A Bright and Guilty Place Page 9

  “Something’s warped about this case,” he said. “I don’t think Plunkett killed Ned Doheny.”

  Silence fell. The deputy gave White a wry little so-what smile.

  “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” White said.

  Now the sheriff’s man shook his head. “There’s no ‘we’ about it, kid,” he said. “Old man Doheny’s too big to monkey with.”

  White left the morgue and drove away. He spent the rest of the night and the early part of the morning at the lab in the Hall of Justice, inspecting and firing the murder weapon. He found no fingerprints on the Bisley, not even partials or smudges. This was odd. Nor could White explain to himself why the gun had been hot when he removed it from beneath Plunkett; the leaking body warmth of the corpse didn’t account for it. White had no choice but to conclude that somebody had wiped clean the gun and otherwise tampered with it.

  At 10 A.M., when White phoned Lucien Wheeler with his findings, Wheeler listened without comment and told him to report in person to Buron Fitts. So for White it was yet another ride in the Model T, back across the city, to Hollywood and leafy Marmont Lane, high above Sunset Boulevard where Fitts then kept his home.

  “He was a young man, forceful and filled with a mixture of idealism and practicality. Few people really knew Buron Fitts, for his personality changed in direct ratio to the number of people in his presence. I liked him best when I met him alone,” White wrote.

  On this Sunday morning White found Fitts with a Bible in his hand; he’d just come back from church. In WWI Fitts had been a marine officer. Shrapnel blew off part of his right knee at the Battle of the Argonne and he’d also suffered mustard gas burns, episodes he didn’t hesitate to rehash for the benefit of the press and additional column inches. Fitts had ridden to power on the back of his status as veteran and hero, supported by the American Legion and Harry Chandler. While running for D.A., Fitts had undergone surgeries resulting in the loss of his wounded leg and its replacement by an artificial one, a series of procedures reported daily in the Times as the campaign rolled on. Buron Fitts “limped noisily into office,” as one cynic put it.

  “He was a fighter,” White wrote.

  For White himself this had been the most extraordinary night in a youthful life that was already rich with incident. Though exhausted, he buzzed with adrenaline, certain he was on to something big. He took out the crime scene photographs that he’d developed and laid them out, telling Fitts he just didn’t believe that Plunkett had killed Doheny and then himself. At the very least, he said, the shootings couldn’t possibly have happened in the way claimed by Dr. E. C. Fishbaugh.

  “The physical facts and the testimony of witnesses don’t jibe,” White said. He was tired and irritable and, as often, a little too eager. “I understand, too, that some people believe the Doheny family are too influential to tamper with.”

  Now Fitts, in turn, grew testy. His sharp eyes glittered. “There isn’t a man in the United States big enough to stop me conducting a criminal investigation,” he said. “But if Plunkett didn’t kill Doheny, who did?”

  That was the question. White said he didn’t know, but he did know that they hadn’t discovered the truth—yet.

  “We’ll damn soon find out,” said Fitts, the fighter, the “soldier prosecutor.” He got Lucien Wheeler on the phone, ordering him to get all the Doheny witnesses down to the Hall of Justice for further questioning. Leslie White sat in, and when E. C. Fishbaugh came into the interview room, he seized his chance.

  “Doctor, you were approaching the house at the time the shooting took place and you rushed into the bedroom within a matter of seconds,” he said. “Is that correct?”

  Fishbaugh nodded.

  “Doheny was dead when you arrived?”

  Again, a nod.

  “And the body was not disturbed in any way?”

  Fishbaugh was defensive. “It was not disturbed in any way.”

  “Then, Doctor, as an experienced physician, will you kindly explain how blood could run up from the ears and cross back and forth over the face of a man who never moved off his back?”

  This was White’s coup, his big moment in the Doheny investigation. Blood had streaked in a crisscross pattern on Ned Doheny’s face. White’s crime scene photographs show the covering, dried, and in places thick. This wasn’t conjecture, but hard evidence. The patterns made by Ned Doheny’s blood flatly contradicted Fishbaugh’s story.

