“Gone as in not in her bedroom. Not in any room in the house. So we look outside, and hear that little dog yapping, and right away I notice the light on in the guesthouse. When we go in there-I’ll never forget it, try as I might-there she was, facedown, lying across the daybed. She was in the nude. Holding on to the phone with one hand.”
“Dead?”
“Looked that way to me. Her color was awful, kind of… blue. But Eunice took the phone from her fingers and called for an ambulance. Then she put some kind of emergency call in to Dr. Greenson, who phoned back and said he’d come soon and in the meantime call Dr. Engelberg. I went out to mind the front gates. The ambulance got there before Greenson and Engelberg.”
This was the first anyone had said anything about an ambulance.
Well, some neighbors had mentioned seeing one, but none of the primary witnesses. And it made sense. It was Saturday night and both Greenson and Engelberg were out, Mrs. Murray initially getting answering services for both doctors. So what would she do next?
Call an ambulance.
And an ambulance attendant would certainly turn Marilyn faceup to try resuscitation, and if the body had been initially found in the cottage, that explained the dual lividity several times over.
As for Marilyn being in the guesthouse, if she had private phone calls to make, she might have wanted to get away from the prying eyes and ears of Mrs. Murray, who she distrusted enough to have just fired.
“After that, all hell broke loose,” Jefferies said. “Police cars, bunch of other vehicles, all kinds of people crawling over everywhere.”
“What kind of people?”
“Men in suits. Plainclothes cops, maybe? I think some may have been from the studio. I mean, they were all over the place.”
“What about the window, Norm?”
He made an embarrassed smirk. “That suicide thing, breaking in to rescue her? Some plainclothes guy thought that up. There was a dozen of those birds or more. Then, like a magician snapped his fingers? They’re gone.”
“Could you describe any of them?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe the guy who was in charge, or at least in charge of some of them. My take was, there were different… what would you call it? Groups or… factions? Anyway, they weren’t all on the same team. They had some shared goals, but they definitely weren’t on the same team.”
“What did he look like, the guy in charge?”
“Big. Kind of ugly. Rugged face. Funny thing-he kind of reminded me of that guy on TV.”
“What guy on TV?”
“Paladin.”
Walt Schaefer ran the largest ambulance service in Los Angeles County. He was an old friend of Fred Rubinski’s, and the nature of his business and ours meant the A-1 Detective Agency and the Schaefer Ambulance Service were not strangers.
So when I called and said I needed to talk to him, and preferred not to do it by phone, he didn’t even ask me why. Just said sure, come on over.
I crossed the nondescript bullpen of dispatchers and on through the open door into Walt’s modest office, which had the same cheap rec room-type paneling as the outer area. I shut the door.
A husky, tanned guy in his fifties, Walt was in shirtsleeves with a clip-on tie and you’d never know he was a multimillionaire. Sitting behind a cluttered metal desk, he looked like an overwhelmed junior-high guidance counselor. File cabinets whose tops were piled with folders crowded his work area, and a dozen framed commendations hung crookedly.
He rocked back in his swivel chair and showed off his bridgework. The egg-like shape of his skull was emphasized by seriously thinning, graying dark hair.
“Let me guess,” he said in his raspy second tenor. “Somebody needs a discreet exit from the city.”
That was a good guess. Just after the war, in addition to running ambulances all over Los Angeles, Walt had established a pioneering air ambulance service. Flying under the banner of medical emergencies, such a service could fly its planes into just about any airport in the world.
Obviously such flights were usually legit. But we had on occasion used his service to spirit clients out of town, and it was an open secret that Schaefer flew clandestine flights for Uncle Sam.
“This time I’m here about an indiscreet exit,” I said.
“Really? Do tell.”
“Just wanted to ask you, Walt, if you’re aware Marilyn Monroe’s neighbors spotted one of your wagons at her house the night she died.”
This near lie (neighbors had spotted an ambulance but had not singled out Schaefer) might have elicited any number of indignant responses. Walt might have asked me what the hell I was talking about, or pressed me for the name of the supposed witness, or maybe said get the fuck out.
But his response was low-key and calm yet dismissive. “We didn’t take a call from that residence,” he said.
“You handle damn near all the calls in Brentwood.”
“‘Damn near’ is not all the calls. And maybe there wasn’t a call. Sorry you made the trip for nothing, Nate. Say hi to Fred.”
Then he gave me a thin, cold-eyed smile that meant the conversation was over and the pleasant relationship between Schaefer Ambulance and the A-1 was on shaky ground.
He was doing paperwork or pretending to before I could make it out of his small office.
So I made two stops on my way to the Jag. First, I told the bullpen, in a loud firm voice, who I was, where I could be found, and that I was looking for off-the-record information about the call to Marilyn Monroe’s house late Saturday or early Sunday night… and that I was renowned for my generosity. I did this going around scattering business cards like confetti.
Then I repeated the operation in the big garage, where half a dozen ambulances were being washed or serviced, my voice echoing with a nice importance. I didn’t scatter the cards this time, handing them individually to drivers.
Somebody in the bullpen must have filled Walt in, because he came rushing at me, tie flapping, as I headed through an open garage door to the street.
He blocked my path. “What the hell’s the idea, Nate?”
“I’m looking into Marilyn’s death.”
“Why in hell?”
“Because nobody else is.”
“Bullshit! The papers say that Suicide Squad is out questioning people right now.”
“Funny, ’cause so am I, and I haven’t run into any of them.”
Walt let out a frustrated sigh, shook his head, then took me by the arm. Walked me back into the garage, our footsteps resonating like small-arms fire. Put me in the rider’s seat of one of the wagons and came around the other side and got behind the wheel. I had a feeling he hadn’t driven an ambulance himself in a long, long time.
“I will give this to you off the record,” he said softly, tightly. “If you’re working for a client trying to find out if the woman met foul play, I will deny the story to anybody but the cops. If you’re working for a reporter, you can’t use it, because once you say ‘ambulance,’ they’ll know it’s us. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He sighed, looked out the windshield at the wooden slats of a closed garage door. “Two of my boys happened to be close, right around the corner practically, when they caught the emergency call. They got there in under two minutes, no siren.”
The ambulance driver and his partner were met by a tall man who let them in the gates of the hacienda-style home (obviously Jefferies), and a “frumpy” middle-aged woman (guess who) with a poodle on a leash. She and the
