The Starlight Club 4: Marilyn: Scarface, Goodfellas, Mob Guys & Hitmen (Starlight Club Mystery Mob)

by Joe Corso

  “Are you crazy? Are you looking to get yourself killed?” Lawford yelled. Then he realized he was practically screaming, so he quieted down, slumped back into his chair, and looked around with a worried look as if someone was coming for him. “Christ, I’m getting so paranoid. I’m thinking they’ve got the house wired.”

  “Who are they? Is it Bobby?”

  “Stop it! Don’t go any further and … don’t ask me anymore questions or you’ll get both of us killed.”

  Red pulled his jacket aside and let Lawford see the weapon strapped to his belt. Red walked to the window and waved to his men, who he was sure were looking for the sign for them to come into the house. Red told Lawford to tell his housekeeper to escort his men here. Lawford did as he was told. When the men entered the room, Lawford knew these were seriously dangerous men. “Who exactly are you guys?”

  “We’re whoever killed Marilyn Monroe’s worst nightmare. That’s who we are. Now tell us what you know. I want to know where we can find the guys who were with Bobby last night.”

  Lawford's eyes almost bulged out of his face. “Are you crazy? I can’t tell you that. Ask Bobby yourself if you’re so anxious to know.”

  Trenchie walked over to Lawford, grabbed him by his collar, and said, “You talk to us now motherfucker, or you’ll die.” He took his gun out, put the barrel right smack in the center of Lawford’s forehead, and cocked the hammer. “Give me that pillow.” He pointed to the couch. Shooter got it and handed it to him. “I don’t have time for this shit so either tell us what we want to know or this will be the last conversation you’ll ever have. Your choice, tell us what we want to know now, or you die now.” Trenchie took the pillow and covered Lawford’s face with it. Then he pressed the barrel deep into the pillow so that Lawford could feel the barrel through the pillow pressing against his forehead.

  Shooter said, “Do it … Shoot the bastard.”

  “Noooo! Don’t shoot. I’ll tell you what you want to know … just don’t shoot me.”

  Trenchie removed the pillow from Lawford’s forehead and holstered his weapon. Red motioned to Shooter to get his attention. Then he pointed to the table and told him to pour Peter a drink . . . a heavy drink. Red handed it to Lawford and said to him softly, “Start at the beginning Peter, and don’t leave anything out.” Peter Lawford didn’t want to discuss Marilyn, but he found to his surprise that when he began to tell Red what he knew, it had a cleansing effect on him. He felt good telling these men the story that he had been holding back for fear of being killed. He told them everything he knew about her death, including how they took Marilyn to the hospital to build an alibi. Then he told them how they brought Marilyn back home and put her in bed. It was the next sentence that put Red in a killing rage. He listened, seething, as Lawford explained why she died. “While Marilyn was unconscious,” Lawford said, “one of Reynolds’ men administered the drugs anally to her while both Bobby and the second man searched the room for any incriminating evidence. They found and took her diary and many of her letters she received from both Jack and Bobby and others. I liked Marilyn,” Peter said. “We were pals, and I know she liked me.” He looked up at Red with tears streaming down his face. “They gave her the drugs anally so they wouldn’t be found in her system. The drugs were administered in an enema, which confused the coroner because he couldn’t account for the abnormal discoloration of her colon.” Red took out the pictures and showed them to Lawford who appeared ready to pass out from either remorse or drink or both. He took the pictures and gave them a cursory look, then he seemed to recover from his stupor and came back to life. He squinted and focused his eyes to see the pictures better and through his red-rimmed, tear-filled eyes, recognition set in “Wh-Where? How did you get these pictures?”

  Red pointed to them and asked him point blank, “Are these the men who killed Marilyn?”

  Peter looked up through teary eyes and just nodded, and hung his head as he handed the pictures back to Red.

  Red lifted Lawford’s chin with his left hand and said to him, “If you tell anyone we were here tonight, we’ll come back and when we leave, you’ll be a very dead man. Now look at me, and tell me you understand what I just told you.”

