The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “It was a ruse. Johnny was pulling strings to make himself respectable after he got out of jail.”

  “Why?”

  “God, I love how you keep delivering the straight lines.”

  “So give me the punch line, George Jessel.”

  “Johnny Roselli is also known as—let’s see here; I wrote this down—‘Filippo Sacco, Handsome Johnny, James Roselli.’ He’s, um, the Chicago outfit’s man in L.A. He was part of the Capone Syndicate. Convicted of federal labor racketeering charges for masterminding the Mob shakedown of the Hollywood unions. Sprung in 1947. Now he calls himself a PR guy and a consultant, but his fingers are still in any number of pies. He takes bets at Santa Anita.”

  “Horse books,” I said.

  “What?”

  “My son calls him Uncle Daddy. Says he makes ‘horse books.’”

  “Well, he sure as hell didn’t write My Friend Flicka.”

  “Okay, I’m sitting down now.”

  “Hang on,” she said, and told me a story:

  Johnny Stompanato had been Lana Turner’s lover (she said). They wrote letters to each other. Extreme letters. Lana’s were addressed to “Daddy Darling” and “Dearest Precious Heart.” The Sweater Girl wrote of “our love, our hopes, our dreams, our sex and longings.” She wrote, “You’re my man.” She penned these letters even during periods when, she later testified, she was being beaten by the same Precious Heart who was fucking her, the Daddy Darling her daughter, Cheryl, eventually shot.

  You can see pictures of him dead on the floor.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Say you’re handsome, Ben. And charming.”

  “That’s a stretch.”

  “Say you send a girl flowers every day. You lay on the veneer. Chocolates. The fine car. The mink. The dinners and the Dom. All of which a man uses to disguise the fact that he wants to bed a woman. All of which allows the woman to pretend that whatever carnal interest she may have in the man is something else when, you know, what she really wants is to be thrown on the bed, in the back of the car, in a bathroom stall, and ravished.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “It didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “It happened over the course of months. But at one point, as Lana put it, ‘I had fallen for him,’ and whatever he needed to know or to gain he got from her through sex. And so.”

  “So what?”

  “Johnny Stompanato was doing to Lana what Johnny Roselli is doing to your wife: extorting her. Sexually. He wanted information: Your Social Security number. Your bank account. Your license number. And then—”

  “Then what?”

  “Just do me a favor, Ben.”

  “Sure.”

  “Get out of Verona Gardens.”

  There was a pounding at the door.

  “Ben?”

  The Tall Man from Ciro’s was standing outside.

  And he was smiling.

  41.

  The archetypal American story is arguably the story of the Guy Who Does Not Give Up. You can achieve anything if you just Put Your Mind to It. Horatio Alger. The Little Engine That Could. Hey, the Mafia, too. But Ragged Dick never had to deal with Bobby Kennedy. And the Little Engine wasn’t stopped on his way up the hill by LAPD goons or some guy named John Rawlston or Roselli who had something to do with both the Santa Anita racetrack and my wife.

  I was done. I wanted to quit. But here’s Johnny:

  “You must be Ben,” he said.

  “Oh, actually.”

  “Front desk says you’re Ben. Well, you must be. Fitzgerald, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Call me Johnny.”

  He reached into his jacket, removed a business card, and handed it to me. It said “consultant.” He then removed a pack of cigarettes, revealing a flash of what looked like a gun. He put a cigarette into his mouth and handed the pack to me.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Not what I heard.” He flipped his lighter, lit the cigarette.

  “What did you hear?”

  “I hear you smoke a lot even though your son has asthma ’n’ that you don’t have money ’n’ that you keep your kid in a bad hotel.”

  “It’s not a hotel.”

  “Was the last time I looked, Don.”

  “Name’s Ben.”

  “You know, I love that part in Naked City when you go to find the boxer and he’s doing sit-ups. What’d they use in that? Chloroform?”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “I saw Naked City.”

  “Jeanne Carmen?”

  “Nice girl.”

  “You know Jeanne Carmen.”

  “I know a lot of people. I’m a producer.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You’ve seen my movies?”

  “Never saw He Walked by Night.”

  “How about The Empty Glass?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “You’d like it, Don. All about the death of an actress. So they find her dead on the bed but the glass was empty. Now, let me ask you something,” he said. “How did she swallow those pills?”

  • • •

  The place was like one of those department-store showrooms where the spines of coverless books are turned to the back of the shelves, so as not to screw up the color scheme. The style was strictly Mid-Century Motel Room. The picture above the couch against the left wall showed a spiky torero in some Spanish bullring. On the other side of the couch stood a tall cage in which a bright green and orange parrot hung on a mini-trapeze. His plumed head bobbed up and down.

  My wife’s nightgown lay on the bed above her slippers.

  My son’s Monopoly board sat on the floor, real bills standing in for play money.

  Johnny took his jacket off and laid it on the sheet. He untied his shoelaces, took a flask from his vest pocket, and handed it to me.

  “No thanks.”

  “Have a seat.” He patted the spot beside him.

  I took my hat off and sat. “You were saying.”

