“I’d hoped by Monday there’d be a story in the papers,” I said, “that would’ve meant nobody had to lay low on this thing anymore.”
With a glum nod, he said, “Yeah-everything out in the open, so what’s to hide.”
“Right. But I heard today that that story got spiked. The administration is putting the lid on, and everybody’s rolling over. But that may be okay.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, it’s the next best thing. Either everything’s public, or everything’s hidden. In either case, you should be able to come out of hiding. That is, if you have any kind of insurance at all.”
“What kind of insurance?”
“You’ve got tapes. Intel may have taken the key ones, from that night, but the rest are in a lockbox, right?”
“… Right.”
I shrugged. “Make it known they’ll stay put unless somebody tries to do something bad to you. It’s the oldest dodge in the book, but it still works. What the kids call an oldie but a goodie.”
He was nodding. “Yeah, that had occurred to me.”
“Anyway, I figure you really do have the tapes from that night. Possibly somewhere right here, unless you took the time to put ’em in a bus station locker or something, before you came around to get me out of bed, the night Marilyn died. Morning, I mean.”
His forehead was deeply creased. “Is that some kind of offhanded accusation?”
“Not that offhand. You may have handed the tapes off to a client, but as last-moment as this all was, I doubt that. If so, you had enough machines rolling to keep backups.”
“What the hell are-”
“Roger, I talked to Captain Hamilton. He’s generally not forthcoming to me, but reading between the lines- hell, even reading what was on the lines-he didn’t have those tapes. Fact, he wanted to know how to get in touch with you. Of course, I didn’t rat you out.”
His face had gone blank, though his eyes looked tired. He began blinking too much. But he didn’t play games.
“How long have you known?” he asked.
“I suspected from the start. I’ve known for… hell, I don’t know, probably since I got the time line down. Two things, Roger-when you claim to have waltzed in through the front door, and into Marilyn’s bedroom, where you supposedly removed the wiretap gizmos? By that time, that place was crawling with every intel copper and fed and Fox security goon in town.”
He just shrugged a little. “Happens, when you have to get your story together early in the game.” He sipped his beer-a Schlitz.
I liked Schlitz, which is why we stocked the safe house fridge with them. So I sipped mine, too. The husky whisper of the surf provided a lulling backdrop.
Then I said, “The other thing I learned from the time line-which I grant you is a little vague, because everybody’s story seems to float around-is that really only one person had the perfect opportunity, somewhere between nine and ten o’clock, to slip in the front door and kill Marilyn.”
“I didn’t do that,” he said simply.
“No you didn’t. What you did actually was easier than going in the front door, though you may have gone in that way after you took care of Marilyn. Because at some point you did remove the bugging devices. Or, possibly, you were called in, and came back as part of the tag team cleanup crews that searched that place and stage- managed that death scene and did everything but wax the new kitchen floor.”
He grinned. Actually grinned.
“Lawford called me,” he admitted with a gruff laugh. “I was back home already and he fucking called me. Wanted me to get over there and get the bugs out. He’d cleared it with Hamilton. So I did.”
“Back home, you mean,” I said, “after finishing your first job at Fifth Helena. If you were in the van, supervising the surveillance taping, how did you get the call?”
Pryor shrugged. “I have a car phone. Like Bogie in Sabrina. You know me, Nate. I have all the toys. You gonna ask who made the call?”
He wasn’t even looking at the. 38 resting on the Formica top. It was like the weapon was a centerpiece or a forgotten half-eaten sandwich.
“We’ll get to that,” I said. “Anyway, Marilyn wasn’t in her bedroom. She’d gone out to the guesthouse, wanting to get away from her own phone tap, and the prying ears of Mrs. Murray. Did you see a light on? How did you know that’s where she was?”
“Oh, that guest cottage was wired for sound, too. She didn’t know it, of course. I didn’t tell you the full extent of what I installed-some of it was hardwired. I was well paid, Nate. Very well paid.”
“And by multiple clients. Got to hand it to you. You have always been one savvy businessman. Hope the Chamber of Commerce knows about your initiative. Anyway, Marilyn had taken either chloral hydrate or more Nembutal than she’d recently been taking-she’d had a bad day, and wanted to knock herself out. Not kill herself. And she had a pretty fine pharmaceutical sense, although clean as she was, she might have overestimated what she could handle. In any case, nothing fatal.”
He folded his hands on the table. About a foot from the gun. The continuing pulse of surf brushing the beach created an air of timeless unreality, making our conversation seem oddly abstract.
“Still,” I said, “she’d taken enough junk to pass out on the phone, in the middle of a conversation, and spook somebody. Enough for her to be dead to the world-but not dead -when you came in and gave her that hot shot.”
“Now I’m a medic.”
“No, you’re a guy with diabetes who knows his way around a needle.”
“And just happened to have a hypo full of Nembutal handy.”
“Not just happened to-you’d had that handy for weeks, Roger, maybe months. One or more of your employers knew that at some point they might have to have this problem dealt with… or possibly take an opportunity that presented itself, like a nonfatal overdose that could be turned into a fatal one.”
A laugh from deep in his belly got caught behind his lips. Then he said, “Now you have me riding around in my van with a needle of poison in my pocket.”
“Not riding around. Parked, mostly, near Marilyn’s. And anyway, you’re capable of riding around with a needle full of poison, right, Roger? Like that needle of nicotine you tried to stick in me?”
He didn’t argue. He knew me too well. He just sat there with his young-looking-for-forty face turning older by the second, his eyes hooded and rather moist. I hoped he wouldn’t cry. I hate it when they cry.
Or anyway I hate it when they cry and I’m still telling them the story.
I went on with my once-upon-a-time: “If I’d had any doubt, which I didn’t, the capper came this morning, when Thad Brown called me to let me know that noise suppressor came from a guy in Culver City, who specializes in firearms gadgetry. The name meant nothing to Thad, in regard to this case anyway, but I knew it was a pal of yours, a guy you get your custom weapons stuff from.”
He was shaking his head, but not denying anything. “I didn’t like having to do that, Nate. You been decent to me.”
“Yet you got over it. See, Roger, the needles and the poison? That’s why I don’t need to get you to tell me who had you do this thing. I’m fairly sure I know.”
“That so.”
“Mmm-hmmm. The hypo is highly reminiscent of the Cuban follies the mob and the CIA have been staging- not with a lot of success, prior to this, I grant you. They have this very special doctor named Gottlieb-and I wish to hell I didn’t know his name-who ought to be played by Karloff, twenty years ago. He’s the mad doc who builds assassination kits for Uncle Sam. He can whip up a poison or lethal virus faster than your mama can scramble you an egg. So my guess is that the hypo full of Nembutal cocktail came from the CIA. But not the order to remove her. That came from Chicago. Or maybe their local rep-Rosselli?”
He said nothing.
“Here’s the thing, Roger. I can’t turn you in, because nobody seems to want to arrest anybody in this particular murder case. And if they did, I couldn’t turn you in anyway, because you were working for me in this
