CHAPTER 21

 

Friday morning, I was in a swimsuit and Flo was in a baby blue bikini and we were both in sunglasses, sitting poolside in deck chairs in back of her big white birthday cake of a mansion on Roxbury Drive.

We were working.

I, in fact, had been working since the night before, staying in her house as the inside man with another A-1 agent outside on the street. After the attempt Wednesday night on me (and possibly her) at the hotel bungalow, I felt some precautions were in order. And as for my duties as inside man, I will leave that to your fertile imagination.

In the youthful ponytail again, she was going over notes on a steno pad, her slender tan body pearled with perspiration. As Joe Friday used to say, it was hot in Los Angeles.

“I’m close,” she said, tapping the eraser end of a pencil on her pad. “The puzzle pieces are coming together, even with half of the witnesses leaving town. If one of us could just pin Greenson down, that might do it.”

“May still happen,” I said. “Engelberg would’ve been nice.…”

He was among those who had suddenly decided to take a vacation—or as the doctor’s secretary had put it on the phone, “an extended period of time away from Los Angeles.”

Flo glanced at me over the tops of her Ray-Bans. “We don’t have to solve this mystery, Nate—all we have to do is raise sufficient questions, backed up by facts.”

The nature of my business—and the business of my nature—was solving mysteries; but she was right.

“It’s tough,” I said, “with so much of what we have coming from off-the-record sources.”

“Not all. Both Hazel Washington and Inez Melson had no problem being quoted.”

The Washington woman—Marilyn’s maid at Fox—had seen interesting things at Marilyn’s house when she and her husband had stopped by at around noon Sunday hoping to retrieve a card table and chairs they’d loaned the actress. Four clean-cut young men in dark slacks, white shirts, and mirror-polished Brogans were among an infestation that included uniformed Fox security guards, telephone company technicians, police, and reporters.

Hazel’s husband, Rocky, was an LAPD detective, so the couple got access where others might not have. As Hazel and Rocky hauled their furniture out, they noticed one of the clean-cut quartet burning a big pile of documents in the living room fireplace. Among them were several spiral notebooks.

Executrix Melson took a similar path. Monday morning she had been going through Marilyn’s papers in a file cabinet in the guest cottage, but few papers remained. The file had been broken into, the lock forced, many documents and other items missing. Ironically, one document left behind was a bill from a lock company—in March, Marilyn had changed the lock on the file as well as installed bars on the guest cottage windows.

Flo had called the A-1 Lock and Safe Company of Santa Monica (no relation to the A-1 Detective Agency) and talked her way to the locksmith who’d worked on the cabinet. He told her Marilyn had said in passing she felt things were disappearing from her files.

“Those guys burning papers in the fireplace,” I said, “have to be spooks.”

“Spies, you mean?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that ilk, anyway. CIA, FBI, Secret Service—they could all have an interest in Marilyn.”

“You’re not really suggesting the government could have had Marilyn killed.”

“More likely killed her themselves.”

Somewhere, next door maybe, a transistor radio was playing rock ’n’ roll—right now, “Calendar Girl.”

“Nate, you can’t be serious.…”

“Let’s talk about another kind of government—organized crime. Back in Capone days, the big boss might have said, ‘Bump off that bastard McGurn.’ And McGurn would be bumped. But these are more sophisticated, technological times. You never know who’s listening, who’s watching. So your modern-day Capone says, ‘That bastard McWhozit’s a real problem. Somebody ought to do something about him.’ And somebody does.”

“And you think the president or the attorney general has that kind of power?”

I laughed. “You kidding? A woman who has been intimate with both Jack and Bobby, who has overhead top-level, even top secret conversations? Learning things that no one outside the innermost circle should know?”

She shook her head, ponytail wagging. “I can’t believe that.”

“You don’t want to believe that. The notebooks those clean-cut characters were burning—those were Marilyn’s notes on things Jack and Bobby had shared with her. A kind of a diary—the most dangerous kind imaginable.”

“So then we’re … convinced it’s murder.”

“Somebody tried to murder me, remember? Maybe murder us. That hypo I confiscated from our visitor? Don’t get upset, but—”

“Don’t get upset!”

“It was filled with pure nicotine.”

