speech to give on Monday to some other lawyers.
I walked up between houses where suddenly the Palisades Beach Road loomed, shockingly close to the beachfront properties. My Jag was parked up here, but I wasn’t going to retrieve it yet. I had a call to make.
The bell and my knocking weren’t getting a result, but I kept it up, alternating, until the Lawfords’ Negro maid-in a tan uniform the color of my sport shirt-finally answered. She did not look happy.
“We’re not receiving nobody today,” she said, and started to close the door.
I inserted a Ked-shod foot, and the door caught it, making me long for Florsheims. I pushed my way in, and she stumbled back and had a frightened look, but I slipped off my Ray-Bans and calmed her, patting the air with a raised palm.
“Honey,” I said, “I’m not a threat, and I’m not a reporter. I’ve been here before, remember? Or do we all look alike? Tell Mr. Lawford that Nate Heller is here to see him. Do it now.”
But she recovered her dignity and held her ground. “No. Mr. Lawford isn’t seeing nobody today.”
“Is he still in bed? I know where the bedroom is.”
Her eyes and nostrils flared, and she said, “Mr. Lawford is up but isn’t, as I clearly stated, receiving nobody.”
“Then I’ll just wait here till he does.” I leaned against the door behind me. “Let me know.”
She had no idea how to deal with that, and-huffing a little bit, muttering under her breath-she finally went off. A good five minutes passed and I figured maybe she called the cops. There were certainly no Secret Service around. Then I heard footsteps and thought maybe Lawford himself was coming, but it was just her.
“He’s in the den. Come with me.”
“No, that’s okay. I know where it is.”
The den featured big windows and a collection of comfortable chairs and couches and walls with built-in bookcases that were also home to some fancy hi-fi equipment. But no music was playing and the windows were covered, and Lawford-in a blue polo and white deck pants-was slouched in a dark brown leather overstuffed couch with his sandaled feet up on an equally padded ottoman. One small lamp was on, on a distant end table, and the room was damn near dark.
I took a matching chair opposite him. To one side of the ottoman was a low-slung, mostly glass coffee table with Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Playboy magazines scattered, as well as a big glass pitcher of what might have been tomato juice but was probably equally vodka, a stalk of celery stuck in it. The coffee table was also home to a box of Kleenex, which had given birth to scattered wads of used tissues, some on the coffee table, others on the floor.
Lawford’s berry-brown face looked terrible-deep grooves, flesh that seemed to have been frozen in the process of melting. His eyes were mostly red, half-hooded, and his graying hair was uncombed. Little dark splotches on the sport shirt indicated he had occasionally spilled a bit of Bloody Mary on himself. A glass of the red stuff was in one hand, threatening to pour itself onto the Oriental carpet.
“Nathan,” he said, and he smiled, though it was among the sadder smiles I’ve witnessed. “Glad to see you, old boy.”
He got more British when he was sloshed.
He pitched forward and stuck out a hand and I shook it. To say it was a limp-fish shake would be to insult a limp fish. Then he flopped back.
“So kind of you to come. So kind…” He sipped the drink. “Would you like one? There are glasses over there, or Erma Lee can fetch you something else…?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“She’s dead, Nate. That poor girl’s dead. And it’s all my fault. All my fault…”
Then he began to cry. To sob. Spilled some drink on himself but managed to put the glass on the coffee table and then just rolled up in a ball and bawled, right there on the couch. It went on for several minutes. I didn’t comfort him.
When he seemed to have it out of his system, I said, “ Was it?”
“… What?” He righted himself. Looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. Tears were all over his face, and snot, too. I pushed the box of Kleenex toward him. So I guess maybe I did comfort him.
“Was it your fault, Peter? Is it your fault?
His lower lip trembled as he frowned. He had wiped his face and nose clean, and added another little wadded-up ball to the floor. “You… you don’t blame me, do you, Nathan?”
“I don’t blame anybody,” I said. Yet. “I don’t even blame Marilyn. I was at the house this morning, early this morning-saw them wheel her out.”
He closed his eyes. Shuddered. “I’m glad Pat’s not here. She would be… I know she is taking this hard… but at least her family’s there… around her.”
“I sat in on some of the police interviews, before the Intelligence Division came in and took over.”
“Did they really? Hamilton and that bunch?”
“Yeah. How drunk are you?”
“I’m… all right. We can talk. I can tell you want to talk.”
“Good.” I crossed my legs, got comfortable. “I heard Mickey Rudin say you were the one who initiated the phone calls that led to Marilyn being found. You’d invited her to a party, and you checked on her, and were… concerned?”
He drew in a breath. Nodded. Then he straightened up, sat more erect, clearing his mind, apparently. Of course, part of that process included finishing his current Bloody Mary and pouring himself another.
“I… I may have been the last person to talk to her alive,” he said.
I managed not to point out the unlikelihood of anyone talking to her dead.
“What the hell happened last night, Peter?”
He shrugged his eyebrows. “Saturday afternoon, I mentioned to Marilyn that I was planning an informal barbecue for about eight o’clock that evening, out on the lanai. You know, people are in and out of here all day, in swimsuits, going to the pool, and generally enjoying themselves. So I was having a few friends over. Eventually we just had Chinese delivered. As it turned out, I was, uh… a little too high to manage an actual barbecue.”
“Where does Marilyn come in, Peter?”
“I called her about seven, seven thirty… to see if she was coming. She said no… she was already in bed. She sounded terrible, very slurry. She almost seemed to be… slipping away.”
“If she’d taken some chloral hydrate,” I said, “she would be.”
“Yes, I know, but I sensed she was… I could feel her… the depression rolling in on her. Moving in. Like… like bad weather. Sometimes she couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I started really talking to her, almost shouting… sort of a verbal slap, to wake her up.”
“Peter, if she’d had sleeping pills-”
“You don’t understand. Some of what she was saying… I didn’t think she was saying good night, Nathan-I thought she was saying good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
He nodded, took a swig of Bloody Mary, and said, “‘Say good-bye to Pat,’ she told me. ‘Say good-bye to Jack, and say good-bye to yourself… because you’re a nice guy.’”
That last seemed like wishful thinking to me. She hadn’t thought Lawford was a very nice guy at Cal-Neva, after he and his wife sat her down for a good talking-to. I’d say she hated him then. And that was just days ago…
“I had a party under way,” he was saying. “I do try to be a good host, and I didn’t want to bother any of them with it.”
“Who was there?”
“The Naars… a couple we’ve known for years; Joe’s a TV producer. Bullets Durgom, the agent. My agent, Milt Ebbins, was supposed to come but begged off. Small group. Anyway, fifteen minutes, half an hour later, I was just not able to shake the feeling something was wrong… so I called Marilyn again, or tried to. I got a busy signal.”
“How many numbers did you have of hers?”
“Just the one.”
He may not have had the personal line. He may have been calling the phone in the fitting room, not the one with her in the bedroom.
