by Tim Baker
The throb rose inside Hastings’s head, singing its way across his mind, contracting his thoughts to a single impulse: action.
He listens. It’s silent in the bedroom.
He enters the bedroom, closing the door until it’s just ajar. Her breathing is laboured but steady. Probably sleeping pills; possibly booze. He feels the dorsum pulse on her right foot. Slow; steady. She’s not in any trouble. His eyes travel up her leg to the still-wet trace of lovemaking on the sheet, one of her thighs gleaming with a sticky sheen. It is a private and transgressive moment—the revelation of an intimate act made public; without consent. A classic Movie Star moment . . . if you were Confidential Magazine.
Hastings modestly covers the sleeping woman with the top sheet and puts a spare pillow across the bedside lamp. The room drops into twilight, the filtered lampshade still providing enough light for him to see. He sets to work fast, starting with the drawer of the bedside table, stepping back in surprise. Roselli had asked him to find a diary. There are at least twelve books inside the drawer. Hundreds of pages of notes, confessions, pleas, tirades and observations. Names leap out and hit him across the face with their celebrity: DiMaggio, Miller, Sinatra, JFK, Eva Marlowe . . . Rex Bannister.
Hastings swears aloud.
Marilyn stirs, turning onto her back, the sheet getting caught up in her legs. Hastings freezes, staring at her eyes. They stay closed. He approaches the door, and checks outside. The faces of the three men on the porch are furrowed with conflict. A car is parked across the road, full of darkness. He watches it for a long moment and then sees the telltale red pulse of a cigarette half-concealed inside a closed fist. Someone waiting. Someone watching.
The man in the car across the street raises something to his face. A camera. The men pause on the porch, arguing in hot whispers, unconscious of the dual surveillance.
Marilyn sighs. He looks back at her, a wisp of hair caught across her lips, rising and descending with her breathing, as regular as a metronome. He opens a chest of drawers. More diaries. He hadn’t figured on that; he hadn’t figured on the naked movie star or the man watching in the car either.
Hastings starts packing the diaries into a vanity case. He checks an antique secretary desk. Nothing but a manila envelope.
Inside are catch-your-breath photos of Marilyn. In all of them her face is creased unconscious from dope or booze. He slips the envelope inside the case and turns back to the sleeping woman. Whatever she’s on, she’s breathing normally; she’s as safe as someone like her can be.
Safer than Susan ever was.
He picks up the bag and goes to the door.
Freezes.
The men have come inside the house, and are gathered around a telephone. Hastings gently eases the bedside phone from the cradle. A piqued voice fills the space between the receiver and his ear. ‘She said that . . . ?’ Another voice he recognizes but can’t quite place: light, nasal, with the unmistakable twang of privilege. ‘Do you think she’d actually do it?’
There is a heavy sigh and then someone in the room next door speaks, Hastings hearing the echo coming from the phone. ‘Jesus, Jack, you know her; there’s no telling what she might do . . . ’ Hastings weighs the moment. He could leave now through her bedroom window, while the men are on the phone, or he could stay and try to find out what they are talking about. He has the books. He could get the license plates of all the cars outside. He could put it all together without risking that much more.
He could still get away.
He places the phone on the bed, slips the window latch open silently and starts to climb out when something moves behind him, black and fast. He whirls, his gun drawn. Nothing. He scans the room and finally sees it. Smoke gliding towards him from the pillow on the lamp. It’s begun to smoulder. He tugs the pillow onto the floor. The room swells with light.
He drops out the window and backs away, hunched out of view, watching the shadows of the men projected on the wall as they enter the bedroom. He follows the paving stones towards the pool, freezing when he sees the green eyes staring straight at him. Not so much a challenge as an expression of curiosity. A white cat with a grey cap around its ears arches against his legs, its meow alarming in the nighttime silence. Then it scents Bella and disappears with a light, regretful purr.
He’s just made it past the pool when it finally hits him—the voice on the phone. And his hand is still shaking when he slips the key into the ignition of his car, almost expecting a boom . . .
