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 She had her usual withdrawn, otherworldly air; but there was something else, too—was she frightened?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 no
ndescript 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.
CHAPTER 15
By mid-morning, Sorrento Beach—the sun high and hot over white sands blemished only by that distinctive seaweed the tide insisted upon delivering—had been invaded by skimpy-suited girls and boys and brightly colored umbrellas and beach chairs and, of course, volleyball nets.
A Top 40 station was doing a live feed from a kiosk, loudspeakers bombarding the kids with rock ’n’ roll. Right now those who weren’t knocking a ball across a net were twisting right there on the beach to “Irresistible You.” Plenty of girls had the sort of platinum hair and stylized makeup Marilyn had made famous. Plenty of others were doing the Liz Taylor Cleopatra bit, before anybody knew if that movie would ever get finished, much less released.
A surprising number of kids were sitting on the sand reading a newspaper—not something you saw on this or any beach every day, but this wasn’t just any day, was it? Some were even handling the papers with care, when finished reading, folding and covering them with a towel or putting them inside a side pouch of a bag with other precious items like suntan lotion, insect repellent, or cigarettes.
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