“First thing that nobody knows,” he said, “is I was pretty much there all day. I was remodeling Miss Monroe’s kitchen. Laid new floor tiles, among other things. Funny.”
“Funny?”
“Started out so average, such a nothing day. You never know, do you, when it’s gonna be the worst day of your life? Well, this one was right in there.”
A gull shrieked. A teenage girl laughed. I chewed popcorn.
Jefferies said he’d got to the house on Fifth Helena Drive around 8:30 A.M., and hadn’t left until after dawn Sunday morning, the same time I had.
“The first thing out of the ordinary,” he said, “was this argument between the Newcomb woman and Miss Monroe. It was about loyalty. About whether this Newcomb gal was loyal to her, or to the … you know, the Kennedys.”
“How did this come up?”
“I gathered Miss Monroe—it’s not disrespectful I call her Marilyn, because she let me call her that—Marilyn, she was expecting Bobby Kennedy—you know, the attorney general?”
Marilyn Monroe—you know, the actress?
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“She’d been expecting him to come to the house Friday night. And he hadn’t showed. Way I took it, the Newcomb woman said she could make that happen, only it didn’t. Anyway, she fired her.”
“Who fired … What?”
“Marilyn fired Newcomb.”
“This was when?”
“Just before lunch. Newcomb gal slept till noon. Marilyn, she’d been out gardening in the morning. Also talking to some photographer who wanted to take pictures of her for Playboy. The guy was trying to talk her into it, and I guess she must’ve agreed at some earlier time, and was saying now how she had second thoughts, because of maybe it would make her out a sex object. Is what I gathered.”
“Back to Pat Newcomb.…”
“Okay, Newcomb. They argue, Marilyn fires her, and then I was doing some work outside and missed why, but for some reason the woman is still hanging around all day.”
“Newcomb, you mean.”
“Yeah. Only she spends all her time in that room where the two phones are. Like she’s just waiting for one to ring, and maybe won something or her lab results are in. And in fact she’s still there when Kennedy and Lawford show up, and as far as I know never comes out.”
“When was that?”
“Sometime between three and four. Marilyn had this nice spread of food ready, so she must have expected them. Marilyn looked real nice. Not all movie star decked out, but nice. You were there at the house a few times, Mr. Heller. You know how good she could look, not trying so hard.”
I just nodded.
His eyebrows went up. “Oh, I skipped something that’s maybe important.”
“That’s okay, Norm. Take your time.”
“After lunch, I finished up in the kitchen, and I was loading my tools in my pickup. Never meant to stay all day. But Eunice comes out and she looks like death warmed over.”
This was her son-in-law, so I decided not to point out that Murray always looked like death warmed over.
“She was shaking her head and sighing and so on, and I say, ‘What’s wrong, Eunice?’ And she says, all surprised and upset, ‘Marilyn just fired me.’”
“Fired her? Mrs. Murray was fired Saturday afternoon, too?”
“That’s right. Marilyn wanted her to pack her things and leave, be gone by the end of the day. Which is why I stuck around into the evening.”
“I don’t follow, Norm.”
“Well, Eunice practically lived at that place. She never gave up her own apartment, but three or four nights a week, she’d stay at Marilyn’s. So she had a lot of stuff around. I was to stay and help her pack and get her things together. There was more than would fit in her car. So we started loading up my truck.”
“Did Mrs. Murray say why she’d been fired?”
“No.” He shrugged and gave me an earnest look. “Maybe Marilyn finally figured out Eunice was spying on her.”
“Uh, yeah. Maybe that was it.”
“So we’re packing up the truck, and sometime between three and four, Peter Lawford comes around and he’s got Bobby Kennedy himself along. Big as life. Well, really, fairly small, but you know what I mean.”
“Were you around after they showed up?”
“Not very long at all. Mr. Lawford made it real clear he wanted Eunice and me out of there, and told us to go to the market. He gave me some money and said to bring back some Cokes for everybody, but not to hurry. So an hour later, more or less, we come back with a couple cartons of Coke, and their car is gone.”
“What kind of car, Norm?”
“Mercedes, I think.” He shifted and the wooden bench groaned. “We went in the house and Marilyn looked just terrible. She was just … boiling mad. Just sore as hell in a way I never saw from her. Weird thing, though, she seemed scared and burning all at once. That’s when my mother-in-law called Dr. Greenson.”
“Called him because she worked for him, right?”
“Yeah. Him and Marilyn. Nice work if you can get it—two paychecks for one job? Anyway, Greenson said he’d come right over. And I think he got there around five.”
“Had Pat Newcomb gone?”
“No. She did shortly after that. The doc went in and talked to Marilyn a little while, then came back out and says to Newcomb, who’s in the living room with Eunice, ‘Marilyn wonders when you’re leaving, Pat. When are you leaving?’ And Newcomb gets up and walks out, just like that. With not one word.”
“How long was Greenson there?”
“Maybe … till seven P.M.? He comes out and tells Eunice that he’s instructed Marilyn to take two Nembutals, and then asks Mrs. Murray to stay overnight and keep an eye on her. With all her belongings packed and everything, Eunice wanted to make sure that ‘met with Marilyn’s approval,’ but the doc said it did.”
