American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (15 page)

What about George? Sherman had asked. The oldest brother, his father explained, had left town yesterday for Reno. He was pursuing Peter Claudiannes, a suspect in the attempted murder of a witness in the trial. That was when Raymond spoke up. Go watch Sherman play, Dad, he urged. He’d take the detective’s place in court. He’d protect Heney. He was twenty-two; he wasn’t a kid. Billy mulled in silence for a moment. C’mon, Dad, Raymond repeated. At last Billy acquiesced. Be on guard at all times, he told Raymond. The chances of anything happening are slim, nevertheless be on guard.

As a trial recess ended, as people filed back in, as Raymond bent over the courtroom stove giving the fire a stir, a man in a black overcoat moved toward the prosecutor. He pulled a revolver from his coat pocket and fired. The sound boomed through the confined space, and Raymond turned at once. He leaped at the shooter, knocking the pistol out of his extended hand before another round could be fired. But it was too late. Heney had collapsed facedown on the prosecution table, blood was forming a deep red puddle beneath his head. The bullet had sliced through his jaw and gone on to lodge in his neck. Heney was still breathing when he was rushed to the hospital, but death seemed imminent.

The next morning Billy Burns emerged from the hospital to address the crowd of reporters; they had been waiting all night for some news. “Frank is going to make it,” he announced. “You folks know,” he added with a relieved laugh, “how hard a lawyer’s jaw muscles are.”

But Billy had no jokes for Raymond. He could not forgive the boy’s failure.

Three years later Raymond could understand both his culpability and his father’s continued anger. But he also believed this was only a partial explanation for the relentlessness in his father’s attitude. The larger, unarticulated reason was not his fault.

Raymond could not help it that he was not George. George was his father’s favorite son. George, the tall, thin handsome one, who had followed his father into the Secret Service; the charmer who dated showgirls and palled around with George M. Cohan. But now George Burns, the designated heir to the nationwide Burns Detective Agency, was gone. In May 1909 George, not yet thirty, had contracted tuberculosis. He died in a hospital in Monrovia.

Billy was bereft. His pain was such that he was unable to express his sorrow; it was beyond words. Raymond suffered through the detective’s silent bitterness and felt his cold, sorrowful glare. In time, Raymond understood that words were unnecessary. He knew what his father was thinking: The wrong son had been taken from him.

And so when Raymond had received the telegram from his father announcing that Bryce was in Indianapolis, he was determined to track him down. He wanted to prove to Billy that he could get the job done. He wanted to demonstrate that although he could not replace George, he, too, was his father’s son.

He left Chicago promptly, and on the train to Indianapolis he worked out a plan of action. First, he would check the phone books to see if a J. B. Bryce or Bryson was listed. If that failed, he would try to find where Bryce worked. Since Bryce was familiar with dynamite, Raymond reasoned that he would most likely be employed in the construction business.

The Structural Iron Workers headquarters was in downtown Indianapolis. Raymond assumed that an unemployed worker returning after some time on the coast would stop by the union offices to see if any job sites were hiring. Raymond understood, of course, that the union would not cooperate with him or anyone connected with the Burns Agency; organized labor had made it clear that they believed that they were being set up to take the fall in the Los Angeles bombing. But Raymond had a description of Bryce. The union offices were on the fifth floor of the American Central Life Building on First Street. He’d hang around the lobby and wait till he spotted Bryce. It wasn’t much of a plan, but all he could do was hope that it would work.

It didn’t. When he arrived in Indianapolis, Raymond discovered that no Bryce or Bryson was listed in the phone book. And after three days of wandering through the lobby of the American Central Life Building and loitering on nearby street corners, he was beginning to attract attention. Soon either he would be arrested, or a couple of burly union members would drag him off to show him what they thought of spying private investigators.

On the fourth day, Raymond found an office in a nearby building that gave him an unobstructed view straight into the lobby of the American Central Life Building. It cost him a few dollars, but no one minded if he sat for hours and stared across the street.

