Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

But the coroner’s final verdict was that Thelma died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkley’s drunk-driving fatalities.

I wasn’t buying the coroner’s verdict, either.

I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Thelma, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday , long after she had “officially” died.

Miranda Diamond, Eastman’s now ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Thelma, still dressed in her Trocadero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine Sunday, mid-morning. She was, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.

Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Thelma around four Sunday afternoon. Thelma had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”

Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they heard Eastman and Thelma quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. Eastman said he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).

“It was a lover’s quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boy friend-some Latin fellow from San Francisco-and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”

Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Thelma didn’t own any real interest in her Sidewalk Cafe; she had made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got 50 percent of the profits.

I called Rondell after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.

“We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m going to hang up.”

And he did.

Rondell was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage; even a Chicago boy like me found it disgusting. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business and the film industry was it. And I was just an out-of-town private detective with a local dead client.

On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get something for it, even if it was posthumous.

I went out the next Monday morning-one week to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage-and at the Cafe, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants. He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy lttle mustache.

“What brings you around, Heller? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.

He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.

“What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”

“I mean I know you murdered Thelma,” I said.

He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Heller. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”

“I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question…did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”

He put the paper down. He sipped the bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.

I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Thelma met her fate the next day-Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”

“Is it, really? Heller, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard…”

“Exactly. They heard -but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member of Artie Lewis’ dance band, maybe? Let the cops and the papers wonder. Well, it won’t wash with me; I was with her for her last month. She had no new serious love in her life, from San Francisco or elsewhere. Your ‘swarthy man’ is the little Latin lover who wasn’t there.”

“Miranda saw him with her, Heller…”

“No. Miranda didn’t see anything. She told the story you wanted her to tell; she went along with you, and you treated her right in the divorce settlement. You can afford to. You’re sole owner of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe, now. Lock, stock and barrel, with no messy interference from the star on the marquee. And now you’re free to accept Lucky Luciano’s offer, aren’t you?”

That rocked him, like a physical blow. “What?”

“That’s why you killed Thelma. She was standing in your way. You wanted to put a casino in upstairs; it would mean big money, ver big money.”

“I have money.”

“Yes, and you spend it. You live very lavishly. I’ve been checking up on you. I know you intimately already, and I’m going to know you even better.”

His eyes quivered in the diamond mask of his face. “What are you talking about?”

“You tried to scare her at first-extortion notes, having her followed; maybe you did this with Luciano’s help, maybe you did it on your own. I don’t know. But then she hired me, and you scurried off into the darkness to think up something new.”

He sneered and gestured archly with his cigarette holder, the cigarette in which he was about to light up. “I’m breathlessly awaiting just what evil thing it was I conjured up next.”

“You decided to commit the perfect crime. Just like in the movies. You would kill Thelma one cold night, knocking her out, shoving booze down her, leaving her to die in that garage with the car running. Then you would set out to make it seem that she was still alive-during a day when you were very handsomely, unquestionably alibied.”

“You’re not making any sense. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death…”

“Yes. But the time of death is assumed to have been the night before you said you saw her last. Your melodrama was too involved for the simple-minded authorities, who only wanted to hush things up. They went with the more basic, obvious, tidy solution that Thelma died an accidental death early Saturday morning.” I laughed, once. “You were so cute in pursuit of the ‘perfect crime’ you tripped yourself, Eastman.”