“When was that?”
“Sometime between three and four. Marilyn had this nice spread of food ready, so she must have expected them. Marilyn looked real nice. Not all movie star decked out, but nice. You were there at the house a few times, Mr. Heller. You know how good she could look, not trying so hard.”
I just nodded.
His eyebrows went up. “Oh, I skipped something that’s maybe important.”
“That’s okay, Norm. Take your time.”
“After lunch, I finished up in the kitchen, and I was loading my tools in my pickup. Never meant to stay all day. But Eunice comes out and she looks like death warmed over.”
This was her son-in-law, so I decided not to point out that Murray always looked like death warmed over.
“She was shaking her head and sighing and so on, and I say, ‘What’s wrong, Eunice?’ And she says, all surprised and upset, ‘Marilyn just fired me.’”
“Fired her? Mrs. Murray was fired Saturday afternoon, too?”
“That’s right. Marilyn wanted her to pack her things and leave, be gone by the end of the day. Which is why I stuck around into the evening.”
“I don’t follow, Norm.”
“Well, Eunice practically lived at that place. She never gave up her own apartment, but three or four nights a week, she’d stay at Marilyn’s. So she had a lot of stuff around. I was to stay and help her pack and get her things together. There was more than would fit in her car. So we started loading up my truck.”
“Did Mrs. Murray say why she’d been fired?”
“No.” He shrugged and gave me an earnest look. “Maybe Marilyn finally figured out Eunice was spying on her.”
“Uh, yeah. Maybe that was it.”
“So we’re packing up the truck, and sometime between three and four, Peter Lawford comes around and he’s got Bobby Kennedy himself along. Big as life. Well, really, fairly small, but you know what I mean.”
“Were you around after they showed up?”
“Not very long at all. Mr. Lawford made it real clear he wanted Eunice and me out of there, and told us to go to the market. He gave me some money and said to bring back some Cokes for everybody, but not to hurry. So an hour later, more or less, we come back with a couple cartons of Coke, and their car is gone.”
“What kind of car, Norm?”
“Mercedes, I think.” He shifted and the wooden bench groaned. “We went in the house and Marilyn looked just terrible. She was just… boiling mad. Just sore as hell in a way I never saw from her. Weird thing, though, she seemed scared and burning all at once. That’s when my mother-in-law called Dr. Greenson.”
“Called him because she worked for him, right?”
“Yeah. Him and Marilyn. Nice work if you can get it-two paychecks for one job? Anyway, Greenson said he’d come right over. And I think he got there around five.”
“Had Pat Newcomb gone?”
“No. She did shortly after that. The doc went in and talked to Marilyn a little while, then came back out and says to Newcomb, who’s in the living room with Eunice, ‘Marilyn wonders when you’re leaving, Pat. When are you leaving?’ And Newcomb gets up and walks out, just like that. With not one word.”
“How long was Greenson there?”
“Maybe… till seven P.M.? He comes out and tells Eunice that he’s instructed Marilyn to take two Nembutals, and then asks Mrs. Murray to stay overnight and keep an eye on her. With all her belongings packed and everything, Eunice wanted to make sure that ‘met with Marilyn’s approval,’ but the doc said it did.”
“Norm, why didn’t you leave at that point?”
“Eunice asked me to stay. She was real shaky and upset, over everything that happened, so I sat and watched television with her.”
“Where was Marilyn?”
“Never saw her all evening. She was in her room. Some time, maybe ten thirty, Eunice got a phone call. Came back in and said she had to check on Marilyn. We were watching Gunsmoke, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to Eunice. All of a sudden she comes rushing back and says Marilyn is gone.”
“Gone as in dead?”
“Gone as in not in her bedroom. Not in any room in the house. So we look outside, and hear that little dog yapping, and right away I notice the light on in the guesthouse. When we go in there-I’ll never forget it, try as I might-there she was, facedown, lying across the daybed. She was in the nude. Holding on to the phone with one hand.”
“Dead?”
“Looked that way to me. Her color was awful, kind of… blue. But Eunice took the phone from her fingers and called for an ambulance. Then she put some kind of emergency call in to Dr. Greenson, who phoned back and said he’d come soon and in the meantime call Dr. Engelberg. I went out to mind the front gates. The ambulance got there before Greenson and Engelberg.”
This was the first anyone had said anything about an ambulance.
Well, some neighbors had mentioned seeing one, but none of the primary witnesses. And it made sense. It was Saturday night and both Greenson and Engelberg were out, Mrs. Murray initially getting answering services for both doctors. So what would she do next?
Call an ambulance.
And an ambulance attendant would certainly turn Marilyn faceup to try resuscitation, and if the body had been initially found in the cottage, that explained the dual lividity several times over.
As for Marilyn being in the guesthouse, if she had private phone calls to make, she might have wanted to get away from the prying eyes and ears of Mrs. Murray, who she distrusted enough to have just fired.
“After that, all hell broke loose,” Jefferies said. “Police cars, bunch of other vehicles, all kinds of people crawling over everywhere.”
“What kind of people?”
“Men in suits. Plainclothes cops, maybe? I think some may have been from the studio. I mean, they were all over the place.”
“What about the window, Norm?”
He made an embarrassed smirk. “That suicide thing, breaking in to rescue her? Some plainclothes guy thought that up. There was a dozen of those birds or more. Then, like a magician snapped his fingers? They’re gone.”
“Could you describe any of them?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe the guy who was in charge, or at least in charge of some of them. My take was, there were different… what would you call it? Groups or… factions? Anyway, they weren’t all on the same team. They had some shared goals, but they definitely weren’t on the same team.”
“What did he look like, the guy in charge?”
“Big. Kind of ugly. Rugged face. Funny thing-he kind of reminded me of that guy on TV.”
“What guy on TV?”
“Paladin.”
Walt Schaefer ran the largest ambulance service in Los Angeles County. He was an old friend of Fred Rubinski’s, and the nature of his business and ours meant the A-1 Detective Agency and the Schaefer Ambulance Service were not strangers.
So when I called and said I needed to talk to him, and preferred not to do it by phone, he didn’t even ask me why. Just said sure, come on over.
I crossed the nondescript bullpen of dispatchers and on through the open door into Walt’s modest office, which had the same cheap rec room-type paneling as the outer area. I shut the door.
A husky, tanned guy in his fifties, Walt was in shirtsleeves with a clip-on tie and you’d never know he was a multimillionaire. Sitting behind a cluttered metal desk, he looked like an overwhelmed junior-high guidance counselor. File cabinets whose tops were piled with folders crowded his work area, and a dozen framed commendations hung crookedly.
He rocked back in his swivel chair and showed off his bridgework. The egg-like shape of his skull was emphasized by seriously thinning, graying dark hair.
“Let me guess,” he said in his raspy second tenor. “Somebody needs a discreet exit from the city.”