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 whol
e 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 jump
ed 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.”
Bye Bye, Baby Page 27