  Fishbaugh was trapped and he knew it. In a low voice he admitted that young Doheny had lived for approximately twenty minutes after the shooting. His pulse had been faint and he was bleeding from both sides of the head with blood trickling from his mouth. Fishbaugh tried to save him by moving him on his side and clearing his breathing passages—to no avail.

  Buron Fitts slammed his fist on a table. If Fishbaugh had lied about this, and he had, he might have lied about other things too. Yet his story had already been peddled to the scrum of newsmen at Greystone and accepted wholesale. Fitts didn’t like the smell of it. Still angry, he told Fishbaugh to get out of his sight, promising there would be “a sweeping investigation.”

  White saw reason to be satisfied. An inexperienced forensics man, he’d nonetheless done a thorough and competent job. Now he was happy to turn the whole thing over to the older and wiser brains of Lucien Wheeler and Buron Fitts. But within hours a different Buron Fitts—Fitts the survivor, Fitts the politician who knew where his bread was buttered, Fitts the man who was already plotting a run at the governorship of California—called a press conference, declaring that county authorities had already signed death certificates for both men, labeling the tragedy as a murder and a suicide. “My office has concluded beyond all doubt that Hugh Plunkett, while insane, shot Ned Doheny and then turned the gun on himself,” Fitts announced.

  No inquest would be held, and Ned Doheny’s body would undergo no autopsy.

  The case was closed.

  It was a staggering turnaround.

  E. C. Fishbaugh modified his story about how he found Ned Doheny, telling the Times: “He was breathing but unconscious. A telephone directory was lying on the bed opened to the page where my name is listed.” A Doheny attorney added further spin, suggesting that Plunkett had arrived at Greystone intent on suicide and Ned Doheny had nobly tried to talk him out of it.

  One moment the “sweeping investigation” had been about to step up several gears; the next, it was over. “The newspapers dropped the Doheny story as if it burned their fingers,” White wrote. This was the most sensational of the many murders in L.A.’s history up to that time, and for twenty-four hours the press handled it as such: screaming headlines, pages of photographs and crime scene constructions and character artwork—thousands of column inches. Then silence. Coverage stopped dead.

  White would believe until the end of his life that Doheny’s power killed the story. Certainly Doheny knew how to use the media. He’d spent time and money in the assemblage of his own myth, that of the free-spirited, free-roaming frontiersman who made good through adventure and luck and ceaseless striving. More recently he’d been chasing Cecil B. DeMille to turn selected episodes of his life into a movie and offset the damaging publicity generated by Teapot Dome. He was a calculating and autocratic man. Harry Chandler and William Randolph Hearst, owners of the city’s most influential papers, were close friends and had been, at various times and in different ventures, business partners. To study the press treatment of the Greystone tragedy is to be stunned by the speed with which a massive story went away.

  Only the publishers of underground rags (there were scores of them in L.A. at the time, short-lived and energetic, often scandalous) questioned the official version. “DEATH TRAGEDY CONNECTS TO TEAPOT DOME,” reported the editors of The Truth, a fortnightly whose ill-printed and disintegrating pages are categorized as “California Ephemera” in the Special Collections department at UCLA. “District Attorney Buron Fitts would have us think that a chauffeur went mad and killed a rich man and then
himself at the Doheny’s palatial home last Saturday night,” The Truth noted in its issue for March 2, 1929. “We are not satisfied that this is the whole, or accurate story—and we call upon Mr. Fitts to tell us THE TRUTH about Hugh Plunkett and his role as a $100,000 bagman in the famed Teapot Dome affair. Did Hugh Plunkett’s mind really ‘go suddenly mad.’ Or was he himself murdered by a ruthlessly applied death-dealing bullet?”

  Doheny biographer Dan La Botz, writes: “Today, years later, it seems clear that Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett were the victims of old man Doheny’s ambition …. He had used his son and his son’s friend to carry out the dirty business of bribery and deceit … No matter whose hand did the deed, it was Doheny’s character that killed them, his egotism, his hubris.”

