Authors: Mary Miley
Thanking the clerk, I moved out of the way of the people in line behind me and scanned the station floor, breathing in the familiar mix of leather, cigars, and coal smoke. Train stations smelled like home. Sometimes I thought of my life as one long train ride punctuated by glimpses of the real world whizzing by my window. For twenty-five years, I had dragged trunks and valises from one town to another, usually on the weekends, spending most Saturday nights on the train to save the dollar for a hotel. I’d been through a hundred stations like La Grande Depot, maybe not as large or as nice as La Grande, which was one of the main depots for the Acheson, Topeka, and the Santa Fe, but train stations have much the same smells and sounds, large or small, wherever you go. This one had been built back when the fanciful Moorish style ruled the imagination of urban architects everywhere and Los Angeles was being flooded by Easterners lured by the promise of a healthy climate. Back then it had been one of the most modern and luxurious stations in the country; this afternoon it bustled with overdressed matrons, serge-suited businessmen, rough cowboys, shabby Mexicans, and a couple Indians with their long black hair tied back with leather thongs. Who would remember a man with a droopy mouth in this colorful cast of thousands?
I hadn’t slept much last night, despite my bedtime glass of sherry. Thoughts of murder pushed sleep clean out of my head. Seemingly small details kept elbowing their way upstage, demanding consideration, putting me in mind of the throngs of extras that showed up at every open casting call trying to be noticed among so many.
No thanks, not today, not you, no thanks. Yes, you.
I had been pestered by the image of a man with a droopy mouth—a man no one in the neighborhood knew—and the sound of a single gunshot—a sound no one in the neighborhood heard.
I knocked on the door that the ticket vendor had indicated and asked for Stitch Owens. About three minutes later, a man with a blotchy face and a bulbous nose stepped out.
“You looking for me?” he asked as he scratched a match for his cigar. His voice was rough, as if he didn’t get much chance to use it.
“Yes, sir. You were working the ticket booth Sunday afternoon, two days ago?”
“Might’ve been.” He pulled on his cigar to get it going, not bothering to turn aside when he exhaled.
The smoke burned my nose and throat, but I didn’t flinch. I put on my youngest voice and mannerisms and rocked from my heels to toes like a girl. My stylish bob lessened the effect, but I had no time to create this part properly. “I know it’s a long shot, mister, but I was wondering if you sold a ticket to a man with a droopy mouth on Sunday afternoon.”
“What sort of man?”
I played the odds and improvised. “Middle age. Average height. Dark suit. The droopy mouth is the only part anyone would remember.”
He let his eyes travel slowly about the station before returning to me. “Why do you want to know for?”
I gave a worried sigh. “It’s my auntie who sent me, sir. My uncle left Sunday afternoon and hasn’t arrived yet. She asked me to check and see if he ever left the station.”
“Sorry, kid. I don’t make it a habit to remember passengers. Now scram.”
He slammed the door. I surveyed the station again. The departures-and-arrivals board shuffled around letters and numbers like cards at a poker table until they snapped at the right place. Brakes squealed as a train eased into its platform. Steam hissed as another pulled out. Redcaps hurried to and fro. At the far end of the station, tucked under a sign for the Harvey House, was a newsstand.
What would a man do after buying a ticket? I took my younger self over to the newsstand where an array of morning papers had been stacked on the floor. With a glance at the headline that blared
PARAMOUNT DIRECTOR MURDERED
, I reached for the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Examiner,
and the
Daily News.
“Excuse me, mister. Was this newsstand open Sunday, two days ago?” I asked, handing him six cents for all three.
“Sure was, little lady. Every day from six-thirty sharp.”
“Were you working here that day?”
“I was indeed.”
“Do you happen to remember seeing a man with a droopy mouth?”
“What do you mean, droopy mouth?”
“The corner of his mouth sagged a good bit.” I pulled the corner of my mouth down, the way poor Edna’s had looked that morning outside Esther’s apartment.
“I’m afraid not,” he said, then he cocked his head to one side. “Mind me asking why you’re asking?”
“I’m looking for my uncle. He was supposed to take the train east on Sunday afternoon, but he didn’t arrive yesterday, so my auntie asked me to make sure he left. I hope nothing happened to him.”
