The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  The dues and savings of the Teamsters were being used by Teamster leaders, President Beck in particular, to buy homes, racehorses, Sulka robes, “twenty-one pairs of nylons, outboard motors, shirts, chairs, love seats, rugs, a gravy boat, a biscuit box, a 20-foot deep freeze, two aluminum boats, a gun, a bow tie, six pairs of knee drawers.” The money was also being loaned to people like Morris “Moe” Dalitz, former member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, who used it to build the Desert Inn and Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.

  Robert Kennedy, crusader, crossed the country in search of more information. His first stop: Los Angeles. His first contact: Captain James Hamilton of L.A.’s Intelligence Division.

  Kennedy met Hamilton and Lieutenant Joseph Stephens, chief of the Police Labor Squad, on November 14, 1956. He talked to members of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. He talked to Anthony Doria, mobster Johnny Dio’s friend. He heard about members of the Retail Clerks of San Diego who had been beaten by goons. He heard about the hoods who had tried to take over the L.A. Union of Plumbers and Steamfitters.

  There were unsolved murders, bodies in barrels, and the story of the L.A. union organizer who had been told to “stay out of San Diego.” Messages on cocktail napkins: “Stay out of San Diego.” Phone calls: “No San Diego or you die.”

  But the man went to San Diego. He intended to organize jukebox operators. He stayed at the Beachcomber Motel. And one night, after a few drinks at the bar, he was ambushed on the way back to his room. Knocked on the back of the head with a blackjack. When he woke, he was lying on Black’s Beach. A seagull pecked at his head, blood on its beak. He sat up, waved the birds away—and that was when he felt the pain in his backside.

  He wanted to get out of San Diego. He never should have gone to San Diego. But the pain was so bad that he couldn’t drive. He called the ambulance. At the hospital, they removed a cucumber from his rectum. It still had a price sticker on it. Back in his car, at the hotel, a note on the passenger seat read:

  “Next time it will be a watermelon.”

  I put the book down and went in search of timelines and logistics. I combed through the last few copies of the L.A. Times, tracking the Kennedys’ whereabouts from August 4 to yesterday.

  And this is what I found:

  Bobby had been scheduled to speak at the American Bar Association Conference on Monday, August 6, so he spent the weekend with Ethel and kids at the Bates Ranch in Gilroy, three hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles. On Saturday, Marilyn’s last day, everyone went horseback riding.

  On Sunday, Bobby attended mass at 9:30 A.M. in Gilroy. “He was without his usual flashy smile and shook hands woodenly with those that welcomed him,” one paper said. “Perhaps the cares of the administration are weighing heavily on him.”

  Perhaps.

  I also found this from Dorothy Kilgallen’s column in the New York Journal American:

  Marilyn Monroe’s health must be improving. She’s been attending select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the town again. In California, they’re circulating a photograph of her that certainly isn’t as bare as the famous calendar, but is very interesting. And she’s cooking in the sex-appeal department, too; she’s proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his prime. So don’t write off Marilyn Monroe as finished.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. The librarian stood above me, wiry gray hair and granny glasses. Dark suit. “Sir,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t smoke in here.”

  “I wondered why there were no ashtrays.”

  “Anyway, we’re closed,” she said, checking her wrist with one swift gesture. She had a little mustache. “It’s ten P.M.”

  “I didn’t notice the time. I’ve been reading.”

  “And smoking. We’re closing.”

  “I need to use the men’s room.”

  She told me where it was. I picked up the Monroe diary and noticed, as I stood, that the homeless man’s right wrist had slipped from his black coat. On it: an expensive wristwatch.

  • • •

  The bathroom door was ajar. The light would not turn on. I heard dripping in the darkness and touched things I didn’t want to touch as I made my way to what I hoped were the urinals.

  I flushed and stepped back outside.

  I walked into Zoology and, through the parallel stacks, saw the homeless man going methodically through my briefcase. He was lifting it up by the handle, shaking out the papers inside, then bending to the floor.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize he was looking for the diary. They were all looking for it. I was carrying it, nervous: What would they do to get it? I paged to the entries I had not yet read and ripped out as much as I could. I shoved them into the back of my trousers, slipped The Book of Secrets between The Vertebrate Body and The World of Plankton, and walked toward the front room.

  The man was gone.

  So was my briefcase.

  25.

  The tavern on Melrose was near the blue tamale place. It was called Joe’s. And, no, since you ask, I don’t remember seeing a flash when I left the car. I figured I was being followed, but I never saw anyone on the sidewalk, with or without a camera. I never saw anyone across the street—at least not at first. The tavern had a sort of stucco, almost adobe, wall. That much I remember. And red neon in dark windows. That’s what you can see in the first of the photos they took of me, the photo you have here, Doctor, in the stack of evidence:

  4. A stained manila folder containing a number of 8 × 10 photographs

  In the third photo, taken twenty minutes later, you can see I am leaving the tavern.

