The Empty Glass (2 page)

3.

T
he diary was filled with yellow pages on which blue handwriting had broken all the college rules. The word
MEMORIES
was embossed on the cover in the same gold that edged the paper. It was a dime-a-dozen diary—available at any drugstore. I had no reason to believe that it could bring down the government, Doctor. I had no reason to believe that Marilyn had died because of it, or that others would die because of it. I had no reason to believe it would jeopardize my own life or that of my family. So you ask: If I had known, would I have just walked away? Let it destroy the actress and the girl who had found it instead of all of us?

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“Jo Carnahan. LACCO.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Anything’s possible,” she said. “Didn’t your mother teach you that?”

“I never knew my mother.”

“Sorry to hear it. And now if you’ll excuse me.” She walked past me, and I grabbed her elbow, spinning her sharply around.

I caught a glint in her eye, a little hidden laugh.

Who did she remind me of?

“That red book,” I said. “What is it?”

“My diary.”

It wasn’t. You know that, Doc.

I took it from her.

“What’s the big idea?” she said.

“What’s
your
big idea? Impersonating an employee from the coroner’s office. I was going to say a man from the coroner’s office, but—”

“I’m not a man.”

“I can see that. You’re a thief.”

“I’m not. I’m Annie Laurie.”

“Thought you said your name was Jo.”

“Annie Laurie is my pen name. It’s a gossip column. You don’t read it?”

“No,” I lied. Of
course
I read it. I’d read it for years. Everyone in Southland reads it. They’re lying if they say they don’t. Do
you
read it, Doc?

“No.”

“I thought so.”

Annie Laurie is second only to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons when it comes to chronicling the ins and outs and ups and downs of the rich and famous. Okay, third only to Hedda and Louella. She has a husband named Dick, a Santa Anita jockey who is always on vacation; three cats; two precocious twin children perpetually at boarding school; and a cottage on Catalina. Annie Laurie has been writing her
L.A. Mirror
column, “The Voice of Hollywood,” and broadcasting her WOLA radio show,
Annie Laurie Presents
, for the better part of thirty years, but she is not—unlike Parsons and Hopper—a real person; she is a character. The writers who impersonate Annie Laurie change, but Annie herself does not.

“Don’t you think it’s strange?” asked Jo.

“What?”

“Well, there’s a bathroom in the housekeeper’s room,” she said. “And the carpet in here.”

“What about it?”

“See how high the pile is?”

She smiled and left the room.

Guy Hockett and his son from Westwood Village Mortuary were putting Miss Monroe’s body on the gurney. Rigor mortis had set in. This wasn’t what the son had expected. He hadn’t expected to see the source of locked-bathroom fantasies now unmovable and cold in his own hands, her bones cracking as they wrapped leather straps around her wrists and ankles.

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?”

It was Pat Newcomb, Miss Monroe’s publicist.

In the five-page death report filed by the LAPD, the deceased was described not as the star of
Some Like It Hot
or
The Seven Year Itch
—and not as the erstwhile wife of Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio, the most famous woman in the world—but as a “female Caucasian, age 36, height 5.4, weight 115 pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes, and slender, medium build. Occupation: actress.”

•   •   •

T
he entrance to the Telephone Room, otherwise known as the guest bedroom, was across the hall from Mrs. Murray’s bedroom. I carried the diary inside and shut the door and sat on the bed by the door that led to the pool and saw a white phone on the table. There were two phones. The cord to the other phone, pink, led through the door and down the hall to where the receiver now sat on the death bed. One number, GRanite 61890, was for close friends; the other, GRanite 24830, was for everyone else.

I opened the diary.

The Book of Secrets
was written in that blue scrawl on the inside page.

I turned the pages—some torn, others covered with illegible script, still others stained with unidentifiable fluids. I was searching for anything that might lead to next of kin: a lost mother, a missing son or father, a brother in Topeka, a sister in Detroit.

The diary had been started only six months before, on February 2, 2:01
A.M
.:

“I hear clicking on the line,”

it read,

That’s what it sounds like—Morse code. Faint voices all around. Bars are on the windows but the night is dark and the pool should be lit but it’s not on account of the remodel. A few times I heard noises like people at the window but I looked around. No one there and so now, see? Who’s crazy now?!!!

This was followed by a list of questions:

1. What is it like to do your job?

2. Are you going to keep J. E. H.?

3. What is next for Cuba?

The book was full of elisions, deletions, and torn pages. I saw no information about next of kin. The only number I found was RE7-8200. Others had been erased or were illegible. RE7-8200 was not only repeated; near it Marilyn had scrawled, in ragged letters, the name “Mrs. Green.”

I picked up the white phone and called.

“Hello,” a woman answered.

“Mrs. Green, please?”

I heard breathing. “Excuse me?”

“I’m looking for a Mrs. Green.”

“Your name, please?”

