CHAPTER 5

 

The Lawfords lived in what Hollywood types would call a beach house but anybody else would call a mansion. The rambling marble-and-stucco neo-Spanish dwelling on Palisades Beach Road had been Louis B. Mayer’s, once upon a time, visited by—and making an impression upon—young Peter Lawford, back when he was a contract player at MGM.

It could still make an impression, though from without it was just another (if large) Santa Monica beachfront property like those of the neighbors, doctors or lawyers or agents; usually not movie stars, who preferred Malibu or Beverly Hills. Like Marilyn, who lived barely ten minutes away, the Lawfords cared more about comfort than status. When you’re the president’s sister and brother-in-law, status isn’t an issue.

Despite the size of the place—taking up two lots—you could park right in front of it, pulling in like you were at a roadside restaurant. I stepped out into the cool ocean breeze of late afternoon, shadows just starting to go to work, the pound of surf making foamy music.

I’d come right over from my encounter with Roger Pryor and his TV repair van, and had spotted two similar vans (though not ones I recognized as Roger’s) parked within a quarter mile of the fenced-in Lawford estate.

Slipping my Ray-Bans in my sport-shirt pocket, I was about to knock at the front door when two guys in black suits and black ties and black sunglasses materialized and made bookends of themselves. The one on my right was a little older—thirty-five?—and took the lead: “May we help you, sir?”

This was with the warmth of a UNIVAC spitting out a punch card.

“My name’s Nathan Heller,” I said, and got my wallet out and let the windows flip down, displaying my array of investigator’s licenses: Illinois, Los Angeles, New York State. “I’m a friend of Mr. Lawford’s, and of the president and the attorney general.”

That got something that might have been a smile out of the older one. I wondered what branch they were. Was there a permanent fed detail attached to keep an eye on the presidential relatives who lived here?

The younger one, who hadn’t said anything, departed, heading to a black Ford Galaxie parked two down from my Jag.

“Black suit,” I said to the guy on my right, “black tie, black sedan? You guys really know how to blend in here in sunny Cal.”

“Who says we’re trying to blend in?”

“Well, the sunglasses are a start. What if I asked to see your credentials?”

“You could ask.”

I didn’t.

But it only took five minutes for me to be cleared, and I didn’t even have to knock again, as a smiling and slightly chagrined Patricia Kennedy Lawford opened the door on us.

“Mr. Heller,” she said pleasantly, offering a hand for me to take and shake. “Nate. Nice to see you again.”

Pat Lawford wasn’t beautiful—too much Kennedy in her face—but she was certainly striking, tall, slender, not yet forty, fetchingly casual in a blue-and-white striped top and matching blue capris with white Keds.

“Sorry to stop by without calling, Mrs. Lawford. It’s important I see Peter.”

“Certainly, and it’s Pat, of course.”

She opened the door for me, and nodded and smiled tightly at the men in black.

“See you at the company picnic,” I told them, and then the door was closed on them. “Are they always here?”

“Sometimes they’re here,” she said, with a smile that had just enough crinkles in it to say that was none of my business.

I had been inside this house before. I knew it had a dozen rooms and yet managed to have a nice lived-in, comfortable feel while reeking of money.

The Lawfords had intimate parties two or three times a week, dinner and games and cards, with poker usually reserved strictly for “boys’ nights in.” I was not a regular, by any means, nor was I stranger. I’d been here often enough to know Pat made a great beef stew, and Peter’s specialty was liver and bacon with Brussels sprouts. The latter dish was enough to make some invitees inquire on the phone who tonight’s chef would be—Pat, Peter, or their cook.

Also, I was aware Pat could be moody. I’d seen her warm, I’d seen her hostile, I’d seen her indifferent. And I’d seen all that just being here maybe half a dozen times in three years. Today—despite being unsure whether to call me “Mr. Heller” or “Nate”—she was gracious, moving through the spacious, curving living room with windows on the ocean and French doors to wrought-iron balconies.

“Is Peter expecting you?” she asked, glancing back at me.

“No. This is something that just came up. I wouldn’t be so rude as to drop by this late in the day if it wasn’t important.”

“Don’t be silly. We haven’t even made dinner plans yet.”

I noticed she stopped short of inviting me to be part of them.

She guided me outside, down some steps onto the generous skirt of an enormous marble swimming pool separated by a fence from the Pacific, whose tide was rushing in just yards away. Down the beach, the voices of young people, teenagers probably, laughed and shouted, distant, like memories.

In a yellow polo shirt, white slacks and sandals, wearing sunglasses, Peter Lawford was semi-reclined in a lounge-style deck chair next to a small white metal table. He was reading Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. That was my first clue to something being amiss—like me, he was more the Harold Robbins type; that had to be Pat’s book.

On the white table was a pitcher of what was probably martinis, but the only glass was in Lawford’s hand. Maybe he was thirsty. The guy did put away a lot of booze, I could testify.