“Norm, why didn’t you leave at that point?”
“Eunice asked me to stay. She was real shaky and upset, over everything that happened, so I sat and watched television with her.”
“Where was Marilyn?”
“Never saw her all evening. She was in her room. Some time, maybe ten thirty, Eunice got a phone call. Came back in and said she had to check on Marilyn. We were watching Gunsmoke, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to Eunice. All of a sudden she comes rushing back and says Marilyn is gone.”
“Gone as in dead?”
“Gone as in not in her bedroom. Not in any room in the house. So we look outside, and hear that little dog yapping, and right away I notice the light on in the guesthouse. When we go in there—I’ll never forget it, try as I might—there she was, facedown, lying across the daybed. She was in the nude. Holding on to the phone with one hand.”
“Dead?”
“Looked that way to me. Her color was awful, kind of … blue. But Eunice took the phone from her fingers and called for an ambulance. Then she put some kind of emergency call in to Dr. Greenson, who phoned back and said he’d come soon and in the meantime call Dr. Engelberg. I went out to mind the front gates. The ambulance got there before Greenson and Engelberg.”
This was the first anyone had said anything about an ambulance.
Well, some neighbors had mentioned seeing one, but none of the primary witnesses. And it made sense. It was Saturday night and both Greenson and Engelberg were out, Mrs. Murray initially getting answering services for both doctors. So what would she do next?
Call an ambulance.
And an ambulance attendant would certainly turn Marilyn faceup to try resuscitation, and if the body had been initially found in the cottage, that explained the dual lividity several times over.
As for Marilyn being in the guesthouse, if she had private phone calls to make, she might have wanted to get away from the prying eyes and ears of Mrs. Murray, who she distrusted enough to have just fired.
“After that, all hell broke loose,” Jefferies said. “Police cars, bunch of other vehi
cles, all kinds of people crawling over everywhere.”
“What kind of people?”
“Men in suits. Plainclothes cops, maybe? I think some may have been from the studio. I mean, they were all over the place.”
“What about the window, Norm?”
He made an embarrassed smirk. “That suicide thing, breaking in to rescue her? Some plainclothes guy thought that up. There was a dozen of those birds or more. Then, like a magician snapped his fingers? They’re gone.”
“Could you describe any of them?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe the guy who was in charge, or at least in charge of some of them. My take was, there were different … what would you call it? Groups or … factions? Anyway, they weren’t all on the same team. They had some shared goals, but they definitely weren’t on the same team.”
“What did he look like, the guy in charge?”
“Big. Kind of ugly. Rugged face. Funny thing—he kind of reminded me of that guy on TV.”
“What guy on TV?”
“Paladin.”
* * *
Walt Schaefer ran the largest ambulance service in Los Angeles County. He was an old friend of Fred Rubinski’s, and the nature of his business and ours meant the A-1 Detective Agency and the Schaefer Ambulance Service were not strangers.
So when I called and said I needed to talk to him, and preferred not to do it by phone, he didn’t even ask me why. Just said sure, come on over.
I crossed the nondescript bullpen of dispatchers and on through the open door into Walt’s modest office, which had the same cheap rec room–type paneling as the outer area. I shut the door.
A husky, tanned guy in his fifties, Walt was in shirtsleeves with a clip-on tie and you’d never know he was a multimillionaire. Sitting behind a cluttered metal desk, he looked like an overwhelmed junior-high guidance counselor. File cabinets whose tops were piled with folders crowded his work area, and a dozen framed commendations hung crookedly.
He rocked back in his swivel chair and showed off his bridgework. The egg-like shape of his skull was emphasized by seriously thinning, graying dark hair.
“Let me guess,” he said in his raspy second tenor. “Somebody needs a discreet exit from the city.”
That was a good guess. Just after the war, in addition to running ambulances all over Los Angeles, Walt had established a pioneering air ambulance service. Flying under the banner of medical emergencies, such a service could fly its planes into just about any airport in the world.
Obviously such flights were usually legit. But we had on occasion used his service to spirit clients out of town, and it was an open secret that Schaefer flew clandestine flights for Uncle Sam.
“This time I’m here about an indiscreet exit,” I said.
“Really? Do tell.”
“Just wanted to ask you, Walt, if you’re aware Marilyn Monroe’s neighbors spotted one of your wagons at her house the night she died.”
This near lie (neighbors had spotted an ambulance but had not singled out Schaefer) might have elicited any number of indignant responses. Walt might have asked me what the hell I was talking about, or pressed me for the name of the supposed witness, or maybe said get the fuck out.
But his response was low-key and calm yet dismissive. “We didn’t take a call from that residence,” he said.
“You handle damn near all the calls in Brentwood.”
“‘Damn near’ is not all the calls. And maybe there wasn’t a call. Sorry you made the trip for nothing, Nate. Say hi to Fred.”
Then he gave me a thin, cold-eyed smile that meant the conversation was over and the pleasant relationship between Schaefer Ambulance and the A-1 was on shaky ground.
