A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (20 page)

Joe Taylor, the LAPD’s chief of detectives, came into the room. “Hello, Charlie,” he said.

Crawford turned his head, looking through half-open eyes. “Hello, Joe. I know you.” “What’s up, Charlie? How are you?” “Fine,” said Crawford, smiling.

Taylor glanced down. A doctor swabbed the wound in Crawford’s belly, preparing for surgery. “Who did it, Charlie?”

Crawford shook his head.

“You’d better tell us now while you can.”

“I don’t know. Ask Spencer—he knows.”

“Spencer’s dead, Charlie.”

Crawford smiled faintly and shut his eyes; even as he was about to go under the knife, he adhered to the code of his world: he wasn’t about to rat out anybody to a cop.

“Call the Reverend Briegleb right away,” Taylor said to one of his uniformed LAPD men. “Maybe he’ll tell him who did it.”

The doors of the white-walled operating theater opened and Crawford was wheeled beneath the big lamps. “Has she come? Has my wife? Has she come?” he said in a whisper.

“She’s on her way,” a nurse told him.

A doctor applied ether to Crawford’s face. Sweet fumes wafted into the nostrils of cops and reporters. Crawford had already lost consciousness when his wife, Ella, did arrive. A slight and slender woman in her late thirties with sad blue eyes, she rushed down the hallway holding a Bible. “I want to see him,” she said. “I’m in trouble and I want to pray. He’s my husband … God, help me!”

The nurse led Ella Crawford into a small adjoining room, where she fell to her knees and wept. Gustav Briegleb swept in, smartly dressed as always, in flannel pants and blazer, his arrogant face even more frowning than usual. “There’s nothing I can say,” he told reporters. “Only that Charlie has joined my church and is right with God.”

From down the hall came the sound of Ella Crawford, weeping and crying out. Briegleb went to join her, and soon the two, suited in surgical gowns with masks covering their faces, were allowed into the operating room. Doctors gave Crawford transfusions of blood; they cut him open, tried to fix his wrecked insides, and sewed him back up again. “Mrs. Crawford stood there like a Trojan and only the tears that rolled from her eyes bespoke the surge of emotions that engulfed her,” wrote the
Examiner
.

At 7:45 P.M. orderlies wheeled Charlie Crawford out of the operating theater. “We can only hope,” one of the surgeons said. Ella Crawford waited with her sister and Charlie’s brother, George. The Crawford family doctor arrived from Beverly Hills and did his best to comfort them and offer hope. Gustav Briegleb led them in prayers. An agonizing hour crawled by before an intern came with the news. He didn’t need to say anything; they read the surgery’s outcome in the expression on his face. At 8:32 P.M. Charlie Crawford had passed away. The Gray Wolf was gone. That elaborate security system in the office at 6665 Sunset Boulevard had been installed in vain. Crawford had died as he feared he would, violently and by a bullet.

22

The Ballad of Dave Clark

L
eslie White was finishing up his work on Sunset Boulevard when news came through of Crawford’s death. He felt a pang, remembering how Crawford had saved him from further embarrassment during the Callie Grimes trial. Had Crawford really been such a bad man? There’d been something very human and sympathetic about him, White thought. Few others in the D.A.’s office mourned Crawford’s passing, however. “Good riddance,” pronounced Buron Fitts. It was more surprising, perhaps, that the death of Herbert Spencer provoked little outrage. He’d been a newspaperman, after all. It quickly emerged, though, that Spencer had milked the rackets. The Los Feliz house that he owned was worth $25,000. He drove a $4,000 Lincoln. His grieving widow dressed in fur. Herb Spencer resembled Jake Lingle in the wrong sorts of ways.

Next morning, White was at the Hall of Justice, talking with colleagues in his small cubbyhole of an office, wondering who, if not Guy McAfee, might have committed the murders, when Blayney Matthews burst in and astonished them with the news. The man they were looking for was Dave Clark.

White refused to believe it at first, but then Matthews told him that Crawford had mentioned Clark’s name moments before he died. Or so the Reverend Gustav Briegleb was claiming. Briegleb’s story was that he’d held Crawford’s hand and asked who did it. Crawford had whispered “Dave” before passing away.

Matthews agreed that Briegleb was self-important and self-dramatizing, but there were other witnesses. George Crawford, Charlie’s brother, had recognized Clark all along, it seemed, but had waited to tell Briegleb rather than the authorities. The lovely Billie Rohrback, shown Clark’s photograph, had confirmed that he was the man she’d seen leaving Crawford’s office, walking slowly at first, buttoning his jacket, then hurrying and donning his straw skimmer. LAPD detectives had already checked Clark’s bank account. On Tuesday morning, the day before the shootings, he’d bought a .38 Colt and fifty copper-coated bullets from a downtown sporting goods store. He’d paid with a $27 check that bounced.

“Where is he now?”

Matthews believed that Clark had crossed the border into Mexico and was holed up in Agua Caliente. “I want you to go down there and check,” he said. “Make sure you’re armed. He might be dangerous.”

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 Brentwood 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.”