The Empty Glass (9 page)

23.

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.

“So what did you do next?” you ask.

“Went back to my office.”

“Why didn’t you call the evidence tech?”

“And tell him that my razor had ended up in the Evidence Room? Would
you
believe that?”

“No.”

“You’d think I’d put it there myself. What other explanation is there?”

“You’re not answering my question, Ben.”

•   •   •

M
ore than once my father would leave empty beer cans that weren’t really empty around the hotel rooms we shared in Bunker Hill, San Bernardino, and La Habra. Or he and some woman he’d picked up in a Vernon bar would kill half a bottle of rotgut from a package store and he would teach her dance steps to the music that came from whatever faded radio sat by the side of the bed. