American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (10 page)

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The San Fernando Valley seemed as unlikely a place for a real estate investment as it was to shoot a movie. Its 150,000 acres, more or less, of sun-bleached, bone-dry desert land were hospitable only to horned toads, rattlers, and tarantulas. Still, it had one potential virtue—it was a mere twenty miles from Los Angeles. As the city grew, far-seeing speculators realized that this forsaken valley would acquire a new significance. Perhaps someday it could even become a suburb dotted with picket-fenced homes for people who worked in downtown Los Angeles. But this sort of nearly magical transformation, subdividing a wasteland into tree-shaded plots of green lawns and bright flowerbeds, would require—water.

And so from the start, as the machinations covertly unfolded to bring the Owens River water to Los Angeles, the plotters, Billy explained, had another equally furtive agenda. Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler, along with a group of their friends, had been buying up the San Fernando Valley. The land went for a song; the gloating sellers were only too eager to take the fools’ pennies.

Otis and his fellow investors, however, knew they would have the last laugh. They mortgaged a large chunk of their personal fortunes, confident that their stakes would in time be multiplied many times over. Developing the land would cost them millions, but after the houses were built, the roads were paved, and the schools were erected, they would own a city-size southern California suburb.

In the fall of 1910, after years of steady acquisition, the Los Angeles Suburban Home Company—the conspirators’ front organization—was ready to begin the first phase of development. The company hoped to turn 47,500 acres of desert into a sprawling subdivision of comfortable single-family homes. Homes whose faucets and garden hoses flowed generously with water siphoned off from an aqueduct ostensibly constructed to serve Los Angeles. Water brought to the valley by city taxpayers’ millions.

Only now, Billy pointed out, there were uncertainties. The aqueduct was still not completed. In next year’s municipal election, the voters would be asked to approve another round of expensive bonds to fund the project. This time the public might not be so easily persuaded. The city’s growing Socialist Party was grumbling that “handing the aqueduct water over to the land barons” for their own private use in the San Fernando Valley was a scandalous theft of a public resource. It was a pretty persuasive argument; the voters might very well listen. If the Socialists won the 1911 mayoral election and pushed George Alexander out of city hall, then the San Fernando Valley would never get a drop of city water. And Otis, Chandler, and their partners would have lost millions.

MacLaren listened with mounting interest, but he was puzzled. He did not understand how the city’s possible abandonment of the aqueduct project and the potential collapse of the San Fernando Valley development could be tied into the bombing of the
Times
Building. His boss had promised to provide a motive, but if one was there, he still didn’t see it.

Billy, however, would not be rushed. His mind enjoyed a good puzzle; and perhaps even more, he wanted Mac to appreciate the deductive brilliance of his solution. Ever the performer, he continued to tease.

What have we established over the last three months? Billy asked. Then without even pretending to wait for a response, he answered his own question. Nothing, he said. Only accusations, theories.

Bodies were still being dug out of the rubble, but Otis and the M&M were certain they knew who was to blame. Immediately they had pointed their fingers at labor. Called it a terrorist attack, a dynamite plot to intimidate the capitalists.

Others had said a gas leak had caused the explosion. MacLaren nodded in agreement. The
Examiner,
he knew, had reported that people had been smelling gas in the building all evening. The paper quoted a boy from the pressroom: “The gas has been terrible all night. Everybody noticed it.” According to this theory, the leaking combustible gas accidentally ignited the highly inflammable stock of printing materials stored in Ink Alley, a corridor outside the
Times
Building.

Eugene Debs, the railroad union leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate, Billy went on, had another theory. Just a week after the explosion, Debs had written an article in
Appeal to Reason
stating that “the
Times
and its crowd of union-haters are the instigators.” In subsequent issues he had posed incriminating questions: “Wasn’t it strange that all the big officials and chief editors were out of the building when the explosion occurred?” “Why was Otis out of town at this time?” “How did Harry Chandler just happen to be on the street?” And when a gloating Debs uncovered that Otis had recently taken out a $100,000 insurance policy on the
Times
Building, even the paper had to respond. An indignant
Times
editorial struggled to dismiss the implications as preposterous: “Some of the more hardy of the
Times’
enemies industriously spread the report that the
Times
had blown up its own building and killed its own men for the dual purpose of getting the insurance and fastening the crime on organized labor.”

