THE S E ARE UNC OR R EC TED A DVA NC E PR OOFS BOUN D FOR YOUR R EV IEWING C ONV ENIENC E In quoting from this book for ...
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THE S E ARE UNC OR R EC TED A DVA NC E PR OOFS BOUN D FOR YOUR R EV IEWING C ONV ENIENC E In quoting from this book for reviews or any other purpose, please refer to the final printed book, as the author may make changes on these proofs before the book goes to press.
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
THE
10 11
EMPTY GLASS
12 13 14 15
J . I . B a ke r
16 17 18 19
BLU E R I DER PR E S S
20
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
21
New York
22
2012
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
15 16 17 18 19 20
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2012 by J. I. Baker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
21
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK
22
Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
23 24
BOOK DESIGN BY A MANDA DEWEY
25
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
26 27 28 29 30S
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For my parents
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
THE
11
EMPTY GLASS
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—
10
deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—
11
persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
12 13
—John F. Kennedy
14 15 16
Let’s play murder— or divorce.
17 —Marilyn Monroe
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01 02 03 04 05 06
1.
07 08 09 10 11 12
A
13
fter a while, everything started to blur. I felt that I’d spent hours, days, lying on the floor of this
14
hotel with my face against the wood and my eyes open wide as the air
15
came through the vent near my head. The whoosh was all I heard—
16
then the door closing, the keys in the lock, the footsteps on the floor
17
stopping as I turned to see the patent leather shoes before my eyes,
18
the stub of a cigarette dropped between them, burning.
19
And then there was the gun.
20
“Wake up.” Captain Hamilton pushed the Smith & Wesson into
21 22
my neck. “I want you to write me a letter.” I don’t remember when or how I did it. The three (or was it four?
23
Or five? Or ten? I don’t remember) Nembutals had knocked me out.
24
The captain was out of focus, going double.
25
He handed me the pen that she had used to write her own last
26
words, and forced me to write mine. Reeling on the bed with his gun
27
at my temple, I thought of the notes written on napkins and doors and
28
windows and carpets that lined the shelves of Suicide Notes and
29 S30
Weapons. Now I was adding my own:
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J. I. BAKER
01
Take care of Max for me. Tell him that I loved him. Tell him
02
that whatever else his father did, he loved his son.
03 04
“That’s good, Delilah.” He loomed over me. “Now you feel good?”
05
I nodded.
06
“Even better.” He handed me the bottle.
07
I leaned forward, reached for the pills, and ended up with the
08
gun. Ah, his shoulder had been injured, Doc. You know that.
09
I don’t need to tell you that I shot him. I was on my back, elbows
10
locked. He was bending down when the gun kicked, a black dime
11
smoking on his chest. He reared, touched the hole, and stared at the
12
fluid that glistened like oil on his fi nger. “Oh, I know what this is,” he
13
said as he fell.
14
I heard the sound his skull made.
15
I know what happens when you die.
16 17 19
Y
20
and blow smoke to the ceiling fan with the bulb above the table, and I
21
notice (not for the fi rst time) how clammy and pitted your skin is.
22
You’re a big man, Doc, like an aging football player, with the face and
23
waist of a small-town cop. “Let’s go over this again,” you say. You
24
adjust your wire-rimmed glasses and check the notes that you are
25
keeping in the book near the Sony reel-to-reel, lying on the desk like
26
a suitcase, rolling at RECORD. “You shot him.”
18
ou sigh and rub your forehead. “All right.” You shake a Chesterfield from your pack and light it with a kitchen match. You drag
27
“In self-defense. You see the bandages. You gave me the Novril.”
28
“Is it working?”
29
“For now.”
30S
You sit on one side of the table; I sit on the other. Between us, that
31N
reel-to-reel, a stack of used and unused seven-inch tapes, a glass {2 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
ashtray, a vial of Novril, and your pack of Chesterfields. There is also
01
a box with a label reading “Fitzgerald, Ben, Psych Eval.” It contains
02
what you call “the evidence”:
03 04
1. The Smith & Wesson
05
2. A vial of Nembutal
06
3. A piece of notebook paper reading “Chalet 52” and “July 28”
07
4. A stained manila folder containing a number of 8 × 10
08 09
photographs 5. Amahl and the Night Visitors
10
6. A bag of ashes
11
7. A new red MEMORIES diary.
12 13 14
Y
15
ou pick up Item No. 1. “It had your fingerprints on it.”
16
“Like I said, I shot him.”
“Why?”
17
“Why did anyone do anything? Everything changed after she
18 19
died.” “Who?”
20
“The actress. I’ve told you this already.”
21
“Tell me again.”
22
So I do:
23
“I woke to the sound of the knock on the door and sat up in the
24
light from the neon sign that snaked along the wall outside the win-
25
dow,” I say. “An empty carton of moo goo gai pan sat beside me; I
26
hadn’t thrown it out. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamt the knock or actu-
27
ally heard it. I didn’t have a phone—”
28
“Hang on.” You are frowning. Something is wrong with the Sony.
29
The wheels have stopped. You hit REWIND, then PLAY, and I hear my
S30
voice:
N31 {3 }
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J. I. BAKER
01 02
“—touched the hole, and stared at the fluid that glistened like oil on his finger—”
03
You hit STOP and look up at me. “Like oil?”
04
I nod.
05
“It glistened like oil, Ben?”
06
“It’s a simile.”
07
“Who do you think you are, Edna Ferber?”
08
But you can’t hear my voice on the tape anymore. This is where
09
the recording stopped. There is nothing but static. You make minor
10
adjustments to the machine and try it again: REWIND, STOP, PLAY.
11
It doesn’t work. You hit it with the heel of your hand.
12
REWIND, STOP, PLAY.
13
My voice: “Why did anyone do anything? Everything changed
14 15 16
after she died.” You pause the tape and look at me. “Now pick up where you left off.”
17
“Give me a cigarette first.”
18
“I thought you quit.”
19
“That was yesterday.”
20
You give me a cigarette.
21
And a Novril, too: for the pain.
22
After a while, everything starts to blur.
23
“Tell the truth this time,” you say.
24
“I already told you the truth.”
25
“So tell it again.”
26 27 28 29 30S 31N {4 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
S U N D AY, A U G U S T 5 ,
10
1962
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01 02 03 04 05 06
2.
07 08 09 10 11
I
woke to the sound of the knock on the door and sat up in the light
12
from the neon sign that snaked along the wall outside the window.
13
An empty carton of moo goo gai pan sat beside me; I hadn’t thrown it
14
out. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamt the knock or actually heard it. I
15
didn’t have a phone.
16
“Hello?”
17
The knock again, then a voice:
18
“Ben?”
19
It sounded like Inez.
20
“Coming.”
21
The seventh-floor apartment was fifty bucks a week, furnished,
22
which meant a hard bed with a history and springs that whined
23
when you turned over; yellow curtains with plastic linings that
24
smelled of cigarettes; a carpet into which a sort of hopelessness had
25
settled, like dust; and a sign on the door reading:
26
LOCK THE DOOR
27
BEFORE YOU SLEEP.
As if I needed the reminder.
28
My small bedroom was connected to what the brochures had
29
called the “living area” by a short hallway that contained a water
S30 N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
closet. By “living area,” they meant a used couch, a hot plate, and
02
bare bulbs that fl ickered in the endless cycling of uneven electricity.
03
The door leading out to the stairs was on the left as I walked from the
04
bedroom. I stared through the peephole: a fish-eye view of Inez. She
05
was the night clerk in the lobby bar.
06
“Who’s it?”
07
“Call for you, Señor Ben.”
08
I unlocked the door. “Is Max all right?”
09
“Is not your son.”
10
“My wife?”
11
“Not your wife, Señor Ben. Is work. You coming?”
12
“I need to get dressed.” I was wearing boxers that weren’t so
13
white anymore. I slipped on an undershirt and stepped into the pants
14
on the floor and pulled suspenders with a snap over my shoulders.
15
Then I checked my face in the mirror that hung, framed like a photo-
16
graph, to the left of the door: the shock of black hair, the pale skin,
17
the bleary eyes and bluish stubble.
18 19
The broken clock on the elbow of wall between the couch and kitchenette read 2:15.
20
It was always 2:15.
21
There was cold coffee on the hot plate from the night before, so I
22
poured it into a cup with the ring around the rim. Housekeeping
23
wasn’t my strong point, and I don’t like cold coffee. But it helped me
24
avoid smoking, which for me was like trying to fly.
25
I knew the packet of Kents sat in the wastebasket under the sink.
26
I had tossed it there the night before. I grabbed it, along with the half-
27
eaten sandwich I now figured I might need. Today was supposed to be
28
Day One of my new smokeless life, but I told myself that Kents got rid
29
of the tar.
30S
Tar is what kills you.
31N {8 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
.
.
.
01 02
he phone sat on the desk in the dimly lit bar you reached through
T
03
the double doors off the fading lobby. The bar served as both the
04
Savoy’s unofficial reception area and, well, the bar. It had ripped
05
black leather cushions on metal stools, plastic napkin holders, and
06
pressed-tin walls. The red lightbulbs made the place look like a Hol-
07
land whorehouse.
08
Behind the bar, Inez answered the phone and sold cigarette packs
09
with tickets slipped inside. You collected enough, you could buy a
10
toaster. She had tacked pictures of actors she admired up and down
11
the walls: the wrestler El Santo, Cantinflas, and Dolores Del Rio,
12
whose name meant (she said) “Sadness of the River.”
13
She handed me the phone.
14
“Ben here.” I slipped the cigarette into my mouth.
15
“Fitz.” It was the department administrator, Seldon. “It’s nuts
16 17
over here. We need you.” “Time is it?”
18
“Five. Need you down here.”
19
“The office?”
20
“Brentwood. One-two-three-oh-five Fifth Helena Drive.”
21
“Come again?”
22
He gave me the address. I wrote it down.
23
“Someone died,” he said.
24
“No kidding.”
25
“Someone famous.”
26
He told me who it was. I remembered reading scandal-sheet stuff
27
about a film she hadn’t finished. I had the copy of Life magazine with
28
her last interview: “It might be kind of a relief to be fi nished,” she had
29
said. “It’s sort of like, I don’t know, some kind of yard dash you’re
S30 N31
{9 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve
02
made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again.”
03
“Think it’s maybe a . . . no, Billy,” Seldon said. “Daddy’s okay.
04
Go back to bed, okay? Sorry.” Back into the receiver: “Family stuff. I
05
woke the kids.”
06
“You woke me, too.”
07
“Need next of kin.”
08
“I don’t handle next of kin.”
09
“You’ll handle it today.”
10
I was a deputy coroner with clerical functions, overseeing Suicide
11
Notes and Weapons. Sounds simple, but sometimes a suicide note is
12
written on part of the floor, a door, mirrors, whole sections of walls.
13
You could walk through the Sheriff’s Evidence Room and see doors
14
propped against the shelves, covered with lipstick, reading: “Dear
15
Andrew. Tell the children I loved them.”
16
“Hurry,” Seldon said.
17
I tried. It took ten minutes to get the Rambler started. It was a
18
used ’58 I had purchased through the classifieds. The seller had asked
19
me to assume his contract, which I did without knowing the abuse it
20
had taken. It was like a battered wife that way; it ran like one, too.
21
I patted my pockets for a match.
22
Tomorrow would be Day One.
23 24 26
T
27
the street, though I could see the Spanish tiles on the roof of the
28
garage. No name on the mailbox. It was modest enough. I wondered
29
why she’d bought it. The most famous woman in the world, with all
30S
the money that implies, but instead of a mansion in the Hills, she’d
31N
bought a one-floor hacienda in Brentwood.
25
he green wooden gate outside the house sat in the middle of a stucco wall covered with bougainvilleas. It hid the property from
{ 10 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
This one-floor hacienda in Brentwood.
01
I parked in the cul-de-sac on the fifth of the numbered Helenas,
02
tossed what was left of the third Kent to the tar, and carried my brief-
03
case through the photographers and reporters with their press creden-
04
tials lodged like playing cards in hatbands. Not to mention the
05
neighbors gathering in their tea-rose flannel housecoats.
06
The sun was coming up. There were low-pressure systems in Utah
07
and Nevada, and a southerly wind: That’s what the radio said. It was
08
going to be another scorcher.
09
Two cops flanked the gate.
10
“Morning, officers. Ben Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”
11
“You’re already inside.”
12
“What?”
13
“LACCO is already inside.”
14
“Not true.”
15
“Is so. Taking pictures. A woman.”
16
“A woman? You ask for credentials?”
17
“No.”
18
I flashed my credentials. “What does this say?”
19
“Mr. Benjamin Fitzgerald, deputy coroner, L.A. County Coro-
20 21
ner’s Office.” “Thanks,” I said.
22
“Fun job.”
23
“You bet.”
24
I walked through the living room to a hallway that led into a bed-
25
room too small for all the people inside it now—maybe fifteen square
26
feet. I can’t remember how many; they kept coming and going. Maybe
27
five? Then six or seven. And two or three; then seven again. A man
28
popped his head through the door and told someone named Don to
29
come into the kitchen, and Don stopped dusting the dresser for prints
S30
and stepped on a Sinatra record.
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J. I. BAKER
01
There were bags and boxes from I. Magnin’s and Bullock’s on
02
Wilshire all over the floor. Leicas flashed as photographers took shots
03
that would vanish tomorrow. Cops drew lines with chalk, covering the
04
floor with a canvas cloth. My eyes darted from the detective dusting
05
shattered glass to the copy of Horticulture beneath the bed to the rub-
06
ber gloves spotted with liquid and the pills embedded in carpet fibers,
07
but all of this—and everything— stopped when I saw the actress.
08
She was lying facedown on the bed, clutching a phone. A sheet
09
was pulled up to her shoulders. You could see the ash-blond hair fried
10
from too many treatments. The cord snaked underneath her body.
11
Her fingernails were blue. The cause of death seemed obvious: an
12
overdose. Except—
13 14
Except the body was in the soldier’s position: legs straight, head down.
15
“I don’t have to tell you what that means, Doctor,” I say.
16
“Yes,” you say. “You do.”
17
“Well, it looked like she had been placed.”
18
“What?”
19
“Placed,” I say. “People who overdose don’t drift happily away.
20
There are usually convulsions. Vomiting. They die contorted. And
21
she was clutching the phone.”
22
“So?”
23
“A person dying of a barbiturate overdose would not have died
24
clutching a phone. She might have answered it. But a person dying of
25
a barbiturate overdose would have gone limp before the convulsions
26
began.”
27 28 29 30S
I walked to the bed and looked down. There was no vomitus. She looked peaceful. On the bedside table, several vials of prescription drugs sat under a lamp covered with a handkerchief. One of the vials read San Vicente
31N { 12 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
Pharmacy: “Marilyn Monroe. Engelberg . . . 7. 25.62 . . . 0.5 gms . . .
01
at bedtime.”
02
It’s the vial that sits before us now—part of your “evidence,”
03 04
Doctor: Item No. 2.
05
Under the table was a Mexican ceramic jug, cap askew; piles of
06 07
books and papers; a jar of face cream—and an empty water glass. Remember the glass. It becomes significant.
08
A voice behind me: “Helluva thing.”
09
I turned and saw Jack Clemmons in the doorway. His face was so
10
red it looked raw, his hair the color of diluted mustard. He was West
11
LAPD: the watch commander on duty at the western division when
12
the call had come in that morning.
13
“To what do I owe the pleasure, Fitz?”
14
“Here for next of kin.”
15
“There are no next of kin. Only a mother down at Rockhaven.”
16
“Never heard of Rockhaven.”
17
“You will.”
18
“What happened here?” I asked.
19
“It’s a helluva thing.”
20
The housekeeper, Eunice Murray, claimed she’d noticed a light
21
under Marilyn’s door (Jack said) when she retired around ten on the
22
previous evening. She went to bed in her own room, adjacent to Mari-
23
lyn’s; they share a wall. She woke at midnight and had to go to the
24
bathroom. The bathroom was in the Telephone Room, connected to
25
her own bedroom, but somehow she ended up in the hall in front of
26
Marilyn’s room instead. She noticed that the light was still on under
27
the door, which was locked from the inside. She knocked: no answer.
28 29
“So what do you think she did?” Jack asked.
S30
“She called the police.”
N31 { 13 }
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01
“Oh, no, that would be too easy, Fitz. That would be too obvious.
02
This is Hollywood. Everyone needs a twist. She didn’t call the police.
03
She called the psychiatrist.”
04
“The psychiatrist?”
05
“Him.” He pointed to a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man
06
who stood in a suit by the window looking ashen. “Ralph Greenson.
07
Marilyn’s shrink.”
08
“And what did he do?”
09
When Greenson arrived at the house (Jack said) he, too, found
10
the door locked. He went outside, looked through the window, and
11
saw the actress lying facedown and nude on the bed under rumpled
12
bedclothes. She looked “peculiar,” he said. She wasn’t moving. He
13
broke the window with a poker from the living-room fireplace and
14
climbed inside. She was clutching the phone. “She must have been
15
calling for help,” Greenson had said.
16 17
“Why would she call for help when the housekeeper was in the next room?” I asked.
18
“Beats me. The shrink told Mrs. Murray, ‘We’ve lost her,’ and
19
called Dr. Engelberg, her physician. And Dr. Engelberg called me
20
at—get this, Fitz—four thirty-five A.M.”
21
“They waited four hours to call the cops?”
22
“Yep.”
23
“Mind if I ask the doctor a few questions?”
24
“You’re not investigating, Ben.”
25
“I’m curious.”
26
“Same old Ben.” He smiled. “Be my guest.”
27
I walked up to Greenson, introduced myself, and said, “If you
28
don’t mind me asking: Why did you wait four hours to call the cops?”
29
“We had to get permission from the publicity department fi rst.”
30S
“What publicity department?”
31N
“Twentieth Century–Fox. Miss Monroe was filming there.” { 14 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“So what did you do while you waited?”
01
“Talked,” Greenson said.
02
“For four hours?”
03
“Look, I see no reason why I should go through this again. I’ve
04
been through this already. I’ve already spoken to the coroner’s office.”
05
“I’m the coroner’s office.”
06
“So is she.”
07
“Who?”
08
“Her.” He pointed to a woman with a camera taking pictures of
09
the space around the bed. She was maybe thirty-five and had violet
10
eyes with dark lashes and black hair done up in a bun. She wore a
11
gray skinned-down Norman Norell suit and stiletto shoes. Her crim-
12
son nails matched her lips. I could see the powder on her face. She
13
reminded me of someone.
14
Eventually I would see her smiling up at me from behind the
15
edge of a martini glass, moisture glistening on her front teeth, her
16 17
lipstick smeared on cocktail napkins and, later, bed linens. But for now: She was pulling something from underneath the
18 19
dead star’s pillow.
20
It was the red leather diary.
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 15 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
3.
07 08 09 10 11 13
T
14
bossed on the cover in the same gold that edged the paper. It was a
15
dime-a-dozen diary—available at any drugstore. I had no reason to
16
believe that it could bring down the government, Doctor. I had no rea-
17
son to believe that Marilyn had died because of it, or that others would
18
die because of it. I had no reason to believe it would jeopardize my
19
own life or that of my family. So you ask: If I had known, would I have
20
just walked away? Let it destroy the actress and the girl who had found
21
it instead of all of us?
12
he diary was filled with yellow pages on which blue handwriting had broken all the college rules. The word
22
“Who are you?” I asked her.
23
“Jo Carnahan. LACCO.”
24
“That’s not possible.”
25 26
MEMORIES
was em-
“Anything’s possible,” she said. “Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
27
“I never knew my mother.”
28
“Sorry to hear it. And now if you’ll excuse me.” She walked past
29
me, and I grabbed her elbow, spinning her sharply around.
30S
I caught a glint in her eye, a little hidden laugh.
31N
Who did she remind me of?
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 16
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“That red book,” I said. “What is it?”
01
“My diary.”
02
It wasn’t. You know that, Doc.
03
I took it from her.
04
“What’s the big idea?” she said.
05
“What’s your big idea? Impersonating an employee from the cor-
06
oner’s office. I was going to say a man from the coroner’s office, but—”
07
“I’m not a man.”
08
“I can see that. You’re a thief.”
09
“I’m not. I’m Annie Laurie.”
10
“Thought you said your name was Jo.”
11
“Annie Laurie is my pen name. It’s a gossip column. You don’t
12 13
read it?” “No,” I lied. Of course I read it. I’d read it for years. Everyone in
14
Southland reads it. They’re lying if they say they don’t. Do you read
15
it, Doc?
16
“No.”
17
“I thought so.”
18
Annie Laurie is second only to Hedda Hopper and Louella Par-
19
sons when it comes to chronicling the ins and outs and ups and downs
20
of the rich and famous. Okay, third only to Hedda and Louella. She has
21
a husband named Dick, a Santa Anita jockey who is always on vaca-
22
tion; three cats; two precocious twin children perpetually at boarding
23
school; and a cottage on Catalina. Annie Laurie has been writing her
24
L.A. Mirror column, “The Voice of Hollywood,” and broadcasting her
25
WOLA radio show, Annie Laurie Presents, for the better part of thirty
26
years, but she is not—unlike Parsons and Hopper—a real person; she
27
is a character. The writers who impersonate Annie Laurie change, but
28
Annie herself does not.
29
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” asked Jo.
S30
“What?”
N31 { 17 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
“Well, there’s a bathroom in the housekeeper’s room,” she said.
02
“And the carpet in here.”
03
“What about it?”
04
“See how high the pile is?”
05
She smiled and left the room.
06
Guy Hockett and his son from Westwood Village Mortuary were
07
putting Miss Monroe’s body on the gurney. Rigor mortis had set in.
08
This wasn’t what the son had expected. He hadn’t expected to see the
09
source of locked-bathroom fantasies now unmovable and cold in his
10
own hands, her bones cracking as they wrapped leather straps around
11
her wrists and ankles.
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
Leather straps as if to restrain a madwoman. As if she would just get up and walk away. They covered her in a pale blue blanket and wheeled her from the house. A young woman screamed in the hallway, police telling her that she needed to leave because they were sealing the place. “Keep shooting, vultures!” she shouted as I walked out. “How would you feel if your best friend just died?”
20
It was Pat Newcomb, Miss Monroe’s publicist.
21
In the five-page death report filed by the LAPD, the deceased was
22
described not as the star of Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year
23
Itch—and not as the erstwhile wife of Arthur Miller and Joe DiMag-
24
gio, the most famous woman in the world—but as a “female Cauca-
25
sian, age 36, height 5.4, weight 115 pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes,
26
and slender, medium build. Occupation: actress.”
27 28 29 30S
T
he entrance to the Telephone Room, otherwise known as the guest bedroom, was across the hall from Mrs. Murray’s bedroom.
31N { 18 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
I carried the diary inside and shut the door and sat on the bed by the
01
door that led to the pool and saw a white phone on the table. There
02
were two phones. The cord to the other phone, pink, led through the
03
door and down the hall to where the receiver now sat on the death bed.
04
One number, GRanite 61890, was for close friends; the other, GRan-
05
ite 24830, was for everyone else.
06
I opened the diary.
07
The Book of Secrets was written in that blue scrawl on the inside
08
page.
09
I turned the pages— some torn, others covered with illegible
10
script, still others stained with unidentifiable fluids. I was searching
11
for anything that might lead to next of kin: a lost mother, a missing
12
son or father, a brother in Topeka, a sister in Detroit.
13
The diary had been started only six months before, on February 2, 2:01 A.M.:
14 15 16
“I hear clicking on the line,”
17
it read,
18 That’s what it sounds like—Morse code. Faint voices all around.
19
Bars are on the windows but the night is dark and the pool
20
should be lit but it’s not on account of the remodel. A few times
21
I heard noises like people at the window but I looked around.
22
No one there and so now, see? Who’s crazy now?!!!
23 24 25
T
26
his was followed by a list of questions:
27
1. What is it like to do your job?
28
2. Are you going to keep J. E. H.?
29 S30
3. What is next for Cuba?
N31 { 19 }
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J. I. BAKER
.