  Lawford looked up again with red, teary eyes and raised his right hand as if it were pledging allegiance to the flag. “You have my word. I won’t say a word to anyone because it would only get me killed by those guys. Besides, I’d like to see Marilyn get some justice. She deserves it. She was a good kid. Naive and innocent in the ways of the world, but she was still innocent and didn’t deserve to die this way.”

  Red looked into Lawford’s eyes and told him, “The men who killed Marilyn are dead men walking; only they don’t know it yet.”

  Lawford looked into Red’s dead eyes, which were now nothing more than slits as he said those words, and Lawford knew it was true. He knew that the men who killed Marilyn were dead men as sure as he knew that there was a God above. Red got what he wanted from him. He thanked Lawford. He and his men left him sitting in his office with a drink in his hand, crying like a baby. They were gone as suddenly as they had arrived.

  CHAPTER 35

  Reynolds nervously tapped his fingers on the side of the chair, waiting for Bobby Kennedy to finish reading his report. “What happened in Cal Neva, Emil?”

  Reynolds explained how they drugged both Marilyn’s and her bodyguard’s drinks. When the drugs took effect and they were unconscious, Reynolds' men carried her bodyguard to his room. He told Kennedy how they gave Marilyn a half a dose so she would regain consciousness quickly. He explained that they told her that Jack intended to telephone her the following day and he went on to tell Bobby how her eyes lit up when he mentioned that the president was going to call her. After hearing that, she went voluntarily with the men. Once they landed in California, he had a car standing by that took her home, where she apparently overdosed on drugs and died. “You didn’t murder her or have her murdered, did you, Emil? Because she was alive when I left her. All I wanted was the diary and the letters Jack and I sent her.”

  Reynolds began to sweat. He wondered if Bobby could tell he was lying. The attorney general was very good at reading someone’s body nuances. Reynolds waited for Bobby to question him further, but either he wasn’t interested or he didn’t really want to know the answers to the questions.

  Bobby switched topics. “What happened at Madison Square Garden? What was that fiasco about?” Bobby hadn’t known Reynolds planned to have Nixon assassinated. Although the attorney general hadn’t given explicit orders to have him assassinated, he did mention in passing that Nixon was becoming a problem and that something needed to be done about him. Reynolds believed Bobby’s veiled command meant Nixon was to be done away with and he took it upon himself to carry out the unsaid order. Reynolds composed himself and continued his story. “There were two contract killers who were killed before they could kill Nixon.”

  “Good. I don’t want anyone, especially Nixon to think I had anything to do with the attempt on his life. You know, Emil. All I wanted from the beginning was for Marilyn to be placed in a mental institution to keep her from telling everyone what she thought she knew. It could have been embarrassing to the president and it could have caused him unforeseen problems, which he doesn’t need at this time. Especially with Khrushchev holding his finger on the nuclear button. Maybe it’s better this way. By her taking her life, she saved everyone a lot of grief. The president has to have a clear head. He couldn’t have some blond bimbo calling him every five minutes on his private line, threatening to take down the presidency just because he didn’t want to see her any longer.”

  When the meeting ended, Reynolds left the room thinking that Bobby was delusional. He actually had convinced himself that Marilyn had committed suicide. While the attorney general was present at Marilyn’s house the night she died, he wasn’t present when Marilyn was given the drug. It was true that he visited her house with Reynolds and one of the men who took her from Cal Neva,
but he needed plausible deniability so he was conspicuously absent when the deed was done. It was also true that Bobby himself decided which items of Marilyn’s were to be taken as evidence, as he put it. The most important items, of course, were her diary and her letters.

  Red went to his safe and pulled out his address book, the one he used to keep in his desk drawer in his office in the old Starlight Club. He intended to put it back in his desk drawer, but he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet with the club just having been rebuilt. He would put his house in order and he’d do it when he was comfortable in the new Starlight Club. He thumbed through the pages of his address book until he found the phone number he wanted, and then he dialed it. There was a click as the phone was picked up and a familiar voice answered. “Ed, here. Who’s this?”

  “Ed, it’s Mr. Blue. I need to speak to you.”

