I cut in: “Nembutal. That’s the brand name of pentobarbital.”
“Right—and we’re talking about an abnormally large concentration of the stuff.” She referred to her notes again. “There were eight prescription bottles found at her bedside, including an empty container for twenty-five Nembutal. Also, a chloral hydrate container with ten pills remaining.”
Jesse had brought coffee and I sipped some. “I assume Curphey performed this autopsy himself…?”
“No. A young fellow, Noguchi, fairly new. There’s only three full-time pathologists on staff.”
“Did this Jap call it a suicide?”
“At first. Then, when things didn’t add up—literally add up—he sent tissue samples for further analysis. Kidney, stomach, urine, intestines. Those aren’t back yet, my contact tells me.”
“What do you mean, literally didn’t add up?”
The columnist folded her hands. “For Marilyn to have overdosed—whether accidentally or on purpose—she would have to have taken fifty to seventy chloral hydrate pills, and seventy-five to ninety Nembutals.”
I couldn’t find anything to say.
“My contact quotes Noguchi as saying there were enough drugs in Marilyn Monroe to kill any three persons.” She again leaned forward. “Nate, do you think she could have taken—physically taken—a minimum of one hundred twenty-five pills?”
“No,” I said flatly. “She’d have had to take them very, very quickly—mouthfuls, swallowing, gulping them and still manage not to … puke.”
That last word was spoken softly, as this was a restaurant, after all.
I went on: “And if she’d taken them a few at a time, she’d be unconscious, or maybe dead, before swallowing enough to reach the extreme level of barbs you’re talking about.”
Flo gave me a crisp nod, then said, “Thing is, she only had twenty-four Nembutal in the house, at most—that was her prescription, which she’d filled on Friday.”
“And there were ten chloral hydrates left in that pill container,” I said hollowly. “Could she have injected herself?”
She shrugged. “Well, Marilyn died in a locked room, supposedly, and no hypodermic was found.”
“I don’t think it was locked. Somebody else could have injected her.”
“Maybe.” Her eyes narrowed, blue glittering from the slits. “Here’s a small mystery. I call it ‘small’ because I do think it can be cleared up. Noguchi claims to have gone over every inch of her with a magnifying glass, and saw no injection marks. But there are several problems with that.”
I nodded. “There are plenty of places hard to detect an injection—on an existing bruise, for example, and she was splotched as hell, with lividity. She may have had existing bruises. Also under the arm, bunch of places.”
“And Noguchi just didn’t see it, magnifying glass or not.”
I leaned toward her. “Something’s not right, because I know Marilyn was getting regular injections from this character Engelberg, for her sinus and cold problems. Liver extract and vitamins. She almost certainly had an injection within a day or two of dying.”
“Are you sure that’s what the injections were?”
“No,” I admitted. “Far as I know, Engelberg could be one of these Dr. Feelgoods. Enough stars and politicians take magic shots from quacks to make that a possibility.”
“But Engelberg didn’t get there till after Marilyn was gone.”
I shrugged. “How do we know? Who the hell can say how many people were running in and out of there, all night? What little I heard Sunday morning was riddled with lies and half-truths.”
Like Pat Newcomb saying she left Marilyn’s place late in the afternoon, and that Marilyn was in great spirits. But I knew Marilyn was unhappy as hell then, because of her fight with Bobby. Unhappy enough to have her shrink make an emergency house call.
And Mrs. Murray had been playing tricks with time that H. G. Wells might have envied.
“There’s one more really interesting item,” Flo said. She was having another martini, and sipped it. “Noguchi found almost nothing in her stomach. A small quantity of liquid, he said. No sign of heavy drugs or sedatives.”
“No pill residue? Don’t they call those Nembutals ‘yellow jackets’—for the yellow in the gelatin? Shouldn’t there be yellow dye?”
“Yes. But there was no residue. No evidence of pills in the stomach or small intestine. No…” She checked her notes. “… No ‘refractile crystals.’ Whatever that means.”
