The Empty Glass

by J. I. Baker

  “You sonnavabitch,” he said. “Cheating on your wife.”

  “I never cheated—”

  “The camera doesn’t lie.”

  “But cameramen do.”

  From the cars around us, four men emerged in dungarees and plaid shirts. The first was the same psychopathically grinning Jimmy Cagney with the porkpie hat I had seen at Triple XXX. He stood with the three others, Irish thugs who looked ready to plant me in the pavement—but they picked up Mikkelson instead, and hung him in the air from the back of his suit like a scarecrow. His feet kicked, swimming in nothing, as Cagney slammed his fist into the shutterbug’s nose—and another man grabbed hold of the camera.

  Blood.

  “Hey!” Mikkelson said. “I work for you guys.”

  Flash!

  This went on until he could hardly speak, his face the pulpy tomato you see here in the pictures.

  Now you ask: “What did he mean by ‘I work for you guys’?”

  “He meant LAPD.”

  “How do you know?”

  Captain Hamilton stepped out from one of the cars. He took the tape and the diary and then arrested me: “For assault and battery,” he said.

  “Don’t get fresh,” I said as Cagney patted down my pants.

  “He’s a comedian, see,” the captain said. “Hey, comedian. Ever hear the joke about the man who beat up a photographer?”

  “No.”

  “He went to jail,” he said, opening my wallet. “Where’s your license?”

  “In my wallet.”

  “All I see is this.” He handed me the Get Out of Jail Free card. “It won’t work. You go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go—”

  56.

  I did not collect two hundred dollars.

  I was cuffed and searched in the hall on the concrete against the red wall; they patted me down and removed my property, putting my belt and shoes in plastic bags. They even took my socks off. They took the handcuffs off and patted me down again, face hard against the wall.

  “You liked frisking me so much, you had to do it a second time?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” one cop said. “And your sister was there, too.”

  I waited to be booked in the holding tank. I waited for I wasn’t sure how long, until—

  In the Booking Area, the jailer stood behind a desk against cheap wood paneling. On the desk was a typewriter.

  They took my fingerprints on an ink pad on a small shitty table near the desk. They took my photo from two angles, front and side. My booking number was displayed on a metal rectangular box that extended, like a sideways T, from a galvanized pole. The jailer loosened it with a screw, moving it up to just under my chin.

  “Name?” the jailer asked.

  “Ben Fitzgerald.”

  “DOB.”

  “Seven/eleven/twenty-nine.”

  “Occupation.”

  “Deputy coroner, Suicide Notes and Weapons. Or, well, it used to be.”

  “Used to?”

  “I’m not sure it’s my job anymore.”

  “Unemployed,” he said. “Sex?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Yeah, and your sister was there, too. Sex?”

  “Male.”

  “Height.”

  “Five foot eleven inches.”

  “Any medical conditions?”

  “No.”

  The jailer typed all this on the form. I signed it. The bail was preset. They let me make one phone call. I called Verona Gardens:

  “Rose,” I said. “It’s Ben. I’m calling from—”

  “That hotel?”

  “Worse. I only have five minutes. Max okay?”

  “What is this about?”

  “I need help.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m in jail. I can explain.”

  “Ben.”

  “I need bail.”

  “You think I have the money?”

  “You’re dating Johnny. He’s a mobster. Maybe he could peel off some of that Monopoly money and head on over to the—”

  “He’s not that kind of mobster.”

  “What other kind is there?”

  “I really have to go.”

  “Time’s up,” the man said.

  • • •

  There were five male Felony cells with heavy old bars in the jail. Mine was 10 × 10 and had a toilet, a sink, a mirror, and a bed. They gave me a bag of hygiene supplies (toothbrush, soap, and a towel) and locked me in.

  So I waited and I smoked. I don’t know how much time passed. All I knew was that the pile of butts kept growing. It was like this place, Doc. There were no windows; the only light came from the bare bulb on the ceiling.

  They slipped the Mirror under the cell door. In it, I found an item about a man named Ben Fitzgerald, a former member of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office who, drunk and disorderly, had beaten a photographer and was now being held on bail in the Men’s Central Jail on Bauchet:

  Fitzgerald’s wife recently filed for divorce on account of “physical and mental cruelty” and is living in seclusion with their son because, sources say, she is “afraid for her life.”

  • • •

  At some point the guard slipped a tray of food under the cell door. I stared at the congealed Salisbury steak and the cup of soup, a small carton of milk smelling like the refrigerator. I wasn’t hungry. I let the tray sit and stretched out on the bed.

  In the middle of the night—or what seemed like night—I woke to the sound of scraping. Two rats were eating the food that I had left behind.

  In the morning, they were dead.

  The guard was unlocking the door. “Rise and shine,” he said. “Someone paid your bail, mister.”

  “Rose?”

  “No,” he said. “Your brother.”

