“The two doctors were waiting for me in there,” Clemmons said. “This taller doc, Engelberg, distinguished-looking fella, he’d pulled a chair up and was sitting near the bed. The other doc, smaller, with a mustache, was standing over by the nightstand-that was Greenson. He introduced himself. He was the guy on the phone, all right, with the Dr. Freud accent.”
The psychiatrist simply said to the officer, “She committed suicide,” then pointed out an empty container of Nembutal at the woman’s bedside. “She took all of those.”
The sergeant drew back the sheet revealing what proved to be a naked Marilyn Monroe, but “with no makeup, and splotched with lividity.”
“She was lying facedown in what I call the soldier’s position,” he said. “Her face against a pillow, arms by her side, right arm slightly bent. Legs stretched out perfectly straight.”
What I’d seen.
I asked, “And how did that strike you?”
“Hinky as hell. If she OD’ed on barbs, she’d be all twisted up. I’ve seen dozens of them. Wrong. Dead wrong.” He shifted on the bench. “Then I asked ’em if the body had been moved. You could tell from the dual lividity she had been. And these lying bastards, both of them, say no, she hasn’t been moved. This is how they found her.”
“Both said that.”
“Yeah. Well, the little guy, Greenson, he kind of took charge. The taller guy seemed in a real funk. Not talkative at all. Whereas this Greenson character…” He shook his head, smirked humorlessly, and for once looked directly at me. “… He was cocky, almost daring me to accuse him of something. I kept thinking, ‘What the hell’s wrong with this guy?’ It just didn’t fit the situation.”
“What’s your take on the scene itself?”
“That it was the most obviously staged death scene I ever saw. The pill bottles were arranged in neat order and the body deliberately positioned. It all looked too damn tidy.”
“Tidy? Really?”
“Yeah. Everything was neat. I of course looked for a suicide note, but there wasn’t one, weren’t any documents, no scripts, no notebooks, nothing like that.”
But just an hour later, I had seen a very messy bedroom, with plenty of scripts and books-although, perhaps significantly, I had not seen any of Marilyn’s spiral-bound notebooks.
Had somebody searched the place, and then tidied it? And someone later searched it again, and messed it back up? Or even worked on the scene to make it look less staged, so a pro like Clemmons wouldn’t pick up on it? Curiouser and curiouser.
Clemmons had then asked the doctors if they’d tried to revive her, and they both claimed it had been too late. Neither would hazard a guess what time she took the pills.
He was looking at me again. “If you’re a private detective, Mr. Heller, I assume you’re an ex-cop. Am I right?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Well, in your experience, at a death scene where the victim’s doctor is present, whether accident, suicide, or even murder, weren’t the doctors helpful? Trying to be as informative as they could?”
“That’s pretty standard.”
“Well, these two had to be interrogated like goddamn suspects.”
Maybe that’s what they were.
“Something else strange-there was no drinking glass in that bedroom for her to have taken a single damn pill, let alone handfuls.”
“There was when I visited the scene, maybe an hour after you did.”
“Then it was planted. But that’s not the really strange thing-her bathroom? Where she would run a glass of water to take those pills? There was plumbing work in progress. You know, she was having a lot of repairs and remodeling done on the old place.”
“Right. Plumbing work. So what?”
“So the water in her bathroom was off.”
I gaped at him.
“It’s the truth, Mr. Heller. Turned off. She couldn’t have run a glass of water to save her life, never mind take it. She couldn’t use that bathroom, if she had to pee, either-she’d have to run down the hall.”
“Did you ask the doctors whether Marilyn took injections?”
“Yeah I did. Greenson never gave her any, but she was getting some kind of vitamin shot from Engelberg, had done so the day before she died, in fact. Both claimed she didn’t inject herself. And I didn’t see any needles around.”
He fell silent.
I prompted him: “Was that it? Did you search the house?”
“I gave the place a quick look,” he said with a gloomy shrug. “I was the first officer on the scene, but I’m not a detective. Didn’t spend much time doing it, and didn’t check the guest cottage, either… though, and this may sound crazy, I had this kind of sixth-sense feeling there were people out there. And I would have checked, but I got sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked how?”
“By seeing light coming from the garage, where I did check when I went looking for Mrs. Murray.”
“Looking for her?”
“Yeah. The biddy slipped away while I was questioning the docs in the death bedroom. So where do I find her? Out in the garage, the door up, where the washer and drier are. And she’s washing a load of clothes! She’d already washed one load and folded the linens and is doing a second, preparing a third!”
“Do you think the sheets on the bed were changed?”
“Maybe. Maybe the poor girl soiled them. Lots do, when they die. Maybe it was out of some sense of preserving a star’s dignity. I don’t know. And I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t think to ask, I was so flummoxed by it.”
“But you did question Murray, right?”
“Oh yeah, right there in the garage. While she folded fucking towels, pardon my French.”
The story she’d told Clemmons mirrored the one she had told Lieutenant Armstrong Sunday morning in Marilyn’s breakfast nook, but with one significant difference.
“Mrs. Murray said she found the body around midnight, and that she immediately called Dr. Greenson, who arrived about half an hour later.”
“Did she say why she checked on Marilyn at midnight?”
“Yeah, and that also was odd. She said the light was on under Marilyn’s door, and the phone cord was running under, all the way down the hall from this spare bedroom where the two phones were. Okay, now first of all-”
“The thick-pile carpet prevented Murray from seeing a crack of light under the door.”
“Right! And second, not thirty seconds before, Mrs. Murray had said how Marilyn often kept one of her phones in there with her at bedtime-to make late-night calls when she couldn’t sleep.”
“Which was most nights.”
“Right, which was most nights. So what was suspicious about the phone cord under the door? It was typical, not unusual. Mrs. Murray also said the door was locked, but I didn’t see any keys around.”
Murray had told Clemmons the same tale she gave to Lieutenant Armstrong about Greenson having to break in the window.
“Even while she was fidgeting with that laundry, nervous as hell, she’s speaking in this soft, even, precise little voice. And everything she gave me seemed prepared, rehearsed as hell. Anyway, I went back to the bedroom, where the doctors were still keeping the body company.”
I gave him half a grin. “Let me guess. You wanted to ask them why they waited four hours to notify the police.”
“ Oh yeah. Well, this Greenson, in this smart-ass tone, says, ‘We had to get permission.’ And I say, ‘Who the hell from?’ Not terribly professional, but it was getting to me. And he says, ‘The studio publicity department. Twentieth Century-Fox. Miss Monroe is making a film there.’ Like I should know better than to ask.”
“Told you this right out.”
He cut the air with a hand. “Right out. I’ve heard about this kind of thing, but I was dumbfounded. And when I asked those docs what they’d done during those four hours, they told me-you’re gonna love this, Mr. Heller-they said, ‘We were just talking.’”
“About what in hell?”
“Oh, when I asked them… they shrugged. Cop at the scene of a suspicious death, they know it’s a coroner’s case, they know they have to notify the police in such an instance, and right away… and what do they do? Just shrug.”