“I think it just means any sign of reaction.” I shifted in the booth. “Okay. Yeah, well, this smells.”
“Funny you should say that, because it doesn’t smell. Not of what it should smell—victims who ingest chloral hydrate give off a powerful pearl-like odor. Noguchi notes its absence. What he doesn’t note is what that absence of odor strongly implies.”
“Death by injection,” I said.
She sipped her cocktail.
I sipped my coffee.
Then she smiled at me; not a broad smile, just a small, friendly one.
“So, Nate—whose friend are you? Mine? Bobby’s? Marilyn’s?”
“… You’ve told me a lot, Flo. But you haven’t told me why you’re telling me.…”
No smile at all now. “I want to hire you. I can only do so much myself, and I don’t want to use any other reporter on this. Anybody seasoned could steal it out from under me. Anybody who’s green isn’t good enough. I’m going to run after this on my own pretty legs, but I need help. And you know why I need help—we’re already behind the clock.”
With every day that passes, an unsolved murder is more likely to stay that way. The first twenty-fours are critical, and we’d lost those. After the first week, your odds drop precipitously.
“You know it’s risky, using me,” I said. “Maybe Bobby’s already hired me to help cover this up.”
The biggest favor you can do me, Nate, is to just stay out of this.
“Cover up what? If this is about Marilyn and Bobby having a fling, and Marilyn getting depressed and killing herself, that’s a big story. Yes. Might even cost the Kennedys the next election. Might. But if it’s a murder, and the Kennedys are covering it up … which would imply that the Kennedys made that murder happen … Well, Nate, whose friend are you?”
You could picture it, the beautiful blonde sitting at the wood-and-glass bar next to her famous ballplayer husband, and some fans come up and they don’t even care about Marilyn. Funny. Absurd. Fucking comical.
But somebody had to care about Marilyn.
“Can you afford a retainer of two thousand?” I asked her.
She made out the check.
CHAPTER 17
The Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills provided a beautiful little oasis forming a triangle between busy intersections at the north end of Rodeo Drive. The landscaping was lush, the fountains bubbling, the trees majestic, the flowerbeds plentiful. And for a meeting with Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the LAPD, the location couldn’t have been more convenient for me—the park had once been the five-acre front lawn of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
With a gentle wind whispering through the copious trees, Clemmons and I sat with the sun at our backs on a wrought-iron bench near the big central fountain, where colorful Japanese fish provided a touch of the exotic.
The off-duty cop did not look in the least exotic, or even like he belonged anywhere near Beverly Hills in his short-sleeve red-and-black plaid shirt and Levi’s. I was still in the suit I’d worn to Musso’s, albeit with tie loosened, as this meeting was taking place in the early afternoon of that same day.
Flo Kilgore had provided me with Clemmons’ home number, warning me she hadn’t reached him yet, but I got lucky and caught him right away. He worked midnight to eight, and normally slept from about nine till 4:00 P.M., but I’d reached him much earlier.
“Haven’t been sleeping so good last few days,” he’d told me on the phone. “So, then, what? You’re working for the Monroe estate?�
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“No,” I said. “I don’t even know who that would be. Marilyn’s mother is in the loony bin and she has a half sister somewhere.”
At no time in this investigation did I tell anyone I was working for a reporter.
I went on: “I was doing security for Marilyn, and looking into some things for her. She was my client and I feel like I owe it to her to ask a few questions that nobody else seems to be.”
There had been a long pause. If he was caught up in Captain James Hamilton’s cover-up, this was where Clemmons would have hung up on me. A good sign when he didn’t.
And now we were sitting on that iron bench. On a weekday, there were more squirrels than people here, and the frothing fountain provided nice noise to cover up our conversation. So did horn honks and other car sounds from nearby Sunset Boulevard.
