Silent Murders by Mary Miley Page A

You provided some of those names yourself. There’s a copy across the street. Order me another coffee when the gal comes by. I’ll be right back.”
    A few minutes later he handed me a four-page typed list. It was a carbon, probably the bottom of seven with letters like fuzzy caterpillars, but still legible.
    “Mind if I copy the last page?”
    “Suit yourself. Maybe you’ll think of some more to add.”
    I used his pencil and the back of a Lucky’s menu, and finished in a few minutes. As I suspected, Lorna McCall fell toward the end of the list. So did Lottie Pickford, despite what Douglas had said about her being with them that night, and several others I knew. They had been among the last to leave. Among the last to see Bruno Heilmann alive. Among the ones who saw his killer? Had one of them killed him?
    “Did you answer the call to Lorna McCall’s apartment?” I asked, handing him back his pencil.
    Carl shook his head. “Bates and Marconi did. They brought in the maid. The detectives are questioning her now.” He saw me grimace and said, “They won’t be hard on her. They don’t suspect her of anything, like they did you. She’s just some middle-aged foreigner who had the bad luck to walk into the girl’s apartment first. She’ll be released shortly.”
    That gave me an idea. A few pointed glances at the clock on the wall and hints that I needed to return to work eased Carl out of the booth and back to his beat. But instead of catching the next streetcar to the studio, I settled down on a bench in the full morning sun where I could see the front door of the police station, and I waited.
    It was only a half hour or so before she came down the steps, a brown-haired woman dressed in the gray garb of a domestic. She came across the street and headed for the bus stop. I fell in behind her.
    “Oh, they let you go, too?” I said to her as I caught up. Naturally, she looked puzzled, and I quickly gave her the impression that I had just come from the police station. “I saw you inside. They were questioning me, too. These murders are so horrible!”
    After a few minutes of comparing stories—Carl was right; they treated her much better than they had treated me yesterday—I noticed aloud that it was nearly lunchtime and wondered if she was as hungry as I was. I said I’d be honored to treat her at Lucky’s.
    Her name was Magda Szabo. A solid woman and big-boned, she had the appearance of a sturdy Old World peasant that needed only a scarf tied under her chin to complete the image. She asked me where I worked. Turns out her husband was a cameraman for Vitagraph Studios. Their children were grown; she had been working as a domestic for young actresses for five years, ever since she and her family came to Hollywood from Hungary. Same country as Adolph Zukor, and no, they didn’t know him. Hungary is a big place, it turns out. Her English was pretty good … better than my Hungarian anyway. By the time our meat loaf and potatoes arrived, we were old friends.
    Food is a good antidote for shock, and Magda had been quite shocked to find her young employer dead in the bathroom that morning. She needed little encouragement to spill the beans.
    “Only three months and one week I work there,” she said, shaking her head in sorrow. “Such a pretty girl and so kind. Like angel she was to look at, but…” She made tsk-tsk sounds with her tongue and sighed. “Too much men, too much hooch, too much dope, too much party, but I am so sad for her to die like that, her head in the toilet.”
    “What do you think happened?”
    “First I think it is accident—that too much hooch make her sick after ze party, so she go to throw up in ze toilet and pass out, fall front face into ze toilet and drown. Because when I come this morning, there is no broken lock, no looking like a fight, no broken things all over. Looks nice everywhere.”
    “So you found her body in the bathroom?”
    “And I call ze police right away. Two