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 23

  57.

  I don’t have a brother, but this is what I knew about my “brother,” Doc: He drank a quart of Scotch and smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. He spent Hollywood nights in a Caddy filled with girls he called his “Little Sweeties.” He’d been an LAPD dick for ten years but ran afoul of Chief William Parker so went out on his own as a private eye. But when he was convicted of doping a horse at Santa Anita, his license was suspended. That didn’t stop him, though.

  He just went underground.

  His face was half jowls and half eyes. I’m repeating myself, but listen: His eyes were black and they followed you even when his head did not, like Jesus in paintings. He wore paisley shirts open at his wide collar, his chest hair matching his white sideburns. My brother looked a lot like Fred Otash.

  That’s because he was Fred Otash.

  Now you tell me that I’m crazy: “This is beginning to sound like paranoid schizophrenia.”

  “Come on.”

  “A common delusion among schizos is that they’re being singled out for harm—the government is taping their phone calls or a coworker is poisoning their coffee or they are being stalked by a master wiretapper who shows up at the jail and pretends to be their brother.”

  “But he did.”

  “Sure,” you say. “See what I mean?”

  “Heya, brother,” Fred said.

  “I don’t have a brother.”

  “He gets like this,” Fred said to the guard. “Goes through phases and all. It’s getting worse. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Take care of him, huh?”

  “Sure,” Fred said. “It’s what I’m here for.”

  “He’s gonna kill me,” I said.

  Fred shot the guard another sad look.

  “Best of luck, buddy,” the guard said.

  He left us alone.

  Fred took the Smith & Wesson from under his jacket and held it to my gut. “Are you ready to behave?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Say ‘yes,’ baby brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He kissed me on the forehead. “I’m sure you know why I’m here.”
/>   “I have an idea.”

  “A tape. A Sony reel-to-reel.”

  “Captain Hamilton took it.”

  “But the tape he took was not the tape you found. I’m sure you can imagine the surprise when we played it for some powerful people, brother, who were wakened in the night to hear an opera.”

  “An opera.”

  • • •

  Now you turn your tape off and remove another from Evidence: Item No. 5. You thread its brown strands into the take-up reel, REWIND, FAST FORWARD, and PLAY:

  “Oh Mother!” a boy soprano sings. “. . . There’s never been such a sky—”

  You hit STOP. “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” you say. You light another cigarette, drag, and blow smoke in a stream to the ceiling.

  “You never know what you might find in a bus station locker after midnight,” I say.

  “I know what you found in the bus station locker after midnight, Ben, and it was not Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera. Now for the last time—”

  Where’s the tape?” Fred asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  “Oh, really?” He reached inside his pocket, withdrawing a small purple dinosaur:

  The Toy Surprise.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Hey, it’s swell to see you, kid,” he said. “It’s been a while. Now, let’s talk about old times.”

  He led me from the jail. Out the front door, we stepped straight into a camera crew, the TV lights flooding my eyes.

  “Good evening, dear ones,” Jo said. “This is Annie Laurie.”

  58.

  We drove out to Point Dume. I’d always thought it was spelled “Doom.” That day it might as well have been. It was nice in Jo’s DeSoto with the top down, the wind in her hair and kerchief, her sunglasses on though it was overcast. The city vanished as we followed the PCH, past shuttered nightclubs along the cliffs and the crashing waves that I could hear but only vaguely saw in the haze that led out to the horizon.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A place I know. In Malibu.”

  “Why?”

  “You have to ask? They’re after you.”

  It started to rain. She put the top up. I turned the radio dial until I found a working station.

  “Not Ricky Nelson,” she said.

  “I like Ricky Nelson.”

  “Something else.”

  “You know the words to ‘Young World.’ I saw you singing them.”

  She took a drag. The ash crackled. “Cigarette?”

  “No thanks. I quit.”

  “Since when?”

  “This morning.”

  “You liar.”

  “Coming from you,” I said, “that’s rich. Don’t you think you have a lot of explaining to do?”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question.”

  I don’t remember everything she said, Doctor, but I remember that she said she’d met Captain James Hamilton in 1959 while following a lead: Dragnet’s Jack Webb had asked LAPD’s Captain Parker to use his bug man, Phelps, to spy on Webb’s former wife, Julie London.

  Captain Hamilton took Jo to drinks at the Villa Capri to convince her to lay off Webb, the LAPD’s PR puppy. Over martinis and cigars, in exchange for keeping quiet in her column about Webb, he gave her scandal-sheet stuff about Liberace’s trouser-chasing and Robert Mitchum’s pot-smoking as his hand slipped under her skirt, a brush meant not for her skin but for his. Still, she twitched in a way that indicated it was not altogether unwelcome.

  It wasn’t unwelcome for years.

  “He kept saying he would leave his wife but never did,” she said. “They never do. I wasn’t sure I wanted it anyway. What we had was special—it wasn’t mundane. No one took the garbage out. No one nagged about feeding the cats.”

