Free A Cast of Killers by Sidney Kirkpatrick

Taylor was also scheduled to appear on behalf of his servant, Henry Peavey, makes the whole thing sound pretty suspicious.”
    “Is Moreno still alive?”
    “The last of the Latin lovers? Yes.”
    Vidor returned his notebook to his pocket.
    “You’ve been a great help. You seem to have given this Taylor thing a lot of thought.”
    Swanson laughed her famous laugh.
    “Not for years. But at the time, how could I help it? Being that close to Marshall Neilan, I felt like an accessory or something.”
    “Any theories?” Vidor asked.
    “Dozens.”
    Vidor joined her laughter.
    “I mean, aside from all the obvious ones that have been tossed around now for ... what? ... forty years? ... you shouldn’t overlook Taylor’s professional colleagues and friends who just happened to make it big only after he was killed. Like George Hopkins and Douglas MacLean?”
    While Swanson was completely enjoying herself, facetiously adding to the already laughably long list of suspects, Vidor grew tense. He knew George Hopkins. Hopkins had been the art director on a film Vidor had made for Warner Brothers.
    “George Hopkins knew Taylor?”
    “Oh, yeah. Taylor gave him his first big-time job in pictures. They were very close friends.”
    “Interesting.” Vidor took out his notebook, added Hopkins’s name to it. He thought Hopkins might be able to answer an important question about Taylor. When Vidor had worked with Hopkins, Hopkins was having an affair with a friend of Vidor’s—an important Academy Award winning Hollywood director, a man. Hopkins had also attended dance lessons at the same studio Taylor did, where their instructor, according to Hollywood gossip, was a particularly flagrant dandy named Duncan.
    Douglas MacLean, Taylor’s neighbor and friend, had become a big-time Hollywood producer—a producer of a King Vidor film. Paramount had always been good to MacLean. Perhaps too good.
    Swanson walked Vidor to the door.
    “You really think you’re going to solve this mystery?”
    Vidor was ready for the question.
    “I’m not a detective, Gloria,” he said. “I’m just a moviemaker.”
    Swanson accepted a kiss on the cheek and returned it. “Yes, you are, King, and a very good one. But you haven’t answered my question.”

9
     
     
    William Desmond Taylor was a hero in the First World War.
    He was an infantryman wounded at Belleau Wood.
    He was an ace pilot decorated by the Royal Flying Corps for shooting down German biplanes.
    He was a buck private whose selfless bravery earned him officers’ commissions.
    The roles he played in the war were as varied as the newspapers and magazines that reported them. Vidor read printed accounts, interviews, studio publicity releases, even Taylor’s own war journal, which Vidor had acquired from a Hollywood souvenir dealer. All that the various reports had in common were that Taylor had served for Great Britain and that he had served heroically—two facts Vidor had believed from the beginning, having witnessed, along with six thousand other spectators, a full honor guard composed of officers of every army of the British Commonwealth firing a hero’s salute over Taylor’s Union Jack-adorned casket. Some of the reports smacked of pure Hollywood PR. Others, such as those from friends like Mary Miles Minter, might have resulted from self-promotion on Taylor’s part. And still others—who knew? But whatever the truth of Taylor’s wartime experiences might be, Vidor felt it might play a part in Taylor’s postwar life, and death.
    There had been stories about Taylor’s testifying in a wartime court-martial, and speculation that the soldier he testified against might have tracked him to Hollywood and taken his revenge. But like every aspect of his life, Taylor’s war years were clouded with contradictions, and Vidor needed to understand what really happened. So he asked his friend Laurence Stallings if he might be able to help. Having directed such a wide variety of