“I’m close,” she said, tapping the eraser end of a pencil on her pad. “The puzzle pieces are coming together, even with half of the witnesses leaving town. If one of us could just pin Greenson down, that might do it.”
“May still happen,” I said. “Engelberg would’ve been nice…”
He was among those who had suddenly decided to take a vacation-or as the doctor’s secretary had put it on the phone, “an extended period of time away from Los Angeles.”
Flo glanced at me over the tops of her Ray-Bans. “We don’t have to solve this mystery, Nate-all we have to do is raise sufficient questions, backed up by facts.”
The nature of my business-and the business of my nature-was solving mysteries; but she was right.
“It’s tough,” I said, “with so much of what we have coming from off-the-record sources.”
“Not all. Both Hazel Washington and Inez Melson had no problem being quoted.”
The Washington woman-Marilyn’s maid at Fox-had seen interesting things at Marilyn’s house when she and her husband had stopped by at around noon Sunday hoping to retrieve a card table and chairs they’d loaned the actress. Four clean-cut young men in dark slacks, white shirts, and mirror-polished Brogans were among an infestation that included uniformed Fox security guards, telephone company technicians, police, and reporters.
Hazel’s husband, Rocky, was an LAPD detective, so the couple got access where others might not have. As Hazel and Rocky hauled their furniture out, they noticed one of the clean-cut quartet burning a big pile of documents in the living room fireplace. Among them were several spiral notebooks.
Executrix Melson took a similar path. Monday morning she had been going through Marilyn’s papers in a file cabinet in the guest cottage, but few papers remained. The file had been broken into, the lock forced, many documents and other items missing. Ironically, one document left behind was a bill from a lock company-in March, Marilyn had changed the lock on the file as well as installed bars on the guest cottage windows.
Flo had called the A-1 Lock and Safe Company of Santa Monica (no relation to the A-1 Detective Agency) and talked her way to the locksmith who’d worked on the cabinet. He told her Marilyn had said in passing she felt things were disappearing from her files.
“Those guys burning papers in the fireplace,” I said, “have to be spooks.”
“Spies, you mean?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that ilk, anyway. CIA, FBI, Secret Service-they could all have an interest in Marilyn.”
“You’re not really suggesting the government could have had Marilyn killed.”
“More likely killed her themselves.”
Somewhere, next door maybe, a transistor radio was playing rock ’n’ roll-right now, “Calendar Girl.”
“Nate, you can’t be serious…”
“Let’s talk about another kind of government-organized crime. Back in Capone days, the big boss might have said, ‘Bump off that bastard McGurn.’ And McGurn would be bumped. But these are more sophisticated, technological times. You never know who’s listening, who’s watching. So your modern-day Capone says, ‘That bastard McWhozit’s a real problem. Somebody ought to do something about him.’ And somebody does.”
“And you think the president or the attorney general has that kind of power?”
I laughed. “You kidding? A woman who has been intimate with both Jack and Bobby, who has overhead top-level, even top secret conversations? Learning things that no one outside the innermost circle should know?”
She shook her head, ponytail wagging. “I can’t believe that.”
“You don’t want to believe that. The notebooks those clean-cut characters were burning-those were Marilyn’s notes on things Jack and Bobby had shared with her. A kind of a diary-the most dangerous kind imaginable.”
“So then we’re… convinced it’s murder.”
“Somebody tried to murder me, remember? Maybe murder us. That hypo I confiscated from our visitor? Don’t get upset, but-”
“Don’t get upset!”
“It was filled with pure nicotine.”
“ Cigarettes nicotine?”
“A lethal drug in sufficient quantity that creates the appearance of a heart attack in its victim. A routine autopsy wouldn’t turn anything up, and a pathologist would have to know what he’s looking for, to spot it.”
“You had it analyzed?”
“I didn’t taste it.”
She sat staring at the blue shimmering water in her pool. “Palisades Park” was coming from the next-door radio. I was fairly certain she was thinking about what a nice life she had, and what a shame it would be to risk losing it, even over the scoop of a lifetime.
“How long,” she said softly, almost timidly, “will you keep your people watching my house?”
“Until your story’s published. You’ll be safe after that. You may be attacked professionally and personally, but your death would be too convenient not to raise suspicion.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Of course, I could just move in.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“I was hoping for kept man.”
She laughed. I could always make her laugh.
My relief came on at noon-an agent who would not work the bedroom beat-and I headed to the A-1.
No message slips on my desk, but I checked with Fred on the office line. “Nothing from Thad Brown?”
“Actually he did call. So far, the nine-mil is not traceable. Serial numbers filed off. He’s turned the Beretta over for possible ballistics match-up with something in their files, but that’ll take forever and a day. The noise suppressor is of course a custom job, and that may lead somewhere. More by tomorrow, maybe.”
The afternoon I spent on the phone chasing associates of Marilyn’s. Makeup artist Whitey Snyder and costume designer William Travilla (one of her personal fashion designers) were glad to talk to me, but had nothing. Her close friend and masseur Ralph Roberts did have some interesting information and insights.
Turned out Roberts and Marilyn were planning to have dinner Saturday evening, and he’d called that afternoon to confirm. He got Dr. Greenson instead, who told him Marilyn was out.
“This Greenson is a goddamn Svengali,” Roberts said. “Very controlling. Marilyn and I’d been friends for years, and he advised her to cut me off. She didn’t, though, bless her heart. Listen, Mr. Heller, I know she was still seeing Greenson-remember, she was more addicted to therapy than pills-but just the same, she was not happy with him. Not for the last couple months.”
“How so?”
“She didn’t think he was doing her any good-not personally, and not professionally.”
“Separate that out for me-‘personally and professionally.’”
“Well, that quack inserted himself into the Fox fiasco, and did her no good at all, playing agent or manager or whatever. What she accomplished, getting that new contract, having Fox come crawling back to her, that was all her. She was brilliant, really, and an incredible businesswoman. Greenson was a detriment, if anything. She was going to get rid of him.”
“ Fire him?”
“Definitely. Both him and that awful Murray woman. Did you know Greenson put that woman next to Marilyn just to spy on her?”
“How did you learn that?”
“Marilyn told me.”
Another call was illuminating, too, but in other ways.
The chief fix-it guy at Fox was Frank Neill. He was a onetime police reporter and a sort of in-house private eye for the studio, though he called himself a publicist now.
“Say, Frank. Nate Heller. Tying up some loose ends for Marilyn’s estate. What time did you and your guys get to the house Sunday morning?”
All right, the estate part was a lie, and the whole approach a cheap shot. But you have to try.
“Wasn’t there,” Neill said. “Nobody from the studio was.”
He hung up. No small talk. No good-bye. No chance for me to point out that the neighbors had seen security guards in Fox uniforms, and Dr. Greenson had told Officer Clemmons at the scene that he had called the studio before the cops. Just a click that spoke volumes.