“You don’t want to believe that. The notebooks those clean-cut characters were burning-those were Marilyn’s notes on things Jack and Bobby had shared with her. A kind of a diary-the most dangerous kind imaginable.”
“So then we’re… convinced it’s murder.”
“Somebody tried to murder me, remember? Maybe murder us. That hypo I confiscated from our visitor? Don’t get upset, but-”
“Don’t get upset!”
“It was filled with pure nicotine.”
“ Cigarettes nicotine?”
“A lethal drug in sufficient quantity that creates the appearance of a heart attack in its victim. A routine autopsy wouldn’t turn anything up, and a pathologist would have to know what he’s looking for, to spot it.”
“You had it analyzed?”
“I didn’t taste it.”
She sat staring at the blue shimmering water in her pool. “Palisades Park” was coming from the next-door radio. I was fairly certain she was thinking about what a nice life she had, and what a shame it would be to risk losing it, even over the scoop of a lifetime.
“How long,” she said softly, almost timidly, “will you keep your people watching my house?”
“Until your story’s published. You’ll be safe after that. You may be attacked professionally and personally, but your death would be too convenient not to raise suspicion.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Of course, I could just move in.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“I was hoping for kept man.”
She laughed. I could always make her laugh.
My relief came on at noon-an agent who would not work the bedroom beat-and I headed to the A-1.
No message slips on my desk, but I checked with Fred on the office line. “Nothing from Thad Brown?”
“Actually he did call. So far, the nine-mil is not traceable. Serial numbers filed off. He’s turned the Beretta over for possible ballistics match-up with something in their files, but that’ll take forever and a day. The noise suppressor is of course a custom job, and that may lead somewhere. More by tomorrow, maybe.”
The afternoon I spent on the phone chasing associates of Marilyn’s. Makeup artist Whitey Snyder and costume designer William Travilla (one of her personal fashion designers) were glad to talk to me, but had nothing. Her close friend and masseur Ralph Roberts did have some interesting information and insights.
Turned out Roberts and Marilyn were planning to have dinner Saturday evening, and he’d called that afternoon to confirm. He got Dr. Greenson instead, who told him Marilyn was out.
“This Greenson is a goddamn Svengali,” Roberts said. “Very controlling. Marilyn and I’d been friends for years, and he advised her to cut me off. She didn’t, though, bless her heart. Listen, Mr. Heller, I know she was still seeing Greenson-remember, she was more addicted to therapy than pills-but just the same, she was not happy with him. Not for the last couple months.”
“How so?”
“She didn’t think he was doing her any good-not personally, and not professionally.”
“Separate that out for me-‘personally and professionally.’”
“Well, that quack inserted himself into the Fox fiasco, and did her no good at all, playing agent or manager or whatever. What she accomplished, getting that new contract, having Fox come crawling back to her, that was all her. She was brilliant, really, and an incredible businesswoman. Greenson was a detriment, if anything. She was going to get rid of him.”
“ Fire him?”
“Definitely. Both him and that awful Murray woman. Did you know Greenson put that woman next to Marilyn just to spy on her?”
“How did you learn that?”
“Marilyn told me.”
Another call was illuminating, too, but in other ways.
The chief fix-it guy at Fox was Frank Neill. He was a onetime police reporter and a sort of in-house private eye for the studio, though he called himself a publicist now.
“Say, Frank. Nate Heller. Tying up some loose ends for Marilyn’s estate. What time did you and your guys get to the house Sunday morning?”
All right, the estate part was a lie, and the whole approach a cheap shot. But you have to try.
“Wasn’t there,” Neill said. “Nobody from the studio was.”
He hung up. No small talk. No good-bye. No chance for me to point out that the neighbors had seen security guards in Fox uniforms, and Dr. Greenson had told Officer Clemmons at the scene that he had called the studio before the cops. Just a click that spoke volumes.
I left my fourth message on Dr. Greenson’s home answering machine, then tried his office. His secretary informed me the doctor would not be in next week, and for several weeks thereafter.
He, too, was going on an “extended” trip away from Los Angeles.
This discouraged but did not defeat me. I began calling every travel agency in town, saying I was Dr. Greenson’s assistant and needed to confirm his reservations. On my fourth try, I learned that he and his wife would be leaving for London on Monday. That gave me the weekend to corner the bastard.
I was the first one to leave the office, well before five. Closer to four. I wanted to shower and make myself handsome before driving over to my ex-wife’s to remind her what a huge mistake she’d made, and to pick my son up for dinner and a movie. Everybody deserves an evening off, right?
Wrong.
I was approaching my car in the underground parking garage near the Bradbury Building, my footsteps echoing in the cavernous cement structure, thinking it was a little eerie to be alone in the underlit catacomb. But when I discovered I wasn’t really alone, it wasn’t reassuring at all.
Two men in sunglasses, well-tailored black suits with black ties, and mirror-polished black shoes, looking distressingly young and clean-cut, stepped out from between cars and quickly bookended me. I was still walking. They walked along.
“Mr. Heller, I wonder if you’d accompany us? There’s someone who would like to talk to you.”
Whatever happened to the good old days, when the guys attempting to kidnap you had cauliflower ears and bent noses and either just blackjacked you or stuck a gun in your ribs and said to get in the fucking trunk?
I of course was not about to go around unarmed, after the needle incident. My suit coat-a Maxwell Street number, tailored to accommodate my shoulder-holstered Browning-was unbuttoned and I had the gun out in a blink and whirled, taking two quick steps back and showing them the long barrel with the black round hole where death comes out.
I was feeling like a private eye again. Peter Gunn. Those 77 Sunset Strip clowns. Even James fucking Bond had nothing on me.
And then I really felt like a private eye, when a third guy I hadn’t seen hit me from behind with something very hard. It didn’t put my lights out, so I can’t provide anything poetic about black pools I dove into. Instead, I just hung puppet-like in midair, undignified as hell, trying not to piss myself, as the first two clean-cut lads held me by the arms, to prevent my hitting the pavement…
… before dragging me to a parked car as black as their suits and stuffing me in the trunk.
Maybe these were the good old days.
The ride was short enough to mean we were still in downtown Los Angeles. When the trunk lid opened, all three were standing there-the third was another clean-cut one, but brawnier, a former college athlete no doubt-and I did not leap out at them and clean their young clocks.
The first two politely helped me out, and apologized several times, one even asking how I felt, though I declined to answer on the grounds that I might humiliate myself. Then they decided to help me out on that score, and-after I’d seen only enough to know I was in another concrete parking garage-blindfolded me.