  “Saying what?”

  “How did she swallow those pills?”

  He took a deep swig from the flask and squinted, eyes watering. “I asked you that question,” he said. “Say, I wish I knew. The whole thing is like a movie. I know the beginning. I’m puzzling over the middle. But the end is what’s really bothering me. You know what I think the problem is?”

  “What?”

  “Lack of historical accuracy. Bad source material. I need to do more research. I need to know about the last weekend Marilyn spent alive. It was at Cal-Neva Lodge out on the border between Nevada and California. Sinatra was there,” he said. “And something happened in Chalet fifty-two, where Marilyn was staying. Something bad.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I need to know.”

  “What makes you think I can help?”

  “I’m a patriot, Ben. I enlisted at thirty-seven. They didn’t want me. I was ‘physically unfit.’ That’s what they said. I had neuritis and arthritis in my spine. I had tuberculosis. But I kept going down to the board out in Westwood until I was inducted. Landed in Normandy and went through the Rhineland into Central Europe. That’s where I learned German,” he said, “from the whores.”

  “How?”

  “They called them Sleeping Dictionaries. You get them in bed and they whisper in your ear and that is how I learned the language.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “It wasn’t hard to reach your wife. She put ads in the paper. She was dating some old fanook named Mr. Charles. Reginald Charles. It wasn’t hard to take the fat fuck out into the back and slit his belly just a little. It wasn’t hard to be a comfort when I found out that her ex had either poisoned her son or left drugs out so her son could think they were candy. So I start to see your wife. And so she softens up. It’s not long before she tells me something.”

  “What?”

  “You found a diary.”

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

  “I told you I’m a patriot. We got the vote in West Virginia. You think Kennedy would have stood a chance otherwise? Humphrey had the state sewn up until we went out with piles of cash and baseball bats. You know what they think about Micks out there? The bleeding ugly Irish?”

  “No.”

  “Why are Christmas lights and Irishmen alike?”

  “Half of them are broke and the other half don’t work,” I said.

  “So we changed all that—and the first thing Bobby does after big brother gets elected is go after Jimmy Hoffa. You read The Enemy Within. Still, it didn’t end there. You know the Brown Derby?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s where first I met Robert Maheu.”

  • • •

  He was a barrel of a man who slipped (Johnny said) into the round booth in the Derby’s back room. He worked for Howard Hughes and was a fixer for the CIA, having once made a porn film that showed a Sukarno look-alike having sex with a woman in Moscow. He told Johnny that the government was preparing to invade Cuba. Castro had overthrown Batista in 1958, kicking the Mob’s casinos out of Havana. The West celebrated the coup at first—but it wasn’t long before Castro’s Communism became clear, and (worse) a missile base now existed ninety miles off the coast of Florida.

  It was February 1961.

  “What if,” Maheu asked Johnny in the Derby that day, “you’d had the opportunity to get rid of Hitler in 1932?”

  “I would have blown him away.”

  “Anyone with a soul would have, sure. And you have it, John. That’s why we want to work with you.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “The CIA. Help us eliminate the Beard.”

  “Now, how’s that gonna work?” Johnny asked. “Feds follow me everywhere. They go to my shirtmaker to see if I’m paying cash, for crissake.”

  “You won’t have trouble. We’ll pay you a hundred and fifty thousand—in bills. But if you say Bob Maheu brought you into this, I will deny and deny. Swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Now Johnny took another swig from the flask and handed it to me.

  “No thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.” He swigged again. “You know what botulinum is?”

  “No.”

  “Now, that’s a nerve toxin. It binds to nerve cells, which stops them from releasing a neurotransmitter—fancy name for what makes nerves work. If a neurotransmitter stops functioning, you get paralysis—tongue, ribs. Guinea pigs don’t die from it—who knew? But guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Monkeys do. I watched them. The CIA made a pill, see. They were gonna get rid of Castro with botulinum first and then move in. We had a man with the pill in a restaurant. He was going to drop it in Castro’s soup, but the Kennedys pulled the plug. So they sent all our boys into an ambush.”

  You know the drill, Doc: On April fifteenth, U.S. bombers disguised as Cuban revolutionary planes flew over Cuba. On Bahía de Cochinos, American-trained Cuban exiles filled the beaches, but the rebels had been tipped off by the whores in the hills. The boats landed and blood flowed. No air cover. No backup—thanks to the Kennedys. The soldiers were slaughtered like (I can’t help it, Doc) pigs.

  “So we got JFK elected. So we offered to assassinate the enemy. Now I’m a patriot: I took no money. And what happened? After Cuba, my shirtmaker calls to say the Feds are hanging around again, asking if I paid cash. I was still paying cash. Except not the hundred and fifty thousand—money that I never took.”

  The phone rang.

  Johnny picked up. “Hello.” He frowned at me. “For you.” He handed me the phone.

  “Hi.”

  “Front desk,” the man said. “A . . . Mr. Roselli here to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny. Says you’re expecting him.”

  “Look, this isn’t my room—”

  “He asked for you. Said you were there.”

