The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “No water glass,” I said.

  “Bingo.”

  It was not what I had seen at the house, Doc: On the table by the bed I’d seen the same vial of pills, the same books and papers, the same jar of night cream—and an empty glass.

  “Somehow between the time I took this picture and the time that you arrived, Ben, a glass showed up on the table. Someone put it there. I didn’t think there was anything suspicious about the death until that happened. I’m looking around, and the first thing I think is: If this is an overdose, where’s the water?”

  “They turned it off the night before. The renovations.”

  “So how’d she swallow the pills?”

  “I don’t think she swallowed anything.”

  “Come again?”

  “She had four-point-five percent milligrams of barbiturates and eight percent chloral hydrate in her bloodstream.”

  “I heard.”

  “That means she needed to swallow around thirty to forty Nembutals. And that doesn’t even account for the thirteen percent pentobarbital Dr. Abernethy also found in the liver. When you consider the liver—”

  “I was considering the chili.”

  “When you consider the liver, it means that an additional twenty or so capsules and tablets had to have been ingested. That means, Miss Carnahan—”

  “Jo.”

  “That means, Jo, that case number 81128 had to have consumed at least fifty, if not eighty, pills to die.”

  “But she did die.”

  “The point is we’re assuming she consumed them by mouth.”

  “So?”

  “So even if she’d had a water glass, even if she’d drunk a gallon of water, she couldn’t have swallowed those pills.”

  “I could swallow that basket of toast.”

  “It’s not the same thing. The pills are poison. The body rejects them. You vomit them up.”

  She glanced back at the menu. “Maybe I won’t have the chili after all.”

  “We found nothing in her digestive tract,” I said. “Not even a yellow stain.”

  “Why would you find that?”

  “Nembutals are known as ‘yellow jackets,’ ’cause of their deep color. If Miss Monroe had somehow swallowed, say, thirty-six of them, her digestive tract would have been stained yellow—but there was no color,” I said. “And no refractile crystals.”

  “Refractive what?”

  “Refractile. If you ingest more than twelve capsules of barbiturates, refractile crystals show up in the digestive tract or in the stomach.”

  “Please use English, please.”

  “That’s refractile crystals. Meaning . . . I don’t know . . . they refract.”

  “And that means?”

  “Subject to refraction.”

  “Oh. Jesus.”

  “It means they have the power to change the direction of the ray of light.”

  “You mean they reflect.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, why didn’t you?”

  “Two Flames of Love,” Tommy said, carefully depositing two martini glasses filled with Pepe’s house special: vodka, “La Ina” Fino Sherry, and burned orange peel.

  Jo’s eyes sparkled as she extended her glass to mine.

  The glasses touched. We drank.

  “So you’re telling me that you don’t think she killed herself?”

  It’s not my business to speculate (I told her, as I’m telling you, Doc), but in the entire history of forensics, no one has ever died with such high blood concentrations of phenobarb and chloral hydrate as a result of oral ingestion.

  “Then why did she leave a suicide note?” she asked.

  “She didn’t.”

  “Oh, really?” She took a piece of paper from that same manila envelope.

  It was a page torn from the diary.

  “You took this from the death scene?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “You know that’s illegal.”

  “You gonna arrest me?”

  “Maybe.”

  The paper was covered with illegible writing and crossed-off numbers. The only words I could read were “The enemy within.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Jo said. “It was lying on her pillow, as if she’d tried to call someone.”

  “She was calling the Justice Department.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She left the number in her diary. I read it.”

  “How?”

  “I took it.”

  “Now who’s going to get arrested?” she said. “You took the diary?”

  I nodded. “I have it right here.”

  18.

  May 16, 1962. Forgive me but it was all I ever wanted. I tried so many times but never with results and always with pain, well, once I almost died but this will be different and will change everything, the one who will have the things I never had and see the things I never saw and be loved and safe and sane and mine.

  [redacted], forgive me: [redacted]

  But it started and I was excited and then it ended again like before. The General just stopped calling. It was just like his brother all over again. He gave me a number and told me to use the name of Mrs. Green but first the woman on the other end said she didn’t know a Mrs. Green and then it just stopped working.

  Mrs. Green is what he told me to tell them like a secret that we shared, like with so many others, in bed. But now he’s not here. He never is. Like the Commander. Marilyn Monroe is a soldier but what good is a soldier without a commander?

  I started calling the other number the public one saying I was Mrs. Green. I looked it up in the book:

  RE7-8200

  RE7-8200

  RE7-8200

  It was like before. “I need to speak to him!” I said and all that. “He owes me! You understand?”

  I believe he loved me or was falling in love with me I don’t believe it was just what they call “pillow talk” when he said that he would leave his wife and kids. He meant it or his dick did, Diary!!!!

  But someone got to him. His brother or wife? The woman who is calling me at night? Diary, I DON’T sleep but now there is the ringing of the pink phone at 1 and 3 a.m. someone on the other end saying, “Stay away from [redacted].”

