The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “There were parties,” Otash said, chewing his cigar. “Extreme ones.”

  When Pat was away, Peter stocked the house with starlets and would-be singers, waitresses and child acrobats, girls who did nothing but walk around in bikinis with thumbs in their mouths, girls who sat stoned and nude with legs spread on the edges of beds. There was music and booze, and when the orgies ended, often around dawn, the president would take one or two of his favorite “kids” back to his hotel.

  That is why the house had bugs: “And I don’t mean cockroaches,” Otash said. “Four bugs were installed. In the bedroom, on the phones. Numerous tapes were made of Marilyn and Jack in the act of love.”

  “Did you hear Bobby Kennedy on a tape, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the Lawford house?”

  “The Monroe house.”

  “There were bugs in the Brentwood hacienda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the tapes confirm that Bobby and Marilyn had an affair?”

  “Of course . . . sure. Bobby and Marilyn were recorded many times.”

  “Were tapes recorded at Marilyn’s house up until her death?”

  “They were recorded on the day of her death . . . the night of her death.”

  “A conversation with Kennedy?”

  “Bobby Kennedy.”

  “And what were they talking about?”

  “It was a violent argument. She was saying, ‘I feel passed around! I feel used! I feel like a piece of meat!’”

  “And you heard this tape?”

  “One of them.”

  “One.”

  “There were two. One belonged to the Kennedys.”

  “And the second?”

  “It was Marilyn’s. They’ve torn that place upside down trying to find it. That’s why there was a delay before anyone was called.”

  “They didn’t find it?”

  “They wondered if I knew where it was. I didn’t. I would have told them. The only one who thinks she knows for sure is Jeanne Carmen.”

  “And what does Jeanne Carmen say?”

  “Marilyn hid it in a bus locker.”

  “Well, that should tell you something.”

  “You know how many bus lockers there are in this city, guy?”

  52.

  882 North Doheny Drive is a triplex on the corner of Cynthia Street. Sinatra’s accountant manages the place, which is why the singer’s secretary lives there. So does Jeanne Carmen, who had more than once been the willing if not eager recipient of the Chairman of the Board’s affections, which were as changeable as the weather in San Francisco, where both he and Tony Bennett had so glibly left their hearts. Marilyn herself had first lived at Doheny before she married DiMaggio. She moved back after divorcing the playwright. She stayed there, a kind of way station, on her way to the permanent digs—as permanent as her digs would ever be. She died only six months after moving to Brentwood.

  But you know that already.

  So do I.

  What I didn’t know was what Jeanne Carmen knew, or had been led to believe, about the tape.

  I went in through the lobby. The bell didn’t work, so I stood by the mailboxes smoking before someone emerged, a woman with her dog, and I climbed three flights to 3A, the alphanumeric I had found next to the initials J.C. on the mailbox.

  I knocked.

  A voice: “Hang on a second.”

  A dog barked—one of those precious teacups that use noise to overcompensate for the fact that they can only shake and pee. Jeanne opened the door three fingers and peered out. She wore a bathrobe. Her blond hair was mussed. Roots peeked from the scalp, looking vaguely skunkish. She wore no makeup. I wondered if she’d been up all night. Maybe I had woken her.

  “Who are you?”

  I tipped my hat. “Ben Fitzgerald, ma’am. Friend of Jo Carnahan’s.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We met at Ciro’s. You said I looked like Don Taylor, ma’am. You said Shakespeare—”

  “Get out of here.”

  “You said Shakespeare said ‘more’s the pity.’”

  “Shakespeare said a lot of things. It’s no concern of mine.”

  She started to close the door. I put my foot in it. “If I could just have a minute of your time.”

  “You already had a minute.”

  “One more, then. One question, really.”

  She opened the door slightly.

  “You told Miss Carnahan about a tape.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You know Jo Carnahan.”

  “Socially.”

  “You said Marilyn had a tape.”

  “Who said anything about a tape?”

  “Jo, ma’am. She said—”

  “That bitch.”

  A voice from inside: “Jeanne?” A man. Was this one of her pill parties? Or was she entertaining one of her extracurriculars? “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Wrong number,” she said, and closed the door.

  Sure, a Big Story was out there somewhere in our sprawling, sports-starved metropolis just waiting for Benjamin Fitzgerald, deputy coroner, to break it. But a guy can get discouraged—especially when he hasn’t eaten in twenty-four hours.

  So I ordered the ham and eggs at the first restaurant I could find, an evil place where I discovered mold on the bottom of the pie that I wanted just to tide me over before the eggs. The old woman behind the counter didn’t seem to have washed her hair. Her hairnet looked like a clogged drain. That should have tipped me off. I didn’t want the eggs anymore—they were probably filled with shells or blood—so I canceled my order.

