Bye bye,baby nh-15

by Max Allan Collins

  “What brings you to Tinseltown, Jim?”

  We were sitting on a spectacularly uncomfortable brocade couch.

  “Hell, Nate, I been on the road all this month and it’s just starting. Negotiating God knows how many contracts, dealing with this latest bullshit case against me, this Florida thing? And, of course, lining up support for the big contract.”

  “What contract is that?”

  He cackled. His rather tiny eyes danced in the wide, rugged face. “The contract that has Bobby Kennedy’s asshole puckering! We’ve been working for months, for years, on a nationwide master contract, a bargaining agreement that’ll stop commerce in this country with a single strike order.”

  “A single phone call from you, you mean?”

  He grinned like a demented pixie. “That’s right. What do you think your old man would think about that?”

  Jimmy always talked about my father like he’d known him. And I never broke it to Jim that my father would likely have considered him a monster and a disgrace to the unionist cause.

  On the other hand, it was hard to deny Jimmy Hoffa was an effective labor leader, and that he’d negotiated generous contracts for his members.

  “Listen,” he said, and he leaned over and patted my knee. “I know you’re a busy guy, important guy out here, not just in Chicago, these days. I’m proud of you, kid.”

  We were roughly the same age, but he’d always called me “kid.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He hunched his shoulders in a Cagney-like way, a recurring mannerism. “Thing is, I just don’t want you to think I’m sticking my nose where it don’t belong.”

  “How so, Jim?”

  His eyes all but disappeared into folds of flesh. “I need a personal assurance from you. That is, of course, if I’m not overstepping the bounds of our friendship.”

  “Oh-kay…”

  The eyes tightened. They were hard and cold now. “I know you ran into somebody, the other day, who is doing some work for me.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. What else would Roger Pryor do but run to Jimmy? What would I have done in his situation?

  “Roger, you mean,” I said.

  “Yeah. You recommended him to me, or anyway your partner, Rubinski, did. I used Pryor a couple of times now and he seems reliable. He is reliable, Nate?”

  “Far as it goes. He’s for hire, like all of us.”

  He hitched his shoulders. “Well, Pryor told me you saw where he was parked and looked over his setup and guessed right away that he was, uh, doing a little eavesdropping on a certain female, who is I understand a friend and maybe a client of yours.”

  “Marilyn is a friend, and a client.”

  “Roger says he made you aware of the fact that our glorious president is fucking her. And I think maybe his brother is, too.”

  I blinked. “What, you mean Ted?”

  “No! Bobby.”

  My head bobbed back, like I’d taken a punch. Then I almost laughed. “That’s just silly, Jim. Bob’s a family man. You know that.”

  “You want to see the list I got of the women he’s screwed since January?”

  “No thanks.” Knowing this was hateful wishful thinking on his part, I said, “So then-you got Marilyn and Bobby on tape, too?”

  His face scrunched into a cagey mask. “Maybe. I don’t think that’s really your business.”

  He’d brought it up.

  But why press it, and anyway, this was horseshit. I just wasn’t in a position to tell Jimmy what I knew to be true-that Bobby’s only role here was to shut down the JFK/MM affair. A typical Kennedy family hatchet-man assignment.

  Jimmy waved a hand, smiled, shrugged. “Let’s not get off the track, kid. You want a beer or a Coke or anything? There’s a wet bar, too.”

  “No thanks, Jim.”

  He leaned forward-what was that, Jade East? “The question I want to ask, one friend to another, is whether you have told your client what you know.”

  “You mean, have I told Marilyn that her house is bugged?”

  Anxiety clenched his features. “That her house is bugged, yes.”

  “No. It doesn’t strictly speaking have anything to do with the job she’s hired me to do, and Roger is a colleague and, out of professional courtesy… no. I haven’t told her.”

  But I might. Hadn’t decided. Had been all up night thinking about it, but hadn’t decided…

  Jimmy was grinning his Chinaman grin again. “That’s good, Nate, that’s good. Now here’s what I want you to do, kid. I want you to stay in touch with little Miss Seven Year Itch. I want you to stay friendly.”

  “Well, we are friends. But I’m heading back to Chicago.”