  It’s hard to identify me in the first shot—they did not use a telephoto lens, and the name on the photo reads “Milo,” which is not my name.

  But in the third shot . . .

  “Can I do you for?” the bartender said. Like a bartender in a movie, he had a handlebar mustache and a neat red bow tie and was wiping out the inside of a pint glass with a white towel.

  “Wild Turkey, Joe. Neat.”

  “How’d you know my name is Joe?”

  “It’s the name on the bar.”

  “I’m not that Joe.”

  He poured.

  I smelled the damp hops. I saw the wood scored with pierced hearts and names of long-ago loves, the black lines from burned cigarettes and damp rings from a century’s worth of bottle bottoms. Wet cardboard cases of beer were stacked before the bathroom you could reach just past the pool table. The circular fan set high in the wall at the end of the hall blew out, I somehow knew, into the back of a parking lot where you would find a Dumpster filled with orange rinds and the greasy remains of onion rings and wax paper that had once lined the red plastic baskets.

  I lit a cigarette.

  “There a phone here?”

  “Of course.”

  There was always a phone. It was set in the dark wall near the front door and the cigarette machine. Inside was a light and a little seat near the dangling phone book.

  I called Jo.

  The phone, you know, kept ringing. Each ring was followed by a click. The smoke curled and rose to the top of the booth.

  “Hello?” A man’s metallic voice.

  I swallowed. “Jo there?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Who is this?” he said.

  I hung up.

  I put a dime into the Wurlitzer to the right of the front door and played B-7, “Young World,” by the good Ricky Nelson. I didn’t care that he was on that TV show people made fun of. He could really tear it up.

  I went back to the bar, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the pages I had torn from the diary.

  You had to put the pieces together. The writing wasn’t always legible. There were random scrawled words and names, like “HORSE BOOK OPEN” and “Roberta Linn.” Much of it did not make sense, but the stuff that did make sense made clear that, the we
ekend before Marilyn died, she had gone out to the place that Sinatra owned, a place half in California and half in Nevada, hence its name: Cal-Neva Lodge.

  The Nevada half featured gambling. You stepped past the exact geographical point where the states changed in the hall and found yourself in a casino once frequented by the likes of Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clara Bow, and William Randolph Hearst.

  On the weekend of July 28 and 29, Sinatra was performing in the Celebrity Showroom. He’d invited Marilyn to come, she wrote, “just for kicks.” But it wasn’t kicks. She had taken a lot of pills. She wrote about taking them as Sinatra sang “September Song” and there was champagne and vodka as the room blurred and music faded and she looked up to see a chandelier and ceiling tiles falling from the rain the night before. The tiles were falling on her. She was certain. And one tile became two. And three. Until—

  Now there was a flash from the street outside: lightning? No.

  A camera?

  I carried the pages to the front door and looked out.

  Duane Mikkelson, the guy from the Mirror, was taking pictures through the window on the sidewalk. He had the same Chiclet teeth that I remembered, crammed into the same gums that were too high when he smiled. The same sunglasses, even at night; the same fedora with the same press pass in it.

  I carried the pages past the pool table into the bathroom.

  It was dim and green, like an aquarium but without water. No windows.

  I locked the door. There was one stall. The toilet inside hadn’t been flushed since Grant took Richmond. I shut the cover and stood on it, reaching up for the ceiling tiles. They were all square-shaped and mostly stained with water that had turned yellow. I pushed one up, slid it over, pushed the pages I had ripped on top of another tile inside, then pulled the first tile back over the space.

  Dust filtered down. I coughed, wiped my hands against my pants, and jumped off the toilet.

  Back at the bar, I saw another flash.

  “It’s this one, see, Doc?” I point to the second picture in the file. “It’s closer; you can see me better, though the name on the photo here is, again, ‘Milo.’”

  In the third picture, I am standing outside and staring toward the camera, holding my hands above my eyes like an admiral. What you can’t see is the car—my car—below the lens. The windows had been shattered, the doors opened, and the seats slit with razors.

  My empty, torn briefcase sat on the front seat.

  Enter that into evidence, Doc.

  “It isn’t evidence,” you say.

  “Oh?”

  I stepped over the shattered glass, slipped onto the car seat, put the key in the ignition.

  But the Rambler didn’t start.

  I heard thunder. I looked back to the bar and, through the drops on the window, saw the bartender at the door.

  And that was when the cab pulled up.

  26.

  Weather we’re having,” the driver said over the sound of the wind wings.

  “Sure enough.”

  “Santa Anas, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “The devil’s wind, what they call them. What is that phrase? An ill wind blows no good.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sorry? Can’t hear you. Gotta speak up.”

  “I said I don’t know! I wouldn’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t want weather like this to continue.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Coyotes come down from the mountains. They say the other day a woman gave birth to a lion. Or a prince.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Mud slides and all that. One day it will all just continue, you know. The fires will start and not stop. They say that. It’s the end times. Like the Whore of Babylon. The woman who died. The actress. What’s her name?”