01
.
.
02 04
T
05
RE7- 8200. Others had been erased or were illegible. RE7- 8200 was
06
not only repeated; near it Marilyn had scrawled, in ragged letters, the
07
name “Mrs. Green.”
03
he book was full of elisions, deletions, and torn pages. I saw no information about next of kin. The only number I found was
08
I picked up the white phone and called.
09
“Hello,” a woman answered.
10
“Mrs. Green, please?”
11
I heard breathing. “Excuse me?”
12
“I’m looking for a Mrs. Green.”
13
“Your name, please?”
14
“Ben Fitzgerald. L.A. County Coroner’s.”
15
“Mr. Fitzgerald, fine,” she said. “But who is Mrs. Green?”
16
“That’s what I want to know.”
17 18
“There is no Mrs. Green,” she said. “I’ve never heard of Mrs. Green.”
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 20 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 20
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01 02 03 04 05 06
4.
07 08 09 10 11
he L.A. County Morgue is in the basement of the Hall of Justice
T
12
located where North Broadway forms an overpass off Santa Ana
13
not far from Chinatown. The coroner, the sheriff’s office, the DA, and
14
the county jail are there. The medical examiner is on the fi rst floor.
15
That’s where my office is. There are only a few offices, because the
16
staff is so small: three medical examiners, four lab techs, a few coron-
17
er’s aides.
18
They call it Pneumonia Hall.
19
It was just after 9
I was at my desk eating the sandwich I’d
20
retrieved from the trash and looking out the window onto the parking
21
lot. On the blotter in front of me sat a framed picture of Rose, Max,
22
and me smiling on the beach at Malibu: “In happier times,” the cap-
23
tion might have read in Photoplay. Pigeons perched, as they always
24
perched, on the window ledge. Every now and then I saw them mating.
25
“Ben,” Dr. Noguchi said at the door. He was the deputy medical
26
A. M .
27
examiner. His first name was Thomas. “Yeah.”
28
“We’re almost ready.”
29 S30
I put my sandwich down.
N31
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J. I. BAKER
.
01
.
.
02 04
T
05
in the basement where the rats were. They looked like numbered
06
freezers. I opened 33, pulling the lever below the temperature gauge,
07
and saw the toe tags. I wheeled the body on the stretcher to Table 1 in
08
the windowless room, looked at the flesh on bright steel with the hose
09
and the drainage system, the sink and the suspended scale.
03
10 11
he most famous woman in the world was now Coroner’s Case No. 81128, her toe tagged in steel crypt 33. The crypts covered a wall
A sheet was pulled up over her breasts. Her eyes were closed, her hair hanging limp as if she had just washed it.
12
The autopsy lasted five hours.
13
I won’t bore you with the details, Doctor, but a few things stuck
14
with me:
15
Dr. Noguchi performed the procedure. This was odd. Yes, he was
16
the only person on staff who was a university faculty member, assis-
17
tant professor of pathology at Loma Linda, but he had only recently
18
been appointed deputy medical examiner. Normally the chief medi-
19
cal examiner would have done it. Even stranger, Chief Coroner Cur-
20
phey himself attended the autopsy, along with District Attorney John
21
Miner.
22
This never happened.
23
“There are no puncture marks,” Dr. Noguchi said into his mic as
24
he began the external examination, and “no indication” that Monroe
25
had injected herself. There was no indication that anyone else had
26
injected her, either. “There’s bruising,” he said: “a slight ecchymotic
27
area . . . in the left hip and left side of the lower back.”
28
A bruise is a sign of violence. Its color comes from protein
29
enzymes thrown off by white blood cells that try to contain the dam-
30S
age. Those enzymes change from dark purple to brown to yellow over
31N
time. The bruise on Miss Monroe’s left hip was dark purple, which { 22 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 22
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
means it probably appeared on the night she died. But it was never
01
explained.
02
Dr. Noguchi also noted “dual lividity.” You ask me what this
03
means: Livor mortis happens during the first eight hours after death.
04
The heart mixes plasma with red blood cells. When the heart stops,
05
the mixing ends, and the cells settle in the lower portion of the body.
06
If the body is on its left side, the lividity—a purplish spotting—
07
appears at the bottom of that side. If livor mortis is present on both
08
sides, it’s called “dual lividity.”
09
In this case, we found livor mortis on both the back and posterior
10
aspect of the arms and legs. Which would indicate one thing: The
11
body had been moved.
12
Around twelve-thirty, Noguchi opened the stomach. It was the
13
first abdominal organ he examined. In it, he found 20 ccs, about three
14
tablespoons, of a brown liquid. But no pills were in the liquid. In fact,
15
nothing indicated that she had swallowed anything poisonous.
16
In the duodenum, the first digestive tract after the stomach, there
17
was “no evidence,” Noguchi said, “of pills. No residue. No coloration.”
18
“And no odor of pear,” I said.
19
Noguchi turned to me: “What?”
20
“Never mind.”
21
In his autopsy report, Noguchi summarized the digestive-system
22
findings:
23 24
The esophagus has a longitudinal folding mucosa. The stomach
25
is almost completely empty. The volume is estimated to be no
26
more than 20 cc. No residue of the pills is noted. A smear made
27
from the gastric contents examined under the polarized micro-
28
scope shows no refractile crystals. The mucosa shows marked
29
congestion and submucosal petechial hemorrhage diffusely. The
S30
duodenum are also examined under the polarized microscope
N31
{ 23 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 23
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
and show no refractile crystals. The remainder of the small intes-
02
tine shows no gross abnormality. The colon shows marked con-
03
gestion and purplish discoloration.
04 05 07
T
08
plish discoloration” may have meant the colon had been . . . compro-
09
mised in the recent past.
06
his is what created all the controversy, Doc. Why? I don’t quite know where to begin, but for now: “marked congestion and pur-
10
Noguchi wrote: “Unembalmed blood is taken for alcohol and bar-
11
biturate examination. Liver, kidney, stomach and contents, urine and
12
intestine are saved for further toxicological study.” These contents
13
were sent to Ralph J. Abernethy, the chief toxicologist.
14 15 16 17
They took a picture of the corpse and returned Case 81128 to crypt 33. Noguchi’s eventual verdict: “Suicide.” He circled the word on the final report, adding the word “Probable.”
18
The picture that you have, Doc—the one marked “62-609
19
8-5-62” in the evidence folder—was taken afterward. The face looks
20
sunken because the skull was cut open to remove and weigh the brain.
21
You have other pictures there, too, of course: one taken of the body in
22
the broom closet of Westwood Village. And photos taken by Sinatra
23
at Cal-Neva the week before she died.
24
But all that will come soon enough. At the time, I figured the
25
whole sad business was finished, but it wasn’t. It was never finished.
26
When I returned to my office, the WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip on my desk
27
read: “See me.”
28
That meant only one thing.
29
It meant Curphey.
30S 31N { 24 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 24
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
5.
07 08 09 10 11
hief Coroner Theodore Joscelyn Curphey had a golf set in his
C
12
office. It was one of those sets with a square of fake grass and a
13
metal circle with flaps surrounding a hole you hit the ball into. He was
14
teeing off beside his desk when I stepped inside.
15 16
“You wanted to see me?” “One second.” He hit the ball. And missed. “There.” He wiped
17
both hands together, propping the nine iron against his desk and sit-
18
ting down.
19
His office windows, like mine, overlooked the parking lot. They
20
were bracketed by bookshelves. A TV sat on the cabinet to the left: A
21
roller derby show was on. A box of Dependable kitchen matches sat
22
on the desk near the wire-webbed ashtray that held his pipe. He
23
picked up the pipe, reignited it, and leaned back in his chair. “Have a
24
seat,” he said.
25
You want to know about Theodore J. Curphey, Doctor. Well, he
26
was bald with liver spots. He had glasses with thick lenses that made
27
his eyes pop and a mustache that made him look, more than anything,
28
like a—
29 S30
“I don’t care what he looked like.”
N31
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 25
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
“ ‘Like a walrus,’ I was going to say.”
02
“He was from New York,” you say. “How did he end up in L.A.?”
03
Northwest Airlines Flight 823 was scheduled to depart LaGuar-
04
dia for Miami at 2:45 P.M. on February 1, 1957, but takeoff was delayed
05
for three hours on account of the snow. There was a lot of snow.
06
Despite a slight sliding of the nosewheel on pavement, the fl ight was
07
cleared around 6 P.M. There was a normal roll, the fi rst stage of take-
08
off, but the DC-6A did not achieve sufficient altitude over Flushing
09
Bay, and sixty seconds after it became airborne, the craft clipped the
10
treetops over Rikers Island.
11
It crashed.
12
Twenty people died.
13
Curphey’s work on the case brought him to the attention of
14
Los Angeles County. Later that year, he became the county’s first cor-
15
oner. There was resentment at the morgue: An outsider—from
16
New York, no less—was now boss. Some think that’s how he got into
17
trouble: A rat went to Bonelli and the Board of Supervisors with
18
information about the tissue samples kept in the storage room on
19
Kohler.
20
But more on that later.
21
“Siddown, Ben.”
22
I did.
23
He looked at me over those thick glasses. “I just wanted to check
24
in,” Curphey said. “See how you’re doing.”
25
“Okay, I think.”
26
He opened the personnel file on his desk and paged through its
27
papers, reading. At one point he frowned and looked up at me, squint-
28
ing. “Thirty-three years old.”
29
“Yes.”
30S
“A Step Three.”
31N { 26 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 26
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
“Yes.”
01
“Good-looking young man.”
02
“Thank you.”
03
“You started with us as . . .”
04
“Deputy coroner, Suicide Notes and Weapons. I was an embalmer
05 06
before.” “So you wanted a change.”
07
“The truth is I wanted more money. My son was born. I needed it.
08 09
So I took the civil service exam and the walk-through test.” “The walk-through test?”
10
“You have to walk through this place and not pass out.”
11
He did not find this funny. He returned to the papers, shuffl ing
12
through them until he looked up, adjusted his glasses, and said,
13
“Well, we certainly appreciate the work you do, Ben. Not to mention
14
what you did for us at trial.”
15 16
“Of course.” “Another man, a lesser man, might have balked.”
17
“All right.” Where was he going with this?
18
“I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what happened today.”
19
“I don’t know what you mean.”
20
“During the autopsy. What’s your verdict?”
21
“It’s not my place to say.”
22
“It wasn’t your place to say that there was no odor of pear, either,
23 24
but you said it. Why?” “A chloral overdose always smells of pear, and there were no
25 26
refractile crystals and no—” “The tox report will tell us everything we need to know.”
27
“She was in the soldier’s position when we found her, sir. She was
28
clutching the phone. A person dying of a barbiturate overdose would
29 S30
not have died clutching a phone.”
N31 { 27 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 27
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J. I. BAKER
01
“So,” he said, “is that why you called the Justice Department?”
02
“I’m sorry?”
03
“I got a call from a friend at the Justice Department in Washing-
04
ton, and he said that at eight-oh-nine
05
named Angie Novello received a phone call from one . . . Ben Fitzger-
06
ald at the L.A. County Morgue. It originated from the Monroe
07
house. He said this Ben was looking for a ‘Mrs. Green.’ ” Curphey
08
took his glasses off and stared at me. “Why did you call the Justice
09
Department?”
A. M .,
precisely, a woman
10
“I was looking for next of kin.”
11
“At the Justice Department?”
12
“It was a number I had.”
13
“A number.”
14
“I found it in a notebook. At the Monroe house.”
15
“What type of notebook?”
16
“Seemed to be a diary.”
17
“What was in the diary?”
18
“I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”
19
“Where is it now?”
20
“I left it back at the house.”
21
“Let me make something clear, Ben.” He leaned forward. “It’s
22
not your job to speculate.”
23
“You asked my opinion.”
24
“You’re not coroner yet.”
25
“I play golf as well as anyone.”
26
“I don’t want you making any more phone calls.”
27
“What about next of kin?”
28
“The next of kin bullshit is just bullshit, a formality. Everyone
29
knows the girl’s mother is out at Rockhaven. If you want next of kin,
30S
that’s who you want to see. Go visit her. Tell her what happened to her
31N { 28 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 28
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THE EMPTY GLASS
poor dead daughter, if she doesn’t know already, and you’ve done
01
your job.”
02
“Yes, sir.”
03
“Are we clear?”
04
“Crystal.”
05
But I knew what I had to do. And to do it I needed a flashlight.
06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
{ 29 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 29
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
6.
07 08 09 10 11 12 13
T
he flashlight was cheap, but that was okay. I didn’t need a good one. I paid for it at True Value and put it on the shotgun seat,
14
took Temple to Wilshire and San Vicente back down to the numbered
15
Helenas and the Brentwood hacienda.
16
“Relative humidity is sixty-two percent,” said the man on the
17
Rambler radio: “The temperature humidity index stands at seventy-
18
three, and the wind is calm. Marilyn Monroe is dead, apparently from
19
an overdose of sleeping pills. An investigation is ongoing, but here is
20
the statement from Deputy Coroner Cronkite . . .”
21
The day was ending, the lights in the basin below the spray of
22
palms spreading out like fire in a grid under the sky. There was a
23
moon. You could see the smaller lights from cars along the highway
24
winding like a silver river through the trees.
25
I parked past the scalloped gate in the wall on Fifth.
26 27 29
N
30S
ence, Doc, and I couldn’t stop thinking of that little red memory
28
ow you ask why I returned, because I care about my job, but there are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experi-
31N
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 30
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THE EMPTY GLASS
book. It seemed to contain the solution to a mystery. All right, and
01
I was covering my ass. Curphey knew something. He knew that peo-
02
ple who overdose on chloral smell of pear; he knew that anyone with
03
all those Nembutals in her stomach would have been yellow inside.
04
He knew what it meant that we’d found no refractile crystals. But he
05
didn’t like that I knew— or had noticed—all this. He was playing
06
some kind of a game, and I didn’t want to get screwed the way that I’d
07
been screwed before.
08
So go back through the microfi lm, Doc, and in January you will see images of me testifying at the hearings, along with the headline:
09 10 11
ACCUSED OF WILLFUL MISUSE OF OFFICE!
12 13
Curphey was charged with nine counts involving the removal
14
of organ tissue from bodies during postmortem examinations in
15
cases that involved accidents or “mystery deaths.” That’s what the
16
paper called them. He had asked for the tissue to be removed even
17
when the organs were not involved with the cause of death; the relatives
18
of the deceased were never told how their dear ones were mutilated.
19
County Board of Supervisors Chairman Frank G. Bonelli testi-
20
fied that his office received more complaints about the coroner’s
21
department than any other agency, and Supervisor Hahn called for an
22
explanation of “pig pen” conditions in the LACCO storage room at
23
754 Kohler.
24
I knew that storage room; I had taken the tissue samples there,
25 26
but that’s not what I told the jury. After we won, we all went out to celebrate on the county’s dime,
27
which led to the images that you have surely seen, Doctor. You’ve
28
heard of the L.A. Mirror?
29 S30
“Of course.”
N31 { 31 }
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J. I. BAKER
01 02
“My wife, of all people, believed what they wrote. Which is why she kicked me out—”
03
“Stick to the point,” you say.
04
Okay: The cul-de-sac was dark.
05
A cop stood outside the gate, a kid puffing out his chest like a bird.
06
“Evening,” I said.
07
“Evening, sir.”
08
“Need to get inside.”
09
“There’s a sign on the door. Says ‘Any person breaking into or
10
entering these premises will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the
11
law.’ ”
12
I showed him my badge. “LACCO.”
13
“I can read. I am under orders not to let in anyone else from the
14
coroner’s office.”
15
“I work for Curphey.”
16
“Orders from Curphey: no one inside.”
17
“Look, I’m in a bit of trouble—”
18
“Buddy. Read my lips, okay. Get the fuck out of here.”
19
“I just hoped that—”
20
“What part of ‘get the fuck out of here’ don’t you understand?”
21
“The ‘fuck’ part,” I said. “I flunked biology.”
22
He reached for his gun.
23
“All right.” I raised my hands and backed up. “Don’t get all Gary
24
Cooper on me.”
25
I put the car in reverse, right arm around the passenger seat as if
26
it were a girl, and looked back through the window. I was careful not
27
to clip the cars parked on both sides of the street as I pulled into a
28
dark driveway, then took a right out of Fifth.
29
On Carmelina, I parked and sat and thought and needed to stop
30S
thinking. I got in trouble when I thought, but then so did Galileo. Not
31N
to mention Jack Paar. { 32 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 32
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THE EMPTY GLASS
I got out of the car.
01
There were no streetlights, so I walked under the dark jacarandas
02
down Sixth to another cul-de-sac. There was a locked gate to the right.
03
It fronted on a driveway. I vaulted over it, walked along the strip of
04
land between the driveway and another house, and through the back-
05
yard all the way to Miss Monroe’s pool.
06
I took a left and walked along the narrow lawn to the window of
07
the room where she had died. The glass had already been broken the
08
night before, so I pulled myself up and dropped down inside.
09 10 11
nd here the tape breaks. It’s at 12583. “Fuck,” you say, and stub
A
12
your Chesterfield, trying to splice it together. Then you feed it
13
back through the reels, REWIND, FORWARD, STOP at 12573, and hit PLAY.
14
“So you climbed inside.”
15
“I found the diary where I’d left it, Doctor, under the pillow in
16
the Telephone Room, and when I picked it up I remembered what Jo
17
had said about the bathroom and the carpet.”
18
“What about it?” you ask.
19
“Well, she’d said there was a bathroom in the housekeeper’s room
20
and mentioned the height of the carpet pile. And suddenly I knew
21
what all this meant.”
22
“What did it mean?”
23
I went into Eunice Murray’s room and fl ipped the switch, but the
24
power had already been shut off. I shone the flashlight around. The
25
room was neat, orderly, the same layout as Marilyn’s, the bed against
26
the left wall. On the opposite side of the bed, near the window over-
27
looking the pool, a door on the left led into a bathroom that connected
28
to the Telephone Room.
29
So let’s get this straight, Doctor: Mrs. Murray said she’d woken
S30
up because she needed to use the bathroom. That (she claimed) was
N31
{ 33 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 33
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J. I. BAKER
01
how and why she’d seen the light under Marilyn’s door. But why
02
would she have gone into the hall when her bathroom was accessible
03
through her own room?
04
Then I went inside Marilyn’s room. I put the flashlight on the
05
floor facing the hall and closed the door. The carpet pile was so high
06
that it scraped against the underside of the door when I closed it.
07
The carpet hid the light.
08
“I don’t think this adds up to much,” you say.
09
“I think it adds up to a lot.”
10
There are logical problems with Mrs. Murray’s testimony, Doc-
11
tor; there was a four-hour gap between the time the docs arrived and
12
the call to the police. We found no yellow color in the digestive tract,
13
and no refractile crystals: no evidence that Marilyn had ingested
14
pills. The body showed dual lividity, which indicates that it was
15
moved.
16
“So?” you say.
17
“Why was the body moved?”
18
“Let’s stick to the subject at hand,” you say: “You found the diary
19
in the Telephone Room. Did you read it?”
20
“Yes.”
21
I sat on the deathbed. The flashlight illuminated MEMORIES on the
22 23
cover. I felt the red leather, saw gold on the edge. And opened it.
24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 34 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 34
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
THE BOOK OF SECRETS
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
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9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 36
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
7.
07 08 09 10 11
F
ebruary 2, 2:01 a.m. I hear clicking on the line. That’s what it
12
sounds like—Morse code. Faint voices all around. Bars are on the
13
windows but the night is dark and the pool should be lit but it’s not on
14
account of the remodel. A few times I heard noises like people at the
15
window but I looked around. No one there and so now, see? Who’s
16 17
crazy now?!!! Mrs. Murray is padding around in her slippers I can hear her pad-
18
ding through the door and once I thought about getting up and going
19
to talk but don’t feel like it. I called a few people. NO ONE was home,
20
or they were all ignoring me. They always ignore me so all I have left
21
is YOU, Diary!!
22
They are following me I know it there are wires in the walls I have
23 24
called Fred and there are bugs. I don’t mean insects. Tonight I went to dinner at the beach house and Danny helped
25 26
me with the notes. I still have them in my purse:
27 1. What is it like to do your job?
28
2. Are you going to keep J. E. H.?
29 S30
3. What is next for Cuba?
N31
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 37
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
.
01
.
.
02 04
I
05
through the gate into the room and they were eating dinner at the
06
table when I walked in. Some of them, like the surfers Pat hates, were
07
barefoot.
03
08 09 10
was late I am always late so they expected it. We drove to where the highway is Beach Road under the bluffs and went down the hill
Peter said, “Drink?” I was already drunk but “yes” I took the glass and everyone said hi and Peter introduced me to the General.
11
The chair to the left of the General was empty and that was my
12
plate. I mean the one that was untouched and napkins and silverware
13
beside it and the glass near the candelabras where a Polaroid camera
14
sat and it was new. They were taking pictures.
15
“Nice to meet you.” I hardly looked at the General. I sat and pre-
16
tended that I didn’t care and wasn’t impressed. He pretended the
17
same, dear Diary.
18
Diary, I had another glass and the room got warm and I giggled at
19
a joke someone had made. I wasn’t looking at the General and won-
20
dered if he was laughing.
21
Then I turned to him.
22
The General was looking across the table at Peter, his mouth
23
smiling but his eyes were not and saw me staring at him and I think
24
his smile died. He looked serious. Well, Diary, lust is more serious
25
than anything.
26
He kept staring. I kept the glass against my lips. It became a
27
Point that I was making with that lipstick, a Thing I did like
28
ice on nipples. It drove men MAD!!!! Well, just press a glass to lips
29
and let the color bleed on crystal and keep it there and see what
30S
happens.
31N
It happened to him. Well, that Adam’s apple bobbed and he { 38 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 38
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THE EMPTY GLASS
reached under the table and touched my thigh it sparked with the
01
static from the helicopter that landed behind the house and you know
02
the neighbors just hated the sand in their pool!!!!
03
I jumped and champagne spilled and he took his hand away and
04
“Oh gosh sorry let me” and wiped my dress with his napkin and real-
05
ized what he was doing and looked up with Peter pouring more cham-
06
pagne, his sister laughing though angry at the surfers and all that
07
damn sand from bare feet and dropped the napkin he was shrugging
08
like the awkward altar boy you know he was, Diary!!!!
09
I turned to the General.
10
“What,” I said, “is next for Cuba?”
11 12 13
D
own the long line of the beach I could see the lights of the Pier
14
and the farther pier in the fog off the ocean, the Ferris and
15
merry-go-round where I’d once stood watching couples on the tilting
16
chairs. Well, I’d eaten cotton candy and worn the wig and wandered
17
the city to buy a wedding ring. Well, the salespeople were rude. They
18
didn’t know who I was. I had a black wig on and they didn’t care.
19
Sometimes I don’t think straight.
20
“I didn’t want to say it back in the house,” the General said. I
21
could hardly hear over the waves. You could hear sounds on the high-
22
way and music drifted over the waves. You can hear things that way. I
23
know that!!! (Even voices.) “You just have to stop calling,” he said.
24
“He calls me when he needs to.”
25
“That’s different. He has different needs.”
26
“How different than mine?”
27
“He’s a busy man.”
28
“I’m busy, too, for fuck’s sake. You think I’m not? But I know
29 S30
what matters in life. I make time for other people.” “Tell that to your mother.”
N31 { 39 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 39
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J. I. BAKER
01
“Oh, now that was a low. That was really a low—”
02
“I’m sorry. Look—”
03
“He gave me his number. He said I could call. And suddenly it
04 05 06
doesn’t work. So I have to call the fucking switchboard?” “You have so many people,” he said. “There must be thousands.”
07
It wasn’t true. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time but
08
men don’t have the nerve to call, not the right ones. And once in a
09
while I meet a nice guy and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have
10
to be from Hollywood he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a
11
few drinks and go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see
12
it going through his mind: “Oh my God I’m going to fuck Marilyn
13
Monroe” and he can’t get it up.
