Ikon (12 page)

‘What I was going to say was that I know that I can trust you, cynical or not.’

She stared at him acutely. ‘What are you getting at?’ ‘I’m simply saying that I know that I can trust you.’ ‘Well, of course you can trust me. I don’t propose to give up the chance to be First Lady next year, just for the dubious pleasure of passing around the tedious little details of your grubby little plots. God, Titus, you haven’t ever said or done anything worth gossiping about.’

Titus said, ‘I want you to do something for me. I can’t do it myself, not now. Because of what happened at the Elkswood Hotel, I’ve got Secret Service men standing three deep all around me.’

‘I did notice rather a lot of men with short haircuts and dark suits milling around in the garden.’

Titus finished his martini and flicked the rim of the glass with his fingernail so that it rang. ‘Nadine, I want you to take care of our principal witness. The girl with whom Marshall was involved, the one who can help us stop the RING talks. I want you to meet her, set her up in a safe location, and then keep her happy until we need her.’

‘What do I have to do? Read her The Lives of the Presidents and feed her on Pepperidge Farm gingernuts?’

‘Nadine,’ cautioned Titus, quietly. Joe Jasper tried to smirk, but found it difficult.

The truth was that the marriage between Titus and Nadine Alexander was one of the spectacles of Washington, to be ranked beside the John Paul Jones statue and the National History Wax Museum. They were

fiercely attracted to each other sexually, and yet their politics and their personalities were at complete odds. All they shared, besides their hunger for each other in bed, was ambition. Nadine was a natural-born Southern Democrat (her father had been a warm friend of Herman Tal-madge and B. Everett Jordan) while Titus was a bullet-headed Yankee from Illinois, whose father had known nobody but the local tax-collector and a cop called Cum-mings with whom he had played Saturday-night poker.

Titus and Nadine had met at a cocktail party at the Nixon White House. They had both been drinking too much. Afterwards, they had gone to the Madison Hotel, ‘Washington’s Correct Address’, and made ferocious love all night and all the following morning. They had married because Titus wanted to be President and Nadine wanted to be First Lady. She still browsed through Architectural Digest, selecting furniture and tableware and hand-embroidered sheets for the White House. Their marriage, according to Joe Jasper, was straight As - acid, amatory juices, and ambition.

Nadine often thought she should have been a movie star, or a model. She was 5ft lOins, with thick wavy brunette hair, shoulders like Arnold Schwarzenegger and a magnificent 38-inch bust. Somebody had once said that she would have looked better as the figurehead for a ship. But she wanted the White House more than anything. She had once told her mother that she wanted the White House more than happiness. Her father had died when she was ten, of a coronary, on the top of a flight of stairs, at a birthday party. Since then, birthday cakes had always reminded Nadine of death. She said, ‘This girl, she’s a hooker I suppose?’ ‘Not so much a hooker,’ said Joe. ‘More of a hostess.’ ‘You realize that what you’re asking me to do is completely against my ethical and moral principles?’

‘Possibly,’ agreed Titus. ‘But not against your personal interests. If Marshall Roberts fails to pull off the RING talks, then there’s no question that he’s going to be badly

the picture, but not much else. It could have been a one-off souvenir; something she found; something she bought at one of those stores that sell old political campaign buttons. Photographs come into people’s possession in the oddest ways. My aunt used to have a family snapshot of Harry Truman. I think she found it in a bus-station wastebasket.’

Daniel gave her a long, expectant look. He began to realize what she was going to say next, and why she was hesitating. The simplest of all reasons for Margot Schneider owning the Polaroid carried the looniest of all implications; and once they spoke the lunacy out loud, they were going to have to accept that recorded history and political logic had for years been standing on their heads. Kathy said, with a slight catch in her throat, Then, of course, I had to consider the most obvious reason. Margot Schneider owned the picture because it belonged to her; because it had been given to her by President Kennedy. Maybe she had taken it herself.’

‘She was supposed to be an Air Force widow, so what had she been doing in Hollywood taking Polaroids of President Kennedy?’

