, after much pressure, did she guess that he might have been about thirty-five and that he stood, possibly, about five foot nine.

Still, MacLean, along with Mabel Normand, had allowed detectives to establish a timeline of the killing. King told Woolwine there was general consensus that the killer had slipped into the bungalow during the few minutes when Taylor had been walking Normand to her car. He’d apparently been lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity. The cement-paved alley behind the courtyard—the exact place where the MacLeans’ maid had heard someone walking—had been littered with six cigarette butts, some only half smoked, leading detectives to conclude that the man waiting there had been anxious. One cigarette—likely the last one the killer lit before he spotted Taylor walking off with Normand and quickly sneaked into the house—was barely touched.

King estimated that probably no more than five minutes had passed between the time Taylor returned to his apartment and the time MacLean and others heard the shot. Whatever transpired between Taylor and his killer was brief. Either the man with the gun came and did what he intended to do quickly, or something unexpected happened that caused him to shoot.

Taylor’s own gun had been found in a drawer upstairs. It had not been discharged.

The director’s chauffeur, Howard Fellows, had rung Taylor’s doorbell at 8:15. There was no answer, Fellows told police, although the lights were on in the apartment; assuming the director was either asleep or out, Fellows had put the car in the garage and gone home. The chauffeur’s statement fit the detectives’ working timeline: by 8:15, Taylor had already been dead between twenty and twenty-five minutes.

Eager for a scoop, reporters had been scrambling through the neighborhood since yesterday morning, digging up more witnesses. Only now, King said, were police getting around to interviewing these people themselves. Two guys at a nearby gas station were among the most important witnesses. They told of a stranger asking for Taylor’s address just a couple of hours before the murder. In addition,
two streetcar operators reported a man boarding the Big Red at either 7:54 or 8:25—they couldn’t remember precisely which. Given how few passengers ever boarded at the Maryland Avenue stop, though, they took note of the man. All four witnesses described a similar suspect: aged about twenty-six or twenty-seven, with dark hair. Like the man MacLean saw, this man also wore a cap. But he was also described as being well dressed—hardly MacLean’s image of a motion-picture burglar.

The newspapers, however, disregarded the discrepancies and jumped to the conclusion that the witnesses were describing the same man.

King was absolutely convinced that the culprit was not Edward Sands. When Floyd Hartley, the gas station owner, was shown a photo of Taylor’s former valet, he was “inclined to think they were different individuals.” Besides, as King pointed out to Woolwine, why would Sands need to ask directions to Taylor’s apartment?

King told Woolwine that while many on the force were convinced that Sands was the killer, there were other possibilities. Taylor might have been paying off a blackmailer. Police were learning that the director was considered “the easiest ‘touch’ in Hollywood . . . an extremely liberal man to borrow money from.” Taylor’s books, in full view on his rolltop desk, were full of stubs marked “cash.” These were presumed to be loans to individuals, but King wondered if some of them had been blackmail payments. Certainly a man with an abandoned family was susceptible to blackmail. The checks ranged from $200 to $1,500. Moreover, investigators were befuddled by a yawning disparity of some $13,000 between the figures Taylor had been preparing to report on his tax form and a preliminary accounting of his income and expenses.

Finally, King reported, some were speculating that Taylor might have been killed in a dispute over a woman. This was the theory the newspapers, especially the ones controlled by William Randolph Hearst, were favoring in their headlines:

J
EALOUS
M
AN
H
UNTED AS
S
LAYER OF
T
AYLOR
.
P
OLICE
C
ONVINCED

E
ITHER
W
OMAN
K
ILLED
D
IRECTOR OR
F
URNISHED
M
OTIVE
.

In fact, police were hardly convinced of such a fact. Most were still betting on Sands. But jealousy as a motive did fit King’s hunch that the murder was impulsive, a crime of passion.

But why had a woman even entered the speculation, given that all of the witnesses insisted they had seen a man?

King explained that detectives kept hearing about two particular females in Taylor’s life. Both ladies had given them reasons to be suspicious. Mabel Normand was a known addict, with drug dealers and bootleggers as contacts. And Mary Miles Minter had made quite the spectacle of herself when Taylor’s body was found. Exactly what was her relationship to the dead man?

Woolwine had his own suspicions. Finally he
offered King a lead of his own, handing the detective a letter across his desk.

To his trained eye, the letter struck King as the work of a woman, evidently “a lady of refinement.” The letter informed the police that a search of the basement of Mabel Normand’s apartment at Seventh and Vermont would reveal a .38-caliber pearl-handled revolver. Taylor had been killed with a .38-caliber bullet.

All sorts of tips like this had been flowing into the district attorney’s office, by phone, letter, and telegram. But this one, Woolwine thought, warranted an investigation as soon as possible. Taking the assignment, King headed out of the Hall of Records to pay a visit to Mabel Normand.

Back on Alvarado Court, other agents from Woolwine’s office were mapping out Taylor’s bungalow and searching the surrounding neighborhood. Fingerprints were taken, but too many people had elbowed their way into the apartment on the morning the body was found, moving chairs, sitting at tables, and opening drawers, for the police to expect anything very useful to be found.

The district men, as they were called, wore more expensive suits than the gumshoes on the police force. With solemn, serious faces, they kept largely to themselves. The city cops viewed the district men as inefficient interlopers. But even worse, from their perspective, was a third investigation team, this time from the county sheriff’s office, who the cops viewed as too lenient. Rivalries and tensions were percolating everywhere.

