The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  She walked outside, shutting the door behind her, and waited in the bushes to the right of the front door, camera in hand.

  • • •

  The picture that she finally took,” Jo said, “showed Senator John F. Kennedy emerging from the front door of the Kater brownstone in Georgetown with his shoes in his hand. Mrs. Florence M. Kater sent it to thirty-two journalists. Myself included. She also sent it to the FIBS.”

  “The Fibs.”

  “The FBI. She was almost unhinged. Her sense of justice, sense of religion as a Catholic—all of these things were ‘grievously wounded.’ That’s what she said in her letter. She was a nut but what bugged her about Mr. D-Mass. was that he had lied. He claimed to have principles but he’d lied. He didn’t give a shit. He only cared about himself and his success. And Mrs. Florence Kater wanted the world to know the truth.”

  “So what happened to the photographs?”

  “That’s the whole point: nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Blackout. Shutdown. Nothing. Every journalist I knew went to their editors. And their editors went to the publishers. The photo of Senator Kennedy went all the way up the food chain. And that’s where it vanished. No one would touch it. Not with that proverbial ten-foot pole. Mrs. Kater checked the papers every morning. And not just the Washington Post. She checked every paper she’d sent the picture to, and not one reported the story. She couldn’t understand it. She was sure something had gone wrong. She made phone calls. No one called her back. She made appointments. They were canceled. The world was closing off. And then her house was robbed, her precious jewelry stolen. But what really galled her, what offended her in the deepest part of her being, and down to her core, was the fact that when she returned to the bedroom after snapping Kennedy, that night, she had seen Marty’s hand moving frantically under the bedcovers.

  “He was masturbating,” Jo said, and leaned down to kiss me.

  29.

  Jo.”

  “Shh!”

  “The nurse.”

  “Fuck her.”

  “Guy over there.”

  “Is so doped up he won’t remember in the morning.”

  She was kissing me again, leaning over the gurney when I said, “Jo?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Who answered your phone?”

  “What?”

  “I called you earlier. A man answered.”

  “Oh, that was you,” she said. “My father.”

  “Your father.”

  “I take care of him sometimes.”

  A voice: “What are you doing?”

  I looked up.

  It was the nurse.

  “I’m just searching for some marbles,” Jo said, standing. She brushed the waist of her dress, and turned to me: “I didn’t see any Greenies, did you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” the nurse said. “And you were smoking! I can tell you were smoking!”

  “It’s that.” Jo pointed to the votive burning under the nearby gurney. “The candles aren’t exactly up to code, are they?”

  “God is the code.”

  “God isn’t the fire department.”

  The man groaned.

  “You, you hussy,” the nurse said, “are the whore of Babylon.”

  “As long as my reputation hasn’t reached Beverly Hills.”

  “May God forgive you.”

  “I don’t care about forgiveness,” she said. “I just want my marbles back.”

  The nurse left in a huff.

  We finished the Canadian Club.

  “So what does that Florence Kater story mean?” I said.

  “It means the Kennedys can do whatever they want. After Kennedy was elected, he made Pamela Turnure Jackie’s press secretary, for crying out loud.”

  “Okay, that’s one thing. But you’re not really suggesting that JFK and Bobby killed Marilyn Monroe.”

  “They had motive. She was prepared to go public.”

  “The brothers weren’t anywhere near Los Angeles that night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It was in the papers.”

  “Do you always believe what you read?”

  “Jack was in Hyannisport. Bobby was in Gilroy. That’s three hundred miles away. On Saturday, Bobby went horseback riding. On Sunday, he went to church at nine-thirty. Are you telling me that the attorney general of the United States sort of magically disappeared after horseback riding, flew out to Los Angeles to kill Marilyn, and managed to show up again for church by Sunday morning? It’s not possible.”

  “Then who took off outside Peter Lawford’s house?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Jeanne Carmen said there was a contretemps with Lawford’s neighbors the night Marilyn died.”

  “Who’s Jeanne Carmen?”

  “An actress. Does it matter? She said the neighbors were annoyed by the sand in their pool.”

  “The sand?”

  “The helicopter kicked it up when it left the Lawford property. The neighbors heard the noise. Who was in that helicopter, Ben?”

  “It couldn’t have been Bobby Kennedy.”

  “Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Irving Berlin,” she said. “Inga Arvad was a Nazi. Judith Exner was a mob moll. And all that got swept under the rug. Why was Marilyn any different?”

  “Because she was a movie star?”

  “That’s not what Jeanne said. She said it wasn’t about sex,” Jo said. “It was something much more scandalous.”

  “What’s more scandalous than sex?”

  “Politics,” she said.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8

  30.

  I saw the funeral on TV. I was lying in the hospital room on the fifth floor staring up into the set that was bolted to the wall and tilting toward me. My head was propped on two pillows; tubes were in my nose, a hep-lock IV drip taped to my arm.

  “The curtain falls,” the TV anchor said into the camera. He stood before the wall that separated the mortuary grounds from the street and all the staring people. “Brief and simple are the rites that mark the funeral of Marilyn Monroe. We grasp at straws, as if knowing how she died—or why—might enable us to bring her back . . .”

