by J. I. Baker
He hung up.
I checked the coin slot for stray dimes, unfolded the doors, and spent thirty-five cents on a fresh pack of Kents from the cigarette machine.
The matchbook, at least, was free.
15.
Verdugo City isn’t a city proper so much as a vacant area in the La Crescenta Valley south of the San Gabriels in north Glendale. One of the developers whose ambitious lives stud L.A. history like pushpins on a precinct map decided to build a residential area here. He started with a two-story redbrick post office built at the railway terminus. The development never took off, but the post office still exists. I’d seen it before, on some errand or another, but I couldn’t find it that day, as I can’t find so much of the L.A. I remember.
The unplanned urban sprawl had grown like an invasive plant around surrounding communities, consuming them with prefab ranch houses and taxes, the whole city built on sand that shifted like its values. Which means that so much of what I remember is gone, and there are days when I wander the bleached streets wishing I had photos of the buildings I’d lived in, trying to remember the location of the ice cream stand where my father once took me, when in fact I’m not sure it was ever there to begin with.
“What does this have to do with anything?” you ask.
“I went out to Verdugo City.”
“Why?”
“To find Marilyn’s mother. Next of kin, remember? That’s how the whole thing started.”
• • •
Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked at the Rockhaven front desk. It was in the alcove of a chintzy waiting room that contained a Bunn coffeemaker and a low table surrounded by a few chairs.
I took my hat off. “No.”
“We only admit guests with appointments. Your name again?”
“Fitzgerald.”
“I don’t see it on this list.”
“I’m from the L.A. County Coroner’s. I’m looking for next of kin for Norma Jeane Baker. You probably know her as Marilyn Monroe.”
“Oh, my.” She brightened visibly, adjusting her white shift as if I were about to take her picture. “Well, you’ll want to see Gladys, then.”
“And Gladys is—?”
“The mother. She’s in recreation now, but recess will be over in, I’d say, ten minutes. I’ll let them know. Do you mind waiting?”
“Nome.”
“Have a seat. Coffee is free.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Cream’s free, too.”
The coffee was bad. So was the cream.
I sat on one of the chairs that had been worn over the years by women who waited for people who never arrived and things that never happened. On the table was a plastic ashtray on which the name Rockhaven had been painted in pink brushstrokes by Mexican immigrants in factories just outside town.
“Pardon me?” the receptionist said. “Sir?”
I looked up, toothpick still in my mouth. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wondered, did you . . . know Marilyn Monroe? In person, I mean?”
“No.”
“Well, I wondered. Because people say I look like her. ’Course I think that’s utter nonsense.”
“I only ever saw her dead. You don’t look like her dead.”
“Oh, my.”
The manageress emerged from the long hall, like a female (not to say human) ironing board, stiff in her straitjacket suit, and announced that Gladys Morton was “ready” but that I was to “confine myself only to questions of a practical, professional nature.”
“I wouldn’t think of doing anything else.”
“Then you’re not like all the others.”
“What others?”
“The ones that were here. Asking inappropriate things.”
“About what?”
“Come along. She’s in the Annex.”
• • •
The light in the room was cold. The room was cold, too, oddly enough, given the heat. The old woman sat on the edge of the bed in a housecoat, a purse clutched with worn hands below the knees. Her nylons were torn. She wore nice shoes, not slippers. She looked as if she had dressed in “fancy” clothes for lunch at the Folger Café, where she would sip tepid coffee in porcelain cups on saucers bearing the famous faded blue logo. She would order the Fancy Eggs and a slice of the coconut cream pie because, of course, this was a “special occasion.”
The bed was small and crisply made. There was nothing else in the room but a dresser and a mirror turned to the wall. And a bedside table: a fringed lamp, a water glass, a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
“She thinks,” said the manageress who’d brought me to this room, “she’s going shopping, don’t you, Gladys?”
Gladys did not look up. She had the long empty stare of schizophrenia. Mental illness ran like a virus in the family. We know that now. Gladys’s sick mother killed herself. Gladys herself believed that men were following her, lurking outside every window, behind every door.
She had to double-check her closet before bed every night.
“When she isn’t frightened,” the woman whispered to me, “she simply isn’t here.”
I wondered what sort of burden that would be: panic the high price of feeling alive. In the absence of fright, there is only the void she was clearly in then, staring without blinking at a spot on the floor.
“Gladys?” the woman said. “Aren’t you? Going shopping.”
Gladys looked up. “I have my list.”
“This nice young man may be willing to help you.”
The old woman’s face darted up to mine. The movement seemed mechanical, more vegetable than human. “I don’t want him to help me.”
“He just wants to ask you some questions, dear. Surely you can answer some questions for him.”
Gladys’s head turned back to the floor.
There was nothing there.
“He believes in God,” the manageress said, finally.
Gladys looked up. “What kind of God?”
“The only God,” I said.
