A Bright and Guilty Place Page 19

  White spent the next three hours in his car, heading south toward San Diego and Tijuana. He wore a holstered Colt beneath his arm and beside him on the seat was the magnificent “auto-riot” gun that he’d fetched from Ventura. In his diary he recorded that he felt “pretty silly” with this weaponry. After all, “it was only Dave.” Then again, White realized, perhaps he didn’t know Dave Clark. Was the cool and debonair fellow with whom he’d worked, and with whom he’d chatted on the steps of the Hall of Justice, really a murderer? Much had changed for Leslie White since his arrival in L.A., but this seemed the most bizarre development of all. On arriving at Agua Caliente, White talked to the manager of the resort who told him that Clark was a frequent and respected guest. The manager checked the reservation book, confirming that Clark had spent the previous Saturday and Sunday nights at Agua Caliente but wasn’t there now.

  White was relieved. “I didn’t care about the wasted time and gasoline,” he said. “Whatever Dave Clark had done, and wherever he was, I wouldn’t have to arrest him or threaten him with a gun.”

  The mystery of Dave Clark’s whereabouts perplexed the LAPD and the men of the D.A.’s office for the better part of a day. It would transpire that Clark had indeed been at 6665 Sunset Boulevard at the time of the shootings, but he hadn’t fled to Mexico.

  On leaving Crawford’s office, Dave Clark walked down Sunset Boulevard toward Los Palmas and got into his car, the yellow Ford Roadster with the wire-rimmed wheels and the white-walled tires. He drove the entire winding length of Sunset, about fifteen miles, through Hollywood and Beverly Hills, past UCLA, through Brent-wood and Pacific Palisades, all the way to the beach. He drove up the coast, as if heading for San Francisco, then turned and came back to Santa Monica, where he parked in the Palisades looking out over the ocean. He sat in his car, apparently thinking, for about two hours before driving back downtown, another twenty miles or so, and left the Ford in a parking garage. He checked into the Stowell, a luxurious hotel crammed into a narrow downtown lot, registering under the name Dave Coleman. Next morning he rose early and drove to the beach again. By this time he knew that Crawford and Spencer were both dead. Again, he went up the coast, past Malibu, and walked for hours. He’d panicked, and now, with the surf pounding in his ears, he figured out what to do. He felt oddly calm, but then he was known to perform well in a crisis; he hashed out a plan, a strategy for survival.

  Having not seen her husband since Tuesday morning, when he’d kissed her on the cheek and promised to be back for dinner, Nancy Clark had called the police and reported him missing. Now investigators called at the Clark house on North Detroit Avenue in Hancock Park, asking if she knew where he was. She didn’t. She told them that yes, Dave had been under strain recently, because of his run at the judgeship. But he hadn’t been complaining. He was, she said, “close-mouthed.” She told them he couldn’t possibly be connected in any way with the shootings. Nancy Clark, frantic and frightened, said that her husband must be in San Francisco, talking politics with the governor. Such was her hope—desperate and rather sad.

  Another bulletin went out over the police radios and the teletype machines. “Arrest and hold for investigation in the case of the Crawford-Spencer murders—David H. Clark, former Deputy District Attorney, well known to all peace officers—American, 33 years of age, 6 feet and ½ inch tall, 175 pounds; medium complexion, small moustache. Wearing dark gray Oxford suit, green tie. White sailor straw hat. Very neat dresser. Very erect.” The bulletins gave details of Clark’s Ford, then warned: “This man is armed with a .38 caliber revolver No. 576025.”

  Clark was on the Santa Monica pier when he saw the Examiner’s evening “extra” with its headline: “DAVE CLARK SOUGHT IN SHOOTING.” It was about ten o’clock. He collected his car and drove east along the empty stretches of Pico Boulevard, stopping at a little roadside diner to call the D.A.’s office. Fitts wasn’t there, so he spoke to Blayney Matthews and said, “Blayney, this is Dave Clark. I’m coming in.” Thirty minutes later he left the Ford in a downtown parking lot. He was haggard, with deep circles under his eyes. “He fairly ran past the gauntlet of popping gleaming flashlights and the array of cameras,” said the Evening Express.