  A white moth batted against the bulb stuck in the peeling ceiling, a charred halo surrounding the porcelain base. For a moment—it felt like hours—I heard that sound; then all sound dropped out.

  I hung up.

  “What was that?” Johnny said.

  “Wrong number.”

  “Why would they call you?”

  “I said it was a wrong number.”

  “Who knows you’re here?”

  “No one.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. Someone else wants that diary.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “No,” he said. “But your girlfriend does.”

  A knock at the door. “Ben!” A voice: “It’s Johnny.”

  “Jesus.” He took the gun from his holster and walked to the door.

  The curtains were blowing over the fire escape.

  I stepped onto the metal and held the rickety rusted bars seven flights down to the ground; just across the street, Jo sat behind the wheel of a squad car.

  42.

  What are you doing?” I asked, climbing into the side.

  “Rescuing you,” Jo said.

  “This isn’t your car.”

  “It’s my friend’s.”

  “It’s a cop car.”

  “I have friends in high places,” she said as she drove south, looking up. “Did you hear that?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “You know how they always say that gunshots sound like fireworks?”

  I nodded.

  “That wasn’t fireworks,” she said.

  43.

  I hear the sirens all night. It’s clear that things aren’t going well. The papers are filled with doomsday news. Stocks are falling, grocery stores emptied out. People are making “lead” hats out of foil and covering their windows with duct tape. Schools have issued defense pamphlets in case of “enemy attack.” It’s everything but the moon filled with blood and the woman with WISDOM tattooed on her forehead. You can see things in the clouds, too, like the end of the world.

  That’s what happened in Cuba: One scenario, at least, in the sad series of scenarios that began with Ian Fleming. You know how they say that life imitates art? The truth is that life imitates spy stories.

  One night at a fancy Georgetown dinner party in the spring of 1960, the baked Alaska had just been served when Senator John F. Kennedy, the host, leaned back and looked at his guest of honor, the James Bond author, with a cigar in his mouth. “If you had to eliminate Castro,” Kennedy asked, “how would you do it?”

  Well, Fleming thought this was a wonderful joke, a sort of party game and, half under the influence of some fine wine or another, he gave his James Bond answers:

  Set off an elaborate fireworks display to terrify the Cubans into thinking the Second Coming was at hand.

  Give Castro an exploding cigar.

  Put an explosive into a Caribbean mollusk near where Castro scuba dives.

  Or slip him a pill.

  And now Jo was asking, “Ben, what happened back there?” I told her everything. Then I looked up to see that she was pulling into the Ambassador lot.

  “Where are you going?”

  “My apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “Jesus, all these questions. Why is the sky blue? Why did Fido have to die? Do you know the way to San Jose?”

  “Take 1-5 North.”

  “Now, let me ask you something,” she said. “Did you leave your hotel light on?”

  “It’s not a hotel.”

  “The light was on in your room just now. I saw it from the car.”

  • • •

  I’d never been inside the Ambassador—not even for a drink at the Grove. Well, I didn’t have the money. Miss Monroe had begun her career here at a poolside modeling agency, and my friend Ed had once stayed in one of the Catalina bungalows. But now here I stood, hat in hand, in the lobby where the porters whisked valises on steel rollers to the banks of elevators filled with women in ermine
and white dresses and long stockings, and the next thing I knew I was rising with Jo to her room overlooking the fake beach and the pool they called the Crystal Plunge on the third floor of the southern wing.

  “Here.” She opened the door and we stepped into a sitting area filled with faux Empire furniture and cream walls with stripes that Jo called puce, a fancy word for what happens when pink is left out in the sun for too long. An ivory Princess phone sat on a table under a mirror framed by a train of grasping cupids who had gotten tangled up in sheets but didn’t seem troubled about it.

  “Mabel, draw a bath, will you?” Jo called to an unseen maid, kicking her high heels off in the entryway and dropping her keys into a ceramic dish under the mirror.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The colored maid appeared, wearing a white apron around a black dress that whispered as she moved into the bathroom.

  “Make yourself at home,” Jo said. “Just promise to keep everything up to code.”

  “What code?”

  “The Production Code. I’ll sleep with my feet on the floor.”

  “You’re inviting me to sleep over?”

  “Over is the operative word,” she said. “Not with. So promise: No excessive or lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures or gestures, or any scenes that stimulate the lower or baser element.”

  “I promise.”

  “Complete nudity is not permitted. Including nudity in silhouette.”

  “I’ll keep my pants on.”

  “No dancing that emphasizes indecent movements.”

  “I don’t dance.”

  “Good.”

  Jo pulled her earrings off, one by one, making that little cupping gesture with the tilting head that was only one of the mysterious movements that women had collectively mastered.

  She dropped her earrings in the bowl, then checked her watch. “Jesus, look at the time. I have to hurry.”

  “You’re going—?”

  “Out.”

  “With?”

  “These questions! Delilah. She’s my best friend. Oh, I know it’s annoying, but she’s having such trouble, and what kind of a friend would I be if I let her sob alone in her Miller all night?”

  “She drinks Miller?”