Another day passed. Then someone making his way toward the elevators caught his eye. It wasn’t Bryce, but something about the man seemed familiar. Raymond couldn’t quite place what had gotten his attention. Perhaps he knew the man from some other case? Enough! Raymond chided himself. Whatever had prompted this feeling was unimportant. He needed to focus on the job at hand, on finding Bryce.

But only minutes later the short, round-faced man returned to the lobby. Now he was accompanied by a bigger, husky man, with a shock of gunmetal-gray hair falling over his forehead. He was handsome in a pleasant way, a man with a good-natured, even-featured face. Raymond had no idea who he was. But as he looked again at the shorter man, he had a shock of recognition. Raymond had supervised the investigation into the bombing at the Peoria train yard and the hunt for the bomber. He looked hard, and he knew: He was staring at the elusive J. W. McGraw.

TWENTY-TWO

______________________

R
AYMOND JUMPED UP
from his seat by the window and raced to the street. By the time he was outside, McGraw and his friend were already a block ahead and had turned into Illinois Street. Raymond moved quickly, fearful that he had lost them. But as Raymond hurried toward Illinois Street, he saw that the two men had stopped by the Orpheum Theater. They stood talking by the two huge stone pharaohs guarding the entrance. Then they went inside. After a moment Raymond followed.

McGraw and his friend sat up front, close to the screen. Raymond thought about taking a seat behind the two men but decided it would be too risky. His father had standing instructions for shadowing:
Never mind how promising may be the outlook, the shadow must draw off rather than let the subject know he is being followed.
These stern words were echoing in Raymond’s ears. He feared McGraw would make him for a detective. If McGraw panicked and ran, he might never be found. It was crucial to keep on him, to track where he went when he left the Orpheum. This time he would not let his father down.

Raymond sat in the rear, too far behind the pair to hear what they were discussing. But from this vantage point, he could keep an eye on the exits. When McGraw left, he’d be able to slip out and follow.

Raymond waited impatiently. He wondered where McGraw would lead him. He was eager to tell his father about what he had discovered. The lights began to dim. All Raymond could do was to wait, and watch the movie.

_____

As it happened, the movie playing that week at the Indianapolis Orpheum was D.W. Griffith’s
The Lonedale Operator.
This was the third movie the director had made during his California trip. It was a small story, another melodrama, but it was so expertly done, the suspense so carefully ratcheted up, that Raymond might easily have become caught up in what was happening on the screen. And Raymond might well have noticed the parallels between the heroine who must prove to her father that she can get the job done and his own circumstances.

Blanche Sweet played a young girl who takes over her father’s post as a railroad station telegraph operator just as a payroll shipment is due on an arriving train. A pair of hoboes thinks the inexperienced girl will be unable to prevent them from making off with the payroll. However, Blanche rises to the challenge. After failing to summon help, she holds them off. In the final scene the revolver she has been brandishing is revealed to be nothing more than a monkey-wrench wrapped in a handkerchief. What father could be prouder of his brave, resourceful daughter?

D.W.’s great power was his ability to tell stories on the screen that would pull at audiences’ sympathies and fire their imaginations. Raymond kept a vigilant watch on the exits, but no doubt he was rooting for Blanche, too. He wanted her to triumph, to justify her father’s confidence. Just as he was determined to prove to his dad that he was worthy of his respect and his love.

What Raymond could not know or appreciate was all the trouble D.W. had had during the shooting of the movie with Blanche. The attraction that had once existed between the director and his star had disappeared. They no longer felt any ease in each other’s presence. She treated D.W. with a feisty belligerence, and the director, with a shrewd resignation, exploited her roiling temperament. He had her play herself. The spunky heroine he captured on the screen was a bristling continuation of her off-camera demeanor. So D.W. was satisfied. He could deal with Blanche to his own advantage.

