Bye Bye, Baby Page 19

  Both the Herald and the Times had put out EXTRA! editions, first time since the Bel Air fire last year. The Times headline said it all, in eighty-six-point type: MARILYN, DEAD. I had to give them points for style—somehow that comma provided punch and poignance, separating MM from death, making her bigger than mere mortality.

  Viewing all this from behind the comfort of my Ray-Bans, I’d been walking the beach, up and down, in a tan Ban-Lon sport shirt by Puritan, white Levi’s, white Keds, and no socks. For a guy almost three times as old as most of these infants, I looked young as hell; I’d been out here enough this summer to display a nice tan, if I kept my clothes on. The DJ was playing “The Wanderer” now, and that was about right. Since maybe nine thirty, I’d wandered this stretch of beach, and even found enough appetite for a hot dog and Coke at a stand, half an hour ago.

  I’d returned to my bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel just long enough to decide against going back to sleep or having breakfast. I did call Fred Rubinski, who cursed me out for waking him up again but then stayed awake a while to say he’d helped Pryor out, and that the guy should be ensconced in our safe house by now. Fred also sat still for a rundown on what I’d seen and heard at 12305 Fifth Helena.

  Typically gruff, he asked, “Then you figure it was an accidental overdose?”

  “Yeah. But despite what I told ’em, I’m not with the coroner’s office. So we may want to wait for another opinion.”

  “Here’s an opinion—definitely a cover-up. Studio … or…?”

  “Don’t say it.”

  He didn’t. “You finished with this? Satisfied?”

  “Don’t know. We gotta get a handle on what’s going on, or we’ll be putting Roger Pryor up in that cottage till Christmas.”

  “Suppose so. These are dangerous waters, Nate.”

  I’d used those very words with Marilyn.

  The waters looked not dangerous at all right now, the blue-green tide rolling in lazily. Not good surfing weather. But a fine day to walk along the beach or play volleyball or do the Twist on the sand near a radio station kiosk that was maybe five hundred yards from the sprawling Lawford beach house.

  The curtains were drawn on the big old place. Even the picture windows onto the ocean were covered, shuttered, unusual for summer. No sign of life, no flurry of activity here. I knew the mistress of the house, our president’s sister, wasn’t home—she’d left Cal-Neva for Hyannis Port and was still out there, with various other family members, though Bobby wasn’t one of them. The paper said the attorney general was in San Francisco—had a speech to give on Monday to some other lawyers.

  I walked up between houses where suddenly the Palisades Beach Road loomed, shockingly close to the beachfront properties. My Jag was parked up here, but I wasn’t going to retrieve it yet. I had a call to make.

  The bell and my knocking weren’t getting a result, but I kept it up, alternating, until the Lawfords’ Negro maid—in a tan uniform the color of my sport shirt—finally answered. She did not look happy.

  “We’re not receiving nobody today,” she said, and started to close the door.

  I inserted a Ked-shod foot, and the door caught it, making me long for Florsheims. I pushed my way in, and she stumbled back and had a frightened look, but I slipped off my Ray-Bans and calmed her, patting the air with a raised palm.

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m not a threat, and I’m not a reporter. I’ve been here before, remember? Or do we all look alike? Tell Mr. Lawford that Nate Heller is here to see him. Do it now.”

  But she recovered her dignity and held her ground. “No. Mr. Lawford isn’t seeing nobody today.”

  “Is he still in bed? I know where the bedroom is.”

  Her eyes and nostrils flared, and she said, “Mr. Lawford is up but isn’t, as I clearly stated, receiving nobody.”

  “Then I’ll just wait here till he does.” I leaned against the door behind me. “Let me know.”

  She had no idea how to deal with that, and—huffing a little bit, muttering under her breath—she finally went off. A good five minutes passed and I figured maybe she called the cops. There were certainly no Secret Service around. Then I heard footsteps and thought maybe Lawford himself was coming, but it was just her.

  “He’s in the den. Come with me.”

  “No, that’s okay. I know where it is.”