Lots of finger-pointing, Billy went on, but the crucial questions had not been answered: Why did Otis need the insurance money? Why did the building reek of gas? Why would Otis have been so determined to brand organized labor as bomb-makers and murderers? Why would he have blown up his own building?

That was where, Billy suggested, Otis’s scheme to bring water to the San Fernando Valley fit in. It provided a motive. And once this missing piece was in place, logical answers fell into place, too. Look at it this way, the detective suggested.

Otis needed the insurance money because the valley development had dragged on and expensively on. It had drained him. The $100,000 would help handle his cash-flow problem for the short term, especially if he put off rebuilding the offices that had been blown up. Or maybe he’d never replace the building. The paper, after all, had not missed a day’s circulation, despite the destruction of its presses and offices.

But what if the houses in the San Fernando Valley were never built? What if a new Socialist mayor and city council put an end to his scheme? What if a new administration prohibited water’s being drained off from the city’s aqueduct to irrigate the valley? Well, Otis and Chandler would stand to lose a fortune. Maybe they’d be wiped out, ruined. One hundred grand of insurance money would sure come in handy. It was a fortune—enough to keep the
Times
going for a year or two.

But, Billy raced on, as if following a well-marked trail, what if there was a way of pocketing $100,000 and at the same time ensuring that the project would go forward? Would Chandler and Otis be interested? Well, if people believed that labor was capable of planting dynamite and killing innocent people, it sure would make a lot of people angry. Who’d vote for the Socialists, a party aligned with murderers? If Alexander and his cronies were reelected, then the aqueduct would be built, the San Fernando Valley would get all the water it needed—and Otis would reap his millions.

“That motive enough for you?” asked Billy, full of triumph.

MacLaren started to respond. But before he got very far, Billy was interrupted by a tap on his back. The detective turned to see Harold Greaves of his Chicago office standing behind him.

Greaves held a long box under his arm.

FOURTEEN

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T
HREE DAYS LATER
George Nichols took the train to San Francisco to rent costumes for D.W. As it happened, Billy was also on his way to San Francisco. But the detective did not take a direct train. He didn’t dare. First he needed to lose the man who was following him.

Billy had noticed the tail the morning after his dinner with Mac. He had been leaving the hotel, on his way to police headquarters, when he suspected he was being watched. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a man in a brown suit and a brimmed hat. Quickly he improvised a plan. Looking back into the lobby, he recognized one of the ladies who had been seated at Griffith’s table. Abruptly he turned and went to speak with her. The talk was all contrivance, Billy introducing himself and asking that his greetings be conveyed to Mr. Griffith. Still, Billy did his best to let it go on a few awkward moments longer than necessary. When Billy finally exited the hotel, he saw that the man in the brown suit was still there. Now the detective had no doubts: He was being watched. He only wondered for whom the man was working. Otis? Labor? Billy instinctively clutched the package his agent had delivered more tightly under his arm and continued on his way. The detective hoped what was inside would help him discover who was so very interested in the progress of his investigation.

At headquarters Greaves, his Chicago operative, joined him, and together they met with Police Chief Galloway. Greaves was a tall, hulking presence, by nature terse and blunt, and he had no trouble intimidating witnesses. He towered over Billy, but his manner around his boss was always deferential and often obsequious. From Billy’s perspective, Greaves was a conscientious agent, particularly valuable when a hardcase needed to be persuaded, but despite his talents Billy found it a struggle to be in the man’s presence. That morning Billy focused his attention entirely on the police chief.

