I shrugged. “How do we know? Who the hell can say how many people were running in and out of there, all night? What little I heard Sunday morning was riddled with lies and half-truths.”
Like Pat Newcomb saying she left Marilyn’s place late in the afternoon, and that Marilyn was in great spirits. But I knew Marilyn was unhappy as hell then, because of her fight with Bobby. Unhappy enough to have her shrink make an emergency house call.
And Mrs. Murray had been playing tricks with time that H. G. Wells might have envied.
“There’s one more really interesting item,” Flo said. She was having another martini, and sipped it. “Noguchi found almost nothing in her stomach. A small quantity of liquid, he said. No sign of heavy drugs or sedatives.”
“No pill residue? Don’t they call those Nembutals ‘yellow jackets’-for the yellow in the gelatin? Shouldn’t there be yellow dye?”
“Yes. But there was no residue. No evidence of pills in the stomach or small intestine. No…” She checked her notes. “… No ‘refractile crystals.’ Whatever that means.”
“I think it just means any sign of reaction.” I shifted in the booth. “Okay. Yeah, well, this smells.”
“Funny you should say that, because it doesn’t smell. Not of what it should smell-victims who ingest chloral hydrate give off a powerful pearl-like odor. Noguchi notes its absence. What he doesn’t note is what that absence of odor strongly implies.”
“Death by injection,” I said.
She sipped her cocktail.
I sipped my coffee.
Then she smiled at me; not a broad smile, just a small, friendly one.
“So, Nate-whose friend are you? Mine? Bobby’s? Marilyn’s?”
“… You’ve told me a lot, Flo. But you haven’t told me why you’re telling me…”
No smile at all now. “I want to hire you. I can only do so much myself, and I don’t want to use any other reporter on this. Anybody seasoned could steal it out from under me. Anybody who’s green isn’t good enough. I’m going to run after this on my own pretty legs, but I need help. And you know why I need help-we’re already behind the clock.”
With every day that passes, an unsolved murder is more likely to stay that way. The first twenty-fours are critical, and we’d lost those. After the first week, your odds drop precipitously.
“You know it’s risky, using me,” I said. “Maybe Bobby’s already hired me to help cover this up.”
The biggest favor you can do me, Nate, is to just stay out of this.
“Cover up what? If this is about Marilyn and Bobby having a fling, and Marilyn getting depressed and killing herself, that’s a big story. Yes. Might even cost the Kennedys the next election. Might. But if it’s a murder, and the Kennedys are covering it up… which would imply that the Kennedys made that murder happen… Well, Nate, whose friend are you?”
You could picture it, the beautiful blonde sitting at the wood-and-glass bar next to her famous ballplayer husband, and some fans come up and they don’t even care about Marilyn. Funny. Absurd. Fucking comical.
But somebody had to care about Marilyn.
“Can you afford a retainer of two thousand?” I asked her.
She made out the check.
CHAPTER 17
The Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills provided a beautiful little oasis forming a triangle between busy intersections at the north end of Rodeo Drive. The landscaping was lush, the fountains bubbling, the trees majestic, the flowerbeds plentiful. And for a meeting with Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the LAPD, the location couldn’t have been more convenient for me-the park had once been the five-acre front lawn of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
With a gentle wind whispering through the copious trees, Clemmons and I sat with the sun at our backs on a wrought-iron bench near the big central fountain, where colorful Japanese fish provided a touch of the exotic.
The off-duty cop did not look in the least exotic, or even like he belonged anywhere near Beverly Hills in his short-sleeve red-and-black plaid shirt and Levi’s. I was still in the suit I’d worn to Musso’s, albeit with tie loosened, as this meeting was taking place in the early afternoon of that same day.
Flo Kilgore had provided me with Clemmons’ home number, warning me she hadn’t reached him yet, but I got lucky and caught him right away. He worked midnight to eight, and normally slept from about nine till 4:00 P.M., but I’d reached him much earlier.
“Haven’t been sleeping so good last few days,” he’d told me on the phone. “So, then, what? You’re working for the Monroe estate?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t even know who that would be. Marilyn’s mother is in the loony bin and she has a half sister somewhere.”
At no time in this investigation did I tell anyone I was working for a reporter.
I went on: “I was doing security for Marilyn, and looking into some things for her. She was my client and I feel like I owe it to her to ask a few questions that nobody else seems to be.”
There had been a long pause. If he was caught up in Captain James Hamilton’s cover-up, this was where Clemmons would have hung up on me. A good sign when he didn’t.
And now we were sitting on that iron bench. On a weekday, there were more squirrels than people here, and the frothing fountain provided nice noise to cover up our conversation. So did horn honks and other car sounds from nearby Sunset Boulevard.
My companion was a cop right out of Central Casting-about forty, square-shouldered, square-jawed, flinty-eyed, with a narrow line for a mouth, speaking in a no-nonsense second tenor.
“I came on duty as watch commander at the substation at midnight,” Sergeant Clemmons said.
He sat comfortably, nothing tense about his body language, though his eyes were tight and his tone carried an edge. Only occasionally did he look right at me, mostly staring into his thoughts.
“Routine night,” he was saying. “Slow as hell. Had my feet up when the phone rang well after four A.M. ”
Clemmons said he didn’t understand the caller at first, a male with “a European accent.”
“Guy is agitated, talking real fast. I ask him to calm down, slow down. He says all right, and there’s this pause you coulda hung a hammock in. And then he tells me Marilyn Monroe is dead. That she’d committed suicide. Well, that woke me up, all right. But my first thought is, it’s a damn hoax. So I ask him to identify himself.”
The caller said he was Dr. Ralph Greenson, “Miss Monroe’s psychiatrist.” Clemmons asked for the address and said he’d be right over.
“My mind was racing,” he said, with the tiniest smile. “I mean, you can imagine-if this thing was on the level, all hell would break loose. So I go out there myself, and don’t waste any time about it. No need for a siren, though-streets deserted, and if she really was dead, Marilyn Monroe wasn’t going anywhere.”
When he turned down the little dead-end alley of Fifth Helena Drive, he found the gates open, and pulled into the brick courtyard. A few cars were there, and he apologized to me that he didn’t spend any time committing their makes to memory or writing down any license numbers.
“But then, there were no lights on at all outside the Monroe house,” he said. “Porch and garage all dark. Not even pool lights, and damn few on in the house. Only sounds were police calls from my radio and a dog barking.”
Maf, Marilyn’s poodle, most likely.
“So I go up and knock on the door. I can hear footsteps, more than one person whispering, but I must have stood there a full minute before the porch light comes on and that Murray woman answers.” He shook his head. “ She was a hell of a character-all whispery and nervous and afraid of her own shadow.”
“How did that strike you, her odd demeanor?”
“To me, she seemed dishonest right off the bat. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong, Mr. Heller, not right then… but I knew something was off about the woman.”
Immediately the housekeeper led the police sergeant to the bedroom, “very near the front door, actually,” where a sheet-covered body sprawled across the bed. A shock of platinum-blonde hair poked up onto a pillow.