14 15
“I understand,” the General said. “But you have to stop calling him. From now on, why don’t you try calling me?”
16
He took my hand and I felt sparks more than static and looked at
17
him and was it a truly kind face in the light from the houses?
18
The houses were along the bluffs and the children that I always
19
watched played around the nets but it was dark where we stood so I
20
couldn’t really see him. So was it kindness or just the reflection of
21
something?
22 23
“I hear you have a new house,” he said. “Will you let me see your house?”
24
I don’t remember how I answered I don’t remember now and the
25
clock by my bed reads 3:15. The minute hand keeps moving. I wish it
26
would stop, Diary!
27
I have taken another couple from the vial by the bed and there are
28
six. I wrote the number that I started with down and it was eight. You
29
see it written here I always write it I started with eight so I want to be
30S
sure. They say that I am special and I’m wondering if the moment is
31N { 40 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 40
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THE EMPTY GLASS
coming when I will close my eyes and the things that seem real bleed
01
into what can’t be. That’s the second you know you are slipping which
02
is what I feel now a slow slipping. I can’t finish the conversation I want
03
to write it out, what I remember, but am falling asleep leap a leap and
04
so I won’t forget:
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 41 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 41
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
8.
07 08 09 10 11 13
T
14
in the distance and rain in the jacarandas, but what I really heard was
15
inside. A tumbler click? A key turning in a lock? I stood, the beam
16
fading. The flashlight was cheap. I’ve said that already. I switched it
17
off and walked to the door that led into the hall.
12
he flashlight bobbed on those last scrawled lines, but I turned its dying circle to the door when I heard the noise. There were sirens
18
I looked out.
19
A noise: something in the living room, the low sweep of light.
20
A silhouette stepped into the hall, raising his own fl ashlight
21
toward me as I jumped back inside Marilyn’s room and pressed myself
22
against the wall behind the door, eyeing the broken window and lis-
23
tening as the men—there were two now— entered the Telephone
24
Room:
25
“—red,” the voice said.
26
“So much shit.” Another voice. “Who knew she had it?”
27
“Nothing here.”
28
“You what?”
29
“I said there’s nothing. I said there’s . . . I don’t see it.”
30S
“Let’s look in the other room. Maybe they got it wrong.”
31N
“The captain said—”
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 42
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Come on.”
01
“He would have to—”
02
“It’s not in here. Nothing’s in here.”
03
“Except a bunch of shit. Let’s try the other room.”
04
I pressed myself against the wall behind the door, hands flat on
05 06
both sides, my face all eyes. The beam swept the room.
07
I held my breath.
08
The beam steadied on the bed, landing on the diary.
09
“There it is!”
10
I ran and grabbed the diary from the bed and darted to the bro-
11
ken window, cutting myself on the glass left in the frame, and dropped
12
to the lawn.
13
“Grab his jacket!”
14
I heard crickets and barking dogs in the air out on Sixth. I
15
thought of Mrs. Murray’s testimony, Miss Monroe in the soldier’s
16
position, no refractile crystals, the missing yellow, the entry in the diary—
17
I jumped over the fence and ran to the cul-de-sac.
18
A van marked B.F. FOX ELECTRIC was parked down the street from
19 20
my car. It hadn’t been there before. I got inside the Rambler. The engine wouldn’t turn. I sat turning
21
the key, lights and radio flashing, then dying as the cheap bastard
22
sparked out.
23
I pushed the diary onto the floor, kicked it under the seats as the
24
engine clicked and I drove straight into the man. I couldn’t see his
25
face. He fell to the street, picking himself up just as I turned and sped
26
down Sixth.
27
In the rearview mirror, I saw them coming.
28
It was 8:01. And I was late.
29 S30 N31 { 43 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 43
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
9.
07 08 09 10 11 “
13
Y
14
an apron and mitts. She opened the lid, waving away smoke with
15
those Mickey Mouse hands. “Burned,” she said, and turned to me.
16
“You were supposed to pick him up an hour ago.”
12
ou’re late,” Rose said as she took a blackened casserole from the oven and put it on the counter to the right of the sink. She wore
17
“I got delayed at work.”
18
“Sure, it’s always work. Don’t tell me.”
19
“It’s something this time.”
20
“Like . . . what? The tissue samples?”
21
“Hey.”
22
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean it.”
23
We were in El Segundo, not far from the airport. The name
24
means “the second” in Spanish, since it’s only the second location in
25
the U. S. to host a Standard Oil plant.
26
That tells you almost everything you need to know.
27
The house was where I’d lived until just after the trial, the place
28
where we had tried to make a home. Rose sighed, deflated, and
29
shrugged with a slap of both mitts against her summer dress. She had
30S
long brown hair that she was always brushing behind her ears and
31N
skin that looked like a soap commercial. She smelled of soap, too.
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 44
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THE EMPTY GLASS
Someone once asked, “What is there to say about love that
01
someone else hasn’t already made money off of?” I don’t have an
02
answer to that. I don’t have anything to say about love. I certainly
03
never made money off it. Rose once cut my black hair with clippers in
04
the kitchen and, picking it up from the floor, said, “Too bad I can’t
05
sell this.”
06
She had fallen in love, she said, with my hair and the way it
07
curled around my ears and the way one ear stuck out more than the
08
other and the way my eyebrows looked, she said. That and, she said,
09
my hands. For me it was the same. It’s the details that you notice—the
10
slight damp on the back of her neck, the way she clips her fingernails.
11
Now I held The Book of Secrets up to her. “The diary,” I said.
12 13
“Of Marilyn Monroe.” “Well, that’s just great, but how does that put food on the table?”
14
“There’s food on the table.”
15
“The damn cookbook doesn’t work. It’s like that sweater you
16 17
gave me.” “Which?”
18
“The one that never kept me warm. We’ll have to get dinner out.”
19
“I don’t mind.”
20
“I don’t mean you,” she said. “Someone’s coming over.”
21
“What kind of someone?”
22
“We’ve discussed this before: It’s a trial separation.”
23
“When do we reach a verdict?”
24
“We already did. You can only make so many withdrawals from
25
an emotional bank account before it’s empty.”
26
“Are you seeing that therapist again?”
27
“I need to stand up for myself.”
28
“You’re seeing that therapist again.”
29
“I need to take care of Max.”
S30
“You do take care of him.”
N31 { 45 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 45
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J. I. BAKER
01
“You know what he asked me last night?”
02
“No.”
03
“He wanted to know what a whore was. Some kid told Max that
04
his father was caught with a whore and there are pictures to prove it.
05
So Max—”
06
“I wasn’t caught with a whore.”
07
“That’s not what the Mirror said. I want to show you something.”
08
She walked from the kitchen through the dining room to the living
09
room where Max sat playing Monopoly on the carpet.
10
I followed.
11
“Max?”
12
My son looked up, and I don’t know how to tell you what I felt
13
about him, Doc. He was nine. He was four feet and four inches. He
14
was the most beautiful kid in the world. You wouldn’t believe how
15
beautiful.
16 17
And there he sat. I see him now: playing with the game he didn’t know how to play, using the silver pieces as toys.
18
His favorite was the thimble.
19
“Show Ben what’s on your leg.”
20
It was “Ben”: not “Dad” or “Daddy.”
21
“Do I haf to?”
22
“Yes,” she said as the boy stood and shambled over to where I
23
stood. He sheepishly slipped from the beige corduroys he wore with
24
the gray T-shirt. He wore Batman underwear. Rose pointed to the tiny
25
marks in a small, symmetrical cluster near his ankle.
26
“Look at this, Ben,” she said. “Do you know what this is?”
27
“Bites.”
28
“Bedbugs. From your fleabag hotel.”
29
“It’s not a hotel.”
30S
“The hotel where he spends every other week. God only
31N { 46 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 46
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THE EMPTY GLASS
knows what else he’s getting from that place. VD from the toilet
01
seats—”
02
I cupped my hands over Max’s ears. They were small and warm.
03 04
“Little pitchers. My apartment is fine, Rose.” “Your hotel—”
05
“Please,” I said. “Let’s go into the bedroom.”
06 07 08
T
he bedroom was in disarray: clothes on the floor, the bed unmade,
09
the picture of Rose, Max, and me that had sat by the alarm clock
10
on the bedside table turned to the wall. Moving boxes sat around the
11
bed, filled with my stuff: books, the old model train I had bought for
12
Max’s last birthday and assembled in the basement, my typewriter, a
13
stack of jazz albums Rose had never liked, a few 8mm W. C. Fields
14
movies, and a baseball bat.
15
“We need to make this fast,” she said. “I want custody of Max.”
16
Like a punch in the gut. “You’re kidding me?”
17
“—lieved,” she said over the plane flying low into the airport.
18
“You what?”
19
“I said I thought you’d be relieved.”
20
“To lose my son?”
21
“To have more time. To kiss Daddy Curphey’s ass.”
22
“I don’t kiss ass.”
23
“You perjured yourself.”
24
“I got a promotion.”
25
“Step Three? That’s what you got in return for your soul?
26
Faust at least got Gretchen. You got a bottle of bourbon in a Wilshire
27
hotel.”
28 29
“It’s not a hotel. It’s the Savoy.”
S30
“On Wilshire.”
N31 { 47 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 47
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J. I. BAKER
01
“I think I should remind you that you kicked me out.”
02
“You want me to remind you why?”
03
“The Mirror lied,” I said.
04
“Oh, and you chopped down the cherry tree.”
05
The doorbell rang. “Jesus,” she said.
06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 48 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 48
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
10.
07 08 09 10 11
I
suppose that I can trace the death of my marriage to the afternoon
12
we won the lawsuit, Doc, after which we all repaired to a place
13
called Verona Gardens. It had once been a tony nightclub—it was
14
now a hotel— on Hollywood Boulevard.
15
We started with some fancy drinks that seemingly shielded us
16
from excess through egg whites and umbrellas, but it wasn’t long
17
before we achieved a kind of liftoff on the harder stuff, and the next
18
thing I knew we were drinking shots straight from someone’s bottle.
19
Everyone was toasting me. My testimony had made me a hero,
20
the new deputy coroner, Step Three, and with every shot I felt that I
21
was taking yet another step away from my own past. I was a big man,
22
important, and had proved it in the courthouse. I wasn’t going to end
23
up lost, a failure out in San Berdoo, hulling beans.
24
This is what I kept telling the woman who had, like everything
25
else, lurched out of nowhere. She liked my hair, she said. She kept
26
touching it, telling me that it was black and not only black but glossy
27
and beautiful and how my lips were red against the white of the skin
28
and the bluish stubble of beard. “You Irish?” she asked.
29
“Black Irish.”
S30
“Black,” she said, “is sexy, Freaky.”
N31
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 49
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
The next thing I knew I woke on a bed that was smeared with
02
blood. An ashtray filled with butts sat in the sun that streamed
03
through open blinds. There were bowls of half-eaten Chinese food.
04
Some of it was dripping on the walls.
05
The phone was ringing.
06
“Jesus.”
07
I stood, still in my clothes, and stumbled to the phone, trying to
08
piece together the story of the night from the evidence of things
09
around me.
10
Lipstick on the mirror read, “So long, sucker.”
11
She had emptied out my wallet.
12
“Hello?” I said.
13
“This Ben Fitzgerald?”
14
“Yes,” I said. “Who’s—”
15
“Duane Mikkelson. From the Mirror. You heard of it?”
16 17 “
19
I
20
underwear. “This must be my boy.”
18
s this my boy?” Rose’s New Friend said as he entered the house, taking his hat off and smiling down at Max, who was playing in his
21
Max looked up.
22
The New Friend bent to tickle my son’s face with his forefinger.
23
“Or is this a monkey?”
24
The New Friend was older—forty-eight at least—with a thick
25
gray mustache slightly twirled at the edges and gray hair so precisely
26
parted and pomaded it looked plastic. He was Santa Claus with a
27
shave and a haircut.
28
He looked like money.
29
He also looked like a flit.
30S
“Rose,” I said. “Let’s put Max’s pants on.”
31N
The New Friend looked up at me. { 50 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 50
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
“Mr. Charles,” my wife said, “this is Ben. Ben, this is—”
01
“Reginald Charles.” He extended his hand. “Very pleased to
02 03
meet you.” I shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m afraid dinner is
04 05
ruined. The cookbook didn’t work.” “Oh, a shame.”
06
“Neither did the sweater,” I said.
07
“What?”
08
“Never mind.”
09
“Ben was just leaving,” Rose said.
10
I brought Max’s pants to the boy and held them out for him to
11 12
step in. “Come on, buddy. We’re going to the park.” “You’re not taking him to Pacific Ocean, are you?” Rose asked.
13
“Sure am.”
14
“Yay!” Max said.
15
“That place is a death trap,” said Rose.
16 17
“At least there are no bedbugs.”
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 51 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 51
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
11.
07 08 09 10 11 13
A
14
hours, he must be a daily detective of his own ashtrays and bar food,
15
his napkins and the lipstick on unfi ltered Pall Malls, his stained
16
sheets and the smell of hops under the streetlight in the back of
17
the bar where the fans kick out exhaust. He must be a detective of
18
his own soggy evenings, as I had been the morning after the trial— or
19
as I was when, that night, I found myself in a part of town I didn’t
20
know.
12
drinker loses time. I knew this from my dad. A drinker’s life disappears, like magic, from 5
P. M .
to 3
A. M .
To recapture the
21
“This is Titusville Air,” the friendly voice said on the radio.
22
The reception started going out when the lights from the only
23 24
other car on the road rose in the rearview. It was a Ford Fairlane. Dice dangled from the rearview mirror. It
25
tailed me for maybe five miles but disappeared when I finally found
26
the PCH and, soon afterward, Pacific Ocean Park.
27
“Dad?” Max asked in the shotgun seat.
28
“Yeah.”
29
“What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros?”
30S
“I give up, Max. What?”
31N
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Hell-if-I-know.”
01
“That’s a good one, sport. That’s really a good one.”
02 03 04
he park stretched across a three-block swath of Venice, like a T
T
05
with its stem jutting into the ocean. At the tip was an island over-
06
looking the Pacific; you reached it only on the Ocean Skyway bubble
07
carts. I parked in the Ocean lot in a part of town you know is run-
08
down. Venice. You’ve been there. Rose thought it was a “death trap”
09
and “dangerous and unsanitary,” just like the Savoy.
10
It wasn’t. But a man whose wife is divorcing him has only a few
11
options, one of which involves giving the son those things that she
12
denies. These “things,” she now claims, included Wild Turkey and
13
pills, which is a lie. You know that, Doctor.
14
“I don’t,” you say.
15
I grabbed the diary and held my son’s hand as we left the car and
16
walked past the lights around the fountains with the dolphins and the
17
swirling Neptune and the starfish at the top of the rotating pole to the
18
ticket window under yellow arches. Behind the Plexiglas, in the green
19
fluorescent light, sat a woman whose head barely cleared the low shelf.
20
“Two, please.”
21
“One ninety-eight.”
22
We walked into the park that stretched down to the island at the
23
end with the sound of laughing and the ca-ching of clown heads eject-
24
ing at the pop of water rifles and the lights of the city in the sky over
25
the Santa Monicas. Yellow and green neon lit the balls above the hot
26
dog and the cotton candy stands.
27
“Where to, sport?”
28
“Around the World in Eighty Turns.”
29 S30
“You always get sick on that one.”
N31 { 53 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
“Mom gets sick on that one.”
02
“Okay.” I wondered how far I should go. “How is she, sport?”
03
“She’s okay. She’s seeing people.”
04
“People.”
05
“Like the man. She put an ad in.”
06
“Where?”
07
“Newspaper. For testing boyfriends.”
08
“What kind?”
09 10
“Other daddies, I guess. She’s mad at you,” he said. “But I can help.”
11
“How?”
12
“Here.” He took the Get Out of Jail Free card from his pocket.
13
“It’s the only one I have.”
14
I bent down, hands on his small shoulders, and looked straight
15
into his face. “You know something?” I said. “I’m gonna keep this
16
forever.”
17
And I will.
18
Later, he threw up in the toilet of the Savoy because his belly
19
hurt, he said, thanks to Around the World in 80 Turns, a trip we’d
20
taken twice, and while I sat on the edge of the bed, hand on his damp
21
forehead, I heard the rattling in his chest. He was clutching his silver
22
thimble.
23
He was having an asthma attack, Doctor. He has asthma. So, at
24
2:15, I took him for a drive. It’s pretty much the only cure. You roll
25
the windows down. You try to clear his lungs.
26
We drove for hours.
27
At 2:15, we returned to the hotel and I carried my sleeping son up
28
the stairs to the room on the seventh floor. I sat watching his chest rise
29
and fall behind his T-shirt as the lights elongated on the ceiling from
30S
the cars on Wilshire. Some dwindled into nothing as they passed.
31N
Some didn’t. { 54 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
When he finally slept, I reached for the Wild Turkey in the
01
kitchen cupboard, took the Kent pack from my pocket, and carried
02
The Book of Secrets to the sofa that faced the window over Wilshire.
03
I opened it and read.
04 05 06
T
he tape moves slowly. You stare at me, eyes wide, the cigarette
07
burning all the way down to your fingers.
08
“So,” you finally ask. “What did you read?”
09
“Tell me where Max is fi rst.”
10
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
11
“Talk about a double standard.”
12
“You’re under arrest. How many times do I need to remind you of
13 14
that? Now, what was in the diary?” I say nothing.
15
The tape is at 23462.
16
You take a long drag, cupping your hand over your mouth, and
17 18
squint against the smoke. “I will wait for five more minutes.” The tape: 23465, 23466, 23467.
19
“Time’s up.” You stand, turn the Sony off, carrying all but one
20
unused tape from the room. The door slams with the deep echo of
21
metal. The keys hanging from the ring around your belt jangle as, no
22
doubt, you lock the door.
23
Seconds later, the lock clicks again. The guard enters, pasty face
24 25
and dull eyes, and clears away the evidence:
26 1. The Smith & Wesson
27
2. A vial of Nembutal
28
3. A piece of notebook paper reading “Chalet 52” and “July 28”
29 S30
4. A stained manila folder containing a number of 8 × 10
N31
photographs { 55 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 55
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J. I. BAKER
01
5. Amahl and the Night Visitors
02
6. A bag of ashes
03
7. A new red MEMORIES diary
04 05 06 07 08
T
he guard looks briefly up at me but doesn’t say a thing. He leaves the room and locks the door.
I hear ticking, footsteps, and then nothing else for hours.
09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 56 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 56
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01 02 03 04 05 06
12 .
07 08 09 10 11
I
t’s hard to tell how much time has passed. There are no windows
12
in the room with the green paint and the ceiling with the light and
13
the fan. I stare at the recorder that is the only thing left—that and the
14
ashtray filled with spent cigarettes but no lighter or matches. It sits on
15
a folded newspaper, dated October 22:
16
“Let’s be clear-headed on Communism!” an ad reads. “The
17
League strongly supports the President’s over-due decision to act
18
against the Soviet build-up in Cuba.”
19
I sleep, briefly, but I see what I always see, when I close my eyes:
20 21
the drugged woman, crouched on all fours. They never turn the light out.
22
The Novril is wearing off. I don’t know what time it is—there is
23
no clock—but hours must have passed and the ache is everywhere. I
24
suppose that is why my voice is hard to understand when I finally
25
thread the unused tape into the Sony, clear my throat, and press
26
RECORD:
27
“Okay,” (I say). “I’ll tell you. The entry I read in the diary was
28
about sex. The man she met at the party, the one she called the Gen-
29
eral, who wanted to see her house? He showed up at the house. And
S30
she showed her house to him. They had sex. Because she believed his
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
lies, just like she believed his brother’s. He wore dirty white socks,
02
okay?”
03
Then I shout: “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
04
No one responds, so I shout until I am hoarse:
05
“She said he wore white socks under his suit! Said he was like a
06
little boy! He came to see her house the morning after the party! They
07
ended up in bed! He ended up—”
08 09
The door opens. You walk in with a plate of food and—thank you, sir—the vial of Novril.
10
I reach for it.
11
“Grabby! Hang on, now. Eat first. A boy’s got to keep his strength
12
up.” You pick the chicken off the bone in mealy shreds and hold it to
13
my lips, feeding me; when I am finished, you say, “Dessert.”
14
Dessert is three Novrils.
15
I suck the bitter pills from your fingers; the pain fades, my vision
16
blurs, and the whoosh from the vent on the floor is all I can hear as
17
you adjust your glasses and ask one question. Then another.
18
—try to say that I can’t hear you, but you don’t understand. It’s
19
silent except for the sea in my head, the sound from the air vent below.
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 58 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
13.
07 08 09 10 11
F
ebruary 2, 11:05 p.m. The funny thing was the socks they were
12
white. He wasn’t like the Commander he was a boy and gosh so
13
sloppy. He came to see my house. “I hear you have a new house. Will
14
you let me see your house?” But that is like the joke about the etch-
15
ings he wanted to come up and see them but it was more because it
16 17
always is. “Hi,” he said at the door. He had a bottle of Dom Pérignon. It’s
18
what I like and Peter must have told him. “House-warming present,”
19
he said.
20
I think the word is sheepish.
21
I said thank you and tried to get him to relax because he didn’t so
22
I put the champagne on ice and was thinking maybe we might drink
23
it later.
24
I am drinking it now.
25
But I was nervous, too, Diary!!!! And why torture yourself with
26
hellos? Well, I showed him the house it wasn’t finished on account of
27
I’d just moved. Well, he knew that. The red couch was delivered to
28
the cottage and everything needed fi xing but “here is the living room.
29
The couch will go there. It’s Norman Norell. The furniture came
S30 N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
from Mexico, a lot of it. Taxco. Eunice helped. The fi replace works.
02
Kiva. I haven’t lit it yet.”
03 04 05 06
I took him through the hall that led from the living room into the Telephone Room, Mrs. Murray’s room and my room. My room is where I am now drinking and writing and wondering if this will make sense.
07
The windows are covered with shades they call them black-outs I
08
can’t sleep if the sun or moon comes inside but the reason I want the
09
shades is so that I don’t see the Man.
10
He is there now.
11
I take a Nembutal and wash it down with his Dom. The yellow is
12
so pretty and pretty soon I take another with the champagne open on
13
the floor and once I knocked the bottle over or maybe someone
14
else did.
15
Okay, get to the point. I am sorry, diary, but the point is that the
16
sheets are still dirty and smell of him or should I say his socks? The
17
stain is on the sheets and then inside me.
18
“This is the bedroom,” I said and he just stared kind of gulping
19
like he was swallowing, that Adam’s apple bob. He was shorter than
20
me so I tried bending down but it didn’t really work.
21
“Well,” he said. “So this is it.”
22
“The bedroom.”
23
“This is the bedroom.”
24
I was thinking it might happen with the champagne later but it
25
happened then when he leaned to kiss me fi rst my cheek and then he
26
was all over me “like,” as they say, “a cheap suit.” Well the suit wasn’t
27
cheap but he wore socks under the trousers. NEWS FLASH!!!! White
28
socks.
29
I said that already.
30S
Then he was almost naked in his underwear and white socks I
31N { 60 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
kept laughing at the socks and when I pulled on the edge of his shorts
01
I saw the wrinkly lolling thing like an ugly Florida of flesh that always
02
made me laugh but I tried not to. It was sadder than his socks. Well
03
you can’t laugh at that.
04
But I couldn’t help it so he needed to show me how important he
05
was to establish his power which is why he told me what he shouldn’t
06
have. He talked about the Bay of Pigs. He talked about Castro.
07
I wrote it down, dear diary. I made notes on a napkin after he left:
08 09
Robert Maheu at the Brown Derby. Johnny Roselli. Poison in a
10
pen or Castro’s soup. Or [redacted] But Jack pulled the plug.
11
When all those boats hit Bahia de Cochinos, and all the rebels
12
died. The CIA. The CIA.
