CHAPTER 14

 

The morning was bright and remarkably clear for smoggy Los Angeles, pleasantly warm thanks to desert winds, though experience said by midday we’d have a scorcher.

It was pushing 6:00 A.M. when I followed a cream-colored, somewhat battered Ford van down the dead-end that was Fifth Helena Drive. The vehicle’s side panels said WESTWOOD VILLAGE MORTUARY—no Roger Pryor fake-out, this was the genuine article, and a potentially nice piece of luck for me.

The van nosed through a gathering crowd of press and gawkers at the scallop-topped wooden gates. Two uniformed cops were on sentry duty and immediately opened up for the mortuary wagon, my Jag practically kissing its rear bumper. My window was down and the young cop I passed gave me a look as I glided by.

I nodded, said, “Coroner’s office,” and he nodded back and returned his attention to the swarm of neighbors and reporters.

I’d spotted a few familiar faces in that crowd—Tommy Thompson, Life’s Beverly Hills man; showbiz columnist Jim Bacon of the Associated Press; Flo Kilgore, the New York Herald Tribune Hollywood correspondent. Flo was a brunette in her forties with pretty eyes, a weak chin, and a nice shape—I’d been out with her a few times, between husbands (she had just ditched her fourth). Wasn’t sure if she’d made me, as I passed through the Fifth Helena portals.

But her presence, and that of those other famous ink slingers, was no surprise to me. On the radio on the way over I’d already heard the following: “Marilyn Monroe is dead of suicide at age thirty-six. We grasp at straws as if knowing how she died will bring her back. Not since Jean Harlow have the standards of feminine beauty been so embodied in one woman. Marilyn Monroe—dead at thirty-six.”

For a news bulletin, that had been pretty studied; but with Marilyn’s history of overdoses and other melodrama (as Sinatra put it), all the news services would have obits on file and even squibs like that, ready to go.

What really disturbed me was that flat pronouncement of suicide. If I was following a mortuary wagon in, then the body was still in the house. A little early in the game for a verdict, even from the newshounds.

I backed the Jag around so I’d be facing out if I had to beat a hasty retreat. For a moment my path was blocked by a pudgy guy in a suit walking Marilyn’s little white mutt off somewhere. But I still managed to follow the two mortuary reps across the brick courtyard and into the house. Both wore the expected black suits and ties, slim, nondescript messengers of death—one shorter, fiftyish, Brylcreemed and bespectacled, the other a beanpole no more than twenty, with a flattop and his mouth hanging open.

Except for a quartet of milling uniformed cops, who just nodded at us as we came in, the living room was empty, Marilyn’s Mexican-flavored decorations doing nothing to make the occasion less somber. Muffled conversation came from the direction of the dining room—I thought I picked out Pat Newcomb’s voice, and maybe the indistinct murmur that characterized housekeeper Murray.

The two mortuary reps paused, probably to ask where the bedroom was, and I pitched in: “Just to your right.” Making the turn into the nearby hallway, we saw two uniformed cops posted in the hall, one at her door. Nobody questioned it when I followed the black-clad duo inside the master bedroom, stepping over the long phone cord that led back to the fitting room.

A sheet had been pulled over Marilyn’s body, with just tufts of her hair visible against a like-colored pillow. The older mortician carefully drew back the sheet and gathered it at the feet of the naked woman who was lying facedown, diagonally, toes bottom right, head top left and turned left, right arm bent, legs straight. Against her pale flesh, the bruising of lividity was stark.

“She’s been moved,” I said to the mortician.

He expressed no opinion.

Not that it was a matter of opinion: blood pools in the body when the heart stops pumping. If you die facedown, blood will settle along your chest. And she showed that distinctive bruised look on her face and neck, so had probably died facedown. Okay. Then why was there also lividity along her back? And the back of her legs and arms?

It takes four hours for lividity to reach a fixed state. Any movement of the body within that time frame would result in that bruised look. She seemed posed, as if to show she’d been talking or trying to get somebody on the phone, a hand hovering off the bed over a dropped receiver on the carpeted floor.

But if she’d overdosed on barbiturates, she would have suffered convulsions, and died in a contorted position. Not this gracefully tragic one, which was as studied as that radio bulletin.