  You see how they removed that and how they crossed it out? I didn’t do that. I wrote the name but when I woke in the morning it was gone.

  Maybe it is the man at the window.

  He should face me and tell me why. Or tell me on the phone. I don’t care. I just want to know why.

  An hour ago I called the number asked for him again and they said he wasn’t there again and asked to take a message. “Boy, I’ll give you a message tell him [redacted] and [redacted] clicks on my phone and [redacted] is bugging my house on account of they want information. Did you get that? Can you spell that, Angie?”

  “I can spell that.”

  “Tell him if he doesn’t call me back I will call a press conference. Have you got that?”

  “I got that.”

  “I could blow this whole thing sky-high.”

  Yes there are the clicks the sound of clicking on the phone and voices like people whispering in the background like they’re listening and something rustling in my closet the clack-clack of empty hangers there. The water is wrong but the man who came to fix it didn’t. Eunice said that he was there and something tells me he is STILL!!!

  I’m TIRED of being used TIRED of being treated like an animal. WORSE than an animal!!!!

  God it’s too hot to sleep and I know something’s going to happen and then there’s the bottle of pills.

  Three more would help or thirty.

  And now the phone is ringing

  • • •

  The phone,” Jo said.

  I looked up from the diary. “What about it?”

  “She lived and died on the phone. She was clutching it in her hand.”

  “So?�
�

  “Did anyone go to GTE?”

  “What’s that?”

  “General Telephone. Did anyone check the phone records?”

  “Aren’t you the journalist?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question,” she said as she stood from the table.

  19.

  A guy at GTE named George agreed to meet us in the Service Room to tell us what he didn’t want to tell us (he said) on the phone. But the fact is that he didn’t meet us in the Service Room. When we showed up, the woman behind the long counter said that George was still at lunch. It was strange for him, she said, as he was a man of routine.

  “Where does he usually lunch?” Jo asked.

  “The Tip Top on Melrose. Always at the same time. And he always has the same thing: the corned beef sandwich on rye. I should know. I’ve worked here twenty years.”

  “Thanks.” Jo turned to go.

  “You want to talk to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try the Benson Bar on Fifth.”

  “You said he takes his lunch at Tip Top.”

  “You asked where he usually takes his lunch, but today he’s at the Benson.” She checked her watch. “He’s usually back by one-thirty.”

  “Time is it now?”

  “Almost three.”

  Just then I remembered something: “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “I need to pick up Max.”

  “Max?”

  “My son. He’s at school.”

  “You’re married?”

  “Almost.”

  “What does that mean, almost?”

  “Call me,” I said. “I’m at the Savoy.”

  • • •

  I parked across the street in the rain. The buses were gone. The classes were over, the flag off the pole. Two stragglers left with their parents in yellow raincoats, holding umbrellas over their heads. I remembered a drawing Max had once done showing clouds and the moon and the rain. “Ligting comes with rain,” he’d written. “Ligting is dangerous.”

  Max didn’t have a raincoat. Or an umbrella. He didn’t have boots, either.

  I pushed through the double doors into the lobby, blinking against the water that dripped from my hair. The school smelled like all schools smell in the rain, wet cotton mixed with chlorine from an unseen pool. The trophy cases were filled with dusty mementos of teachers who had died and of spelling bees won. The floor was covered with boot prints.

  The sign on the first door to the left, the one before the hall of lockers, read PRINCIPAL in gold letters.

  “I’m looking for my son,” I said to the woman behind the desk. Cat’s-eye glasses hung on a chain around her neck. A series of cubicles flanked a narrow hall that led to the only room with a view. On the door, a sign showed two kids with googly eyes: “THE PRINCIPAL IS YOUR PAL!” it read.

  “And his name would be?”

  “Max Fitzgerald.”

  “And he’s in? Whose class?”

  “Third grade. He’s a third-grader.”

  “His teacher’s name?”

  “Starts with a W.”

  “That won’t help much. We have several W’s.”

  “Wallace? Wilson?”

  “We have a Weston. Williams. And a Wettergren.” She frowned, put those glasses on the bridge of her nose, and looked up at me over the frames.

  “I think it’s Wettergren. I’m pretty sure it’s—”

  “Mrs. Wettergren’s class has all gone, I’m afraid. They’ve all gone home.”

  “I was supposed to pick him up.”

  “Your son: Max Fitzgerald. Is he the handsome little boy—”

  “Of course.”

  “The one who didn’t have a raincoat?”

  “I didn’t know it would be raining.”

  “The weather report is quite simple, sir. He didn’t have an umbrella, either. Or boots.”

  “I didn’t know he needed—”

  “He waited in the rain for thirty minutes, Mr. . . . Fitzgerald.”

  “Ben.”

  “Mrs. Wettergren stayed with the umbrella. Your wife—”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “She came to pick him up.”

  “I’m sorry. May I use your phone?”

  “There’s a pay phone in the lobby.”

  I dropped the dime. Pressed the phone to my ear. And dialed into silence.