My companion was a cop right out of Central Casting—about forty, square-shouldered, square-jawed, flinty-eyed, with a narrow line for a mouth, speaking in a no-nonsense second tenor.
“I came on duty as watch commander at the substation at midnight,” Sergeant Clemmons said.
He sat comfortably, nothing tense about his body language, though his eyes were tight and his tone carried an edge. Only occasionally did he look right at me, mostly staring into his thoughts.
“Routine night,” he was saying. “Slow as hell. Had my feet up when the phone rang well after four A.M.”
Clemmons said he didn’t understand the caller at first, a male with “a European accent.”
“Guy is agitated, talking real fast. I ask him to calm down, slow down. He says all right, and there’s this pause you coulda hung a hammock in. And then he tells me Marilyn Monroe is dead. That she’d committed suicide. Well, that woke me up, all right. But my first thought is, it’s a damn hoax. So I ask him to identify himself.”
The caller said he was Dr. Ralph Greenson, “Miss Monroe’s psychiatrist.” Clemmons asked for the address and said he’d be right over.
“My mind was racing,” he said, with the tiniest smile. “I mean, you can imagine—if this thing was on the level, all hell would break loose. So I go out there myself, and don’t waste any time about it. No need for a siren, though—streets deserted, and if she really was dead, Marilyn Monroe wasn’t going anywhere.”
When he turned down the little dead-end alley of Fifth Helena Drive, he found the gates open, and pulled into the brick courtyard. A few cars were there, and he apologized to me that he didn’t spend any time committing their makes to memory or writing down any license numbers.
“But then, there were no lights on at all outside the Monroe house,” he said. “Porch and garage all dark. Not even pool lights, and damn few on in the house. Only sounds were police calls from my radio and a dog barking.”
Maf, Marilyn’s poodle, most likely.
“So I go up and knock on the door. I can hear footsteps, more than one person whispering, but I must have stood there a full minute before the porch light comes on and that Murray woman answers.” He shook his head. “She was a hell of a character—all whispery and nervous and afraid of her own shadow.”
“How did that strike you, her odd demeanor?”
“To me, she seemed dishonest right off the bat. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong, Mr. Heller, not right then … but I knew something was off about the woman.”
Immediately the housekeeper led the police sergeant to the bedroom, “very near the front door, actually,” where a sheet-covered body sprawled across the bed. A shock of platinum-blonde hair poked up onto a pillow.
“The two doctors were waiting for me in there,” Clemmons said. “This taller doc, Engelberg, distinguished-looking fella, he’d pulled a chair up and was sitting near the bed. The other doc, smaller, with a mustache, was standing over by the nightstand—that was Greenson. He introduced himself. He was the guy on the phone, all right, with the Dr. Freud accent.”
The psychiatrist simply said to the officer, “She committed suicide,” then pointed out an empty container of Nembutal at the woman’s bedside. “She took all of those.”
The sergeant drew back the sheet revealing what proved to be a naked Marilyn Monroe, but “with no makeup, and splotched with lividity.”
“She was lying facedown in what I call the soldier’s position,” he said. “Her face against a pillow, arms by her side, right arm slightly bent. Legs stretched out perfectly straight.”
What I’d seen.
I asked, “And how did that strike you?”
“Hinky as hell. If she OD’ed on barbs, she’d be all twisted up. I’ve seen dozens of them. Wrong. Dead wrong.” He shifted on the bench. “Then I asked ’em if the body had been moved. You could tell from the dual lividity she had been. And these lying bastards, both of them, say no, she hasn’t been moved. This is how they found her.”
“Both said that.”
“Yeah. Well, the little guy, Greenson, he kind of took charge. The taller guy seemed in a real funk. Not talkative at all. Whereas this Greenson character…” He shook his head, smirked humorlessly, and for once looked directly at me. “… He was cocky, almost daring me to accuse him of something. I kept thinking, ‘What the hell’s wrong with this guy?’ It just didn’t fit the situation.”
“What’s your take on the scene itself?”