  She handed me the bill, but when I reached into my wallet I realized I had nothing left. “Look, I have to get money.”

  “Oldest trick in the book.”

  “I don’t have money, ma’am. But I can leave my hat.”

  “It’s not much of a hat. Not worth the price of that pie.”

  “That pie was garbage.”

  “I made that pie.”

  “There’s mold on the bottom.”

  “That isn’t mold,” she said. “It’s tapioca.”

  • • •

  “—overdrawn,” said the bank manager. “We’ve been trying to contact you. We’re quite troubled about checks made out for an inordinate amount of money, and have no choice but to close—”

  “I didn’t write any checks.”

  “Let’s not drift down this tiresome route, Mr. Fitzgerald. Trust me: I’ve traveled it often. It has been a trying day and I have all but exhausted my patience. We’ve been trying to contact you.”

  “I’ve been on vacation.”

  “That’s not what we heard.”

  “Oh?”

  “We tracked you down at work,” he said. “They said that you were fired.”

  53.

  Taking everything into account, what action, if any, do you think the U.S. should take at this time in regard to Cuba?

  Bomb, invade . . . 10%

  Trade embargo . . . 13%

  Something short of war . . . 26%

  Hands off . . . 22%

  Other action . . . 4%

  Don’t know . . . 23%

  I don’t know, either, Doc. No one does. I am reading the Gallup poll results in the Times as you try to make the Sony work. It has stopped again. When it finally kicks in, you stare at the turning tape, sweat beading on your forehead as you light another cigarette and say, “Put the paper down.”

  I do.

  “Now continue.”

  “Where were we?” I manage a yawn.

  “You went to pay for the pie. You didn’t have the money.”

  “Worse,” I said. “I didn’t have a job.”

  • • •

  I returned to the place where I had spent my adult working life, the rat’s labyrinth of dark halls and empty offices, and heard the giggling just before I saw the man with a brush. He was repainting the name on my office door. My name had been removed; it was
now nothing but a splotch that lay, along with my postcard from the Pick-Carter in Cleveland, on the papers that covered the floor.

  “’Scuse me.” I said.

  The painter turned to me.

  “This is my office,” I said.

  “So why is Archie in there?”

  I heard the giggling again. Through the half-opened door, I saw feet on a desk. They began to jiggle as the man named Archie whispered, then laughed again.

  I stepped inside.

  He was nuzzling the phone, his broad grin stretching over most of his face. His right hand was cupped over the receiver and mouth. I stood until he caught my eye, put his hand on the receiver, and said, “May I help you?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just working.”

  “Working.”

  “The daily grind. All that. Another day, another three-fifty an hour. And all that.”

  “I mean what are you doing here?”

  “Oh, here.”

  “My office.”

  “Yours?” He looked around, surprised. “What’s your name?”

  “Ben Fitzgerald.”

  “Oh, hey, Ben. Tell me: How are your ‘other opportunities’ going?”

  “What?”

  “The ones you ‘left’ to ‘pursue.’”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The memo said you left LACCO ‘to pursue other opportunities.’ In Cleveland.”

  “Who said Cleveland?”

  “Who else?” he said. “Curphey.”

  • • •

  I found him on the sixth hole, a bunker cut within the putting surface of the Riviera Country Club, built over the sets that director Thomas Ince had constructed on the slopes of the Santa Ynez Canyon in 1912. Back then, it was known as Inceville, where the director made hundreds of movies that no one remembers now. You could walk through ersatz Japanese villages, Puritan settlements, and Swiss streets seven miles up the hills from the spot where Sunset ends at the Pacific Coast Highway. The place only lasted ten years. The first fire hit in 1916. By 1922 it was already a ghost town.

  Now it’s the Pacific Palisades.

  “Dr. Curphey?” I said.

  He stopped, looked up, and turned. He was smoking his pipe. “Ben.”

  “I want to speak with you.”

  “Another time.”

  “Was I fired?”

  “I said another time.”

  I grabbed the club from his hands. “I went on vacation like you told me to go on vacation and I forgot what you told me to forget but I came back to the office this morning to find that someone had taken my job.”

  “Archie didn’t take your job,” Curphey said. “He earned it. He’s a hardworking, moral young man. That’s what we need in this office.”

  “I perjured myself for you.”

  “And you stole a diary from the Monroe house. And you stole Nembutals from the Monroe file. And you stole the key to the Evidence Room. Now we asked you to get help.”

  “I was never offered help.”

  “You turned it down.”

  “I don’t have a job. What am I supposed to do?”

  “I’m sure you’re familiar with the classifieds. I suggest you check them out. Now, please give me my club.”

  “I have a son to support.”