“He probably just got off for a stretch along the way and missed his train. Happens all the time. He’ll arrive on the next one.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Thank you, sir.”
Our director, Frank Richardson, had sent me to La Grande Depot to meet a new makeup artist he had hired to replace one who had jumped to Warner Brothers a couple weeks ago. I had come early to test my theory about the man with the droopy mouth. The fact that no one in Esther’s neighborhood recognized the description made me think he could be from out of town. If so, he must have come and gone by train. Someone at the station might remember a man with an unusual physical characteristic like that. The hands of the giant clock high on the opposite wall told me I had another hour and a half before the makeup artist’s train pulled in. Plenty of time for a little investigating. I carried my newspapers into the Harvey House.
There is a Harvey House restaurant in every Santa Fe railroad station worth its salt, and those who didn’t eat Harvey House food in the restaurants ate Harvey House food in the dining cars. I was darn sure I’d eaten more Blue Plate Specials in my lifetime than Fred Harvey himself, and I could have recited the menu and prices with Harvey Girl precision.
The Harvey House at La Grande Depot was situated in a long room designed to resemble a dining car. Inside, some forty swivel seats were fixed around a single racetrack counter so spanking clean that the light from the globe fixtures above bounced off its surface like a mirror. The breakfast crowd had moved on, the lunch crowd had not yet assembled, but for Harvey Girls, idleness is sin. One was mopping the floor, another was watering the ferns that grew in wall planters, and two more worked in the middle of the racetrack, setting each place with a complement of silver utensils, a blue china plate, a glass cruet of water, and a linen napkin.
I sat at one end of the counter and ordered coffee. By the time it arrived, the two men at the opposite end had paid their bill, and I was the only customer in the place.
The explosive
Times
headline left me with no doubt that by tomorrow every daily in America would have followed its lead. By the time William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer resumed their never-ending duel, the scandal would escalate—as it had with poor Fatty Arbuckle—into the realm of international melodrama, until no one who had actually attended Bruno Heilmann’s party would recognize the event.
I read through the story. Bruno Heilmann, Paramount director extraordinaire, had been killed at dawn in a hail of bullets after a decadent orgy in his Hollywood mansion. Witnesses described seeing a suspicious man lurking about the house during the party, and several identified him as the husband of one of Heilmann’s paramours, as yet unnamed. Zukor was said to be pressuring police to find the killer fast. There was no mention of Esther, aside from the original article, nor of Lorna McCall.
Nearly every word the reporter wrote was wrong. If the subject hadn’t been so serious, I would have laughed out loud. Surely all newspaper stories were not this far off the mark? Had the scrambling of facts been accidental? The others carried the same hokum under the headlines:
WHO KILLED BRUNO HEILMANN
? and
FILM DIRECTOR’S SLAYING LEADS TO PROBE
.
I motioned to the Harvey Girl who had brought my coffee. “I wonder if any of you girls worked this past Sunday?”
“Sarah did,” she replied, cocking her head toward the floor mopper. “She opens on Sundays and was off at three. I came in then for the late shift.”
“Only one girl on duty on Sundays?”
“No, two, plus the cook of course. Rebecca was here on morning shift, too.” She indicated the girl with the watering can.
The morning shift girls didn’t interest me. The killer, if he wasn’t local, would have left after Lorna McCall’s death which, according to the doctor, had occurred Sunday afternoon. “Do you happen to remember a man with a droopy mouth who came in for a bite to eat that afternoon?” I illustrated the affliction by pulling down the corner of my own mouth.
“Can’t say as I do. Has he gone missing?”
I gave her the uncle routine and a large tip, then made my way to the far end of the room where Sarah was bent over a bucket of suds. She was dressed in the standard Harvey Girl uniform—a long-sleeved black dress with a stiff Elsie collar, black shoes and black stockings, with a white wraparound apron that was so starched it would have broken before it folded. Never mind modern skirt lengths, Harvey Girl hems measured eight inches from the floor. And the heavens would crack if they ever wore jewelry or makeup. Poor things, they all looked like nuns to me.
Sarah’s eyebrows arched expectantly as I approached, and she looked happy enough to stop mopping.