‘Exactly. She was supposed to be an Air Force widow, a normal middle-aged lady living on a military pension, leading a routine, unexceptional life. Yet she had no Social Security card that anybody could find; there were no pictures of her anywhere, not even in the files at Luke Air Force Base, where her husband used to fly from; and for no apparent motive she was murdered by an unknown man or woman in the most gruesome way you can think of. She wasn’t raped and she wasn’t robbed. Her head was removed so that nobody could identify her; and within twenty-four hours the National Security Agency sent an agent down to remove the rest of her, too - an agent who had carte-blanche to kill anybody he liked, just so long as he got the body back.’

‘Why didn’t the guy who killed her take the body in the first place?’ Daniel wanted to know. ‘He could have

dumped her in the desert somewhere and nobody would have found her for years, if at all.’

‘I thought about that, too. But if Margot Schneider had simply disappeared without trace, the police would have started making much more intensive inquiries into her background; where she came from, who her relatives were, that kind of thing, instead of accepting the apparent fact that here was poor Mrs Margot Schneider and here she was dead.’

Kathy paused, and then she said, ‘She was the right age, she had the right kind of physique, and the police found hairs in the bathroom washbasin which corresponded with her natural hair colour, before she bleached it. There was a circular mark on the back of her right arm, too.’

‘You really believe it was possible? I mean, you really believe it was her?’

‘I’m - what, 75 per cent sure of it. Eighty per cent. Why else did Skellett react so violently when I asked him if she was connected with Cuba? I couldn’t fit the bricks together but I could tell that they all came out of the same box. Kennedy - Monroe - Margot Schneider. If Margot Schneider hadn’t been Marilyn Monroe, why would Skellett have bothered to torture me? He tried to tell me that Margot Schneider was part of a Soviet spy ring or something like that; but he completely failed to explain why the very mention of Cuba in connection with Margot Schneider was enough to make him speed through Phoenix at 90 miles an hour, kill two cops, and then behave like a medieval torturer. And I can tell you something - whatever Skellett knows about Margot Schneider, or Marilyn Monroe - it was sufficiently devastating to make it worthwhile blowing one of his own men into tiny little pieces, just to help him get away.’

Daniel said, ‘Why did you ask him about Cuba?’

‘No particular reason. Reporter’s nose for trouble, I guess. It was the biggest political storm that was brewing at the time, in 1962. I just took a shot at it. I’ve been reading through most of the books on Marilyn Monroe’s

death, and trying to form some opinions about the various theories on why she died, and how; and I couldn’t find any idea that was actually solid enough, actually concrete enough - either to justify somebody killing her, or to justify her going into hiding in Arizona for the rest of her life.’

‘Didn’t somebody once say that she was killed by agents of the Communist party because she was threatening to expose Bobby’s plans to legalize a whole lot of left-wing political organizations?’

Kathy Forbes shook her head. There are scores of theories, most of them cranky. Hardly any of them stand up to the simple test of asking yourself, would Marilyn Monroe really have done that? She wasn’t a politically active person, neither was she vengeful. No, it’s my view that she simply overheard too much from Jack and Bobby; listened to one too many of their political problems. And one day they realized that she knew so much about one particular political problem that her life could be in danger. Their lives were in danger, too, as we know from what happened in November, 1963, and in June, 1968, and it makes much more sense to me that all three of them -Marilyn, Jack, and Bobby - were under threat from the same people. Skellett’s people, whoever they are.’

She replaced her sunglasses, and then she said, ‘Whether Marilyn died in 1962 or not, and I really believe now that she didn’t, she was killed because of something she knew that was crucially important, and as far as I could judge, Cuba was the only crisis big enough. What’s more, if Margot Schneider really was Marilyn Monroe, the crisis was long-lasting enough to make it worthwhile somebody murdering her after twenty years. Now, which crisis can you think of that Jack and Bobby were faced with which is still going on today? Which crisis could still harbour a secret dangerous enough to kill people for? The Mafia, possibly; spies, not likely. No, I chose Cuba, and Skellett’s reaction proved me right.’

‘Now there’s Willy,’ said Daniel. ‘Where do you think he fits in?’

‘I don’t know, said Kathy. ‘I’ve been swivelling the whole thing around in my mind like a Rubik’s cube, ever since you telephoned me this morning.’

‘I never could solve Rubik’s cube.’