Her entire body, save for the lividity-touched areas, had a bluish cast, as if she’d frozen to death, and her nails looked dark and dirty, probably from gardening.

The rest of the underfurnished space was a mess, much messier than I’d seen it on prior visits. A drinking glass on the floor near the bed, the phone and receiver (near her left hand), clutter on the nightstand (though pill bottles stood like little soldiers), letters and books and magazines on the floor, purses against one wall, very junky. No sign of her spiral notebooks, though.

Had the room been tossed?

“Rigor’s set in,” I noted.

This time the mortician replied: “Advanced.”

“Time of death, educated guess?”

He adjusted his glasses and checked his watch; his mouth moved silently with math.

Then he said, “Between nine thirty and eleven thirty last night.” He shook his head, giving the naked, bruised body a sorrowful look. “It’ll take a while to straighten her out and get her on the gurney.”

The young mortuary guy said, “Jeez, Pop, she just looks like some girl. Not Marilyn Monroe.”

So it was a family business. That was heartwarming.

Pop was getting a paper bag out of his pocket and brushing the pills into it; they were rattling, the bottles mostly full, apparently.

“Hey!” I said. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Collecting evidence for the coroner, Detective.”

I guessed “detective” would do fine as a designation for me. Anyway, it was too late to stop him; maybe that sweeping motion had preserved some fingerprints.

Father and son were starting the grisly task of bending the dead woman’s stiff limbs into the desired position, and I’d had about enough. Before I left, I noticed something odd—Marilyn’s black-out curtains were brushed aside, revealing that a window had been broken, and some boards haphazardly put up on the outside.

In the hallway, I asked the uniformed guy what the deal was with the window.

“Marilyn’s shrink had to break in.” He gestured with a thumb at the door he was leaning against. “This was locked.”

“Really?” I took a look at the keyhole lock. “So who cleaned up the glass?”

“Huh? Nobody cleaned up the glass.”

“Well, if he broke in from outside, there’d be glass on the floor. There isn’t any.”

He just shrugged. “That’s for you detectives to scope out.”

Everybody thought I was a detective. I guessed I was a detective. Here I thought I was with the coroner’s office.…

The dining room turned out to be the holding area for people waiting to be questioned. Under a swag-chained star of frosted glass and leaded copper, at a big rustic round wooden table with a handcrafted look, sat four people who might have been attending a séance.

Shell-shocked Pat Newcomb, her dark blonde hair a mess, wore sunglasses and pajamas under a tan raincoat. Jowly, dark-haired, dark-eyed Mickey Rudin (Marilyn’s attorney as well as Sinatra’s) looked professional and put-upon in a brown suit and loosened tie. A somber horse-faced guy about fifty (Dr. Hyman Engelberg, I later learned) wore a sport coat and no tie. And Ichabod Crane–ish handyman Norman Jefferies, in a dark sweater over a dark button-down shirt, sat with hands folded, like he was saying grace.

Two detectives had set up a temporary HQ in the nearby kitchen. A young plainclothes dick, taking notes, had borrowed one of the wooden chairs from the dining room table, and positioned it several feet away from the trestle table by the window that served as a breakfast nook. Another plainclothes cop, seated on a bench at that table, had his back to me as I entered, and across from him sat Mrs. Murray, looking like your least favorite grade-school teacher.

It wasn’t at all secure—you could hear some of what was being said out in the dining room, I’d noticed, although with whispery Mrs. Murray you didn’t get much. You barely picked it up in the room with her. She was wearing a sort of Aztec-pattern poncho (almost certainly a gift from Marilyn) over a simple cream-colored dress.

I moved to the Hotpoint fridge where I could get a side view of the detective doing the interview. I was pleased and relieved to see that these officers were not intel—likely from the West Los Angeles Detective Division, since the guy asking the questions was Lt. Grover Armstrong, who ran it.

Armstrong I knew, but the younger guy no, and he climbed out of his chair and demanded who I was, since after all I was just somebody who’d wandered unbidden out into the kitchen. He didn’t look bright, a crew-cut former jock, but I gave him credit for being the first person to really question my presence.