“Cigarettes nicotine?”

“A lethal drug in sufficient quantity that creates the appearance of a heart attack in its victim. A routine autopsy wouldn’t turn anything up, and a pathologist would have to know what he’s looking for, to spot it.”

“You had it analyzed?”

“I didn’t taste it.”

She sat staring at the blue shimmering water in her pool. “Palisades Park” was coming from the next-door radio. I was fairly certain she was thinking about what a nice life she had, and what a shame it would be to risk losing it, even over the scoop of a lifetime.

“How long,” she said softly, almost timidly, “will you keep your people watching my house?”

“Until your story’s published. You’ll be safe after that. You may be attacked professionally and personally, but your death would be too convenient not to raise suspicion.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Of course, I could just move in.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“I was hoping for kept man.”

She laughed. I could always make her laugh.

My relief came on at noon—an agent who would not work the bedroom beat—and I headed to the A-1.

No message slips on my desk, but I checked with Fred on the office line. “Nothing from Thad Brown?”

“Actually he did call. So far, the nine-mil is not traceable. Serial numbers filed off. He’s turned the Beretta over for possible ballistics match-up with something in their files, but that’ll take forever and a day. The noise suppressor is of course a custom job, and that may lead somewhere. More by tomorrow, maybe.”

The afternoon I spent on the phone chasing associates of Marilyn’s. Makeup artist Whitey Snyder and costume designer William Travilla (one of her personal fashion designers) were glad to talk to me, but had nothing. Her close friend and masseur Ralph Roberts did have some interesting information and insights.

Turned out Roberts and Marilyn were planning to have dinner Saturday evening, and he’d called that afternoon to confirm. He got Dr. Greenson instead, who told him Marilyn was out.

“This Greenson is a goddamn Svengali,” Roberts said. “Very controlling. Marilyn and I’d been friends for years, and he advised her to cut me off. She didn’t, though, bless her heart. Listen, Mr. Heller, I know she was still seeing Greenson—remember, she was more addicted to therapy than pills—but just the same, she was not happy with him. Not for the last couple months.”

“How so?”

“She didn’t think he was doing her any good—not personally, and not professionally.”

“Separate that out for me—‘personally and professionally.’”

“Well, that quack inserted himself into the Fox fiasco, and did her no good at all, playing agent or manager or whatever. What she accomplished, getting that new contract, having Fox come crawling back to her, that was all her. She was brilliant, really, and an incredible businesswoman. Greenson was a detriment, if anything. She was going to get rid of him.”

“Fire him?”

“Definitely. Both him and that awful Murray woman. Did you know Greenson put that woman next to Marilyn just to spy on her?”

“How did you learn that?”

“Marilyn told me.”

Another call was illuminating, too, but in other ways.

The chief fix-it guy at Fox was Frank Neill. He was a onetime police reporter and a sort of in-house private eye for the studio, though he called himself a publicist now.

“Say, Frank. Nate Heller. Tying up some loose ends for Marilyn’s estate. What time did you and your guys get to the house Sunday morning?”

All right, the estate part was a lie, and the whole approach a cheap shot. But you have to try.

“Wasn’t there,” Neill said. “Nobody from the studio was.”

He hung up. No small talk. No good-bye. No chance for me to point out that the neighbors had seen security guards in Fox uniforms, and Dr. Greenson had told Officer Clemmons at the scene that he had called the studio before the cops. Just a click that spoke volumes.

I left my fourth message on Dr. Greenson’s home answering machine, then tried his office. His secretary informed me the doctor would not be in next week, and for several weeks thereafter.

He, too, was going on an “extended” trip away from Los Angeles.

This discouraged but did not defeat me. I began calling every travel agency in town, saying I was Dr. Greenson’s assistant and needed to confirm his reservations. On my fourth try, I learned that he and his wife would be leaving for London on Monday. That gave me the weekend to corner the bastard.

I was the first one to leave the office, well before five. Closer to four. I wanted to shower and make myself handsome before driving over to my ex-wife’s to remind her what a huge mistake she’d made, and to pick my son up for dinner and a movie. Everybody deserves an evening off, right?

Wrong.

