The Empty Glass (16 page)

42.

W
hat are you doing?” I asked, climbing into the side.

“Rescuing you,” Jo said.

“This isn’t your car.”

“It’s my friend’s.”

“It’s a
cop
car.”

“I have friends in high places,” she said as she drove south, looking up. “Did you hear that?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“You know how they always say that gunshots sound like fireworks?”

I nodded.

“That wasn’t fireworks,” she said.

43.

I
hear the sirens all night. It’s clear that things aren’t going well. The papers are filled with doomsday news. Stocks are falling, grocery stores emptied out. People are making “lead” hats out of foil and covering their windows with duct tape. Schools have issued defense pamphlets in case of “enemy attack.” It’s everything but the moon filled with blood and the woman with
WISDOM
tattooed on her forehead. You can see things in the clouds, too, like the end of the world.

That’s what happened in Cuba: One scenario, at least, in the sad series of scenarios that began with Ian Fleming. You know how they say that life imitates art? The truth is that life imitates spy stories.

One night at a fancy Georgetown dinner party in the spring of 1960, the baked Alaska had just been served when Senator John F. Kennedy, the host, leaned back and looked at his guest of honor, the James Bond author, with a cigar in his mouth. “If you had to eliminate Castro,” Kennedy asked, “how would you do it?”

Well, Fleming thought this was a wonderful joke, a sort of party game and, half under the influence of some fine wine or another, he gave his James Bond answers:

Set off an elaborate fireworks display to terrify the Cubans into thinking the Second Coming was at hand.

Give Castro an exploding cigar.

Put an explosive into a Caribbean mollusk near where Castro scuba dives.

Or slip him a pill.

And now Jo was asking, “Ben, what happened back there?” I told her everything. Then I looked up to see that she was pulling into the Ambassador lot.

“Where are you going?”

“My apartment.”

“Why?”

“Jesus, all these questions. Why is the sky blue? Why did Fido have to die? Do you know the way to San Jose?”

“Take 1-5 North.”

“Now, let me ask
you
something,” she said. “Did you leave your hotel light on?”

“It’s not a hotel.”

“The light was on in your room just now. I saw it from the car.”

•   •   •

I
’d never been inside the Ambassador—not even for a drink at the Grove. Well, I didn’t have the money. Miss Monroe had begun her career here at a poolside modeling agency, and my friend Ed had once stayed in one of the Catalina bungalows. But now here I stood, hat in hand, in the lobby where the porters whisked valises on steel rollers to the banks of elevators filled with women in ermine and white dresses and long stockings, and the next thing I knew I was rising with Jo to her room overlooking the fake beach and the pool they called the Crystal Plunge on the third floor of the southern wing.

“Here.” She opened the door and we stepped into a sitting area filled with faux Empire furniture and cream walls with stripes that Jo called
puce
, a fancy word for what happens when pink is left out in the sun for too long. An ivory Princess phone sat on a table under a mirror framed by a train of grasping cupids who had gotten tangled up in sheets but didn’t seem troubled about it.

“Mabel, draw a bath, will you?” Jo called to an unseen maid, kicking her high heels off in the entryway and dropping her keys into a ceramic dish under the mirror.

“Yes, ma’am.” The colored maid appeared, wearing a white apron around a black dress that whispered as she moved into the bathroom.

“Make yourself at home,” Jo said. “Just promise to keep everything up to code.”

“What code?”

“The Production Code. I’ll sleep with my feet on the floor.”

“You’re inviting me to sleep over?”

“
Over
is the operative word,” she said. “Not
with
. So promise: No excessive or lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures or gestures, or any scenes that stimulate the lower or baser element.”

“I promise.”

“Complete nudity is not permitted. Including nudity in silhouette.”

“I’ll keep my pants on.”

“No dancing that emphasizes indecent movements.”

“I don’t dance.”

“Good.”

Jo pulled her earrings off, one by one, making that little cupping gesture with the tilting head that was only one of the mysterious movements that women had collectively mastered.

She dropped her earrings in the bowl, then checked her watch. “Jesus, look at the time. I have to hurry.”

“You’re going—?”

“Out.”

“With?”

“These questions! Delilah. She’s my best friend. Oh, I know it’s annoying, but she’s having such trouble, and what kind of a friend would I be if I let her sob alone in her Miller all night?”

“She drinks Miller?”

