The Blonde (45 page)
“Shhh …” She was trying to choke down sobs, which was making it
difficult to get the words out, and her vision was blurry with tears, although the pressure of Bobby’s arm around her was unchanged. He gave no sign of surprise, or alarm. They were almost to the gate by then, and he whispered in her ear, “Let’s go talk about this somewhere private, all right? Somewhere safe. We’ll get a room at the Roosevelt. We’ll take your car. Do you have the keys to your car?”
“Yes.”
“Give them to me.”
She fumbled in the pocket of her slacks for the keys, handed them over.
“Good. Now pull yourself together, try not to make a scene in front of these people. I’m here, and I’ll get you through it. Just keep your head down, and you can cry later if you want to.”
“Okay.”
The helicopter lifted off behind them, kicking up sand and whipping their hair, making it impossible to say anything more. Peter was at the gate holding it open so they could pass, and Marilyn shielded her eyes with her hand as they hurried across the patio, through the house, out the front entryway. It wasn’t until they were on the drive, out by the highway, that he released her, unlocking the front passenger door and holding it open so that she could climb in. He shut her in, and turned to say a few words to the sentries in the plain black suits. She watched him in the side mirror—his handsome, worried, asymmetrical face, the intensity with which he was giving instructions, and felt sad for his children, riding the cable cars without their father that weekend. In the rearview, she checked her appearance, wiped away the smudged mascara under her eyes. She was trying to pinch some color into her pallid complexion when a man—not the man she was expecting—slipped into the driver’s seat and started up the car.
He was holding down the locks, so she could only crank the window. “You said—”
The kindness was gone from Bobby’s countenance as he approached the
car. “Marilyn, this man is going to take you to your psychiatrist’s house. The address is 920 Franklin, you got that?” he said to the driver, who grunted yes.
“But—”
“You’re lucky I’m not dumping you in a sanitarium right now. What Jack said to you he may have meant, for all I know. But that’s never going to happen. You hear me? God help me, if you try and contact me or my brother again, I’ll have put you where no one can find you.”
His back was already to her when the man behind the wheel peeled away from the house, a second car tailing them up the highway. “Take me back,” she said, but anemically, so that she almost couldn’t blame him for ignoring her. As they drove into the city she began to wonder where Alexei’s people were, if they were watching from passing cars or if they were waiting at her home. If Bobby really had planned to talk to her, and if so, whether Jack knew that he’d threaten to have her sent away, do the same thing the Russians had done to her. She still had no will to protest, a few moments later, when the driver dragged her across the Greensons’ yard. He rang the doorbell, and she tried to straighten up, smooth her hair, when she saw their teenage daughter had answered the door.
“Can I help you?” Becky asked. Her hair was up in curlers, and a floral nightgown covered most of her body.
“Is Dr. Greenson at home?”
“No.” Becky’s eyes, wide with alarm, went to Marilyn. “They’re at the Hollywood Bowl. The Henry Mancini Orchestra. Do you want me to call him?”
“No.” Marilyn managed to summon a little force as she told the driver, “You can leave me with her.”
“But Mr. Kennedy said—”
“Give her the fucking car keys,” Marilyn said. “The concert must be over by now, Dr. Greenson will be home soon. Anyway, you can tell your boss I’m in good hands and I won’t bother him anymore.”
He was reluctant, but did as he was told. Marilyn stood on the steps to the house next to Becky as he crossed the lawn and climbed into the idling car that had followed them from the Lawfords’ beach house, and watched it disappear down the hill.
“Do you want me to call Father? I could, they’d find him. He’d come right away.”
“No.” Marilyn took the keys from her and began to stumble over the grass to the place where they’d left her car. “Have him call when he gets back, though, just to check on me, see if I’m still around …”
“Are you sure you’re fit to drive?” Becky cried after her.