13 14 15
T
hat was it. That was all. I wasn’t sure what it meant but I knew
16
that this was his little-boy little-man search for approval.
17
From ME!!!!!
18 19 20
D
“
21
ad?” I jumped and dropped the diary to the floor. I turned and
22
saw Max. He was standing at the end of the hall, rubbing his eyes with
23
his knuckles.
24
“Jeez, Maxie, you scared me.”
25
“Sorry, Dad.”
26
“How you feeling?”
27
“Fine.”
28
“The bad air gone?”
29 S30
“It’s gone. What are you doing up?”
N31 { 61 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
“I could ask you the same question, sport. It’s late.”
02
“It’s early.”
03
It was 2:15.
04
“You’re smoking again,” he said.
05
“I’m not.”
06
“You have cigarettes.”
07
“Didn’t light them.”
08
“You were going to.”
09 10
I picked the Kent pack up, crushed it, and dropped it to the floor. “You happy?”
11
He nodded.
12
“Now, go back to bed.”
13
“Tuck me in again?”
14
“Sure.”
15
I walked him down the hall and tucked in his toes and then pulled
16
the bedspread up to just under his chin and kissed his forehead.
17
“Now, you go back to sleep. How many fingers?” I asked at the door.
18
“Three.”
19
I left the door open three fingers so that he could see into the hall
20
and was heading back to the front room when I heard his voice:
21
“Dad?”
22
“Yeah, sport?”
23
“Where’s Mom?”
24
“Home.”
25
“Why aren’t you home?”
26
Hey, try answering that one, smart guy. “I wish I knew,” I said.
27 28 29 30S 31N
“Now, go to bed.” Back in the living room, I picked up my glass, saw the light in the last of the bourbon, and drained it. I drifted into sleep, awakening either two minutes or two hours later to the sound of honking outside. { 62 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
It was 2:15.
01
The car kept honking, someone laying on the horn.
02
Someone was yelling, “Shattap!”
03
I walked across the room and looked out.
04
It was the Ford Fairlane.
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 63 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
M O N D AY, A U G U S T 6
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
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9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 66
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
14.
07 08 09 10 11
MARILYN MONROE FOUND DEAD!
12
Sleeping pill overdose! Empty bottle near bed!
13 14
I bought the Times from the newsstand on the sidewalk and car-
15
ried it back to 7-A and sat on the couch while Max slept. I read every-
16
thing anyone knew about the death that was bigger than the Soviet
17
explosion of a nuclear bomb in Uppsala, bigger than Nixon at the
18
helm of the GOP, bigger than the fact that little William Webb, Jr.,
19
the state’s only Thalidomide baby, would undergo a bone graft from
20
his legs to his arms on August 23.
21
Russia’s newspaper Izvestia claimed that Hollywood and “West-
22 23
ern values” had killed Monroe. Coroner Curphey offered his “presumptive opinion” that death
24
was due to “an overdose of a drug. Further toxicological and micro-
25
scopic studies should be available within forty-eight hours, though it
26
will be about a week before an investigation establishes whether or
27
not Miss Monroe’s death was an accident.”
28
But the big news came from Marshall Cantwell’s article in the
29 S30
Times:
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
Mrs. Monroe’s body was discovered after her housekeeper and
02
companion, Mrs. Eunice Murray, awoke about 3 a.m. and saw a
03
light still burning in the actress’s room.
04
But the bedroom door was locked. She was unable to arouse
05
[sic] Miss Monroe by shouts and rapping on the door, and imme-
06
diately telephoned Miss Monroe’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph
07
Greenson.
08
Dr. Greenson took a poker from the fireplace, smashed in a
09
window, and climbed into the Monroe bedroom. He took the
10
telephone from her hand and told Mrs. Murray, “She appears to
11
be dead.”
12
He called Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who had prescribed the
13
sleeping pills, and pronounced her dead on his arrival at the
14
house a short time later.
15
Dr. Engelberg called police at 4:20 a.m. and two officers
16
arrived in five minutes.
17 18 19 20
D
o I need to tell you what’s wrong with this picture, Doctor? Mrs. Murray, Dr. Greenson, and Dr. Engelberg had all told Jack
21
Clemmons that Murray woke just after midnight. But here the time
22
had been conveniently moved forward three hours.
23
In the same article, Pat Newcomb was said to be “nearly hysteri-
24
cal with grief” and was quoted: “When your best friend kills herself,
25
how do you feel? What do you do?” She added: “This must have been
26
an accident.” Her best friend killed herself. But it was an accident.
27 28 29 30S 31N
I
dropped Max off at summer school in El Segundo, then headed to the Esso station. I fiddled with the radio knob until I landed on { 68 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 68
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THE EMPTY GLASS
Annie Laurie Presents. I heard swelling strings and an announcer
01
saying, “Live from Hollywood, it’s Annie Laurie Presents—and this
02
is Annie Laurie!”
03
Then Jo’s voice, like mink incarnate: “Hello, dear ones! ‘I was
04
never used to being happy, so that wasn’t something I ever took for
05
granted.’ Now, who said those words? The answer: the late Marilyn
06
Monroe, who died yesterday at thirty-six. Rest in peace, dear one.
07
And in the Long, Deep Sigh Department: Darling Tab Hunter is see-
08
ing Naughty Natalie Wood again. But take heart: Tinseltown Tattlers
09
swear that Natalie would and Tab . . . wouldn’t!”
10
I pulled into the lot over the black hose that rang a bell. The
11
gas jockey in a gray suit and a tiny cap like a railroad engineer’s ran
12
from the glass building, a greasy towel slung over his left shoulder.
13 14
He took the Rambler.
15 16
I
carried my briefcase past the pumps, standing underneath the
17
palms that hung limp in the heat, to the phone booth. I rifled
18 19
through the white pages that hung on a chain from the shelf. The listing was under “Times, Los Angeles,” the number Osbrn
20 21
9-2527. I stood at the phone and called.
22
“L.A. Times,” the switchboard said.
23
“Marshall Cantwell, please.”
24
“—second.”
25
A buzzing, followed by a voice: “Cantwell.”
26
“Yes, hi, Mr. Cantwell. This is Ben Fitzgerald down at the County
27 28
Coroner’s? Was wondering if I could ask you a stupid question.”
29
“Sure.” “The time that was printed in your article today, about the Monroe death?”
N31 { 69 }
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S30
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
“What about it?”
02
“Well, you quoted Mrs. Murray, the housekeeper, as saying that
03
she woke at three A.M. That accurate?”
04
“Mr. Fitzgerald, I’m a reporter.”
05
“I know. Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t a misprint or some-
06
thing. Mrs. Murray told you that she woke at three A.M?”
07
“She did.”
08
“Did you talk to Greenson and Engelberg about this?”
09
“Yes.”
10
“Did they verify the time?”
11
“Mr. Fitzgerald, I find this line of questioning insulting. You do
12 13 14
your job, and I’ll do mine.” “Please just answer the question, and then I’ll hang up. Did they verify the time?”
15
“Yes.”
16
He hung up.
17 18
I shook my last Kent from the pack in my pocket, but I didn’t light it.
19
It was Day One.
20
I chewed on the butt, opened the phone book to the M’s, but
21
found no listing for a “Eunice Murray.” There was an “E A Murray”
22
on Fourth Avenue, and an “E J Murray” on Oxford.
23 24
The first was the wrong number. The second didn’t answer, so I turned to the G’s, my finger going down the names:
25
“Greenson Ralph R MD”: 436 N Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills.
26
I dialed CR 1-4050.
27
A woman answered. “Dr. Greenson’s office.”
28
“Dr. Greenson, please.”
29
“The doctor isn’t in right now.”
30S
“When do you expect him?”
31N
“Not soon. He’s on vacation.” { 70 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Vacation.” I scrawled this on my pad. “When will he return?”
01
“I’m not sure.”
02
“You’re not . . . sure. Are you his secretary?”
03
“Yes, sir.”
04
“And you’re not sure when he’s returning?”
05
She didn’t respond.
06
“What if I had an emergency?”
07
“Is this an emergency?”
08
“No, but what if?”
09
“Are you a patient of Dr Greenson’s, sir?”
10
“No, ma’am.”
11
“Would you like to schedule an appointment?”
12
I hung up, my finger moving down the white pages again to the
13
second number: Dr. Hyman Engelberg—9730 Wilshire in Beverly
14
Hills, CRestview 5-4366.
15 16
He, too, was on vacation. “Is the whole world on vacation?” I asked Engelberg’s secretary.
17
“I can’t speak for the world, sir. I can only speak for Dr. Engel-
18 19
berg. He’s in the Côte d’Azur.” “The Côte d’Azur.” I scribbled this on the paper, then called
20 21
Clemmons. “Hello?”
22
“Jack, it’s Ben.”
23
“Ben. How’s it hanging?”
24
“To the left. As usual. Look, Jack. Did you see the papers this
25 26
morning?” “Of course.”
27
“Then you know what I’m calling about. The timeline changed.
28
Reporter from the paper swears that Greenson, Engelberg, and Mur-
29
ray all told him that Murray woke up around three. They told you
S30
midnight, though, right?”
N31 { 71 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
I heard him breathing, kids fighting in the background.
02
“Jack?” I said. “You there?”
03
“I’m listening.”
04
“You said they told you midnight.”
05
“So?”
06
“So all three changed their story. First it was midnight. Then it
07
was three. Someone got to them, Jack.”
08
“Fitz, this isn’t a great time. We’re packing up.”
09
“Packing.”
10
“Taking a few weeks off.”
11
“How nice for you.”
12
“Could really use the break. Get out of this heat.”
13
“Great,” I said. “In the Côte d’Azur?”
14
“Where?”
15
“You going to the Côte d’Azur?”
16
“What gave you that idea? Florence, Fitz. We’re going to
17
Florence.”
18
“Who’s paying for it, Jack?”
19
“’Scuse me?”
20
“I said who’s paying for your trip?”
21
“Kinda question is that?”
22
“Murray told you midnight, Jack. Greenson told you midnight.
23
Engelberg told you midnight. Isn’t that right?”
24
“I don’t remember.”
25
“You don’t—”
26
“Does it matter? The poor girl overdosed, for crissakes. All the
27
papers say she overdosed. Who cares when they found her? She had a
28
history of this. She wasn’t murdered.”
29
“Who said anything about murder?”
30S
“It’s in her history, her genes. Her mother—”
31N
“Who said anything about murder, Jack?” { 72 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“The truth is that I can’t say.”
01
“Jack—”
02
“The truth is I don’t know.”
03
He hung up.
04
I checked the coin slot for stray dimes, unfolded the doors, and
05
spent thirty-five cents on a fresh pack of Kents from the cigarette
06
machine.
07 08
The matchbook, at least, was free.
09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 73 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
15.
07 08 09 10 11 13
V
14
One of the developers whose ambitious lives stud L.A. history like
15
pushpins on a precinct map decided to build a residential area here.
16
He started with a two-story redbrick post office built at the railway
17
terminus. The development never took off, but the post office still
18
exists. I’d seen it before, on some errand or another, but I couldn’t
19
find it that day, as I can’t find so much of the L.A. I remember.
12
erdugo City isn’t a city proper so much as a vacant area in the La Crescenta Valley south of the San Gabriels in north Glendale.
20
The unplanned urban sprawl had grown like an invasive plant
21
around surrounding communities, consuming them with prefab
22
ranch houses and taxes, the whole city built on sand that shifted like
23
its values. Which means that so much of what I remember is gone,
24
and there are days when I wander the bleached streets wishing I had
25
photos of the buildings I’d lived in, trying to remember the location
26
of the ice cream stand where my father once took me, when in fact I’m
27
not sure it was ever there to begin with.
28
“What does this have to do with anything?” you ask.
29
“I went out to Verdugo City.”
30S
“Why?”
31N
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“To find Marilyn’s mother. Next of kin, remember? That’s how
01 02
the whole thing started.”
03 04
D
“
o you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked at the Rock-
05
haven front desk. It was in the alcove of a chintzy waiting room
06
that contained a Bunn coffeemaker and a low table surrounded by a
07
few chairs.
08
I took my hat off. “No.”
09
“We only admit guests with appointments. Your name again?”
10
“Fitzgerald.”
11
“I don’t see it on this list.”
12
“I’m from the L.A. County Coroner’s. I’m looking for next of kin
13
for Norma Jeane Baker. You probably know her as Marilyn Monroe.”
14
“Oh, my.” She brightened visibly, adjusting her white shift as if I
15
were about to take her picture. “Well, you’ll want to see Gladys, then.”
16
“And Gladys is—?”
17
“The mother. She’s in recreation now, but recess will be over in,
18 19
I’d say, ten minutes. I’ll let them know. Do you mind waiting?” “Nome.”
20
“Have a seat. Coffee is free.”
21
“Thank you, ma’am.”
22
“Cream’s free, too.”
23
The coffee was bad. So was the cream.
24
I sat on one of the chairs that had been worn over the years by
25
women who waited for people who never arrived and things that never
26
happened. On the table was a plastic ashtray on which the name Rock-
27
haven had been painted in pink brushstrokes by Mexican immigrants
28
in factories just outside town.
29 S30
“Pardon me?” the receptionist said. “Sir?”
N31 { 75 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
I looked up, toothpick still in my mouth. “Yes?”
02
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wondered, did you . . . know Mari-
03
lyn Monroe? In person, I mean?”
04
“No.”
05
“Well, I wondered. Because people say I look like her. ’Course I
06
think that’s utter nonsense.”
07
“I only ever saw her dead. You don’t look like her dead.”
08
“Oh, my.”
09
The manageress emerged from the long hall, like a female (not to
10
say human) ironing board, stiff in her straitjacket suit, and announced
11
that Gladys Morton was “ready” but that I was to “confi ne myself only
12
to questions of a practical, professional nature.”
13
“I wouldn’t think of doing anything else.”
14
“Then you’re not like all the others.”
15
“What others?”
16
“The ones that were here. Asking inappropriate things.”
17
“About what?”
18
“Come along. She’s in the Annex.”
19 20 22
T
23
in a housecoat, a purse clutched with worn hands below the knees.
24
Her nylons were torn. She wore nice shoes, not slippers. She looked as
25
if she had dressed in “fancy” clothes for lunch at the Folger Café,
26
where she would sip tepid coffee in porcelain cups on saucers bearing
27
the famous faded blue logo. She would order the Fancy Eggs and a
28
slice of the coconut cream pie because, of course, this was a “special
29
occasion.”
21
he light in the room was cold. The room was cold, too, oddly enough, given the heat. The old woman sat on the edge of the bed
30S
The bed was small and crisply made. There was nothing else in
31N
the room but a dresser and a mirror turned to the wall. And a bedside { 76 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
table: a fringed lamp, a water glass, a copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Sci-
01
ence and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
02
“She thinks,” said the manageress who’d brought me to this
03 04
room, “she’s going shopping, don’t you, Gladys?” Gladys did not look up. She had the long empty stare of schizo-
05
phrenia. Mental illness ran like a virus in the family. We know that
06
now. Gladys’s sick mother killed herself. Gladys herself believed that
07
men were following her, lurking outside every window, behind every
08
door.
09
She had to double-check her closet before bed every night.
10
“When she isn’t frightened,” the woman whispered to me, “she
11 12
simply isn’t here.” I wondered what sort of burden that would be: panic the high
13
price of feeling alive. In the absence of fright, there is only the void
14
she was clearly in then, staring without blinking at a spot on the floor.
15 16
“Gladys?” the woman said. “Aren’t you? Going shopping.” Gladys looked up. “I have my list.”
17
“This nice young man may be willing to help you.”
18
The old woman’s face darted up to mine. The movement seemed
19
mechanical, more vegetable than human. “I don’t want him to
20
help me.”
21
“He just wants to ask you some questions, dear. Surely you can
22 23
answer some questions for him.” Gladys’s head turned back to the floor.
24
There was nothing there.
25
“He believes in God,” the manageress said, finally.
26
Gladys looked up. “What kind of God?”
27
“The only God,” I said.
28
“Amen,” she said, explaining that signs in the sky proved that
29
God existed and showed his pure love. Spiders on the wall like the
S30
ones you could see were merely God in disguise. God had not absented
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
himself from the world that he loved so well and so truly well. The
02
proof was everywhere that God was everywhere. Even in the smallest
03
things. Especially in the smallest things.
04
“Amen,” I said.
05
“Like that.” She pointed to a stain on the floor.
06
“I need to tell you something, ma’am,” I said.
07
“Tell me what you know.” She looked into my eyes for the fi rst
08
time. Her gaze was empty. Her finger was still pointing.
09
“Your daughter,” I said, “has died. Is dead. She’s dead.”
10
“My daughter?”
11
“Norma Jeane.”
12
“I don’t remember. I don’t recall.”
13
“Marilyn Monroe. Her name was Marilyn Monroe.”
14
“I have never heard,” she said, “of Marilyn Monroe.”
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 78 }
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01
16.
02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
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J. I. BAKER
.
01
.
.
02 03 04
T
hat was the first iteration of the tox report. A revision, with minor corrections, followed later that day:
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 80 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
Now, you want to know what this report means, Doc. Well, it was
01
clear that Miss Monroe’s death had been caused by a massive
02
overdose— 4.5 milligrams barbs and 8 milligrams chloral. Her liver
03
contained 13 mg pentobarbital, or Nembutal.
04
And that was troubling.
05
“Why?” you ask.
06
I looked for the specimen analyses that Noguchi had requested.
07
Ralph Abernethy, the chief toxicologist, had delivered analyses on
08
the blood and liver, but Noguchi had requested analyses on the kid-
09
ney, stomach, urine, and intestines as well. It was in the autopsy
10
report. He’d requested them because the analysis of all these organs
11
would show exactly how barbiturates had entered the system.
12
But it wasn’t there.
13
“Without specimen analysis, Doctor, there’s no way of telling
14 15
how the pills were ingested.”
16
“Why does that matter? She killed herself, Ben.” “Did she?”
17
“Everyone says she killed herself.”
18
“I’m not everyone.”
19
I picked up the phone and called—
20
“Noguchi,” said the voice on the other end.
21
“Morning, Doctor. It’s Ben. I don’t see specimen analyses on the
22 23
tox report.” “I know. I asked Dr. Abernethy for them again.”
24
“Why didn’t he do them in the first place?”
25
“He said it was obviously an overdose.”
26
“It wasn’t obviously anything.”
27
“So you say.”
28
“Where is Dr. Abernethy now?”
29 S30
“You know,” he said: “the press conference.”
N31 { 81 }
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J. I. BAKER
.
01
.
.
02 04
F
05
phey said as I stepped into the room on the fifth floor. I propped
06
myself against the wall, searching for Abernethy among the rows of
07
reporters on folding chairs, public officials, some taking notes, others
08
snapping pictures.
03
“
rom information supplied” to us, we feel we can make a presumptive opinion that Miss Monroe did not die of natural causes,” Cur-
09
I was chewing a toothpick.
10
Curphey sat behind a mass of microphones in his coroner whites.
11
The table was covered with a cloth; a pitcher of water sat in the mid-
12
dle. He was flanked by three men. Behind them stood a cop.
13
“The cause of death was a massive overdose of barbiturates,” he
14
continued. “Chief toxicologist R. J. Abernethy found four-point-five
15
milligrams of barbiturate poisoning per one hundred cc’s of blood,
16
about twice what we’d consider a lethal dose. The exact type of drug
17
ingested by Miss Monroe has not been determined.
18
“Her death will be probed by my office and by the Los Angeles
19
Suicide Prevention Team, the independent investigating unit of the
20
Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center at UCLA. I’d like to think of
21
this as the ‘suicide squad.’ Through this organ, we will hold exhaus-
22
tive interviews regarding the probable suicide of Marilyn Monroe.
23
And now.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to introduce you to the
24
team.”
25 26 27 28
Dr. Robert Litman was a psychiatrist and UCLA professor who had studied under Dr. Greenson. Dr. Norman Farberow was a psychologist and the nominal head of the Suicide Squad.
29
Dr. Norman Tabachnick was yet another associate of Greenson’s.
30S
“We will take a psychiatric approach to the case,” Curphey said.
31N
“This involves delving delicately but thoroughly into Miss Monroe’s { 82 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
personal history. We’re interviewing everybody. We’ll seek out all per-
01
sons with whom Miss Monroe had recently been associated.” There
02
would be, he said, “no limitations” to the scope of their inquiry; the
03
team “would go as far back in her life as necessary.”
04
“Dr. Curphey!” a voice from the crowd.
05
I looked across the chairs and saw Jo Carnahan. She sat in the
06
middle of the row. She wore a waistless chemise with a chain belt and
07
a gold evening bag. She held a reporter’s notebook and a pen.
08
I still didn’t know who she reminded me of.
09
“I’m sorry.” Curphey squinted against the light. “I haven’t
10
opened up the floor to questions. Now, we will be very thorough in
11
our treatment of this. It is obviously—”
12
“Dr. Curphey,” Jo said again. “How could she have swallowed the
13 14
pills when there was no water glass?” “I beg your pardon?”
15
“There was no water glass in Miss Monroe’s room. If the verdict is
16
that she took a handful of sleeping pills, why was there no water glass
17
in the room?”
18
“Ma’am—”
19
“The name is Jo Carnahan.”
20
“Miss Carnahan, I am not a detective. I am the coroner. I do not
21
speak as an expert when I say that we can have no idea at this juncture
22
how Miss Monroe ingested the pills. She could in fact have chewed
23
them.”
24
“She chewed fifty pills?”
25
“We don’t know the exact count, Miss Carnahan. In any event,
26
there was a water glass. I myself saw it. There are photos of it. It was
27
empty.”
28 29
“But Mr. Curphey—” “I haven’t opened the floor to questions, Miss Carnahan.”
S30
The cop behind Curphey stepped into the crowd, moved down
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
the aisle, and motioned for Jo to leave. There were hushed words. Jo
02
refused to move; the cop grabbed Jo’s arm, muttering things I
03
couldn’t hear as he tugged at her. She wasn’t leaving, though: “Mr.
04
Curphey—”
05
“Dr. Curphey,” he corrected.
06
“You haven’t answered my question.”
07
All the cameras turned to Jo, flashing as she was pulled from the
08 09
aisle down the hall to the door. I followed her.
10 11 13
N
14
repeating the self-serving things Curphey had said, and though at
15
least a hundred pictures had been taken of Jo being yanked from the
16
building, not a single one was published. They didn’t mention Jo, the
17
empty glass— or the fact that her nose was bleeding.
12
18 19 20 21
one of this showed up in the papers the next day, by the way. You should know that. They all reported on the conference, dutifully
She stormed through the parking lot along Spring, clutching a manila envelope under her right arm. “Ma’am,” I said, following her. I was grinning. I don’t know why. Something about her—
22
“Go away.”
23
“Name’s Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”
24
“Sure, I remember. The bright boy who kicked me from the
25
death house yesterday.”
26
“You weren’t supposed to be there.”
27
“And you weren’t supposed to steal the tissue samples.”
28
“I didn’t steal the tissue samples.”
29
“That’s what you testified.”
30S
“I was doing my job.”
31N
“So was I.” { 84 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Need a tissue?”
01
“You mean a sample?”
02
“I mean a Kleenex.”
03
“I need you to get lost.”
04
She stopped at her DeSoto, a candy-apple ’61. She took the keys
05 06
from her gold purse. “I know why there was no water glass,” I said.
07
She froze. Very slowly, she straightened. She turned. “What?”
08
“I said: I know why there was no water glass.”
09
“Really. Tell me.”
10
“If I show you mine,” I said, “will you show me yours?”
11
“Depends.”
12
“On what?”
13
“How big it is.”
14
It was big. You know how big it was, Doctor.
15
“Well, I’m famished,” she said. “You want lunch?”
16
“I could eat a horse.”
17
“Right. So how do you feel about chili?”
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
{ 85 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
17.
07 08 09 10 11 13
H
14
Ken doll hair was combed over a bald spot. He didn’t look like he
15
worked at a joint where they treated food like paper dolls, dressing rib
16
bones up in ribbons, torturing carrots and radishes into tiny swans,
17
Eiffel Towers, and the constellation of Orion.
