by J. I. Baker
Except the body was in the soldier’s position: legs straight, head down.
“I don’t have to tell you what that means, Doctor,” I say.
“Yes,” you say. “You do.”
“Well, it looked like she had been placed.”
“What?”
“Placed,” I say. “People who overdose don’t drift happily away. There are usually convulsions. Vomiting. They die contorted. And she was clutching the phone.”
“So?”
“A person dying of a barbiturate overdose would not have died clutching a phone. She might have answered it. But a person dying of a barbiturate overdose would have gone limp before the convulsions began.”
I walked to the bed and looked down. There was no vomitus. She looked peaceful.
On the bedside table, several vials of prescription drugs sat under a lamp covered with a handkerchief. One of the vials read San Vicente Pharmacy: “Marilyn Monroe. Engelberg . . . 7.25.62 . . . 0.5 gms . . . at bedtime.”
It’s the vial that sits before us now—part of your “evidence,” Doctor:
Item No. 2.
Under the table was a Mexican ceramic jug, cap askew; piles of books and papers; a jar of face cream—and an empty water glass.
Remember the glass. It becomes significant.
A voice behind me: “Helluva thing.”
I turned and saw Jack Clemmons in the doorway. His face was so red it looked raw, his hair the color of diluted mustard. He was West LAPD: the watch commander on duty at the western division when the call had come in that morning.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Fitz?”
“Here for next of kin.”
“There are no next of kin. Only a mother down at Rockhaven.”
“Never heard of Rockhaven.”
“You will.”
“What happened here?” I asked.
“It’s a helluva thing.”
The housekeeper, Eunice Murray, claimed she’d noticed a light under Marilyn’s door (Jack said) when she retired around ten on the previous evening. She went to bed in her own room, adjacent to Marilyn’s; they share a wall. She woke at midnight and had to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was in the Telephone Room, connected to her own bedroom, but somehow she ended up in the hall in front of Marilyn’s room instead. She noticed that the light was still on under the door, which was locked from the inside. She knocked: no answer.
“So what do you think she did?” Jack asked.
“She called the police.”
“Oh, no, that would be too easy, Fitz. That would be too obvious. This is Hollywood. Everyone needs a twist. She didn’t call the police. She called the psychiatrist.”
“The psychiatrist?”
“Him.” He pointed to a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man who stood in a suit by the window looking ashen. “Ralph Greenson. Marilyn’s shrink.”
“And what did he do?”
When Greenson arrived at the house (Jack said) he, too, found the door locked. He went outside, looked through the window, and saw the actress lying facedown and nude on the bed under rumpled bedclothes. She looked “peculiar,” he said. She wasn’t moving. He broke the window with a poker from the living-room fireplace and climbed inside. She was clutching the phone. “She must have been calling for help,” Greenson had said.
“Why would she call for help when the housekeeper was in the next room?” I asked.
“Beats me. The shrink told Mrs. Murray, ‘We’ve lost her,’ and called Dr. Engelberg, her physician. And Dr. Engelberg called me at—get this, Fitz—four thirty-five A.M.”
“They waited four hours to call the cops?”
“Yep.”
“Mind if I ask the doctor a few questions?”
“You’re not investigating, Ben.”
“I’m curious.”
“Same old Ben.” He smiled. “Be my guest.”
I walked up to Greenson, introduced myself, and said, “If you don’t mind me asking: Why did you wait four hours to call the cops?”
“We had to get permission from the publicity department first.”
“What publicity department?”
“Twentieth Century-Fox. Miss Monroe was filming there.”
“So what did you do while you waited?”
“Talked,” Greenson said.
“For four hours?”
“Look, I see no reason why I should go through this again. I’ve been through this already. I’ve already spoken to the coroner’s office.”
“I’m the coroner’s office.”
“So is she.”
“Who?”
“Her.” He pointed to a woman with a camera taking pictures of the space around the bed. She was maybe thirty-five and had violet eyes with dark lashes and black hair done up in a bun. She wore a gray skinned-down Norman Norell suit and stiletto shoes. Her crimson nails matched her lips. I could see the powder on her face. She reminded me of someone.
Eventually I would see her smiling up at me from behind the edge of a martini glass, moisture glistening on her front teeth, her lipstick smeared on cocktail napkins and, later, bed linens.
But for now: She was pulling something from underneath the dead star’s pillow.
It was the red leather diary.
3.
The diary was filled with yellow pages on which blue handwriting had broken all the college rules. The word MEMORIES was embossed on the cover in the same gold that edged the paper. It was a dime-a-dozen diary—available at any drugstore. I had no reason to believe that it could bring down the government, Doctor. I had no reason to believe that Marilyn had died because of it, or that others would die because of it. I had no reason to believe it would jeopardize my own life or that of my family. So you ask: If I had known, would I have just walked away? Let it destroy the actress and the girl who had found it instead of all of us?
“Who are you?” I asked her.