  He waved a finger, like a cross schoolmaster. “No. You are not. You are staying out here and cozying up to that immoral little broad and seeing what she has to say about Bobby and his cunt-hound brother.”

  “Jim-you’ve got the place bugged already…”

  His voice, already hard, hardened, and words machine-gunned at me: “Listen, she’s not stupid. If she’s having her own phone bugged-yeah, Roger told me; don’t be naive-then she knows there’s a possibility of being eavesdropped upon. So she probably will spend time with you elsewhere. Maybe at your bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Maybe outside her place at her swimming pool. But if in some part of the house that ain’t bugged, like where the washing machines are, she starts talking while they’re churning? She spills anything incriminating about Bobby and Jack, I want to know.”

  “Jim-please. She’s my friend. Like you’re my friend.”

  “Some things are bigger than other things.” His mouth moved as if he was tasting something foul. “These two privileged pricks, never did an honest day’s work in their lives, have singled me out as some kind of fucking cancer, rich kid bastards. And that cocky little shit, Bobby? You’ve seen him go out of his way to embarrass me in public, you know how he dogs my ass, it’s a goddamn vendetta, and it’s got to stop. It is going to stop.” He worked at removing his scowl, and shrugged. “This is a harmless thing, anyway, what I’m suggesting.”

  “Harmless?”

  “Yeah. We get information on what kind of sorry immoral lowlifes these two brothers are, and we either embarrass their ass out of office, or they straighten up and honor agreements and deals they have made with certain individuals, myself included. You know a little about the Castro situation. Was I a good American on that one, Nate, or was I good American?”

  “You were a good American,” I said.

  “You should hope this works because otherwise it could get ugly.” Very quietly, he said, “I damn near killed Bobby’s punk ass a couple years back, remember?”

  I remembered. I’d stopped it. But Jimmy didn’t know that.

  His upper lip peeled back and his smile was a skull’s. “Next time I’m going after the brother.”

  The casualness of that was chilling. “But why Jack? Bobby’s the one causing the trouble. Bobby’s the one you hate.”

  “You gotta cut off the head of the snake to get rid of the rattle, kid. That lecherous liar Jack, if he would do us the favor of ceasing to exist? You really think a President Lyndon Johnson’s gonna hang onto Bobby Kennedy as his attorney general?”

  He straightened without standing, digging his hand in his pocket. Christ, was he going for a gun or a knife or something?

  No-he was peeling hundreds off a fat roll. “Here. Off the books, the way we both like it. A thousand as a retainer do the trick?”

  The son of a bitch was going to pay me to betray a client, and a woman I very much liked. I should have shoved the bills down his damn throat.

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said, and found a place for them in my wallet. “Anything else?”

  CHAPTER 8

  So I decided to stay on a while in Hollywood. My partner Fred was thrilled at the prospect, and my son Sam seemed pleased, too, though neither of them factored into my decision.

  Keeping Jimmy Hoffa happy did
. With surveillance in play, I’d need to see Marilyn a few times to justify the thousand I’d taken from the labor leader.

  Not that I’d wanted to take it, nor did I have any intention of betraying Marilyn to Hoffa or anybody else. I’d been provided the number of an LA attorney to whom I was to file my reports-these would be bogus, of course, but I’d have to make a few. The point was to stay alive, and seem to be cooperating.

  Beyond that, I wanted to get Marilyn alone, or anyway in some area of her home where a conversation would not make it onto tape-by the pool or in her garden, maybe.

  The morning after the Ambassador confab, Roger Pryor put in my phone tap, Marilyn having arranged for both Mrs. Murray and handyman Norman to be away. So early that afternoon, I called her private line-if a line tapped by its owner and Christ knew how many others might still be called private-and said I’d like to stop by and check up on the work my subcontractor had done.

  “Oh, please come, Nate!” a very upbeat Marilyn said. “I have so much to tell you.”

  “Things are going well, then?”

  “Wait till you hear.”