“Ben Fitzgerald. L.A. County Coroner’s.”

“Mr. Fitzgerald, fine,” she said. “But who is Mrs. Green?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

“There is no Mrs. Green,” she said. “I’ve never heard of Mrs. Green.”

4.

T
he L.A. County Morgue is in the basement of the Hall of Justice located where North Broadway forms an overpass off Santa Ana not far from Chinatown. The coroner, the sheriff’s office, the D.A., and the county jail are there. The medical examiner is on the first floor. That’s where my office is. There are only a few offices, because the staff is so small: three medical examiners, four lab techs, a few coroner’s aides.

They call it Pneumonia Hall.

It was just after 9
A.M
. I was at my desk eating the sandwich I’d retrieved from the trash and looking out the window onto the parking lot. On the blotter in front of me sat a framed picture of Rose, Max, and me smiling on the beach at Malibu: “In happier times,” the caption might have read in
Photoplay
. Pigeons perched, as they always perched, on the window ledge. Every now and then I saw them mating.

“Ben,” Dr. Noguchi said at the door. He was the deputy medical examiner. His first name was Thomas.

“Yeah.”

“We’re almost ready.”

I put my sandwich down.

•   •   •

T
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 in the basement where the rats were. They looked like numbered freezers. I opened 33, pulling the lever below the temperature gauge, and saw the toe tags. I wheeled the body on the stretcher to Table 1 in the windowless room, looked at the flesh on bright steel with the hose and the drainage system, the sink and the suspended scale.

A sheet was pulled up over her breasts. Her eyes were closed, her hair hanging limp as if she had just washed it.

The autopsy lasted five hours.

I won’t bore you with the details, Doctor, but a few things stuck with me:

Dr. Noguchi performed the procedure. This was odd. Yes, he was the only person on staff who was a university faculty member, assistant professor of pathology at Loma Linda, but he had only recently been appointed deputy medical examiner. Normally the chief medical examiner would have done it. Even stranger, Chief Coroner Curphey himself attended the autopsy, along with District Attorney John Miner.

This never happened.

“There are no puncture marks,” Dr. Noguchi said into his mic as he began the external examination, and “no indication” that Monroe had injected herself. There was no indication that anyone else had injected her, either. “There’s bruising,” he said, “a slight ecchymotic area . . . in the left hip and left side of the lower back.”

A bruise is a sign of violence. Its color comes from protein enzymes thrown off by white blood cells that try to contain the damage. Those enzymes change from dark purple to brown to yellow over time. The bruise on Miss Monroe’s left hip was dark purple, which means it probably appeared on the night she died. But it was never explained.

Dr. Noguchi also noted “dual lividity.” You ask me what this means: Livor mortis happens during the first eight hours after death. The heart mixes plasma with red blood cells. When the heart stops, the mixing ends, and the cells settle in the lower portion of the body. If the body is on its left side, the lividity—a purplish spotting—appears at the bottom of that side. If livor mortis is present on both sides, it’s called “dual lividity.”

In this case, we found livor mortis on both the back and posterior aspect of the arms and legs. Which would indicate one thing: The body had been moved.

Around twelve-thirty, Noguchi opened the stomach. It was the first abdominal organ he examined. In it, he found 20 ccs, about three tablespoons, of a brown liquid. But no pills were in the liquid. In fact, nothing indicated that she had swallowed anything poisonous.

In the duodenum, the first digestive tract after the stomach, there was “no evidence,” Noguchi said, “of pills. No residue. No coloration.”

“And no odor of pear,” I said.

Noguchi turned to me: “What?”

“Never mind.”

In his autopsy report, Noguchi summarized the digestive-system findings:

The esophagus has a longitudinal folding mucosa. The stomach is almost completely empty. The volume is estimated to be no more than 20 cc. No residue of the pills is noted. A smear made from the gastric contents examined under the polarized microscope shows no refractile crystals. The mucosa shows marked congestion and submucosal petechial hemorrhage diffusely. The duodenum are also examined under the polarized microscope and show no refractile crystals. The remainder of the small intestine shows no gross abnormality. The colon shows marked congestion and purplish discoloration.

This is what created all the controversy, Doc. Why? I don’t quite know where to begin, but for now: “marked congestion and purplish discoloration” may have meant the colon had been . . . compromised in the recent past.

Noguchi wrote: “Unembalmed blood is taken for alcohol and barbiturate examination. Liver, kidney, stomach and contents, urine and intestine are saved for further toxicological study.” These contents were sent to Ralph J. Abernethy, the chief toxicologist.

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.”

The picture that you have, Doc—the one marked “62-609 8-5-62” in the evidence folder—was taken afterward. The face looks sunken because the skull was cut open to remove and weigh the brain. You have other pictures there, too, of course: one taken of the body in the broom closet of Westwood Village. And photos taken by Sinatra at Cal-Neva the week before she died.