“Jo Carnahan. LACCO.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Anything’s possible,” she said. “Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
“I never knew my mother.”
“Sorry to hear it. And now if you’ll excuse me.” She walked past me, and I grabbed her elbow, spinning her sharply around.
I caught a glint in her eye, a little hidden laugh.
Who did she remind me of?
“That red book,” I said. “What is it?”
“My diary.”
It wasn’t. You know that, Doc.
I took it from her.
“What’s the big idea?” she said.
“What’s your big idea? Impersonating an employee from the coroner’s office. I was going to say a man from the coroner’s office, but—”
“I’m not a man.”
“I can see that. You’re a thief.”
“I’m not. I’m Annie Laurie.”
“Thought you said your name was Jo.”
“Annie Laurie is my pen name. It’s a gossip column. You don’t read it?”
“No,” I lied. Of course I read it. I’d read it for years. Everyone in Southland reads it. They’re lying if they say they don’t. Do you read it, Doc?
“No.”
“I thought so.”
Annie Laurie is second only to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons when it comes to chronicling the ins and outs and ups and downs of the rich and famous. Okay, third only to Hedda and Louella. She has a husband named Dick, a Santa Anita jockey who is always on vacation; three cats; two precocious twin children perpetually at boarding school; and a cottage on Catalina. Annie Laurie has been writing her L.A. Mirror column, “The Voice of Hollywood,” and broadcasting her WOLA radio show, Annie Laurie Presents, for the better part of thirty years, but she is not—unlike Parsons and Hopper—a real person; she is a character. The writers who impersonate Annie Laurie change, but Annie herself does not.
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” asked Jo.
“What?”
“Well, there’s a b
athroom in the housekeeper’s room,” she said. “And the carpet in here.”
“What about it?”
“See how high the pile is?”
She smiled and left the room.
Guy Hockett and his son from Westwood Village Mortuary were putting Miss Monroe’s body on the gurney. Rigor mortis had set in. This wasn’t what the son had expected. He hadn’t expected to see the source of locked-bathroom fantasies now unmovable and cold in his own hands, her bones cracking as they wrapped leather straps around her wrists and ankles.
Leather straps as if to restrain a madwoman. As if she would just get up and walk away.
They covered her in a pale blue blanket and wheeled her from the house.
A young woman screamed in the hallway, police telling her that she needed to leave because they were sealing the place.
“Keep shooting, vultures!” she shouted as I walked out. “How would you feel if your best friend just died?”
It was Pat Newcomb, Miss Monroe’s publicist.
In the five-page death report filed by the LAPD, the deceased was described not as the star of Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch—and not as the erstwhile wife of Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio, the most famous woman in the world—but as a “female Caucasian, age 36, height 5.4, weight 115 pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes, and slender, medium build. Occupation: actress.”
• • •
The entrance to the Telephone Room, otherwise known as the guest bedroom, was across the hall from Mrs. Murray’s bedroom. I carried the diary inside and shut the door and sat on the bed by the door that led to the pool and saw a white phone on the table. There were two phones. The cord to the other phone, pink, led through the door and down the hall to where the receiver now sat on the death bed. One number, GRanite 61890, was for close friends; the other, GRanite 24830, was for everyone else.
I opened the diary.
The Book of Secrets was written in that blue scrawl on the inside page.
I turned the pages—some torn, others covered with illegible script, still others stained with unidentifiable fluids. I was searching for anything that might lead to next of kin: a lost mother, a missing son or father, a brother in Topeka, a sister in Detroit.
The diary had been started only six months before, on February 2, 2:01 A.M.:
“I hear clicking on the line,”
it read,
That’s what it sounds like—Morse code. Faint voices all around. Bars are on the windows but the night is dark and the pool should be lit but it’s not on account of the remodel. A few times I heard noises like people at the window but I looked around. No one there and so now, see? Who’s crazy now?!!!
This was followed by a list of questions:
1. What is it like to do your job?
2. Are you going to keep J. E. H.?
3. What is next for Cuba?
The book was full of elisions, deletions, and torn pages. I saw no information about next of kin. The only number I found was RE7-8200. Others had been erased or were illegible. RE7-8200 was not only repeated; near it Marilyn had scrawled, in ragged letters, the name “Mrs. Green.”
I picked up the white phone and called.
“Hello,” a woman answered.
“Mrs. Green, please?”
I heard breathing. “Excuse me?”
“I’m looking for a Mrs. Green.”
“Your name, please?”
“Ben Fitzgerald. L.A. County Coroner’s.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald, fine,” she said. “But who is Mrs. Green?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“There is no Mrs. Green,” she said. “I’ve never heard of Mrs. Green.”
4.
The L.A. County Morgue is in the basement of the Hall of Justice located where North Broadway forms an overpass off Santa Ana not far from Chinatown. The coroner, the sheriff’s office, the D.A., and the county jail are there. The medical examiner is on the first floor. That’s where my office is. There are only a few offices, because the staff is so small: three medical examiners, four lab techs, a few coroner’s aides.
