“When did he get here?”
“Oh, Dr. Greenson lives close by-he must have arrived five or ten minutes later.”
Armstrong glanced at the young cop taking this down. The cop showed no reaction to any of this. A witness had just carved three and a half hours off a statement made to another officer only an hour before.
“All right, then,” Armstrong said. “Now that we’ve… corrected the time frame, let’s back up and go over how you first got concerned about Miss Monroe.”
The vague, whispery voice continued: “Certainly. I went to bed about ten o’clock. I’d noticed the light was on under Marilyn’s door, and assumed she was talking on the telephone with a friend, which was not unusual, so I went to bed. I woke up at midnight, and had to use the bathroom. The light was still on under Marilyn’s door, and I became quite concerned. She’d been in bed since late evening and should have been asleep by now. I tried the door, but it was locked, you see.”
“Locked?”
“Yes, from the inside.” She shifted primly, her hands in her lap. “I knocked, but Marilyn didn’t answer. So I called her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, who as I say lives nearby. When he arrived, he too failed to rouse her with his knocking, so he went outside and looked in through the bedroom window. He saw Marilyn lying motionless on the bed, looking peculiar. He broke the window with a fireplace poker I provided, and climbed inside and came around and opened the door. He said, ‘We’ve lost her.’”
“And after that?”
“Dr. Greenson called Dr. Engelberg. Marilyn’s internist. He arrived shortly and pronounced her dead.”
This she had delivered with the emotion of a grocery clerk requesting payment.
“What did you do after finding the body?”
She tossed her head girlishly. “Oh, so many things. I realized there would be hundreds of people involved, and of course I had to dress.” She touched the gay poncho. “All sorts of things to do. I called Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn. I called and asked him to come over immediately and repair the broken window.”
Which he had done by hammering a few boards over it. Before the police arrived.
“Then,” she was saying, and gave a little wave, “I was doing other things. You know how it is.”
“What kind of things?”
“Getting my own possessions together. Why, I’ve practically lived here most of the time these past months, and I have many personal items besides my clothes. There’s a laundry basket of mine here, and I filled it with my things. I really don’t know what else there is I can tell you.”
Marilyn’s housekeeper/companion folded her arms, her sad, sick smile continuing. She had spoken her piece.
“Well-thank you, Mrs. Murray.”
She smiled and nodded, slipped off the bench from behind the trestle table and exited with studied dignity, back into the dining room.
Armstrong sighed, got up and slid in where Mrs. Murray had been, so he could face me.
“Well?” he asked.
“You want to start?”
“No,” he said wearily. “Take a run at it.”
“First of all, how prepared does that story sound? Marilyn was ‘motionless’ and looked ‘peculiar’… who talks like that?”
He didn’t bother answering.
“And this business about ‘Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn.’ He’s Mrs. Murray’s damn son -in-law.”
“You missed the part,” Armstrong said, almost groaning, “where I tried to get Monroe’s activities for the day out of her. She was vague, downright evasive.”
“Possibly lying. Go take a look at the carpet in that hall-it’s wall-to-wall. The door is flush to it. I may be wrong, but I doubt any light could show under it.”
“I hadn’t noticed that.”
“I take it there was no suicide note.”
“No.”
“Did you find a key in that bedroom?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Lieutenant, this is an old house, with old-fashioned doors and locks. I bet the keys are all long gone. That break-in was staged-how exactly did Dr. Greenson look into a bedroom with black-out curtains over the windows and see a goddamn thing? Plus, no glass on the floor. Was there glass on the ground outside?”
“Yeah.” He gave up a heavy sigh. “So we agree the scene was staged. What do you make of it?”
“Well, it’s probably not murder. Marilyn has a history of this kind of thing. Suicide attempts, girl who cried wolf stuff, but also going overboard with drugs.”
“You see her recently, Nate? Did she seem depressed?”
“I saw her a few days ago. Her career was going great guns.”
“I read she got fired…”
“She just got rehired, and at a big pay boost.” I shrugged. “She had a few personal problems. In the love-life department. And anybody with that kind of problem can have a bad night and decide to cash it in.”
“Is that what happened here?”
“I’ll be honest, Lieutenant, I hate to think of it ending like that. She was flawed, a cross between a genius and a little girl lost… but she was one of a kind, and I really thought she had a shot at making it over the long haul. It’s small solace, but I think the more likely answer is that she misjudged her self-medication.”
“My understanding is Miss Monroe was a heavy user who knew exactly what she could and could not get away with, in the pharmaceutical area.”
“Normally. But she was clean. She cleaned up for that movie, and-except for sinusitis she was fighting-was healthier than ever. Sure, she had a champagne binge now and then, but as of this last week, the only pills she was on were sleeping pills. Light dosage. Insomnia was the problem, you know.”
He leaned his chin into an elbow-supported hand. “So she had trouble getting to sleep, misjudged, and took too many pills.”
“That’s my guess, Lieutenant. But it’s not a wild one.”
“So not a murder.”
“Probably not a murder.”
He sighed, dropped his hand, shook his big head. “What’s going on, then? The housekeeper first saying ‘around midnight,’ then it’s three thirty…”
“What do you think, Lieutenant? The docs called the studio when they found her dead-’cause dead or alive, she’s a star and a property, Fox’s property, and the studio wants to stage-manage the scene. If there was a note, they destroyed it-recently they smeared her in the press, and now they’d prefer an accidental death to a suicide where they come up the villain. You’ve been there before-this joint was probably swarming with studio cleanup crew.”
Armstrong knew I was right. “Fucking one-industry town,” he groused. “Waltz into crime scenes and treat ’em like a goddamn movie set.”
“No,” I said. “They respect movie sets. Movie sets they leave alone. Screws with continuity.”
Next up was Mickey Rudin. Milton. I knew him to speak to, but he’d never done any business with me personally or the A-1, either.
The attorney wasn’t exactly fat but it was an effort to get himself squeezed into the nooklike area formed by the trestle table and its benches. His jowls had five o’clock shadow-well, 5:00 A.M. shadow, anyway.
He didn’t wait for a question, just started right in.
“Last evening, eight four sixty-two, my message service received a call at eight twenty-five P.M. that was relayed to me at eight thirty P.M. I was to call Milton Ebbins, an acquaintance of mine who is an agent. Around eight forty-five P.M., I called Mr. Ebbins, who told me he’d received a call from his client Peter Lawford, who stated he had called Miss Monroe about a party she was to have attended at his home on the beach. But Miss Monroe’s voice seemed to fade out, and the connection was broken. Mr. Lawford’s attempts to call her back were unsuccessful, the line busy, and Mr. Ebbins requested that I call Miss Monroe and determine that everything was all right. Short of that, I was to attempt to reach one of her two doctors. At about nine P.M., I tried to call Miss Monroe and the phone was answered by the housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, who assured me that Miss Monroe was all right. That, Lieutenant Armstrong, is all I know.”