poodle led them to a small guest cottage, but stayed outside.
Within, Schaefer’s guys got a shock-Marilyn Monroe lay nude, faceup on a folded-out daybed, arm draped toward a phone on the floor.
“She was obviously dead,” Walt said, with a fatalistic shrug. “Her body had a blueish tinge, possibly indicating a swift death. So there was nothing my boys could do-we’re not a hearse service. As they were getting ready to head out, one of her doctors showed up, this fellow Greenson, I believe.”
“Her psychiatrist.”
“Yeah, but psychiatrists are MDs. They can pronounce death. So he asked my boys to wait and he went into that cottage and came back a minute or so later. Asked the boys to go in and load her on a gurney and take her to the nearest hospital. Santa Monica hospital.”
“But she was dead…”
“Which is why my boys, who generally follow doctor’s orders in this business, didn’t-they just politely turned him down and left. Apparently Greenson, if that’s who it was, said he hadn’t pronounced her dead and that they should take her, with the suggestion that they would say she expired on the way. That would make it a hospital matter… and also a Schaefer Ambulance matter, incidentally, as my boys well knew… but from the doctor’s vantage, it’d take some of the heat off them there at the house. Is my opinion.”
“What time was this?”
“Between ten and eleven.”
“Can you check your log?”
“What log?” He shifted in the seat, one hand on the wheel, like an impatient driver in traffic. “By the time my boys left, the other doctor, Engelberg, was there and several cops, too.”
“Before midnight, cops were there?”
“Yeah. And one of them was the kind of cop you don’t fuck with.”
“… Intel, Walt?”
“I didn’t say that.” He turned a dour gaze on me. “Now listen carefully, Nate. Eighty percent of my business comes from the city and county, with another ten percent that is very lucrative from the U.S. government. With the Kennedys involved, if I were to speak up about what I know, this business I have worked to build up since nineteen fucking thirty-two would go down the drain. And what do I know, really? That my guys went there, she was dead, and they turned around and came back. Because in case I failed to mention it, we’re not a goddamn hearse service.”
“What you know, Walt, and what at least two of your people know, is that the official story on Marilyn’s death is bullshit.”
“And if I come forward, what? Justice will be served? Do I have to tell you what brand of justice gets served up in LA? Chief Parker justice. And by the way, who’s the top guy at the Justice Department right now? Let it go, Nate. Let it the hell go.”
A siren screamed and made me jump as an ambulance pulled out.
“Look,” Walt said, “she overdosed, we were too late to save her, her own doctor was too late to save her… so nobody saved her. The cops have made it clear to me- clear -that they aren’t interested in pursuing this case. My government clients have indicated, through intermediaries, mind you, that my discretion would be appreciated. Do I really have to tell Nate Heller which way the wind blows?”
“A woman died, Walt.”
“And how many women died today in Los Angeles that my buggies picked up? If I don’t know, you sure don’t. Look. Nate. We never spoke.” He shook his head, sighed heavily. “What good hearing this shit does you, I have no idea.”
He climbed down out of the ambulance, shut the door, and for a while I just sat there in the vehicle, going nowhere.
CHAPTER 21
Friday morning, I was in a swimsuit and Flo was in a baby blue bikini and we were both in sunglasses, sitting poolside in deck chairs in back of her big white birthday cake of a mansion on Roxbury Drive.
We were working.
I, in fact, had been working since the night before, staying in her house as the inside man with another A-1 agent outside on the street. After the attempt Wednesday night on me (and possibly her) at the hotel bungalow, I felt some precautions were in order. And as for my duties as inside man, I will leave that to your fertile imagination.
In the youthful ponytail again, she was going over notes on a steno pad, her slender tan body pearled with perspiration. As Joe Friday used to say, it was hot in Los Angeles.
“I’m close,” she said, tapping the eraser end of a pencil on her pad. “The puzzle pieces are coming together, even with half of the witnesses leaving town. If one of us could just pin Greenson down, that might do it.”
“May still happen,” I said. “Engelberg would’ve been nice…”
He was among those who had suddenly decided to take a vacation-or as the doctor’s secretary had put it on the phone, “an extended period of time away from Los Angeles.”
Flo glanced at me over the tops of her Ray-Bans. “We don’t have to solve this mystery, Nate-all we have to do is raise sufficient questions, backed up by facts.”
The nature of my business-and the business of my nature-was solving mysteries; but she was right.
“It’s tough,” I said, “with so much of what we have coming from off-the-record sources.”
“Not all. Both Hazel Washington and Inez Melson had no problem being quoted.”
The Washington woman-Marilyn’s maid at Fox-had seen interesting things at Marilyn’s house when she and her husband had stopped by at around noon Sunday hoping to retrieve a card table and chairs they’d loaned the actress. Four clean-cut young men in dark slacks, white shirts, and mirror-polished Brogans were among an infestation that included uniformed Fox security guards, telephone company technicians, police, and reporters.
Hazel’s husband, Rocky, was an LAPD detective, so the couple got access where others might not have. As Hazel and Rocky hauled their furniture out, they noticed one of the clean-cut quartet burning a big pile of documents in the living room fireplace. Among them were several spiral notebooks.
Executrix Melson took a similar path. Monday morning she had been going through Marilyn’s papers in a file cabinet in the guest cottage, but few papers remained. The file had been broken into, the lock forced, many documents and other items missing. Ironically, one document left behind was a bill from a lock company-in March, Marilyn had changed the lock on the file as well as installed bars on the guest cottage windows.
Flo had called the A-1 Lock and Safe Company of Santa Monica (no relation to the A-1 Detective Agency) and talked her way to the locksmith who’d worked on the cabinet. He told her Marilyn had said in passing she felt things were disappearing from her files.
“Those guys burning papers in the fireplace,” I said, “have to be spooks.”
“Spies, you mean?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that ilk, anyway. CIA, FBI, Secret Service-they could all have an interest in Marilyn.”
“You’re not really suggesting the government could have had Marilyn killed.”
“More likely killed her themselves.”
Somewhere, next door maybe, a transistor radio was playing rock ’n’ roll-right now, “Calendar Girl.”
“Nate, you can’t be serious…”
“Let’s talk about another kind of government-organized crime. Back in Capone days, the big boss might have said, ‘Bump off that bastard McGurn.’ And McGurn would be bumped. But these are more sophisticated, technological times. You never know who’s listening, who’s watching. So your modern-day Capone says, ‘That bastard McWhozit’s a real problem. Somebody ought to do something about him.’ And somebody does.”
“And you think the president or the attorney general has that kind of power?”
I laughed. “You kidding? A woman who has been intimate with both Jack and Bobby, who has overhead top- level, even top secret conversations? Learning things that no one outside the innermost circle should know?”
She shook her head, ponytail wagging. “I can’t believe that.”
