The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “I don’t suppose,” you say.

  The bare light over the table off the kitchenette was on, and it swung slightly, as if someone had just touched it, but everything else seemed normal. The toilet was still running. The bed was unmade.

  The doorbell rang.

  I pressed the intercom: “Yes?”

  “Señor Ben, it’s Inez. You see?”

  “See what?”

  “The doorbell works. They fix it.”

  “It wasn’t broken,” I said.

  It was 2:15.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 7

  21.

  The heat wave continued in Southland. It was eighty-nine in L.A., ninety-plus in San Gabriel and San Fernando. It was ninety-two at the Civic Center, humidity at forty-one. That’s what they said on the radio. The papers were still filled with Marilyn news: preparations for the funeral, Curphey’s press conference, interviews with the hairdressers and stylists who’d Known Her Well.

  A story in the Times gave the first complete chronology of her last day: Everyone claimed that she had seemed “happy.” Her press agent, Pat Newcomb, had spent the night before in the Telephone Room. And Marilyn had spent a sleepless night in her own bedroom, on the phone. That morning, the actress asked for oxygen, the Hollywood cure for a hangover. There was no oxygen, so she drank grapefruit juice instead. She shared it with Newcomb; at some point, they argued. Newcomb said that the argument was about the fact that she herself had slept all night but Marilyn had not.

  “You gonna pay for that paper, or aren’t you?” the man behind the newsstand asked. He wore a visor over a balding head. Nudie magazines hung on a sagging wash line behind him.

  “Sorry.” I reached into my pockets and found nothing. “Be right back.” I handed him the paper.

  “You already read half of what it’s worth.”

  “Not true,” I said. “I didn’t read the funnies.”

  • • •

  The jukebox was running, but no one was in the bar. Elisha Cook, Jr., and Inez were long gone. The ripped leather booths were empty, the candles on the dark scored tables unlit. A silver bell for service sat on the shelf of the alcove. I rang it but no one came. I took my hat off and slid it along the bar wood. The clock on the wall read 8:12—late enough to call home.

  I stepped behind the bar and grabbed the phone. I thought about smoking a cigarette, but decided against it.

  It was Day One.

  Rose: “Hello?”

  “It’s Ben.”

  She didn’t say a thing, so I said it again: “It’s Ben.”

  “I heard you the first time. Jesus, Ben. What happened?”

  “I showed up at the house last night, and you weren’t there.”

  “Oh? And where were you when you were supposed to pick up Max?”

  “I don’t know what to say. I mean I’m sorry.”

  “You should be sorry to Max. He’s the one you abandoned.”

  “I didn’t abandon anyone.”

  “Standing alone on the sidewalk in the rain waiting for his daddy after all the other kids had gone? He drew a crayon picture for you, Ben. He wanted you to see it.”

  “I just want to say I’m sorry to—”

  “A crayon picture,” she said. “For you.”

  “Rose, I’m onto something. If you knew the truth, you’d understand.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Rose?”

  She had hung up.

  I lit a cigarette.

  Tomorrow would be—

  You know.

  I called Jo.

  “Ben!” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I know. You left a message.”

  “So I went to see our dear friend George from GTE in the bar. He told me that all hell has broken loose. Marilyn’s phone records have disappeared.”

  “I’m sure the police—”

  “It wasn’t the police. This is where it gets interesting. He told me that toll calls are recorded by hand at the traffic center and filed in boxes that are picked up every night and taken to headquarters. Once they’re there, you can’t access them. Same thing happens with the calls you dial. They refer to them as—let me read my writing here—Measured Message Unit calls. Well, those are recorded on a yellow tape roll, whatever that means, and that ends up in lockdown, too.”

  “So?”

  “So no ordinary cop would be able to get ahold of those records after they were filed. He said, ‘Not even J. Edgar Hoover.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not even J. Edgar Hoover, he said, could get access to those records after they had been filed. But someone did. Someone at the very highest level wanted access to those phone records.”

  “To be the first to see them?”

  “To make sure that no one else did.”

  • • •

  Baldwin Hills is named after the range that overlooks the L.A. basin and the lower plain to the north. It’s bordered on the southeast by Leimert Park, on the south by Windsor Hills, on the north by the Mid City, on the west by Culver City.

  There are active oil wells in the mid hills along La Cienega, but most of the derricks in the area are rusting, which is what I discovered when I parked on the drive below the hill and walked to the fence at the top. I put my fingers through the links and stared. There was a lot of bleached dirt and dust but no office. And no B. F. Fox Electric.

  I looked at the, como se dice, work order in my hand and checked the address: 4100 S La Cienega Blvd.

  It was the right address, but nothing was here.

  The last few entries in the diary of Marilyn Monroe—I now know—were often elliptical, drug-addled, hard to parse or even read. It was sometimes difficult to understand what she was trying to communicate, even harder to understand the connection between the final entries and whatever she’d meant when she’d written “the enemy within.”

