It takes four hours for lividity to reach a fixed state. Any movement of the body within that time frame would result in that bruised look. She seemed posed, as if to show she’d been talking or trying to get somebody on the phone, a hand hovering off the bed over a dropped receiver on the carpeted floor.
But if she’d overdosed on barbiturates, she would have suffered convulsions, and died in a contorted position. Not this gracefully tragic one, which was as studied as that radio bulletin.
Her entire body, save for the lividity-touched areas, had a bluish cast, as if she’d frozen to death, and her nails looked dark and dirty, probably from gardening.
The rest of the underfurnished space was a mess, much messier than I’d seen it on prior visits. A drinking glass on the floor near the bed, the phone and receiver (near her left hand), clutter on the nightstand (though pill bottles stood like little soldiers), letters and books and magazines on the floor, purses against one wall, very junky. No sign of her spiral notebooks, though.
Had the room been tossed?
“Rigor’s set in,” I noted.
This time the mortician replied: “Advanced.”
“Time of death, educated guess?”
He adjusted his glasses and checked his watch; his mouth moved silently with math.
Then he said, “Between nine thirty and eleven thirty last night.” He shook his head, giving the naked, bruised body a sorrowful look. “It’ll take a while to straighten her out and get her on the gurney.”
The young mortuary guy said, “Jeez, Pop, she just looks like some girl. Not Marilyn Monroe.”
So it was a family business. That was heartwarming.
Pop was getting a paper bag out of his pocket and brushing the pills into it; they were rattling, the bottles mostly full, apparently.
“Hey!” I said. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Collecting evidence for the coroner, Detective.”
I guessed “detective” would do fine as a designation for me. Anyway, it was too late to stop him; maybe that sweeping motion had preserved some fingerprints.
Father and son were starting the grisly task of bending the dead woman’s stiff limbs into the desired position, and I’d had about enough. Before I left, I noticed something odd-Marilyn’s black-out curtains were brushed aside, revealing that a window had been broken, and some boards haphazardly put up on the outside.
In the hallway, I asked the uniformed guy what the deal was with the window.
“Marilyn’s shrink had to break in.” He gestured with a thumb at the door he was leaning against. “This was locked.”
“Really?” I took a look at the keyhole lock. “So who cleaned up the glass?”
“Huh? Nobody cleaned up the glass.”
“Well, if he broke in from outside, there’d be glass on the floor. There isn’t any.”
He just shrugged. “That’s for you detectives to scope out.”
Everybody thought I was a detective. I guessed I was a detective. Here I thought I was with the coroner’s office…
The dining room turned out to be the holding area for people waiting to be questioned. Under a swag-chained star of frosted glass and leaded copper, at a big rustic round wooden table with a handcrafted look, sat four people who might have been attending a seance.
Shell-shocked Pat Newcomb, her dark blonde hair a mess, wore sunglasses and pajamas under a tan raincoat. Jowly, dark-haired, dark-eyed Mickey Rudin (Marilyn’s attorney as well as Sinatra’s) looked professional and put-upon in a brown suit and loosened tie. A somber horse-faced guy about fifty (Dr. Hyman Engelberg, I later learned) wore a sport coat and no tie. And Ichabod Crane-ish handyman Norman Jefferies, in a dark sweater over a dark button-down shirt, sat with hands folded, like he was saying grace.
Two detectives had set up a temporary HQ in the nearby kitchen. A young plainclothes dick, taking notes, had borrowed one of the wooden chairs from the dining room table, and positioned it several feet away from the trestle table by the window that served as a breakfast nook. Another plainclothes cop, seated on a bench at that table, had his back to me as I entered, and across from him sat Mrs. Murray, looking like your least favorite grade-school teacher.
It wasn’t at all secure-you could hear some of what was being said out in the dining room, I’d noticed, although with whispery Mrs. Murray you didn’t get much. You barely picked it up in the room with her. She was wearing a sort of Aztec-pattern poncho (almost certainly a gift from Marilyn) over a simple cream-colored dress.
I moved to the Hotpoint fridge where I could get a side view of the detective doing the interview. I was pleased and relieved to see that these officers were not intel-likely from the West Los Angeles Detective Division, since the guy asking the questions was Lt. Grover Armstrong, who ran it.
Armstrong I knew, but the younger guy no, and he climbed out of his chair and demanded who I was, since after all I was just somebody who’d wandered unbidden out into the kitchen. He didn’t look bright, a crew-cut former jock, but I gave him credit for being the first person to really question my presence.
I didn’t bother answering the kid. I just waited for heavyset, fortyish Armstrong to swivel his bucket head and recognize me. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies, either.
Mildly irritated by the interruption, he excused himself to Mrs. Murray and slid off the bench onto his feet and faced me, hands doing Superman on his hips. His suit was brown and baggy but his tie was fresh and crisply knotted.
“What are you doing here, Nate?”
“I was on a job for Marilyn. I heard about this and came over.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I lied.”
That seemed an acceptable answer to the seasoned copper. “What kind of a job?”
Over in the breakfast nook, from behind her cat’s-eye glasses, Mrs. Murray was gazing at me with undisguised contempt, certain I was about to betray Marilyn.
“Helping out on security,” I said.
The younger officer already didn’t like me. He said, “Yeah? Helping how?”
“That gate out front? My idea.”
The kid was staring at me, searching for sarcasm. He wasn’t that good a detective.
Armstrong was studying me. Then he said, “You know these people?”
“Some of them.”
“You want to sit in on the interviews? If something strikes you, you can even ask a question.”
“I’d like that.”
He gestured to his side of the bench. “Come on in, then.”
I sat next to him, and Mrs. Murray made a point of not looking at me as she said, “He’s not a policeman.”
“No,” Armstrong said, right across from her, “but he’s a professional detective and Miss Monroe hired him in that capacity.”
That’s all he gave her.
“I need to back up,” Armstrong said. “You told the first officer on the scene, Officer Clemmons, that you discovered something was wrong with Miss Monroe around midnight. But the police weren’t called till four twenty-five A.M. ”
“I was mistaken,” she said with the kind of patient little smile a grandmother gives a really stupid grandchild. “This was upsetting to me, and I must have lost track of time. It may have been closer to three thirty that I noticed a problem.”
Armstrong’s eyebrows hiked. “You lost track of three and a half hours?”
The smile, ever more inappropriate, turned up at the corners. “You know how it is.”
Armstrong gave me a sideways glance. Neither of us knew how it was.
“So what time,” the lieutenant asked, “did you call Dr. Greenson?”
Speaking of which, where was Greenson? I didn’t interrupt to ask.
“I believe I called him at three thirty-five,” she said. She had her usual withdrawn, otherworldly air; but there was something else, too-was she frightened?