But all that will come soon enough. At the time, I figured the whole sad business was finished, but it wasn’t. It was never finished. When I returned to my office, the
WHILE YOU WERE OUT
slip on my desk read: “See me.”

That meant only one thing.

It meant Curphey.

5.

C
hief Coroner Theodore Joscelyn Curphey had a golf set in his office. It was one of those sets with a square of fake grass and a metal circle with flaps surrounding a hole you hit the ball into. He was teeing off beside his desk when I stepped inside.

“You wanted to see me?”

“One second.” He hit the ball. And missed. “There.” He wiped both hands together, propping the nine iron against his desk and sitting down.

His office windows, like mine, overlooked the parking lot. They were bracketed by bookshelves. A TV sat on the cabinet to the left: A roller derby show was on. A box of Dependable kitchen matches sat on the desk near the wire-webbed ashtray that held his pipe. He picked up the pipe, reignited it, and leaned back in his chair. “Have a seat,” he said.

You want to know about Theodore J. Curphey, Doctor. Well, he was bald with liver spots. He had glasses with thick lenses that made his eyes pop and a mustache that made him look, more than anything, like a—

“I don’t care what he looked like.”

“‘Like a walrus,’ I was going to say.”

“He was from New York,” you say. “How did he end up in L.A.?”

Northwest Airlines Flight 823 was scheduled to depart LaGuardia for Miami at 2:45
P.M
. on February 1, 1957, but takeoff was delayed for three hours on account of the snow. There was a
lot
of snow. Despite a slight sliding of the nosewheel on pavement, the flight was cleared around 6
P.M
. There was a normal roll, the first stage of takeoff, but the DC-6A did not achieve sufficient altitude over Flushing Bay, and sixty seconds after it became airborne, the craft clipped the treetops over Rikers Island.

It crashed.

Twenty people died.

Curphey’s work on the case brought him to the attention of Los Angeles County. Later that year, he became the county’s first coroner. There was resentment at the morgue: An outsider—from New York, no less—was now boss. Some think that’s how he got into trouble: A rat went to Bonelli and the Board of Supervisors with information about the tissue samples kept in the storage room on Kohler.

But more on that later.

“Siddown, Ben.”

I did.

He looked at me over those thick glasses. “I just wanted to check in,” Curphey said. “See how you’re doing.”

“Okay, I think.”

He opened the personnel file on his desk and paged through its papers, reading. At one point he frowned and looked up at me, squinting. “Thirty-three years old.”

“Yes.”

“A Step Three.”

“Yes.”

“Good-looking young man.”

“Thank you.”

“You started with us as . . .”

“Deputy coroner, Suicide Notes and Weapons. I was an embalmer before.”

“So you wanted a change.”

“The truth is I wanted more money. My son was born. I needed it. So I took the civil service exam and the walk-through test.”

“The walk-through test?”

“You have to walk through this place and not pass out.”

He did not find this funny. He returned to the papers, shuffling through them until he looked up, adjusted his glasses, and said, “Well, we certainly appreciate the work you do, Ben. Not to mention what you did for us at trial.”

“Of course.”

“Another man, a lesser man, might have balked.”

“All right.” Where was he going with this?

“I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what happened today.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“During the autopsy. What’s your verdict?”

“It’s not my place to say.”

“It wasn’t your place to say that there was no odor of pear, either, but you said it. Why?”

“A chloral overdose always smells of pear, and there were no refractile crystals and no—”

“The tox report will tell us everything we need to know.”

“She was in the soldier’s position when we found her, sir. She was clutching the phone. A person dying of a barbiturate overdose would not have died clutching a phone.”

“So,” he said, “is
that
why you called the Justice Department?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I got a call from a friend at the Justice Department in Washington, and he said that at eight-oh-nine
A.M
., precisely, a woman named Angie Novello received a phone call from one . . . Ben Fitzgerald at the L.A. County Morgue. It originated from the Monroe house. He said this Ben was looking for a ‘Mrs. Green.’” Curphey took his glasses off and stared at me. “Why did you call the Justice Department?”

“I was looking for next of kin.”

“At the
Justice
Department?”

“It was a number I had.”

“A number.”

“I found it in a notebook. At the Monroe house.”

“What type of notebook?”

“Seemed to be a diary.”

“What was in the diary?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”

“Where is it now?”

“I left it back at the house.”

“Let me make something clear, Ben.” He leaned forward. “It’s not your job to speculate.”

“You asked my opinion.”

“You’re not coroner yet.”

“I play golf as well as anyone.”

“I don’t want you making any more phone calls.”

“What about next of kin?”

“The next-of-kin bullshit is just bullshit, a formality. Everyone knows the girl’s mother is out at Rockhaven. If you want next of kin, that’s who you want to see. Go visit her. Tell her what happened to her poor dead daughter, if she doesn’t know already, and you’ve done your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

But I knew what I had to do. And to do it I needed a flashlight.