The banging at the bungalow door alternated with the doorbell’s ding until the racket had given up on trying to work itself into my dream and instead roused me from a deep, pleasant sleep.
Saturday had been a great day for me-I’d taken Sam to Grauman’s Chinese, where we got to watch Sophia Loren bend over and put her hands in cement (no bad angle on that) and took in the matinee of her latest movie, Boccaccio ’70, one of those arty foreign jobs that made little sense, but also had Anita Ekberg and Romy Schneider in it. The European landscape, with its rolling hills and inviting valleys, was lush enough to hold the interest of a teenager and his old man.
That evening I’d taken a starlet out, to take in Bobby Darin at the Cloister supper club on the Strip-I’d done a Chicago job for Darin, and was able to get my date backstage for an autograph and some harmless flirtation. She was an attractive redhead of twenty-three who made a point of not putting out on the first date. Fortunately this had been our third.
Anyway, she was long since back in her Studio City apartment-I loved it when they had their own car-and I was enjoying the big roomy double bed when that racket ensued.
Despite my good mood, I took time to get my nine-millimeter out of the suitcase. There was no real reason to suspect anything was amiss, and this wasn’t twenty or thirty years ago when unfriendly people with weapons occasionally dropped in on me in the middle of the night, or rather pre-dawn morning.
But I took it along just the same, padding out into the living room in my shorts, T-shirt, and bare feet. I cracked the door, looked past the night latch, catching my visitor poised with raised fist, about to deliver yet another knock.
“What the hell?” I said.
It was Roger Pryor, who I’d last seen in a “TV repair” van in Brentwood.
“Let me in, Nate,” he said, breathing hard. His breath was lousy; of course, so was mine. “For Chrissake, lemme in…”
I let him in, and closed the door behind him, reapplying the night latch.
He looked like hell-his thinning blonde hair uncombed, his eyes bloodshot, his bland, deeply creased boyish face reddish, his phony 24-HOUR ELECTRIC jumpsuit rumpled.
“What’s that for?” he blurted, pointing at the gun in my left hand.
“People don’t usually drop by at five in the morning,” I said. “You know what they call guys from Chicago who aren’t paranoid?”
“What?”
“Dead.” I motioned to the couch. “Can what it is wait till I pee and get my trousers on?”
He swallowed and nodded, then stumbled over to the couch and flopped, while I headed to the john, then back into the bedroom. I returned the gun to my suitcase, swapping it for a fresh polo and some slacks. I stayed barefoot.
When I joined him, pulling a chair around so I could sit facing him, Pryor had a sick look, the red replaced by fish-belly white. I thought he might paint the carpet.
“You okay?”
He swallowed. “It’s just the fuckin’ diabetes. Why don’t you age, Heller, like the rest of us?”
“Clean living. To what do I owe this honor?”
Another swallow, then an earnestness came into his face, and a little color. “This is a job I was working for you, remember-you aren’t my only client, but you’re in this. You are in this.”
“Roger, what the hell are you-”
“You invited yourself in!” His defensiveness crackled like electricity; maybe it was the jumpsuit. “ You tell me -when I told you who I was working for, the multiple clients? Did you keep that to yourself? Or did you run over to Lawford’s goddamn castle, and spill?”
Was that a guess?
With neither sarcasm nor rancor, I asked, “Are you sick? Do you need a doctor? Food? Drink? There’s twenty-four-hour room service here, and it’s not just a scam written on the side of van.” Well, some sarcasm in that last part.
He was tasting his mouth; he didn’t seem to like the flavor, yet he kept tasting. Still, he did not request a room-service alternative, merely stating flatly, “She’s dead.”
“Who is dead?” I asked.
Knowing.
He glanced all around, including up and down. “Is this place… safe?”
“You mean is some asshole bugging it? You tell me.”
“… It’s Marilyn.”
The sigh I let out took a while.
His eyes were as moist as they were red. “Looks like a drug overdose. There’s people all over that place. Cars. Ambulance. Christ knows.”
“But do the cops know?”
His eyes popped. “ Some know, all right. Jesus shit, man, I was asleep in the van. Shorthanded working a double shift.” The shaggy eyebrows went up. “Heard some very interesting stuff in the late afternoon. Very interesting. You want to hear?”
“Eventually. For now, skip ahead.”