  They showed Westwood Village, where the funeral would be held. The sign looked cheap, like a roadside attraction, a small “Swiss” hotel along some unused highway:

  WESTWOOD VILLAGE

  MEMORIAL PARK AND MORTUARY

  Forty men with walkie-talkies stood outside.

  People shouted and took pictures.

  According to the Times, “special police from movie studios” and “agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency” would be inside. Monroe would be wearing her wig from The Misfits and a chartreuse dress she’d purchased in Florence. No jewelry. A solid bronze casket would be lined with champagne-colored velvet.

  The Suicide Squad was “still active,” the Times said, quoting Tabachnick saying they had talked to doctors in the case and friends of the dead actress. It quoted Farberow saying that it may be “another two weeks” before Curphey’s office reached a “final decision.”

  Arthur Miller said he did not think she had taken her own life. Publicist Pat Newcomb said the same, adding that she had made plans: On Monday, Marilyn had an appointment with her lawyer. On Tuesday she was scheduled to meet with J. Lee Thompson, producer of The Guns of Navarone. On September 12, she was scheduled to be in New York for an Esquire cover shoot.

  Suicide, the paper said, ranks as the ninth cause of death in California.

  • • •

  Every morning, the week that followed, they woke me at four-thirty so that one of the residents could take my temperature and blood pressure. Why these tests seemed more important than sleep, I have no idea—especially since they kept telling me to “get some rest.”

  I got so little. Partly because of the noises in the place, but mostly because I didn’t stop thinking about what Jo had sa
id about the sand in the pool near the Lawford house. On the day I was released, I asked for a Yellow Pages and paged through the H’s to “Helicopter.”

  There were four helicopter companies in Los Angeles but only one in Santa Monica. That was Conners on Clover Field. It was a fifteen-acre landing site named for World War I pilot Lieutenant Greayer “Grubby” Clover. It was the home of Douglas Aircraft, which had moved to an abandoned movie studio in 1922 and started making military planes. They tested them on Clover Field.

  During World War II, Douglas realized that their plant was vulnerable to air attack, so they worked with a team of Warner Brothers set designers to camouflage it. They stretched five million square feet of chicken wire over four hundred poles, covering the terminal, hangars, and parking lots. On top of this, they built fake wood-frame houses complete with garages, fences, clotheslines—and even “trees” made of the same chicken wire. They spray-painted chicken feathers to look like leaves, then covered the runway with green paint and turned the largest hangar into a hill.

  The place was so well disguised that even the pilots who knew about it had trouble finding it, and when the camouflage was eliminated, in 1945, the neighbors mourned as if a monument had been torn down.

  I picked up the telephone and called Conners.

  A man answered. “Hello?”

  Did I really want to do this? Was it worth it? Jack Clemmons was in Italy. The doctors were in the Côte d’Azur. Eunice Murray was God only knew where, along with Pat Newcomb. They had all disappeared, leaving me the last man standing, but what price would I pay for the truth?

  I hung up.

  At 2:15, I put on the clothes that Jo had brought.

  A monogram had been stitched in red above the left pocket of the new shirt:

  JEH, it read.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15

  31.

  I wasn’t thinking about Marilyn and wouldn’t think of Marilyn and the only reason I went back to Joe’s on Melrose was to get my ruined car. I didn’t intend to walk inside the place, and I wouldn’t have walked inside the place—except for the fact that I couldn’t find a pay phone on the sidewalk.

  Joe was mopping up the bar as I walked to the bank of lit phones to the right of the door. I sat on the stool under a phone and put a dime in and called a tow truck.

  “Be right there.”

  I hung up.

  I would not think of the diary. I wasn’t thinking of the diary as I played “Young World” on the Wurlitzer and sat at the bar. I smelled the familiar and comforting smell of damp hops. I saw the wood scored with pierced hearts and long-ago loves, the black lines from burned cigarettes. But I’ve said this already, haven’t I?

  I went up to the bar.

  “Jesus,” Joe said. “What happened to you?”

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “You and Albert Anastasia.”

  “Very funny.”

  “What can I get you?”

  “Budweiser.”

  “Kinda early, isn’t it?”

  “I had a rough day.”

  “You look it.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  I waited for the tow truck. I wasn’t thinking about Marilyn. I was on vacation, after all, but after another Budweiser (okay, three), the truck still hadn’t arrived and I really had to pee.

  Sorry for the vulgarity.

  “No problem,” you say.

  I stood from the bar with the foam still in the glass and walked past the table to the bathroom. I wasn’t going to look for what was left of the diary, but the truth is that I didn’t use the urinal. I used a stall—the same stall, in fact, where I had hidden the torn pages.

  I was whistling and pissing when I couldn’t help myself: I looked up to see the tile over the toilet slipped just slightly to the right. Past it was darkness, and . . . what?

  Pages?

  I flushed, closed the cover, stood and pushed the tile over, my head rising from the light into the darkness, eyes above the ceiling line, staring across the tile tops, past rattraps and rusted pipes, searching for the diary.

