Free A Cast of Killers by Sidney Kirkpatrick Page B

and his country. And to himself.”
    “But what could he have proved?” Vidor asked. “He didn’t see any action. In fact, from what I got out of his journal, he didn’t see much of anything, except Friday night variety shows.”
    Stallings finished off a hot dog and licked mustard from his fingers. “That’s true.” He picked up Taylor’s journal, randomly flipped through it. “Private Gale, magician; Corley, pianist and singer; Hendry, bagpipes. Not like most war journals I’ve read.” He sat the book back down, readied another hot dog.
    “Maybe his commanding officers knew who he was and gave him the assignment he was most suited for, directing their shows. I mean, how many men were there named William Desmond Taylor?”
    “Yeah,” Vidor said, “and he certainly wouldn’t have enlisted as Tanner and risked that whole ball of wax being found out.”
    Vidor picked up the journal, turned to a small entry Taylor had made about the court-martial at which he had testified. The note said he had hidden his evidence behind a barracks window for safekeeping until the trial.
    “What about this court-martial?”
    “You know as much about it as I do,” Stallings said.
    “It would be next to impossible to find out any more now. We don’t even know the name of the soldier on trial, or what he was being tried for. And the name of one witness doesn’t give us much to go on.”
    “Maybe it was one of the men Taylor mentioned in the journal, one of the ones he directed.”
    “I checked those names with the records. No court-martial I can find,” Stallings replied.
    “Oh.”
    Vidor stood, looked out the window. Across the street, construction workers walked on girders and platforms, raising another high-rise office building, oblivious to the height and the weather.
    “I appreciate the help, Larry,” he said. “This Taylor story gets more interesting the deeper I get into it.”
    “Well, as I said, I hope you know what you’re getting into. This sounds like the kind of story that, no matter how you end up writing it, you’re always going to know another way that’d be just as good.”
    Stallings wadded his lunch wrappings into a ball and stuffed it into his briefcase with the recruiting papers.
    “I almost forgot,” he said. “I found this stuck between a couple of pages in Taylor’s journal” He handed Vidor a small, wrinkled photograph. “Looks like our man with a couple of his buddies.”
    Vidor inspected the photograph in the light from the window. It showed Taylor in his uniform, standing with three other officers. Two of the officers Vidor didn’t recognize. But the one on the far right looked exactly like Taylor’s brother, Denis Deane Tanner.

10
     
     
    Herb Dalmas fancied himself another Raymond Chandler. The celebrated hardboiled author was his idol, and, like him, Dalmas had abandoned an early career choice—he had been an associate professor at Rutgers; Chandler, an oil company executive—to try his hand at mystery writing. Like Chandler, who had called the industry “poison to writers” but had been forever attracted to the money it offered, he had moved to Hollywood, hoping to find work in motion pictures. His first novel, Exit Screaming, released the year before, seemed to be providing the break he needed. Upon the novel’s publication, Vidor had expressed interest in developing the book as a movie project and, especially impressed with the mystery’s structure, had asked Dalmas for any insight he might have into the Taylor case. Dalmas had jumped at the opportunity to work, if only in a minor advisory capacity, on his first real Hollywood mystery, researching the case throughout the promotional tour for Exit Screaming. Now, the tour ended, he stood in the lobby of the Lombardy Hotel, an inscribed copy of the novel under his arm, waiting to share his ideas with Vidor.
    Vidor exited an elevator and was taken by Dalmas’s appearance. More than his literary idol, he looked like one