I was approaching my car in the underground parking garage near the Bradbury Building, my footsteps echoing in the cavernous cement structure, thinking it was a little eerie to be alone in the underlit catacomb. But when I discovered I wasn’t really alone, it wasn’t reassuring at all.

Two men in sunglasses, well-tailored black suits with black ties, and mirror-polished black shoes, looking distressingly young and clean-cut, stepped out from between cars and quickly bookended me. I was still walking. They walked along.

“Mr. Heller, I wonder if you’d accompany us? There’s someone who would like to talk to you.”

Whatever happened to the good old days, when the guys attempting to kidnap you had cauliflower ears and bent noses and either just blackjacked you or stuck a gun in your ribs and said to get in the fucking trunk?

I of course was not about to go around unarmed, after the needle incident. My suit coat—a Maxwell Street number, tailored to accommodate my shoulder-holstered Browning—was unbuttoned and I had the gun out in a blink and whirled, taking two quick steps back and showing them the long barrel with the black round hole where death comes out.

I was feeling like a private eye again. Peter Gunn. Those 77 Sunset Strip clowns. Even James fucking Bond had nothing on me.

And then I really felt like a private eye, when a third guy I hadn’t seen hit me from behind with something very hard. It didn’t put my lights out, so I can’t provide anything poetic about black pools I dove into. Instead, I just hung puppet-like in midair, undignified as hell, trying not to piss myself, as the first two clean-cut lads held me by the arms, to prevent my hitting the pavement …

… before dragging me to a parked car as black as their suits and stuffing me in the trunk.

Maybe these were the good old days.

*   *   *

The ride was short enough to mean we were still in downtown Los Angeles. When the trunk lid opened, all three were standing there—the third was another clean-cut one, but brawnier, a former college athlete no doubt—and I did not leap out at them and clean their young clocks.

The first two politely helped me out, and apologized several times, one even asking how I felt, though I declined to answer on the grounds that I might humiliate myself. Then they decided to help me out on that score, and—after I’d seen only enough to know I was in another concrete parking garage—blindfolded me.

I was walked along into what my keen sense of hearing told me was an elevator. We went up quite a few floors, and I was guided down what I’m going to guess was a hallway. Here’s where this kidnapping differed from days of yore—I was taken into a small infirmary room, where a doctor removed my blindfold and gave me the fastest medical treatment I’d ever received.

He was a middle-aged man with gray hair and gray eyes and the requisite white coat. He checked where I’d been clobbered, did the routine physical things, blood pressure, heart, ears, eyes, and so on, and said, “No sign of concussion.” He gave me two aspirin, for the headache that I for some strange reason had, but did not advise me to call him in the morning.

Then I was allowed blindfold-free out into an anonymous hallway in an equally anonymous modern building where the first two of my new friends were waiting, looking more human out of their sunglasses, the brawnier one having gone off to pursue other interests.

“Good news, fellas,” I said. “No concussion.”

“That’s excellent news, Mr. Heller.” No irony. No humor. He was maybe twenty-five and had black hair that went well with the suit, and his otherwise bland face bore light blue eyes that were so pretty they were oddly intimidating.

The other one, his twin in blandness, had brown eyes and brown hair that didn’t match the suit. He gestured and said, “Come this way.”

It was a short trip. I was ushered into a darkened room and placed in a chair at a table—this was a conference room, as I’d been able to perceive, before the door shut behind me and cut off all light. The escorts stayed in the room with me, though I wasn’t sure where.

Now the voice of an older man, resonant, God-like, and even more intimidating than my young escort’s blue eyes, said, “Welcome, Mr. Heller. Our apologies for the methods.”

“It’s a new one, anyway. Guys assault you, then take you to the doctor.”

“We had no intention of assaulting you. You produced a weapon.”

“I didn’t produce it, I pulled it. Would I be out of line asking who you people are? Or anyway, who you work for?”

“Mr. Heller, you are here for us to share information with you. But that information would not be helpful to either party.”

“One party being me, the other party being you?”

“That’s correct.” He cleared his throat. “It has come to our attention that you’ve been conducting a private inquiry into the death of Marilyn Monroe.”

“Yeah. It’s personal. She was my client, and I feel a responsibility.”