“Yeah.” Marilyn swung around for a final glimpse and, smiling sadly, called out, “Hey, darling, you know what? You can really do the twist. Good night! And good-bye, good-bye, good-bye …”
Of course she wasn’t fit to drive, but that didn’t deter her. Not after the events of the day. In fact, there was something maudlin and appropriate about steering the car into the nighttime city in such a frantic state. To die alone, in the land of freeways, mere miles from her birthplace, her car flying off a bridge or crushed against a traffic signal. That would be so much cleaner and simpler than waiting around for Alexei’s people to find her. She drove recklessly with the window down, the night air sharp on her face. She got lost, and that was how she came upon the station. The big yellow building, lit from below like the picture palaces of her adolescence, with its deco ornamentation and palm tree fringe. As she crossed the parking lot, slipping between the black-and-white patrol cars, she had the sense of being far removed from any human activity—she could hear no voices, only the rush of vehicles on an invisible street—as though she were about to pass into another realm.
Inside the halls were wide and neon-lit, and smelled of old coffee cooked down in the pot. Now she heard the squeak of shoes, low murmurings, a file cabinet slammed shut. The first person she actually spoke to sat in an
office by himself, his elbows folded on the big oak desk, a newspaper spread before him. He was wearing a white lab coat over a blue collared shirt, and his face was still pudgy with youth—he might have been born the same year she was, or later, even. The door was open, and
Chief Medical Examiner
was painted on its mottled glass, and she hovered there waiting to catch his attention.
“What do they call you?” she asked, when his absorption in the article—about a string of murders in what the paper termed a house of ill-repute—proved total.
“I am Dr. Noguchi,” he replied, his focus cast down on the spread newspaper. “Dr. Thomas Noguchi.”
“You’re the top guy, huh?” she murmured.
As he glanced up he pulled his large, wire-rim glasses from their perch on his nose and put them aside. “I am the deputy coroner,” he started to say. He stood up awkwardly and cleared his throat. “Oh my. You’re—”
“Yeah?”
“Not wearing any shoes,” he said, eventually, as though actually pronouncing her name would be too much for him.
“I guess I must have lost ’em someplace.”
“Are you all right? I really don’t think you ought to be barefoot here.”
She glanced at her feet, but didn’t see any reason for this to bother anyone. “If you’re not the top guy, how come you’re in his office?”
“Coroner Curphey usually goes home about ten on Friday evenings, and spends the weekend with his family.”
“Sounds kinda lonesome to me. You’re here by yourself all weekend?”
“I suppose he’d come in if there was a big case—but ordinarily there isn’t much I can’t handle personally, on my own. I—I can’t think why that would be of any interest to you. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“This isn’t what you thought it would be like, huh? All alone on a Friday night with Marilyn Monroe …”
“I’m sure I’ve never imagined any scenario of the kind,” the deputy coroner replied, too quickly so she knew it was a lie.
She exhaled a disbelieving murmur and arched her back into the doorframe, cast her eyes down the hall. “I guess I just wanted to see what it’s gonna be like.”
“What
what
will be like?”
“You know, the end.”
“The end?”
“Yeah. I always sort of knew I was the kind of girl they’d find in some seedy motel room somewhere with, I don’t know, an empty bottle of pills next to the bed and a sad, sweet little note, leaving her favorite mink to the prop master’s niece, in handwriting that’s like hers but isn’t. And then she gets wheeled in someplace like this. And every cop on duty gets a nice, big eyeful of her gorgeous corpse.”
The coroner blinked, swallowed. He was trying to meet her gaze, but his focus kept slipping lower, where her breasts stretched the thin weave of her sweater.
“You wanna see them?” Her voice got smoky, and her hair, even unkempt as it was, did its job and fell coquettishly over half her face.
He swallowed. “Them?”
She began lifting her sweater, revealing the pale flesh of her torso.
The coroner leaned forward across the desk, neglecting to close his mouth.
She took two slow, swaying belly-dancer steps into the room, drew the sweater another few inches, above her first ribs. “You do, huh?” she whispered. “You want to see it all?”
The coroner’s head bobbled on his neck as he felt across the desk for his glasses.
