Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Willy Maxwell lived in a rented Art Deco bungalow on a residential street not far from Charlie Chaplin Studio.
He was a man of the night, always on the prowl for celebrity cocaine parties and drunken revelers and middle-aged married directors squiring sixteen-year-old girls into or out of dens of iniquity.
He wanted photos for which he could write stories that would sell to GraphiC, a Bernard McFadden rag located in New York, which paid him a thousand dollars for a piece that could support a headline like Weekend Orgies of Silver Screen Stars or Young Starlet Warns of Celluloid road to ruin.
Many of his “young starlets” were girls who had come to Los Angeles to be famous, began to pay their bills by selling more of themselves than their acting talent, but nonetheless still dreamed of being the next Janet Gaynor.
Having possessed innocence and lost it, some of them could break your heart—if you were not Willy Maxwell; for him, they were nothing more than material.
He worked seven nights a week because he took so much pleasure in his profession, especially when a shocking photo and the accompanying story humiliated the subject and damaged a major career.
He usually rose at eleven o’clock in the morning and took his breakfast shortly after noon at the Vine Street Diner.
At half past eleven on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, before he could set out from home, he answered the doorbell and found two Los Angeles Police Department detectives.
They were holding their ID for his inspection, as if they didn’t have time to waste in the niceties of an introduction. Their names were Shamash and Astarte.
They were big men, about six feet four, as physically imposing as Gene Tunney, the boxer.
Tunney was as handsome as any actor, but not these two.
They were so hard looking that even if they played thugs that the hero beat into pulp, no audience would believe any hero ever born could survive an encounter with them.
Their suits were top of the line—wide in the padded shoulders, trim-cut in the waist—and their shoes looked Italian.
They wore fedoras with style, at a slightly rakish angle.
Quality wristwatches. Pinkie rings. Had they been wearing cheap suits, they might have scared the hell out of Willy, but he was shrewd enough to know them for what they were—cops on the take, his kind of people.
Whatever they wanted, whatever trouble they laid on him, there would be a deal to be made.
And so Willy Joe Maxwell got into the back seat of the unmarked sedan.
Shamash drove, and Astarte sat in the front passenger seat.
Their destination was an upscale apartment building at the west end of Wilshire Boulevard, the kind of place where a girl who made a good living in a bad profession welcomed men who would never hire her for a role in a movie but appreciated the conviction with which she faked orgasms. The apartment was elegantly furnished, although the bed was blood-soaked.
Willy was impatient to learn why they had brought him there.
The stench of gore made him eager for fresh air.
They explained that Marion McMurray wore monogrammed panties.
They suggested that, when he went home, he should conduct a search of his house to find his collection of five pairs, including one caked with blood.
They invited him to spend an hour searching this apartment to see if he could locate the dead woman’s client book.
His name appeared in it with notes about his kinky preferences.
They suggested that he ought to examine the shoes in his closet at home to find the pair with Marion’s blood on the soles.
It was a setup. Willy had not been her client.
These bulls weren’t going to pin this on him, but they meant for him to understand they could send him to death row for another case whenever they wished.
“Or,” said Shamash, “it could work the other way. You do what we’re going to ask, and if one day you knock off somebody, we make sure you’re not the sucker who takes the fall for it. ”
Having received—and paid for—many tips from cops regarding the errant behavior of Hollywood glitterati, Willy had considerable respect for police corruption and the benefits that could flow from it.
Shamash and Astarte had delivered a threat rather than a tip, but it was a threat that came with a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Willy had been born understanding the concept of quid pro quo.
He said, “Whatever you want, consider it already done.”
Shamash explained what Willy had been smart enough to agree to.
He would never again try to kill the Fairchilds’ dog.
He would make no attempt to enter Bramley Hall alone or in the company of anyone else.
He would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, photograph the girl being adopted by Franklin and Loretta Fairchild.
He’d never come within a hundred yards of her.
Furthermore, he would make no inquiry with anyone in the police department or the government regarding Detectives Shamash and Astarte; if he were to do so, they would know, and they would assume he intended to rat them out to Internal Affairs for having been paid under the table to represent the Fairchild family in this matter.
Were that to happen, the next time Willy woke, he would be dead and in Hell.
Now that the three of them were players on the same team, full of mutual respect and affection, the detectives took Willy Maxwell home.
They collected the five pairs of monogrammed panties that had been planted in his residence, including one that was stiff with dried blood.
They showed him which pair of shoes had bloodstained soles so he could dispose of them.
Willy offered each man a pint of the finest Scotch from his illegal stash, but they declined because they were on duty and because, in all good conscience, they could not violate the law of prohibition, which they were sworn to uphold.
Although Franklin and Loretta, being talented filmmakers, had created a convincing storyline and had produced it to perfection, the success of it—they admitted—depended in part on Maxwell being less hip to flimflam and bunco games than he thought he was.
In Marion McMurray’s bedroom, he couldn’t be faulted for not realizing the bedclothes were soaked in pig blood, not human blood.
Few if any surgeons would have had a sharp-enough olfactory sense to tell the difference.
The badges and ID of the LAPD Robbery/Homicide Division, which Shamash and Astarte had presented to the photographer, were so accurate in every detail that any department official would have accepted them without a second glance; in 1930, the title “prop man” was new to the motion-picture business, but some of those who did the job were so talented and obsessed with detail that they could have made a living outside the law as forgery artists.
Identical to the make and model that the LAPD provided for detectives in any of its plainclothes divisions, the sedan Shamash had driven was tagged with a reproduction of police department license plates; it had appeared in Darkmoor Lane, and Willy had not for a moment doubted that it was what it seemed to be.
Shamash and Astarte, whose real names were Leonard Sharpe and Enzo Valenti, might have triggered Willy’s suspicion if they’d been actors well cast for their roles.
However, their faces were too ordinary for movies—not handsome enough to sell a production, not mean enough to be the faces of villains, not quirky enough for roles that provided comic relief.
Nevertheless, they possessed solid theatrical techniques and the confidence to masquerade as corrupt cops because they were members of a recently created profession, stuntmen, and for a few years had spent their days on set, watching actors and learning how to pass for them successfully in the hard-action shots.
Sad-case Marion McMurray was not dead. In fact, she did not exist. The apartment was owned by a young actress who was having success playing best friends and kid sisters, and who was expected one day to have top billing. Willy Joe Maxwell never had a chance.