by J. I. Baker
“The General is here,” Mrs. Murray said. “With Mr. Lawford.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
Well it didn’t seem possible he was in San Francisco he never showed up out of nowhere he always called.
“Well, I’m not ready. I don’t have my hair things.”
“Shall I tell him to go away?”
“Yes.”
Diary I went into the bedroom and closed the door. Well, I hadn’t slept and everything was over and they told me it was over and the only ones who love me are the guys who sit in the balcony and jerk off. Then there are all those clicks and sounds like someone else on the line once I heard a sort of voice I wonder if [redacted]
I looked at the bottle of pills on the table near the bed and tried to remember how many were there last night I counted them now. Fourteen. I had 14 pills. I looked for the napkin that I’d written notes on near the bed. On the napkin was the number 27 and the name [redacted].
[redacted] got them—
The knock on the door.
“Marilyn?” Mrs. Murray. “He’s outside.”
“Tell him I’m not here.”
“He knows you’re here.”
“Tell him I’m sleeping.”
I heard shouting.
“He won’t believe you. He’s upset. You never sleep. He needs to see you.”
“Well, then, tell him to wait. Tell him—”
Here there were two paragraphs of increasingly illegible writing; I could make out only a few words, like “transmitter” and “cordon,” until, at the very end of the diary, it became clear again:
A knocking at the door then Mrs. Murray’s voice and other voices Bobby and then Peter. I want to fall asleep again want to crawl in bed and disappear. It might be kind of nice to be finished. Now there is another knock and this one at the bedroom.
I wish you would all just leave me alone.
• • •
I closed the diary for the last time and said, “That still doesn’t answer the question.”
“What question?’
“What was the argument about?”
“You tell me, Mr. Mortician.”
“I’m not a mortician. I’m a deputy coroner.”
“Can’t we talk about something less grim?”
“Like what?”
“Us.”
“Is that really less grim?”
And in the Long, Deep Sigh Department . . .
She kept quoting Lana Turner.
We finally fell asleep after 2 A.M., the breeze coming over the balcony.
Toward dawn, I woke to find that she was no longer beside me. She was always getting up to smoke. I thought I heard music from a transistor down the beach. There were fires set by surfers on the shoreline.
I sat up in the heat beneath the sheets and saw Jo leaning, nude and smoking, against the balcony of reddish wood.
“You okay?” I asked. She didn’t hear. “Jo?”
She dropped the cigarette to the sand and climbed into bed, turning her back to me so that all I saw in the moonlight was the curve of her thighs.
I told her about Colony Records. I told her about Amahl and the Night Visitors. I told her about the tape.
“You think it got switched?” she asked.
“I guess we’ll find out in the morning.”
But in the morning, she was gone.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24
61.
It was hot. Thick green flies hummed among torn cocktail napkins and the bottles strewn about the balcony. The screen door was open. The radio was on. It was Sunday. I rubbed whatever was left of sleep from my eyes, sat up, and looked for Jo.
The bed was empty.
I ran out to the balcony and watched waves crashing on the beach I hadn’t seen the night before and looked down the cliff through the mist to the sand that ran unbroken, except for the rocks and the man with a stick and a dog, all the way to the shore.
Gulls screamed and picked at strands of seaweed and burned driftwood. There was nothing on the horizon, no line but just those black waves disappearing into mist.
She wasn’t there.
The diary and tape were gone.
So was the Greyhound key.
A note on the bedside table read: “Let’s break this thing wide open! Love, Jo.”
At eight-thirty, I turned the bedside Wilco to Annie Laurie Presents. I heard cheerful chatter about James Mason, Laurence Olivier, and Wally Cox. “Seems Wally Cox is not only a great comedian but also a magician, if you’ve seen his latest soap commercial, dear ones,” she said. “Well, Wally throws a cup of detergent and dirty clothes into a top-loading washer, then presto pulls the clothes out nicely clean. Some trick, dear ones! Oh, but I kid you, Wally. See you Friday! Kisses.”
At first I thought that Jo had developed a cold or was upset or something. She had the Annie Laurie voice but it was different. I couldn’t place it. When the time came for the call-in questions, I called the number that she’d given and got a busy signal. They called this segment the “Round Robin,” and it was preceded by the sound effect of a bird chirping. Yeah, I know: stupid, but that’s show business.
I was getting the busy signal, but I kept calling until her producer answered: “Annie Laurie Presents.”
“This is Ben Fitzgerald. I’m a friend of Jo’s.”
“Who?”
“Jo Carnahan.”
“So?”
“I need to talk to her. It’s important that you put me through.”
“I don’t think you know what’s going on, mister. . . .”
“Put me through.”
“What’s your question?”
“I need to talk to Jo.”
“And I need to know your question.”
So I told him.
Six minutes later, he flipped a switch and I was on:
“—morning, and welcome to Annie Laurie Presents. What’s your name?”