  “You don’t have cats.”

  “That’s not the point. He called it The Iron Rules of Love: We would never have birthdays or anniversaries; we could never celebrate, but so? We didn’t have the boring, nagging details and chores that collect around love like barnacles, and make it sink.”

  “Some metaphor.”

  “Take it or leave it. And things were good. Until.”

  “What.”

  “He wanted me to follow you. He threatened me. But everything ended last night.”

  His wife was out of town, she said. His son was sleeping in the bedroom. He beat Jo up and left her on the bedroom floor. In the middle of the night, she walked down the hall to the living room where the captain sat, an empty glass in hand, passed out on the couch.

  Beside him lay the Monroe diary.

  “The diary?” I said.

  “I have it, Ben.”

  59.

  The water had left a green circle around the drain in the bathroom of the Malibu motel. The pipes shrieked when you turned the faucets on. A torn piece of suicide note or love letter floated on the surface of the water that still ran in the toilet. I removed the cover and pulled the chain and stopped the water running, but behind the shower curtain it still dripped.

  We were in the bathroom. She dropped her trench coat, and I saw for the first time the ruined dress with handprints, purple bruises, and the spots of brown that might have been blood on her skin.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “He was careful not to hit the parts that you can see. That was the important thing. He hit so hard the bottle broke. The bottom ended up on the mantel top,” she said, slipping from her clothes.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You won’t.” She felt the front of my trousers with the flat of her right hand.

  Pearl earrings fell. High heels clattered, too, and torn stockings slipped like Slinkys. The buckled door wouldn’t lock, but we shut it. She backed against it, breasts covered with the imprints of my lips on account of the lipstick she had transferred to my face.

  I dropped my trousers to my ankles and pushed in. Her body adjusted, face turned to one side, heart beating in a blue elongated pulse I could see up the side of her neck.

  She quoted Lana Turner: “You’re my man,” she said.

  Afterward, we lay side by side on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. We drank Canadian Club from tiny bottles. There were lots of tiny bottles. We’d lit candles, too—some kind of sandalwood that mingled with the smell of surf.

  “Let me see the diary,” I said.

  “Not so fast, Ben.”

  “That’s not what you said twenty minutes ago.”

  “I didn’t need to say it twenty minutes ago.” I turned my back against her breasts. She folded her arms around my chest. “Let’s begin with what we know,” she whispered. “What do we know about her last day alive?”

  “She seemed happy,” I said. “Pat Newcomb spent the night in the Telephone Room. Marilyn spent a sleepless night in her own bedroom, on the phone. In the morning, Marilyn asked for oxygen, the Hollywood cure for a hangover. There wasn’t any, so she drank grapefruit juice. She shared it with Newcomb. At some point, she and Pat got into an argument.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “The fact that Pat had slept all night but Marilyn had not.”

  “Sure, but why would a woman who never slept begrudge her best friend sleep? A friend she’d invited over? A guest. Did she expect that Newcomb would spend the night awake with her, watching her talk on the phone and pop pills?”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Because it didn’t happen,” Jo said. “The argument wasn’t about sleep.”

  “What was it about then?”

  She stood up and opened her purse.

  60.

  I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again:

  The diary was bound in leather with yellow pages on which blue handwriting had broken all the college rules. The word MEMORIES was embossed on the cover in the same gold that edged the pap
er. It was a dime-a-dozen diary—available at any drugstore. But now I knew that it could bring down the government. Now I knew that Marilyn had died because of it, and that others would die because of it. It had jeopardized my own life and that of my family. So you ask again: If I had known, would I have just walked away? Let it destroy the girl alone instead of both of us?

  I still can’t answer that.

  I read again the pages I had torn from it:

  August 4, 2:01 p.m.

  All my hair things in the bag I told you about, the one that I kept in the bathroom: They’re gone. I couldn’t find them. I told Pat about this, and she said not to worry.

  “Don’t get so upset,” she said.

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. You who don’t have to wake every morning at 5 for a call for a movie that—

  That was where it ended. I put this fragment, like a puzzle piece, back inside The Book of Secrets, and read:

  —no one wants to see on the lot where Whitey is waiting and the whole crew is waiting for me to be beautiful and you don’t understand. You just couldn’t.

  “Mrs. Murray!” But I didn’t need to shout since she was there like she came from the shadows like she was watching anyway and always watching. “Yes, Marilyn.”

  “Have you seen the bag of hair things?”

  “No, Marilyn.”

  Things are going missing all the time now every morning something new has disappeared.

  The doorbell rang then. Pat was out by the pool she was still mad. “You can’t hold a press conference,” she said.

  “But sure I can. I’m going to blow this whole thing wide open.”

  “Marilyn, it’s the craziest thing—”

  The knock came at the door.