12
18 19
“
ello, Tommy,” she said as the waiter arrived at our booth. He wore a black tux and tie, but his front teeth protruded and his
“Afternoon, Miss Carnahan,” he said. He deposited a basket of warm cheese toast on the white tablecloth. “And how are we today?”
20
“It’s too soon to tell. Two Flames, please,” Jo said, waving across
21
the tables to the bartender, who was laboring over some bright con-
22
coction under rows of winking wineglasses.
23
“Cigarette?” She took a pack of Kools from her gold bag, removed
24
one with the red nails that exactly matched her lips, and held it out
25
to me.
26
“No thanks. Trying to quit.”
27
“Suit yourself.” She slipped it into her mouth. She had a way of
28
making ordinary gestures seem obscene. It had something to do with
29
her amused deliberation and something else to do with her eyes.
30S
I took her lighter and lit the cigarette, and when she lifted her
31N
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THE EMPTY GLASS
white neck to blow smoke toward the ceiling, I knew who she reminded
01
me of:
02
“Vivien Leigh,” I said.
03
“Excuse me?”
04
“Never mind.”
05
Chasen’s was the large green awning on Beverly Boulevard. You
06
always saw the limos parked outside, swells parading past flanks of
07
reporters elbowing each other for the best shots, the diamonds and
08
white furs of Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood, the white tuxedo
09
shirts of Jimmy Stewart and Rock Hudson. They were all blurs
10
against the doors that opened for them, as they’d opened for us, that
11
day, Dave Chasen himself saying, “Afternoon, Miss Carnahan,” and
12
whisking us past the picture of W. C. Fields to the booth where we
13
now sat.
14
“Miss Carnahan?” I said.
15
“Jo.”
16
“With all due respect, Jo: Why do you care what happened to
17
Marilyn Monroe? I mean, I know your show and column. It’s fluff.
18
Women’s magazine stuff. Good guys and bad guys. Stars we love on
19
the way up and then shoot down.”
20
“So?”
21
“Why are you so interested in the water glass?”
22
Jo blew smoke from her mouth toward the ceiling.
23
“I went to convent school in New York. I was a good Irish Catho-
24
lic girl. A daddy’s girl. Maybe all Catholic girls are. I wanted to cover
25
news, but that’s hard for a girl, so I wrote about a convention of beauty
26
parlor owners for the Evening Journal, the opening of a model home
27
in Flatbush. I interviewed the highest tenants in the Empire State
28
Building and Leontyne Price. It wasn’t what I wanted.”
29 S30
“What did you want?”
N31 { 87 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
“Crime. Politics. Business. Big stories. The Boy stories. But
02
water seeks its own level, and a woman isn’t water, but she’s treated
03
like it.”
04
“So?”
05
“The Annie Laurie job opened. I wanted to leave New York. I
06
wasn’t getting anywhere. It was more money. And I like to think I’ve
07
added some dimension to the character. I came up with the phrase
08
‘dear ones.’ And ‘the Long, Deep Sigh Department.’ That was my
09
idea. It’s one of the most popular segments.”
10
“But you still—”
11
“You know how they say ‘once a Catholic, always a Catholic’?”
12
“Sure.”
13
“Once a journalist, always a journalist. I happen to be both.”
14
She took from her manila envelope an 8 × 10 glossy she’d devel-
15
oped at the Mirror:
16
Monroe’s bedside table, covered with vials. Underneath was a
17
Mexican pottery jug, cap askew, piles of books and papers and a jar of
18
face cream, but—
19
“No water glass,” I said.
20
“Bingo.”
21
It was not what I had seen at the house, Doc: On the table by the
22
bed I’d seen the same vial of pills, the same books and papers, the
23
same jar of night cream—and an empty glass.
24
“Somehow between the time I took this picture and the time that
25
you arrived, Ben, a glass showed up on the table. Someone put it
26
there. I didn’t think there was anything suspicious about the death
27
until that happened. I’m looking around, and the first thing I think
28
is: If this is an overdose, where’s the water?”
29
“They turned it off the night before. The renovations.”
30S
“So how’d she swallow the pills?”
31N { 88 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“I don’t think she swallowed anything.”
01
“Come again?”
02
“She had four-point-five percent milligrams of barbiturates and
03 04
eight percent chloral hydrate in her bloodstream.” “I heard.”
05
“That means she needed to swallow around thirty to forty Nem-
06
butals. And that doesn’t even account for the thirteen percent pento-
07
barbital Dr. Abernethy also found in the liver. When you consider the
08
liver—”
09
“I was considering the chili.”
10
“When you consider the liver, it means that an additional twenty
11
or so capsules and tablets had to have been ingested. That means,
12
Miss Carnahan—”
13
“Jo.”
14
“That means, Jo, that case number 81128 had to have consumed
15 16
at least fifty, if not eighty, pills to die.” “But she did die.”
17
“The point is we’re assuming she consumed them by mouth.”
18
“So?”
19
“So even if she’d had a water glass, even if she’d drunk a gallon of
20
water, she couldn’t have swallowed those pills.”
21
“I could swallow that basket of toast.”
22
“It’s not the same thing. The pills are poison. The body rejects
23 24
them. You vomit them up.” She glanced back at the menu. “Maybe I won’t have the chili
25 26
after all.” “We found nothing in her digestive tract,” I said. “Not even a yel-
27 28
low stain.”
29
“Why would you find that?” “Nembutals are known as ‘yellow jackets,’ ’cause of their deep
S30 N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
color. If Miss Monroe had somehow swallowed, say, thirty-six of them,
02
her digestive tract would have been stained yellow—but there was no
03
color,” I said. “And no refractile crystals.”
04
“Refractive what?”
05
“Refractile. If you ingest more than twelve capsules of barbitu-
06
rates, refractile crystals show up in the digestive tract or in the
07
stomach.”
08 09 10
“Please use English, please.” “That’s refractile crystals. Meaning . . . I don’t know . . . they refract.”
11
“And that means?”
12
“Subject to refraction.”
13
“Oh. Jesus.”
14
“It means they have the power to change the direction of the ray
15
of light.”
16
“You mean they reflect.”
17
“You could say that.”
18
“Well, why didn’t you?”
19
“Two Flames of Love,” Tommy said, carefully depositing two
20
martini glasses fi lled with Pepe’s house special: vodka, “La Ina” Fino
21
Sherry, and burned orange peel.
22
Jo’s eyes sparkled as she extended her glass to mine.
23
The glasses touched. We drank.
24
“So you’re telling me that you don’t think she killed herself?”
25
It’s not my business to speculate (I told her, as I’m telling you,
26
Doc), but in the entire history of forensics, no one has ever died with
27
such high blood concentrations of phenobarb and chloral hydrate as a
28
result of oral ingestion.
29
“Then why did she leave a suicide note?” she asked.
30S
“She didn’t.”
31N { 90 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Oh, really?” She took a piece of paper from that same manila
01 02
envelope. It was a page torn from the diary.
03
“You took this from the death scene?” I asked.
04
She nodded.
05
“You know that’s illegal.”
06
“You gonna arrest me?”
07
“Maybe.”
08
The paper was covered with illegible writing and crossed-off
09 10
numbers. The only words I could read were “The enemy within.” “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.
11
“I wish I knew,” Jo said. “It was lying on her pillow, as if she’d
12 13
tried to call someone.” “She was calling the Justice Department.”
14
“How do you know?”
15
“She left the number in her diary. I read it.”
16
“How?”
17
“I took it.”
18
“Now who’s going to get arrested?” she said. “You took the
19 20
diary?”
21
I nodded. “I have it right here.”
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 91 }
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21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
18.
07 08 09 10 11 12 13
M
ay 16, 1962. Forgive me but it was all I ever wanted. I tried so many times but never with results and always with pain, well,
14
once I almost died but this will be different and will change every-
15
thing, the one who will have the things I never had and see the things
16
I never saw and be loved and safe and sane and mine.
17
[redacted], forgive me: [redacted]
18
But it started and I was excited and then it ended again like
19
before. The General just stopped calling. It was just like his brother
20
all over again. He gave me a number and told me to use the name of
21
Mrs. Green but fi rst the woman on the other end said she didn’t know
22
a Mrs. Green and then it just stopped working.
23
Mrs. Green is what he told me to tell them like a secret that we
24
shared, like with so many others, in bed. But now he’s not here. He
25
never is. Like the Commander. Marilyn Monroe is a soldier but what
26
good is a soldier without a commander?
27 28
I started calling the other number the public one saying I was Mrs. Green. I looked it up in the book:
29
RE7- 8200
30S
RE7- 8200
31N
RE7- 8200
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THE EMPTY GLASS
It was like before. “I need to speak to him!” I said and all that.
01 02
“He owes me! You understand?” I believe he loved me or was falling in love with me I don’t believe
03
it was just what they call “pillow talk” when he said that he would
04
leave his wife and kids. He meant it or his dick did, Diary!!!!
05
But someone got to him. His brother or wife? The woman who is
06
calling me at night? Diary, I DON’T sleep but now there is the ring-
07
ing of the pink phone at 1 and 3 a.m. someone on the other end say-
08
ing, “Stay away from [redacted].”
09
You see how they removed that and how they crossed it out? I
10
didn’t do that. I wrote the name but when I woke in the morning it
11
was gone.
12
Maybe it is the man at the window.
13
He should face me and tell me why. Or tell me on the phone. I
14 15
don’t care. I just want to know why. An hour ago I called the number asked for him again and they
16
said he wasn’t there again and asked to take a message. “Boy, I’ll give
17
you a message tell him [redacted] and [redacted] clicks on my phone
18
and [redacted] is bugging my house on account of they want informa-
19
tion. Did you get that? Can you spell that, Angie?”
20
“I can spell that.”
21
“Tell him if he doesn’t call me back I will call a press conference.
22
Have you got that?”
23
“I got that.”
24
“I could blow this whole thing sky-high.”
25
Yes there are the clicks the sound of clicking on the phone and
26
voices like people whispering in the background like they’re listen-
27
ing and something rustling in my closet the clack-clack of empty
28
hangers there. The water is wrong but the man who came to fi x it
29
didn’t. Eunice said that he was there and something tells me he is
S30
STILL!!!
N31 { 93 }
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J. I. BAKER
01 02
I’m TIRED of being used TIRED of being treated like an animal. WORSE than an animal!!!!
03 04
God it’s too hot to sleep and I know something’s going to happen and then there’s the bottle of pills.
05
Three more would help or thirty.
06
And now the phone is ringing
07 08 09 10 11 12
T
he phone,” Jo said.
“
I looked up from the diary. “What about it?”
“She lived and died on the phone. She was clutching it in her hand.”
13
“So?”
14
“Did anyone go to GTE?”
15
“What’s that?”
16
“General Telephone. Did anyone check the phone records?”
17
“Aren’t you the journalist?”
18
“Don’t answer a question with a question,” she said as she stood
19
from the table.
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 94 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 94
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
19.
07 08 09 10 11
guy at GTE named George agreed to meet us in the Service
A
12
Room to tell us what he didn’t want to tell us (he said) on the
13
phone. But the fact is that he didn’t meet us in the Service Room.
14
When we showed up, the woman behind the long counter said that
15
George was still at lunch. It was strange for him, she said, as he was a
16 17
man of routine. “Where does he usually lunch?” Jo asked.
18
“The Tip Top on Melrose. Always at the same time. And he
19
always has the same thing: the corned beef sandwich on rye. I should
20
know. I’ve worked here twenty years.”
21
“Thanks.” Jo turned to go.
22
“You want to talk to him?”
23
“Yes.”
24
“Try the Benson Bar on Fifth.”
25
“You said he takes his lunch at Tip Top.”
26
“You asked where he usually takes his lunch, but today he’s at the
27
Benson.” She checked her watch. “He’s usually back by one-thirty.”
28 29
“Time is it now?” “Almost three.”
S30
Just then I remembered something: “Jesus.”
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
“What?”
02
“I need to pick up Max.”
03
“Max?”
04
“My son. He’s at school.”
05
“You’re married?”
06
“Almost.”
07
“What does that mean, almost?”
08
“Call me,” I said. “I’m at the Savoy.”
09 10 11 12
I
parked across the street in the rain. The buses were gone. The classes were over, the flag off the pole. Two stragglers left with their
13
parents in yellow raincoats, holding umbrellas over their heads. I
14
remembered a drawing Max had once done showing clouds and the
15
moon and the rain. “Ligting comes with rain,” he’d written. “Ligting
16
is dangerous.”
17 18
Max didn’t have a raincoat. Or an umbrella. He didn’t have boots, either.
19
I pushed through the double doors into the lobby, blinking
20
against the water that dripped from my hair. The school smelled like
21
all schools smell in the rain, wet cotton mixed with chlorine from an
22
unseen pool. The trophy cases were filled with dusty mementos of
23
teachers who had died and of spelling bees won. The floor was covered
24
with boot prints.
25 26
The sign on the first door to the left, the one before the hall of lockers, read PRINCIPAL in gold letters.
27
“I’m looking for my son,” I said to the woman behind the desk.
28
Cat’s-eye glasses hung on a chain around her neck. A series of cubi-
29
cles flanked a narrow hall that led to the only room with a view. On
30S
the door, a sign showed two kids with googly eyes: “THE PRINCIPAL IS
31N
YOUR PAL!”
it read. { 96 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“And his name would be?”
01
“Max Fitzgerald.”
02
“And he’s in? Whose class?”
03
“Third grade. He’s a third-grader.”
04
“His teacher’s name?”
05
“Starts with a W.”
06
“That won’t help much. We have several W’s.”
07
“Wallace? Wilson?”
08
“We have a Weston. Williams. And a Wettergren.” She frowned,
09
put those glasses on the bridge of her nose and looked up at me over
10
the frames.
11
“I think it’s Wettergren. I’m pretty sure it’s—”
12
“Mrs. Wettergren’s class has all gone, I’m afraid. They’ve all
13 14
gone home.” “I was supposed to pick him up.”
15
“Your son: Max Fitzgerald. Is he the handsome little boy—”
16
“Of course.”
17
“The one who didn’t have a raincoat?”
18
“I didn’t know it would be raining.”
19
“The weather report is quite simple, sir. He didn’t have an
20 21
umbrella, either. Or boots.” “I didn’t know he needed—”
22
“He waited in the rain for thirty minutes, Mr. . . . Fitzgerald.”
23
“Ben.”
24
“Mrs. Wettergren stayed with the umbrella. Your wife—”
25
“I didn’t know.”
26
“She came to pick him up.”
27
“I’m sorry. May I use your phone?”
28
“There’s a pay phone in the lobby.”
29
I dropped the dime. Pressed the phone to my ear. And dialed into silence.
N31 { 97 }
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S30
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01 02
I hit the coin return. I didn’t care about the rain now. I walked down the sidewalk to the car across the street.
03
A parking ticket sat under the wind wings.
04 05 06 07
I
waited in the car outside the house. No one was home. I waited with the diary and the ticket and the Kents in the glove compartment
08
and the radio on that station. I kept staring through the path the wip-
09
ers cut in the rain. I stared, too, through the window up the driveway
10
to the garage, wondering when Rose would return.
11
I’d fucked up and knew it. I just wanted to apologize.
12
The house was not, unlike most in El Segundo, Spanish Colonial.
13
It was something more “modern,” a polite term for prefab: a barn-red
14
ranch with aluminum siding, a porch in the back with garden hoses
15
underneath and fences on both sides of the lawn.
16 17
I waited. 5:15
P.M.:
“Real friends were almost unanimous in saying they
18
believed that her death was accidental,” the radio voice said through
19
static. “Two motion pictures executives were bidding for her services at
20
the time of her death. Miss Monroe had received an offer of fifty-five
21
thousand dollars a week to star in a nightclub appearance in Las Vegas.”
22
I kept switching stations, trying to get away from the story that
23
had already killed everything, but no one could talk about anything
24
else. Even in Titusville, they were talking:
25
“I am sure it was an accident,” Dean Martin said at 8:26. “She
26
was at my home just a few days ago. She was happy, in excellent spir-
27
its, and we were making plans to resume the picture early next year.
28
She was a warm, wonderful person. The only one she ever hurt was
29
herself.”
30S
1:01 A.M.: I drove back to the Savoy and lit a cigarette.
31N
Tomorrow would be Day One. { 98 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 98
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
20.
07 08 09 10 11
B
“
uenas noches, Señor Ben,” Inez said behind the bar. She was
12
serving beer to Elisha Cook, Jr., or someone who looked like
13
him. It was hard to tell in the bad light, but the presence of this man
14
was a measure of how far the place had fallen.
15
The Savoy had once been a playground for Hollywood’s celluloid
16
set, back when mid-Wilshire had been the Center of the Film World,
17
the Oscars at the Ambassador, Joan Crawford dancing under fake
18
palms at the Cocoanut Grove. The bar off the lobby had featured a
19
dance floor on springs where showgirls kicked, chosen for no reason
20
other than the fact that their breasts looked great in pasties. But it
21
wasn’t long before their eyes were as dead as the dreams that had led
22
to nothing but the snapped spine of a lemon in the bottom of a gin
23
glass.
24
After a few suspicious fi res, the Savoy went from a palace to a sad
25
place that traded in human remnants, pornographic pictures, and
26
flagons of ether and laudanum. The butts of cheap cigarettes sizzled
27
in the gin as the girls picked up their plastic clutches, slid off their
28
respective stools, and followed the latest johns straight up the stairs.
29
You always had to take the stairs.
S30
The elevator never worked.
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
It still didn’t.
02
“A lady call for you,” Inez said.
03
“A lady?”
04
“With a man’s name. She call two time. Say it is about phone
05
records. She say to tell you, mmm, no sé como se dice . . .”
06
She handed me the message on a piece of notebook paper:
07
“Joe Carnahan,” it read: “’Not even Jay Edgar Hoover.’ ”
08
“What does that mean, Inez?”
09
“No sé, Señor Ben.”
10
“She didn’t say?”
11
“No. There was a man come, too.”
12
“What man?”
13
“To fi x your doorbell.”
14
“Doorbell isn’t broken.”
15
“Yes it is, okay. He say you call. You pay for it, okay.”
16
“I didn’t pay for anything,” I said. “Where was he from?”
17
“The doorbell company.”
18
“There’s no such thing. How long was he here?”
19
She shrugged. “Twenty minutes.”
20
“And he was in my room?”
21
“Yes.”
22
“He was alone?”
23
“Don’t be mad, Señor Ben.”
24
“I’m not mad, Inez, it’s just . . . Don’t let anyone inside the apart-
25
ment unless I give you permission, okay?”
26
“He say he have your permission. He have the work order, okay.”
27
She handed me the work order:
28 29 30S 31N { 100 }
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21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
B.F. FOX ELECTRIC
01
4100 S La Cienega Blvd
02
Baldwin Hills
03 04
For work completed Aug 6:
05
installation of new doorbell.
06
Due upon receipt: $13.45
07 08
“Señor Ben?”
09
“Yes.”
10
“¿Eres un hombre bueno, sí? Your wife should know that.”
11
“No entiendo.”
12
“You are a good man,” she said. “Whatever else you do. You have
13 14
a good heart and soul, Señor.” “Gracias, Inez. I appreciate it.”
15
“But you have terrible taste in women.”
16 17 18
I
hardly slept that night. I kept thinking of Jo and Max and Rose and
19
the phone records. Insomnia seeped through the vents that made
20
the rushing sounds you hear when the traffic stops except for the
21
sirens, except for all the rain. It rained a lot that year. Insomnia was
22
layered in the sand that came from over the Mohave through the win-
23
dow. The sand was trapped, along with the smell of smoke, in the
24
carpet, no matter how many times I tried to vacuum it up. No matter
25
that I always kept the windows closed.
26
But it was more than that.
27
“Now you’re getting carried away,” you say. “And too florid. It’s a
28 29
common thing in addicts.” “I’m not an addict.”
S30
“Just tell me what happened.”
N31
{ 101 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
When I went upstairs, the door to 7-A was open, Doctor, and all
02
the lights were on, but I didn’t see anything missing or misplaced.
03
There was nothing to miss or misplace. I could have made the case
04
that the level of milk in the kitchenette was lower than usual, but that
05
may have been my imagination, as you suppose so much is.
06
“I don’t suppose,” you say.
07
The bare light over the table off the kitchenette was on, and it
08
swung slightly, as if someone had just touched it, but everything else
09
seemed normal. The toilet was still running. The bed was unmade.
10
The doorbell rang.
11
I pressed the intercom: “Yes?”
12
“Señor Ben, it’s Inez. You see?”
13
“See what?”
14
“The doorbell works. They fi x it.”
15
“It wasn’t broken,” I said.
16
It was 2:15.
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 102 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 102
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
T U E S D AY, A U G U S T 7
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
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9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 104
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
21.
07 08 09 10 11
T
he heat wave continued in Southland. It was eighty-nine in L.A.,
12
ninety-plus in San Gabriel and San Fernando. It was ninety-two
13
at the Civic Center, humidity at forty-one. That’s what they said on
14
the radio. The papers were still filled with Marilyn news: preparations
15
for the funeral, Curphey’s press conference, interviews with the hair-
16 17
dressers and stylists who’d Known Her Well. A story in the Times gave the first complete chronology of her
18
last day: Everyone claimed that she had seemed “happy.” Her press
19
agent, Pat Newcomb, had spent the night before in the Telephone
20
Room. And Marilyn had spent a sleepless night in her own bedroom,
21
on the phone. That morning, the actress asked for oxygen, the Holly-
22
wood cure for a hangover. There was no oxygen, so she drank grape-
23
fruit juice instead. She shared it with Newcomb; at some point, they
24
argued. Newcomb said that the argument was about the fact that she
25
herself had slept all night but Marilyn had not.
26
“You gonna pay for that paper, or aren’t you?” the man behind
27
the newsstand asked. He wore a visor over a balding head. Nudie mag-
28
azines hung on a sagging wash line behind him.
29
“Sorry.” I reached into my pockets and found nothing. “Be right back.” I handed him the paper.
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 105
S30 N31
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
“You already read half of what it’s worth.”
02
“Not true,” I said. “I didn’t read the funnies.”
03 04 06
T
07
empty, the candles on the dark scored tables unlit. A silver bell for
08
service sat on the shelf of the alcove. I rang it but no one came. I took
09
my hat off and slid it along the bar wood. The clock on the wall read
10
8:12—late enough to call home.
05
11 12
he jukebox was running, but no one was in the bar. Elisha Cook, Jr., and Inez were long gone. The ripped leather booths were
I stepped behind the bar and grabbed the phone. I thought about smoking a cigarette, but decided against it.
13
It was Day One.
14
Rose: “Hello?”
15
“It’s Ben.”
16
She didn’t say a thing, so I said it again: “It’s Ben.”
17
“I heard you the first time. Jesus, Ben. What happened?”
18
“I showed up at the house last night, and you weren’t there.”
19
“Oh? And where were you when you were supposed to pick
20
up Max?”
21
“I don’t know what to say. I mean I’m sorry.”
22
“You should be sorry to Max. He’s the one you abandoned.”
23
“I didn’t abandon anyone.”
24
“Standing alone on the sidewalk in the rain waiting for his daddy
25
after all the other kids had gone? He drew a crayon picture for you,
26
Ben. He wanted you to see it.”
27
“I just want to say I’m sorry to—”
28
“A crayon picture,” she said. “For you.”
29
“Rose, I’m on to something. If you knew the truth, you’d
30S
understand.”
31N { 106 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
She didn’t respond.
01
“Rose?”
02
She had hung up.
03
I lit a cigarette.
04
Tomorrow would be—
05
You know.
06
I called Jo.
07
“Ben!” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
08
“I know. You left a message.”
09
“So I went to see our dear friend George from GTE in the bar. He
10
told me that all hell has broken loose. Marilyn’s phone records have
11
disappeared.”
