Hollywood has always been good at hiding its bodies. Long before the neon sins of Sunset Strip hardened into cliché, men drank too much, stayed up too late, and settled arguments with their fists—or worse—behind respectable doors. One such door closed forever on the morning of July 31, 1944, when Harry Lucenay, a thick-shouldered, middle-aged gambler and dog owner, fell dead on the floor of the Hollywood American Legion Post 43, shot down after an all-night poker game curdled into accusation, fear, and gunfire.

Los Angeles in 1948 was selling dreams by the square foot. The war was over. Veterans were home. Hillsides were being carved into subdivisions. Real estate advertisements offered sunshine and citrus trees. Buy a house and you could look out toward tomorrow. If you had a decent job and a little bit of moxie, you could own a piece of the future. Gladys Eugenia Kern believed in the future.

By the summer of 1947, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel stood out as one of America’s most complicated crime figures. He had once been the country’s most feared gangster and, by 1942, led the New York syndicate’s Murder, Inc. on the West Coast. Later, Siegel reinvented himself as a well-dressed Hollywood insider, making friends with actors and studio executives while promoting his Las Vegas projects as legitimate businesses. Some people thought he was trying to go straight, while others saw a gangster who had become too noticeable and costly.

Long before Hollywood learned to manufacture scandal, Marguerete Favar had lived a life that was enough to make a dozen scripts. A dancer whose beauty blazed across the vaudeville circuit from sea to shining sea, her life ended in a murder that remains one of the decade’s most sensational unsolved crimes. It was also one of its most decadent.