  The den featured big windows and a collection of comfortable chairs and couches and walls with built-in bookcases that were also home to some fancy hi-fi equipment. But no music was playing and the windows were covered, and Lawford—in a blue polo and white deck pants—was slouched in a dark brown leather overstuffed couch with his sandaled feet up on an equally padded ottoman. One small lamp was on, on a distant end table, and the room was damn near dark.

  I took a matching chair opposite him. To one side of the ottoman was a low-slung, mostly glass coffee table with Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Playboy magazines scattered, as well as a big glass pitcher of what might have been tomato juice but was probably equally vodka, a stalk of celery stuck in it. The coffee table was also home to a box of Kleenex, which had given birth to scattered wads of used tissues, some on the coffee table, others on the floor.

  Lawford’s berry-brown face looked terrible—deep grooves, flesh that seemed to have been frozen in the process of melting. His eyes were mostly red, half-hooded, and his graying hair was uncombed. Little dark splotches on the sport shirt indicated he had occasionally spilled a bit of Bloody Mary on himself. A glass of the red stuff was in one hand, threatening to pour itself onto the Oriental carpet.

  “Nathan,” he said, and he smiled, though it was among the sadder smiles I’ve witnessed. “Glad to see you, old boy.”

  He got more British when he was sloshed.

  He pitched forward and stuck out a hand and I shook it. To say it was a limp-fish shake would be to insult a limp fish. Then he flopped back.

  “So kind of you to come. So kind.…” He sipped the drink. “Would you like one? There are glasses over there, or Erma Lee can fetch you something else…?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “She’s dead, Nate. That poor girl’s dead. And it’s all my fault. All my fault.…”

  Then he began to cry. To sob. Spilled some drink on himself but managed to put the glass on the coffee table and then just rolled up in a ball and bawled, right there on the couch. It went on for several minutes. I didn’t comfort him.

  When he seemed to have it out of his system, I said, “Was it?”

  “… What?” He righted himself. Looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. Tears were all over his face, and snot, too. I pushed the box of Kleenex toward him. So I guess maybe I did comfort him.

  “Was it your fault, Peter? Is it your fault?

  His lower lip trembled as he frowned. He had wiped his face and nose clean, and added another little wadded-up ball to the floor. “You … you don’t blame me, do you, Nathan?”

  “I don’t blame anybody,” I said. Yet. “I don’t even blame Marilyn. I was at the house this morning, early this morning—saw them wheel her out.”

  He closed his eyes. Shuddered. “I’m glad Pat’s not here. She would be … I know she is taking this hard … but at least her family’s there … around her.”

  “I sat in on some of the police interviews, before the Intelligence Division came in and took over.”

  “Did they really? Hamilton and that bunch?”

  “Yeah. How drunk are you?”

  “I’m … all right. We can talk. I can tell you want to talk.”

  “Good.” I crossed my legs, got comfortable. “I heard Mickey Rudin say you were the one who initiated the phone calls that led to Marilyn being found. You’d invited her to a party, and you checked on her, and were … concerned?”

  He drew in a breath. Nodded. Then he straightened up, sat more erect, clearing his mind, apparently. Of course, part of that process included finishing his current Bloody Mary and pouring himself another.
/>
  “I … I may have been the last person to talk to her alive,” he said.

  I managed not to point out the unlikelihood of anyone talking to her dead.

  “What the hell happened last night, Peter?”

  He shrugged his eyebrows. “Saturday afternoon, I mentioned to Marilyn that I was planning an informal barbecue for about eight o’clock that evening, out on the lanai. You know, people are in and out of here all day, in swimsuits, going to the pool, and generally enjoying themselves. So I was having a few friends over. Eventually we just had Chinese delivered. As it turned out, I was, uh … a little too high to manage an actual barbecue.”

  “Where does Marilyn come in, Peter?”

  “I called her about seven, seven thirty … to see if she was coming. She said no … she was already in bed. She sounded terrible, very slurry. She almost seemed to be … slipping away.”

