Silent Murders Read Free

modern German style, cold, spare, and angular, with subtle colors, no bric-a-brac, and lots of abstract paintings. Intimidating, like its owner, but not overly large. I guessed he didn’t need a huge place, being a bachelor.
    A butler descended the stairs to take our wraps. Several couples wobbled past him on their way to the second floor, planting each footstep with care and steadying themselves with the handrail.
    I wore a custom-made, sleeveless tea-length frock, green to bring out the color in my eyes, with bugle beads sewn onto every square inch. It was expensive, left over from my last role, where I had played the part of a long-lost heiress in a swindle to bilk her relatives out of her fortune. No one cared to have the clothes back, so I kept them. Myrna was dressed in her finest, a blue silk backless with a handkerchief hem; not costly, but Myrna could wear rags and look like a million bucks. Still, she came across as very young and inexperienced. I made a mental note to keep an eye on her.
    “Shall I use your new name?” I asked, thinking ahead to the introductions.
    She nodded uncertainly, then sighed. “I suppose so. I’ve just started using it on the back of my photographs and to sign my checks.”
    “Good girl. It’s a great name.” The artistic, avant-garde crowd she hung around with had been urging her for some time to come up with a more distinctive-sounding moniker, and she had finally settled on one.
    “Every one of my friends thought Williams was too ordinary for an actress. I still consider it a very, very good name, but … well, I guess they were right. Anyway, everyone had ideas for my new last name—someone suggested Myrna Lisa, can you believe that?” She giggled. “It’s catchy all right, but I’d be too embarrassed to use something so silly.”
    There must have been a hundred people at the party already, with more arriving behind us. We surveyed the living room from our vantage point at the top of the steps and jostled our way through the crush toward an enormous slate patio ringed with more torches. Colorful Japanese lanterns dangled overhead. In the space of sixty seconds I’d spotted several familiar faces from the Son of Zorro and a few people I’d met on my Fairbanks errands. I began to breathe easier. I could fit in here.
    A waiter came near us with a tray of canapés, and I managed to snatch one. Another was taking orders for the bar. Myrna and I were about to request gin rickeys when I caught sight of a waitress circulating the room with a tray of champagne. My all-time favorite.
    “Wait, Myrna! Have you ever had champagne?”
    She shook her head.
    “Try this,” I said, lifting two glasses off the tray and thanking the waitress with a smile.
    She took a sip, but before I could hear her opinion, her eyes opened wide. “Gosh, there’s Raoul Walsh,” she said, pointing to the well-known director. I spun around. “He hired my dance troupe at Grauman’s Egyptian to do the orgy scene in The Wanderer . I was drinking and hanging over a couch with a wine goblet, trying to do what they told me to do. It was really fun.”
    “Can you introduce me?”
    Her mouth turned down. “He doesn’t know me. I’m just a dancer.”
    The champagne was delicious and cold as ice. It had not taken me long to realize that in Hollywood, as elsewhere, Prohibition laws were treated with the scorn they deserved. Liquor was served at every party, brazenly, defiantly, without fear of raids, arrests, or fines, not merely because the police were bribed as they were in most cities, but because the studio bosses ran the show here. The police did what they were told.
    Every man in the room was handsome and every woman beautiful, so why I should find myself staring at one particularly compelling, dark-haired gentleman, I do not know. He had just entered the house and was standing in the foyer unaccompanied, surveying the crowded room. His eyes worked from right to left quickly, then back again more