I didn’t bother answering the kid. I just waited for heavyset, fortyish Armstrong to swivel his bucket head and recognize me. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies, either.

Mildly irritated by the interruption, he excused himself to Mrs. Murray and slid off the bench onto his feet and faced me, hands doing Superman on his hips. His suit was brown and baggy but his tie was fresh and crisply knotted.

“What are you doing here, Nate?”

“I was on a job for Marilyn. I heard about this and came over.”

“How’d you get in?”

“I lied.”

That seemed an acceptable answer to the seasoned copper. “What kind of a job?”

Over in the breakfast nook, from behind her cat’s-eye glasses, Mrs. Murray was gazing at me with undisguised contempt, certain I was about to betray Marilyn.

“Helping out on security,” I said.

The younger officer already didn’t like me. He said, “Yeah? Helping how?”

“That gate out front? My idea.”

The kid was staring at me, searching for sarcasm. He wasn’t that good a detective.

Armstrong was studying me. Then he said, “You know these people?”

“Some of them.”

“You want to sit in on the interviews? If something strikes you, you can even ask a question.”

“I’d like that.”

He gestured to his side of the bench. “Come on in, then.”

I sat next to him, and Mrs. Murray made a point of not looking at me as she said, “He’s not a policeman.”

“No,” Armstrong said, right across from her, “but he’s a professional detective and Miss Monroe hired him in that capacity.”

That’s all he gave her.

“I need to back up,” Armstrong said. “You told the first officer on the scene, Officer Clemmons, that you discovered something was wrong with Miss Monroe around midnight. But the police weren’t called till four twenty-five A.M.”

“I was mistaken,” she said with the kind of patient little smile a grandmother gives a really stupid grandchild. “This was upsetting to me, and I must have lost track of time. It may have been closer to three thirty that I noticed a problem.”

Armstrong’s eyebrows hiked. “You lost track of three and a half hours?”

The smile, ever more inappropriate, turned up at the corners. “You know how it is.”

Armstrong gave me a sideways glance. Neither of us knew how it was.

“So what time,” the lieutenant asked, “did you call Dr. Greenson?”

Speaking of which, where was Greenson? I didn’t interrupt to ask.

“I believe I called him at three thirty-five,” she said. She had her usual withdrawn, otherworldly air; but there was something else, too—was she frightened?

“When did he get here?”

“Oh, Dr. Greenson lives close by—he must have arrived five or ten minutes later.”

Armstrong glanced at the young cop taking this down. The cop showed no reaction to any of this. A witness had just carved three and a half hours off a statement made to another officer only an hour before.

“All right, then,” Armstrong said. “Now that we’ve … corrected the time frame, let’s back up and go over how you first got concerned about Miss Monroe.”

The vague, whispery voice continued: “Certainly. I went to bed about ten o’clock. I’d noticed the light was on under Marilyn’s door, and assumed she was talking on the telephone with a friend, which was not unusual, so I went to bed. I woke up at midnight, and had to use the bathroom. The light was still on under Marilyn’s door, and I became quite concerned. She’d been in bed since late evening and should have been asleep by now. I tried the door, but it was locked, you see.”

“Locked?”

“Yes, from the inside.” She shifted primly, her hands in her lap. “I knocked, but Marilyn didn’t answer. So I called her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, who as I say lives nearby. When he arrived, he too failed to rouse her with his knocking, so he went outside and looked in through the bedroom window. He saw Marilyn lying motionless on the bed, looking peculiar. He broke the window with a fireplace poker I provided, and climbed inside and came around and opened the door. He said, ‘We’ve lost her.’”

“And after that?”

“Dr. Greenson called Dr. Engelberg. Marilyn’s internist. He arrived shortly and pronounced her dead.”

This she had delivered with the emotion of a grocery clerk requesting payment.

“What did you do after finding the body?”

She tossed her head girlishly. “Oh, so many things. I realized there would be hundreds of people involved, and of course I had to dress.” She touched the gay poncho. “All sorts of things to do. I called Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn. I called and asked him to come over immediately and repair the broken window.”