  “If she’d taken some chloral hydrate,” I said, “she would be.”

  “Yes, I know, but I sensed she was … I could feel her … the depression rolling in on her. Moving in. Like … like bad weather. Sometimes she couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I started really talking to her, almost shouting … sort of a verbal slap, to wake her up.”

  “Peter, if she’d had sleeping pills—”

  “You don’t understand. Some of what she was saying … I didn’t think she was saying good night, Nathan—I thought she was saying good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  He nodded, took a swig of Bloody Mary, and said, “‘Say good-bye to Pat,’ she told me. ‘Say good-bye to Jack, and say good-bye to yourself … because you’re a nice guy.’”

  That last seemed like wishful thinking to me. She hadn’t thought Lawford was a very nice guy at Cal-Neva, after he and his wife sat her down for a good talking-to. I’d say she hated him then. And that was just days ago.…

  “I had a party under way,” he was saying. “I do try to be a good host, and I didn’t want to bother any of them with it.”

  “Who was there?”

  “The Naars … a couple we’ve known for years; Joe’s a TV producer. Bullets Durgom, the agent. My agent, Milt Ebbins, was supposed to come but begged off. Small group. Anyway, fifteen minutes, half an hour later, I was just not able to shake the feeling something was wrong … so I called Marilyn again, or tried to. I got a busy signal.”

  “How many numbers did you have of hers?”

  “Just the one.”

  He may not have had the personal line. He may have been calling the phone in the fitting room, not the one with her in the bedroom.

  Lawford was saying, “I called the operator, said I was concerned about a sick person at this number, and could she see if anyone was speaking on the line. No one was. The phone was either off the hook or out of order.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Well, I tended to my party, of course … but I was still bothered. Still worried.”

  But apparently not enough to drive over there. Marilyn lived mere minutes away.

  He dealt with that next: “I called Milt, my agent, and told him about the phone call, and not being able to reach her after that, and said I just had to go over there, and check on her. Milt told me absolutely not. He forbade me go. He said, ‘For Christ’s sake, man, you’re the president’s brother-in-law. If something has happened, how would it look?’ Obviously, he had a point.”

  “… And that was it?”

  “That was it, Nathan. My understanding is that Milt called Mickey Rudin, who checked up on Marilyn. I believe it took a while, because Mickey was out, and the call came into his answering service … but eventually he got ahold of that housekeeper, who said she checked on Marilyn and that Marilyn was fine.”

  “Do you know the time frame of any of those calls?”

  “No. Only of the calls I made, and I am somewhat vague there, as well. I mean, after all—I had no idea that there would be importance to any of this.”

  “Come on, Peter. You say you thought Marilyn was killing herself.”

  “Threatening to kill herself. That was commonplace with her, you know that. Rudin himself called me, Nathan, and said, ‘Marilyn does this all the time.’ He said if there was any reason to be alarmed, he would know about it—because Mrs. Murray would have called his brother-in-law, Greenson.”

  Lawford, apparently finished with his story—and it sounded like a story to me, an alibi—sat back and let out a chestful of air. He suddenly looked smaller. And older.

  “You’ve been talking pretty freely,” I said.

  “Well, yes. Why would I hide anything from you, Nathan? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  That was overstating it, but this was no time to go into that.

  “Peter, what I’m asking is— How freely can we talk in this room?”

  His eyes widened—my God they were red, like Christopher Lee in Horror of Dracula. Then he smiled for the second time since my arrival.

  “Oh, the entire house is quite secure, old boy. Thanks to your tip, we had the place, uh, I believe the term is ‘swept’—and we do so once a week now.”

  “Well, that’s swell. Now let’s talk about Bobby.”

  Despite the tan, he went ashen. “What does Bobby have to—”

  I raised a hand. “You need to not to lie to me. I have no desire to embarrass my friend Bobby or his brother. I am willing to be discreet. But I won’t be lied to, and I won’t be used. Any questions?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’d better refill your glass. You’re going to need it.”