“It’s the Champagne of Beers.”

“Yeah, but Champagne is the Champagne of Champagne.”

“Well, she’s a dirty boozy girl.” She smiled. “Like me. Unzip me? There’s a doll.”

“Undressing scenes should be avoided,” I said as the zipper whispered delicately through silk.

“Ah, but here’s where we try to get around the censors!” she said as her dress crumbled to the floor.

“Miss Carnahan?” The maid stood at the bathroom door. “Your bath is ready.”

The maid took me into what she called the “boo-door,” as if it were a room for ghosts. It was a fancy name for “bedroom.” There were fancy names for everything here. At the far end, a window overlooked the lawn. The window had puce lace curtains that dragged like bridal trains on the checkerboard floor. The mirrored dresser was opposite the bed.

“Make yourself at home,” she said.

So I did.

I started opening the drawers. I went through the panties and bras and silk negligees in her dresser. I went through the bedside drawer and the hat boxes on the shelf above the closet.

I finally found the diary pages under the bed.

44.

Y
ou had to put the pieces together. I’ve said this already, Doc. Miss Monroe’s writing wasn’t always legible. But it seemed clear, as I’ve noted, that Sinatra was performing in the Celebrity Showroom at Cal-Neva Lodge on the weekend of July 28 and 29. He’d invited Marilyn to come, she wrote, “just for kicks.”

But it was more than that. They called Cal-Neva “Heaven in the High Sierras,” but that weekend it was pure hell. There were a lot of pills, and at some point Marilyn woke in her room with “James,” she wrote. “I was naked but I never wanted this. I kept calling out for Frank but it wasn’t till morning that I saw him standing there and he said if I said anything he’d bring Billy Woodfield the pictures and ‘What pictures?’ I asked. Well, the ones that he had taken.

“So I write this now to anyone who might find it and I had no choice. I couldn’t say anything. They said, ‘Leave the General alone’ but I won’t say ‘the General’ anymore I’m not protecting him anymore. His name is [redacted].”

After that, the only legible thing left was a fragment of Marilyn’s final entry—written the day before she died:

August 4, 2:01 p.m.

All my hair things in the bag that I told you about, the one that I kept in the bathroom: They’re gone. I couldn’t find them. I told Pat about this, and she said not to worry.

“Don’t get so upset,” she said.

“Easy for you to say,” I said. You who don’t have to wake every morning at 5 for a call for a movie that—

What are you doing?” Jo asked. She was walking from the bathroom, hair done up in one of those elaborate towel turbans that only women know how to make. It looked like a pink hair dryer. Her silk bathrobe was white and monogrammed with her initials:
JHC
.

I held the pages up. “What were these doing under your bed?”

“Ben—”

“Did you take them from the bar?”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Oh? Then how did you end up in a hotel room with Johnny Roselli?”

I read aloud from the pages: “‘The light was blue and yellow and the sun was high and everyone was gone and I could hardly raise my head everything too heavy including my fingers. The world was too much everything was too much and when I felt I could at least say a few words I called the operator. Billy Woodfield.’”

I looked up at Jo. “What does this mean?”

“What do you get when you cross an elephant—?”

“Who’s Billy Woodfield?”

“Do I look like Nosferatu to you?”

“You mean Nostradamus.”

“Whatever.”

“Ma’am.”

We both looked up.

It was the maid. “Miss Delilah on the phone, ma’am.”

“One moment, Mabel. Hold here for a second?”

I watched her ass swing as she left the room.

I walked to the hall and tried to hear what she was saying. “No. It’s . . . you what? Jesus, I’ll be right over. My God, are you . . . ? Please. I’ll . . . No. I’ll . . . I can’t talk now: He’s here.”

I ducked back into the room before she hung up. “Sorry, Ben,” she said when she returned. “Delilah’s waiting. At Pucini. And she’s mad.”

“Mad.”

“She thinks I’m having an affair.”

“Well, are you?”

“Not yet,” she said.

45.

T
he only Billy Woodfield listed in the White Pages was a “Wm Read Woodfield” at “12336 Rye Scty.” That was Studio City, off Ventura near the freeway. When I rang the bell, a big man answered wearing a wrinkled white shirt that was frayed around the collar. It ballooned around his belly like a sailcloth. He wore blocky black glasses. Gray hair feathered from both sides of his receding hairline.