CHAPTER 20
Dallas 2014
Dwayne Wayne fans the photographs out on the table like tarot cards. Shots of Marilyn tend to be grouped around several recurring themes. Sexy Marilyn. Playful Marilyn. Wistful Marilyn. Tragic Marilyn. These are unlike any I’ve ever seen. Real Marilyn. Some are taken beside a pool house in bright sunshine. Impossibly high palm trees sentinel the scenes, slashes of black tapering off in geometric perfection into a background of white-hot sky. In several of the pictures, Marilyn shares a joke with a beautiful young woman in a one-piece bathing suit. In another, both women sit in bath robes, drinking coffee by the pool. Some of the shots are indoors—shadows suggesting a secret intimacy broken by the blurred radiance of lamps or the silhouette of distant hills glimpsed through windows. In one of the photos Marilyn reclines across a sofa, the other woman sitting on the armrest, a hand on Marilyn’s shoulder; a gesture of both affection and possession. Both women gaze intently across the room at a man whose back obscures a corner of the frame.
Marilyn seems so powerfully present in the photos that I am overwhelmed by a nostalgia that’s closer to personal memory than pop culture history. I may as well be leafing through a long-lost family album, there’s such a relaxed candour in these snapshots; as if nobody knew the photos were being taken.
He did say blackmail.
‘So what have these got to do with JFK?’
There is the soft shiver of a drawer opening and something heavy being extracted. For a queasy moment I think it’s a gun. But it’s an old-fashioned magnifying glass. Dwayne Wayne points to a patch of light in one of the photos. ‘See for yourself.’ I take the loupe and peer intently at the tiny, microscopic detail—doing exactly what I just said not to: examining the minutiae. Through the lens I can clearly see a face mirrored ghostlike in a window in one of the nighttime shots. I feel my blood pressure drop. The reflected face staring right back at me belongs to Jack Kennedy.
Conspiracy.
For the first time, it almost feels real. Dwayne Wayne slaps me kindly on the back. ‘Kind of hard to get your head around, isn’t it?’
If they’re not fakes. ‘How did you get these?’
’These were taken by Walter Stark, a surveillance expert who worked for Howard Hughes. I got them from a lawyer who knew Hughes: Adam Granston.’
Dallas was starting to feel like a very small town. ‘Where were these taken?’
‘At High Sierra, Old Man Bannister’s place in LA.’
I put the magnifying glass down. ‘Why would JFK have an affair with Marilyn at the home of one of his father’s fiercest enemies?’
His laugh is so explosive it makes me jump. ‘JFK didn’t know she was going to be there. It was—what do you call it? When there’s a strange but happy coincidence?’
‘Serendipity?’
‘Pretty word.’ His laughter is a rumble of thunder, threatening a violent storm. ‘JFK had gone there to see the Old Man. He couldn’t hold out anymore. He wanted in.’
‘On what?’
‘The Old Man’s cabal, of course’
Of course. ‘Mr. Wayne, when you attain the power and influence of someone like Rex Bannister, people often accuse you of belonging to a secret society. But at the end of the day, most monopolies and cartels—’
‘Cabals!’
He’s very attached to the term. ‘Most cabals are merely vested interests seeking to pr
otect their collective advantages, like OPEC or the Big Four. You find them in every society. You even find them in nature. Darwin said that cells of a similar—’
‘The cabals of which I speak are outside nature, Mr. Alston.’
‘Nothing’s outside of nature.’
‘My grandfather was a dentist in Tulsa when the Klan burnt down his home in the Race Riots of 1921. You call that kind of hate natural?’ His voice tightens, his eyes shining with indignation. ‘Jasper, right here in Texas! James Byrd’s automobile lynching. You think that was natural?’ He’s putting words in my mouth. I try to interrupt, but he’s on a roll now. ‘Smell the coffee, Mr. Alston, all cabals are outside nature and all cabals are evil. The Klan. The Nazis. The banks. Now take a look at the members of the Old Man’s cabal. The Mafia. Big Oil. The Intelligence Community. The Military Industrial Complex. Why were they working together?’
‘There’s no proof they ever were.’
