The Empty Glass (8 page)

20.

B
uenas noches
, Señor Ben,” Inez said from behind the bar. She was serving beer to Elisha Cook, Jr., or someone who looked like him. It was hard to tell in the bad light, but the presence of this man was a measure of how far the place had fallen.

The Savoy had once been a playground for Hollywood’s celluloid set, back when mid-Wilshire had been the Center of the Film World, the Oscars at the Ambassador, Joan Crawford dancing under fake palms at the Cocoanut Grove. The bar off the lobby had featured a dance floor on springs where showgirls kicked, chosen for no reason other than the fact that their breasts looked great in pasties. But it wasn’t long before their eyes were as dead as the dreams that had led to nothing but the snapped spine of a lemon in the bottom of a gin glass.

After a few suspicious fires, the Savoy went from a palace to a sad place that traded in human remnants, pornographic pictures, and flagons of ether and laudanum. The butts of cheap cigarettes sizzled in the gin as the girls picked up their plastic clutches, slid off their respective stools, and followed the latest johns straight up the stairs.

You always had to take the stairs.

The elevator never worked.

It still didn’t.

“A lady call for you,” Inez said.

“A lady?”

“With a man’s name. She call two time. Say it is about phone records. She say to tell you, mmm,
no sé como se dice . . .”

She handed me the message on a piece of notebook paper:

“Joe Carnahan,” it read. “‘Not even Jay Edgar Hoover.’”

“What does that mean, Inez?”

“
No sé
, Señor Ben.”

“She didn’t say?”

“No. There was a man come, too.”

“What man?”

“To fix your doorbell.”

“Doorbell isn’t broken.”

“Yes it is, okay. He say you call. You pay for it, okay.”

“I didn’t pay for anything,” I said. “Where was he from?”

“The doorbell company.”

“There’s no such thing. How long was he here?”

She shrugged. “Twenty minutes.”

“And he was in my room?”

“Yes.”

“He was alone?”

“Don’t be mad, Señor Ben.”

“I’m not mad, Inez, it’s just . . . Don’t let anyone inside the apartment unless I give you permission, okay?”

“He say he have your permission. He have the work order, okay.”

She handed me the work order:

B. F. FOX ELECTRIC

4100 S La Cienega Blvd

Baldwin Hills

For work completed Aug 6:

installation of new doorbell.

Due upon receipt: $13.45

“Señor Ben?”

“Yes.”

“
¿Eres un hombre bueno, sí?
Your wife should know that.”

“No
entiendo.”

“You are a good man,” she said. “Whatever else you do. You have a good heart and soul, señor.”

“
Gracias
, Inez. I appreciate it.”

“But you have terrible taste in women.”

•   •   •

I
hardly slept that night. I kept thinking of Jo and Max and Rose and the phone records. Insomnia seeped through the vents that made the rushing sounds you hear when the traffic stops except for the sirens, except for all the rain. It rained a lot that year. Insomnia was layered in the sand that came from over the Mohave through the window. The sand was trapped, along with the smell of smoke, in the carpet, no matter how many times I tried to vacuum it up. No matter that I always kept the windows closed.

But it was more than that.

“Now you’re getting carried away,” you say. “And too florid. It’s a common thing in addicts.”

“I’m not an addict.”

“Just tell me what happened.”

When I went upstairs, the door to 7-A was open, Doctor, and all the lights were on, but I didn’t see anything missing or misplaced. There was nothing
to
miss or misplace. I could have made the case that the level of milk in the kitchenette was lower than usual, but that may have been my imagination, as you suppose so much is.

“I don’t
suppose
,” you say.

The bare light over the table off the kitchenette was on, and it swung slightly, as if someone had just touched it, but everything else seemed normal. The toilet was still running. The bed was unmade.

The doorbell rang.

I pressed the intercom: “Yes?”

“Señor Ben, it’s Inez. You see?”

“See what?”

“The doorbell works. They fix it.”

“It wasn’t broken,” I said.

It was 2:15.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 7

21.

T
he heat wave continued in Southland. It was eighty-nine in L.A., ninety-plus in San Gabriel and San Fernando. It was ninety-two at the Civic Center, humidity at forty-one. That’s what they said on the radio. The papers were still filled with Marilyn news: preparations for the funeral, Curphey’s press conference, interviews with the hairdressers and stylists who’d Known Her Well.