  “It’s gone,” I said back in the phone booth. “Someone took it, Jo. I came back to get the car, and—”

  “Mr. Fitzgerald?” A woman’s voice.

  “Jo?”

  “This ain’t Jo.” It was Mabel, the colored maid. “Jo ain’t here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “That club on Sunset.”

  • • •

  The club was Ciro’s, the place on the Strip that, like so much else, had devolved from its status as a glamour spot for movie stars to a mostly empty place that was, that evening, as quiet as a chapel mid-week. It was mid-week, after all, which meant the only people in the place were serious drinkers, as the blonde who sat like a living doll with Jo at the table in the corner was a serious drinker.

  Listen: By living doll, I don’t mean that she was beautiful. I mean that she was scary, as a life-sized doll propped in a chair with a highball and fried blond hair would, in fact, be scary. She waved her burning cigarette over the cloudy empty glass, pulpy limes lolling in the melting ice.

  Her name was Jeanne Carmen. Now you ask who that is, Doctor; no one knows anymore. I sure as hell didn’t. The truth is that you might see her on the Late Show. She was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper in The Monster of Piedras Blancas and Lillibet in Untamed Youth. She is now a trick-shot golfer and a friend of the famous—mostly Marilyn’s. They had been, she said, “pill buddies,” sharing downers and stories of the men that Jeanne called her “extracurriculars.”

  As for Jo: She was wearing sporty Capri pants colored with Picasso blurs of greens, reds, oranges, odd browns; that and sugary pink lipstick. She looked like an unfinished art project, but it was Fashion. “What are you doing here?” she asked me.

  “I’m looking for you.”

  “I’m doing an interview.”

  “I need to talk.”

  “You look like Don Taylor,” Jeanne Carmen said. “Anyone tell you that?”

  “No. I’m Ben.”

  “Jeanne Carmen.”

  She transferred her cigarette to her left hand and extended her right wrist. It was bent like a fairy’s. She wanted me to kiss, not shake, it. So I did. Her whole face puckered in a smile. She smelled of an Eau de Something that only partly masked a deeper smell, that of nicotine and, more, decay.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t even know who Don Taylor is.”

  “He was in Naked City. But he wasn’t naked. More’s the pity. Isn’t that what Shakespeare said?”

  “He said a lot of things.”

  “More’s the pity. You look like a young Don Taylor. Were you ever a soldier?”

  “No.”

  “Don was, in and out of bed. Lovely boy. Would you like a drink?”

  “Wild Turkey, neat.”

  “Yoo-hoo!” She tried to flag one of the waiters who prowled the damp place like superannuated penguins. They all seemed to have bald heads shiny under strands of unwashed hair and mottled with sunspots so large they looked like continents. “Damn them.” She stood and walked across the room to the bar.

  I turned to Jo. She was all angles and attitude now, her voice cold and clipped.

  “You get out of here, Ben.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I went back to the bar. It’s where I hid the extra pages. No one would know they were there, unless—”

  “Ben, you’re like Bluebird’s wife.”

  “Bluebeard.”

  “Whatever. Stop opening that door. You said the heart of all morality is staying out of certain rooms. So clever of you! You’re a clever boy. But the heart of all safety is staying out of certain rooms, too. Now, stop being Pandora. Stop opening the box.”

  “You’re opening it, too.”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  “You’re Annie Laurie.”

  “Not if I can help it. Will you listen to me?”

  “I’m l
istening.”

  “They’ve threatened you.”

  “They did more than that.”

  “They did you a favor: They let you live. But guess what happens next time?”

  “It will be a watermelon?”

  “There!” Jeanne said, pulling her chair out again and settling back at the table. “That’s settled! One Wild Turkey, coming up. Now.” Her hand was on my left thigh. “Where were we?”

  “I think we’re finished,” Jo said.

  “I was telling you about the tape,” she said.

  “What tape?” I asked.

  Jo said: “Enough.”

  Jeanne winced against the stream of smoke that rose from her cigarette, frowned with that stained mouth, and stood, gripping the back of her chair. She stared down at me. “You’re lovely, Don. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Only Shakespeare.”

  “Shut! Up!” she said, and left.

  I turned to Jo. “What was that all about?”

  “I was finished with the interview.”

  “You were hiding something.”

  “Or protecting you. Let’s get a drink.”

  “I already did.”

  “Well, I’m thirsty,” she said, trying to flag down the waiter.

  “Good luck,” I said. “And now about these clothes.”

  32.

  The clothes: I still have the shirt, Doc. It is hanging on the back of the chair that I am sitting in. When you look over my shoulder, I know what you are thinking. I suppose that I can read your mind.

  You want to see the shirt.

  I stand, take it off the chair, and hand it to you. You feel the fabric in your fingers, then touch the monogram.

  “JEH,” you say. “Who’s that?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “But you know now.”

  I nod.

  “Tell me, Ben: Why did you trust Jo Carnahan?”

  • • •

  The clothes that you brought me are pretty fancy,” I said.

  “And you look pretty in them.”