‘Well, I’ve only done it five times. But let’s try some theories out and see if they fit. Or half-fit, at least. The first thing we know for sure is that your friend Willy was killed in a very similar way to Margot Schneider, in the same general locality, within three days. And the method of killing was sufficiently unusual to make it quite likely that he was killed by the same individual. I mean, you don’t get too many flexible saw murderers.’

Daniel wiped sweat from his face. T could use a beer,’ he said. ‘Do you think we could continue this discussion down at the saloon?’

‘Sure,’ Kathy nodded. ‘Do you mind if my friend comes along? He looks tough, but actually he’s very harmless.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ Daniel remarked, and then wondered if he had sounded too macho.

Twenty-One

They sat at a dark corner-table drinking beer by the neck while the local ‘cowpokes’ entertained the tourists with gun-twirling and pretended drunkenness. Kathy’s heavyweight bodyguard dragged his chair back a few feet out of earshot, and tossed peanuts into his mouth by the monotonous handful. The buxom girl behind the bar gave him a sassy wink or two, but he remained expressionless and unmoved.

Kathy said to Daniel, T have about four main theories why Willy Monahan was killed by the same man who killed Marilyn Monroe. None of them may be completely right. For instance, we have to allow that he may have been disposed of by somebody at Williams AFB who cut his head off in the same way as Marilyn’s for no other reason except to throw us off the trail. The two homicides might be completely unconnected. But my feeling is that if the murderer wanted people to think that both murders were committed by the same individual when in actual fact they weren’t, then he or she wouldn’t have kept Willy’s death such a secret. Whoever killed Willy didn’t particularly want anyone to know what had happened to him; unless they were devious enough to make it all seem like a mystery, so that anyone who had actually twigged what was going on, like you and Ronald Kinishba, would be flushed out into the open. Maybe that’s too devious. I don’t know.’

‘It wasn’t difficult for me to get into the air base mortuary,’ said Daniel. ‘Getting out was the tough bit.’

‘Well, that’s something to bear in mind,’ agreed Kathy. ‘Now - we have to think what Marilyn Monroe could possibly have known about Cuba that related to what your friend Willy Monahan had learned about the missiles at Williams AFB. So, let’s shift the Rubik’s cube around and see what we come up with. Monroe - Kennedy -Cuba - missiles. Nuclear missiles were the principal point of contention in the Cuban crisis of 1962; so maybe what Willy Monahan discovered was something to do with a disarmament agreement that was reached between Kennedy and Khruschev. We all know about the treaty of July 25, 1963, which prohibited all nuclear tests except those conducted underground; and that was a direct result of the crisis over Cuba. But maybe there were other agreements, secret agreements which only a few people ever got to hear about.’

‘You mean those missiles that Willy discovered weren’t ever supposed to work against Soviet planes? That Kennedy might have agreed with Khruschev that US planes wouldn’t be able to shoot down any Soviet aircraft?’

‘It’s a theory.’

‘But surely subsequent Presidents would have done something about it. I can’t see Marshall Roberts allowing US fighter planes to fly around with useless weapons.’

‘A couple of years ago, I couldn’t see Marshall Roberts agreeing to the RING talks.’

Daniel sat silent for a moment, then took another swallow of cold beer. ‘It seems incredible.’

That’s what I thought. But the more I went over the idea, the more I rearranged it in my mind, the more sense it seemed to make. That could be dangerous, of course. Journalistic theories have a habit of fitting all the known facts, and still remaining preposterously untrue. But if there had been a number of secret nuclear agreements between Kennedy and Khruschev; if the price of getting the Russians to take their missiles out of Cuba and back to Russia had been much higher than the rest of us poor suckers were led to believe at the time, then Marilyn Monroe’s murder would begin to make sense, so would Willy’s, and so would Jack and Robert Kennedy’s. Skellett’s behaviour still seems a little peculiar, to say the least. I don’t know why he had to make such a three-ring circus out of recovering Marilyn’s body when she was already safely dead. All he did was draw everybody’s attention to the murder, when it could easily have remained as another one of those nasty unsolved mysteries, for ever and ever. But maybe we’ll find that out later.’

‘You don’t think we ought to go to the police?’ asked