He shakes his head with unsurprised disappointment. ‘You need to adjust your vision here, Mr. Alston. You need to start thinking like a Jedi.’
I take a step towards the door. The way things are shaping up, Dwayne Wayne is going to set a new high score on the Dallas Wacko-Meter.
‘Howard Hughes and Old Man Bannister used these photos not to destroy Kennedy, but to control him. TFX was the tribune he was forced to pay. Once he agreed, Marilyn was sacrificed. They knew he loved her. It was part of his punishment.’
That wasn’t enough? ‘And what was the other part?’
‘Public execution. Dallas was his scaffold.’
The putter of air-conditioning fills the tense silence, streamers fluttering nervously. It’s something I’ve noticed in the houses of Dallas: the permanently locked windows. Not just to filter the scorching air, but to stop whatever it is that haunts the city from entering. Dallas is the village in the Carpathian Mountains, bolted and breathless; the stain of its guilt running under the very earth. All that crude oil. All that money. All that power. How can truth survive in this air-conditioned nightmare?
The simple answer: it can’t. Put ‘JFK’ and ‘Dallas’ in any search engine, and you’ll get airline schedules, not assassinations.
Wayne starts sliding the snapshots back into their soiled envelope. ‘These photos are the smoking gun. Physical evidence that confirms the rumours about Marilyn and Kennedy. They provide the only motive for the assassination that stands up.’ He stares at me, his eyes weighing pans, measuring my worth. His smile is not beatific. ‘And none of them have ever been published before.’
’You can’t even be sure they’re real.’
‘They’re genuine. I want a million.’
‘I don’t have a million . . . ’
‘She does . . . ’ He jabs a finger at the woman sitting with Marilyn on the sofa.
‘Who is she?’
‘Her? That’s Betty Bannister.’
CHAPTER 21
Los Angeles 1960
Cops crawl over the Bannister joint, two or three to each room, checking every wall, every panel, every floorboard. Opening cupboards, wardrobes, trunks. Looking under beds.
Footsteps vibrate on the ceiling of the top floor as the attic is searched, bats escaping the strafing intrusion of flashlights. Dozens more police comb the vast foundations. It’s a gold rush down there. Torches, hurricane lamps. Some are wearing miners’ caps. There is the constant whir of generators. Spotlights have been set up in the catacomb passageways of the cellars, dust revolving in the blinding beams.
They haven’t found a way into the well yet, but there are already men tracing the massive old water pipes that striate the grounds, dating back to the time when the estate’s subterranean aquifer provided its own supply of water. The Bannisters were notoriously independent—social code from the old days for selfish and avaricious. The elaborate pumping system not only sucked and channelled High Sierra’s groundwater, but also that of its neighbours. Elaine could have crawled her way into this ancient water network from another entrance, maybe on another level or even from another property. But that didn’t explain the shoe down in the cellar. Or what she was fleeing from.
I stumble on an electrical cord as I make my way towards the dark passage where I found the shoe. There’s an old geezer with survey papers of the grounds. He hears me stumble and turns quickly, shining his torch into my eyes. ‘Found that entrance yet?’ I ask, holding my hand up to the light.
The beam goes back to the blueprints. ‘There isn’t one. Not at this well.’
‘There are other wells?’
‘Four of ’em. But it’s only the north one that has an access door.’
I snatch the paper from his hands. ‘Where’s the north well?’
He shines the light in my face again, his voice strained with annoyance. ‘If you give me back the blueprints, I’ll show you . . . Thank you kindly.’ There is a crackle as a thin-skinned finger taps even thinner paper. ‘Here.’
‘And where does it lead to?’
‘Straight up.’ I grab the torch from him and shine it into his eyes. Two can play at this game. He blinks uncomfortably.
‘You know what I mean: does it lead up to where they found her?’
He shakes his head and taps the column behind him. ‘They found her above this well. That’s for damn sure.’
I shine the light back on the blueprints. ‘And we’re here, right?’
A harrumph for response. It’s a simple compass grid. We’re south. The entrance well is north. But something is wrong. On the plans, the north well seems to be freestanding. ‘What’s all this space here? I don’t remember seeing that.’
