“Your treatment of Marilyn is riddled with unethical behavior. Whether that rises to the standard of you getting your license yanked, I couldn’t say. But you took Marilyn on, even though a lover of hers, a man she nearly married during this period, was already your patient-Frank Sinatra. You took Marilyn on even though Mickey Rudin, your brother-in-law, was her attorney. You placed a former psychiatric nurse of yours, Eunice Murray, in your patient’s home as a spy. You inserted yourself into your patient’s business affairs, and-”
“Need we go over this ground again, Mr. Heller? I won’t argue I may have crossed certain ethical lines, but nothing that would cost me my license to practice.”
“Yeah? What if your first loyalty wasn’t to your patient? What if you were really working for the Kennedys?”
“What?”
“Frank Sinatra knew about Marilyn and Jack. Mickey Rudin knew. Back around ’60, when you took over Marilyn’s case, Frank was very close to the Kennedys. Was placing you as Marilyn’s shrink a way to keep track of her state of mind?”
Now the disgust was openly displayed. “Perhaps you should return the gun to your hand, Mr. Heller. Because that’s the only way I will sit for such insulting nonsense.”
“Well, it’s actually the lesser of two evils. The other possibility is that you’re a Soviet spy.”
His dark eyes showed white all around. “Oh, my God -you really do need to leave, Mr. Heller. I have tried to be cooperative…”
He’d asked me to, so I got the gun back in hand. Didn’t exactly point it at him. Didn’t exactly not point it at him.
“Your Communist ties are well known by Uncle Sam,” I reminded him. “You and Dr. Engelberg. I’d like to talk to him, too.”
“You can’t. He’s in Switzerland.”
“What, making a deposit? You Beverly Hills Commies kill me. So, with your ties to Eunice Murray and her husband-who I understand built this very house we’re in-and ol’ silver-spoon Communist Vanderbilt Field and a whole passel of fellow travelers, you’ve surrounded Marilyn with caring, Communist attention. But what if you have arranged to be Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist so you can hear the things that Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy shared with this eager-to-learn young woman? And didn’t you even help her craft questions to ask Bobby, for her to write the answers down in her notebooks?”
“You can’t believe this.”
I let the gun droop. “Actually, I can’t. It is absurd-are you working for the Kennedys, or the Soviet Union? Or maybe Jack and Bobby are Commie spies. Even Ian Fleming couldn’t sell this crap. But you couldn’t take that chance, could you?”
“What chance?”
“That your very real Communist associations would come out. That’s why you had to go along with whatever the Kennedys’ favorite at the LAPD, Captain Hamilton of the Intelligence Division, asked. And what was asked of you by the CIA or FBI or Secret Service or whatever mix of spooks came around to haunt Marilyn’s hacienda that night. You had no choice. You even, at first, became the spokesman for the suicide crowd. But that finally caught in your craw, didn’t it?”
He said nothing. He was looking past me, either at the window or maybe into his conscience. I considered offering him mine-the nine-millimeter one.
“It’s not often I have to give a doctor a bad prognosis,” I said, “but here it is-today somebody pulled me in and told me bad things about you. Some true, some false or at least exaggerations. I have a reputation, as you noted, for what these gents call ‘rough justice.’”
Now his eyes met mine. “I don’t follow you, Mr. Heller.”
“Somebody, CIA or FBI or, yeah, even Secret Service, grabbed me and tried to sell you to me as Marilyn’s killer. Thinking I would do something rash, like break into your house and put a bullet in your brain.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I do kid around. But not this time. They thought they could play me. Manipulate me into taking you out. Play me a phony tape and watch me dance. Chances are, I would have wound up either dead or arrested for your murder. Maybe Hamilton is sitting out there in an unmarked car, waiting for a gunshot. Anyway, in somebody’s eyes, you would make a good corpse and I would make a better patsy.”
He thought about that. “What can I do?”
“I would write everything down or record it, essentially a full confession, and let everyone know… start with Hamilton… that should you have a fatal accident, that information will go public. Public in the way they thought Marilyn was going to.”
Now his smile bore no disgust. “That is good advice, Mr. Heller. You may not be as ‘crazy’ as you seem.”
“First, hearing that from a psychiatrist is kind of a relief. Second, I got out of the Marines on a Section Eight, so don’t be too sure.” I stood, tucked the nine-mil in my waistband, zipped the jacket over it. “You mind if I go out the front door?”
“Please.”
“Sorry for the intrusion, Doc.”
I was halfway out the den when he said, “There is no way in my lifetime, Mr. Heller, that I can ever make up for this-for aiding the very people who likely took that sweet child’s life…”
“You’re right. Probably isn’t.”
“I don’t really know if I will ever get over it, completely. And I’ll always wonder if there was some way I might have saved her.”
I shrugged. “You might try therapy.”
And left him there.
CHAPTER 23
At Flo’s Roxbury manse, I learned just how hard and fast my little Brenda Starr could work. For all the pampering cocktail parties and press junkets, she proved as hard-boiled a newswoman as Rosalind Russell pretended to be in His Girl Friday.
In a home office as messy as she was well-groomed, Flo Kilgore sat in a T-shirt and rolled-up jeans and no shoes, fingers flying at her Smith-Corona, machine-gunning keys, answering each ding with a forceful carriage return. The converted bedroom was filled with filing cabinets, research books, folders of clippings, and haphazardly stacked steno pads, though she never seemed to have any trouble finding in a flash whatever she needed.
I was chiefly a bystander, or sitter, plopped in a comfy chair between a filing cabinet and a worktable, finishing the last couple hundred pages of The Carpetbaggers. My God, did anybody really have this much sex?
Anyway, my presence was needed for the questions and clarifications she would on occasion toss over her shoulder, her fingers frozen over the keys, poised to attack once I had provided whatever tidbit she required.
We started (if I may generously include myself as part of the process) around 10:00 A.M., after her cook fed us corned-beef hash and buttermilk pancakes, and she had a draft of the story by 1:00 P.M.
She handed it to me, saying, “Remember, we don’t have to solve the mystery. Just raise legitimate questions, and throw light on the dark areas.”
That she had.
Tough but fair, with plenty of confidential sources but a good number going on the record (myself included), the in-depth article made no bones about personal relationships between Marilyn Monroe and both John and Robert Kennedy, and established clearly that RFK had been at MM’s house the afternoon before she died.
The scientific impossibility of an accidental drug overdose by Marilyn, and the probability of a “hot shot” injection having killed her (despite the deputy coroner’s search for injection marks), was stunningly well argued. The presence of the studio, police, and likely government cleanup crews manipulating the scene and even staging the suicide break-in, all during the early morning hours before the death was officially called in, was firmly established.