12
“I’m sure the police—”
13
“It wasn’t the police. This is where it gets interesting. He told
14
me that toll calls are recorded by hand at the traffic center and filed
15
in boxes that are picked up every night and taken to headquarters.
16
Once they’re there, you can’t access them. Same thing happens with
17
the calls you dial. They refer to them as—let me read my writing
18
here—Measured Message Unit calls. Well, those are recorded on a
19
yellow tape roll, whatever that means, and that ends up in lockdown,
20
too.”
21
“So?”
22
“So no ordinary cop would be able to get ahold of those records
23 24
after they were fi led. He said, ‘Not even J. Edgar Hoover.’ ” “What does that mean?”
25
“Not even J. Edgar Hoover, he said, could get access to those
26
records after they had been fi led. But someone did. Someone at the
27
very highest level wanted access to those phone records.”
28 29
“To be the first to see them?”
S30
“To make sure that no one else did.”
N31 { 107 }
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21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
.
01
.
.
02 04
B
05
east by Leimert Park, on the south by Windsor Hills, on the north by
06
the Mid City, on the west by Culver City.
03
aldwin Hills is named after the range that overlooks the L.A. basin and the lower plain to the north. It’s bordered on the south-
07
There are active oil wells in the mid hills along La Cienega, but
08
most of the derricks in the area are rusting, which is what I discov-
09
ered when I parked on the drive below the hill and walked to the fence
10
at the top. I put my fingers through the links and stared. There was a
11
lot of bleached dirt and dust but no office. And no B.F. Fox Electric.
12 13
I looked at the, como se dice, work order in my hand and checked the address: 4100 S La Cienega Blvd.
14
It was the right address, but nothing was here.
15
The last few entries in the diary of Marilyn Monroe—I now
16
know—were often elliptical, drug-addled, hard to parse or even read.
17
It was sometimes difficult to understand what she was trying to com-
18
municate, even harder to understand the connection between the
19
final entries and whatever she’d meant when she’d written “the enemy
20
within.”
21
But the guiding spirit of the thing was paranoia, her belief that
22
she was being watched and bugged and followed. She was consumed
23
by night terrors regarding the phone calls and the clicking on the line
24
and the man outside her window; she often locked her door, as she had
25
the night she died, because she believed the man had gotten inside the
26
house.
27
Now a strange man was visiting my house to fi x a doorbell that
28
wasn’t broken. I’d seen no evidence of a break-in and no evidence of
29
the man the night before—until I returned to the Savoy that morning
30S
around 10:30.
31N
I ran water in the bathroom sink and rolled my sleeves up and { 108 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 108
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
squirted what was left of the Barbasol on my stubble and reached for
01
the Wade & Butcher straight razor that was always to the right of the
02
sink.
03
But it wasn’t to the right of the sink. I stared into the mirror and
04
opened the medicine cabinet.
05
I didn’t find my razor.
06
What I found was a bottle of Nembutals.
07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
{ 109 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 109
21/02/12 8:10 PM
01 02 03 04 05 06
22.
07 08 09 10 11 13
T
14
sealed envelopes, writing descriptions on clipboards tied to the tops
15
with strings: nail clippings, hair samples, bullets.
12
hroughout LACCO, there were old-fashioned post-office mailboxes painted green. In them, we put the evidence of the dead in
16
Someone from the Evidence Division would empty all the boxes
17
at day’s end, collect the envelopes and deliver them to Carl, the evi-
18
dence tech. He was the only one with the key to the Sheriff’s Evidence
19
Room, which, among other things, contained all evidence pertaining
20
to the death of Miss Monroe.
21
He was sitting behind his desk when I found him, that day, feet
22
up on a row of files, watching Yours for a Song. He was singing along
23
with Bert Parks while eating a sandwich. I stepped inside. He didn’t
24
hear me: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” he sang.
25
“Excuse me.”
26
He turned, chewing, and took his feet off the filing cabinets.
27
“Sorry. I’m Ben Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”
28
“Deputy?” He bit into his sandwich again. “How can I help you?”
29
“I need to get into the Evidence Room.”
30S
“Why?”
31N
“I have a problem.”
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 110
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Kind of problem?”
01
I showed him the vial of Nembutals.
02
“Lots of people have that problem. My wife can’t sleep, either.”
03
“The problem is these aren’t my Nembutals.”
04
“Whose are they?”
05
“Marilyn Monroe’s.”
06
He lowered his sandwich. He stopped chewing. “Not possible.”
07
“Look at the label: ‘Dr. Hyman Engelberg. San Vicente
08 09
Pharmacy.’ ”
10
“Jesus,” he said.
11 12
I
t was a windowless warehouse in the subbasement. The ceilings
13
were so high and dark you couldn’t see them. The few functioning
14
lights sparked in the water that dripped even when it wasn’t raining.
15
Aisles were stacked with moldering evidence from ten thousand for-
16
gotten cases on high metal shelving: everything from a bullet or a
17
matchbook with an address in a white folder labeled “Vergie, 6/23/
18
27” to a chandelier or a chair, a mirror or some flooring stained, long
19
ago, with blood.
20
And then there were the stoned rats with pink eyes and ropey tails,
21
whiskery noses that twitched when they rose on hind legs, forepaws
22
hooked like claws. They loved the bags of marijuana confiscated from
23
the Mexicans on, say, Figueroa. They ate through almost anything to
24
get the stuff; you’d see them staggering, stoned, along the floor.
25
“Here you go,” Carl said, handing me the key at the front door.
26
His voice echoed. “Just lock up and return it when you’re done. This
27
place gives me the creeps.”
28 29
“Sure.” “Don’t let them bite,” he said, and shut the door. I heard him laughing down the hall as I looked at the log he had given me:
N31
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S30
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
CASE NO.: 81128
02
DECEDENT NAME: Marilyn Monroe
03
CONTENTS:
04
1.
05
A vial of 25 Nembutal capsules from San Vicente Pharmacy
06
2.
07
A vial of ten chloral hydrate tablets filled on July 25
08
3.
A small key with a red plastic cover labeled
10
4.
The water glass
11
LOCATION: Box 24, Row 13-B
09
“15”
12 13 15
I
16
minutes later, I came across The Book of the Unknown Dead lodged
17
within a stack of mildewed files.
14
located the southernmost row and counted over to row 13 (where the B came in, I had no idea). But I found nothing—until, twenty
18
I’d heard tales of this volume, a large black scrapbook started by
19
an assistant, his name lost to history, in 1921. It was a book into which
20
that first man, and many who came after, put evidence from and pic-
21
tures of people the coroner’s office could never identify. These people
22
were all poor, nameless, and alone.
23
There were pictures of a wino they’d found off Alameda, a black
24
man in a zoot suit in the bathroom of Club Alabam, a hairless man
25
found lying in the reservoir, hobos sliced in half on railroad tracks,
26
floaters washed up in Marina Del Rey . . .
27
“What does this have to do with Monroe?” you ask.
28
“I thought you would be interested.”
29
“Why?”
30S
“Because of my father.”
31N { 112 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“I don’t want to know about your father. I want to know about the
01 02
evidence. Did you find it?” The answer is yes, though it took me a while: The envelope had
03
been misfiled. It was not in Box 24, Row 13-B. It was in Box 25, Row
04
13-C. And, of course, the vial of Nembutal was missing.
05
There was just one item inside. It was stuck in the back. I couldn’t
06 07
dislodge it. I turned it over, shook again, and it fell to the floor. It wasn’t really evidence.
08
It had nothing to do with Miss Monroe.
09
It was my Wade & Butcher razor.
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
{ 113 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
23.
07 08 09 10 11 12 13
Y
ou want to know how my razor ended up in the evidence folder for Coroner’s Case No. 81128? I wish I could tell you.
14
“So what did you do next?” you ask.
15
“Went back to my office.”
16
“Why didn’t you call the evidence tech?”
17 18
“And tell him that my razor had ended up in the Evidence Room? Would you believe that?”
19
“No.”
20
“You’d think I’d put it there myself. What other explanation is
21 22
there?” “You’re not answering my question, Ben.”
23 24 26
M
27
ker Hill, San Bernardino, and La Habra. Or he and some woman he’d
28
picked up in a Vernon bar would kill half a bottle of rotgut from a
29
package store and he would teach her dance steps to the music that
30S
came from whatever faded radio sat by the side of the bed. Very early
31N
on I tried tasting the stuff that seemed to work like magic on my
25
ore than once my father would leave empty beer cans that weren’t really empty around the hotel rooms we shared in Bun-
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 114
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THE EMPTY GLASS
father and all these random women. And, though it made me gag at
01
first, it didn’t take long to realize that the sickness you felt disap-
02
peared fast enough if you swallowed it. It became something more
03
than warm and more than soothing. It changed the way you thought
04
about yourself.
05
It changed the world.
06
Mornings, my father always grabbed the Benzedrine that he would
07
buy in tubes and, swallowing the soaked paper inside, he would say, “I
08
will never do this again.” He always seemed to mean it, but it hap-
09
pened anyway. It happened because the lights were blooming in the
10
restaurants and taverns. They made the trash cans and alleys between
11
bars look good, and he knew that just one drink would kill the haze,
12
making everything better and clear. Would allow him, finally, to sort
13
out what was wrong and give him the strength to continue.
14
Not merely to continue: to thrive.
15
I don’t need to tell my story here. You’re not interested. Neither
16
am I. All you need to know is that he was working as a bean huller in
17
San Bernardino when he disappeared. He got a bean hull in the eye.
18
You almost couldn’t tell the eye was no good, when the doctor was
19
through with it, but it ate at him.
20
He was angry and grew angrier. He drank even more, chasing the
21
long evenings with Benzedrine in the afternoons. “I will never do this
22
again,” he said on the morning that he disappeared. He had sched-
23
uled an appointment with a labor organizer, and before he left he took
24
a swig of Teacher’s from the bottle that hung from the window on a
25
string. He thought I hadn’t noticed.
26
He vanished, as they put it, “without a trace.” A few items about
27
the disappearance of Milo Fitzgerald appeared in the local paper, but
28
they, too, vanished in a few days, and from that point onward I was
29
nothing if not conscious of the gap between the life I knew, and the
S30
life the world acknowledged.
N31 { 115 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
Which is why, of course, I looked for my father in The Book of
02
the Unknown Dead that day. Had he been one of the hobos? The man
03
who had jumped? The one in the back of the limo?
04
“But I never finished,” I say.
05
“Why not?”
06
“Curphey called.”
07 08 10
H
11
looked up, narrowed his eyes, and said, “May I call you right back?”
12
He hung up and nodded at me. “Sit down, Ben.”
09
e was in his lab coat, pipe in his mouth, paging through a manila folder and talking on the black telephone when I walked in. He
13
I did.
14
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”
15
“You have?”
16
“What you said about the diary.”
17
“What about it?”
18
“You said it was in the Monroe home. But Captain Hamilton sent
19
his men to her home and found nothing.”
20
Captain Hamilton.
21
“You didn’t take it, did you?”
22
I lied: “No.”
23
“Where is it?”
24
I said nothing.
25
“Look, I understand the pressures here, Ben. Really. Which is
26
why you should relax. You deserve to. You haven’t had a break in
27
quite a while.”
28
“It’s been busy.”
29
“I know. But a man has to live. A man has to take care of himself.
30S
I worry that you’re not.” He slid an envelope emblazoned with the
31N
LACCO logo across the desk. { 116 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Open it.”
01
I did: It contained one round-trip TWA ticket to Cleveland.
02
“Cleveland?”
03
“I want you to go on vacation, and not think about your job. And
04
not worry about Marilyn Monroe. So we’ve arranged for you to spend
05
some time in Cleveland. At the Pick-Carter. You heard of it?”
06
“I’ve hardly even heard of Cleveland.”
07
“It’s a lovely hotel. You can only do your job when you’re think-
08 09
ing clearly.” “I’m thinking clearly.”
10
“Oh?”
11
“You don’t believe me.”
12
A voice at the door: “Dr. Curphey?”
13
He looked up. “Yes?”
14
His secretary. “May I see you for a second, please.”
15
Curphey looked at me as he left the office.
16
I tapped my finger on his desk and looked around, at the window,
17 18
the TV, the golf clubs . . . and the bookshelf: Volumes of history, psychology, forensics . . . and The Enemy
19 20
Within by Robert Kennedy. Bingo.
21
I took the book down from the shelf and opened it.
22
“Dear Dr. Curphey,” read the inscription on the inside plate:
23 24
“With thanks and gratitude. Yours ever, Bobby.”
25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 117 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
24 .
07 08 09 10 11 13
I
14
The Monroe diary sat to my right. It was late, I didn’t know what
15
time, and I was alone except for the bum who slept with his head on
16
crossed arms two tables ahead. He kept moving in his sleep, snake-
17
like. A severe librarian sat behind the desk in the middle of the room.
18
I lit a cigarette. I dragged and tried to tamp the ash, but there was
19
no ashtray. I set the butt on the edge of the desk and returned to the
20
book.
12
was on the second floor of the library on Fifth, reading The Enemy Within by the green light of a lawyer’s lamp on a long oak table.
21
In 1955, Robert Kennedy was chairman of the Senate Select
22
Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field,
23
also known as the McClellan Committee. Senator John McClellan,
24
D-Arkansas, was chairman. The investigation into Teamster presi-
25
dent Dave Beck and, later, Jimmy Hoffa began when the subcommit-
26
tee started nosing into mob and Teamster involvement in the
27
manufacturing and distribution of clothes for the military.
28
The dues and savings of the Teamsters were being used by Team-
29
ster leaders, President Beck in particular, to buy homes, race horses,
30S
Sulka robes, “twenty-one pairs of nylons, outboard motors, shirts,
31N
chairs, love seats, rugs, a gravy boat, a biscuit box, a 20-foot deep
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 118
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THE EMPTY GLASS
freeze, two aluminum boats, a gun, a bow tie, six pairs of knee draw-
01
ers.” The money was also being loaned to people like Morris “Moe”
02
Dalitz, former member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, who used it to build
03
the Desert Inn and Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.
04
Robert Kennedy, crusader, crossed the country in search of more
05
information. His fi rst stop: Los Angeles. His fi rst contact: Captain
06
James Hamilton of L.A.’s Intelligence Division.
07
Kennedy met Hamilton and Lieutenant Joseph Stephens, chief of
08
the Police Labor Squad, on November 14, 1956. He talked to mem-
09
bers of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. He talked to Anthony Doria,
10
mobster Johnny Dio’s friend. He heard about members of the Retail
11
Clerks of San Diego who had been beaten by goons. He heard about
12
the hoods who had tried to take over the L.A. Union of Plumbers and
13
Steamfitters.
14
There were unsolved murders, bodies in barrels, and the story of
15
the L.A. union organizer who had been told to “stay out of San Diego.”
16
Messages on cocktail napkins: “Stay out of San Diego.” Phone calls:
17
“No San Diego or you die.”
18
But the man went to San Diego. He intended to organize juke box
19
operators. He stayed at the Beachcomber Motel. And one night, after
20
a few drinks at the bar, he was ambushed on the way back to his room.
21
Knocked on the back of the head with a blackjack. When he woke, he
22
was lying on Black Beach. A seagull pecked at his head, blood on its
23
beak. He sat up, waved the birds away—and that was when he felt the
24
pain in his backside.
25
He wanted to get out of San Diego. He never should have gone to
26
San Diego. But the pain was so bad that he couldn’t drive. He called
27
the ambulance. At the hospital, they removed a cucumber from his
28
rectum. It still had a price sticker on it. Back in his car, at the hotel, a
29 S30
note on the passenger seat read: “Next time it will be a watermelon.”
N31
{ 119 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
I put the book down and went in search of timelines and logistics.
02
I combed through the last few copies of the L.A. Times, tracking the
03
Kennedys’ whereabouts from August 4 to yesterday.
04
And this is what I found:
05
Bobby had been scheduled to speak at the American Bar Associ-
06
ation Conference on Monday, August 6, so he spent the weekend with
07
Ethel and kids at the Bates Ranch in Gilroy, three hundred miles
08
northwest of Los Angeles. On Saturday, Marilyn’s last day, everyone
09
went horseback riding.
10
On Sunday, Bobby attended mass at 9:30 A.M. in Gilroy. “He was
11
without his usual flashy smile and shook hands woodenly with those
12
that welcomed him,” one paper said. “Perhaps the cares of the admin-
13
istration are weighing heavily on him.”
14
Perhaps.
15
I also found this from Dorothy Kilgallen’s column in the New
16
York Herald Tribune:
17 18
Marilyn Monroe’s health must be improving. She’s been attend-
19
ing select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the
20
town again. In California, they’re circulating a photograph of
21
her that certainly isn’t as bare as the famous calendar, but is
22
very interesting. And she’s cooking in the sex-appeal depart-
23
ment, too; she’s proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman
24
who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his prime. So don’t
25
write off Marilyn Monroe as finished.
26 27 28 29
I
felt a tap on my shoulder. The librarian stood above me, wiry gray hair and granny glasses. Dark suit. “Sir,” she said.
30S
“Yes.”
31N
“You can’t smoke in here.” { 120 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 120
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“I wondered why there were no ashtrays.”
01
“Anyway, we’re closed,” she said, checking her wrist with one
02
swift gesture. She had a little mustache. “It’s ten P.M.”
03
“I didn’t notice the time. I’ve been reading.”
04
“And smoking. We’re closing.”
05
“I need to use the men’s room.”
06
She told me where it was. I picked up the Monroe diary and
07
noticed, as I stood, that the homeless man’s right wrist had slipped
08
from his black coat. On it: an expensive wristwatch.
09 10 11
he bathroom door was ajar. The light would not turn on. I heard
T
12
dripping in the darkness and touched things I didn’t want to
13
touch as I made my way to what I hoped were the urinals.
14
I flushed and stepped back outside.
15
I walked into Zoology and, through the parallel stacks, saw the
16
homeless man going methodically through my briefcase. He was lift-
17
ing it up by the handle, shaking out the papers inside, then bending
18
to the floor.
19
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize he was looking for the
20
diary. They were all looking for it. I was carrying it, nervous: What
21
would they do to get it? I paged to the entries I had not yet read and
22
ripped out as much as I could. I shoved them into the back of my trou-
23
sers, slipped The Book of Secrets between The Vertebrate Body and
24
The World of Plankton, and walked toward the front room.
25
The man was gone.
26
So was my briefcase.
27 28 29 S30 N31 { 121 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 121
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01 02 03 04 05 06
25.
07 08 09 10 11 13
T
14
when I left the car. I figured I was being followed, but I never saw any-
15
one on the sidewalk, with or without a camera. I never saw anyone
16
across the street—at least not at fi rst. The tavern had a sort of stucco,
17
almost adobe, wall. That much I remember. And red neon in dark
18
windows. That’s what you can see in the first of the photos they took
19
of me, the photo you have here, Doctor, in the stack of evidence:
12
he 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
20 21
4. A stained manila folder containing a number of 8 × 10
22
photographs
23 24 25 26
I
n the third photo, taken twenty minutes later, you can see I am leaving the tavern.
27
It’s hard to identify me in the fi rst shot—they did not use a tele-
28
photo lens, and the name on the photo reads “Milo,” which is not my
29
name.
30S
But in the third shot . . .
31N
“Can I do you for?” the bartender said. Like a bartender in a
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 122
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
movie, he had a handlebar mustache and a neat red bow tie and was
01
wiping out the inside of a pint glass with a white towel.
02
“Wild Turkey, Joe. Neat.”
03
“How’d you know my name is Joe?”
04
“It’s the name on the bar.”
05
“I’m not that Joe.”
06
He poured.
07
I smelled the damp hops. I saw the wood scored with pierced
08
hearts and names of long-ago loves, the black lines from burned ciga-
09
rettes and damp rings from a century’s worth of bottle bottoms. Wet
10
cardboard cases of beer were stacked before the bathroom you could
11
reach just past the pool table. The circular fan set high in the wall at
12
the end of the hall blew out, I somehow knew, into the back of a park-
13
ing lot where you would fi nd a dumpster filled with orange rinds and
14
the greasy remains of onion rings and wax paper that had once lined
15
the red plastic baskets.
16
I lit a cigarette.
17
“There a phone here?”
18
“Of course.”
19
There was always a phone. It was set in the dark wall near the
20
front door and the cigarette machine. Inside was a light and a little
21
seat near the dangling phone book.
22
I called Jo.
23
The phone, you know, kept ringing. Each ring was followed by a
24 25
click. The smoke curled and rose to the top of the booth. “Hello?” A man’s metallic voice.
26
I swallowed. “Jo there?”
27
“Who’s calling?”
28
I didn’t know what to say.
29
“Who is this?” he said.
S30
I hung up.
N31 { 123 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
I put a dime into the Wurlitzer to the right of the front door and
02
played B-7, “Young World,” by the good Ricky Nelson. I didn’t care
03
that he was on that TV show people made fun of. He could really tear
04
it up.
05 06
I went back to the bar, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the pages I had torn from the diary.
07
You had to put the pieces together. The writing wasn’t always
08
legible. There were random scrawled words and names, like “HORSE
09
BOOK OPEN” and “Roberta Linn.” Much of it did not make sense,
10
but the stuff that did make sense made clear that, the weekend before
11
Marilyn died, she had gone out to the place that Sinatra owned, a
12
place half in California and half in Nevada, hence its name: Cal-Neva
13
Lodge.
14
The Nevada half featured gambling. You stepped past the exact
15
geographical point where the states changed in the hall and found
16
yourself in a casino once frequented by the likes of Charles Lind-
17
bergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clara Bow, and William Randolph Hearst.
18
On the weekend of July 28 and 29, Sinatra was performing in the
19
Celebrity Showroom. He’d invited Marilyn to come, she wrote, “just
20
for kicks.” But it wasn’t kicks. She had taken a lot of pills. She wrote
21
about taking them as Sinatra sang “September Song” and there was
22
champagne and vodka as the room blurred and music faded and she
23
looked up to see a chandelier and ceiling tiles falling from the rain the
24
night before. The tiles were falling on her. She was certain. And one
25
tile became two. And three. Until—
26
Now there was a flash from the street outside: lightning? No.
27
A camera?
28
I carried the pages to the front door and looked out.
29
Duane Mikkelson, the guy from the Mirror, was taking pictures
30S
through the window on the sidewalk. He had the same Chiclet teeth
31N
that I remembered, crammed into the same gums that were too high { 124 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 124
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
when he smiled. The same sunglasses, even at night; the same fedora
01
with the same press pass in it.
02
I carried the pages past the pool table into the bathroom.
03
It was dim and green, like an aquarium but without water. No
04 05
windows. I locked the door. There was one stall. The toilet inside hadn’t
06
been flushed since Grant took Richmond. I shut the cover and stood
07
on it, reaching up for the ceiling tiles. They were all square-shaped
08
and mostly stained with water that had turned yellow. I pushed one
09
up, slid it over, pushed the pages I had ripped on top of another tile
10
inside, then pulled the fi rst tile back over the space.
11
Dust filtered down. I coughed, wiped my hands against my pants,
12 13
and jumped off the toilet. Back at the bar: I saw another flash.
14
“It’s this one, see, Doc?” I point to the second picture in the file.
15
“It’s closer; you can see me better, though the name on the photo here
16 17
is, again, ‘Milo.’ ” In the third picture, I am standing outside and staring toward the
18
camera, holding my hands above my eyes like an admiral. What you
19
can’t see is the car—my car—below the lens. The windows had been
20
shattered, the doors opened and the seats slit with razors.
21
My empty, torn briefcase sat on the front seat.
22
Enter that into evidence, Doc.
23
“It isn’t evidence,” you say.
24
“Oh?”
25
I stepped over the shattered glass, slipped onto the car seat, put
26 27
the key in the ignition. But the Rambler didn’t start.
28
I heard thunder. I looked back to the bar and, through the drops
29
on the window, saw the bartender at the door.
S30
And that was when the cab pulled up.
N31
{ 125 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
26.
07 08 09 10 11 12 13
“
W
eather we’re having,” the driver said over the sound of the wind wings.