  Lauter knew Big Red used Mr. Blue as his alias when he was forced to go underground. “I have no appointments now, Mr. Blue. Would this be a convenient time for you to drop by?”

  “Yes. I’ll be right over.”

  Red and Lauter sat at the living room table. “All right, Red, what’s the problem this time?”

  “Number one, I need some information, and number two, I need a drug to knock someone out for a few hours. I’ll need enough of the drug for two people.”

  Lauter rubbed his chin. “No problem. I believe I have what you need. Wait here a minute while I go and check my inventory. If I don’t have enough, I can get some ready for you by the day after tomorrow. Let me go check and I’ll be right back.” He returned in a few minutes. “You’re in luck. I got exactly what you need.” He placed a small bottle of a clear liquid and two syringes on the table. “Fill the syringes to this line.” He pointed to a line on the syringe. “Then bleed the air out until a small amount of fluid spurts out of the needle and then inject it into their necks. It’ll act faster there. But whatever you do, don’t put the needle through clothing. Make sure you hit flesh. You want the drug to enter the body, not spill out on their clothes. Now you said that there was something else. What is it?” he asked.

  Red said, “That’s number three.” He told Lauter about meeting and then protecting Marilyn Monroe, and finally how they killed her using a drug administered anally using an enema. “I want to know what kind of drug they used and then I want to buy some. I’m gonna give those guys a dose of their own medicine.” Lauter smiled.

  Red then handed Lauter a copy of the coroner’s report he had obtained with the help of a large amount of well-placed dollars. Lauter read it with interest. When he was finished, he laid it on the table and explained to Red what he thought of it. “When you read the autopsy report, it’s obvious that she didn’t take the Nembutal by mouth. The report states there were no gross pill fragments found in the stomach, no microscopic crystal residue in gastric or duodenal fluids.”

  Red was impressed with the medical knowledge the Grim Reaper had. Lauter continued with his analysis. “The extremely high level of Nembutal found in her blood would mean that she would have had to have swallowed over 50 pills.” He looked at Red. “That many pills always leave some trace in the stomach.” Lauter lifted his eyes from the autopsy report and his eyes locked on Red’s. “You don’t have to be a goddamned genius to tell that a couple of pairs of strong arms held her down while she struggled against the enema she was given. Look, the report says that there was bruising of the colon, she had some bruises on her posterior hip and her lower back, face, and chest.” Lauter laughed. “I can’t believe that they really expect us to believe this horseshit that she committed suicide. Wait right here. I’m going to get you the same stuff they gave to her.” He returned a few minutes later with a brown grocery bag. “What you want to use on those guys is in this bag. There’s enough to kill a horse here, so it’ll be enough for your two men.”

  Red smiled coldly. He envisioned how he would give it to Marilyn’s two killers. “Thanks, Ed, what do I owe you?”

  “Give me $400.00 for the two syringes, but the enema treatment is on me. I liked that gal and I don’t like what these guys did to her.” Red thanked him and left with the merchandise he needed.

  The boys milled around the bar nursing drinks and waiting for Red to call them into his office to discuss their recent problems, while some of the guys were sitting, most were standing as Red looked around the room and counted heads. Trenchie, Tarzan, Shooter, Joey Bones, Lefty, Ziggy, Fat Charlie, Petey D, and even Piss Clam, who had just been released from the hospital and insisted in being at the meeting, were there. Pointing to Shooter, Red said, “Tell the boys what you found out about Reynolds’ routine. Start from the beginning. Go ahead, the floor is yours.” Shooter told the story right from the beginning, explaining to everyone the facts about Reynolds’ daily routine. When he was finished, Red asked Joey if he had anything to add.

  “Nothing except I want to get those bastards. They have to pay for what they did to that kid. I was her bodyguard. I was supposed to protect her … and she went out of her way to treat me like family. To me, she was a kid in a woman’s body and she had a hard time living up to her sex goddess image.” He looked at Red and asked him, “Do you want me to tell the boys how they killed her?”

  Red gave Joey a slight nod of his head. “Go ahead and tell them, they should know how she died.”