“Well, Nathan Heller,” Lawford said, with a sudden dazzling smile, tossing the book without marking his place, scrambling up to greet me, “this is a pleasant surprise.”

Always Nathan with him, not Nate.

We shook hands, pump-handle style. The last time I’d seen him, I’d taken two hundred bucks off him in poker, so this welcome was warmer than need be. This felt mildly staged, and I had a hunch I knew why.

Lawford looked typically tanned and slender, befitting his recent run as TV’s Thin Man; gray was coming in at the temples, but that was a full head of hair. Not exactly the biggest star in Hollywood, he still had the looks, and a certain grace, though he looked older than his mid-thirties. A limber six feet, he walked me over to a larger white metal table and tossed his sunglasses there—his eyes were as dark as the shades—where two chairs awaited under a white umbrella. Giddy laughter echoed up the beach. Surf rumbled. Sea birds called.

Pat brought over the pitcher of martinis, identifying it as such and asking if I’d like her to bring me a glass, or she could make me something else?

“You’re a gimlet man, if I recall,” she said.

Vodka gimlet, but damned close. I was getting waited on by the president’s sister. Wasn’t I special?

“No, I’m fine, Pat. Thanks. Shouldn’t be here long.”

She smiled tightly; her eyes weren’t as friendly as the rest of her face. “Well, then. I’ll leave you boys to it.”

And she went briskly inside. There was something military about it.

Lawford looked after her fondly. “I’ll never know how I managed that,” he said.

“None of us will,” I admitted, knowing the word was they were desperately unhappy. “I’m going to tell you something off the record.”

“Of course,” he said. He got a gold cigarette case out from his breast pocket, found a lighter in his pants, and lighted up. He didn’t offer me one—he knew I didn’t smoke.

“I can’t give you details without violating the trust of my client,” I said. “There won’t be any details. So don’t ask. All you get is a general warning.”

Now he was frowning. “What is this about, Nathan?”

“If my client wasn’t already compromised, I don’t think I’d even be here. This is a tricky one.”

“All right. Come on, man. Out with it.”

I met his eyes and held them. “I’ve heard the rumors about your brother-in-law and Marilyn.”

“Jack, you mean?”

Well, I didn’t mean Bobby.

He was shrugging and saying lightly, “You know this town, Nathan. The rumor mill. Half of it is nonsense.”

“This is part of that other half. I have it on reliable authority that Jack and Marilyn have been intimate. In fact, that they’ve been intimate”—I jerked a thumb toward the nearby sprawl of Spanish beach mansion—“in one or more of those four bedroom suites of yours.”

His smile was a little too broad, and he seemed about to wave it off, but finally my unchanging deadpan got to him.

“People do things,” he said, with a different kind of shrug. What he said next came with a twinkle in the eye and the lilt of a British accent that made it no less crude: “If you were the president, wouldn’t you fuck Marilyn Monroe, if you had the chance?”

“Me being president,” I said, “doesn’t come up that often.”

“I suppose not,” he granted.

“Peter, I don’t know if you know it, but from time to time, I’ve done jobs for your wife’s family. For Jack, and his father. And Bobby and me, we go way back. To Rackets Committee days. All the way back to that asshole McCarthy. That fucking far.”

“I’m aware, Nathan. Why do you think you’re sitting here?”

“Why do you think I’m sitting here?”

That threw him off balance. His chuckle got mixed up with a cigarette cough. “Well … I, uh … assume it’s to be of help.”

“Marilyn is a friend of mine. I really like the girl.”

“So do I! She and Pat are tight—they’re like schoolgirls together.”

That sent a disturbing if not entirely unappealing image flashing through my mind, but never mind.

“So was it a fling?” I asked. “Was Jack just putting another notch in the Kennedy boys’ belt?”

Lawford’s smile crinkled, then curdled. He was looking for words and not finding them. Actors, especially mediocre ones like Peter, need somebody to provide lines.

“Those two together just once,” I said, “is plenty to make a lot of this administration’s enemies happy. I know for a fact, from my own very special point of view, that certain friends of your friend Frank are not thrilled with Bobby making a hobby out of them at the Justice Department.”

Frank was, of course, Sinatra, and those “friends” included Sam Giancana and James Riddle Hoffa.

His smile almost disappeared. “Frank and I aren’t as close as we once were.”

“Yeah. I heard about Palm Springs.”

That seemed to goose him, mildly. His eyes tightened. “What have you heard?”

“Just that Frank remodeled his place there, hung up a ‘President Kennedy Slept Here’ plaque in advance and everything, spending a small fortune turning it into a kind of Camp David, Hollywood-style.”

Lawford’s expression turned melancholy. “That is true.”

“And Bobby put the brakes on with Jack, told him no matter how hard Sinatra’d worked for him, the president of the United States could not be seen hanging out with a known associate of gangsters.”

“… Also true.”

I sat forward. “But, Christ, Peter—did Jack have to stay with Bing Crosby instead? The only competition in Frank’s class?”

Lawford reached for the martini glass, saying, “And a Republican, old boy.”