“I’m sure you do. But the two thousand dollars you deposited in the A-1 Detective Agency’s business account, provided you by journalist Florence Kilgore, no doubt gives you an additional sense of responsibility. To Miss Kilgore, that is.”

Jesus—how many people had been keeping me under surveillance? How good were they all? How lousy had I gotten?

A loud click announced the throwing of a switch, and at the end of the table, not far from where I sat, one of those carousel gizmos that allowed slides to be shown lighted up, and threw a shaft of white at a screen that revealed itself in the process. Also revealed, in spillover light, was my blue-eyed friend, running the projector nearby.

The radio-announcer voice of my hidden host said, “You are a resourceful investigator, Mr. Heller. You have been involved in an improbable number of important, even famous investigations—the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Huey Long assassination, the Black Dahlia murder. The files on you in Washington are thick and impressive.”

That admission was no slip—he wanted me to know this was an official government agency, or people pretending to be part of one. My gut, though, was these were the real spooky deal. Most likely the Company.

“And we have been keeping track of your progress in the Monroe case. Chief Parker hasn’t bothered to assign a homicide team to it, instead giving a civilian board a rather nebulous assignment, designed to pacify the public. You alone seem to be seeking the truth—you and Miss Kilgore, that is.”

“You’re from Washington, so I guess I don’t have to explain this whole freedom-of-the-press inconvenience.”

“Mr. Heller, we’re not adversaries. We encourage you in your efforts.”

“… You do?”

“We just think you could use a little assistance. A nudge in a direction that may prove worthwhile to you.”

An image jumped onto the screen—a black-and-white photo, a surveillance photo dating back many years. From the clothing of the man in the photo, I pinned it as the late ’30s. And it took me a while to recognize him.

“Dr. Romeo Greenschpoon, now known as Dr. Ralph R. Greenson. Nineteen thirty-seven. An active member of the Los Angeles Communist Party.”

Another image leapt on screen: a photograph from the same era that I immediately recognized as of a much younger version of the rather horse-faced Dr. Engelberg.

“One of Dr. Greenson’s closest friends, since those early, early days—Dr. Hyman Engelberg. On occasion they have even shared medical offices. Dr. Engelberg has been a particularly zealous Communist, and in his spare time has been an instructor for the Communist People’s Educational Center in Los Angeles.”

“Excuse me—you have me at a disadvantage,” I told the darkness. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Mr. Smith.”

“Yeah, well, that’s who Capra sent to Washington, right? Look, Hollywood in those days was full of young liberals who got caught up in this Commie stuff. Budding intellectuals who took the Depression as a hint America wasn’t perfect. Plus, they dug the cult of secrecy—aliases, underground meetings, double identities. Youthful follies, says I.”

Mild defensiveness came into the voice: “Both Greenson and Engelberg were highly active in the Hollywood League for Democratic Action, a well-known Communist front.”

I went ahead and laughed at that. “Mr. Smith, that started out as the Anti-Nazi League, if memory serves. This brand of all-American Commie was up in arms about fascism long before Pearl Harbor. I mean, it’s your show—I’m your guest, right? But don’t hand me peanut shells and tell me somebody stole your peanuts.”

That actually got a dry chuckle out of the darkness.

A face flashed on the screen that I didn’t recognize, same era, a young guy in a flannel shirt and denim overalls with a hammer in his hand (no sickle, though).

“Meet John Murray. A carpenter by trade, originally. Before the war, he formed a leftist coalition designed to take over the Hollywood locals. During the war, as a colonel, he worked with a young army psychiatrist who was using Freudian-Marxist techniques and philosophies in dealing with mental casualties of war.”

A slightly older Greenson, in the uniform of an army captain, popped onto the screen.

“That psychiatrist, of course, was Dr. Ralph Greenson, stationed at Fort Logan, Colorado. To give the devil his due, Greenson had great success with many of his patients.”

I must have missed the part where Greenson was shown to be the devil. But I was starting to think I was not a guest of the CIA, rather the FBI. The paranoid, McCarthyesque slant reeked of J. Edgar Hoover.

A more recent photo of Greenson, outside his office, took the screen. Another surveillance photo.