  The night’s drama wasn’t done. Roger Fowler, Billie Rohrback, and George Crawford, the witnesses from 6665 Sunset, were brought to the Hall of Justice and asked to identify Clark in a lineup. Buron Fitts, Blayney Matthews, and detectives from the LAPD grilled him for hours. Clark refused to explain himself. He said nothing, leaving Fitts no option but to charge him with double murder. “I understand what you have to do, Buron,” Clark said. The morning found him sitting in his shirtsleeves on a bed in the hospital at the L.A. County jail, waiting for a psychiatric evaluation. His jacket hung in a nearby closet. From the lapel he’d removed the Royal Flying Corps pin he customarily wore with such pride.

  Talking to reporters, Clark said something remarkable in its sangfroid. “I’m here as an accused man and I know that many cases I won as a prosecutor came because a defendant talked too much. So I have nothing to say.” The balance of his mind was scarcely in doubt. He had a plan. At one point he buried his head in his hands. “There were the three of us there together. But I’ll talk from the witness stand, not before,” he said, admitting something that Fitts by now knew from other witnesses—namely, that he’d been in the murder room. He also said that he went to Crawford’s office alone, denying that he’d been driven there by any “beautiful bejeweled blonde.” The mystery deepened—or maybe this was Clark starting in on what would be a big part of his strategy: putting up blocks, throwing interference.

  “LOVE FRAME-UP SUSPECTED IN DOUBLE MURDER”; “GANGLAND GUNS BARK”; “GAMBLING CZAR ARRESTED IN MURDER PROBE”; “GREED FOR GOLD PROMPTS FIGHT OF RACKETEERS.” Already the press was having a ball: banner headlines, pages of photographs, witness interviews, crime scene diagrams, reconstructions, and reams of copy. The intimacy of the coverage startles. Celebrities reckon they have a hard time these days, but the L.A. press of the 1920s was a ravenous pack. Reporters barged right into the swiftly changing story, peeking over the partition of the operating theater when the scalpel made its incision, offering handkerchiefs while they counted the grieving widow’s tears, making gleeful note of the beads of sweat on Charlie Crawford’s forehead as he gave up the ghost. The Examiner ran a cartoon strip in which the first cell showed a man with a smoking gun in his hand, blasting another man who sat behind a desk; in the second cell, Dave Clark was seen glumly reading the Examiner edition which named his name; in the third, wearing the straw skimmer, he waved from behind the wheel of his car, surrendering himself at the Hall of Justice; in the fourth, tagged “FINAL EPISODE,” there was “the candidate for judge lodged behind bars, accused of murder.”

  The style of the strip recalls the illustrations then appearing in Black Mask. People were thinking about Clark like a character from a novel or film. They wanted to know his motives. What interplay of hidden forces had propelled his fall from grace? The theories that began to emerge call to mind the flashlit, close-up moments of the great American street photographer Weegee and, perhaps more surprisingly, the archetype of “A Rake’s Progress” as depicted by eighteenth-century London artist William Hogarth. This was a tale both classic and contemporary. Clark was no career crook, but an apparently upright and regular guy, an ambitious working professional trapped by ambience, fate, and his own character flaws.

  But what were the specifics? Clark was keeping his mouth shut, so the D.A.’s investigators pursued their own theories. Blayney Matthews had one in particular. “Find the blonde,” he said, referring to the woman George Crawford said he’d seen in Clark’s car, the woman whose existence Clark had been at pains to deny. “And we might get some answers.”

  Matthews believed the woman was either Mrs. M. Donovan, aka June Taylor, who’d worked for Albert Marco and was known to be a friend of Clark’s, or Elizabeth Wren, a pal of Taylor’s. “The case was red hot and I streaked for New York,
” wrote Beverly Davis, the young woman who, with much sexual swagger, had been running Crawford’s ritzy brothel in Hancock Park, and had been his mistress and spy. “I knew too much to keep my health in Los Angeles.”

  Nothing about a murder suspect’s private life remains secret for long. His or her every past action is examined, or reexamined in a new light, and Matthews recalled a rumor that had been flying around back in 1928, when Clark had led Marco’s prosecution. This had been before Leslie White joined the D.A.’s office, so Matthews filled him in on the details. The story went that, in between Albert Marco’s first and second trials, Clark had been invited to a party at a downtown club and oiled with booze before a woman lured him into the inevitable “compromising situation.” Flashlights boomed, pictures were taken. Clark was then given the names of three prospective jurors favorable to Marco and told to ensure that they wound up on the final panel. At first Clark went along with this blackmail, but then defiantly sent Marco to San Quentin. After this, the incriminating photographs were gathered by Charlie Crawford, who kept them in the safe in his office, waiting until now, when Clark was running for judge, to use them.