“You the fella wants some pictures developed?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Say, that’s a swell shirt.” It was the shirt that Jo had given me, the one with the odd monogram. He fingered it with his right hand. “Where’d you get it?”

“Was a gift.”

“Come in.”

He led me inside his modest house. A golden retriever barked from its pen in the kitchen. We went down the hall to the office, which was also a darkroom. There was a solid desk behind which a clothesline of black-and-white 8 × 10s hung over a sink with a red light. Orange Kodak boxes were stacked on metal shelves. The room smelled of chemicals.

He gestured to the chair that sat across the desk from him. “Have a seat.”

I did.

“Gotta confess that I haven’t been doing much in the photo line lately.” He sat behind the desk. “Been working on a book.”

“Really? You’re a writer?”

He nodded. “About Caryl Chessman. But you don’t care about that.” He lit a Viceroy, handing the pack to me. “Smoke?”

“I only smoke Kents,” I said. “You have any Kents?”

“Viceroys.”

“Tar kills you.”

“Everything kills you.”

“Tar kills you quicker. You should smoke Kents.”

“I don’t like Kents.”

“So,” I said. “Caryl Chessman.”

“Sure.”

“Was he innocent?”

“No. What a bastard. All kinds of people are so interested in his ‘freedom.’ Norman Mailer. Ray Bradbury. Billy Fucking Graham. What about the ‘freedom’ he gave those girls he stopped with his red light?”

“Sure,” I said. “And Marilyn?”

“Who?”

“Marilyn Monroe.”

“What about her?”

“You knew her.”

His eyes narrowed. He adjusted his glasses. “Sure.”

“Can you tell me about her?”

“Why?”

“I’m from the coroner’s office.” I showed him my credentials. “I need to know.”

“Let me guess. The photo project you called me about? It doesn’t exist.”

“You guessed correctly.”

“You don’t need pictures developed.”

“You are right, sir.”

“Well, then we should do this properly. Like a drink?” he asked, pulling a half-empty (half-full) bottle of Crown Royal from the desk’s bottom drawer.

“Sure.”

“It’s good stuff,” he said. “Better than usual. I came into a bit of cash recently.” He deposited the bottle on the desk, removed two dirty highball glasses from the same drawer, and laid them on his papers. And poured: a shot for me, a shot for him.

“Marilyn Monroe was a fabricator.” He raised his glass. “Cheers. She lied. About everything. To herself, even. You know how they say that the goal of any real magician is to perform a trick that fools even himself?”

“No.”

“Well, she was a real magician. She was always pulling imaginary rabbits out of hats. She was always writing, then rewriting, her life. Until even
she
didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t.”

“So you’re saying that whatever’s in the diary is fake?”

“What diary?”

“The one that has your name in it.”

I took the pages from my pocket and showed him the description of what had happened, or what might have happened, at the Cal-Neva Lodge.

His face went slack. He drained his glass of Crown Royal, filled it again to the top, and drank half of it, coughing. His eyes watered. “That’s gibberish,” he said.

“Is it? Why is your name here?”

“It’s not my name.”

“It’s ‘Billy Woodfield.’”

“Could be anyone’s name.”

“There’s no other ‘Billy Woodfield’ in the Los Angeles phone book.”

“Maybe he’s unlisted.”

“Bullshit. It says here Sinatra threatened to bring Billy Woodfield the pictures. What pictures?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“I’ll go to the cops.”

“They won’t care, believe me.”

“Because they’re involved?”

“It’s more than that. It’s much more than that.”

“How much more?”

He didn’t answer.

“All right.” I picked up the pages and stood from the desk. “Thanks for the drink.”

I was all the way across his front lawn, reaching for the car door, when he called from the porch. “Buddy,” he said. “Hey—”

F
rank came by on Monday,” he said back in the office. “I did work for him before, photographing his jet from one of the Conners helicopters out there in Santa Monica. So he had a roll of film that he wanted developed. Said it was ‘high-level’ stuff. Said there were people involved who you don’t want to know were involved. And you don’t want to know their names and shouldn’t. Look, I’m not that kind of guy. I take pictures of movie stars. I write horror movies. I write
Death Valley Days
. You see ‘The Unshakable Man’?”

“No.”

“That was my episode. I don’t want to get involved in any dirty business.”

“But Frank gave you the film.”

“Yeah.”

“And gave you a lot of money to develop it.”

