When I exited the unmarked cul-de-sac onto quietly residential Carmelina Avenue, I noticed a nondescript vehicle parked just around the corner. On my right as the Jag turned left, the white panel truck may or may not have been there before. On my way here, I hadn’t been in any kind of investigative mode, and was trying to find the unmarked street half of a strange address.
Maybe it was this phone-bugging job of Marilyn’s that made me notice now.
But I would like to think I hadn’t been so distracted that seeing the enclosed Hollywood TV Repair van, parked near the mouth of Fifth Helena, wouldn’t have jumped out at me, anyway.
And now we had the disturbing coincidence of this vehicle belonging to Roger Pryor, the guy who did A-1’s electronic surveillance work. The same Roger Pryor whose name had popped into my head when Marilyn asked me to tap her phone.
Of course another question also came immediately to mind: Did Roger’s job in Brentwood have anything to do with Marilyn?
She was not the only actor or actress living around here; probably not even the only famous one. And you didn’t have to be in show business to get spied on-one of the doctors or lawyers living in these nice, mostly mission-style homes might be checking up on their better halves. Not all tennis coaches coached on the court, you know.
Still, that surveillance van was parked within spitting distance of Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe. Who had just hired me, for stated reasons that I didn’t feel covered all her actual concerns, to tap her phone.
I pulled over and parked in front of an English Tudor mini-mansion where palms had been banished from the lush landscaping. This neighborhood was money-modest money compared to Beverly Hills or Bel Air, but enough so that a truck like that couldn’t park forever without annoying somebody.
And when people in a neighborhood like this got annoyed, they let somebody know about it.
Sitting in the parked Jag, watching the white van in my rearview mirror, I wondered if there was any chance Pryor himself was on this job. He had only a handful of employees, and was fussy about his equipment, which he created himself; he was an inventor and tinkerer whose skill in the bugging department dated back to his decade-long stint with the FBI after the war.
Pryor, or one of his boys, might be sitting in that van listening to a tapped phone or bugged room, but I doubted it. First, though this was a pleasant enough June afternoon with ocean breeze making the trip inland, the inside of that van would be an oven.
Second, Roger was more advanced than that. His favorite toy, whether he was bugging a phone or a room or a whole damn house, was a line transmitter, to send eavesdropped conversions by radio waves via FM bands to voice-activated tape recorders as far away as a quarter of a mile.
If he was tapping a phone, Roger would simply gain access to the house, posing as a telephone company repairman, and replace Ma Bell’s phone transmitter with his own gimmick, a bug that looked exactly like what he’d removed. Or he would switch phones entirely, with an identical pre-bugged model.
If he was bugging rooms, Roger would use carbon button mikes, tiny things that could be hidden most anywhere, hooked up to a radio frequency transmitter tied in to (again) a voice-activated tape recorder.
That, beyond the ability to recognize some of the hardware, was about all I knew on the subject. And I wouldn’t have known that much, caring only that jobs got done (not how they got done), but I’d spent enough time with Roger to have some of it creep in by osmosis. He was proud of his work and liked to brag and chatter about his latest gizmos.
That truck was probably empty right now. The voice-activated four-track tape recorders didn’t have to be checked or reloaded for hours. More important to the program was moving the truck now and then, so as not to attract undue notice in these well-off surroundings.
Toward that end, sometimes Roger would bring in one of at least two other vehicles and alternate-Ace Roofing Company, Acme Carpet Cleaners, Southland 24-Hour Plumbing amp; Heating.
All it required was occasional new paint jobs, a few magnetic business-logo signs, and, presto, the surveillance fleet was ready to snoop (no truck bore Pryor’s own logo, though).
I got out and stretched. In my sport shirt and slacks, I looked not at all suspicious, and of course the Jag was right at home. I crossed the street, which had very light traffic, and walked up to the van and circled it.
Nobody in front, of course.
I knocked at the back door. If someone was in there, my knocking might be ignored, so I had to keep it up a while-long enough for any occupant to get worried that my metallic banging would attract more attention than just dealing with whoever was out there.
No response.
Nothing to do but head back to the Jag, where I sat on the passenger side so that it looked like I was waiting for the driver. I angled the rearview mirror to keep the white van in sight, and about fifteen minutes in, I laughed, thinking that this was the first time I’d felt like a private eye in years.
Not that it felt good or bad-butt-in-the-seat surveillance is always boring as hell-but it did seem right. I took my paperback of The Carpetbaggers from the backseat. I picked up where I’d left off, flicking my eyes to the rearview about three times a page. It was a stupid goddamn book but I couldn’t stop reading it, except when a red Mustang convertible with some giddy girls in their late teens pulled into the mouth of the Tudor’s drive and two got out and two others stayed in the car and all four were in bikinis, their hair wet, towels over arms. They were probably legal age but I wasn’t proud of the thoughts I was having. Wasn’t ashamed, either.