  This time when I tooled the Jag down the dead end of Fifth Helena and pulled up to the double wooden gates, they stood open, and I was able to roll into the small courtyard and park next to a two-tone green Dodge and a BMW. The latter wasn’t Marilyn’s-she drove a Caddy, which was probably in the free-standing garage-so she had a visitor. Last time I’d come casually dressed, but the lady of the house was a client now, so today I was in a light-olive Cricketeer suit with a darker green tie and yellow button-down shirt, though I dispensed with a hat.

  The ocean breeze was ruffling the stand of eucalyptus trees that made the second line of defense after the two-foot-thick, seven-foot-high walls. I went up the flagstone walk toward the whitewashed, scarlet bougainvillea-splashed exterior of Marilyn’s Spanish-style hideaway.

  When I knocked at the front door, the dowdy little bespectacled housekeeper-in another shapeless housedress, this one with amoeba-like blobs of yellow and green on white-looked up at me with no recognition. She said nothing, as if her bug-eyed stare behind the cat’s-eye glasses could catch enough sun to reduce me to ash.

  “Nate Heller?” I said. “Miss Monroe is expecting me.”

  “I’ll ask,” she said, and shut the door on me.

  I sighed. If they ever remade Rebecca, this broad was a shoo-in for Mrs. Danvers.

  At least a minute passed before the housekeeper returned, her expression consisting of equal parts contempt and lack of interest.

  “She’s just finishing up with Dr. Greenson,” she said. “Would you like to wait inside?”

  No, I figured I’d climb a tree and watch for ships.

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  She deposited me on a white-upholstered affair better suited for a formal living room than the rest of the living room’s studiously casual if arty Mexican theme. I had a nice view of the fireplace and an expressionist painting of a seated guy playing the guitar.

  I only waited fifteen minutes or so-where Marilyn was concerned that hardly counted-before she entered from the direction of the dining room. In a white short-sleeve blouse, blue jeans, and bare feet, she looked about sixteen-platinum hair lightly brushed, just a touch of lipstick, freckles on display.

  She was leading an average-sized, slender guy, maybe fifty, who wore a dark sport coat, narrow gray-and-black striped tie, and gray knit slacks. His hair was white and thinning but his mustache was black and full; his oval face was home to the kind of sleepy eyes that don’t miss a thing.

  “Romy,” a beaming Marilyn said to him, “this is a dear friend of mine-Nate Heller! He’s been in Life magazine. That ‘Private Eye to the Stars’ you’ve heard about.”

  She made making Life sound like a big deal-she’d been on the cover, what, a dozen times? I got two pages.

  Dr. Ralph Greenson’s smile was as deceptively lazy as his eyes. I’d gotten up off the sofa and met them halfway and he was leaning forward to shake my hand.

  “Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Heller,” he said, with a faint Viennese accent; it was like Central Casting sent him to audition for psychiatrist. “I have indeed heard of you.”

  “And I’ll do you the favor of not calling you the ‘Shrink to the Stars,’” I said.

  “I hope you’re not investigating me, Mr. Heller,” he said, and the smile broadened.

  “Well, Romy,” Marilyn said, “it’s only fair-you’ve been playing detective inside my mind, for how long?”

  She seemed to be enjoying the sight of two of her men meeting for the first time, her hands behind her as she rocked on her heels, a happy kid.

  “I’m just doing a little job for Marilyn,” I explained. “This Fox nonsense.”

  He nodded, frowning. “Ah, I’m afraid I know more of that deplorable matter than you might think.”

  Marilyn was nodding, too. “Romy’s been my chief go-between with the studio. Practically acting as my agent. Tell him what they did, Romy.”

  Greenson sighed. “I was negotiating with the studio heads in good faith when, behind our backs, they were already drawing up the dismissal papers, and filing the lawsuit against Marilyn-”

  “Half a million,” she cut in. “Did I mention that? That they’re suing me?”

  “It was in the papers,” I said.

  A phone began ringing elsewhere in the house, but our hostess didn’t acknowledge it. My God, she looked pretty; so bright-eyed and girlish.

  The psychiatrist continued: “Here I was, arranging terms for Marilyn to return to the set, with assurances that I could help her get there every day and on time, and they were acting in the worst faith imaginable.” He shook his head. “That foul media campaign of theirs-they were preparing to launch that, even as we were negotiating. Reprehensible.”