  But the guiding spirit of the thing was paranoia, her belief that she was being watched and bugged and followed. She was consumed by night terrors regarding the phone calls and the clicking on the line and the man outside her window; she often locked her door, as she had the night she died, because she believed the man had gotten inside the house.

  Now a strange man was visiting my house to fix a doorbell that wasn’t broken. I’d seen no evidence of a break-in and no evidence of the man the night before—until I returned to the Savoy that morning around 10:30.

  I ran water in the bathroom sink and rolled my sleeves up and squirted what was left of the Barbasol on my stubble and reached for the Wade & Butcher straight razor that was always to the right of the sink.

  But it wasn’t to the right of the sink. I stared into the mirror and opened the medicine cabinet.

  I didn’t find my razor.

  What I found was a bottle of Nembutals.

  22.

  Throughout LACCO, there were old-fashioned post-office mailboxes painted green. In them, we put the evidence of the dead in sealed envelopes, writing descriptions on clipboards tied to the tops with strings: nail clippings, hair samples, bullets.

  Someone from the Evidence Division would empty all the boxes at day’s end, collect the envelopes, and deliver them to Carl, the evidence tech. He was the only one with the key to the Sheriff’s Evidence Room, which, among other things, contained all evidence pertaining to the death of Miss Monroe.

  He was sitting behind his desk when I found him, that day, feet up on a row of files, watching Yours for a Song. He was singing along with Bert Parks while eating a sandwich. I stepped inside. He didn’t hear me: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” he sang.

  “Excuse me.”

  He turned, chewing, and took his feet off the filing cabinets.

  “Sorry. I’m Ben Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”

  “Deputy?” He bit into his sandwich again. “How can I help you?”

  “I need to get into the Evidence Room.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a problem.”

&
nbsp; “Kind of problem?”

  I showed him the vial of Nembutals.

  “Lots of people have that problem. My wife can’t sleep, either.”

  “The problem is these aren’t my Nembutals.”

  “Whose are they?”

  “Marilyn Monroe’s.”

  He lowered his sandwich. He stopped chewing. “Not possible.”

  “Look at the label: ‘Dr. Hyman Engelberg. San Vicente Pharmacy.’”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  • • •

  It was a windowless warehouse in the subbasement. The ceilings were so high and dark you couldn’t see them. The few functioning lights sparked in the water that dripped even when it wasn’t raining. Aisles were stacked with moldering evidence from ten thousand forgotten cases on high metal shelving: everything from a bullet or a matchbook with an address in a white folder labeled “Vergie, 6/23/27” to a chandelier or a chair, a mirror or some flooring stained, long ago, with blood.

  And then there were the stoned rats with pink eyes and ropey tails, whiskery noses that twitched when they rose on hind legs, forepaws hooked like claws. They loved the bags of marijuana confiscated from the Mexicans on, say, Figueroa. They ate through almost anything to get the stuff; you’d see them staggering, stoned, along the floor.

  “Here you go,” Carl said, handing me the key at the front door. His voice echoed. “Just lock up and return it when you’re done. This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t let them bite,” he said, and shut the door. I heard him laughing down the hall as I looked at the log he had given me:

  CASE NO.: 81128

  DECEDENT NAME: Marilyn Monroe

  CONTENTS:

  1. A vial of 25 Nembutal capsules from San Vicente Pharmacy

  2. A vial of ten chloral hydrate tablets filled on July 25

  3. A small key with a red plastic cover labeled “15”

  4. The water glass

  LOCATION: Box 24, Row 13-B

  I located the southernmost row and counted over to row 13 (where the B came in, I had no idea). But I found nothing—until, twenty minutes later, I came across The Book of the Unknown Dead lodged within a stack of mildewed files.

  I’d heard tales of this volume, a large black scrapbook started by an assistant, his name lost to history, in 1921. It was a book into which that first man, and many who came after, put evidence from and pictures of people the coroner’s office could never identify. These people were all poor, nameless, and alone.

  There were pictures of a wino they’d found off Alameda, a black man in a zoot suit in the bathroom of Club Alabam, a hairless man found lying in the reservoir, hobos sliced in half on railroad tracks, floaters washed up in Marina del Rey . . .

  “What does this have to do with Monroe?” you ask.

  “I thought you would be interested.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my father.”

  “I don’t want to know about your father. I want to know about the evidence. Did you find it?”

  The answer is yes, though it took me a while: The envelope had been misfiled. It was not in Box 24, Row 13-B. It was in Box 25, Row 13-C. And, of course, the vial of Nembutal was missing.

  There was just one item inside. It was stuck in the back. I couldn’t dislodge it. I turned it over, shook again, and it fell to the floor.

  It wasn’t really evidence.

  It had nothing to do with Miss Monroe.

  It was my Wade & Butcher razor.

  23.

  You want to know how my razor ended up in the evidence folder for Coroner’s Case No. 81128? I wish I could tell you.

  “So what did you do next?” you ask.

  “Went back to my office.”

  “Why didn’t you call the evidence tech?”