  I hit the coin return. I didn’t care about the rain now. I walked down the sidewalk to the car across the street.

  A parking ticket sat under the wind wings.

  • • •

  I waited in the car outside the house. No one was home. I waited with the diary and the ticket and the Kents in the glove compartment and the radio on that station. I kept staring through the path the wipers cut in the rain. I stared, too, through the window up the driveway to the garage, wondering when Rose would return.

  I’d fucked up and knew it. I just wanted to apologize.

  The house was not, unlike most in El Segundo, Spanish Colonial. It was something more “modern,” a polite term for prefab: a barn-red ranch with aluminum siding, a porch in the back with garden hoses underneath and fences on both sides of the lawn.

  I waited.

  5:15 P.M.: “Real friends were almost unanimous in saying they believed that her death was accidental,” the radio voice said through static. “Two motion pictures executives were bidding for her services at the time of her death. Miss Monroe had received an offer of fifty-five thousand dollars a week to star in a nightclub appearance in Las Vegas.”

  I kept switching stations, trying to get away from the story that had already killed everything, but no one could talk about anything else. Even in Titusville, they were talking:

  “I am sure it was an accident,” Dean Martin said at 8:26 P.M. “She was at my home just a few days ago. She was happy, in excellent spirits, and we were making plans to resume the picture early next year. She was a warm, wonderful person. The only one she ever hurt was herself.”

  1:01 A.M.: I drove back to the Savoy and lit a cigarette.

  Tomorrow would be Day One.

  20.

  Buenas noches, Señor Ben,” Inez said from behind the bar. She was serving beer to Elisha Cook, Jr., or someone who looked like him. It was hard to tell in the bad light, but the presence of this man was a measure of how far the place had fallen.

  The Savoy had once been a playground for Hollywood’s celluloid set, back when mid-Wilshire had been the Center of the Film World, the Oscars at the Ambassador, Joan Crawford dancing under fake palms at the Cocoanut Grove. The bar off the lobby had featured a dance floor on springs where showgirls kicked, chosen for no reason other than the fact that their breasts looked great in pasties. But it wasn’t long before their eyes were as dead as the dreams that had led to nothing but the snapped spine of a lemon in the bottom of a gin glass.

  After a few suspicious fires, the Savoy went from a palace to a sad place that traded in human remnants, pornographic pictures, and flagons of ether and laudanum. The butts of cheap cigarettes sizzled in the gin as the girls picked up their plastic clutches, slid off their respective stools, and followed the latest johns straight up the stairs.

  You always had to take the stairs.

  The elevator never worked.

  It still didn’t.

  “A lady call for you,” Inez said.

  “A lady?”

  “With a man’s name. She call two time. Say it is about phone records. She say to tell you, mmm, no sé como se dice . . .”

  She handed me the message on a piece of notebook paper:

  “Joe Carnahan,” it read. “‘Not even Jay Edgar Hoover.’”

  “What does that mean, Inez?”

  “No sé, Señor Ben.”

  “She didn’t say?”

  “No. There was a man come, too.”

  “What man?”

  “To fix your doorbell.”

  “Doorbell isn’t broken.”

  �
��Yes it is, okay. He say you call. You pay for it, okay.”

  “I didn’t pay for anything,” I said. “Where was he from?”

  “The doorbell company.”

  “There’s no such thing. How long was he here?”

  She shrugged. “Twenty minutes.”

  “And he was in my room?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was alone?”

  “Don’t be mad, Señor Ben.”

  “I’m not mad, Inez, it’s just . . . Don’t let anyone inside the apartment unless I give you permission, okay?”

  “He say he have your permission. He have the work order, okay.”

  She handed me the work order:

  B. F. FOX ELECTRIC

  4100 S La Cienega Blvd

  Baldwin Hills

  For work completed Aug 6:

  installation of new doorbell.

  Due upon receipt: $13.45

  “Señor Ben?”

  “Yes.”

  “¿Eres un hombre bueno, sí? Your wife should know that.”

  “No entiendo.”

  “You are a good man,” she said. “Whatever else you do. You have a good heart and soul, señor.”

  “Gracias, Inez. I appreciate it.”

  “But you have terrible taste in women.”

  • • •

  I hardly slept that night. I kept thinking of Jo and Max and Rose and the phone records. Insomnia seeped through the vents that made the rushing sounds you hear when the traffic stops except for the sirens, except for all the rain. It rained a lot that year. Insomnia was layered in the sand that came from over the Mohave through the window. The sand was trapped, along with the smell of smoke, in the carpet, no matter how many times I tried to vacuum it up. No matter that I always kept the windows closed.

  But it was more than that.

  “Now you’re getting carried away,” you say. “And too florid. It’s a common thing in addicts.”

  “I’m not an addict.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  When I went upstairs, the door to 7-A was open, Doctor, and all the lights were on, but I didn’t see anything missing or misplaced. There was nothing to miss or misplace. I could have made the case that the level of milk in the kitchenette was lower than usual, but that may have been my imagination, as you suppose so much is.