“Amen,” she said, explaining that signs in the sky proved that God existed and showed his pure love. Spiders on the wall like the ones you could see were merely God in disguise. God had not absented himself from the world that he loved so well and so truly well. The proof was everywhere that God was everywhere. Even in the smallest things. Especially in the smallest things.
“Amen,” I said.
“Like that.” She pointed to a stain on the floor.
“I need to tell you something, ma’am,” I said.
“Tell me what you know.” She looked into my eyes for the first time. Her gaze was empty. Her finger was still pointing.
“Your daughter,” I said, “has died. Is dead. She’s dead.”
“My daughter?”
“Norma Jeane.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t recall.”
“Marilyn Monroe. Her name was Marilyn Monroe.”
“I have never heard,” she said, “of Marilyn Monroe.”
16.
That was the first iteration of the tox report. A revision, with minor corrections, followed later that day:
Now, you want to know what this report means, Doc. Well, it was clear that Miss Monroe’s death had been caused by a massive overdose—4.5 milligrams barbs and 8 milligrams chloral. Her liver contained 13 mg pentobarbital, or Nembutal.
And that was troubling.
“Why?” you ask.
I looked for the specimen analyses that Noguchi had requested. Ralph Abernethy, the chief toxicologist, had delivered analyses on the blood and liver, but Noguchi had requested analyses on the kidney, stomach, urine, and intestines as well. It was in the autopsy report. He’d requested them because the analysis of all these organs would show exactly how barbiturates had entered the system.
But it wasn’t there.
“Without specimen analysis, Doctor, there’s no way of telling
how the pills were ingested.”
“Why does that matter? She killed herself, Ben.”
“Did she?”
“Everyone says she killed herself.”
“I’m not everyone.”
I picked up the phone and called—
“Noguchi,” said the voice on the other end.
“Morning, Doctor. It’s Ben. I don’t see all the specimen analyses on the tox report.”
“I know. I asked Dr. Abernethy for them again.”
“Why didn’t he do them in the first place?”
“He said it was obviously an overdose.”
“It wasn’t obviously anything.”
“So you say.”
“Where is Dr. Abernethy now?”
“You know,” he said. “The press conference.”
• • •
From information supplied to us, we feel we can make a presumptive opinion that Miss Monroe did not die of natural causes,” Curphey said as I stepped into the room on the fifth floor. I propped myself against the wall, searching for Abernethy among the rows of reporters on folding chairs, public officials, some taking notes, others snapping pictures.
I was chewing a toothpick.
Curphey sat behind a mass of microphones in his coroner whites. The table was covered with a cloth; a pitcher of water sat in the middle. He was flanked by three men. Behind them stood a cop.
“The cause of death was a massive overdose of barbiturates,” he continued. “Chief toxicologist R. J. Abernethy found four-point-five milligrams of barbiturate poisoning per one hundred cc’s of blood, about twice what we’d consider a lethal dose. The exact type of drug ingested by Miss Monroe has not been determined.
“Her death will be probed by my office and by the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, the independent investigating unit of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center at UCLA. I’d like to think of this as the ‘suicide squad.’ Through this organ, we will hold exhaustive interviews regarding the probable suicide of Marilyn Monroe. And now.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to introduce you to the team.”
Dr. Robert Litman was a psychiatrist and UCLA professor who had studied under Dr. Greenson.
Dr. Norman Farberow was a psychologist and the nominal head of the Suicide Squad.
Dr. Norman Tabachnick was yet another associate of Greenson’s.
“We will take a psychiatric approach to the case,” Curphey said. “This involves delving delicately but thoroughly into Miss Monroe’s personal history. We’re interviewing everybody. We’ll seek out all persons with whom Miss Monroe had recently been associated.” There would be, he said, “no limitations” to the scope of their inquiry; the team “would go as far back in her life as necessary.”
“Dr. Curphey!” a voice from the crowd.
I looked across the chairs and saw Jo Carnahan. She sat in the middle of the row. She wore a waistless chemise with a chain belt and a gold evening bag. She held a reporter’s notebook and a pen.
I still didn’t know who she reminded me of.
“I’m sorry.” Curphey squinted against the light. “I haven’t opened up the floor to questions. Now, we will be very thorough in our treatment of this. It is obviously—”
“Dr. Curphey,” Jo said again. “How could she have swallowed the pills when there was no water glass?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There was no water glass in Miss Monroe’s room. If the verdict is that she took a handful of sleeping pills, why was there no water glass in the room?”
“Ma’am—”
“The name is Jo Carnahan.”
“Miss Carnahan, I am not a detective. I am the coroner. I do not speak as an expert when I say that we can have no idea at this juncture how Miss Monroe ingested the pills. She could in fact have chewed them.”
“She chewed fifty pills?”
“We don’t know the exact count, Miss Carnahan. In any event, there was a water glass. I myself saw it. There are photos of it. It was empty.”
“But Mr. Curphey—”
“I haven’t opened the floor to questions, Miss Carnahan.”