  It didn’t seem my place, or maybe just not the right moment, to ask what the hell a shrink was doing acting as an agent, or how the hell he could assure Fox his patient could be on set.

  The stout housekeeper materialized at my side. How did she do that?

  “Telephone, dear,” she told her charge. “It’s Mr. Rudin.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Murray,” Marilyn said with a smile. Was there something strained in it?

  Then the housekeeper was gone, and Marilyn was making an apologetic gesture, moving off herself, heading toward the bedrooms, saying, “I have to take that. Romi, thank you for coming over!”

  “Always my pleasure,” he said.

  When we were alone, I asked the doctor, “Do you have another appointment to get to, or could we talk?”

  “We can talk. I usually spend several hours with Marilyn, but today only took half an hour. Come with me.”

  Greenson seemed very much at home in Marilyn’s place, and he showed me to the sunroom, where he fixed himself a Scotch and soda from the liquor cart (I passed) and settled onto a cushioned wicker chair while I took the wicker love seat opposite.

  The space was bright, thanks to the uncovered windows, with a view of the kidney-shaped pool, where the blue surface twinkled like a Hollywood special effect. Two walnut bookcases were home to an eclectic collection of books, everything from Hemingway and Camus to Thurber and The Little Engine That Could. Mexican touches prevailed here, as well-an Aztec tapestry on one wall, and wirework musicians in sombreros on another.

  “What kind of job are you doing for Marilyn, Mr. Heller?”

  “She’s my client. That’s confidential. Sort of like doctor and patient?”

  He upturned a palm. “You were the one who suggested we talk, Mr. Heller. Anyway, I’m merely interested in knowing if you feel she is displaying any… how shall I put it?”

  “Mental illness? Symptoms of paranoia?”

  “Call it signs of stress.”

  “Working for Twentieth Century-Fox, who wouldn’t? This is only the second time I’ve seen her lately, but she seems fine, particularly considering what the papers are saying about her.”

&n
bsp; “She presented you as a friend.”

  “I met her in 1954. Another Chicagoan, Ben Hecht, introduced us-he was ghosting her autobiography, which was never published.” I shrugged. “I’ve done the odd job for her, time to time.”

  “Finding her father, for example?”

  I grinned at him. “If you’re going to use information you garnered from sessions with your patient, Doc, I’ll have to cry foul.”

  He patted the air with his free hand; his drink was in the other. “Perhaps I overstepped, Mr. Heller. It’s just… I feel confident, based upon what I do know about you, never mind the source, that you have Marilyn’s welfare at heart.”

  “Swell. She obviously thinks the world of you. What’s this ‘Romy’ stuff?”

  His smile made the mustache twitch. “My real name is Romeo Greenschpoon. Anglicizing one’s name is very common out here, of course. But I changed mine, legally, long before I came west.”

  “Where, at Ellis Island?”

  “No. I’m a Brooklyn-born Russian Jew, Mr. Heller. But I studied for many years in Vienna, and that explains the accent.”

  Or the affectation.

  “Greenschpoon is a mouthful,” I admitted, “and I guess if I had a wife and she was going to a shrink named Romeo, it might give me pause. Probably a good call, changing it.”

  His smile froze. He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  “Tell me,” I said, “if I’m not overstepping-am I right in thinking that Marilyn’s doing pretty well right now? For the blow she got, from those pricks at the studio, she ought to be reeling. But she seems to be thriving.”

  Nodding, he said, “She is. She’s in excellent shape. One of her problems, and this I think is fair for us to discuss, is that for a long time she was seeing many doctors-most of whom did not know of one another’s existence.”

  “So she could get prescriptions from a raft of them. It’s an old dodge.”

  He nodded grimly, then gave me a half smile that seemed almost a smirk. “Right now she has only two doctors, her internist, with whom I work closely, and myself. I completely weaned her off all of these drugs-my God, Mr. Heller, when we first met, she was on a laundry list of medications… Demerol, Sodium Pentothal, phenobarbital, Amytal, Nembutal… and currently she is clean. She uses a little chloral hydrate for her insomnia problem, but that’s all.”