The biggest favor you can do me, Nate, is to just stay out of this.
“Cover up what? If this is about Marilyn and Bobby having a fling, and Marilyn getting depressed and killing herself, that’s a big story. Yes. Might even cost the Kennedys the next election. Might. But if it’s a murder, and the Kennedys are covering it up… which would imply that the Kennedys made that murder happen… Well, Nate, whose friend are you?”
You could picture it, the beautiful blonde sitting at the wood-and-glass bar next to her famous ballplayer husband, and some fans come up and they don’t even care about Marilyn. Funny. Absurd. Fucking comical.
But somebody had to care about Marilyn.
“Can you afford a retainer of two thousand?” I asked her.
She made out the check.
CHAPTER 17
The Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills provided a beautiful little oasis forming a triangle between busy intersections at the north end of Rodeo Drive. The landscaping was lush, the fountains bubbling, the trees majestic, the flowerbeds plentiful. And for a meeting with Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the LAPD, the location couldn’t have been more convenient for me-the park had once been the five-acre front lawn of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
With a gentle wind whispering through the copious trees, Clemmons and I sat with the sun at our backs on a wrought-iron bench near the big central fountain, where colorful Japanese fish provided a touch of the exotic.
The off-duty cop did not look in the least exotic, or even like he belonged anywhere near Beverly Hills in his short-sleeve red-and-black plaid shirt and Levi’s. I was still in the suit I’d worn to Musso’s, albeit with tie loosened, as this meeting was taking place in the early afternoon of that same day.
Flo Kilgore had provided me with Clemmons’ home number, warning me she hadn’t reached him yet, but I got lucky and caught him right away. He worked midnight to eight, and normally slept from about nine till 4:00 P.M., but I’d reached him much earlier.
“Haven’t been sleeping so good last few days,” he’d told me on the phone. “So, then, what? You’re working for the Monroe estate?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t even know who that would be. Marilyn’s mother is in the loony bin and she has a half sister somewhere.”
At no time in this investigation did I tell anyone I was working for a reporter.
I went on: “I was doing security for Marilyn, and looking into some things for her. She was my client and I feel like I owe it to her to ask a few questions that nobody else seems to be.”
There had been a long pause. If he was caught up in Captain James Hamilton’s cover-up, this was where Clemmons would have hung up on me. A good sign when he didn’t.
And now we were sitting on that iron bench. On a weekday, there were more squirrels than people here, and the frothing fountain provided nice noise to cover up our conversation. So did horn honks and other car sounds from nearby Sunset Boulevard.
My companion was a cop right out of Central Casting-about forty, square-shouldered, square-jawed, flinty- eyed, with a narrow line for a mouth, speaking in a no-nonsense second tenor.
“I came on duty as watch commander at the substation at midnight,” Sergeant Clemmons said.
He sat comfortably, nothing tense about his body language, though his eyes were tight and his tone carried an edge. Only occasionally did he look right at me, mostly staring into his thoughts.
“Routine night,” he was saying. “Slow as hell. Had my feet up when the phone rang well after four A.M. ”
Clemmons said he didn’t understand the caller at first, a male with “a European accent.”
“Guy is agitated, talking real fast. I ask him to calm down, slow down. He says all right, and there’s this pause you coulda hung a hammock in. And then he tells me Marilyn Monroe is dead. That she’d committed suicide. Well, that woke me up, all right. But my first thought is, it’s a damn hoax. So I ask him to identify himself.”
The caller said he was Dr. Ralph Greenson, “Miss Monroe’s psychiatrist.” Clemmons asked for the address and said he’d be right over.
“My mind was racing,” he said, with the tiniest smile. “I mean, you can imagine-if this thing was on the level, all hell would break loose. So I go out there myself, and don’t waste any time about it. No need for a siren, though- streets deserted, and if she really was dead, Marilyn Monroe wasn’t going anywhere.”
When he turned down the little dead-end alley of Fifth Helena Drive, he found the gates open, and pulled into the brick courtyard. A few cars were there, and he apologized to me that he didn’t spend any time committing their makes to memory or writing down any license numbers.
“But then, there were no lights on at all outside the Monroe house,” he said. “Porch and garage all dark. Not even pool lights, and damn few on in the house. Only sounds were police calls from my radio and a dog barking.”
Maf, Marilyn’s poodle, most likely.
“So I go up and knock on the door. I can hear footsteps, more than one person whispering, but I must have stood there a full minute before the porch light comes on and that Murray woman answers.” He shook his head. “ She was a hell of a character-all whispery and nervous and afraid of her own shadow.”
“How did that strike you, her odd demeanor?”
“To me, she seemed dishonest right off the bat. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong, Mr. Heller, not right then… but I knew something was off about the woman.”
Immediately the housekeeper led the police sergeant to the bedroom, “very near the front door, actually,” where a sheet-covered body sprawled across the bed. A shock of platinum-blonde hair poked up onto a pillow.
“The two doctors were waiting for me in there,” Clemmons said. “This taller doc, Engelberg, distinguished- looking fella, he’d pulled a chair up and was sitting near the bed. The other doc, smaller, with a mustache, was standing over by the nightstand-that was Greenson. He introduced himself. He was the guy on the phone, all right, with the Dr. Freud accent.”
The psychiatrist simply said to the officer, “She committed suicide,” then pointed out an empty container of Nembutal at the woman’s bedside. “She took all of those.”
The sergeant drew back the sheet revealing what proved to be a naked Marilyn Monroe, but “with no makeup, and splotched with lividity.”
“She was lying facedown in what I call the soldier’s position,” he said. “Her face against a pillow, arms by her side, right arm slightly bent. Legs stretched out perfectly straight.”
What I’d seen.
I asked, “And how did that strike you?”
“Hinky as hell. If she OD’ed on barbs, she’d be all twisted up. I’ve seen dozens of them. Wrong. Dead wrong.” He shifted on the bench. “Then I asked ’em if the body had been moved. You could tell from the dual lividity she had been. And these lying bastards, both of them, say no, she hasn’t been moved. This is how they found her.”
“Both said that.”
“Yeah. Well, the little guy, Greenson, he kind of took charge. The taller guy seemed in a real funk. Not talkative at all. Whereas this Greenson character…” He shook his head, smirked humorlessly, and for once looked directly at me. “… He was cocky, almost daring me to accuse him of something. I kept thinking, ‘What the hell’s wrong with this guy?’ It just didn’t fit the situation.”
“What’s your take on the scene itself?”
“That it was the most obviously staged death scene I ever saw. The pill bottles were arranged in neat order and the body deliberately positioned. It all looked too damn tidy.”
“Tidy? Really?”
“Yeah. Everything was neat. I of course looked for a suicide note, but there wasn’t one, weren’t any documents, no scripts, no notebooks, nothing like that.”
But just an hour later, I had seen a very messy bedroom, with plenty of scripts and books-although, perhaps