Then her shoulders drew back, and her smile disappeared. She dropped the hem of her sweater and tilted her head back. “No,” she said. “I don’t think you’re going to see them just yet. After all, you’ll get plenty when I’m dead.”
Los Angeles, August 1962
WALLS had been in a state of agitation for so many weeks that he was only ever able to fall asleep for a few minutes at a time. “You look like shit,” his mother had observed that morning (out of disappointment more than concern, it seemed to him), and he could not tell her the reason why. The reason for his paleness, his bagged eyes, was that his friend who worked in the lab at the Bureau had finally gotten back to him regarding the flask that Marilyn had left in her hotel room back in May.
“Must be some case,” he’d said, and explained that the contents matched a substance known to the Bureau because a Soviet scientist who had defected the previous summer had used it in negotiating a new life for himself and his wife in Dublin, New Mexico. According to the defector, the formula was his own invention, had been tested on numerous human subjects, and was meant to cause heart failure when ingested, but go undetected by typical Western autopsy procedures. Walls had hung up and closed his eyes, waiting out moments of dire intestinal turmoil such as he had never known, and which did not fully abate until he determined that the president was still alive and well (at least as of the printing of the morning edition). The flask, moreover, was with the Bureau. But the fact that a method of assassination had been delivered to the object of his surveillance, without his knowledge but under his watch, and that she’d had ample time to use it, was as terrifying as any he could imagine. The fact that she had not yet committed the act was as gentle as a lullaby.
He knew he should call Toll immediately. He was in over his head, and
needed the full resources of the Bureau behind him. But the failure of his independent undercover operation socked him with shame, and he decided that so long as he could determine that Kennedy was safely in Hyannis, and Marilyn was in California, he would allow himself twenty-four more hours to bring her in on his own.
Since that day in early summer when the police had chased him off Marilyn’s lawn and he had subsequently lost his job with Alan Jacobs’s firm (“We both know that broad is crazy,” Alan had apologized), he had tried to justify his solitary tactics by monitoring the movements of the president and the movie star on his own. This task had, briefly, seemed within his power—Marilyn was giving so many interviews, sitting for photographers in such a noisy way, that her whereabouts were quite generally known around town. Otherwise she was spending a lot of time either with Joe DiMaggio or Frank Sinatra, in which case the gossip columnists left a trail for him to follow. The president meanwhile kept coming or going from Hyannis Port all June and July, so the news was full of pictures of him boarding
Air Force One
, or sailing with his handsome, happy children. But somewhere along the way Walls had become distrustful. He no longer believed the statements of reporters or government officials, and was becoming leery of the evidence collected with his own eyes and ears. The more the world seemed to reassure him that all was well—Marilyn was trim and smiling; the president was a devoted family man—the more he believed otherwise, that those pretty images were in fact pieces of an elaborate conspiracy, and the underground movements of the most conspicuous people in the U.S.A. might, at any moment, erupt into a tragedy only he could prevent.
He’d gotten in the habit of monitoring the Lawfords’ Santa Monica place, which the press had taken to calling the Western White House on account of the president’s frequent visits there, and which he knew to be the setting for many of Kennedy and Marilyn’s assignations. After dark he would park his car in the public lot and stroll along the sand, even though he had
no proof of their having been anywhere near each other in months. It had occurred to Walls that the affair might have ended for some humdrum reason—maybe Mrs. Kennedy had caught on after that wanton rendition of “Happy Birthday,” or perhaps Kennedy’s desire had flagged, which was a possibility Walls ought not to have been caught off guard by.
The ritual soothed him, however, made him feel that everything was under control, and Nan Pettycomb, with whom he remained on drinking terms, had told him that Marilyn was still an occasional guest. And then, around midnight on Friday evening, after he had more or less despaired of finding her before his self-imposed deadline, he saw a helicopter descend to the beach, and a man who might have been the president stride across the sand, where he embraced a woman whose pale hair obscured her face.