They call it Pneumonia Hall.
It was just after 9 A.M. I was at my desk eating the sandwich I’d retrieved from the trash and looking out the window onto the parking lot. On the blotter in front of me sat a framed picture of Rose, Max, and me smiling on the beach at Malibu: “In happier times,” the caption might have read in Photoplay. Pigeons perched, as they always perched, on the window ledge. Every now and then I saw them mating.
“Ben,” Dr. Noguchi said at the door. He was the deputy medical examiner. His first name was Thomas.
“Yeah.”
“We’re almost ready.”
I put my sandwich down.
• • •
The most famous woman in the world was now Coroner’s Case No. 81128, her toe tagged in steel crypt 33. The crypts covered a wall in the basement where the rats were. They looked like numbered freezers. I opened 33, pulling the lever below the temperature gauge, and saw the toe tags. I wheeled the body on the stretcher to Table 1 in the windowless room, looked at the flesh on bright steel with the hose and the drainage system, the sink and the suspended scale.
A sheet was pulled up over her breasts. Her eyes were closed, her hair hanging limp as if she had just washed it.
The autopsy lasted five hours.
I won’t bore you with the details, Doctor, but a few things stuck with me:
Dr. Noguchi performed the procedure. This was odd. Yes, he was the only person on staff who was a university faculty member, assistant professor of pathology at Loma Linda, but he had only recently been appointed deputy medical examiner. Normally the chief medical examiner would have done it. Even stranger, Chief Coroner Curphey himself attended the autopsy, along with District Attorney John Miner.
This never happened.
“There are no puncture marks,” Dr. Noguchi said into his mic as he began the external examination, and “no indication” that Monroe had injected herself. There was no indication that anyone else had injected her, either. “There’s bruising,” he said, “a slight ecchymotic area . . . in the left hip and left side of the lower back.”
A bruise is a sign of violence. Its color comes from protein enzymes thrown off by white blood cells that try to contain the damage. Those enzymes change from dark purple to brown to yellow over time. The bruise on Miss Monroe’s left hip was dark purple, which means it probably appeared on the night she died. But it was never explained.
Dr. Noguchi also noted “dual lividity.” You ask me what this means: Livor mortis happens during the first eight hours after death. The heart mixes plasma with red blood cells. When the heart stops, the mixing ends, and the cells settle in the lower portion of the body. If the body is on its left side, the lividity—a purplish spotting—appears at the bottom of that side. If livor mortis is present on both sides, it’s called “dual lividity.”
In this case, we found livor mortis on both the back and posterior aspect of the arms and legs. Which would indicate one thing: The body had been moved.
Around twelve-thirty, Noguchi opened the stomach. It was the first abdominal organ he examined. In it, he found 20 ccs, about three tablespoons, of a brown liquid. But no pills were in the liquid. In fact, nothing indicated that she had swallowed anything poisonous.
In the duodenum, the first digestive tract after the stomach, there was “no evidence,” Noguchi said, “of pills. No residue. No coloration.”
“And no odor of pear,” I said.
Noguchi turned to me: “What?”
“Never mind.”
In his autopsy report, Noguchi summarized the digestive-system findings:
The esophagus has a longitudinal folding mucosa. The stomach is almost completely empty. The volume is estimated to be no more than 20 cc. No residue of the pills is noted. A smear made from the gastric contents examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals. The mucosa shows marked congestion and submuc
osal petechial hemorrhage diffusely. The duodenum are also examined under the polarized microscope and show no refractile crystals. The remainder of the small intestine shows no gross abnormality. The colon shows marked congestion and purplish discoloration.
This is what created all the controversy, Doc. Why? I don’t quite know where to begin, but for now: “marked congestion and purplish discoloration” may have meant the colon had been . . . compromised in the recent past.
Noguchi wrote: “Unembalmed blood is taken for alcohol and barbiturate examination. Liver, kidney, stomach and contents, urine and intestine are saved for further toxicological study.” These contents were sent to Ralph J. Abernethy, the chief toxicologist.
They took a picture of the corpse and returned Case 81128 to crypt 33.
Noguchi’s eventual verdict: “Suicide.” He circled the word on the final report, adding the word “Probable.”
The picture that you have, Doc—the one marked “62-609 8-5-62” in the evidence folder—was taken afterward. The face looks sunken because the skull was cut open to remove and weigh the brain. You have other pictures there, too, of course: one taken of the body in the broom closet of Westwood Village. And photos taken by Sinatra at Cal-Neva the week before she died.
But all that will come soon enough. At the time, I figured the whole sad business was finished, but it wasn’t. It was never finished. When I returned to my office, the WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip on my desk read: “See me.”
That meant only one thing.
It meant Curphey.
5.
Chief Coroner Theodore Joscelyn Curphey had a golf set in his office. It was one of those sets with a square of fake grass and a metal circle with flaps surrounding a hole you hit the ball into. He was teeing off beside his desk when I stepped inside.