With great ceremony, Billy opened the carton he had been carrying. Inside was the unexploded bomb that had been recovered in September from the Peoria train yard. The chief looked and didn’t understand; for an uneasy moment he thought another bomb had been found in his city. Billy calmed his fears but offered no further explanation. Instead, no doubt enjoying the mystery he was creating, he asked the puzzled chief to please produce the device that had been recovered from the home of the M&M secretary. The chief immediately dispatched an aide.

Billy waited with a building sense of anticipation. The course of his investigation was, he felt, about to be determined. As he had worked it out in his mind, there were only two possibilities. If the bombs were similar, then the culprits were part of a larger, nationwide terrorist conspiracy: labor versus capital. If not, then all his suspicions about Otis would have to be explored. Either way, the case was about to take a dramatic turn.

As soon as the device was delivered to the room, Billy began his inspection. There was an alarm clock manufactured by the New Haven Clock Company and a No. 5 Columbia dry battery. He picked up the clock and held it close to his eyes. Soldered to the alarm key was a tiny piece of grooved brass. Wires ran from this piece of brass to another brass plate fastened to the battery board by a simple screw and nut. When the current ran between these two contact points, the dynamite would explode.

He then turned to the Peoria device. He looked at the clock and the battery. With great care he examined the brass plate grooved to fit the winding key, the soldering technique, and the screw fastened to the battery board. When he was finished, he paused, more for effect than to work things out.

There is one essential difference in the two devices, he explained at last. Nitroglycerin was the explosive component in the first bomb. The Los Angeles bombs were primed to ignite dynamite—a powerful and rarely fabricated 80 percent charge. Other than that—

“Identical,” he announced triumphantly. The two bombs, he said, were made by the same person. It wasn’t simply that the alarm clocks and batteries were manufactured by the same companies. The wiring, the soldering, the brass plates—it was as if the bomb-maker had left his signature, Billy told the chief.

The chief was impressed. But at the same time he realized they were no closer to identifying the person who had made the two bombs. And without this vital information, they could not discover who had planted them, and why.

I really don’t see, Mr. Burns, how we’re farther along in this investigation than before, the chief demurred. He was clearly growing impatient; so much for the great detective.

Billy listened without interrupting. He seemed to be enjoying the moment. Then he spoke. “Let me inform you of something we have been fortunate to keep secret. A little pinch of sawdust taken as a sample in the railyards in Peoria came in very handy,” he revealed.

It was Harold Greaves who had originally followed the sawdust trail, but it was Billy who told the story. Along with the unexploded bomb, an empty nitroglycerin can had been found last September near the train yard. “Knowing that nitroglycerin could not be transported on railroad trains,” he began (according to an account he wrote years later), “we felt that it must have been manufactured within easy reach of where the explosion took place.” Days after the explosion, teams of Burns’s operatives fanned out around Peoria.

They found one distributor, then another, and another. It didn’t take them very long to discover that the nitroglycerin could have been bought from any of more than a dozen sources. How would Burns’s men determine where the bomb-maker had made his purchase?

“One of the essential features which go to make up the efficient detective,” Billy often lectured, “is the vigilance over small details.” At the train yard, such vigilance, he explained, had resulted in the discovery of another clue. A pile of sawdust lay near the abandoned can. Dutifully, it had been gathered up and sent on to the agency office in Chicago. It was this mound of sawdust, Billy told Chief Galloway, that had provided the first big break in the Peoria bombing. He was now confident it would also help him find the man who had blown up the
Times
Building.

Harold Greaves had been ready to give up. For weeks, Billy told the chief, his operative had been traveling in an expanding circle around Peoria and had little to show for his efforts. It wasn’t that his investigation had produced no results. Rather, his search had been too successful. He already had a long list of names of men who had purchased nitro. But he had no definitive way of knowing which of them, if any, had used the explosive to build a bomb. It would take months, years perhaps, to investigate all the suspects. And it was just as likely they all were innocent.