At Flo’s Roxbury manse, I learned just how hard and fast my little Brenda Starr could work. For all the pampering cocktail parties and press junkets, she proved as hard-boiled a newswoman as Rosalind Russell pretended to be in His Girl Friday.
In a home office as messy as she was well-groomed, Flo Kilgore sat in a T-shirt and rolled-up jeans and no shoes, fingers flying at her Smith-Corona, machine-gunning keys, answering each ding with a forceful carriage return. The converted bedroom was filled with filing cabinets, research books, folders of clippings, and haphazardly stacked steno pads, though she never seemed to have any trouble finding in a flash whatever she needed.
I was chiefly a bystander, or sitter, plopped in a comfy chair between a filing cabinet and a worktable, finishing the last couple hundred pages of The Carpetbaggers. My God, did anybody really have this much sex?
Anyway, my presence was needed for the questions and clarifications she would on occasion toss over her shoulder, her fingers frozen over the keys, poised to attack once I had provided whatever tidbit she required.
We started (if I may generously include myself as part of the process) around 10:00 A.M., after her cook fed us corned-beef hash and buttermilk pancakes, and she had a draft of the story by 1:00 P.M.
She handed it to me, saying, “Remember, we don’t have to solve the mystery. Just raise legitimate questions, and throw light on the dark areas.”
That she had.
Tough but fair, with plenty of confidential sources but a good number going on the record (myself included), the in-depth article made no bones about personal relationships between Marilyn Monroe and both John and Robert Kennedy, and established clearly that RFK had been at MM’s house the afternoon before she died.
The scientific impossibility of an accidental drug overdose by Marilyn, and the probability of a “hot shot” injection having killed her (despite the deputy coroner’s search for injection marks), was stunningly well argued. The presence of the studio, police, and likely government cleanup crews manipulating the scene and even staging the suicide break-in, all during the early morning hours before the death was officially called in, was firmly established.
“What do you think?” she asked, bright-eyed, her smile tentatively proud.
“Ship it,” I said.
But what she did was call it in, and somebody in New York took down the copy word-for-word (“… period, paragraph…”), all twenty-five hundred of them.
We took a late lunch at Nate ’n Al’s, both casual, though she’d traded her T-shirt and Levi’s for a white blouse and gray skirt. I still had on the lime-green polo and darker green Jaymar slacks I’d worn over to her place this morning. We laughed in the face of death by sharing a huge pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich.
“You really like it?” she said eagerly.
“I love pastrami.”
She giggled. “No. You know…”
“I think,” I said grandly, Russian dressing dribbling down my mouth, “you will be the first Hollywood columnist ever to win the Pulitzer.”
She beamed, her blue eyes bright; her dark brown hair bounced at her shoulders, none of that bouffant noise. “You’re not teasing?”
“No. It’s a well-substantiated piece. What now?”
“Now I wait to hear from my editor.”
“Will he get back to you on a Saturday?”
“For this story, you bet.”
But she didn’t hear till deep into Sunday. I was back at my bungalow, and Sam had come over to use the hotel pool. I was in my swim trunks and a Catalina pullover, about to follow him out, when the phone rang.
She was in tears. And angry.
“Cocksuckers,” she said.
Flo didn’t swear lightly, so I knew at once her story had been nixed.
“What did your editor say?”
“He said I did a ‘damn good job of research.’ But even though the Herald Tribune is a Republican paper, this is an election year, and the story would seem a ‘gratuitous slap’ at the president and his brother. They’re killing it.”
“Christ, how the hell do you write off exposing a movie star’s murder as a gratuitous fucking slap?”
“I think this is more than just editorial policy. I… Nate, I know it’s more.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have contacts in the administration.” She wasn’t crying now, at least not sobbing, though she snuffled some. “They say the Trib sent the story over by telex and asked them to confirm or deny the reporting about Bobby and Jack. They refused to do either, which was bad enough, but you can bet some pressure was put on, behind the scenes.”
“Always is. Can you take it elsewhere?”
Her sigh seemed endless. Then: “If a paper as right-leaning as the Trib won’t print the thing, who will? I might find a magazine to use it, but I would likely lose my job. And I like my job. Anyway… I used to like my job…”
“I’ll come right over.”
“No. No, not today. I want to be alone today. We were up very late last night, remember…”
I did. We’d been giving those carpetbaggers a run for the money.
“… and I just have to zonk out. Get some sleep. I’m gonna pop some pills in the glorious Hollywood tradition, and just go away for a while… Bye, Nate.”
“Bye, baby.”
That was a fitting way for Flo to write -30- on this story, wasn’t it? Pop some sleeping pills? Zonk out like Zelda, aka Marilyn Monroe, the former Norma Jeane?
My son overheard this, my end anyway, and he gave me a worried, earnest look, the kind you can summon when you haven’t been in the world as long as the grown-ups.
“Jesus, Dad! What the hell happened? You sound really upset.”
I just shook a finger at him. “I’m fine. Don’t you go using bad fucking language, just because you hear me doing it.”
We went swimming.
The moon was nearly full. What its ivory touch could do with a godforsaken landscape was impressive-the narrow, rocky beach, the ribbon of concrete, the barren cliffside with scrubby brush hanging on for dear life. The ocean, as choppy tonight as it was vast, sported waves whose white peaks were like angels dancing on the void.
The two-story beach cottage the A-1 used as a safe house was nothing so grand as the Lawford villa on Sorrento Beach, also on the Pacific Coast Highway. But we were way north of that, between Sunset and Temescal Canyon. The modest clapboard, close enough to the ocean to require stilts, had no immediate neighbors, and was nicely isolated from any police presence.