  “Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Oh, sure. You a churchgoing man?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh, no? Well, it’s all in the Bible. You don’t live in the mountains, do you?”

  “I told you. I live on Wilshire.”

  “Oh, sure. By the big hotel.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “Up-and-coming neighborhood, I heard.”

  “More or less. The place is smoky, though. And old.”

  “Oh, that can’t be good.”

  “No.”

  “Can’t be good for you, I mean,” he said. “Or your son.”

  “Well, I’m trying to—” I started to say save up enough money to move. But I stopped, of course. “How did you know that I have a son?”

  I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror. I thought I saw his mouth, too, smiling. But that must be a memory that I applied later, because I could not have seen his mouth. Not in the rearview mirror. I saw his eyes, though, in the light from a passing car as we drove onto a deserted road.

  “You told me you had a son,” he said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Of course you did. How else would I know?”

  “That’s my question.”

  “And my answer is: You told me.”

  The lights were dying behind us. “Where are we going?”

  “To your hotel.”

  “I don’t know where we are.”

  The radio was filled with static. It was tuned to a talk show featuring a man playing muted music and speaking in a throaty voice: “Whatever happened to ‘Good night, stars, I love you’? Or whatever happened to ‘Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight’? Whatever happened to Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy? As the aging hand of time runs her fingers through my hair, all I can think of is: Whatever happened to ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep’?”

  The driver adjusted the knob, the passing stations fuzzy and crackling. Here and there he got a signal:

  “—live, coming to you from the world-famous Cocoanut Grove where—”

  “—on the floor of the bathroom as the children—”

  “—cruise with a throng of the other Kennedy clansmen Sunday and then a bit of solitude, just the president and Mrs. Kennedy, before they part today.”

  We were moving through the hills, lightning in the clouds. I figured we were taking the back roads around 101, what locals call Freeway 101, following the old thoroughfare that linked the Spanish missions. The roads are mostly rural, black stretches heading into a midnight broken only by abandoned hotels and railroad quarries and gas stations lit by Coke machines. There weren’t any cars, and though for maybe twenty minutes I contemplated pulling on the handle and jumping into the night, we were speeding, and a roll across that pavement would have killed me.

  We finally pulled up a winding muddy canyon road. The words TRIPLE XXX RANCH were set in dead neon on the arched entrance.

  “Right,” the driver said, parking just under the sign. The wings went back and forth. “That’ll be five sixty.”

  “This isn’t my building.”

  His eyes lifted in the mirror. “You asked me to drive you. I drove you. It’s a simple transaction: You owe me five sixty.”

  “I’m not paying you for leaving me out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I have ways of dealing with deadbeats.”

  He pushed his palm against the padded horn.

  Headlights from another car flashed through the rain on the windshield.

  Someone opened the cab’s back door, and I was yanked into the mud, staring up at a man with a psychopathically grinning Jimmy Cagney face and a porkpie hat as the cab pulled away, rolling through the arches.

  “You’re supposed to be on vacation,” the man said. He was short and wiry, like an Irish boxer. “Why aren’t you on vacation?”

  “I got bored.”

  “Where is The Book of Secrets?”

  Rain fell like a veil around his head.

  “I don’t know what—”

  There were other men. I hadn’t seen them at first, but now they were behind me. One of them picked me up, both hands un
der my armpits, and held me close to his hard heavy chest as the small man in the hat hauled off and punched me in the jaw.

  The night went white, my head rocking back. I blinked, lips drooling blood and rain, and stared at him. The headlights blinded me. He was a black shadow surrounded by light.

  “I’m not going to ask you again,” he said. “Where is The Book of Secrets?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He punched me again. Harder, this time. My head jolted back. I heard a crack. I saw stars. I saw more stars than were in the heavens. Or MGM. The second man tightened his grip as Cagney reached into his jacket pocket, LAPD shield flashing, and pulled out a cucumber.

  “It’s in the library,” I said.

  27.

  Ben.”

  I took the ice pack off my face and opened my eyes. As much as I could. They were bloody slits, but I could see Jo.

  She stood above me as I lay on a gurney near a moaning guy on yet another gurney just two feet away. She was dressed, as always, like Edith Head. She wore a clean-lined bias-cut cream dress with oversized pink buttons. (Don’t ask me how I know all this.) She wore jet earrings, too. At her sides, like matching luggage, sat a bag from I. Magnin and her purse.

  “Jo.”

  “Shh!”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven or so.”

  “That means nothing to me. Why are you here?”

  “Hospital called.”

  “Why?”

  “You put me down as next of kin.”

  “What?”

  “They asked for next of kin, and you said me.”

  “Must have been delirious.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m touched.”

  “Yeah, well, I was touched myself about a hundred times tonight, and right now I’m not feeling so great.”