“Excuse me,” I began. “I wonder if you can do me a great favor. I’m trying to trace the whereabouts of my uncle, who’s gone missing. You were here Sunday afternoon, were you not?”
She nodded. “My shift was over at three.”
“Do you remember a customer whose mouth drooped on one side, like this?”
“Oh, yes, miss, I do,” she said with no hesitation. A friendly young woman, maybe twenty years old, she seemed happy to catch her breath and oblige a customer at the same time. “I remember him because, well, it’s not so usual to see a person with such an affliction, is it?”
Thankfully not, I thought, elated at the news. My hunch was correct. The droopy-mouthed man was from out of town. I was betting that this man had killed Esther and probably Heilmann and Lorna McCall, too. “What time was that?”
“Six-thirty on the dot. We always open at six-thirty.”
“In the morning?” That was impossible. Lorna had died in the afternoon. “Are you certain?”
“Yes, miss. He was waiting outside for us to unlock the door. That’s how I remember.”
“Did he speak to you at all?”
“He isn’t a talker, your uncle, is he? He sat there.” She pointed at the end of the racetrack counter. “Next to where you were just sitting. He was almost the only one in here. Sunday mornings aren’t busy for us. There aren’t many trains leaving till late morning.”
“Did he mention where he was going?”
“He took the Chicagoan.”
“He told you he was going to Chicago?”
“Not in so many words, but it seemed likely. He ordered a cooked breakfast and nursed his coffee until seven. The first Chicagoan that day leaves at seven-ten. The next train out doesn’t leave till almost eight. And he was dressed in big-city clothes, a striped suit and a swell hat, so that made me think he was city-bound. Of course, he could’ve gotten off any place along the route, but the seven-ten goes all the way to Chicago.”
Well acquainted with the Chicagoan from my vaudeville days, I knew its stops nearly as well as its conductors did. The route headed west from Los Angeles, and after passing through Albuquerque, split in two, the northernmost section passing through Dodge City, the southernmost through Amarillo. The tracks joined up again at Newton before continuing through Kansas City to Chicago, a journey that lasted two and a half days, start to finish. The eastbound train was called the Chicagoan. The same train going west was known as the Kansas Cityan. If Droopy Mouth had gone directly to Chicago, he would, I calculated, arrive at about five this evening.
I thanked Sarah with a silver dollar and interrupted Rebecca, who by now was wiping chair seats with a damp rag. She, too, remembered seeing the man early that morning but had nothing to add to what Sarah had told me.
I returned to my coffee and considered what I’d learned. If I was right, the droopy-mouthed man seen leaving Esther’s building had killed her, but he had come to Los Angeles to kill Heilmann. If he had left on Sunday morning’s train, he had definitely
not
killed Lorna McCall. It looked like Lorna’s death really was accidental.
Having arrived in Los Angeles, probably sometime Saturday, the killer would have needed transportation to and from Heilmann’s house. With taxis, he ran the risk of being remembered. He couldn’t take a bus or a Red Car—they didn’t run that late at night. He couldn’t walk all the way—Heilmann lived miles from the train station. He couldn’t rent a car or he’d leave a trail. Under the circumstances, what would I do?
I’d steal a car.
I flipped the pages of my
Times
until I came across what I was looking for: a woman’s name among the bylines. Ida Overstreet. Sounded good to me.
Nellie Bly excepted, female reporters had been around for only about ten years, ever since the Great War siphoned off so many young men for service in Europe that the newspapers were forced to hire women to do a man’s job. After the war ended, most were let go, but a few stayed on at the larger newspapers to write up weddings and recipes. I had hoped to find a woman’s name in the news section of the
Times,
but no such luck. The society reporter would have to do.
“Where’s the nearest police station?” I asked the Harvey Girl, setting a nickel on the counter for my coffee. She told me. I walked back to the newsstand and bought a notebook and some Wrigley’s gum. With another glance at the clock, I left La Grande and climbed into the Ford flivver. I had plenty of time.
17
Ten minutes later, a hard-nosed newspaperwoman marched up the steps of the Central Division police station at First and Hill, a notebook under her arm, a pencil behind her ear, and a chip on her shoulder.