Which he had done by hammering a few boards over it. Before the police arrived.

“Then,” she was saying, and gave a little wave, “I was doing other things. You know how it is.”

“What kind of things?”

“Getting my own possessions together. Why, I’ve practically lived here most of the time these past months, and I have many personal items besides my clothes. There’s a laundry basket of mine here, and I filled it with my things. I really don’t know what else there is I can tell you.”

Marilyn’s housekeeper/companion folded her arms, her sad, sick smile continuing. She had spoken her piece.

“Well—thank you, Mrs. Murray.”

She smiled and nodded, slipped off the bench from behind the trestle table and exited with studied dignity, back into the dining room.

Armstrong sighed, got up and slid in where Mrs. Murray had been, so he could face me.

“Well?” he asked.

“You want to start?”

“No,” he said wearily. “Take a run at it.”

“First of all, how prepared does that story sound? Marilyn was ‘motionless’ and looked ‘peculiar’ … who talks like that?”

He didn’t bother answering.

“And this business about ‘Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn.’ He’s Mrs. Murray’s damn son-in-law.”

“You missed the part,” Armstrong said, almost groaning, “where I tried to get Monroe’s activities for the day out of her. She was vague, downright evasive.”

“Possibly lying. Go take a look at the carpet in that hall—it’s wall-to-wall. The door is flush to it. I may be wrong, but I doubt any light could show under it.”

“I hadn’t noticed that.”

“I take it there was no suicide note.”

“No.”

“Did you find a key in that bedroom?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Lieutenant, this is an old house, with old-fashioned doors and locks. I bet the keys are all long gone. That break-in was staged—how exactly did Dr. Greenson look into a bedroom with black-out curtains over the windows and see a goddamn thing? Plus, no glass on the floor. Was there glass on the ground outside?”

“Yeah.” He gave up a heavy sigh. “So we agree the scene was staged. What do you make of it?”

“Well, it’s probably not murder. Marilyn has a history of this kind of thing. Suicide attempts, girl who cried wolf stuff, but also going overboard with drugs.”

“You see her recently, Nate? Did she seem depressed?”

“I saw her a few days ago. Her career was going great guns.”

“I read she got fired.…”

“She just got rehired, and at a big pay boost.” I shrugged. “She had a few personal problems. In the love-life department. And anybody with that kind of problem can have a bad night and decide to cash it in.”

“Is that what happened here?”

“I’ll be honest, Lieutenant, I hate to think of it ending like that. She was flawed, a cross between a genius and a little girl lost … but she was one of a kind, and I really thought she had a shot at making it over the long haul. It’s small solace, but I think the more likely answer is that she misjudged her self-medication.”

“My understanding is Miss Monroe was a heavy user who knew exactly what she could and could not get away with, in the pharmaceutical area.”

“Normally. But she was clean. She cleaned up for that movie, and—except for sinusitis she was fighting—was healthier than ever. Sure, she had a champagne binge now and then, but as of this last week, the only pills she was on were sleeping pills. Light dosage. Insomnia was the problem, you know.”

He leaned his chin into an elbow-supported hand. “So she had trouble getting to sleep, misjudged, and took too many pills.”

“That’s my guess, Lieutenant. But it’s not a wild one.”

“So not a murder.”

“Probably not a murder.”

He sighed, dropped his hand, shook his big head. “What’s going on, then? The housekeeper first saying ‘around midnight,’ then it’s three thirty.…”

“What do you think, Lieutenant? The docs called the studio when they found her dead—’cause dead or alive, she’s a star and a property, Fox’s property, and the studio wants to stage-manage the scene. If there was a note, they destroyed it—recently they smeared her in the press, and now they’d prefer an accidental death to a suicide where they come up the villain. You’ve been there before—this joint was probably swarming with studio cleanup crew.”

Armstrong knew I was right. “Fucking one-industry town,” he groused. “Waltz into crime scenes and treat ’em like a goddamn movie set.”

“No,” I said. “They respect movie sets. Movie sets they leave alone. Screws with continuity.”

Next up was Mickey Rudin. Milton. I knew him to speak to, but he’d never done any business with me personally or the A-1, either.

