fake-out, this was the genuine article, and a potentially nice piece of luck for me.
The van nosed through a gathering crowd of press and gawkers at the scallop-topped wooden gates. Two uniformed cops were on sentry duty and immediately opened up for the mortuary wagon, my Jag practically kissing its rear bumper. My window was down and the young cop I passed gave me a look as I glided by.
I nodded, said, “Coroner’s office,” and he nodded back and returned his attention to the swarm of neighbors and reporters.
I’d spotted a few familiar faces in that crowd-Tommy Thompson, Life ’s Beverly Hills man; showbiz columnist Jim Bacon of the Associated Press; Flo Kilgore, the New York Herald Tribune Hollywood correspondent. Flo was a brunette in her forties with pretty eyes, a weak chin, and a nice shape-I’d been out with her a few times, between husbands (she had just ditched her fourth). Wasn’t sure if she’d made me, as I passed through the Fifth Helena portals.
But her presence, and that of those other famous ink slingers, was no surprise to me. On the radio on the way over I’d already heard the following: “Marilyn Monroe is dead of suicide at age thirty-six. We grasp at straws as if knowing how she died will bring her back. Not since Jean Harlow have the standards of feminine beauty been so embodied in one woman. Marilyn Monroe-dead at thirty-six.”
For a news bulletin, that had been pretty studied; but with Marilyn’s history of overdoses and other melodrama (as Sinatra put it), all the news services would have obits on file and even squibs like that, ready to go.
What really disturbed me was that flat pronouncement of suicide. If I was following a mortuary wagon in, then the body was still in the house. A little early in the game for a verdict, even from the newshounds.
I backed the Jag around so I’d be facing out if I had to beat a hasty retreat. For a moment my path was blocked by a pudgy guy in a suit walking Marilyn’s little white mutt off somewhere. But I still managed to follow the two mortuary reps across the brick courtyard and into the house. Both wore the expected black suits and ties, slim, nondescript messengers of death-one shorter, fiftyish, Brylcreemed and bespectacled, the other a beanpole no more than twenty, with a flattop and his mouth hanging open.
Except for a quartet of milling uniformed cops, who just nodded at us as we came in, the living room was empty, Marilyn’s Mexican-flavored decorations doing nothing to make the occasion less somber. Muffled conversation came from the direction of the dining room-I thought I picked out Pat Newcomb’s voice, and maybe the indistinct murmur that characterized housekeeper Murray.
The two mortuary reps paused, probably to ask where the bedroom was, and I pitched in: “Just to your right.” Making the turn into the nearby hallway, we saw two uniformed cops posted in the hall, one at her door. Nobody questioned it when I followed the black-clad duo inside the master bedroom, stepping over the long phone cord that led back to the fitting room.
A sheet had been pulled over Marilyn’s body, with just tufts of her hair visible against a like-colored pillow. The older mortician carefully drew back the sheet and gathered it at the feet of the naked woman who was lying facedown, diagonally, toes bottom right, head top left and turned left, right arm bent, legs straight. Against her pale flesh, the bruising of lividity was stark.
“She’s been moved,” I said to the mortician.
He expressed no opinion.
Not that it was a matter of opinion: blood pools in the body when the heart stops pumping. If you die facedown, blood will settle along your chest. And she showed that distinctive bruised look on her face and neck, so had probably died facedown. Okay. Then why was there also lividity along her back? And the back of her legs and arms?
It takes four hours for lividity to reach a fixed state. Any movement of the body within that time frame would result in that bruised look. She seemed posed, as if to show she’d been talking or trying to get somebody on the phone, a hand hovering off the bed over a dropped receiver on the carpeted floor.
But if she’d overdosed on barbiturates, she would have suffered convulsions, and died in a contorted position. Not this gracefully tragic one, which was as studied as that radio bulletin.
Her entire body, save for the lividity-touched areas, had a bluish cast, as if she’d frozen to death, and her nails looked dark and dirty, probably from gardening.
The rest of the underfurnished space was a mess, much messier than I’d seen it on prior visits. A drinking glass on the floor near the bed, the phone and receiver (near her left hand), clutter on the nightstand (though pill bottles stood like little soldiers), letters and books and magazines on the floor, purses against one wall, very junky. No sign of her spiral notebooks, though.
Had the room been tossed?
“Rigor’s set in,” I noted.
This time the mortician replied: “Advanced.”
“Time of death, educated guess?”
He adjusted his glasses and checked his watch; his mouth moved silently with math.
Then he said, “Between nine thirty and eleven thirty last night.” He shook his head, giving the naked, bruised body a sorrowful look. “It’ll take a while to straighten her out and get her on the gurney.”
The young mortuary guy said, “Jeez, Pop, she just looks like some girl. Not Marilyn Monroe.”
So it was a family business. That was heartwarming.
Pop was getting a paper bag out of his pocket and brushing the pills into it; they were rattling, the bottles mostly full, apparently.
“Hey!” I said. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Collecting evidence for the coroner, Detective.”
I guessed “detective” would do fine as a designation for me. Anyway, it was too late to stop him; maybe that sweeping motion had preserved some fingerprints.
Father and son were starting the grisly task of bending the dead woman’s stiff limbs into the desired position, and I’d had about enough. Before I left, I noticed something odd-Marilyn’s black-out curtains were brushed aside, revealing that a window had been broken, and some boards haphazardly put up on the outside.
In the hallway, I asked the uniformed guy what the deal was with the window.
“Marilyn’s shrink had to break in.” He gestured with a thumb at the door he was leaning against. “This was locked.”
“Really?” I took a look at the keyhole lock. “So who cleaned up the glass?”
“Huh? Nobody cleaned up the glass.”
“Well, if he broke in from outside, there’d be glass on the floor. There isn’t any.”
He just shrugged. “That’s for you detectives to scope out.”
Everybody thought I was a detective. I guessed I was a detective. Here I thought I was with the coroner’s office…
The dining room turned out to be the holding area for people waiting to be questioned. Under a swag-chained star of frosted glass and leaded copper, at a big rustic round wooden table with a handcrafted look, sat four people who might have been attending a seance.
Shell-shocked Pat Newcomb, her dark blonde hair a mess, wore sunglasses and pajamas under a tan raincoat. Jowly, dark-haired, dark-eyed Mickey Rudin (Marilyn’s attorney as well as Sinatra’s) looked professional and put-upon in a brown suit and loosened tie. A somber horse-faced guy about fifty (Dr. Hyman Engelberg, I later learned) wore a sport coat and no tie. And Ichabod Crane-ish handyman Norman Jefferies, in a dark sweater over a dark button-down shirt, sat with hands folded, like he was saying grace.
Two detectives had set up a temporary HQ in the nearby kitchen. A young plainclothes dick, taking notes, had borrowed one of the wooden chairs from the dining room table, and positioned it several feet away from the trestle table by the window that served as a breakfast nook. Another plainclothes cop, seated on a bench at that table, had his back to me as I entered, and across from him sat Mrs. Murray, looking like your least favorite grade-school teacher.
It wasn’t at all secure-you could hear some of what was being said out in the dining room, I’d noticed, although with whispery Mrs. Murray you didn’t get much. You barely picked it up in the room with her. She was wearing a sort of Aztec-pattern poncho (almost certainly a gift from Marilyn) over a simple cream-colored dress.
I moved to the Hotpoint fridge where I could get a side view of the detective doing the interview. I was