  “The woman threatened the president and she naively believed that they wouldn’t do anything to her. They knew they had to get her out of the way so how did they do that? They drugged both our drinks in Cal Neva. They dragged me to my room and they flew Marilyn to her home with a story that the president wanted to talk to her the next day, and she bought the story and that’s where they killed her – in her home. We’re no strangers to killings . . . but you have to ask yourself ‘how?’ How did they kill her?” Joey took a deep breath and continued. “I’ll tell you how they killed her. . . they drugged her so she wouldn’t know what happened and when she was unconscious, they gave her a killing drug rectally. That’s right. They shoved a tube up her ass and shot her full of poison. Now … you might ask yourself, why in hell would they go to the trouble of doing that? They did that to hide the drugs from being found in her body. There were no needle marks, no drugs found in the stomach, and no one to question a fragile woman’s state of mind after she committed suicide. They wanted to keep her quiet, maybe put her in a sanitarium, but we stopped that from happening. They put her in a hospital once before and when DiMaggio found out about it he went there and demanded that they release his wife. So what was their only move? It was murder plain and simple and they had the power of the two most powerful men in the world behind them to cover up their crime; the President and the Attorney General of the United States. They did what they wanted to do with impunity. I for one can’t wait for payback. How about you guys?” Everyone clapped their hands in approval.

  Red raised his hands to quiet the room. “Excellent talk, Joey. I never knew you had it in you.” This brought laughs from everyone.

  Joey smiled. “What do you mean you didn’t know I had it in me? Hell, I didn’t know I had it in me.” The room broke into more laughter. That’s why Red loved these guys. He raised his hands once again.

  “Okay. We know what we have to do. The question now is: how do we do it? I say we should do what Trenchie suggested and do to him what we did to Lonegan. We’ll pick Reynolds up when he leaves for work and take him to the warehouse we rented near Washington. We’ll get him to tell us where we can find those two bozos, the ones that drugged Joey and Marilyn, and then we’ll kill the bastards. But before we do this thing, I want to get your input. Does anyone have any other suggestions or advice?” Petey D raised his hand. “Go ahead Petey.”

  “What are we going to do about Bobby Kennedy? That bastard deserves to die. He’s a fuckin backstabbing, lying rat. What’s gonna happen to him?”

  “We don’t touch Bobby.”

  Fat Charlie spoke up. “Why not touch him? What is he; something special that he
can’t be killed?”

  “I didn’t say he wouldn’t be touched. He’ll definitely be touched, but not by us. There are others who have ideas about him. And I’m not at liberty to say more at this time. First things first, remember that.” The men got the message. Red knew something that they didn’t, so they didn’t push it. But it pleased them to know that plans were in motion to take care of the two brothers.

  “Anyone else?”

  Ziggy raised his hand. “Can we somehow lure them here to Queens?”

  “Even if we could, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t want anyone in Washington to get a whiff of us guys from Queens having anything to do with what’s about to happen.”

  Ziggy nodded his approval. “Yeah. You’re right, boss. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Okay, so it’s settled. I’m taking Joey Bones and Shooter. They know the lay of the land and they know Reynolds’ daily routine. I’m also taking Trenchie and Petey D. The rest of you guys are on standby. If I need you, I’ll call you, but you’ll report to Tarzan and you’ll stay here at the Starlight Club until I tell you otherwise. Is that clear?” Red waited for nods of acknowledgement from the other four men. “Good. Now what about the police car you had the mechanic across the street working on. Is it done yet?”

  Joey Bones stood. “It’s not only finished, but we drove it to Washington. It’s in the warehouse we rented. It’s set to roll whenever you need it.”

  “Great. Since we don’t have to worry about the car, you three will leave with me tomorrow. Be here at 9 a.m. sharp.”

  Piss Clam raised his hand. “What about me, boss? You want me to come too?” The room burst into laughter. Here was poor Piss Clam, white as a ghost, his arm shot to pieces from all the tubes he had in him, having difficulty walking, and he was asking Red if he wanted him to come along with them.