“That it was the most obviously staged death scene I ever saw. The pill bottles were arranged in neat order and the body deliberately positioned. It all looked too damn tidy.”
“Tidy? Really?”
“Yeah. Everything was neat. I of course looked for a suicide note, but there wasn’t one, weren’t any documents, no scripts, no notebooks, nothing like that.”
But just an hour later, I had seen a very messy bedroom, with plenty of scripts and books—although, perhaps significantly, I had not seen any of Marilyn’s spiral-bound notebooks.
Had somebody searched the place, and then tidied it? And someone later searched it again, and messed it back up? Or even worked on the scene to make it look less staged, so a pro like Clemmons wouldn’t pick up on it? Curiouser and curiouser.
Clemmons had then asked the doctors if they’d tried to revive her, and they both claimed it had been too late. Neither would hazard a guess what time she took the pills.
He was looking at me again. “If you’re a private detective, Mr. Heller, I assume you’re an ex-cop. Am I right?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Well, in your experience, at a death scene where the victim’s doctor is present, whether accident, suicide, or even murder, weren’t the doctors helpful? Trying to be as informative as they could?”
“That’s pretty standard.”
“Well, these two had to be interrogated like goddamn suspects.”
Maybe that’s what they were.
“Something else strange—there was no drinking glass in that bedroom for her to have taken a single damn pill, let alone handfuls.”
“There was when I visited the scene, maybe an hour after you did.”
“Then it was planted. But that’s not the really strange thing—her bathroom? Where she would run a glass of water to take those pills? There was plumbing work in progress. You know, she was having a lot of repairs and remodeling done on the old place.”
“Right. Plumbing work. So what?”
“So the water in her bathroom was off.”
I gaped at him.
“It’s the truth, Mr. Heller. Turned off. She couldn’t have run a glass of water to save her life, never mind take it. She couldn’t use that bathroom, if she had to pee, either—she’d have to run down the hall.”
“Did you ask the doctors whether Marilyn took injections?”
“Yeah I did. Greenson never gave her any, but she was getting some kind of vitamin shot from Engelberg, had done so the day before she died, in fact. Both claimed she didn’t inject herself. And I didn’t see any needles around.”
He fell silent.
I prompted him: “Was that it? Did you searc
h the house?”
“I gave the place a quick look,” he said with a gloomy shrug. “I was the first officer on the scene, but I’m not a detective. Didn’t spend much time doing it, and didn’t check the guest cottage, either … though, and this may sound crazy, I had this kind of sixth-sense feeling there were people out there. And I would have checked, but I got sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked how?”
“By seeing light coming from the garage, where I did check when I went looking for Mrs. Murray.”
“Looking for her?”
“Yeah. The biddy slipped away while I was questioning the docs in the death bedroom. So where do I find her? Out in the garage, the door up, where the washer and drier are. And she’s washing a load of clothes! She’d already washed one load and folded the linens and is doing a second, preparing a third!”
“Do you think the sheets on the bed were changed?”
“Maybe. Maybe the poor girl soiled them. Lots do, when they die. Maybe it was out of some sense of preserving a star’s dignity. I don’t know. And I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t think to ask, I was so flummoxed by it.”
“But you did question Murray, right?”
“Oh yeah, right there in the garage. While she folded fucking towels, pardon my French.”
The story she’d told Clemmons mirrored the one she had told Lieutenant Armstrong Sunday morning in Marilyn’s breakfast nook, but with one significant difference.
“Mrs. Murray said she found the body around midnight, and that she immediately called Dr. Greenson, who arrived about half an hour later.”
“Did she say why she checked on Marilyn at midnight?”
“Yeah, and that also was odd. She said the light was on under Marilyn’s door, and the phone cord was running under, all the way down the hall from this spare bedroom where the two phones were. Okay, now first of all—”
“The thick-pile carpet prevented Murray from seeing a crack of light under the door.”
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