  According to this theory, either June Taylor or Elizabeth Wren had delivered Clark to Sunset Boulevard to hear Crawford’s terms. Then there’d been an argument and the shootings, and Clark had escaped with the photographs. Or perhaps it had been his intention all along to kill Crawford and steal the photographs. In which case Taylor’s—or Wren’s—role might have been different. Either way, Herb Spencer had been killed because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Judge William Doran supported this idea of the Marco trial connection. Doran recalled how he’d known something was fishy about the jury and that Dave Clark had said, “If you’re smart, Judge, you’ll dismiss that jury panel right now,” almost out of the blue, as if making up his mind on the spur of the moment. A Hollywood detective gave further credence to Blayney Matthews’s blackmail theory, telling how Clark had shown up at his precinct the day before the shootings. Clark had said, “I’ve got a story to tell,” but had left without telling it.

  Frederic Girnau, publisher of the Pacific Coast Reporter, already in trouble for the trash he’d published about Clara Bow, pointed out that he’d run a story months back about the wild parties Dave Clark was in the habit of attending. In an April issue, Girnau had addressed himself to Dave Clark directly, concerning Clark’s candidacy for the judgeship: “You are the candidate of Guy McAfee and Helen Werner. The underworld is 100 per cent in back of you. We have no personal animosity against you, but we contend you are not the man to sit on the municipal bench. Get out of the race pronto, Dave. You know what I mean, don’t you? And stop sending people to my office to try to bribe me with money. I don’t play that way, Dave.”

  Had Clark really sought to bribe Girnau? It seems more likely that Girnau was taking a swipe at Clark because of Clark’s work on behalf of Clara Bow. But everybody jumped in with their opinion about the killings. The Reverend Bob Shuler swiftly devoted an entire issue of his magazine to the story. Shuler had Buron Fitts as a source, and Fitts was already busy trying to rewrite history—claiming that he’d known for months, even years, that Clark had been corrupted. “Fitts has reason to believe that Albert Marco was convicted in spite of Dave Clark not because of him,” Shuler wrote. “Fitts believes that Dave Clark is the fair-haired boy of the Guy McAfee gambling control and that he was running for the judgeship, as many men do all over the nation, so that the racket might have one more friend in court.”

  Titled “The Strange Death of Charlie Crawford,” Shuler’s sixty-four-page pamphlet weaves together a sketchy telling of Crawford’s early career history in Seattle with a persuasive analysis of the struggle for power that led to his death. Buron Fitts was in no doubt that Clark had pulled the trigger. Shuler wrote:

  Just what was the immediate cause he does not know. That Dave was getting over a jag might have entered in. That the three men consumed a bottle of whiskey during their conference, evidently Crawford and Clark getting the lion’s share, might partially explain. Crawford might have been putting the screws to Clark, to get at McAfee. They might have sent for Clark to put him on the spot. On the other hand, Clark might have gone to Crawford for some more campaign money and Spencer butted in just in time to provoke a couple of murders. Or Clark might have gone over to persuade Crawford to make up with McAfee after Monday’s quarrel. Or yet again, Clark may have been told by McAfee that Crawford was going to withdraw his support, muddy the waters and defeat him. In which case he might have gone over for a showdown.

  Dave Clark, the man with a multitude of possible motives, was in a jail cell in the Hall of Justice. Without any great effort on his part, while there he gathered 67,000 votes in his run for the judgeship—not enough to secure the seat (the winner polled 71,000 votes) but an amazing showing. A then-current Times photograph shows him behind bars, looking suave and elegant in his shirtsleeves, sitting on the ground playing cards with a bunch of other prisoners, black and white, who look at him with a mixture of curiosity and almost hero-worship. He cut a remarkable figure. A Times editorial attacked not Clark’s nerve, but his refusal to come straight out and tell his story. This smacked of opportunism and determination to survive at all costs, the Times said, sounding an unreasonably high moral note. Clark was worried, even if he was too stoic and self-assured to show it. Writing on yellow scrap paper, the only material available to him, he sent a note to his wife: “Nancy, sweetheart: Believe in me.”