That teenage tail almost made me miss the guy in the gray repairman’s coveralls who was approaching the rear of the van. He parked another vehicle somewhere down the street, no doubt.
As I was climbing out of the Jag, the girls giggled and pointed at me-at my age, I never knew whether it was a compliment or not-and the guy (who might have been Roger, but his back was to me and it was half a block down) was working a key in a rear lock.
He climbed in, shut the double door.
I crossed the street and jogged over.
I could hear him moving around in there as I raised my knuckles to the metal and knocked. After only two raps, the doors parted and presented a sliver of a pleasant-faced Roger-in the mode of dealing with a curious neighbor. He seemed about to say “Yes” when he frowned, then a half smile formed though his shaggy eyebrows kept frowning.
“Nate?” he asked.
“It’s not my stunt double.”
He froze while trying to process my presence. His hair a golden, thinning blond, his face a broad, bland oval with a well-creased boyishness, he was about forty and five ten or so, with a modest paunch. He looked convincing in the repairman uniform, which even had a sewn-on Hollywood TV Repair insignia. Actually he had a long-ago legal degree he never used, which had gotten him into the FBI.
“What the hell are you…? Get up in here.”
He shut me in.
It was predictably warm, though a good-size floor fan was going, up near the divider closing off the front from the back, the path of the blades cooling both us and a three-tiered metal rack with eight reel-to-reel upright recorders churning, amidst various electronic gadgets and gauges, a few lineman headsets tossed casually here and there. This was at my left as I crouched inside the windowless rear doors. At my right was a small, well-worn yellow-and-gold nubby upholstered couch, which my host plopped down on, leaving plenty of room for me.
“Want a cold one?” he asked, digging in a cooler just beyond the couch. He demonstrated what he was offering by holding up a sweating can of Schlitz.
“Why not?”
He church-keyed it open and I took that one while he fished for another.
“What’s the occasion?” he asked. Very good-naturedly, and if I hadn’t been in the business myself, and hadn’t known Roger, I’d have missed the suspicion. “You never bother dropping by my little penthouse on wheels when I’m doing a job for you. And I’m not doing a job for you.”
I sipped the Schlitz. With the beer, and the floor fan, it was like sitting on a back porch somewhere in the dead of summer.
“That’s the funny thing,” I said. “I just told a client, oh… not an hour ago… that I’d be getting back to her with details on how my man would be around tomorrow to put a bug on her phone.”
He laughed. “Do tell. And I’m that man? And you spotted the truck, and decided to save yourself a phone call?” He sipped the beer.
“Here’s the thing,” I said, and wiped foam off my upper lip. “My client? It’s Marilyn Monroe.”
I’ll give him this much-he didn’t cough beer out of his nose or anything, and the eyes flickered only a little, not even enough to make the shaggy eyebrows wiggle.
“I thought she lived over on North Doheny,” he said casually.
“No you didn’t.” I gestured with a hitchhiker’s thumb. “You know she lives down this highfalutin alley. Are you bugging her phone, or her bedroom, or her whole damn house?”
He gave me another half a smile, then shook his head and gave me a hooded-eyed look. He brushed a little spilled foam off his gray coveralls. “What if I said this was a divorce case?”
“I’d say you’re full of shit. Who hired you, the studio?”
He shook his head, and the smile widened into a give-me-a-break-buddy grin. “Look, Nate-I have a client. And it’s not you. There’s such a thing as ethics and professional courtesy and conflict of interest and, you know, all kinds of factors at play.”
“This afternoon,” I said, “or tomorrow, I would have given you a call, telling you Marilyn wants her phones tapped. Wants tapes of all her calls. And you’d have said, ‘Sure.’ Or would you have told me no, because you already were doing a job involving her? That kind of ethics and professional courtesy and conflict of interest, Roger?”
His face went expressionless; then one caterpillar eyebrow jerked. “I could claim that… but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Right.”
“So… are you going to screw it up for me, and tell Marilyn she needs somebody to come in to sweep for bugs? Least you could do is give me the job.”
“Answer my question, Roger. You already have her phone tapped?”
“No.”
“The house…?”
“No. Just the bedroom. Master bedroom. I can pick up some stuff from other rooms from there. Small house for a big star.”
“Who’s your client?”
He shook his head, drank his beer, then leaned back with folded arms and a defensive posture. “No. I can’t do that.”
“Let me give you your options. First, I can tell Marilyn her house is bugged and help her get rid of the pests… and no you don’t get the gig. After which the A-1 can, in future, find some firm other than Pryor Investigative Services, Inc., to use for its surveillance work. How much do you bill us on the average year, do you suppose?”