A story in the
Times
gave the first complete chronology of her last day: Everyone claimed that she had seemed “happy.” Her press agent, Pat Newcomb, had spent the night before in the Telephone Room. And Marilyn had spent a sleepless night in her own bedroom, on the phone. That morning, the actress asked for oxygen, the Hollywood cure for a hangover. There was no oxygen, so she drank grapefruit juice instead. She shared it with Newcomb; at some point, they argued. Newcomb said that the argument was about the fact that she herself had slept all night but Marilyn had not.

“You gonna pay for that paper, or aren’t you?” the man behind the newsstand asked. He wore a visor over a balding head. Nudie magazines hung on a sagging wash line behind him.

“Sorry.” I reached into my pockets and found nothing. “Be right back.” I handed him the paper.

“You already read half of what it’s worth.”

“Not true,” I said. “I didn’t read the funnies.”

•   •   •

T
he jukebox was running, but no one was in the bar. Elisha Cook, Jr., and Inez were long gone. The ripped leather booths were empty, the candles on the dark scored tables unlit. A silver bell for service sat on the shelf of the alcove. I rang it but no one came. I took my hat off and slid it along the bar wood. The clock on the wall read 8:12—late enough to call home.

I stepped behind the bar and grabbed the phone. I thought about smoking a cigarette, but decided against it.

It was Day One.

Rose: “Hello?”

“It’s Ben.”

She didn’t say a thing, so I said it again: “It’s Ben.”

“I heard you the first time. Jesus, Ben. What happened?”

“I showed up at the house last night, and you weren’t there.”

“Oh? And where were you when you were supposed to pick up Max?”

“I don’t know what to say. I mean I’m sorry.”

“You should be sorry to Max.
He’s
the one you abandoned.”

“I didn’t abandon anyone.”

“Standing alone on the sidewalk in the rain waiting for his daddy after all the other kids had gone? He drew a crayon picture for you, Ben. He wanted you to see it.”

“I just want to say I’m sorry to—”

“A crayon picture,” she said. “For
you
.”

“Rose, I’m onto something. If you knew the truth, you’d understand.”

She didn’t respond.

“Rose?”

She had hung up.

I lit a cigarette.

Tomorrow would be—

You know.

I called Jo.

“Ben!” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I know. You left a message.”

“So I went to see our dear friend George from GTE in the bar. He told me that all hell has broken loose. Marilyn’s phone records have disappeared.”

“I’m sure the police—”

“It wasn’t the police. This is where it gets interesting. He told me that toll calls are recorded by hand at the traffic center and filed in boxes that are picked up every night and taken to headquarters. Once they’re there, you can’t access them. Same thing happens with the calls you dial. They refer to them as—let me read my writing here—Measured Message Unit calls. Well, those are recorded on a yellow tape roll, whatever that means, and
that
ends up in lockdown, too.”

“So?”

“So no ordinary cop would be able to get ahold of those records after they were filed. He said, ‘Not even J. Edgar Hoover.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Not even J. Edgar Hoover, he said, could get access to those records after they had been filed. But someone did. Someone at the very highest level wanted access to those phone records.”

“To be the first to see them?”

“To make sure that no one else did.”

•   •   •

B
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 southeast by Leimert Park, on the south by Windsor Hills, on the north by the Mid City, on the west by Culver City.

There are active oil wells in the mid hills along La Cienega, but most of the derricks in the area are rusting, which is what I discovered when I parked on the drive below the hill and walked to the fence at the top. I put my fingers through the links and stared. There was a lot of bleached dirt and dust but no office. And no B. F. Fox Electric.

I looked at the,
como se dice
, work order in my hand and checked the address: 4100 S La Cienega Blvd.

It was the right address, but nothing was here.

The last few entries in the diary of Marilyn Monroe—I now know—were often elliptical, drug-addled, hard to parse or even read. It was sometimes difficult to understand what she was trying to communicate, even harder to understand the connection between the final entries and whatever she’d meant when she’d written “the enemy within.”

But the guiding spirit of the thing was paranoia, her belief that she was being watched and bugged and followed. She was consumed by night terrors regarding the phone calls and the clicking on the line and the man outside her window; she often locked her door, as she had the night she died, because she believed the man had gotten inside the house.