A Republican old boy was right.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I think Bobby gets carried away with this do-gooder nonsense. Where does he think Old Joe’s money came from?”

Lawford grunted something that was not quite a laugh. “That is the point, Nathan. One must purge one’s self of the sins of the father.”

“Tell that to Jack before he picks out his next movie actress to bang. Or at least tell him to pick one less famous, and less temperamental, than Marilyn.”

Lawford sighed. “Bobby was right, and you’re right, too, Nathan. It wasn’t so much Sinatra himself, you see, or even his associates. Hell, in our nightclub act—you’ve seen it?”

I nodded.

He was smiling, remembering. “Joey would say, ‘Tell them about the good things the Mafia’s been doing, Frank.’ And the audience would roar, and Frank would, too. I mean, it’s a joke. It’s kind of … sexy. Naughty fun.”

I’d been around gangsters in Chicago since I was a kid. And I admit I never thought of them as “naughty fun.”

“Something made Bobby put the kibosh on it,” I said.

“Giancana had stayed there—there in Palm Springs at Frank’s place. Old J. Edgar has the photos in a file. And one could not have the president bedding down where the boss of the Chicago Outfit once slumbered. Could one?”

“Frank could always get a bigger plaque and put both names on.”

He gave that the raspy laugh it deserved, and pressed on: “Jack is a great man. He has a huge heart, and a mind that to me is unfathomable in its brilliance. And the pain he’s in—do you know, Nathan, that he almost always wears a back brace?”

“Yeah. Except when he’s fucking, which is a good deal of the time. I also know he’s got Addison’s disease, and was given the last rites four times before he ran for Congress. Public has no idea of the state of his health. The VD, for example.”

Lawford looked pale despite the tan. “How do you know these things, Nathan?”

“Hell, who do you think covered them up? Answer me, Peter—is it a fling, or is this affair ongoing, Marilyn and Jack?”

“It, uh … was ongoing. It’s either over, or tapering off. Fling doesn’t quite cover it. It goes back farther than you might imagine, Nathan—unless you already know that.”

“No. Nobody hired me to cover this up. Yet.”

Lawford was staring, but not at me. “Started back in the fifties. I was at the party where she flirted with Jack and Jack flirted with her and DiMaggio just fumed.” He sipped the martini and smiled. “I’ll tell you something funny, Nathan … about Palm Springs?”

“Sure. I can always use a laugh.”

“At Bing Crosby’s? Marilyn was there. Openly with Jack. Playing goddamn hostess. My God, how the word hasn’t gotten out, I’ll never know.”

I didn’t shock easily, but I admit this news threw me. “Bobby forbids him to sleep at Sinatra’s, but it’s okay to screw Marilyn at Der Bingle’s? You have any aspirin, Pete?”

“I keep myself well-supplied in painkillers.”

“Maybe Crosby should put a plaque over that bed.” I shifted on the metal chair. The sun was setting fire to the ocean. “Why is Sinatra pissed at you?”

“You know Frank and his temper.”

“I know Frank and his temper, but I also know Frank sees you as his entrée to the Kennedys.”

He winced. “I’m afraid that relationship is strained at the moment, as well—not over, merely strained. Anyway, I was finally elected for something in this family.”

“What?”

His expression was wry. “To deliver the bad news to Frank.”

My eyebrows went up. “That Jack was going to stay with Crosby, not him?”

“Yes.”

“And he took it well.”

Lawford studied the remains of his martini as if reading tea leaves. “I understand he took a sledgehammer out to the cement helicopter pad he’d had constructed for the president, and broke it up into little pieces.”

That made me smile.

“It’s not funny, Nathan.”

“It’s kind of funny, Peter.”

He sighed. Took another draw on his cigarette, then sighed again, with smoke this time.

“What else?” he asked.

“I really am here to help,” I said. “That’s why I’m telling you that Marilyn’s place has been bugged.”

I’d expected more of a reaction, but all I got was him twitching a sort of noncommittal smile.

“Really,” Lawford said. “Well, that’s interesting. Who by?”

So that didn’t worry him. But he was interested.

“Apparently,” I said, “everybody but the Boy Scouts of America, and I haven’t ruled them out. Maybe by you or your in-laws, I don’t know. But I’m here to pass along one of those words to the wise you hear so much about.”

“All right.”

“Tell that reckless son of a bitch in the White House to use some discretion for a goddamn fucking change.”

Lawford chuckled dryly. “As if he’d listen to me. As if he’d listen to anyone … But Nathan, I do thank you for this.”

He started to rise, assuming I was done, but I waved him back to his chair. He frowned and drew on his cigarette.

“Something else?” he asked.

“Yeah. But maybe I can spare myself the bother of telling this twice.”

“How so?”

“I think I ought to share this with your houseguest.”

He half-smiled again, but the eyes weren’t twinkling. “And what houseguest would that be?”

“I don’t know. It’s either Jack or Bobby. Was that Secret Service or FBI out there?”