He was doing paperwork or pretending to before I could make it out of his small office.
So I made two stops on my way to the Jag. First, I told the bullpen, in a loud firm voice, who I was, where I could be found, and that I was looking for off-the-record information about the call to Marilyn Monroe’s house late Saturday or early Sunday night … and that I was renowned for my generosity. I did this going around scattering business cards like confetti.
Then I repeated the operation in the big garage, where half a dozen ambulances were being washed or serviced, my voice echoing with a nice importance. I didn’t scatter the cards this time, handing them individually to drivers.
Somebody in the bullpen must have filled Walt in, because he came rushing at me, tie flapping, as I headed through an open garage door to the street.
He blocked my path. “What the hell’s the idea, Nate?”
“I’m looking into Marilyn’s death.”
“Why in hell?”
“Because nobody else is.”
“Bullshit! The papers say that Suicide Squad is out questioning people right now.”
“Funny, ’cause so am I, and I haven’t run into any of them.”
Walt let out a frustrated sigh, shook his head, then took me by the arm. Walked me back into the garage, our footsteps resonating like small-arms fire. Put me in the rider’s seat of one of the wagons and came around the other side and got behind the wheel. I had a feeling he hadn’t driven an ambulance himself in a long, long time.
“I will give this to you off the record,” he said softly, tightly. “If you’re working for a client trying to find out if the woman met foul play, I will deny the story to anybody but the cops. If you’re working for a reporter, you can’t use it, because once you say ‘ambulance,’ they’ll know it’s us. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He sighed, looked out the windshield at the wooden slats of a closed garage door. “Two of my boys happened to be close, right around the corner practically, when they caught the emergency call. They got there in under two minutes, no siren.”
The ambulance driver and his partner were met by a tall man who let them in the gates of the hacienda-style home (obviously Jefferies), and a “frumpy” middle-aged woman (guess who) with a poodle on a leash. She and the poodle led them to a small guest cottage, but stayed outside.
Within, Schaefer’s guys got a shock—Marilyn Monroe lay nude, faceup on a folded-out daybed, arm draped toward a phone on the floor.
“She was obviously dead,” Walt said, with a fatalistic shrug. “Her body had a blueish tinge, possibly indicating a swift death. So there was nothing my boys could do—we’re not a hearse service. As they were getting ready to head out, one of her doctors showed up, this fellow Greenson, I believe.”
“Her psychiatrist.”
“Yeah, but psychiatrists are MDs. They can pronounce death. So he asked my boys to wait and he went into that cottage and came back a minute or so later. Asked the boys to go in and load her on a gurney and take her to the nearest hospital. Santa Monica hospital.”
“But she was dead.…”
“Which is why my boys, who generally follow doctor’s orders in this business, didn’t—they just politely turned him down and left. Apparently Greenson, if that’s who it was, said he hadn’t pronounced her dead and that they should take her, with the suggestion that they would say she expired on the way. That would make it a hospital matter … and also a Schaefer Ambulance matter, incidentally, as my boys well knew … but from the doctor’s vantage, it’d take some of the heat off them there at the house. Is my opinion.”
“What time was this?”
“Between ten and eleven.”
“Can you check your log?”
“What log?” He shifted in the seat, one hand on the wheel, like an impatient driver in traffic. “By the time my boys left, the other doctor, Engelberg, was there and several cops, too.”
“Before midnight, cops were there?”
“Yeah. And one of them was the kind of cop you don’t fuck with.”
“… Intel, Walt?”
“I didn’t say that.” He turned a dour gaze on me. “Now listen carefully, Nate. Eighty percent of my business comes from the city and county, with another ten percent that is very lucrative
from the U.S. government. With the Kennedys involved, if I were to speak up about what I know, this business I have worked to build up since nineteen fucking thirty-two would go down the drain. And what do I know, really? That my guys went there, she was dead, and they turned around and came back. Because in case I failed to mention it, we’re not a goddamn hearse service.”
“What you know, Walt, and what at least two of your people know, is that the official story on Marilyn’s death is bullshit.”
“And if I come forward, what? Justice will be served? Do I have to tell you what brand of justice gets served up in LA? Chief Parker justice. And by the way, who’s the top guy at the Justice Department right now? Let it go, Nate. Let it the hell go.”
A siren screamed and made me jump as an ambulance pulled out.
“Look,” Walt said, “she overdosed, we were too late to save her, her own doctor was too late to save her … so nobody saved her. The cops have made it clear to me—clear—that they aren’t interested in pursuing this case. My government clients have indicated, through intermediaries, mind you, that my discretion would be appreciated. Do I really have to tell Nate Heller which way the wind blows?”
“A woman died, Walt.”
“And how many women died today in Los Angeles that my buggies picked up? If I don’t know, you sure don’t. Look. Nate. We never spoke.” He shook his head, sighed heavily. “What good hearing this shit does you, I have no idea.”
He climbed down out of the ambulance, shut the door, and for a while I just sat there in the vehicle, going nowhere.
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.
Bye Bye, Baby Page 26