14
“Sure enough.”
15
“Santa Anas, you know.”
16
“I know.”
17
“The devil’s wind, what they call them. What is that phrase? An
18
ill wind blows no good.”
19
“I don’t know.”
20
“Sorry? Can’t hear you. Gotta speak up.”
21
“I said I don’t know! I wouldn’t know.”
22
“Wouldn’t want weather like this to continue.”
23
“No, sir.”
24
“Coyotes come down from the mountains. They say the other day
25
a woman gave birth to a lion. Or a prince.”
26
“You don’t say.”
27
“Mud slides and all that. One day it will all just continue, you
28
know. The fires will start and not stop. They say that. It’s the end
29
times. Like the Whore of Babylon. The woman who died. The actress.
30S
What’s her name?”
31N
“Marilyn Monroe.”
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 126
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
“Oh, sure. You a churchgoing man?”
01
“Not exactly.”
02
“Oh, no? Well, it’s all in the Bible. You don’t live in the moun-
03 04
tains, do you?” “I told you. I live on Wilshire.”
05
“Oh, sure. By the big hotel.”
06
“Yeah. That.”
07
“Up-and-coming neighborhood, I heard.”
08
“More or less. The place is smoky, though. And old.”
09
“Oh, that can’t be good.”
10
“No.”
11
“Can’t be good for you, I mean,” he said. “Or your son.”
12
“Well, I’m trying to—” I started to say save up enough money to
13
move. But I stopped, of course. “How did you know that I have a son?”
14
I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror. I thought I saw his mouth,
15
too, smiling. But that must be a memory that I applied later, because
16
I could not have seen his mouth. Not in the rearview mirror. I saw his
17
eyes, though, in the light from a passing car as we drove onto a
18
deserted road.
19
“You told me you had a son,” he said.
20
“I didn’t.”
21
“Of course you did. How else would I know?”
22
“That’s my question.”
23
“And my answer is: You told me.”
24
The lights were dying behind us. “Where are we going?”
25
“To your hotel.”
26
“I don’t know where we are.”
27
The radio was filled with static. It was tuned to a talk show featur-
28
ing a man playing muted music and speaking in a throaty voice:
29
“Whatever happened to good night, stars, I love you? Or whatever
S30
happened to starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight? Whatever
N31
{ 127 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
happened to Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy? As the aging
02
hand of time runs her fingers through my hair, all I can think of is:
03
Whatever happened to ‘now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my
04
soul to keep’?”
05 06 07 08
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—”
09
“—on the floor of the bathroom as the children—”
10
“—cruise with a throng of the other Kennedy clansmen Sunday
11
and then a bit of solitude, just the president and Mrs. Kennedy, before
12
they part today.”
13
We were moving through the hills, lightning in the clouds. I fig-
14
ured we were taking the back roads around 101, what locals call Free-
15
way 101, following the old thoroughfare that linked the Spanish
16
missions. The roads are mostly rural, black stretches heading into a
17
midnight broken only by abandoned hotels and railroad quarries and
18
gas stations lit by Coke machines. There weren’t any cars, and though
19
for maybe twenty minutes I contemplated pulling on the handle and
20
jumping into the night, we were speeding, and a roll across that pave-
21
ment would have killed me.
22 23 24 25
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.”
26
“This isn’t my building.”
27
His eyes lifted in the mirror. “You asked me to drive you. I drove
28
you. It’s a simple transaction: You owe me five sixty.”
29
“I’m not paying you for leaving me out in the middle of nowhere.”
30S
“I have ways of dealing with deadbeats.”
31N
He pushed his palm against the padded horn. { 128 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 128
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THE EMPTY GLASS
Headlights from another car flashed through the rain on the
01 02
windshield. Someone opened the cab’s back door, and I was yanked into the
03
mud, staring up at a man with a psychopathically grinning Jimmy
04
Cagney face and a porkpie hat as the cab pulled away, rolling through
05
the arches.
06
“You’re supposed to be on vacation,” the man said. He was short
07 08
and wiry, like an Irish boxer. “Why aren’t you on vacation?” “I got bored.”
09
“Where is The Book of Secrets?”
10
Rain fell like a veil around his head.
11
“I don’t know what—”
12
There were other men. I hadn’t seen them at first, but now they
13
were behind me. One of them picked me up, both hands under my
14
armpits, and held me close to his hard heavy chest as the small man in
15
the hat hauled off and punched me in the jaw.
16
The night went white, my head rocking back. I blinked, lips
17
drooling blood and rain, and stared at him. The headlights blinded
18
me. He was a black shadow surrounded by light.
19
“I’m not going to ask you again,” he said. “Where is The Book of
20 21
Secrets?” “I don’t know.”
22
He punched me again. Harder, this time. My head jolted back. I
23
heard a crack. I saw stars. I saw more stars than were in the heavens.
24
Or MGM. The second man tightened his grip as Cagney reached into
25
his jacket pocket, LAPD shield flashing, and pulled out a cucumber.
26 27
“It’s in the library,” I said.
28 29 S30 N31 { 129 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
2 7.
07 08 09 10 11 13
B
14
as I could. They were bloody slits, but I could see Jo.
12
“
en.” I took the ice pack off my face and opened my eyes. As much
15
She stood above me as I lay on a gurney near a moaning guy on
16
yet another gurney just two feet away. She was dressed, as always, like
17
Edith Head. She wore a clean-lined bias-cut cream dress with over-
18
sized pink buttons. (Don’t ask me how I know all this.) She wore jet
19
earrings, too. At her sides, like matching luggage, sat a bag from I.
20
Magnin and her purse.
21
“Jo.”
22
“Shh!”
23
“What time is it?”
24
“Eleven or so.”
25
“That means nothing to me. Why are you here?”
26
“Hospital called.”
27
“Why?”
28
“You put me down as next of kin.”
29
“What?”
30S
“They asked for next of kin, and you said me.”
31N
“Must have been delirious.”
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m touched.”
01
“Yeah, well, I was touched myself about a hundred times tonight,
02 03
and right now I’m not feeling so great.” “They said blunt trauma to the face and chest. A fractured rib
04 05
and nasal fractures. And echees . . .” “Ecchymoses.”
06
“What’s that?”
07
“Bruises. They tried to put a cucumber up my ass.”
08
“Jesus, you poor kid.”
09
“I’m not a kid.”
10
“You are to me. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
11
“Sure, if you reached sexual maturity at five.”
12
“I was very advanced for my age,” she said. “Can I smoke in
13 14
here?” “If he doesn’t mind.” I tilted my head in the direction of the guy
15
on the gurney next to mine. “Do you mind, mister?” I said. “If she
16 17
smokes?” He merely groaned.
18
There was a red prayer candle under his gurney. It was technically
19
illegal, a fire hazard, but this was a Catholic hospital, so what’s illegal?
20
“Now.” Jo lit a cigarette. “What happened?”
21
“They beat me up.”
22
“I can see that. Who’s they?”
23
“What do you get when you cross an elephant with a
24
rhinoceros?”
25
“What?”
26
“Hell-if-I-know,” I said, and told her everything: the man in the
27
white van, the intruder in the Savoy with a work order for nonexistent
28
work, done by a nonexistent company at a nonexistent address, and
29
ending when I told them where the diary was. As I spoke, she wrote in
S30
her reporter’s notebook, quickly slipped from her purse.
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
Ah, so this was no mere social call.
02
“How did you get here?” she asked.
03
“I woke on the grounds of the Triple XXX Ranch, and the next
04
thing I knew . . .”
05
I was at a liquor store along the service road. The rain had
06
stopped, leaving puddles in the lot. The neon sign above the door
07
buzzed like an insect, the I missing from LIQUORS.
08
A bell rang overhead when I stepped into the fluorescence. A man
09
stood on the ladder to the right, stocking shelves above refrigerator
10
cases in his overalls. A woman sat on a swivel chair behind the coun-
11
ter covered with cigar boxes and small racks of sexual aids. On the
12
shelf behind her, “nature” magazines were wrapped in brown paper.
13
The cigarette dropped from the woman’s lips when she saw my bloody
14
clothes and face.
15 16
She opened her mouth, as if to scream, but “It’s okay,” I said. “I need a cab.”
17
“I’m calling the police!”
18
“Please.” I took my wallet from the pocket of my bloody pants
19
and tried to hand her money, but all I found was the Get Out of Jail
20
Free card.
21 22
Thirty minutes later, the paramedic in the back of the ambulance was leaning over me, saying, “Do you know your name?”
23
“Ben Fitzgerald.”
24
“Do you know where you are, Mr. Fitzgerald?”
25
“In the back of an ambulance.”
26
“What happened, Mr. Fitzgerald?”
27
“I took a cab.”
28
“He’s delirious.”
29
At the hospital, the resident injected me with morphine and
30S
packed my nose to stop the bleeding and applied the cold compress.
31N { 132 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
And the next thing I knew I opened my eyes to find Jo looking like
01
Vivien Leigh. Dressed like Edith Head. With her bag from I. Magnin.
02
I. Magnin was where she bought most of her clothes. That and
03
Bullock’s on Wilshire. But the clothes inside this particular bag were
04
men’s clothes, nice ones: Sulka underwear, socks, a silk undershirt, a
05
Van Heusen shirt, a striped tie, high-rising slip-on Bond Street shoes
06
with square toes and wingtips, and a chocolate brown worsted pin-
07
striped suit.
08
“A suit.”
09
“It’s brown for town,” she said. “With black stripings, see?”
10
“Sure.”
11
“Now let’s get you into some respectable drawers.”
12
“I’m not supposed to put on underwear, Jo. I’m in a hospital
13 14
gown.” “I wouldn’t be caught dead in a hospital gown.”
15
“So you’ll die at home.”
16
“With dignity—and stiletto heels. Come on.” She held the under-
17
wear up. “It’s lovely. Sulka makes such adorable vicuña dressing
18
gowns.”
19
“You know you have a tendency to overemphasize certain sylla-
20 21
bles in words? Webster is turning over in his grave.” “Webster never wore Sulka. Go on: I won’t look.”
22
She dropped her cigarette to the floor, crushed it with her heel,
23 24
and handed me the pair of briefs. I had some trouble slipping them on under the hospital gown.
25 26
She helped by lifting my legs. “No fair,” I said, adjusting the briefs. “You peeked.”
27
“I didn’t have much choice,” she said: “Did anyone ever tell you
28 29
that you have a great ass?”
S30
“No.”
N31 { 133 }
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J. I. BAKER
01 02
“With or without the cucumber. You could bounce a quarter off that ass.”
03
“Wouldn’t you rather buy a Clark bar?”
04
She leaned over and kissed my forehead.
05
“Hey, that’s nice,” I said.
06
She kissed me again: this time, on the mouth.
07
“You shouldn’t do that.”
08
“Why not?”
09
“Makes my head hurt.”
10
“That’s what morphine is for.”
11
“Morphine doesn’t work for that kind of hurt.”
12
“Maybe this will.” She took a pint of Canadian Club from her
13
purse. “I figured you could use it.”
14
“Just don’t let the nurses see.”
15
She cracked the seal and looked around. She frowned. “This is
16
awfully familiar.”
17
“What?”
18
“No water glass.”
19
“The service here is awful,” I said: “Waitress!”
20
Jo put her left forefinger on my lips. “Shh!”
21
“Nurse!”
22
The nurse arrived. “Mr. Fitzgerald?”
23
Jo spun around, shoving the bottle into her purse.
24
“May we have a water glass, ma’am? Make that two?”
25 26
“Mr. Fitzgerald.” The nurse did not move. “I’ll have you know that this is not a restaurant.”
27
“No wonder the food is so bad.”
28
But the whiskey was good. It helped all kinds of hurt. Jo sat on
29
the edge of the gurney, and we drank it straight from the bottle, since
30S
the Evil Nurse never returned. Jo passed it to me, and I passed it to
31N
her as I told her that Bobby Kennedy was “the enemy within.” { 134 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Well, of course!” Her eyes widened. “That’s it! The diary is
01
about Bobby. Well, it’s right there: She called him the General. He
02
was the attorney general, and he wore white socks with a black suit,
03
and he was the ‘altar boy,’ the mama’s boy. Which is what Bobby is.
04
Or was.”
05
“It just seems odd.”
06
“What?”
07
“The attorney general of the United States was fucking Marilyn
08 09
Monroe? Seriously?” “I’ll take that and raise you twenty: The president of the United
10 11
States was fucking Marilyn Monroe.” “Ridiculous.”
12
“Why?”
13
“He’s the president of the United States.”
14
“So that makes him perfect? He has a cock.”
15
“I have a cock.”
16
“I noticed.”
17
“Not all men are cheaters, Jo.”
18
“Oh? And you?”
19
“The heart of all morality is staying out of certain rooms.”
20
“You were caught in a woman’s hotel room.”
21
“I was drunk.”
22
“That’s an excuse? Tell that to the Kennedys.”
23
“I believe in the New Frontier.”
24
“The New Frontier is hooey, Ben, like everything else about the
25
guy: It’s public relations, advertising. They sold Jack into that job the
26
way they’d sell soap. Joe Kennedy said this, in an interview. You
27
think that guy believes in what he’s selling? JFK has been packaged
28
for your consumption. You think he’s not cheating on Jackie? When
29
he was elected, one of his aides said, ‘This administration is going to
S30
do for sex what the last one did for golf.’ ”
N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
Jo said that Kennedy had carried on an “illicit relationship with
02
another man’s wife” during World War II and [redacted] with a
03
woman in Las Vegas. He dated a woman named Inga Arvad, who’d
04
attended the 1936 Summer Olympics with Hitler. He dated a woman
05
named Judith Exner, who was also dating Mafia chieftain Sam Gian-
06
cana. There were others, too— so many that Jack could never remem-
07
ber their names. “Kid” was what he called them. “Hello, kid,” he
08
once told a woman in his hotel during the 1960 campaign. “We have
09
only fifteen minutes.”
10
Fifteen minutes was all he ever needed.
11
“And then,” Jo said, “there was Florence.”
12
“Who?”
13
“Florence M. Kater. You never heard of her?”
14
“No.”
15
She handed me the bottle and said, “Drink.”
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 136 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
28.
07 08 09 10 11
he was a housewife who had rented a room in her Georgetown
S
12
duplex to a woman named Pamela Turnure, an aide in the office of
13
the young, ambitious Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. The
14
elegant, lovely, and poised Miss Turnure seemed the very model of the
15
perfect tenant, but Mrs. Florence Kater soon became annoyed by the
16
young woman’s behavior. Mrs. Kater had, as she’d told her own hus-
17
band, Marty, clearly and repeatedly stipulated that her tenant keep
18
“regular hours” and be “quiet.” The hours the lovely Miss Turnure
19
kept, however, were anything but regular, the time she spent in her
20
small apartment at the top of the stairs anything but quiet, her behav-
21
ior more befitting a barmaid than what Mrs. Kater would have called
22
a “lady.”
23
It turned out that the elegant Miss Turnure was making what
24
Mrs. Kater called “violent love” in the upstairs bedroom, just down
25
the hall past the staircase from Mrs. Kater and her husband. And
26
when, annoyed, one night, by the fifth successive incident of “violent
27
noise” from the “banging” of the bed and what she called “male moo-
28
ing like an ox,” Mrs. Kater sat up in bed next to Marty, who asked
29 S30
what was wrong. “It’s that woman again,” she said.
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 137
N31
21/02/12 8:10 PM
J. I. BAKER
01
“What woman?”
02
“The Turnure woman! Don’t you hear it?”
03
“Go back to sleep, Mother.”
04
“But just hear it,” she said. “There’s a man in the house.”
05
“So she has a boyfriend.”
06
“It’s against the rules,” Mrs. Kater said.
07
She was a short woman whose auburn hair had begun to gray but
08
was dyed and styled every week under the UFO-like hair dryers by
09
Darlene, the single mom, at the beauty shop down the street. She
10
wore pillbox hats and pearls and her hair surrounded the moon of her
11
face in a fiery corona of Aqua Net. She was a woman of convictions
12
that were sealed in the chamber of her heart where nothing could
13
touch them. She liked rules, order, straight lines, neat answers, final
14
decisions. She was a certain person who believed in certainty.
15
She was certain that her tenant was lying to her. She found her
16
scuffed slippers near the bed with her toes, wrapped the bathrobe that
17
hung on the bedpost around her faintly shivering body and walked,
18
still wearing her cap and curlers, to the tenant’s door and knocked.
19
She heard giggling. Shushing. Then nothing.
20
She knocked again: “What are you doing in there?”
21
“Decorating,” Miss Turnure said.
22
“I hear a man in there. No men are allowed in here.”
23
“I’m moving furniture.”
24
“I am trying to sleep. Please keep the noise down.”
25
A muffled “sorry,” followed by more giggling.
26
But Mrs. Kater was awake. She had never been a good sleeper.
27
Sleep was even harder to come by now that she was older. There were
28
pills by her bed but they made her feel groggy in the morning.
29
The male mooing continued. The banging continued. Some deco-
30S
rating! Mrs. Kater thought, wide awake and furious now in bed. It was
31N
(she later recalled) 1:16 A.M. when, deciding to catch her pretty tenant { 138 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
in a lie, she went down to the parlor with a bay window overlooking
01
Hope near the river and waited with her legs crossed under the bath-
02
robe in the light from over the road. She waited almost without mov-
03
ing until, at 1:35, the door creaked upstairs; she heard more shushing
04
and giggling as the yellow light spread onto the wall and floor. And
05
into the light stepped a handsome young man with his shoes.
06
He held them twinned in his left hand as his right palm
07
grazed the banister. He tiptoed down the stairs, rocking exaggerat-
08
edly back and forth, his head lowered as if wanting to know exactly
09
what his feet were doing. Mrs. Kater, never reticent, marched across
10
the floor to the carpet at the base of the stairs and stared straight into
11
the face of the man who looked, surprised, at the fierce little woman
12
in curlers.
13
“It was Senator Kennedy,” Mrs. Kater said later in the only inter-
14
view she ever gave. “Senator Jack Kennedy. He gave me that smile
15
that he gives everyone and held out the right hand that he holds out to
16
everyone and said what I suppose seemed the right thing to say at the
17
time, which was, ‘Good evening, ma’am.’ ”
18
“It isn’t evening,” Mrs. Kater said. “It’s morning. And you have
19
woken me for the fifth time in a row. And for the last time! You with
20
your male mooing like an ox.”
21
“I don’t moo.”
22
“You mooed.”
23
She did not care who this young man was, or how much money
24
his family had, or how powerful his father was, or how far he was
25
going. She did not care who he would become or what it might mean
26
to the country or the world. He was the unwanted guest of a female
27
tenant who had broken Mrs. Kater’s stated rules. The rules were quite
28
clear and they were firm. The rules, however, had been ignored and
29
this was “cause,” Mrs. Kater announced, “for eviction. I will,” she
S30
said, “evict her.”
N31 { 139 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
Kennedy then showed the arrogance—what the Mob called
02
hamartia—that was, despite his charm, the mark of the beast on his
03
family. “Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t care what the fuck you do.”
04
And with that he left the house and the sleepless housewife
05
behind. She watched him walk, shoes in hand, his untucked white
06
shirt trailing like a duck’s behind, across the street.
07
Now, Mrs. Kater was not timid. She was not a woman to be, as she
08
called it, “deterred.” She was mad now. Her tenant, a guest who had
09
broken the rules and who did not seem to care, was “making violent
10
love”—Mrs. Kater’s words—to the famous senator from Boston. A
11
man who in the darkness of her own living room, carrying his shoes,
12
had said “fuck” to her. To her! Mrs. Florence Kater! Well, she would
13
not sit “idly by,” she said, while two good-looking young people kept
14
her up all night on account of what she called “rutting.” Who did they
15
think she was? Well, she was Mrs. Florence Kater.
16
And she had a plan.
17 18 20
S
21
square. It was the first camera, Don explained, that featured a plastic
22
lens, but “don’t worry,” he told Mrs. Kater. “It’s very high quality:
23
Perspex.”
19
he found the Kodak 44A, 127 roll film camera at Don’s Photo on Eighteenth Street. It took twelve pictures a roll, each 44mm
24
“What’s Perspex?”
25
“A glass alternative. From Combined Optical Industries.”
26
“I don’t care about that,” Mrs. Kater said. “Can it take pictures at
27
night?”
28
“Of course.” He pointed to the flash. “See?”
29
She paid for it, returning to the house near the nice park and the
30S
river. She ascended the steps that seemed higher each day and
31N
removed the keys from the pouch of the purse where the keys always { 140 }
9780399158193_EmptyGlass_TX_p1-326.indd 140
21/02/12 8:10 PM
THE EMPTY GLASS
were and put the bronze in the lock of the door. She was turning the
01
key when she heard the giggling.
02
Giggling? Like the giggling she had heard last night. And the man’s voice. That man! That man! The senator was back!
03 04
She opened the door and stepped into the living room.
05
Her husband!
06
Her husband stood, grinning and (she noticed) beltless, before
07
the swivel chair on which the lovely Turnure sat with legs extended, as
08
if applying nail polish, revealing panties beneath her short skirt. She
09
wore hose that made her legs look, as the French say, “more nude than
10
nude,” and she gazed girlishly up at Marty (her husband!) as he lazily
11
slapped the bottoms of her bare feet with the flyswatter.
12
It wasn’t even summer!
13
“Shoo,” Miss Turnure was saying as Mrs. Kater stepped in.
14 15
“Shoo, fly.”
16
“Marty!” Marty spun and Miss Turnure looked up, the mirth in their eyes
17
dying. Marty lowered the flyswatter, comically raised as if to strike the
18
lovely Miss Turnure. His lower lip protruded. Lovely Miss Turnure
19
herself lowered her pink feet to the floor. They pressed firmly against
20
the wood—but, Mrs. Kater noticed, her toes wiggled luxuriously.
21
“Hello, Mother,” Marty said.
22
“Don’t call me that. For godssakes, Marty: What are you doing?”
23
“Killing fl ies.”
24
“On Miss Turnure’s feet? Dear God!”
25 26 27
T
hat night a siren sounded through the window. Martin, a heavy
28
sleeper, had sunk to bed like a sack of cement and was snoring.
29
He had been snoring since midnight. Mrs. Kater, on the other hand,
S30
was awake and staring at the ceiling. Waiting.
N31
{ 141 }
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J. I. BAKER
01
She sighed. The Kodak 44A was under the bed, loaded with fi lm.
02
At 1:25, she thought she heard the door open downstairs. She sat up.
03
She was wearing curlers under a plastic hairnet; white cold cream cov-
04
ered her face. Her ears twitched like a fox’s.
05
She heard the creak of wood and footsteps on the floorboards as
06
someone walked through the living room. She heard the same feet
07
climb the steps. She stood and walked across her own floor to the door
08
that was open partway. She peered through it and watched as Senator
09
Kennedy, D-Mass, crept with shoes again in his hand to the door across
10
the hallway.
11
A light came from under the Turnure woman’s door. The senator
12
opened the door, and for a second she saw rosy Pamela standing nude
13
against the light from inside. She was smiling. She giggled softly,
14
then opened the door, exposing her pink breasts, taking the senator
15
into her arms.
16
They shut the door.
17
Mrs. Kater swallowed.
18
It wouldn’t be long now.
19
It never was.
20
She walked to Marty in the darkness. “Marty,” she whispered,
21
shoving him with her hands. “It’s them again.”
22
“Wha,” he muttered, still snoring.
23
“It’s happening again.”
24
“Go back to sleep.”
25
But of course she could not, and knowing that she only had a
26
few minutes left, she retrieved the camera from under the bed and
27
tiptoed down the stairs to the front of the house and saw that the sena-
28
tor, D-Mass, had left the front door unlocked. More villainy! More
29
treachery! For all she knew, half of the night street was now inside her
30S
home!
31N { 142 }
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She walked outside, shutting the door behind her, and waited in
01 02
the bushes to the right of the front door, camera in hand.