“Sure.”

“Hence the hooch.”

“You got it.”

“So what was on the film?”

He stood and walked past me to the door of his office, stepped out and looked around, then returned to the doorway, facing me, a shadow, his glass reflecting the light from above. “You know, Monroe annoyed me,” he said. “Called at three
A.M.
like she called anyone she trusted. Woke my wife. Pissed her off. But it wasn’t dirty business. She was just a friend. That’s why it was hard to see her like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way that she looked in these photos.”

•   •   •

T
he photos were taken in Chalet 52 of the Cal-Neva Lodge, he said, looking through his files. A gooseneck lamp illuminated a stack of folders meticulously labeled in his neat hand. He looked at me from across the desk. I took notes on what he said.

The notes are right here, Doctor. They’re part of the evidence in the box on your desk:

Item No. 3: A piece of notebook paper reading “Chalet 52” and “July 28.”

Now you ask what these words mean.

Chalet 52:

Cal-Neva isn’t visible from the road. It’s set back in the woods. Three cabins have the best views of Crystal Bay and the Sierra Nevadas. Bungalow 1 is reserved for Sinatra. The others are for “broads” and celebrity friends—Peter Lawford, Dean Martin. There are tunnels leading under these bungalows to the bar and the casino—a plus for Frank and his cronies. There is a trapdoor in the closet of Chalet 52, where Marilyn stayed on the night of July 28.

It was Sinatra’s idea to take her there for the weekend, Billy said: She’d been lying low ever since singing her breathless “Happy Birthday” to the president. She threw the first ball at the new Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine on June 1—her last public appearance. But that was it. That was all. Sinatra said he wanted to celebrate the renewal of her contract with Fox. She had been fired from
Something’s Got to Give
for being late. But she had powerful friends: Bobby Kennedy called Judge Rosenman, and Fox head Peter Levathes was told to reinstate and renegotiate the contract. So Sinatra flew her out on his private airplane,
Christina
: Plane N710E.

They landed in the Truckee Tahoe Airport.

July 28:

Dino performed that night in the Celebrity Showroom. He sang “That’s Amore” and “Memories Are Made of This.” He sang “Sway” and “Volare.” But Monroe was not at Sinatra’s table drinking her usual Dom Pérignon in her usual green Jean Louis dress and her usual high heels. She wasn’t wearing the emerald earrings Sinatra had given her. She wasn’t with her Mexican lover, José Bolaños.

She was locked in Chalet 52 high above the rocks over the bay, chasing the sleep that had always eluded her, curled up in the round bed with a bottle of Dom, hiding from the man she believed was still following her, the man she had seen peering through the windows.

She was sure (Billy said) she saw him walking past the window. She got up in the dark, took another Nembutal, and heard laughter through the woods. Music—Dino in his second set—coming from the lounge. Quarters clanking in the metal, tiny windows lighting up with cherries, cherries, cherries. Cocktail glasses clinking under big Nevada stars, laughter skimming over the black basin.

She opened the drapes, looked out the window and saw (she was certain) the imprint of a nose and lips on the glass. And there, too: writing.

One word on the window:

WHORE.

“Sinatra came by at three
A.M
., and she was upset,” Billy said. “That’s what he told me: ‘Upset.’ She had ‘seen something outside,’ she said, and was scared. She said, ‘You don’t believe me? Okay, look.’ So she pointed to the window, and Frank walked to the window that looked down to the lake. He stood there for a long while.”

“Did he see anything?” I asked.

“I didn’t ask. You can’t ask Frank anything. You only listen, so I listened as he told me that he went back to the round bed and told Marilyn nothing was there. She was panicked, though: She didn’t believe him. ‘You erased it,’ she said. ‘You wiped it off the window!’ She went bonkers then.”

“Why?”

“Because if he had erased the word
WHORE
from the dark glass, that meant it had been written from inside the room.”

She panicked, looking under the bed and opening the closet. But the room was small and nothing was there. “The tunnels!” she shouted, running to the closet. “He came in through the trapdoor!”

Sinatra dragged at his cigarette, knowing what he had to do.

The vial of chloral hydrate sat, half-empty, on her bedside table. He had another bottle in his pocket. They were coming with more. “So,” Billy said, “he told Marilyn to have another drink, and then there was a knock at the door. Sinatra said it was room service.”

But it wasn’t room service.

It was a man.