Free It Happened One Knife by JEFFREY COHEN

again.
    “He murdered his wife, you know,” Lillis said. “Les killed Vivian, and then burned the house down.”
    And Mitchell closed the back doors of the ambulance.

8
    If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it’s just possible you haven’t grasped the situation.
    —JEAN KERR, PLEASE DON’T EAT THE DAISIES
    SATURDAY
    I spent the morning at my bedroom computer, scouring the Internet for information about Vivian Reynolds’s death. I hadn’t actually done much Internet research before, other than to look up a defunct comedian on the Internet Movie Database every once in a while, but I dove in now.
    The volume and breadth of information available was amazing, and somewhat frightening. There were entire websites devoted to Vivian’s memory, which was rather astounding, considering that she never really became a huge star. Her IMDb listing showed only three films before she began working with Lillis and Townes, and after that, she always played second fiddle (third fiddle) to the team. (I also discovered that there was a male actor named E. Vivian Reynolds, who appeared in five films between 1917 and 1934, ending his career playing “Butler” in Love at Second Sight .)
    A number of the Vivian Reynolds sites referred to her “tragic death,” but only one, www.whokilledviv.com , suggested the death was anything but an accident. Citing “sources within the LAPD at the time of the fire,” the (anonymous, like the “sources”) writer of the site tried to make the case that Reynolds was dead before her bungalow caught fire, and while no names were mentioned, it’s clear from references throughout the site that the person hosting it believed Reynolds’s marriage to Les Townes was less than idyllic.
    The facts I could confirm on multiple sites were these: On November 10, 1958, while Lillis and Townes were working on a film ( Step This Way , which had no female lead), Vivian Reynolds spent the afternoon at the Hillcrest Country Club, across from 20th Century Fox on Pico Boulevard. She spent a few hours in the bar, but didn’t drink to excess, according to the bartender. She then left by herself.
    She must have gone home to Bel Air, because three hours later, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to reports of a fire, and found the Townes/Reynolds home in flames. By the time Vivian’s body was found, it was identifiable only through dental records.
    The official record listed the fire as electrical in nature, and did not classify it as suspicious. Townes, at least outwardly inconsolable, didn’t return to the set of Step This Way for eight weeks, a very long time during the reign of the studio system (Clark Gable, for example, was back on the set of Somewhere I’ll Find You only thirty-eight days after Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash). It was up to Harry Lillis, who was also grieving for a lost love, to shoot around his partner and eventually to cover Townes’s absence by claiming that he, Lillis, had pneumonia and couldn’t film. When they finally managed to finish the movie, it was hardly the team’s best effort (understandable, under the circumstances), and although they worked together for another five years, the seeds for Lillis and Townes’s split were planted the day Vivian Reynolds died.
    Still, the LAPD had been quick to declare the fire one of the accidental, electrical variety, and Vivian Reynolds’s death an awful consequence of that accident. No foul play was determined in the case. Clearly, it was up to me to bring in the experts.
    “So let me get this straight,” said Chief Barry Dutton. “You want me to investigate a death that was ruled an accident. ”
    “Yes,” I agreed. It was chilly in his office. You’d think the town would spring for a better heating system for their top law enforcement official. I’d brought coffee and doughnuts. You learn stuff when you hang around with cops.
    “And it took place in California,” Dutton continued.
    I