pleased and relieved to see that these officers were not intel-likely from the West Los Angeles Detective Division, since the guy asking the questions was Lt. Grover Armstrong, who ran it.
Armstrong I knew, but the younger guy no, and he climbed out of his chair and demanded who I was, since after all I was just somebody who’d wandered unbidden out into the kitchen. He didn’t look bright, a crew-cut former jock, but I gave him credit for being the first person to really question my presence.
I didn’t bother answering the kid. I just waited for heavyset, fortyish Armstrong to swivel his bucket head and recognize me. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies, either.
Mildly irritated by the interruption, he excused himself to Mrs. Murray and slid off the bench onto his feet and faced me, hands doing Superman on his hips. His suit was brown and baggy but his tie was fresh and crisply knotted.
“What are you doing here, Nate?”
“I was on a job for Marilyn. I heard about this and came over.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I lied.”
That seemed an acceptable answer to the seasoned copper. “What kind of a job?”
Over in the breakfast nook, from behind her cat’s-eye glasses, Mrs. Murray was gazing at me with undisguised contempt, certain I was about to betray Marilyn.
“Helping out on security,” I said.
The younger officer already didn’t like me. He said, “Yeah? Helping how?”
“That gate out front? My idea.”
The kid was staring at me, searching for sarcasm. He wasn’t that good a detective.
Armstrong was studying me. Then he said, “You know these people?”
“Some of them.”
“You want to sit in on the interviews? If something strikes you, you can even ask a question.”
“I’d like that.”
He gestured to his side of the bench. “Come on in, then.”
I sat next to him, and Mrs. Murray made a point of not looking at me as she said, “He’s not a policeman.”
“No,” Armstrong said, right across from her, “but he’s a professional detective and Miss Monroe hired him in that capacity.”
That’s all he gave her.
“I need to back up,” Armstrong said. “You told the first officer on the scene, Officer Clemmons, that you discovered something was wrong with Miss Monroe around midnight. But the police weren’t called till four twenty- five A.M. ”
“I was mistaken,” she said with the kind of patient little smile a grandmother gives a really stupid grandchild. “This was upsetting to me, and I must have lost track of time. It may have been closer to three thirty that I noticed a problem.”
Armstrong’s eyebrows hiked. “You lost track of three and a half hours?”
The smile, ever more inappropriate, turned up at the corners. “You know how it is.”
Armstrong gave me a sideways glance. Neither of us knew how it was.
“So what time,” the lieutenant asked, “did you call Dr. Greenson?”
Speaking of which, where was Greenson? I didn’t interrupt to ask.
“I believe I called him at three thirty-five,” she said. She had her usual withdrawn, otherworldly air; but there was something else, too-was she frightened?
“When did he get here?”
“Oh, Dr. Greenson lives close by-he must have arrived five or ten minutes later.”
Armstrong glanced at the young cop taking this down. The cop showed no reaction to any of this. A witness had just carved three and a half hours off a statement made to another officer only an hour before.
“All right, then,” Armstrong said. “Now that we’ve… corrected the time frame, let’s back up and go over how you first got concerned about Miss Monroe.”
The vague, whispery voice continued: “Certainly. I went to bed about ten o’clock. I’d noticed the light was on under Marilyn’s door, and assumed she was talking on the telephone with a friend, which was not unusual, so I went to bed. I woke up at midnight, and had to use the bathroom. The light was still on under Marilyn’s door, and I became quite concerned. She’d been in bed since late evening and should have been asleep by now. I tried the door, but it was locked, you see.”
“Locked?”
“Yes, from the inside.” She shifted primly, her hands in her lap. “I knocked, but Marilyn didn’t answer. So I called her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, who as I say lives nearby. When he arrived, he too failed to rouse her with his knocking, so he went outside and looked in through the bedroom window. He saw Marilyn lying motionless on the bed, looking peculiar. He broke the window with a fireplace poker I provided, and climbed inside and came around and opened the door. He said, ‘We’ve lost her.’”
“And after that?”
“Dr. Greenson called Dr. Engelberg. Marilyn’s internist. He arrived shortly and pronounced her dead.”
This she had delivered with the emotion of a grocery clerk requesting payment.
“What did you do after finding the body?”
She tossed her head girlishly. “Oh, so many things. I realized there would be hundreds of people involved, and of course I had to dress.” She touched the gay poncho. “All sorts of things to do. I called Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn. I called and asked him to come over immediately and repair the broken window.”
Which he had done by hammering a few boards over it. Before the police arrived.
“Then,” she was saying, and gave a little wave, “I was doing other things. You know how it is.”
“What kind of things?”
“Getting my own possessions together. Why, I’ve practically lived here most of the time these past months, and I have many personal items besides my clothes. There’s a laundry basket of mine here, and I filled it with my things. I really don’t know what else there is I can tell you.”
Marilyn’s housekeeper/companion folded her arms, her sad, sick smile continuing. She had spoken her piece.
“Well-thank you, Mrs. Murray.”
She smiled and nodded, slipped off the bench from behind the trestle table and exited with studied dignity, back into the dining room.
Armstrong sighed, got up and slid in where Mrs. Murray had been, so he could face me.
“Well?” he asked.
“You want to start?”
“No,” he said wearily. “Take a run at it.”
“First of all, how prepared does that story sound? Marilyn was ‘motionless’ and looked ‘peculiar’… who talks like that?”
He didn’t bother answering.
“And this business about ‘Norman Jefferies, a handyman employed by Marilyn.’ He’s Mrs. Murray’s damn son -in-law.”
“You missed the part,” Armstrong said, almost groaning, “where I tried to get Monroe’s activities for the day out of her. She was vague, downright evasive.”
“Possibly lying. Go take a look at the carpet in that hall-it’s wall-to-wall. The door is flush to it. I may be wrong, but I doubt any light could show under it.”
“I hadn’t noticed that.”
“I take it there was no suicide note.”
“No.”
“Did you find a key in that bedroom?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Lieutenant, this is an old house, with old-fashioned doors and locks. I bet the keys are all