The attorney wasn’t exactly fat but it was an effort to get himself squeezed into the nooklike area formed by the trestle table and its benches. His jowls had five o’clock shadow—well, 5:00 A.M. shadow, anyway.

He didn’t wait for a question, just started right in.

“Last evening, eight four sixty-two, my message service received a call at eight twenty-five P.M. that was relayed to me at eight thirty P.M. I was to call Milton Ebbins, an acquaintance of mine who is an agent. Around eight forty-five P.M., I called Mr. Ebbins, who told me he’d received a call from his client Peter Lawford, who stated he had called Miss Monroe about a party she was to have attended at his home on the beach. But Miss Monroe’s voice seemed to fade out, and the connection was broken. Mr. Lawford’s attempts to call her back were unsuccessful, the line busy, and Mr. Ebbins requested that I call Miss Monroe and determine that everything was all right. Short of that, I was to attempt to reach one of her two doctors. At about nine P.M., I tried to call Miss Monroe and the phone was answered by the housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, who assured me that Miss Monroe was all right. That, Lieutenant Armstrong, is all I know.”

After that performance, I damn near expected him to take a bow. But he just gave Armstrong a nod, ignoring me, and worked his way out of the nook, like a piece of shrapnel finding its way through flesh.

This gave the lieutenant time to ask, “Mr. Rudin—what are you doing here now?”

“Dr. Greenson called me. I thought I might be needed.”

Then he was gone.

“Fucking lawyers,” Armstrong said.

I couldn’t disagree.

The young cop ushered Pat Newcomb in next. She almost staggered in, still wearing the sunglasses. She took her position across from Armstrong in the nook, freezing when she saw me. I guess she hadn’t really noticed my presence before.

“Nate Heller?” she said, as if not sure I was me. “What are you doing here?”

There was nothing accusatory in it.

“Just trying to help out, Pat. You can talk freely to Lieutenant Armstrong. He’s one of the good guys.”

Armstrong gave her a serious, supportive smile. “How are you feeling, Miss Newcomb?”

“How the hell do you think I feel, losing my best friend?”

And she began to cry.

I told the young plainclothes kid to get her some Kleenex; he gave me a look that said he didn’t like being ordered around by a private detective, even if that private detective was older and wiser. But he did it.

When she’d gathered herself, Pat said, “I … I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for. What can I tell you?”

I didn’t know whether that last was in the vernacular—as in, what can I say?—or a genuine offer to the investigator.

“How did you happen to be here, Miss Newcomb, when we arrived?”

Her reply seemed, at first, a non sequitur: “I was home sick. I was here yesterday—slept over. Marilyn knew I wasn’t feeling well, fighting a bad case of bronchitis, and offered me a sort of sanctuary. Typical of her, that kind of concern for a friend. ‘You can sun in the back,’ she said, ‘and get all the rest you want, and forget about going to the hospital.’”

“What was her state of mind?”

“She was in wonderful spirits. Very good mood—very happy. Friday night we had a nice dinner at a quiet little restaurant near here. Saturday she was puttering around the house, just getting things done—this was the first home she ever owned herself, you know. It was all apartments and rentals before, and … she was excited, a little girl with a new toy.”

“Can you remember what time you left? And what was her mood then?”

“Probably … five forty-five? Six? Her mood hadn’t changed. She smiled at me from the door and said, ‘See you tomorrow. Toodle-oo!’”

“And you went home?”

“Yes. To bed. Took some medicine. Slept till a phone call woke me, from Mickey Rudin, uh, Milton Rudin. He’s Marilyn’s attorney, but then you must know that, and he’s also Dr. Greenson’s brother-in-law.”

That last I hadn’t known, nor had Armstrong, apparently, based on our exchange of glances. Immediately it explained where the chain of phone calls had begun.

“Mickey … Mr. Rudin … said Marilyn had … had accidentally overdosed.”

Again the lieutenant and I traded looks.

“I came over here and met with my boss, Arthur Jacobs. I’m Marilyn’s publicist. Did I say that? Her publicist. Mr. Jacobs is my boss. It’s his agency.”

“Mr. Jacobs was here?”

“Yes.”