Now a strange man was visiting my house to fix a doorbell that wasn’t broken. I’d seen no evidence of a break-in and no evidence of the man the night before—until I returned to the Savoy that morning around 10:30.

I ran water in the bathroom sink and rolled my sleeves up and squirted what was left of the Barbasol on my stubble and reached for the Wade & Butcher straight razor that was always to the right of the sink.

But it wasn’t to the right of the sink. I stared into the mirror and opened the medicine cabinet.

I didn’t find my razor.

What I found was a bottle of Nembutals.

22.

T
hroughout LACCO, there were old-fashioned post-office mailboxes painted green. In them, we put the evidence of the dead in sealed envelopes, writing descriptions on clipboards tied to the tops with strings: nail clippings, hair samples, bullets.

Someone from the Evidence Division would empty all the boxes at day’s end, collect the envelopes, and deliver them to Carl, the evidence tech. He was the only one with the key to the Sheriff’s Evidence Room, which, among other things, contained all evidence pertaining to the death of Miss Monroe.

He was sitting behind his desk when I found him, that day, feet up on a row of files, watching
Yours for a Song
. He was singing along with Bert Parks while eating a sandwich. I stepped inside. He didn’t hear me: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” he sang.

“Excuse me.”

He turned, chewing, and took his feet off the filing cabinets.

“Sorry. I’m Ben Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”

“Deputy?” He bit into his sandwich again. “How can I help you?”

“I need to get into the Evidence Room.”

“Why?”

“I have a problem.”

“Kind of problem?”

I showed him the vial of Nembutals.

“Lots of people have that problem. My wife can’t sleep, either.”

“The problem is these aren’t
my
Nembutals.”

“Whose are they?”

“Marilyn Monroe’s.”

He lowered his sandwich. He stopped chewing. “Not possible.”

“Look at the label: ‘Dr. Hyman Engelberg. San Vicente Pharmacy.’”

“Jesus,” he said.

•   •   •

I
t was a windowless warehouse in the subbasement. The ceilings were so high and dark you couldn’t see them. The few functioning lights sparked in the water that dripped even when it wasn’t raining. Aisles were stacked with moldering evidence from ten thousand forgotten cases on high metal shelving: everything from a bullet or a matchbook with an address in a white folder labeled “Vergie, 6/23/27” to a chandelier or a chair, a mirror or some flooring stained, long ago, with blood.

And then there were the stoned rats with pink eyes and ropey tails, whiskery noses that twitched when they rose on hind legs, forepaws hooked like claws. They loved the bags of marijuana confiscated from the Mexicans on, say, Figueroa. They ate through almost anything to get the stuff; you’d see them staggering, stoned, along the floor.

“Here you go,” Carl said, handing me the key at the front door. His voice echoed. “Just lock up and return it when you’re done. This place gives me the creeps.”

“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:

CASE NO.: 81128

DECEDENT NAME: Marilyn Monroe

CONTENTS:

1. A vial of 25 Nembutal capsules from San Vicente Pharmacy

2. A vial of ten chloral hydrate tablets filled on July 25

3. A small key with a red plastic cover labeled “15”

4. The water glass

LOCATION: Box 24, Row 13-B

I 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 minutes later, I came across
The Book of the Unknown Dead
lodged within a stack of mildewed files.

I’d heard tales of this volume, a large black scrapbook started by an assistant, his name lost to history, in 1921. It was a book into which that first man, and many who came after, put evidence from and pictures of people the coroner’s office could never identify. These people were all poor, nameless, and alone.

There were pictures of a wino they’d found off Alameda, a black man in a zoot suit in the bathroom of Club Alabam, a hairless man found lying in the reservoir, hobos sliced in half on railroad tracks, floaters washed up in Marina del Rey . . .

“What does this have to do with Monroe?” you ask.

“I thought you would be interested.”

“Why?”

“Because of my father.”

“I don’t want to know about your father. I want to know about the evidence. Did you find it?”

The answer is yes, though it took me a while: The envelope had been misfiled. It was not in Box 24, Row 13-B. It was in Box
25
, Row 13-
C
. And, of course, the vial of Nembutal was missing.

There was just one item inside. It was stuck in the back. I couldn’t dislodge it. I turned it over, shook again, and it fell to the floor.

It wasn’t really evidence.

It had nothing to do with Miss Monroe.

It was my Wade & Butcher razor.