The Empty Glass (20 page)

58.

W
e drove out to Point Dume. I’d always thought it was spelled “Doom.” That day it might as well have been. It was nice in Jo’s DeSoto with the top down, the wind in her hair and kerchief, her sunglasses on though it was overcast. The city vanished as we followed the PCH, past shuttered nightclubs along the cliffs and the crashing waves that I could hear but only vaguely saw in the haze that led out to the horizon.

“Where are we going?”

“A place I know. In Malibu.”

“Why?”

“You have to ask? They’re after you.”

It started to rain. She put the top up. I turned the radio dial until I found a working station.

“Not Ricky Nelson,” she said.

“I
like
Ricky Nelson.”

“Something else.”

“You know the words to ‘Young World.’ I saw you singing them.”

She took a drag. The ash crackled. “Cigarette?”

“No thanks. I quit.”

“Since when?”

“This morning.”

“You liar.”

“Coming from you,” I said, “that’s rich. Don’t you think you have a lot of explaining to do?”

“How much time do you have?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question.”

I don’t remember everything she said, Doctor, but I remember that she said she’d met Captain James Hamilton in 1959 while following a lead:
Dragnet
’s Jack Webb had asked LAPD’s Captain Parker to use his bug man, Phelps, to spy on Webb’s former wife, Julie London.

Captain Hamilton took Jo to drinks at the Villa Capri to convince her to lay off Webb, the LAPD’s PR puppy. Over martinis and cigars, in exchange for keeping quiet in her column about Webb, he gave her scandal-sheet stuff about Liberace’s trouser-chasing and Robert Mitchum’s pot-smoking as his hand slipped under her skirt, a brush meant not for her skin but for his. Still, she twitched in a way that indicated it was not altogether unwelcome.

It wasn’t unwelcome for years.

“He kept saying he would leave his wife but never did,” she said. “They never do. I wasn’t sure I wanted it anyway. What we had was special—it wasn’t mundane. No one took the garbage out. No one nagged about feeding the cats.”

“You don’t
have
cats.”

“That’s not the point. He called it The Iron Rules of Love: We would never have birthdays or anniversaries; we could never celebrate, but so? We didn’t have the boring, nagging details and chores that collect around love like barnacles, and make it sink.”

“Some metaphor.”

“Take it or leave it. And things were good. Until.”

“What.”

“He wanted me to follow you. He threatened me. But everything ended last night.”

His wife was out of town, she said. His son was sleeping in the bedroom. He beat Jo up and left her on the bedroom floor. In the middle of the night, she walked down the hall to the living room where the captain sat, an empty glass in hand, passed out on the couch.

Beside him lay the Monroe diary.

“The diary?” I said.

“I have it, Ben.”

59.

T
he water had left a green circle around the drain in the bathroom of the Malibu motel. The pipes shrieked when you turned the faucets on. A torn piece of suicide note or love letter floated on the surface of the water that still ran in the toilet. I removed the cover and pulled the chain and stopped the water running, but behind the shower curtain it still dripped.

We were in the bathroom. She dropped her trench coat, and I saw for the first time the ruined dress with handprints, purple bruises, and the spots of brown that might have been blood on her skin.

“Jesus,” I said.

“He was careful not to hit the parts that you can see. That was the important thing. He hit so hard the bottle broke. The bottom ended up on the mantel top,” she said, slipping from her clothes.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t.” She felt the front of my trousers with the flat of her right hand.

Pearl earrings fell. High heels clattered, too, and torn stockings slipped like Slinkys. The buckled door wouldn’t lock, but we shut it. She backed against it, breasts covered with the imprints of my lips on account of the lipstick she had transferred to my face.

I dropped my trousers to my ankles and pushed in. Her body adjusted, face turned to one side, heart beating in a blue elongated pulse I could see up the side of her neck.

She quoted Lana Turner: “You’re my man,” she said.

Afterward, we lay side by side on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. We drank Canadian Club from tiny bottles. There were lots of tiny bottles. We’d lit candles, too—some kind of sandalwood that mingled with the smell of surf.

“Let me see the diary,” I said.

“Not so fast, Ben.”

“That’s not what you said twenty minutes ago.”