The beach house had once been Fred’s, back when he was doing sport fishing (there was a marina a few miles up the highway). But now that my partner was getting on in years, he rarely went out, and then just for the sun and solitude. So we’d converted the property into one of our safe houses.
Part of the bottom floor was a carport, and I slipped the Jaguar in next to the nondescript dark blue Chevy Impala that Roger Pryor had driven out here. Presumably his employees were making use of the several panel trucks his agency owned. The two floors were set up as individual apartments, in case we needed to use the place for two witnesses or clients or whatever.
To get to the first-floor digs, you came around the side, on a little wooden-plank balcony-type walkway. The night was cool, especially considering how hot the day had been; I was in the ninja/tennis pro getup again, with the Browning nine-mil in my waistband under the unzipped Windbreaker.
I had a key but figured knocking was more polite. Wouldn’t want to walk in on the guy jacking off or taking a dump or pursuing some other undignified if necessary human activity.
Roger cracked the door, his blandly boyish countenance creased with worry, his thinning blonde hair looking slept on. He was in a green plaid sport shirt and tan slacks and socks, looking like a high school shop teacher, except for the lack of shoes and the. 38 revolver in his right hand.
“Nate,” he said. “I thought you’d forgotten me.”
He opened the door.
We were immediately in a living room with an assortment of secondhand furnishings-the A-1 did not splurge on its safe houses, knowing that those staying there were generally lucky to have anywhere to camp. But it wasn’t unpleasant. Homey, in a road company Leave It to Beaver fashion.
The small kitchen, at left (windows on the ocean were at right), was open onto the comfy living room area, with its couch and recliner and portable, rabbit-eared TV on a stand (Bonanza was on), all sharing a round braided rug.
Roger rested the. 38 on the kitchen table, its Formica modernity out of place against the ancient brown cabinets and a humming Century of Progress-era refrigerator.
“Cold one?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“There’s just beer. None of that soda shit you go for.”
“I’ll take a beer. We’ll pretend I’m a big boy.”
The sounds of the Cartwrights on the Ponderosa were annoying me, so I took the liberty of going in and switching off the set. This made more prominent the sound of surf rushing to shore, not far beyond the windows.
We wound up sitting in the little kitchen. That put the. 38 on the table between us. I didn’t blame Roger. I’d be cautious, too, if I were him. That’s why I brought the nine-mil.
He asked, fairly pleasantly but with a slight edge, “So how much longer am I going to have to be cooped up here?”
“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 fiasco, so how do I get out of it with the smell of murder not sticking to me?”
His eyes tightened. He was thinking. Was that daylight at the end of the tunnel, or just another train?
I waved it all off. “And I’m not going to kill you, either. You’re small fry. You’re just a working stiff, like me. What I want are some names. Let’s start with Rosselli.”
“Wasn’t Rosselli. He’s in Vegas.”
“There are phones between LA and Vegas, I understand. Not car phones maybe, but phones.”
“No. Not Rosselli. It was… it was Giananca himself.”
That made sense. “And who called him? Lawford?”
“I don’t know. I honest to Christ don’t know. You’ll have to climb that ladder yourself, Heller.”
Then his brow creased with thought, and he leaned forward and his head almost hovered over the. 38, though his hands weren’t near it now.
“Or maybe,” he said, some desperation finally reading in his voice, “I can help you climb. Look. Say I help you. I know you liked that broad, and I had nothing against her either, if it hadn’t been me do it, it’d been half a dozen others, some spook, some Outfit guy, fuck, some intel fucker. I didn’t kill her, the poison somebody else provided did. You with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“I’ll be your inside guy. Trying to get an angle on somebody as high up as Giancana won’t be easy. But maybe I can do it. Maybe I can check in, and ask some questions. Maybe I can find out where this thing flowed from.”
“I’m thinking Hoffa.”
“Definite possibility.”
“But Giancana was fine with it.”
“Obviously.”
“And the CIA went along.”
“No doubt.”
“Okay.” I finished the beer. “Want another cold one?”
“I could use it.”
I went to the refrigerator, opened it, shut it, came back behind him, and stuck the needle of nicotine in his neck.
“ Now you’re a working stiff,” I said.
And thumbed the shit into him. I wouldn’t wear a bigger smile till I was a skull.
Just in case he got ambitious, I swiped the gun off the table and it clattered onto the linoleum floor and, luckily, did not go off. He wriggled around on the floor, clutching his neck like there was something he could do about it, bawling now, which at this point I was fine with.
I went over to the phone out by the couch and dialed Fred Rubinski.
“You can bring the boat around now,” I said.
“Check,” he said.
I went in to see how Roger was doing. He wasn’t unconscious but he had given up. His face looked white and terrible. Good. I retrieved the. 38, so he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory, ending his misery or mine.
Searching the place, I found the box of small white tape boxes in the closet, up on a hatbox shelf the way Marilyn’s tape recorder had been barely hidden at Fifth Helena.
And under some clothes in a bedroom dresser, I found a single red spiral notebook. Thumbing through, words written in Marilyn’s familiar flowing hand jumped out at me: Bay of Pigs, Castro, CIA, Sam Giancana.
I gathered all of the material and set it on the couch. Roger was dead, pretzeled on the floor, having shit himself, turning a light shade of blue.
Then I went into the living room, away from the stench, where a recliner awaited. Before getting comfortable, I switched the TV on. Turned the channel. Who the hell wanted to see Bonanza in black-and-white, anyway? Jack Benny was on, and I could use a laugh.