  Doheny’s malfeasance returned to punish him in a way that does indeed seem plotted to achieve the maximum effects of tragedy and irony, snatching from him that which he wished to preserve above all else: the integrity and future of his family. Ned’s death shattered Doheny. He’d been at Chester Place when the call came through from Greystone. He’d hurried over, driving through the silent streets of Beverly Hills, insisting against advice on seeing the bodies, hoping there’d been a mistake. Then the reality had sunk in. “Yes, it is Ned after all,” he said.

  A Times reporter captured the sad scene: “He gazed at his son’s body for a moment, and then knelt beside it. He shook with emotion as he reached down and took young Doheny’s right hand. ‘Ned, my Ned,’ he sobbed as he was half carried from the room.”

  “He came staggering into his son’s house like a ghost, hardly able to walk. He crept up the stairway. There he collapsed,” wrote the Examiner. “The favorite of madcap fate, in the evening of his life, found himself the plaything of destiny.”

  11

  Good Time Charlie

  Ned Doheny’s funeral was held on Tuesday, February 19, less than sixty hours after the shootings at Greystone. E. L. Doheny wanted this done in a hurry, but with the style and pomp that he felt was his son’s due. The funeral, coming so quickly after the tragedy, and at a time when press coverage was peaking, seized the imagination of the whole city. The outside of St. Vincent’s, the massive church at the corner of Adams and Figueroa that Doheny had paid for, was draped in black. Squads of LAPD men struggled to restrain the thousands of people who crammed and thronged the streets, hoping to get inside, where the congregation filled every seat and overflowed into the aisles, standing rank on rank.

  Dave and Nancy Clark arrived early, and Clark found his wife a seat on the right side of the church, close to the pews that were roped off for family members. He himself joined those who stood, looking back over a sea of hatless heads toward the great oaken doors of the church. Clark knew the Dohenys. While at Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, he’d helped prepare for one of E. L. Doheny’s earlier trials, in which Doheny had been accused of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Clark was part of a large and expensive legal team that eased Doheny off that particular hook. He’d met the old man on several occasions in the corridors of the Petroleum Securities building. He’d known Ned Doheny, having helped draw up the contract with Greystone architect Gordon B. Kaufmann. Clark had attended USC alumni events with Ned, and they’d golfed together at the Los Angeles Country Club. Clark was proud of his connection with the city’s most powerful family; it fitted his vision of himself as an Angeleno who was going places and destined for big things.

  At ten o’clock Clark heard the organ of St. Vincent’s rise and swell, and the service began. Some of E. L. Doheny’s closest business and political associates walked in front of the casket, honorary pallbearers: Ezequiel Ordonez, the Mexican geologist; Frank J. Hogan, Doheny’s Washington attorney in the Teapot Dome trials; Albert Bacon Fall; and Rufus B. von KleinSmid, the head of USC. The presence of these men reflected, perhaps, a son whose life had belonged too much to his father. Clark also noted that Olin Wellborn III, his friend and former boss, was one of the six men actually shouldering Ned’s coffin. Behind the casket walked Lucy Doheny, the widow, her face hidden by a veil that reached almost to the ground. E. L. Doheny himself, shaking and walking on unsteady feet, held his daughter-in-law’s arm—for support, it seemed, rather than comfort. Doheny was white and haggard, and his vacant eyes kept slowly closing and opening, as if his mind was broken.

  The service, hushed and respectful, proceeded nonetheless with all the splendor that E. L. Doheny had wished. John J. Cantwell, a close friend of the Dohenys and the bishop of the diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego, was presiding, clad in purple and seated on a massive throne covered with a canopy of red and gold. Father Martin O’Malley, the pastor of St. Vincent’s, delivered the main address, offering words of gloomy consolation. “Death, bitter death,” he said, the words falling slowly and inexorably through the vaulted reaches of St. Vincent’s and into Dave Clark’s ears. “This is sober truth, this is bitter death. But to you whom Ned Doheny loved, to you who are crushed by the burden of the cross that the loved ones must bear”—and here O’Malley turned toward the weeping widow and the crumpled old man at her side—“to you there is but a few words that might make less and soothe the burden. These are the words that Ned learned at the altar as a child when he was confirmed. Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, although he is dead, shall live, and he who liveth and believeth in me shall not die for ever.’”

