Beware the Curves

Chapter 4

The death of William Desmond Taylor was a Hollywood classic.

Taylor had been a famous Hollywood director, back in the days of the silent pictures.

When, early one morning in 1921, William Desmond Taylor’s butler and general handy man opened the door of the unit in the bungalow court where Taylor was living and found him lying dead on the floor, it started a chain of events which had unexpected repercussions.

It was found that William Desmond Taylor was not William Desmond Taylor at all, but one William Deane Tanner who had mysteriously disappeared from New York some years before. The biographical data which surrounded the famous motion-picture director was as fictitious as the plots he had concocted in the silent days of the pictures.

Stories circulated around Hollywood and found their way into the newspapers about a mysterious woman’s silk nightie which, according to rumor, the butler found neatly folded in an upstairs bureau drawer. The butler very carefully refolded the nightie in a certain manner only to find that, at regular intervals, the sheer silken garment would have been carefully refolded in an entirely different pattern.

The names of motion-picture actresses, famous names of the day, flitted in and out of the case with bizarre statements, explanations, comments and rumors, fully in keeping with the exaggerated gestures of the silent pictures.

In those days, it is to be remembered, an actor dashing in pursuit of someone who was only two jumps ahead would run to a corner of the set, come to a dead stop, invariably look in the wrong direction, shade his eyes with his hand in order to signify that he was looking, then tum in the opposite direction, again shade his eyes, stab his finger in a pointing gesture to indicate unmistakably that his quarry was “going that-a-way” and then from a standing start resume the pursuit until the next corner of the set was reached when the pantomime would be repeated.

The investigation of the murder of William Desmond Taylor followed a similar pattern.

I made copious notes.

When the library closed, I knocked off for the night, with two shorthand books filled with notes.

Wednesday morning I went once more to the newspaper files in the morgue.

Bertha Cool was just going out to lunch as I came in.

“You’ve been to Susanville?” she asked.

“I’m going.”

“Going?” she said. “My God! You’re supposed to have been on your way long ago. Our client rang up and I told him you were already up there.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“What the hell have you been doing?” Bertha blazed at me.

“Getting some insurance,” I said.

“Insurance?“

I nodded.

“For what?”

“To keep us from losing our license,” I told her.

“When are you starting?” Bertha asked, too exasperated to ask for particulars.

“Now,” I told her. “I take a plane to Reno; then I’m renting a car at Reno and driving to Susanville.”

Bertha glared at me angrily. “When will you get to Susanville?”

“It all depends,” I told her.

She said, “Our client is on pins and needles. He’s telephoned twice. He wanted to know if you’d taken off. I told him you had.”

“That’s fine. As long as he feels we’re on the job, he’ll be satisfied.”

Bertha’s face darkened. “Why the hell do you need to take out insurance when we’re working on a dead open-and-shut case?”

“Because it’s dead open-and-shut.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “The police would like to clean up the Endicott murder. They have one witness, a taxi driver by the name of Drude Nickerson. He’s their case. All of a sudden the obituary column reports the death of Drude Nickerson up in Susanville. It’s private. No flowers. You’d naturally think the body would be shipped back to Citrus Grove and that the funeral would be held there.”

Bertha blinked that over.

“I’ll be seeing you,” I told her, and started for the door.

“Pickle me for a beet!” Bertha said under her breath as I opened the door.