“… And the other option?”
“You can tell me who your clients are, and I will give Marilyn a bullshit story about how she needs to be discreet in her pillow talk, because once she has her own phone tapped, it’s easy for somebody else to listen in.”
“Well, that’s true, actually.”
“And I will send you in to do the phone-tap job for me, as promised.”
He twitched something that was neither a smile nor a frown. “The thing is, Nate… I already got more than one client, here. It’s one of those situations where the commodity in question has a lot of interested buyers, and why not keep them all happy, and me prosperous?”
“You wanna give me the ethics speech again, Roger, the conflict of interest thing? I think maybe I missed part of it.”
He moved a palm against the air as if he were polishing it. “Anyway, Nate, these are not the kind of clients you pull anything on.”
“What, are you worried? Is this van bugged? Are your clients listening in on us?”
“Really, Nate. These aren’t pleasant people.”
I let an edge into my voice. “Who wants to hear Marilyn’s bedroom talk, Roger?”
“Well, you wouldn’t know the intermediary’s name, probably. But it’s… Christ on a crutch, Nate, it’s for Hoffa.” He whispered as if afraid his own machines might pick it up: “Jimmy fucking Hoffa.”
I frowned. “Jimmy Hoffa wants to know who Marilyn is diddling? The head of the Teamsters cares who a Hollywood sex symbol takes to bed?”
He made a palms-up gesture with his free hand. “I’m in the surveillance business, Nate. Mine is not to reason why. Mine is but to make the recordings and gather same and ship ’em the hell off.”
Hoffa wasn’t just a name in the headlines to me. Everybody knew him as a controversial labor leader with obvious ties to organized crime. But I knew him personally. In 1957 Hoffa had hired me to infiltrate the so-called Rackets Committee run by Senator John L. McClellan. I had done this, but with the full knowledge of Robert Kennedy, chief counsel of the Rackets Committee.
As a double agent, I’d done Hoffa a good share of harm, but the president of the Teamsters Union didn’t know as much. Jimmy still thought I was a dirty ex-cop from Chicago. And maybe I was. But I’d never really been his dirty ex-cop from Chicago.
Nonetheless, I knew better than most the dangers of tangling asses with the affable, ruthless Teamster boss.
As reel-to-reel tape hummed on the rack nearby, Roger was saying, “And I’m pretty sure Hoffa is in this with another guy nobody oughta try to fuck with. Old friend of yours, Nate-Chicago friend?”
“I have a lot of Chicago friends.”
“So I hear. And one of ’em is Sam Giancana, right?”
Warm though it was in the enclosed space, I felt a chill, and it wasn’t the beer and it wasn’t the floor fan.
From Hoffa we’d gone in an instant to the current operating head of the Chicago mob. Called “Mooney” by friends and foes alike (it signified his craziness), Giancana had started out a street punk on the Near North Side’s Patch, worked his way up to the Capone Outfit, where he became Tony Accardo’s bodyguard. Once the top chair was his, Giancana wrested the numbers racket from the colored gangsters and expanded every other criminal enterprise in the Windy City.
Now he was a well-dressed psychopathic moneymaking machine with all kinds of show business pals, including Frank Sinatra-it was enough to make me wish I hadn’t introduced the two of them.
“ Is he a friend of yours, Nate-Giancana?”
“We get along. Never really had any trouble with him.”
“That friendship you had with Frank Nitti, back when you were starting out, it’s held you in good stead.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “So Hoffa’s your client, and you think Giancana is, too. Why do they care who Marilyn is entertaining?”
He blinked at me, then grinned-amused, amazed. “You’re kidding, right? Marilyn’s your client, and you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
He had the goofy grin of a high schooler telling a pal about a girl who put out. “Her and the prez-that poon hound Jack Kennedy. You know the Kennedy boys, don’t you, Nate? More famous pals of yours. You bragged about your Rackets Committee days in the press enough.”
“I don’t brag. My press agent does.” I shrugged. “I’m aware Jack has a wandering eye.”
“Also a wandering dick.”
I grunted a laugh. Pawed the air. “But this is silly, Rodge. I mean, ridiculous. Marilyn and Jack Kennedy… the president… of the United States? They’re, what-having an affair?”
“You are a detective, Heller. Trust me on this one-I heard it with my own ears. Those aren’t tough voices to ID -unless maybe it was Vaughn Meader and Edie Adams havin’ fun with me.”
He was referring to a couple of well-known impressionists, the former a Kennedy mimic, the latter Ernie Kovacs’ sexy widow, who did a mean Marilyn.