Linda, however, was proving to be more problematic. She was in the process of filing for separation from D.W., but that did not prevent her from hanging around the set and taking bitter measure of both D.W. and his star. Jealous, she went around the Alex each evening and always managed to share a catty word about the woman she suspected had taken her husband away from her. Years later she would still be seething: “The outdoor life of the West had plumped up the fair Blanche . . . Why wouldn’t Blanche have plumped up when she arrived on location with a bag of cream puffs nearly every day and her grandmother got up at odd hours of the night to fry her bacon sandwiches? She soon filled out every wrinkle of the home-made looking tweed suit she had worn on her arrival in Los Angeles.”

By the time the movie was in the can, D.W. had no patience for either of them. He had come to California to make movies. He had lots of ideas, and he wasn’t going to be sidetracked by a difficult star or a jealous wife. Anyway, there were plenty of other actresses to occupy his thoughts. The crew had even started calling him “Mr. Heinz” when he was out of earshot; D.W. had, they playfully calculated, “57 varieties” of women hanging around on and off the set.

Also unknown to Raymond at the time, the meeting at the movie theater had come about because of woman trouble, too. The man McGraw was with was J.J. McNamara, the secretary-treasurer of the union. And J.J. had fled from his office because he didn’t want Mary Dye to see him speaking with McGraw.

Mary was a stenographer for the union, a pretty blue-eyed small-town Ohio girl, and she had fallen hard for J.J. For a while J.J. had been quite happy with the situation. He had even found Mary a room in the North Street boardinghouse where he lived. Conveniently, a single door separated their two adjoining rooms.

But, life imitating melodrama, complications soon entangled their romance. Mary began to feel unsure of J.J.’s intentions. With her mounting insecurity, she grew possessive. She was not above telling friends that they had sneaked off to Cincinnati and gotten married, or that the baby in a photograph was their son rather than her brother. These fabrications made their way back to J.J., and he fumed.

Yet he knew Mary had reason to doubt him. J.J. had become smitten with their landlady, and she with him. They talked to each other about love and held hands. When union business took him out of Indianapolis, he now wrote ardent, heartfelt letters to his landlady, not to Mary.

Making love to two women living under the same roof was, J.J. realized, a volatile situation. It was as if he were caught up in the complicated plot of a movie showing at the Orpheum—D.W. Griffith had made a film called
The Sorrows of the Unfaithful.
But J.J. quickly came to appreciate that he was facing a larger and very real danger. He worked with Mary. She knew a great deal about what the union was doing. He was not sure about the extent of her knowledge, but a small incident had recently left him rumbling with apprehension. Mary had opened his office mail and found a newspaper clipping about a dynamiting.

“Oh,” she said, “what do you think? They have blown up that scab job.” She waved the clipping at him.

Was Mary trying to tell him something? J.J. worried. Was she threatening him?

Whatever her ploy, J.J. decided he had had enough. He was determined to end the romance. She would have to leave the boardinghouse. And he would not work in the union office when she was around. McGraw had been scheduled to meet him at the office; it was too late to do anything about that. But he would not speak to him there. Not while Mary was around.

When McGraw appeared, J.J. quickly hustled him off. On the street, his only plan was to lead McGraw away from Mary or anyone else who might be watching. He had no destination in mind. When they turned a corner, he saw the huge stone pharaohs guarding the entrance to the Orpheum. That’d be as good a place as any, he decided at once. They could talk, and in the dark no one would notice them. Besides, he still remembered
A Corner in Wheat
and how much the film had impressed and excited him.

It’s doubtful, however, that J.J. found much to enjoy in
The Lonedale Operator.
The unyielding, determined heroine might very well have been too reminiscent of Mary.

When they left the Orpheum, the two men went off in separate directions. Raymond stayed with McGraw. He did not know the identity of the handsome man, but he assumed that could be routinely discovered. Apparently he worked for the union; it wouldn’t be hard to connect a name with a face. Raymond wondered what the two had been discussing, but he tried to put that sort of conjecture out of his mind. There would be time to discover that, too. For the present, he had only one task: follow McGraw.

McGraw boarded a train to Chicago, and Raymond found a seat in the same car. When he climbed onto a streetcar outside the Chicago station, Raymond hesitated. Then he hailed a taxi and instructed the driver to follow the streetcar.