“I didn’t
need
to say it twenty minutes ago.” I turned my back against her breasts. She folded her arms around my chest. “Let’s begin with what we know,” she whispered. “What do we know about her last day alive?”

“She seemed happy,” I said. “Pat Newcomb spent the night in the Telephone Room. Marilyn spent a sleepless night in her own bedroom, on the phone. In the morning, Marilyn asked for oxygen, the Hollywood cure for a hangover. There wasn’t any, so she drank grapefruit juice. She shared it with Newcomb. At some point, she and Pat got into an argument.”

“What was the argument about?”

“The fact that Pat had slept all night but Marilyn had not.”

“Sure, but why would a woman who never slept begrudge her best friend sleep? A friend she’d invited over? A guest. Did she expect that Newcomb would spend the night awake with her, watching her talk on the phone and pop pills?”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Because it didn’t happen,” Jo said. “The argument wasn’t about sleep.”

“What was it about then?”

She stood up and opened her purse.

60.

I
’ve said it before. I’ll say it again:

The diary was bound in leather with yellow pages on which blue handwriting had broken all the college rules. The word
MEMORIES
was embossed on the cover in the same gold that edged the paper. It was a dime-a-dozen diary—available at any drugstore. But now I knew that it could bring down the government. Now I knew that Marilyn had died because of it, and that others would die because of it. It had jeopardized my own life and that of my family. So you ask again: If I had known, would I have just walked away? Let it destroy the girl alone instead of both of us?

I still can’t answer that.

I read again the pages I had torn from it:

August 4, 2:01 p.m.

All my hair things in the bag 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—

That was where it ended. I put this fragment, like a puzzle piece, back inside
The Book of Secrets,
and read:

—no one wants to see on the lot where Whitey is waiting and the whole crew is waiting for me to be beautiful and you don’t understand. You just couldn’t.

“Mrs. Murray!” But I didn’t need to shout since she was there like she came from the shadows like she was watching anyway and always watching. “Yes, Marilyn.”

“Have you seen the bag of hair things?”

“No, Marilyn.”

Things are going missing all the time now every morning something new has disappeared.

The doorbell rang then. Pat was out by the pool she was still mad. “You can’t hold a press conference,” she said.

“But sure I can. I’m going to blow this whole thing wide open.”

“Marilyn, it’s the craziest thing—”

The knock came at the door.

“The General is here,” Mrs. Murray said. “With Mr. Lawford.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

Well it didn’t seem possible he was in San Francisco he never showed up out of nowhere he always called.

“Well, I’m not ready. I don’t have my hair things.”

“Shall I tell him to go away?”

“Yes.”

Diary I went into the bedroom and closed the door. Well, I hadn’t slept and everything was over and they told me it was over and the only ones who love me are the guys who sit in the balcony and jerk off. Then there are all those clicks and sounds like someone else on the line once I heard a sort of voice I wonder if [redacted]

I looked at the bottle of pills on the table near the bed and tried to remember how many were there last night I counted them now. Fourteen. I had 14 pills. I looked for the napkin that I’d written notes on near the bed. On the napkin was the number 27 and the name [redacted].

[redacted] got them—

The knock on the door.

“Marilyn?” Mrs. Murray. “He’s outside.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

“He knows you’re here.”

“Tell him I’m sleeping.”

I heard shouting.

“He won’t believe you. He’s upset. You never sleep. He needs to see you.”

“Well, then, tell him to wait. Tell him—”

Here there were two paragraphs of increasingly illegible writing; I could make out only a few words, like “transmitter” and “cordon,” until, at the very end of the diary, it became clear again:

A knocking at the door then Mrs. Murray’s voice and other voices Bobby and then Peter. I want to fall asleep again want to crawl in bed and disappear. It might be kind of nice to be finished. Now there is another knock and this one at the bedroom.

I wish you would all just leave me alone.

•   •   •

I
closed the diary for the last time and said, “That still doesn’t answer the question.”

“What question?’

“What was the argument about?”

“You tell
me
, Mr. Mortician.”

“I’m not a mortician. I’m a deputy coroner.”

“Can’t we talk about something less grim?”

“Like what?”

