A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner Read Free Book Online Page B

her husband. There was college student Edward Hickman who kidnapped twelve-year-old Marion Parker and, having failed to extract a ransom, presented the corpse, with eyes and legs severed and eyelids sewn open, to the girl’s father, asking: “Do you think I’ll be as famous as Leopold and Loeb?” There was the murder of movie director William Desmond Taylor, shot through the heart with a single well-aimed bullet, perhaps having gotten on the wrong side of a dope dealer, or maybe one of the two gorgeous actresses he was bedding, or the mother of one of those actresses with whom he’d also been having an affair, or his ex-wife, or a gay lover. The bisexual Taylor, it transpired, had more people with reason to wish him dead than the victim in an Agatha Christie novel.
    “Ideas grow as rank, coarse, and odorless as geraniums in the freakish atmosphere,” wrote McWilliams. “When so many people have nothing meaningful to do with their time, nothing real with which to occupy their minds, they indulge in fantasy, in silly daydreams, in perversions, and, occasionally, in monstrous crimes.” Incessant migration, rapid growth, and the swiftly repeated cycle of boom and bust and boom again had created a pathology of cults, cranks, and thousands of hastily improvised businesses and buildings—snakes for sale, frogs for sale, diners and stores that shot up in the shapes of owls, derby hats, shoes, airships, teakettles, windmills, and mosques.
    “Los Angeles is the kind of place where perversion is perverted and prostitution prostituted,” McWilliams observed. The city could seem like a vast melodrama of maladjustment. Climactic episodes took on an addictive character, and civic rituals turned inevitably into gaudy spectacle. Much of this now centered at the new Hall of Justice, the thirteen-story Beaux-Arts building in spotless light-gray California granite that occupied an entire block at the corner of Temple and Spring.
    The Hall of Justice was, and is, an impressive structure—solid, dignified, and elegant. When it opened for business in 1926, it was placed atop a hill with a handsome park in front of it, and with the enormous letters HALL OF JUSTICE chiseled in stone above the lofty entranceways. It was designed and erected at a time when the fathers of this most recklessly modern and American of cities felt they needed a Parthenon, a statement of civic intent and seriousness.
    The Hall of Justice cost $6.5 million in 1920s dollars. A barrel-vaulted entrance foyer swept through the entire length of the building, and visitors, like the folks who worked there daily, couldn’t fail to be impressed by the gold marble walls, enormous marble columns, marble floors, and gold-coffered ceiling. Elevators rose to the offices of the District Attorney on the sixth and seventh floors, the courts on the eighth, and the jury and press rooms on the ninth. Above that was the County Jail, a full three floors of cells. Most days the place was a bustling hive. The people of L.A. demanded not only fictional but real-life entertainment. The Hall of Justice, envisioned for a cast of thousands, soon became not something Greek, but the city’s equivalent of the Roman Coliseum, a grand arena of life and death.
    This building would soon become the center of Leslie White’s professional life, as it was of Dave Clark’s. Both would be players in the great crime circus of L.A. in the late 1920s and early 1930s; both would be touched by murder and scandal, although only one would survive intact. White had come to Los Angeles during the first Marco trial, and he’d read about a number of racket-related murders that had occurred since then. Jack Palmer, a Washington State rumrunner, another newcomer to town, had been killed in a downtown rooming house. Palmer’s flapper girlfriend said nonchalantly that he’d been shot by gangsters. Another man, Augie Palambo, was killed in the back of a San Pedro taxi cab. The Evening Express showed a picture of