“Okay. Early evening, I was monitoring, you know, in the headset, and it was just… normal shit. Dull. Nothing going on. Far as the phone went, couple of calls to Lawford, about some party over there she decided not to go to.”
“Go on.”
He shrugged, his eyes staring past me as he collected and ordered thoughts. “She talked to DiMaggio’s son for a while-kid had broke up with a girlfriend or something, and Marilyn said she was glad, didn’t think the girl was right for the boy. Just a friendly, social call. Anyway, dull shit. I took off the headphones and went over and crawled on my little sofa. She was in bed, getting ready to go to sleep-why shouldn’t I? Nobody was over there or anything.”
“Not Mrs. Murray?”
“That witch? Yeah, well, she was there. She was sleeping over. She didn’t always, but she did tonight… I mean, last night? Christ, is that the sun?”
“Seems to be.”
He leaned forward, frowning, the shaggy eyebrows trying to meet. “Look, Nate, my boys and me, we seldom monitor the tapes after a subject’s bedtime. We check them later, of course, but…”
“Then how did you know she was dead? You must have heard something.”
“I’ll tell you what I heard-somebody banging on my door and waking me the hell up!”
I could relate.
“I mean, inside that van?” He shook his head. “It sounded like cannons going off, scared the fuck out of me, somebody slamming their fist against the metal. I bet they goddamn dented it.”
“So who was it?”
“Intel.” He gave the word the ominous tone it deserved. “I don’t know their names. Hamilton wasn’t with them. But they were intel, all right.”
Los Angeles Police Intelligence Division. Captain James Hamilton was Chief Parker’s man in charge. And if I can think of something good to say about Hamilton, you’ll be the first to know.
“What did they do, Roger?”
“Right off, they cuffed me. But they didn’t drag me out and stuff me in a car, they just pushed me onto that little sofa I got in there. The cuffs were behind my back and it was goddamn uncomfortable, I can tell you. Anyway, it was two white guys and a spic. They got a couple spics on the PD now and even a few colored.”
“Skip the sociology.”
“Sure. They showed me their badges and told me wiretapping was illegal in Los Angeles County, and they took every tape. Every fucking one of ’em.”
“Every tape, meaning…?”
“All of the August fourth tapes were there in the van. You know, the ones that I knew the contents of, the morning and afternoon stuff. But also the tapes that started about the time I fell asleep.”
“Meaning, her death might be recorded on those tapes.”
“I guess. But what was there to hear? She probably took pills, right? She wouldn’t fuckin’ narrate it. She’d just swallow them.” He shrugged a single shoulder. “If she puked, you’d hear that, probably.”
“If she puked,” I said, “she might not be dead. You haven’t said how you know.”
“Know…?”
“That Marilyn is dead.”
“Oh.” Another shrug, a full, sour-faced one. “Those pricks told me. ‘Marilyn Monroe killed herself tonight,’ one of ’em says. ‘Overdose,’ he says. ‘Had to happen sooner or later.’ White guy with bad pockmarks and capped teeth, like an actor. ‘And you were eavesdropping. How’s that gonna be for business?’ Something like that, anyway, is what he said.”
“And they just left you there?”
He nodded once. “When they had what they wanted, they uncuffed my ass. Hell, I was glad just not to be dragged to some basement and beat on like a redheaded stepchild.”
“And that was it?”
“Before they left, the other white guy, skinny character with orange hair and blue eyes, he says, ‘Your best bet to stay in business is forget you had this particular job. You were never here. Get it?’ I got it.”
I frowned. “How do you read this?”
He rolled his eyes. “Shit, man, I don’t know. Chief Parker and Hamilton are pretty chummy with the Kennedys. They say Parker is up for Hoover’s job, someday. Maybe the intel boys were cleaning up for the K’s. But I don’t put it past the intel boys to be working for the Outfit, or hell, even the Company. All the interested parties, which is to say my various clients, have plenty of money to spread.”
“Maybe even enough,” I said dryly, “to corrupt such fine public servants.”
That made him laugh. Nervously, but he laughed.
“Christ, Nate, where does that leave us?”
“Us?”
“You’re one of my clients! I was tapping Marilyn’s line for you, remember.”
“Yeah you were. Among how many others?”
He spread his hands, and the shaggy eyebrows climbed his forehead. “You got to ask yourself-you want this in the papers? When the cops come around, not the intel boys, but whatever real cops catch this case, do you want to tell them you were bugging Marilyn’s bedroom?”