“Greenson, of course, became a successful Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Murray worked and traveled for a company we believe to be a Communist front, most frequently going to Mexico. During the ’50s, despite the House Un-American Activities Committee making a target out of Hollywood, neither Greenson nor Engelberg was dissuaded from pursuing their radical beliefs. Communist cell meetings were frequently held at Greenson’s home, and also at Murray’s Santa Monica home, where he lived with his wife.…”

A younger, more attractive photo of Eunice Murray with her husband, John, outside a modest clapboard home, shimmered on the screen.

“… Eunice.”

Another click announced a more recent picture of Engelberg, this a studio portrait.

“Though he had been particularly active and outspoken, Engelberg finally went deep underground during the rest of the so-called Red Scare years.”

I sighed and said, “Marilyn leaned left, but she was no Commie.”

“Her husband was and is.”

“Her ex-husband Arthur Miller? Far as I’m concerned, he’s just another one of these arty dilettantes. Like Marilyn’s poet pal, Norman Rosten, and for that matter the Strasbergs. What are you trying to convince me of? That a lot of stars and Beverly Hills doctors are politically naive? Sold. By the way, doesn’t your file say my father ran a leftist bookstore on the West Side in Chicago? So obviously I’m a Commie, too, right?”

“These are dangerous people, Mr. Heller. Zealots behind their American masks.”

A blurry color photograph came on of a heavyset guy who seemed vaguely familiar. He wore a Mexican-print shirt and was drinking a beer and smiling at somebody off-camera. Then I pegged it: his features echoed Eunice Murray’s husband.

“This is Churchill Murray, John’s brother, who runs a Communist propaganda radio station in Mexico City. He has countless questionable political contacts, including diplomats from the Cuban and Soviet embassies there.”

Now came a color surveillance photo of a balding guy with glasses and a pipe, talking to Churchill Murray outside a cantina.

“Frederick Vanderbilt Field—great-great-grandson of the railroad tycoon. Notorious silver-spoon Communist who was exposed as a Comintern operative and fled to Mexico City. There he was a mainstay of Zona Rosa, a colony of expatriate Americans, Communists mostly, including John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, and of course Churchill Murray—Eunice Murray’s brother-in-law.”

Wearily I said, “So Marilyn had some extreme leftists in her life. I would imagine that’s true of a lot of Hollywood stars.”

“I’m sure it is, Mr. Heller. But not a lot of Hollywood stars have had intimate access to the president and the attorney general.”

“Now you’re imagining Marilyn is a Commie spy?”

“No. A dupe. And we’re not imagining anything.”

A click announced a very recent picture of a beaming Marilyn at a restaurant table with Vanderbilt Field.

“Field is who Miss Monroe stayed with, Mr. Heller, when she went on her buying trip to Mexico, for new furnishings and decorations for her home, a trip on which Miss Monroe was accompanied by Eunice Murray.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, Mr. Heller—Frederick Vanderbilt Field is an active Soviet agent.”

I didn’t say anything. What had seemed foolish at first had become something real and troubling as hell. Marilyn getting friendly with Field, in the middle of her affairs with Jack and Bobby, had made security risks out of the president and the attorney general.

“We have surveillance tapes in which Field, in the guise of conversation, is heard pumping Miss Monroe for confidential information she learned in discussions with the Kennedy brothers.”

“Was Marilyn forthcoming?”

“She was. From her point of view, she was answering questions from an expatriate longing for news of home. Much of what she and Fields discussed was only tangentially associated with politics, her interest in civil rights for example, or her frustration that Jack Kennedy hadn’t fired J. Edgar Hoover. But she also talked about what she viewed as her own intellectual shortcomings, her desire to quit show business and change her life completely.”

The latter was typical Marilyn, and a daydream she would have under no circumstances pursued, at least not until age caught up with her.

Which now it never would.

“Mr. Heller … frankly, we believe Dr. Ralph Greenson, like Vanderbilt Field, is a Soviet agent. Greenson helped form, and then secretly ran, the National Arts, Sciences and Professions Committee, a major force in promoting Communist ideology on the West Coast. Heading up this group, Greenson has influenced sister organizations like the Doctors Professional Group, of which Engelberg was at one time a prominent member.”

“I thought the government had stopped looking for Reds under every bed.”