I motioned with my half-empty beer can, the tapes whispering at me. Grinned at him. “Come on, Rodge. You’re saying the president of the United States himself just stops by Marilyn’s place, and partakes of a piece of ass, while the Secret Service waits on the front stoop? Don’t the neighbors mind?”
Pryor shrugged. “He doesn’t stop by her house.”
“Then how the hell do you know-”
“Tapes I heard are from… another place.”
“What other place?”
“Another place Hoffa’s guy asked me to cover.”
“Do I have to ask again?”
“Heller, honest to Christ, you don’t wanna know this.”
“Whose place, Rodge?”
“… Lawford’s place. That big beach mansion out Santa Monica way.”
“ Peter Lawford’s place.”
“What other Lawford is there?”
“Peter Lawford, the actor, who’s married to Pat Kennedy, the president’s sister… That Peter Lawford’s place.”
“I told you. A detective. There’s four bedrooms in that joint. All covered. Funny thing is, even with famous people? Listening to people screw? Bores the fuckin’ tears out of me, at this point in my jaded career.”
I finished the beer, then said, “Gimme another.”
He selected another Schlitz, like I gave a damn what brand, opened it with the church key. It foamed nicely. I drank.
And thought.
Roger and I didn’t have to discuss why Jimmy Hoffa and Sam Giancana might want incriminating tapes on JFK, although their real mutual enemy was brother Bobby, who had made a hobby out of targeting organized crime, and was an old, hated adversary of both men.
Finally, with a glance at the wall of recorders, I asked, “Why so many tapes rolling, Roger? One little blonde woman, one little bed, one little microphone?”
He looked mildly surprised that I’d figured out the significance of that. “Well, you know, with these electronics, you need a backup.”
“Right. What, six, eight backups? What’s this about, anyway?”
“Like I said, I… got a couple other clients.”
“Wanting the same… commodity?”
“Same sort of stuff, yeah.”
“Are they really good clients? The kind of clients who give you maybe half the work your agency does, that type client?”
“Nobody gives me more business than the A-1, Nate, you know that. You and Fred are good to me. You’re great.” He shook his head, his expression ominous. “But this is not shit that you need to know.”
Interesting-he’d already told me Hoffa and Giancana were involved. This was something or somebody more dangerous?
“Roger, I’ll just find out myself, other ways-you mentioned I was a detective, remember? But that will waste time and piss me off and, by the way, cost you your favorite meal ticket. Like we used to say downstairs at the PD in Chicago, when we got the goldfish out… the rubber hose? Spill.”
He spilled. One set of tapes, he said, was for the LAPD’s notorious Intelligence Division.
That was a surprise. “Don’t they have their own surveillance experts?”
“Yeah, but this they don’t want traced back to them. Frankly, I think it’s a job they’re doing for Fox. The movie studio?”
“I know what Fox is. Why wouldn’t Fox go directly to you?”
“Everybody’s got layers of protection, these days, Nate. Nobody wants anything coming back on them.”
“I’ll remember that. Who else?”
“Who else what?”
“Who else are you making goddamn tapes for?”
“You really don’t want-”
I grabbed him by the front of his coveralls, fists full of cloth. “You shouldn’t give a girl a beer, Roger. We lose all sense of propriety. Now, when I toss you into those fucking tape recorders, you won’t get hurt that bad, probably. But your toys might get broken. Wouldn’t that be sad?”
“Nate! Stop it!” He pulled away from my grasp and flopped back on the couch. “Come on. We’re friends. Business associates.”
“Is that rack of shit screwed in? Or will it tip over?”
“I do certain sub-rosa jobs.”
“All your jobs are sub-rosa.”
“Not this sub-rosa.”
“What are we talking about, Roger?”
“… Spooks.”
I blinked. I admit it-I blinked.
“Roger, you’re not talking about ghosts.”
“No.”
The Company. CIA. Christ, why would they care who Marilyn was fucking? The FBI I could understand-everybody knew J. Edgar Hoover and the Kennedy brothers were not each other’s biggest fans. That Hoover kept a legendary cache of dirt on the rich, famous, and powerful.
“And… that’s it? That’s the client list?”
The shaggy eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Jesus, Nate, isn’t it enough?”
“That’s a lot of tapes you got spooling.”
“Well, of course, one set’s for me. For the safe-deposit vault. You never know when you, uh, you know… you need to know?”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Sorry about getting rough,” I said.
“It was the beer.”
“No. It’s Marilyn. I like her. And I don’t like seeing all these dark clouds gathering around her. So this conversation, Roger, it never happened. I will call you tomorrow at your office-you’ll be in? Good. And we’ll set up you going over to her place, and putting the tap on for her.”
“Okay. You mind if I check on my other stuff, while I’m there, if she isn’t looking?”
I belched. The beer.
“Let your conscience be your guide, Roger,” I said, and climbed out of the van.