  “Oh? I hear he’s being supported by a gangster. Who happens to be fucking your wife.”

  I swung the iron straight into Curphey’s crotch. The pipe popped from his mouth, ashes burning on the kikuyu grass. He staggered backward with an “oof,” clutching his groin even as I felt the hands grab me from behind: one guy on each side as they dragged me, kicking, down the fairway.

  You can see the pictures, Doc. They show me struggling, maybe even “drunk.” Well, that’s the power of suggestion. But if someone handed you them and said, “He was drunk and disorderly,” wouldn’t you agree?

  It sure looks that way.

  Lots of things do.

  “And that was when it hit me,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Curphey said I’d stolen the key to the Evidence Room.”

  “So?”

  “It was true,” I say. “And I still had it.”

  54.

  Rewind, Doc, to the point in the tape where I first entered the Evidence Room, carrying the log that Carl 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 wanted No. 3. I knew what it was for now. So I went back to LACCO, unlocked the Sheriff’s Evidence Room with that first purloined key, and opened the box. I removed the small red key, left Pneumonia Hall, and drove back out to Brentwood, where I waited for the sun to fall. At 8:51, I parked in the cul-de-sac and walked under the dark jacarandas down Sixth to another cul-de-sac. There was a locked gate to the right. It fronted on a driveway. I vaulted over it, walked along the strip of land between the driveway and another house, and all the way back to Miss Monroe’s pool.

  I walked left along the narrow lawn to the window of the room where she had died. I pulled myself up and dropped down.

  At the end of the hall, I stepped into the living room. The furniture had been removed. Nothing was left, not even the feeling you sometimes get from empty houses—a lingering sense of the energy that had once existed. It was a battery without juice, the husk of an orange in a garbage can.

  But the mail was there. The post office had kept delivering it. They always do. It was under the door:

  A bill from I. Magnin’s, a bill from BankAmericard, a letter from someone named “Peters,” and (last) an envelope from the Greyhound Bus Station in North Hollywood.

  I opened the Greyhound envelope, a federal offense. But everything I had done recently was some kind of offense. And they were going to kill me anyway.

  Inside I found a bill for bus locker #15.

  • • •

  The light was low, the place gray and airless. Sad army posters peeled from the walls, and vending machines with chocolate bars that had seen better days were tethered to the wall sockets by mouse-eaten cords. The few conscious souls who prowled the station at this hour (Mexican convicts and tea freaks, wasted girls with sullen come-ons who trailed strands of bleached hair like an army of balding Rapunzels) moved like some sentient species of sea plankton.

  I walked to the long wall of lockers, put the key in #15, and found what I was looking for.

  55.

  Amahl and the Night Visitors is a one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti. It’s a Christmas classic, the first opera composed specifically for TV, broadcast live on NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame on Christmas Eve, 1951. It was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Adoration of the Magi, which Menotti saw on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in—

  “What does that have to do with anything?” you ask.

  I point to the evidence:

  5. Amahl and the Night Visitors

  “So?”

  “It’s what I found at Colony Records.”

  “Why did you go to Colony Records?”

  “It was the only place that I could think of that would have a reel-to-reel.”

  • • •

  The store was on La Cienega near Sunset, a labyrinth of walls stocked with dusty used records (The Music Man); plastic-wrapped new ones (101 Strings, Bill Cosby); and rows of reel-to-reel tapes. Amahl and the Night Visitors was playing when I walked in, the man with the clipped Vandyke behind the front counter closing his eyes as he conducted the unseen orchestra with a pencil.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He looked up.

  I showed him the Sony tape I had found in the bus locker. “I really want
to hear this,” I said, “and wondered if—”

  “We’re already listening.”

  “But it’s Henry Mancini.”

  That seemed to comfort him.

  At first my tape was filled with odd sounds—clicking and indistinct. Hangers jangling in a closet. Laughter and someone talking in a vague way on the phone. But it wasn’t long before I heard the unmistakable sound of sex.

  “That isn’t ‘Moon River,’” the manager said.

  “No.”

  “It’s not ‘Baby Elephant Walk,’ either.” He turned the tape off. “I think you had better leave.”

  From the envelope you now remove a series of photos, each showing a close-up of a man’s terrified face, each more savage and brutal than the last.

  “Why did you beat up the photographer?” you ask.

  “I didn’t.”

  “When you left Colony Records, you saw Duane Mikkelson sitting in a car, and you beat him to a pulp.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, someone did,” you say. “If it wasn’t you—”

  It’s true that, when I left the store, I saw the car across the street. I walked to it and stared through the window at Mikkelson’s grinning mouth. It’s true that I pulled him out onto the street. It’s true that I threw him onto the ground, put my shoe under his chin, and told him to drop the camera.