“Us.”

“Is that really less grim?”

And in the Long, Deep Sigh Department . . .

She kept quoting Lana Turner.

We finally fell asleep after 2
A.M
., the breeze coming over the balcony.

Toward dawn, I woke to find that she was no longer beside me. She was always getting up to smoke. I thought I heard music from a transistor down the beach. There were fires set by surfers on the shoreline.

I sat up in the heat beneath the sheets and saw Jo leaning, nude and smoking, against the balcony of reddish wood.

“You okay?” I asked. She didn’t hear. “Jo?”

She dropped the cigarette to the sand and climbed into bed, turning her back to me so that all I saw in the moonlight was the curve of her thighs.

I told her about Colony Records. I told her about
Amahl and the Night Visitors
. I told her about the tape.

“You think it got switched?” she asked.

“I guess we’ll find out in the morning.”

But in the morning, she was gone.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24

61.

I
t was hot. Thick green flies hummed among torn cocktail napkins and the bottles strewn about the balcony. The screen door was open. The radio was on. It was Sunday. I rubbed whatever was left of sleep from my eyes, sat up, and looked for Jo.

The bed was empty.

I ran out to the balcony and watched waves crashing on the beach I hadn’t seen the night before and looked down the cliff through the mist to the sand that ran unbroken, except for the rocks and the man with a stick and a dog, all the way to the shore.

Gulls screamed and picked at strands of seaweed and burned driftwood. There was nothing on the horizon, no line but just those black waves disappearing into mist.

She wasn’t there.

The diary and tape were gone.

So was the Greyhound key.

A note on the bedside table read: “Let’s break this thing wide open! Love, Jo.”

At eight-thirty, I turned the bedside Wilco to
Annie Laurie Presents
. I heard cheerful chatter about James Mason, Laurence Olivier, and Wally Cox. “Seems Wally Cox is not only a great comedian but also a magician, if you’ve seen his latest soap commercial, dear ones,” she said. “Well, Wally throws a cup of detergent and dirty clothes into a top-loading washer, then presto pulls the clothes out nicely clean. Some trick, dear ones! Oh, but I kid you, Wally. See you Friday! Kisses.”

At first I thought that Jo had developed a cold or was upset or something. She had the Annie Laurie voice but it was different. I couldn’t place it. When the time came for the call-in questions, I called the number that she’d given and got a busy signal. They called this segment the “Round Robin,” and it was preceded by the sound effect of a bird chirping. Yeah, I know: stupid, but that’s show business.

I was getting the busy signal, but I kept calling until her producer answered:
“Annie Laurie Presents.”

“This is Ben Fitzgerald. I’m a friend of Jo’s.”

“Who?”

“Jo Carnahan.”

“So?”

“I need to talk to her. It’s important that you put me through.”

“I don’t think you know what’s going on, mister. . . .”

“Put me through.”

“What’s your question?”

“I need to talk to Jo.”

“And I need to know your question.”

So I told him.

Six minutes later, he flipped a switch and I was on:

“—morning, and welcome to
Annie Laurie Presents
. What’s your name?”

“Ben Fitzgerald.”

“Good morning, dear one. State your question.”

“What do you get,” I said, “when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”

“I beg your pardon?” Annie Laurie said. “Sir, please turn your radio off.”

I flipped the switch.

“I said, what do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”

“What does that have to do with—”

“You’re not Jo.”

“I’m Annie Laurie. And I’m not sure what this has to do with—”

“Marilyn Monroe was murdered,” I said. “The Kennedys were involved. So was Captain James Hamilton of the LAPD, and no one wants to know the truth. There was no water glass. She didn’t take the pills.”

I went on for a while. I went on for a
long
while—until I realized I was talking into a void. They had cut me off. “Hello?”

I hung up and turned the radio back on, Annie Laurie saying: “—on good authority that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall will be at the gala premiere, to be held next Friday at Grauman’s. A fine time will be had by all. And while we’re discussing—”

I called the Ambassador Hotel and asked to be connected to Jo’s room. The phone kept ringing, until—

Someone picked up.

I heard breathing, something rattling.

“Jo?”

Someone hung up.

“Jo.”