03 04 “
he picture that she finally took,” Jo said, “showed Senator John
T
05
F. Kennedy emerging from the front door of the Kater brown-
06
stone in Georgetown with his shoes in his hand. Mrs. Florence M.
07
Kater sent it to thirty-two journalists. Myself included. She also sent
08
it to the FIBS.”
09
“The Fibs.”
10
“The FBI. She was almost unhinged. Her sense of justice, sense
11
of religion as a Catholic—all of these things were ‘grievously
12
wounded.’ That’s what she said in her letter. She was a nut but what
13
bugged her about Mr. D-Mass was that he had lied. He claimed to
14
have principles but he’d lied. He didn’t give a shit. He only cared
15
about himself and his success. And Mrs. Florence Kater wanted the
16 17
world to know the truth.” “So what happened to the photographs?”
18
“That’s the whole point: nothing.”
19
“Nothing.”
20
“Blackout. Shutdown. Nothing. Every journalist I knew went to
21
their editors. And their editors went to the publishers. The photo of
22
Senator Kennedy went all the way up the food chain. And that’s where
23
it vanished. No one would touch it. Not with that proverbial ten-foot
24
pole. Mrs. Kater checked the papers every morning. And not just the
25
Washington Post. She checked every paper she’d sent the picture to,
26
and not one reported the story. She couldn’t understand it. She was
27
sure something had gone wrong. She made phone calls. No one called
28
her back. She made appointments. They were canceled. The world
29
was closing off. And then her house was robbed, her precious jewelry
S30 N31
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J. I. BAKER
01
stolen. But what really galled her, what offended her in the deepest
02
part of her being, and down to her core, was the fact that when she
03
returned to the bedroom after snapping Kennedy, that night, she had
04
seen Marty’s hand moving frantically under the bedcovers.
05
“He was masturbating,” Jo said, and leaned down to kiss me.
06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 144 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
29.
07 08 09 10 11
J
“
12
o.” “Shh!”
13
“The nurse.”
14
“Fuck her.”
15
“Guy over there.”
16
“Is so doped up he won’t remember in the morning.”
17
She was kissing me again, leaning over the gurney when I
18 19
said, “Jo?” “Mmm.”
20
“Who answered your phone?”
21
“What?”
22
“I called you earlier. A man answered.”
23
“Oh, that was you,” she said. “My father.”
24
“Your father.”
25
“I take care of him sometimes.”
26
A voice: “What are you doing?”
27
I looked up.
28
It was the nurse.
29
“I’m just searching for some marbles,” Jo said, standing. She
S30 N31
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01
brushed the waist of her dress, and turned to me: “I didn’t see any
02
Greenies, did you?”
03
“No.”
04
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” the nurse said. “And you
05 06 07
were smoking! I can tell you were smoking!” “It’s that.” Jo pointed to the votive burning under the nearby gurney. “The candles aren’t exactly up to code, are they?”
08
“God is the code.”
09
“God isn’t the fi re department.”
10
The man groaned.
11
“You, you hussy,” the nurse said, “are the whore of Babylon.”
12
“As long as my reputation hasn’t reached Beverly Hills.”
13
“May God forgive you.”
14
“I don’t care about forgiveness,” she said. “I just want my mar-
15
bles back.”
16
The nurse left in a huff.
17
We finished the Canadian Club.
18
“So what does that Florence Kater story mean?” I said.
19
“It means the Kennedys can do whatever they want. After Ken-
20
nedy was elected, he made Pamela Turnure Jackie’s press secretary,
21
for crying out loud.”
22 23
“Okay, that’s one thing. But you’re not really suggesting that JFK and Bobby killed Marilyn Monroe.”
24
“They had motive. She was prepared to go public.”
25
“The brothers weren’t anywhere near Los Angeles that night.”
26
“How do you know?”
27
“It was in the papers.”
28
“Do you always believe what you read?”
29
“Jack was in Hyannisport. Bobby was in Gilroy. That’s three hun-
30S
dred miles away. On Saturday, Bobby went horseback riding. On Sun-
31N
day, he went to church at nine-thirty. Are you telling me that the { 146 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
attorney general of the United States sort of magically disappeared
01
after horseback riding, flew out to Los Angeles to kill Marilyn, and
02
managed to show up again for church by Sunday morning? It’s not
03
possible.”
04
“Then who took off outside Peter Lawford’s house?”
05
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
06
“Jeanne Carmen said there was a contretemps with Lawford’s
07
neighbors the night Marilyn died.”
08
“Who’s Jeanne Carmen?”
09
“An actress. Does it matter? She said the neighbors were annoyed
10 11
by the sand in their pool.” “The sand?”
12
“The helicopter kicked it up when it left the Lawford property.
13 14
The neighbors heard the noise. Who was in that helicopter, Ben?” “It couldn’t have been Bobby Kennedy.”
15
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Irving Berlin,” she said. “Inga Arvad
16
was a Nazi. Judith Exner was a mob moll. And all that got swept under
17
the rug. Why was Marilyn any different?”
18
“Because she was a movie star?”
19
“That’s not what Jeanne said. She said it wasn’t about sex,” Jo
20 21
said. “It was something much more scandalous.” “What’s more scandalous than sex?”
22
“Politics,” she said.
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 147 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
W E D N E S D AY, A U G U S T 8
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
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01 02 03 04 05 06
30.
07 08 09 10 11
I
saw the funeral on TV. I was lying in the hospital room on the fi fth
12
floor staring up into the set that was bolted to the wall and tilting
13
toward me. My head was propped on two pillows; tubes were in my
14
nose, a heplock IV drip taped to my arm.
15
“The curtain falls,” the TV anchor said into the camera. He stood
16
before the wall that separated the mortuary grounds from the street
17
and all the staring people. “Brief and simple are the rites that mark
18
the funeral of Marilyn Monroe. We grasp at straws, as if knowing how
19
she died— or why—might enable us to bring her back . . .”
20
They showed Westwood Village, where the funeral would be held.
21
The sign looked cheap, like a roadside attraction, a small “Swiss”
22
hotel along some unused highway:
23 24
WESTWOOD VILLAGE
25
MEMORIAL PARK AND MORTUARY
26 27 28
F
orty men with walkie-talkies stood outside.
29
People shouted and took pictures.
S30
According to the Times, “special police from movie studios” and
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N31
J. I. BAKER
01
“agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency” would be inside. Monroe
02
would be wearing her wig from The Misfits and a chartreuse dress
03
she’d purchased in Florence. No jewelry. A solid bronze casket would
04
be lined with champagne-colored velvet.
05
The Suicide Squad was “still active,” the Times said, quoting
06
Tabachnick saying they had talked to doctors in the case and friends
07
of the dead actress. It quoted Farberow saying that it may be “another
08
two weeks” before Curphey’s office reached a “final decision.”
09
Arthur Miller said he did not think she had taken her own life.
10
Publicist Pat Newcomb said the same, adding that she had made
11
plans: On Monday, Marilyn had an appointment with her lawyer. On
12
Tuesday she was scheduled to meet with J. Lee Thompson, producer
13
of The Guns of Navarone. On September 12, she was scheduled to be
14
in New York for an Esquire cover shoot.
15 16
Suicide, the paper said, ranks as the ninth cause of death in California.
17 18 20
E
21
blood pressure. Why these tests seemed more important than sleep, I
22
have no idea— especially since they kept telling me to “get some rest.”
23
I got so little. Partly because of the noises in the place, but mostly
24
because I didn’t stop thinking about what Jo had said about the sand
25
in the pool near the Lawford house. On the day I was released, I asked
26
for a Yellow Pages and paged through the H’s to “Helicopter.”
19
very morning, the week that followed, they woke me at four-
thirty so that one of the residents could take my temperature and
27
There were four helicopter companies in Los Angeles but only
28
one in Santa Monica. That was Conners on Clover Field. It was a
29
fifteen-acre landing site named for World War I pilot Lieutenant
30S
Greayer “Grubby” Clover. It was the home of Douglas Aircraft, which
31N { 152 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
had moved to an abandoned movie studio in 1922 and started making
01
military planes. They tested them on Clover Field.
02
During World War II, Douglas realized that their plant was vul-
03
nerable to air attack, so they worked with a team of Warner Brothers
04
set designers to camouflage it. They stretched five million square feet
05
of chicken wire over four hundred poles, covering the terminal, han-
06
gars, and parking lots. On top of this, they built fake wood-frame
07
houses complete with garages, fences, clotheslines—and even “trees”
08
made of the same chicken wire. They spray-painted chicken feathers
09
to look like leaves, then covered the runway with green paint and
10
turned the largest hangar into a hill.
11
The place was so well disguised that even the pilots who knew
12
about it had trouble finding it, and when the camouflage was elimi-
13
nated, in 1945, the neighbors mourned as if a monument had been
14
torn down.
15
I picked up the telephone and called Conners.
16
A man answered. “Hello?”
17
Did I really want to do this? Was it worth it? Jack Clemmons was
18
in Italy. The doctors were in the Côte d’Azur. Eunice Murray was God
19
only knew where, along with Pat Newcomb. They had all disappeared,
20
leaving me the last man standing, but what price would I pay for the
21
truth?
22
I hung up.
23
At 2:15, I put on the clothes that Jo had brought.
24
A monogram had been stitched in red above the left pocket of the
25
new shirt: JEH ,
26 27
it read.
28 29 S30 N31 { 153 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
W E D N E S D AY, A U G U S T 1 5
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31
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01 02 03 04 05 06
31.
07 08 09 10 11
I
wasn’t thinking about Marilyn and wouldn’t think of Marilyn and
12
the only reason I went back to Joe’s on Melrose was to get my ruined
13
car. I didn’t intend to walk inside the place, and I wouldn’t have
14
walked inside the place— except for the fact that I couldn’t find a pay
15
phone on the sidewalk.
16
Joe was mopping up the bar as I walked to the bank of lit phones
17
to the right of the door. I sat on the stool under a phone and put a
18
dime in and called a tow truck.
19
“Be right there.”
20
I hung up.
21
I would not think of the diary. I wasn’t thinking of the diary as I
22
played “Young World” on the Wurlitzer and sat at the bar. I smelled
23
the familiar and comforting smell of damp hops. I saw the wood
24
scored with pierced hearts and long-ago loves, the black lines from
25
burned cigarettes. But I’ve said this already, haven’t I?
26
I went up to the bar.
27
“Jesus,” Joe said. “What happened to you?”
28
“Cut myself shaving.”
29 S30
“You and Albert Anastasia.”
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01
“Very funny.”
02
“What can I get you?”
03
“Budweiser.”
04
“Kinda early, isn’t it?”
05
“I had a rough day.”
06
“You look it.”
07
“Gee, thanks.”
08
“Anytime.”
09
I waited for the tow truck. I wasn’t thinking about Marilyn. I was
10
on vacation, after all, but after another Budweiser (okay, three), the
11
truck still hadn’t arrived and I really had to pee.
12
Sorry for the vulgarity.
13
“No problem,” you say.
14
I stood up from the bar with the foam still in the glass and walked
15
past the table to the bathroom. I wasn’t going to look for what was left
16
of the diary, but the truth is that I didn’t use the urinal. I used a
17
stall—the same stall, in fact, where I had hidden the torn pages.
18
I was whistling and pissing when I couldn’t help myself: I looked
19
up to see the tile over the toilet slipped just slightly to the right. Past
20
it was darkness, and . . . what?
21
Pages?
22
I flushed, closed the cover, stood and pushed the tile over, my
23
head rising from the light into the darkness, eyes above the ceiling
24
line, staring across the tile tops, past rat traps and rusted pipes,
25
searching for the diary.
26 27
“It’s gone,” I said back in the phone booth. “Someone took it, Jo. I came back to get the car, and—”
28
“Mr. Fitzgerald?” A woman’s voice.
29
“Jo?”
30S
“This ain’t Jo.” It was Mabel, the colored maid. “Jo ain’t here.”
31N { 158 }
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“Where is she?”
01
“That club on Sunset.”
02 03 04
he club was Ciro’s, the place on the Strip that, like so much else,
T
05
had devolved from its status as a glamour spot for movie stars to
06
a mostly empty place that was, that evening, as quiet as a chapel mid-
07
week. It was mid-week, after all, which meant the only people in the
08
place were serious drinkers, as the blonde who sat like a living doll
09
with Jo at the table in the corner was a serious drinker.
10
Listen: By living doll, I don’t mean that she was beautiful. I mean
11
that she was scary, as a life-sized doll propped in a chair with a high-
12
ball and fried blond hair would, in fact, be scary. She waved her burn-
13
ing cigarette over the cloudy empty glass, pulpy limes lolling in the
14
melting ice.
15
Her name was Jeanne Carmen. Now you ask who that is, Doctor;
16
no one knows anymore. I sure as hell didn’t. The truth is that you
17
might see her on the Late Show. She was the daughter of the light-
18
house keeper in The Monster of Piedras Blancas and Lillibet in
19
Untamed Youth. She is now a trick-shot golfer and a friend of the
20
famous—mostly Marilyn’s. They had been, she said, “pill buddies,”
21
sharing downers and stories of the men that Jeanne called her
22
“extracurriculars.”
23
As for Jo: She was wearing sporty Capri pants colored with
24
Picasso blurs of greens, reds, oranges, odd browns; that and sugary
25
pink lipstick. She looked like an unfinished art project, but it was
26
Fashion. “What are you doing here?” she asked me.
27
“I’m looking for you.”
28
“I’m doing an interview.”
29 S30
“I need to talk.”
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J. I. BAKER
01 02
“You look like Don Taylor,” Jeanne Carmen said. “Anyone tell you that?”
03
“No. I’m Ben.”
04
“Jeanne Carmen.”
05
She transferred her cigarette to her left hand and extended her
06
right wrist. It was bent like a fairy’s. She wanted me to kiss, not shake,
07
it. So I did. Her whole face puckered in a smile. She smelled of an Eau
08
de Something that only partly masked a deeper smell, that of nicotine
09
and, more, decay.
10 11 12
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t even know who Don Taylor is.” “He was in Naked City. But he wasn’t naked. More’s the pity.
13
Isn’t that what Shakespeare said?”
14
“He said a lot of things.”
15
“More’s the pity. You look like a young Don Taylor. Were you
16
ever a soldier?”
17
“No.”
18
“Don was, in and out of bed. Lovely boy. Would you like a drink?”
19
“Wild Turkey, neat.”
20
“Yoo-hoo!” She tried to flag one of the waiters who prowled the
21
damp place like superannuated penguins. They all seemed to have
22
bald heads shiny under strands of unwashed hair and mottled with
23
sunspots so large they looked like continents. “Damn them.” She
24
stood and walked across the room to the bar.
25 26
I turned to Jo. She was all angles and attitude now, her voice cold and clipped.
27
“You get out of here, Ben.”
28
“Listen,” I said. “I went back to the bar. It’s where I hid the extra
29 30S
pages. No one would know they were there, unless—” “Ben, you’re like Bluebird’s wife.”
31N { 160 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“Bluebeard.”
01
“Whatever. Stop opening that door. You said the heart of all
02
morality is staying out of certain rooms. So clever of you! You’re a
03
clever boy. But the heart of all safety is staying out of certain rooms,
04
too. Now, stop being Pandora. Stop opening the box.”
05
“You’re opening it, too.”
06
“I’m a journalist.”
07
“You’re Annie Laurie.”
08
“Not if I can help it. Will you listen to me?”
09
“I’m listening.”
10
“They’ve threatened you.”
11
“They did more than that.”
12
“They did you a favor: They let you live. But guess what happens
13 14
next time?” “It will be a watermelon?”
15
“There!” Jeanne said, pulling her chair out again and settling
16
back at the table. “That’s settled! One Wild Turkey, coming up. Now.”
17
Her hand was on my left thigh. “Where were we?”
18
“I think we’re finished,” Jo said.
19
“I was telling you about the tape,” she said.
20
“What tape?” I asked.
21
Jo said: “Enough.”
22
Jeanne winced against the stream of smoke that rose from her
23
cigarette, frowned with that stained mouth and stood, gripping the
24
back of her chair. She stared down at me. “You’re lovely, Don. Any-
25
one ever tell you that?”
26
“Only Shakespeare.”
27
“Shut! Up!” she said, and left.
28
I turned to Jo. “What was that all about?”
29 S30
“I was finished with the interview.”
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01
“You were hiding something.”
02
“Or protecting you. Let’s get a drink.”
03
“I already did.”
04
“Well, I’m thirsty,” she said, trying to flag down the waiter.
05
“Good luck,” I said. “And now about these clothes.”
06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30S 31N { 162 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
32 .
07 08 09 10 11
he clothes: I still have the shirt, Doc. It is hanging on the back of
T
12
the chair that I am sitting in. When you look over my shoulder, I
13
know what you are thinking. I suppose that I can read your mind.
14
You want to see the shirt.
15
I stand, take it off the chair, and hand it to you. You feel the fab-
16 17
ric in your fingers, then touch the monogram. “JEH,” you say. “Who’s that?”
18
“I didn’t know.”
19
“But you know now.”
20
I nod.
21
“Tell me, Ben: Why did you trust Jo Carnahan?”
22 23 24
T
“
25
he clothes that you brought me are pretty fancy,” I said.
26
“And you look pretty in them.”
“Except they’re not mine.”
27
She kept waving for the waiter.
28
“Jo, someone else’s monogram is on this shirt. Whose monogram
29 S30
is it?”
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01 02
“What,” she said, “do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”
03
“You know the answer to that one.”
04
“I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing. I didn’t buy them new.”
05
“You didn’t.”
06
“I got them secondhand. Over on Melrose. But they’re beautiful.
07
That’s all that matters. Okay, so I’m not as swell as I’d like you to
08
think.”
09
“Your hands are shaking.”
10
“I never know what to do with my hands,” she said. “I need
11
something.”
12
“Light a cigarette.”
13
She did and took a drag, squinted against the smoke and stared at
14
something over my shoulder. “Wait a second,” she said.
15
“What?”
16
“Don’t turn around until I tell you.”
17
“Why?”
18
“I said, don’t turn around.”
19
I kept staring. She dragged on that cigarette, blowing the
20
smoke out.
21
“Your hands,” I said. “They’re—”
22
“Now.”
23
He was a tall stout man with gray hair that was Brylcreemed and
24
combed in a way that made it look almost plastic. He wore round dark
25
sunglasses and a serge double-breasted bespoke jacket. It was unbut-
26
toned over his gut. His nose was thin and long. He had rings on both
27
hands. He was smoking a cigarette, extending his right pinkie in a
28
way that would have seemed effete if he hadn’t seemed so menacing.
29
That’s the word: menacing. He had what I later learned was called
30S
the Mafia stare: You don’t look someone in the eyes. You look at their
31N
forehead and don’t blink. { 164 }
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“I saw him in the grocery store this morning,” Jo said.
01
“You go grocery shopping?”
02
“Sure.”
03
“You don’t strike me as a coupon clipper.”
04
“Who said anything about coupons?”
05
“Jo, you hardly eat.”
06
“Cigarettes. Will you listen?”
07
“I’m listening.”
08
“You know how supermarkets have those kind of geometric
09
stacks of canned peas and things? Marvels of engineering the Egyp-
10
tians might envy?”
11
“I don’t know if the Egyptians—”
12
“Humor me.”
13
“Okay.”
14
“I passed a stack of canned peas and there he was, holding one of
15 16
the cans up at me.” “So.”
17
“He asked if I wanted the peas, and I said no. He said the peas
18
were good for you and also delicious. I said I wasn’t interested and
19
please leave me alone. I was only looking for cigarettes and maybe
20
some Ovaltine. He said the Ovaltine was in aisle seven. Said I was in
21
the wrong aisle. Well, I wanted to get out, so I went to the checkout
22
and looked behind me. I didn’t see him—until I went out to my car.”
23
“Your car.”
24
“He was staring through the window.”
25
Now the man dropped a dime into the jukebox, hit some letter-
26 27
number combination, and turned toward us as the vinyl spun. “Young World” began playing.
28
“Come on,” Jo said. “Let’s go.”
29
“Where?”
S30
“The Dairy Queen,” she said. “Where else?”
N31
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01 02 03 04 05 06
33.
07 08 09 10 11 13
T
14
cigarette.
12
he Tall Man followed us from Ciro’s, still smoking. He pretended not to see us but stepped to the edge of Sunset and dropped his
15
He was Italian, Doctor.
16
There was valet parking. The monkey attendant showed up,
17
grabbed Jo’s ticket and ran down the lot to her car. When he pulled
18
back up with Jo’s DeSoto, she handed him a dollar and thanked him.
19
“Come on, darling.” She grabbed my hand. “What are you wait-
20
ing for?”
21
“My car.”
22
“Shh!”
23
She pushed me into the driver’s side, because of course the man
24
would drive, and I fumbled with the stick and looked into the rear-
25
view mirror to see the Tall Man staring after us as we pulled into the
26
traffic.
27
“Hang on,” Jo said. “Don’t go too fast.”
28
“It’s a stick.”
29
“So?”
30S
“I don’t know how to drive a stick.”
31N
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
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“You didn’t give me the chance.”
01
I was on Cienega when Jo’s hands started shaking again.
02
“It’s nothing,” she said.
03
“What?”
04
“The lights in the car.”
05
“Which?”
06
“The one behind us.”
07
It was a Ford Fairlane. And not just any Ford Fairlane—it was the
08
one with dice dangling from the rearview mirror. I assumed it
09
belonged to the Man from Ciro’s, but I couldn’t be sure. Later, I was
10
sure. The point is that we didn’t go to the Dairy Queen. We didn’t go
11
to Schrafft’s or Schwab’s.
12
We drove through a red light, snaking through the side roads
13
until it seemed clear I had lost him. Or I thought I had: When I pulled
14
up in front of the Savoy, I saw the car again.
15 16
It was parked across the street from my hotel.
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 S30 N31 { 167 }
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01 02 03 04 05 06
34.
07 08 09 10 11 13
T
14
that we parked down the block from the Fairlane and waited to see
15
what the driver would do.
12
he Savoy is not a hotel. Look, I know I just called it that, Doc, but I didn’t mean to, so strike that from the record and note only
16
The lights were coming on up and down Wilshire. The DeSoto
17
dashboard glowed. Jo had nothing to do with her hands, until she
18
reached for the silver crucifi x that dangled between her breasts and
19
felt it with her fingers like a rosary. I hadn’t seen it before. Well, of
20
course she was Catholic. So was I. Emphasis on was.
21
The engine ticked.
22
The man in the Fairlane hardly moved. His left arm dangled
23
from the window, fingers flicking ash from a butt. But he didn’t leave
24
the car. In fact, he wasn’t doing anything except listening to the radio.
25
We heard the “Boom Boom” song.
26
“What do you suppose he’s doing?” Jo asked.
27
“Waiting for me.”
28
“Why?”
29
“He’s followed me before.”
30S
“So?”
31N
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THE EMPTY GLASS
“So you can’t save me, Jo. You might as well tell me what Jeanne
01 02
said.” I won’t go into what it took to get the information. It was incom-
03
plete anyway. She hadn’t even heard Jeanne’s whole story, in part
04
because I had interrupted it. But it involved the fact that, toward the
05
end of her life, a paranoid Marilyn, believing she was bugged, would
06
(Jeanne said) make and take certain calls only from pay phones,
07
which she haunted around the clock. But very late at night, in bed,
08
washing pills down with champagne, she called her best friends—
09
Jeanne among them. She had done this on her last night, when she
10
sounded “strange,” Jeanne had said.
11
“She was scared,” Jo said. “She wanted Jeanne to come over.”
12
“Why?”
13
“She wouldn’t say. That’s what Jeanne said. She didn’t want
14 15
‘them’ to hear.”
16
“Who was ‘them’?” “Whoever had tapped the phone. Whoever was listening through
17
the walls. Whoever was wiretapping her, making the tape of her life.
18
And death. Someone kept calling her—a woman— saying, ‘You stay
19
away from Bobby.’ She was scared—no, terrified. So she begged