“Ben Fitzgerald.”
“Good morning, dear one. State your question.”
“What do you get,” I said, “when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”
“I beg your pardon?” Annie Laurie said. “Sir, please turn your radio off.”
I flipped the switch.
“I said, what do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“You’re not Jo.”
“I’m Annie Laurie. And I’m not sure what this has to do with—”
“Marilyn Monroe was murdered,” I said. “The Kennedys were involved. So was Captain James Hamilton of the LAPD, and no one wants to know the truth. There was no water glass. She didn’t take the pills.”
I went on for a while. I went on for a long while—until I realized I was talking into a void. They had cut me off. “Hello?”
I hung up and turned the radio back on, Annie Laurie saying: “—on good authority that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall will be at the gala premiere, to be held next Friday at Grauman’s. A fine time will be had by all. And while we’re discussing—”
I called the Ambassador Hotel and asked to be connected to Jo’s room. The phone kept ringing, until—
Someone picked up.
I heard breathing, something rattling.
“Jo?”
Someone hung up.
“Jo.”
62.
This is Sheila Dent from Panorama City,” a woman said on WOLA as the cab drove me down Wilshire. “As a loyal listener, Miss Laurie, I’d like to thank you for the two times you mentioned Soupy Sales on your show recently. I am an avid Soupy fan and just love to hear about him.”
“We all love Soupy, dear one,” Annie said.
“I’ve heard that he will be starring in a new TV series called something O’Toole. Can you tell me if—”
I lit a cigarette.
Tomorrow would be—
You know.
• • •
The man at the front des
k said that Ms. Carnahan was at WOLA in Burbank. She had been at the show all morning, he said. I told him it wasn’t possible, that the woman who was now Annie Laurie was not Jo Carnahan. Annie Laurie had changed yet again. The man at the front desk said that he was happy to take a message, if I cared to leave a message. I said I did not: “I think she’s here. Someone’s here. I need to see her. Call and tell her that it’s Ben Fitzgerald and I need to see her.”
“But, Mr. Fitzgerald,” he said. “With all due respect, you’re already here.”
“What?”
“Look.” He picked up the heavy reception book that sat on the desk and turned to the morning’s entries. At 7:15 A.M., a Mr. Ben Fitzgerald had signed in. “He hasn’t left,” he said. “You haven’t left.”
I ran through the lobby to the elevator.
“Sir!” he shouted. He dropped the phone and stepped out from behind the desk.
Elevator: fifth floor. Fourth.
The stairs were to my left. I took them all the way to [redacted].
• • •
She was on the bed, her head turned toward the puce curtains that blew in over the window and the fire escape overlooking the pool and the beach. Her back was propped against the headboard, eyes staring unblinking at the mirror above the dresser, her usually coiffed black hair mussed like a wig that had shifted. Her makeup was smeared, a lipstick stain on her cheek. She wore those dark false eyelashes.
The Wilco on the bedside table was tuned to Annie Laurie Presents. Annie Laurie hadn’t died. Annie Laurie was forever, the woman who was not Jo talking about Peter O’Toole, Maureen O’Hara, and Theodore Curphey. She quoted Curphey’s findings:
“Miss Monroe had often expressed the wish to give up, withdraw, and even to die.”
Beside the Wilco: a water glass stained with lipstick; two vials of Nembutal; a half-empty bottle of Canadian Club sitting next to the Monroe diary, the bus locker key, the Sony reel-to-reel, flight records from Conners on Clover Field, and a handwritten note.
WOLA: “On more than one occasion in the past, when disappointed and depressed, Marilyn had made suicide attempts using sedative drugs. On these occasions, she had called for help and been rescued.”
I read what Jo had written on the note:
“[redacted] and life. I don’t know how I can face it anymore.”
But what really got me, Doctor, was the postscript. Who writes a postscript to a suicide note? Jo did, apparently:
“P.S.,” she wrote: “Hell-if-I-know.”
She inhaled—a sharp rattling sound: the sound of Nembutal.
“Jo.” I stepped forward. “Jesus,” I said—and that was when he shot her.
Her head jerked violently to one side, blood shooting like water from a hose and covering the bedding. It spattered up at me, as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint.
The gamy smell of iron filled the room.
I looked up.
Captain James Hamilton raised his Smith & Wesson as he walked from the hall all the way to where I stood—tongue lolling in his mouth, hip cocked—and put the gun between my eyes. The chamber was so close that it separated into two chambers, his face looming behind, as if in extreme close-up, seen through a fish-eye lens. “Here,” he said, taking the vial of pills from the table and holding it before my eyes. It blurred. “Have some.”
“No.”
He pointed the gun at my left foot and blew the tip off my big toe.
“God. Damn!” I shouted, hopping on my right foot, falling to the floor, staring up at the ceiling. “Damn.”