  “And tell him that my razor had ended up in the Evidence Room? Would you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “You’d think I’d put it there myself. What other explanation is there?”

  “You’re not answering my question, Ben.”

  • • •

  More than once my father would leave empty beer cans that weren’t really empty around the hotel rooms we shared in Bunker Hill, San Bernardino, and La Habra. Or he and some woman he’d picked up in a Vernon bar would kill half a bottle of rotgut from a package store and he would teach her dance steps to the music that came from whatever faded radio sat by the side of the bed. Very early on I tried tasting the stuff that seemed to work like magic on my father and all these random women. And, though it made me gag at first, it didn’t take long to realize that the sickness you felt disappeared fast enough if you swallowed it. It became something more than warm and more than soothing. It changed the way you thought about yourself.

  It changed the world.

  Mornings, my father always grabbed the Benzedrine that he would buy in tubes and, swallowing the soaked paper inside, he would say, “I will never do this again.” He always seemed to mean it, but it happened anyway. It happened because the lights were blooming in the restaurants and taverns. They made the trash cans and alleys between bars look good, and he knew that just one drink would kill the haze, making everything better and clear. Would allow him, finally, to sort out what was wrong and give him the strength to continue.

  Not merely to continue: to thrive.

  I don’t need to tell my story here. You’re not interested. Neither am I. All you need to know is that he was working as a bean huller in San Bernardino when he disappeared. He got a bean hull in the eye. You almost couldn’t tell the eye was no good, when the doctor was through with it, but it ate at him.

  He was angry and grew angrier. He drank even more, chasing the long evenings with Benzedrine in the afternoons. “I will never do this again,” he said on the morning that he disappeared. He had scheduled an appointment with a labor organizer, and before he left he took a swig of Teacher’s from the bottle that hung from the window on a string. He thought I hadn’t noticed.

  He vanished, as they put it, “without a trace.” A few items about the disappearance of Milo Fitzgerald appeared in the local paper, but they, too, vanished in a few days, and from that point onward I was nothing if not conscious of the gap between the life I knew, and the life the world acknowledged.

  Which is why, of course, I looked for my father in The Book of the Unknown Dead that day. Had he been one of the hobos? The man who had jumped? The one in the back of the limo?

  “But I never finished,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Curphey called.”

  • • •

  He was in his lab coat, pipe in his mouth, paging through a manila folder and talking on the black telephone when I walked in. He looked up, narrowed his eyes, and said, “May I call you right back?” He hung up and nodded at me. “Sit down, Ben.”

  I did.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”

  “You have?”

  “What you said about the diary.”

  “What about it?”

  “You said it was in the Monroe home. But Captain Hamilton sent his men to her home and found nothing.”

  Captain Hamilton.

  “You didn’t take it, did you?”

  I lied: “No.”

  “Where is it?”

  I said nothing.

  “Look, I understand the pressures here, Ben. Really. Which is why you should relax. You deserve to. You haven’t had a break in quite a while.”

  “It’s been busy.”

  “I know. But a man has to live. A man has to take care of himself. I worry that you’re not.” He slid an envelope emblazoned with the LACCO logo across the desk.

  “Open it.”

  I did: It contained one round-trip TWA ticket to Cleveland.

  “Cleveland?”

  “I want you to go on vacation, and not think about your job. And not worry about Marilyn Monroe. So we’ve arranged for you to spend some time in Cleveland. A
t the Pick-Carter. You heard of it?”

  “I’ve hardly even heard of Cleveland.”

  “It’s a lovely hotel. You can only do your job when you’re thinking clearly.”

  “I’m thinking clearly.”

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  A voice at the door: “Dr. Curphey?”

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  His secretary. “May I see you for a second, please.”

  Curphey looked at me as he left the office.

  I tapped my finger on his desk and looked around, at the window, the TV, the golf clubs . . . and the bookshelf:

  Volumes of history, psychology, forensics . . . and The Enemy Within by Robert Kennedy.

  Bingo.

  I took the book down from the shelf and opened it.

  “Dear Dr. Curphey,” read the inscription on the inside plate: “With thanks and gratitude. Yours ever, Bobby.”

  24.

  I was on the second floor of the library on Fifth, reading The Enemy Within by the green light of a lawyer’s lamp on a long oak table. The Monroe diary sat to my right. It was late, I didn’t know what time, and I was alone except for the bum who slept with his head on crossed arms two tables ahead. He kept moving in his sleep, snakelike. A severe librarian sat behind the desk in the middle of the room.

  I lit a cigarette. I dragged and tried to tamp the ash, but there was no ashtray. I set the butt on the edge of the desk and returned to the book.

  In 1955, Robert Kennedy was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, also known as the McClellan Committee. Senator John McClellan, D-Arkansas, was chairman. The investigation into Teamster president Dave Beck and, later, Jimmy Hoffa began when the subcommittee started nosing into mob and Teamster involvement in the manufacturing and distribution of clothes for the military.