“Perhaps under beds, but not in psychiatrists’ offices. It is Soviet espionage policy for cell leaders to have psychiatric training, aiding them in the periodic need to interview key cell members, to appraise their state of mind and continuing loyalty. Mr. Heller, psychoanalysts’ offices around the U.S. have been regularly used by Soviet agents as safe havens for the transfer of intelligence.”

“And I’m supposed to buy that Greenson is one of those?”

“Yes. And to keep in mind that Engelberg is his longtime friend … you might say, comrade. Consider, Mr. Heller—how important a Soviet agent might Greenson prove, having access to the mind of a female who often shares the bed of the president? And/or of the attorney general?”

Well, that I couldn’t bat away with a flip remark.

“We believe that Greenson, with the aid of Engelberg and Mrs. Murray, created a web of influence around Marilyn Monroe devised to gather information from her relationships with the Kennedy brothers.”

“Why are you telling me this, again?”

“To simply aid you in your investigation. Help you avoid going down a blind alley. You see, Mr. Heller, we know that you are a man capable of … rough justice. That people in your life who meet with your disfavor sometimes reach a violent if unexplained end. And in other instances, simply disappear.”

That thick file they said they had on me again. How much did they really know?

“You’ll be free to go, in a very few minutes. Your weapon will be returned to you. First, however, there is something we would like you to hear.”

“Like the Commies say—it’s your party.”

I heard footsteps across from me, and when the radio-announcer voice returned, it was closer than before.

“You spoke to Walter Schaefer yesterday, and he told you a story. You will recall that he did not allow you to speak to the ambulance attendants who figured prominently in that story.”

Christ, whoever they were, they were everywhere.…

“We interviewed the driver. His name is James Hall, and you can seek him out for yourself. Whether he speaks to you frankly or not, we can’t say. But listen to what he told us.…”

A click was followed by the whirring of tape reels.

… happened to be close by, right around the corner practically, when we caught the emergency call. We got there in under two minutes, didn’t even hit the siren. We were met at the front gates of this Mexican-type home by a tall guy, who let us through. Then this frumpy middle-aged lady, leading a poodle on a leash, met us, and led the two of us into this small guest cottage.

That fit Norman Jefferies, Eunice Murray, and, for that matter, Maf.

The lady stayed outside when we went into the cottage, and, brother, did we get the shock of a lifetime. It was Marilyn Monroe, naked, faceup on a folded-out daybed. She was alive, but not in good shape, respiration and heartbeat slight, pulse rapid, weak as hell. To administer CPR, we moved her on the other side of this divider into this sort of foyer area. Wanted to get her on the floor, to provide better support, so we did that, put her on her back and, with an airway tube, started resuscitation.

I had a perfect exchange of air going from Miss Monroe, and her color was coming back, and my partner agreed that it was safe to transport her to a hospital. We were heading out to get the gurney when her doctor showed, medical bag in hand. He had me remove the resuscitator and start mouth-to-mouth. I thought this took us in the wrong direction, but you don’t keep your job in my business disagreeing with doctors. There were no signs of vomit. No distinctive odors. Chloral hydrate, for example, gives you that pear-type odor.

“So the doctor takes this big old heart needle out of his bag and fills it with adrenaline. He tries to inject it into her heart, but apparently the angle was wrong. Needle must’ve hit a rib. Her vital signs were nil at this point, and then the doctor used his stethoscope on her chest, but couldn’t get a heartbeat. He told us he would pronounce her dead, and said we should leave.

A questioner’s voice:

“Did the doctor give you his name?”

“Yeah—Greenson. Her psychiatrist, I think.”

A snap and whirring-to-stop indicated the show was over.

“Well, Mr. Heller?”

“Could be real. Could be a phony. But I can tell you this—the deputy coroner didn’t report any sign of a chipped rib, or a puncture in the area of her heart.”

“Needle marks are easy to miss, particularly with so much lividity. And a ‘Y’ incision in the chest cavity might obliterate any such puncture and possibly any chipped bone.”

I didn’t have a comment.

“That’s all we have for you, Mr. Heller.”

“Time for the blindfold again?”

“Yes. The literal one. We hope, Mr. Heller, that we’ve removed the figurative blindfold, and restored your vision.”