  “I do believe in him,” Nancy told the Examiner. She’d recovered her composure. In the photograph that ran with the interview she stared into the camera with her chin resting on a leather-gloved hand, poised and pretty and defiant—once again her tough father’s daughter. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know who committed those awful murders. But it wasn’t David.” (She was the only one who called him that; everybody else knew him as “Dave.”) She’d never heard of any trouble between her husband and Crawford or Spencer. “He sometimes spoke of them, but just as he spoke of dozens of other people he knew.” Nancy took comfort from her husband’s brief message. She read it repeatedly, tucked it under her pillow, and lay down and went to sleep for the first time since his arrest.

  “She’s a little brick,” Clark said. “She believes in me and that’s all I care about.” Clark rose at 6:30 A.M., breakfasted on coffee, toast, and oatmeal, and attended services conducted by the prison chaplain. Nancy started visiting him two or three times a day. “I can stand everything else so long as she doesn’t desert me, which I know she never will,” he said.

  For Buron Fitts, Clark’s situation was more than an embarrassment. With his tendency to self-pity, Fitts took the matter as a personal attack. Furious, he withdrew every remark he’d made about the brilliance of Dave Clark. “There were three racketeers in that room,” he said, claiming to have firm evidence that Clark was acting for McAfee. “The murders were nothing more than the result of Crawford’s attempts to gain back power he lost two years ago. Racketeers met racketeers and there was murder.”

  To lead his defense, Dave Clark turned to W. I. Gilbert, whom he already knew well from the Clara Bow trial. Now he got to know him even better. Gilbert had an easy manner and a wit that could be biting or genial. His memory was phenomenal and he had the great trial lawyer’s gift: in his examination of a witness, he never hammered a question without driving it all the way and getting an answer; and he never hammered unless he knew where the inquiry would lead. He was tough too; in Oklahoma, where he’d had his training, “to be dressed” meant to carry a gun. “I can see him slowly and deliberately walking along the railing of the jury box calling each man juror by his name as though he had known the juror a lifetime. The southern courtesy he showed the women jurors made the deepest impression on them,” recalled Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Haas. “No-one could anticipate his courtroom tactics. He often turned coups to his advantage.”

  C
lark knew he was in good hands: Gilbert had never had a client convicted and executed for murder. Backing up Gilbert would be Leonard Wilson, a friend of Clark’s and a former judge.

  At his arraignment Clark was mobbed by reporters and a crowd eager to glimpse the suave and newly notorious figure. The murder complaint had been sworn out by Assistant D.A. Tom Menzies, an old friend of Clark’s. Llewellyn Moses, another friend, handled these formal proceedings for the prosecution. The presiding judge, William S. Baird, had known Clark since childhood and couldn’t meet his eye, while the court reporter, Sam Coulter, a classmate from USC, shook Clark’s hand and told him, “I know you’ll come out of this okay.”

  Small wonder, then, that Fitts looked to an outside lawyer to take charge of the prosecution. “It’s just too difficult for anyone at present on my staff to handle this,” he said. He picked W. Joseph Ford, a veteran who, back in 1911, had been part of the team that prosecuted the McNamara brothers for dynamiting the Times building. Subsequently, Ford had squared up against the great Clarence Darrow in Darrow’s trial for bribery, and the two lawyers had grown to hate each other. Ford remained convinced that Darrow had been guilty. On leaving the D.A.’s office in 1914, Ford became a criminal defense lawyer, then the first dean of the law school at Loyola Marymount University. He was already an aging man but his integrity was beyond doubt, or at least as unimpugnable as anybody’s could be in L.A. at that time. He’d known Fitts for years, having been his senior officer in the National Guard. Ford wore his gray hair long. Round, thick-lensed glasses made his eyes look big and black. Plunging into his task, he moved into an office suite in the Hall of Justice. “I expect to go into every gangland and racketeering ramification of the case,” he told the Evening Herald. “It’s not just the blind prosecution of Clark, but the tracking down of whoever else was behind these cold-blooded killings.”