There is the brief scoffing laugh of a tired and bitter man. Someone who has been forced to suffer fools for bosses; to watch them advance in their careers, marry the pretty secretaries, and leave for Catalina Friday mornings while he had to stay at the office all weekend dealing with a major leak at Silver Lake and ruptured mains in Burbank. His watery eyes drown me in his gaze. ‘That’s because this survey was done before World War II.’
I stare at him. ‘Meaning . . . ?’
‘Before. The. Atomic. Bomb.’ Spelling it out for an imbecile. Me.
The bomb shelter.
I start running, pushing past cops and workers, going from light to shadow, light to shadow. I run down a second passageway, heading for the shelter. But instead I come to a brick wall.
A dead end.
Then I get it.
Elaine had gone to the wrong well. Like me, she’d got lost. Maybe she panicked. Maybe she took off her shoe and used it to hit the wall, listening for the hollow thud of the cistern. Or maybe she fell in the dark and lost her shoe, but kept on going until she found the right well. The one with the door. Climbing up. Maybe her accomplice promised her he’d clear the entrance. Maybe he got spooked when I called out to him, and saved himself, knowing he was leaving Elaine to suffocate.
Metal glints ahead of me. I rush inside the bomb shelter. Two cops are going through everything, dusting, taking photos. I scan the walls. Steel, steel. Concrete. Steel. What the hell did I expect—it was a goddamn bomb shelter. No sign of a brick wall. But I know I saw a brick chamber somewhere earlier.
The secret room with the altar.
I trot down the side passage leading to the door. It’s still locked. I cough my way through the dust up some steps, exiting into daylight pandemonium. Mrs. Bannister and her husband were the only people with the keys. She told me so herself. There’s no sign of her in the grounds. Just cops. Everywhere. And firemen. Even military reserves, combing the estate grounds. Bloodhounds strain at leashes, their handlers working grids. Press hounds snap back at them, news crews filming. And huddled around three black cars—the men in suits. FBI. Judgmental and silent. Waiting for the right moment to exert their power. To step in and take over the case. None of them has a broken nose. Boston was lea
ving this part of the investigation to the Los Angeles office for the moment.
Schiller wades out of the havoc of the household, shaking his head in disgust. ‘You could have warned me!’
‘I told you already, before we discovered Elaine Bannister’s . . . ’ I was about to say body, but she’s still technically alive. ‘I checked the bomb shelter, I checked the cellars—there was no one there.’
‘The call had to come from there! They must have been hiding—and you missed them.’ I try to defend myself, but he talks over me, raising his voice so Bevo Means can overhear as he passes. Subtext for the journalist: His fault, not mine. ‘There must be somewhere else in the cellar. Somewhere you missed.’
You.
Means freezes, staying close. He gets the picture. He was the reporter who dubbed Elizabeth Short ‘The Black Dahlia’. I wonder what names he’d come up with for Elaine Bannister.
‘What if they came back here, just to make the calls?’
‘And drag the kid along with them?’ Schiller shoves the still eavesdropping Means roughly on his way. Blaming me is one thing, that helps the Force; but this open discord is another thing all together. This is too close to chaos.
‘Maybe it was just someone imitating a kid. Remember, the kid never spoke.’ He just screamed.
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Maybe it was a woman. Maybe it was a recording.’
’And maybe it was a fucking parrot. I’ve got Parker screaming in one ear, Old Man Bannister in the other, and the fucking Feds squeezing my balls. Not to mention the press, turning this into a sideshow.’ He rips a Herald Examiner out of a passing reporter’s hands. ‘Have you seen this birdcage liner? They’re already comparing it to Little-fucking-Lindy. And look here . . . ’ He folds the paper back to the front page, thumps the greasy headlines with his stumpy fingers. ‘ . . . Not a single fucking word about a parrot.’
FBI agents turn and stare. I usher Schiller away from them. ‘What if they used some kind of electronic gadget that kept bouncing the origin of the calls back to the receiver—to the Bannister Estate? To confuse us?’