  He did, immediately bringing the bright red liquid back up to his lips.

  I said, “I know Bobby was at Marilyn’s yesterday afternoon.”

  “Bobby was in San Francisco!” he blurted.

  “No fucking lies, Peter.”

  “It’s not a lie, it’s—”

  “It’s a lie of omission. He’s been in San Francisco since Friday afternoon. I read the papers. I have access to television. He’s there now. But he flew down here on Saturday. Secretly, but he flew. I am guessing that Marilyn, knowing Bob was going to be in California, pressed for that face-to-face meeting she’d been wanting.”

  Lawford raised an eyebrow. “She was calling around for him. She … she called Hyannis Port. Talked to Pat, who did not give Marilyn the number of the Bates ranch, where he and the family were staying, but did tell her that Bobby would be at the St. Francis Hotel, off and on, through Tuesday. He has a speech to give there tomorrow night.”

  “So Marilyn was still making waves.”

  He nodded glumly. “I took Bob over to Fifth Helena in the afternoon, three or so. I didn’t hear much of what was said. She handed me a glass of champagne and I just went out to the pool and waited. I did go in when things got heated, and tried my best to settle them down. I think we’d all, Marilyn included, thought this meeting could once and for all settle things. Cool it all down. But it went badly. They yelled at each other. A terrible mistake. Bob flew right back to San Francisco.”

  “How did he manage that, without attracting attention?”

  “Helicopter. Flew into Fox and out again.”

  Fox again. He was developing his Enemy Within picture there, and had plenty of support, even after the Zanuck coup.

  “That sounds like the truth,” I said, knowing it matched up with what Pryor had reported hearing.

  “You can see how important it is,” Lawford said, “keeping Bobby out of this. If it were known he saw Marilyn, the afternoon of her death…” He shivered. “… The ramifications are unimaginable.”

  “Not if you can imagine the end of the Kennedys in politics. What do you know about Hamilton’s role in this?”

  “James Hamilton? The policeman?”

  Calling James Hamilton “the policeman” was like saying Marilyn Monroe “the actress.” No one short of Chief Parker himself wielded Hamilton’s kind of power and influence. The intel commander knew where the bodies were buried—sometimes, becaus
e he’d buried them.

  “I told you Hamilton took over the investigation at Marilyn’s,” I said. “And he goes way back with Bobby, to racket-busting days. Is intel looking after Bobby’s interests in this?”

  I didn’t feel Lawford needed to know about Roger Pryor and the tapes that had been seized by Hamilton’s boys.

  “Nathan, I’m afraid you have me out of my depth.…”

  “Chief Parker is looking for J. Edgar’s job, and Hamilton is his Siamese twin. He’s also the guy in charge of security for Jack or Bobby, when either brother comes to town. What do you know, Peter?”

  “Well, I don’t know the answer to that question. I truly don’t.” He swallowed, looked around nervously as if not sure his pronouncement of no bugs had been correct. Eyes narrow, he pushed up from the couch and somehow managed to get on his feet. “You wait here, Nathan—you wait here.”

  I had no clue what this was about. I got up and went over to a window and pulled back the curtain enough to watch little Marilyns and little Lizs run and laugh and bobble prettily along the white beach.

  Finally Peter came in with a white phone in his hands. He plugged it in somewhere and dragged it over to me and set the base on the coffee table and handed me the receiver. He gave me a raised-eyebrow look that said, Take it.

  “This is Nate Heller.”

  The voice accompanied by long-distance crackle was distinctive: “Nathan—Bob. Peter told me about your concerns. I, uh … we are getting some support from the LAPD Intelligence Division, yes. Nothing extralegal, mind you. Just … support.”

  “Bob, the detective that Hamilton replaced was a good man. I’d already talked to him about Marilyn.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. I had him pretty well convinced that the oddness of the scene—and it was odd, Bob—had to do with Twentieth Century–Fox performing cleanup work. That kind of thing has gone on since the beginning of Hollywood.”

  “So I understand. I feel terrible about this.”