“At her behest, ” I reminded him.
“At whoever the fuck’s behest! You want to be in the middle of this?”
I was afraid maybe I already was.
But I asked, “Why are you here, Roger?”
“Because…” He swallowed and made his tone less defensive. “… First of all, we need to cover for each other.”
“Cover how?”
“By neither of us telling more cops or FBI or for shit sake the papers or anybody else about the wiretap job we did for Marilyn.”
“The cops’ll know she’s been tapped.”
“I don’t think so.”
I studied him. “ Why don’t you think so?”
He was trembling. Not a lot, but noticeably. His eyes were no longer meeting mine, instead moving with the search for something to say to me that wouldn’t get him slapped.
Finally he said, “Maybe I did go in there.”
I slapped him.
“Fuck! What was that for?”
I grabbed the front of his electrician’s uniform, just as I had the TV repair one in the van at the beginning of this goddamn fucking mess.
“I’m gonna more than slap you, Roger, if you lie to me again. Every word from your mouth, from here on out, is going to be a shining beacon of truth.”
He wrested himself away, only because I let him. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Heller? We’re in this together.”
Calm now, or anyway pretending to be, I said, “I liked that woman, Roger. If this isn’t suicide, I’ll probably kill someone. And it won’t be myself.”
“It was suicide, all right,” he said, waving that off.
“How did you get in?”
“… I have a key.”
“You said the place was crawling.”
“That was later.”
“What about Mrs. Murray?”
“She was talking to somebody in the kitchen-that doctor of Monroe’s, Greenson, the shrink? Saw them through the sunroom window. I went around and slipped in the front door-it’s right by where the hall goes to the bedrooms, you know. Her bedroom was just… right off there.”
“I know. And you, what? Took your device off that phone?”
He was nodding. “Yeah. I can do that in, like, under thirty seconds, with my trusty screwdriver. Trickier getting rid of the wires to that tape recorder in her closet, though. Let the tape recorder be, because why shouldn’t she own one? So a recorder was on a shelf in her closet, so what? And I had a transmitter in the overhead light to remove, too. Snagged that, and left.”
“But you got them all?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t there a tape in that machine?”
“No. And no stack of tapes, either. The intel boys must’ve beat me to it.”
I looked at my watch: five twenty. “What time was this?”
“Maybe… two hours ago. She looked beautiful.”
“What?”
“She was on her tummy. Face against her pillow. Hand on the receiver. Very sad. There was some, uh, lividity, of course. I mean, she was dead. But beautiful.”
My stomach was hurting. Not with hunger.
I asked, “All this went down after your fun and games with the intel boys?”
More emphatic nodding. “Yes. Yes, that’s how I knew she was gone, ’cause they told me. Like I said, I was sleeping, not monitoring. Don’t look at me like that. If I’d been monitoring, would it have turned out any different?”
“Probably not,” I admitted.
He smoothed his electrician’s uniform shirt with a palm. “I think you owe me an apology.”
“No. Time to tell me what you heard.”
“I fuckin’ told you! I wasn’t-”
“ Earlier that day. You said some ‘very interesting stuff’ took place.”
“Yeah. It did.” One shaggy eyebrow rose, and he lowered his voice, as if maybe somebody was listening, besides me. “Your friend Bobby Kennedy and Lawford dropped by…”
“What?”
“You heard me. Marilyn was fussing with Mrs. Murray over some spread of food. Guacamole she’d made, some other Mexican-type stuff she’d bought for the occasion. She was all excited about ‘the General’ coming by to see her-‘personally.’ Then Kennedy and Lawford showed up, around three fifteen. But I didn’t hear much of Lawford. I think they sent him outside or something.”
“What did you hear?”
“They were in the living room. It started out normal conversation level, and I couldn’t make it out. That’s not unusual. I mean, I had the master bedroom wired, and like I said before, it was right there off the living room, but the entryway is tiled, you know, and everything was kind of echoey and… at a distance.”
“Understood.”
He leaned forward. “But then their voices got louder-they were obviously arguing about something. Something about ‘broken promises.’ And their voices grew shrill. Especially that Kennedy, man, when he gets pissed off, hell, he sounds like an old lady, all high-pitched and screechy.”
“Were you getting words?”