“I know how to take away the hurt.” He handed me that vial of pills, which was now (along with his hand) so much bigger than his body. His face seemed far away. The ceiling fan whirred like a halo behind it. “Here.”
I didn’t take the vial.
He hit my face with the gun and held it to my other foot.
“Okay.” The vial trembled in my hands. I popped a yellow jacket.
“Another.”
I did: the bitter taste in my mouth.
“And another.”
After a while, everything started to blur.
“And this is where we started,” I say. “I mean I’ve told you this already, Doc.”
“Tell me again.”
I felt that I’d spent hours, days, lying on the floor of this hotel with my head on the wood and my eyes open wide as the air came through the vent near my head. The whoosh was all I heard—until I heard the closing of the door, the keys in the lock, the footsteps on the floor stopping only when I turned to see the patent leather shoes beside my eyes, the stub of a cigarette dropped between them, burning.
And then there was the gun.
“Captain Hamilton put the gun to my neck,” I say. “He forced me to write a suicide note. I grabbed the gun.”
“You grabbed—?”
“—his arm was in a sling,” I say. “And then I shot him.”
My eardrums were blown out, the world underwater, but even so I could hear the pounding on the door, the LAPD, hotel security, and bellmen spilling in.
“Memo to newsmen everywhere,” Annie Laurie’s voice: “Reporters who want to interview Tony Randall and ask personal queries had better be in good shape. Randall conducts most of his New York interviews at the Gotham Health Club while exercising. And in the Long, Deep Sigh Department—”
The window over the fire escape was just above the radiator. I climbed through it and down the metal stairs, on my way out to the reservoir.
63.
Now, these are the truly damning pictures—the ones that show me stumbling along Wilshire, my right hand covering one eye to stop the street from doubling as the bellmen and cops follow, dark blotches on the sidewalks.
And everything in slow motion.
I tried to hail a cab.
The light was blue and yellow and the sun was high, and everyone was gone. I could hardly raise my head. Everything was too heavy. Including my fingers. The world was too much. Everything—
There were two cabs. And two drivers.
“The reservoir,” I said, climbing into the back.
“Jesus, mister,” the drivers said. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I stubbed my toe.”
“On an industrial blender?”
“Just go!”
I needed to stay awake.
I couldn’t stay awake.
Now you lean back in your chair and light another cigarette. “Hang on a second,” you say. “What did you do with the tape?”
“Left it at Jo’s.”
“You’re lying.”
“No.”
“Oh?” You press STOP and change the tape. You take the roll from the reel-to-reel and rummage through the pile of boxes until you find Spool #13, marked “CAB DRIVER 9/19/62.”
You thread the tape through the machine and press PLAY:
“Guy was knocked out of his brain,” the driver said. “Bleeding like a stuck pig and couldn’t stand. He told me to shut up and ‘take me to Lake Hollywood Reservoir,’ he said. He could hardly stay awake, and I thought I saw a gun coming out of his pants. And he was carrying a tape.”
“A tape?”
“Some kind of reel-to-reel. Hell, I don’t know why. I just know that he was carrying it like God’s own—”
You press STOP. “You took it from Jo’s room.”
“I didn’t.”
“Tell the truth.”
“The truth is the pain is bad, Doc: Give me a Novril.”
“Tell me what happened first. Then you can have whatever you want.”
“The truth is—”
“Hang on,” you say. “Let me change the reel.”
64.
The truth is that, yes, I took the tape. I took the diary, too, and carried them both to the street and hailed a cab. But halfway to the reservoir, the drivers got mouthy. I saw it coming. They were smoking and kept glancing up at me in the rearview mirror. The mirror was going double but I could see them giving what
I’ve come to call “The Look.”
“You’re not one of those film stars, now, are you?” they asked.
“No one.”
“You look familiar.”
“I get that a lot.”
“I think I know who you are. It’s coming to me, yeah—”
“You going to drive?”
“Just making conversation.”
“Sure, well, here’s some conversation: You know how people ask, ‘Is there a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’” I asked.
“Sure.”
I took Captain Hamilton’s gun from my pocket. “I’m not happy to see you.”
Lake Hollywood Reservoir is just below the Hollywood sign up in the Hills. We took the freeway to the Barham exit and then Cahuenga to Lake Hollywood Drive.
I told the drivers to park near the gate.
We got out of the car. I walked them up the service road through the vegetation to the base of the dam. In the woods that surrounded it I held the drivers at gunpoint and told them to take off their clothes. They kicked off shoes, then socks. They unbuttoned their shirts.
I did, too.
I put their clothes on and left them naked, taking my clothes and the wallet and the keys back to the cab. I drove in the hat and the clothes that I had stolen and stopped at a Rexall. I bought ten Benzedrine inhalers and cracked two open and balled the paper up and swallowed. Well, the uppers didn’t mix with what I’d taken, but what choice did I have? I needed to stay awake. I could hear my heart beat on the radio. I tasted metal in my throat.