Armstrong frowned. “He was gone by the time my sergeant and I arrived.”

“Well, I know Arthur will cooperate in every way.…”

We heard a commotion in the dining room and then a big craggy guy came barging into the kitchen, a bull in search of a china shop. He wore a gray suit, somewhat rumpled, though not as rumpled as his face.

Pat Newcomb jumped a little, and I might have smiled if our uninvited guest hadn’t been Captain James Hamilton.

“What the hell is this cocksucker doing here?” he demanded in an unmusical baritone, giving me the Uncle Sam Wants You point.

Then his football-sized head—with its slicked-back black hair, small eyes, long knobby nose, jug ears, and Kirk Douglas dimpled chin—acknowledged Pat Newcomb with an apologetic nod.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Well? What’s this cocksucker doing here, Lieutenant?”

“Mr. Heller was working security for Miss Monroe,” Armstrong said, looking back at the superior officer and holding in his anger. “I asked him to sit in on the interviews. He knows some of these folks, and is familiar with the circumstances.”

“Well, whoop-de-doodly-doo,” Hamilton said. “On your feet, Heller. Thanks for your help, get the fuck out. Lieutenant, Intelligence Division is taking over this investigation.”

“Sir?” Armstrong said, swinging out of the bench and onto his feet before I could get to mine.

“Have you got statements from all these people?”

“Yes. Preliminary ones. This is the second round. I’m trying to flesh—”

“I said on your feet, Heller!… Lieutenant, release these people, and you and Sergeant Byron turn your notes over to my men. We’ll take over from here.”

“Yes, sir.” Armstrong moved past me, and Pat slipped out of the nook, quickly, exiting like a thief after a smash and grab.

Hamilton turned his dark little eyes on me, and his Sen Sen breath, too. “Are you still here?”

Twenty years ago I’d have made a wisecrack. Thirty years ago I’d have tried to goad him into laying hands on me so I could collect a few teeth.

“Just going,” I said.

Much as I found Hamilton’s presence odious, that he was here spoke volumes—as the commander of intel, he rarely showed at any crime scene, much less a suicide and never a possible accidental death. Yes, it was Marilyn Monroe, but, still—what brought Chief Parker’s top dog to Fifth Helena?

I was afraid I knew, and it was not anything I’d brought up in my otherwise frank discussion with Lieutenant Armstrong, who’d had a short run indeed as the cop in charge of the Monroe investigation.

We were all escorted out the kitchen door by an intel sergeant whose pockmarks and capped teeth identified him as one of the dicks who’d rousted Roger Pryor in his van.

Then, as we came around the house, we got a last look at Marilyn.…

It was 6:30 A.M. when she was wheeled over the Cursum Perficio tiles and onto the bumpy brick courtyard. She was shrouded in a blue woolen blanket I remembered from her bed, nothing of her showing, though you could make out the shape of her hands folded across her stomach. She appeared tiny. Leather straps held her down by the feet and waist.

The gates were opened by the cops on guard, just as the gurney was being loaded up and into the nondescript van by the father-and-son mortician team. Photographers and reporters rushed in, like a tide taking the shore, and questions were hurled at all of us, overlapping into chaotic unintelligibility, against the strobing of flashbulbs.

Pat Newcomb, reacting to the flashes about as well as King Kong, shouted, “Keep shooting, vultures! Keep shooting!”

Possibly the first time a publicist had ever told the press what she really thought.

As the barrage of shouted questions continued, Pat was getting in on the passenger side of the two-tone green Dodge that either belonged to Norman, who was helping her, or Mrs. Murray, who Norman next guided into the back. Finally the handyman came around and got behind the wheel.

I beat them out, again tailing the mortuary wagon, nagged by a stray thought: hadn’t Pat Newcomb said she’d driven over here? Then where was her car?

Right before I got through the gate and onto Fifth Helena, I caught Flo Kilgore’s knowing smile and a tiny finger-point shooting gesture, Gotcha, that told me I’d be hearing from her soon. There were worse fates to suffer.

Where the little alley of a street emptied onto Carmelina Avenue, Marilyn went one way, and I went the other.

But all the questions her death raised rode with me.