“More… just the gist. She said, at one point, ‘I feel used, I feel passed around.’ Toward the end, Kennedy was wanting her to give him something-he kept saying, ‘Where is it?’ Or maybe it was, ‘Where are they?’ This he said over and over-they’d talk and argue, then more of this ‘Where are they’ shit.”
“But what that pertained to…?”
“No idea. Tapes? Anyway, Lawford must’ve heard them-I would guess he went out by the pool, to give them some privacy, but the pool is just off those glass doors in the living room, so he must have heard the yelling and got concerned. Because suddenly I could hear him talking.”
“Peter got in the middle?”
“Exactly. That actor voice of his was easy to tag. He says, ‘Calm down! Calm down!’ to both of them. Then he was saying something about ‘important to the family’ and I definitely heard him say, ‘We can make any arrangements you want!’ Then Kennedy said something, too muffled to make out, and Marilyn got very pissed-I think maybe things became physical, because there was this banging, flopping sound. Finally she was screaming at them, ordering them out of the house.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “And they left.”
“What happened after?”
“Next call of Marilyn’s was pretty soon, maybe ten minutes later. She called that Greenson character and he came right over. He was there several hours.”
“You hear any of their conversation?”
“No. I’m guessing they were talking in that sunroom. That’s where they usually consulted. He’s hardly been on any of these tapes over all these weeks. And that sunroom, it wasn’t bugged. No other rooms were-just the phones themselves and the master bedroom.”
I drew in some air and sat and thought. He let me do that.
After a while, he said, “Will you cover for me, Nate?”
“If you mean, am I willing to forget about the wiretap job Marilyn had us do… what wiretap job?”
He grinned. Nodded.
Now I leaned forward. Friendly. “But, Roger-you need to lay low. This thing, death of a superstar like Marilyn? It’s going to be big, and over the next few days, even weeks, nothing will be bigger.”
His eyes were tight. “I know, but if we-”
I had silenced him with a raised hand. “Think about it. You’ve talked to me-one of your clients. And you talked to the intel boys, who were also your clients, right? But I bet you haven’t talked to Sam Giancana or Jimmy Hoffa or any CIA spook, or any of their minions. Like Johnny Rosselli, for example, who could represent any one or all three.”
His eyes were wide and his jaw slack as the pieces came together. “And… and I gave their tapes up.”
“And you gave their tapes up. Here’s the best part-you gave them up to the cops. The intel boys, granted… but that still counts as cops.” I sat back. Shrugged. “I may do some minor poking around this thing-as I say, Marilyn was my friend-and until this nasty affair has shaken down, I would suggest you, as I said… lie low.”
“Where?”
“You’re not married, right? Not anymore?”
“Not anymore, right.”
“Still got that little house in the hills?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t go there. The tapes from before last night-where are they?”
“In my bank deposit box. I keep several boxes for sensitive material like this. Until delivery to the client, that’s how I routinely handle it.”
“No dupes or anything at your office?”
He shook his head. “No. Nothing. Not even any paperwork. Not on a deal like this.”
“Good.”
I got up and went into the bedroom, then came back with three C notes. “Go buy yourself a few clothes and supplies-groceries and sundries.”
“What? Why?”
“So you don’t get yourself killed. I’m calling Fred Rubinski. He’ll come over with a key to our safe house, and directions. You stay put a while. I’ll let you know when I think it’s okay for you to reapply to the human race.”
He didn’t argue. He just sat there and took the bills, rather absently, and then nodded and said, “I appreciate this. For a guy who’s kind of free with the physical stuff, you’re okay, Nate. But why help me out?”
“Because, like you said, we’re in this together. The same people looking for you might come looking for me, particularly if they found you first, and you made me popular with them.”
“You think I’d rat you out.”
“I know you’d rat me out.”
Roger didn’t argue the point.
So I called Fred, who bitched about being woken up blah blah blah, but when I said Marilyn was dead, and we needed to hide Pryor away for a while, my partner quickly got on board.
I didn’t wait for him, though. I got dressed, leaving the gun behind, and halfway out the door said to Pryor, “Fred’ll be here shortly. In the meantime, watch the place. Like, make sure nobody bugs it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Brentwood. Fifth Helena Drive.”
He was chewing on that when I shut the door and went out into windy warmth and a dawn throwing long shadows. My stomach hurt. I didn’t feel anything like grief yet, not even simple sadness.
But I did feel sick.