The cop behind Curphey stepped into the crowd, moved down the aisle, and motioned for Jo to leave. There were hushed words. Jo refused to move; the cop grabbed Jo’s arm, muttering things I couldn’t hear as he tugged at her. She wasn’t leaving, though: “Mr. Curphey—”
“Dr. Curphey,” he corrected.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
All the cameras turned to Jo, flashing as she was pulled from the aisle down the hall to the door.
I followed her.
• • •
None of this showed up in the papers the next day, by the way. You should know that. They all reported on the conference, dutifully repeating the self-serving things Curphey had said, and though at least a hundred pictures had been taken of Jo being yanked from the building, not a single one was published. They didn’t mention Jo, the empty glass—or the fact that her nose was bleeding.
She stormed through the parking lot along Spring, clutching a manila envelope under her right arm.
“Ma’am,” I said, following her. I was grinning. I don’t know why. Something about her—
“Go away.”
“Name’s Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”
“Sure, I remember. The bright boy who kicked me from the death house yesterday.”
“You weren’t supposed to be there.”
“And you weren’t supposed to steal the tissue samples.”
“I didn’t steal the tissue samples.”
“That’s what you testified.”
“I was doing my job.”
“So was I.”
“Need a tissue?”
“You mean a sample?”
“I mean a Kleenex.”
“I need you to get lost.”
She stopped at her DeSoto, a candy-apple ’61. She took the keys from her gold purse.
“I know why there was no water glass,” I said.
She froze. Very slowly, she straightened. She turned. “What?”
“I said: I know why there was no water glass.”
“Really. Tell me.”
“If I show you mine,” I said, “will you show me yours?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“How big it is.”
It was big. You know how big it was, Doctor.
“Well, I’m famished,” she said. “You want lunch?”
“I could eat a horse.”
“Right. So how do you feel about chili?”
17.
Hello, Tommy,” she said as the waiter arrived at our booth. He wore a black tux and tie, but his front teeth protruded and his Ken-doll hair was combed over a bald spot. He didn’t look like he worked at a joint where they treated food like paper dolls, dressing rib bones up in ribbons, torturing carrots and radishes into tiny swans, Eiffel Towers, and the constellation of Orion.
“Afternoon, Miss Carnahan,” he said. He deposited a basket of warm cheese toast on the white tablecloth. “And how are we today?”
“It’s too soon to tell. Two Flames, please,” Jo said, waving across the tables to the bartender, who was laboring over some bright concoction under rows of winking wineglasses.
“Cigarette?” She took a pack of Kools from her gold bag, removed one with the red nails that exactly matched her lips, and held it out to me.
“No thanks. Trying to quit.”
“Suit yourself.” She slipped it into her mouth. She had a way of making ordinary gestures seem obscene. It had something to do with her amused deliberation and something else to do with her eyes.
I took her lighter and lit the cigarette, and when she lifted her white neck to blow smoke toward the ceiling, I knew who she reminded me of:
“Vivien Leigh,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind.”
Chasen’s was the large green awning on Beverly Boulevard. You always sa
w the limos parked outside, swells parading past flanks of reporters elbowing one another for the best shots, the diamonds and white furs of Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood, the white tuxedo shirts of Jimmy Stewart and Rock Hudson. They were all blurs against the doors that opened for them, as they’d opened for us, that day, Dave Chasen himself saying, “Afternoon, Miss Carnahan,” and whisking us past the picture of W. C. Fields to the booth where we now sat.
“Miss Carnahan?” I said.
“Jo.”
“With all due respect, Jo: Why do you care what happened to Marilyn Monroe? I mean, I know your show and column. It’s fluff. Women’s magazine stuff. Good guys and bad guys. Stars we love on the way up and then shoot down.”
“So?”
“Why are you so interested in the water glass?”
Jo blew smoke from her mouth toward the ceiling.
“I went to convent school in New York. I was a good Irish Catholic girl. A daddy’s girl. Maybe all Catholic girls are. I wanted to cover news, but that’s hard for a girl, so I wrote about a convention of beauty parlor owners for the Evening Journal, the opening of a model home in Flatbush. I interviewed the highest tenants in the Empire State Building and Leontyne Price. It wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What did you want?”
“Crime. Politics. Business. Big stories. The Boy stories. But water seeks its own level, and a woman isn’t water, but she’s treated like it.”
“So?”
“The Annie Laurie job opened. I wanted to leave New York. I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was more money. And I like to think I’ve added some dimension to the character. I came up with the phrase ‘dear ones.’ And ‘the Long, Deep Sigh Department.’ That was my idea. It’s one of the most popular segments.”
“But you still—”
“You know how they say ‘once a Catholic, always a Catholic’?”
“Sure.”
“Once a journalist, always a journalist. I happen to be both.”
She took from her manila envelope an 8 × 10 glossy she’d developed at the Mirror:
Monroe’s bedside table, covered with vials. Underneath was a Mexican pottery jug, cap askew, piles of books and papers and a jar of face cream, but—