  Dave Clark glanced toward his wife, but Nancy had her head bowed in prayer. Nancy had grown up in a Catholic household and still had her faith, attending mass twice a week. Dave Clark’s parents were still active in their local Highland Park church but he’d ceased to care about religion. Nancy believed in permanent and passionate commitments. Dave was more footloose.

  “God grant Ned Doheny eternal rest and let the eternal light shine upon him,” said O’Malley.

  E. L. Doheny seemed to stare unseeingly before him. Lucy Doheny was slumped in her pew, a handkerchief to her eyes, sobbing. The two were helped from their seats for a last glance into the casket. Then Doheny once again held tight to his daughter-in-law’s arm as they walked out of the church.

  Ned’s body was taken by hearse to Forest Lawn and interred in the Doheny family mausoleum, a vast marble temple brought by Doheny from a church in Rome where it had once held the remains of a second-century Christian martyr. Predictably, less ceremony would attend Hugh Plunkett’s funeral, which took place the next day, though he too was laid to rest at Forest Lawn, barely thirty feet from the Doheny mausoleum where Ned lay entombed. The two men were as close in death as they’d been in life, and as far apart.

  After the grandeur of St. Vincent’s, Ned Doheny’s burial was private, a strictly family affair, and Dave Clark wasn’t among those who witnessed it. Besides, on that Tuesday morning, once the requiem mass was concluded and the congregation filed out of church and into the streets, he had business to attend to. He kissed Nancy on the cheek and hurried downtown to attend a hearing in the grand jury room on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. Clark was as yet unaware that these proceedings would have grave implications for his own future, though he did know that the hearing concerned another older man who was at the center of power in Los Angeles: Charlie Crawford.

  Charles Crawford—“Good Time Charlie,” the Examiner called him—was in his early fifties by 1929. Like E. L. Doheny, Crawford came from Irish stock. Like Doheny, he was born of pioneer parents. His basic education in a one-room schoolhouse was followed by a drift westward. Crawford fetched up in Seattle in the late 1890s, soon after prospectors found gold “like piles of yellow shelled corn” up in Alaska’s Yukon Valley, on the banks of the Klondike. “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!,” screamed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!” Within days, the last great gold rush was born; the whole continent went Klondike crazy, and Seattle became the port of entry for those heading to the mining camps. The American economy had been hit hard by financial panic in 1893. Unemployment was widespread and there was gr
owing strife between industrial employers and emerging unions. The prospect of sudden, easy wealth was even more seductive than usual. Within a year of the discovery of gold in Alaska, more than 100,000 people came to Seattle, fanning north into the Yukon territory toward Dawson City. In time 12.5 million ounces of gold were taken from the ground. The writer Jack London recorded the hardships endured, the adventures enjoyed; and Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 silent film The Gold Rush would be set on the Klondike. Another uncharted region of the West was put on the map.

  “Prosperity is here,” said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time, and a hastily formed Seattle Chamber of Commerce, led by the ingenious Erastus Brainerd, plotted a successful campaign to seize the bulk of the gold rush trade.

  Seattle roared, and Charlie Crawford was there, having realized that Klondike entertainment and crime would be even more profitable than Klondike prospecting. Hardworking miners rarely held on to their stake. Gambling parlors and brothels sprang up all over town, and Crawford made his first small fortune, booking dance-hall and vaudeville entertainers into local theaters, dance halls, and saloons. He became a vice-lord in Seattle’s Tenderloin, “a bottomless cauldron of sin,” according to McClure’s magazine in 1911. Lawyer and city councilman Hiram Gill handled the interests of Crawford and other underworld captains. In 1910 Gill ran for mayor on a “wide-open town” ticket, arguing that vice was both natural and lucrative but should be regulated and confined to one section of the city. “Hell, this is a sea port, ain’t it?” Gill said. His campaign was successful, at which point, said McClure’s, “The city transformed itself almost magically into one great gambling hell.” It was Charlie Crawford’s kind of town. On Beacon Hill he built the Northern Club, with 500 rooms the biggest and most elaborate gaming hotel in the country, prefiguring Las Vegas in its grandeur. Roulette, blackjack, craps, faro, poker, and slot machines featured at ground level, while prostitution roosted above.