Stopping off at Alvarado Court on his way to Mabel’s, Eddie King suddenly found himself in the middle. He would have to be a mediator as much as a detective in this mess. But King was up to the task. A native of Indiana like Will Hays, King possessed the same sort of midwestern sangfroid. He was plainspoken, a devoted family man, married for twenty-five years. He and his wife had raised their two children in a modest home on West Forty-Fifth Street in working-class South Los Angeles, a world away from the upscale Westlake district where Taylor had lived. Like Hays, too, King was a short man;
“the smallest man in stature on the police force,” one report called him. But that slight frame contained a substantial mind.
Six years earlier King had been sent from police headquarters to the East Side substation, where he’d taken the younger plainclothesmen under his wing to train them as top-quality detectives. King’s reputation endured, which was why Woolwine had made him his point man.

But the DA wanted him to work on his own, “independent of all officers of the police department.” King knew that would cause only further resentment; besides, it wasn’t his style. A lone-wolf approach hindered good detective work; King needed collaboration. So, in defiance of Woolwine’s orders, he approached Sergeant Jesse Winn, another longtime veteran of the force, and asked him to partner with him on the case. Winn agreed.

The two detectives complemented each other well. Winn was younger than King, just turned forty, and considerably taller than his partner. He was also more aggressive, the bad cop to King’s good. Since Winn had already interviewed Mabel Normand the day before, it made sense that he accompany King now to the actress’s fashionable abode on Seventh Street.

Could Normand really be hiding the gun that had killed Taylor? Had she pulled the trigger? Even if her story checked out that she’d left Taylor and gone home to bed, she still could have come back and plugged him. More than one detective had noted that if the gun had been fired while Taylor was embracing his killer, and if the killer had been short—about Mabel’s size, in fact—then the unusual angle of the bullet through the body might have made sense. Had Mabel been in Taylor’s arms when she shot him in the ribs?

Or maybe one of her drug contacts had offed him. Might Mabel have been in cahoots with her chauffeur, William Davis? The police were trying to determine if Davis
“handled any hop.” Wallace Reid, it was said, received his drug deliveries through his chauffeur. Maybe Mabel did as well.

King and Winn pulled up in front of the actress’s apartment.

On edge, distraught, red-eyed from crying, Mabel did not try to stop the two detectives from searching the place. She stood back, morose and trembling, as King and Winn carefully scoured the place.
“From cellar to attic we went,” King said, “devoting a great length of time to turning over everything where it would be possible to hide a gun.” Finally, in a dresser drawer in Mabel’s bedroom, the two cops found something. Not just one gun. But two.

King inspected them closely. Both were .25-caliber revolvers, “neither of which could have had any connection to the murder,” he realized.

King turned to Mabel and apologized for disturbing her. He and Winn left her alone without any further questioning.

This “beautiful, impulsive, unfortunate” woman, King firmly believed, had no involvement in Taylor’s death. Mabel was a victim herself, of timing and circumstance. “I do not hesitate to say,” King informed Woolwine, “that all suspicion cast upon her was unjust.”

He wasn’t so sure he could say the same about that other woman in Taylor’s life, however.

And so King made plans to interview Mary Miles Minter.

At about the same time that Eddie King was searching Mabel Normand’s basement in Los Angeles, Adolph Zukor was being driven downtown to Pier 54 in New York. The studio chief traveled in the utmost secrecy. He didn’t want any reporters on the pier to spot him.

He was
hurrying to meet Cecil B. DeMille, arriving from Europe onboard the
Aquitania
. Night had fallen. A brackish mist rose from the Hudson River, allowing Creepy to move easily among the shadows. He knew the press dearly wanted a statement from him about the death of Taylor, and he just as dearly did not want to accommodate them.

Zukor had cabled DeMille to apprise him of the Taylor tragedy. The message had reached the director somewhere in the North Atlantic. No doubt at Zukor’s urging, DeMille then sent his own ship-to-shore cable, explaining that he would not be able to take questions from the press when he disembarked. He explained he was suffering from an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, which, while not serious, was still “exceedingly painful,” forcing him to be carried off the ship on a stretcher. Zukor hoped DeMille’s little stunt would keep the hounds at bay.

But even as the mogul scurried down the pier, shrouded in fog, one of those infernal muckrakers had already made his way on board the ship and cornered DeMille in his stateroom, compelling him into making a statement.

“I have just heard of the terrible tragedy,” DeMille said. “You may look all the world over and you could not find a cleaner man than Taylor.” When the reporter suggested that a woman might be behind the killing, DeMille instinctively guessed the studio’s position and discouraged such talk. “Mr. Taylor was not that kind of a man,” he insisted. Thankfully, the stretcher arrived at that point, and DeMille demurred from any further comment.

On the dock, Zukor facilitated the transfer of his top director from ship to ambulance. From there they zigzagged their way uptown to the Hotel Ambassador at Fifty-First Street and Park Avenue. Finally behind closed doors, Zukor filled DeMille in on all the horrific events of the past two days. The Taylor murder was only one part of it. Fatty Arbuckle’s trial had just ended in a second hung jury. Not only were they faced with many months of the Taylor investigation, but they’d also have to endure the gruesome details of Fatty’s pajama party for a third time.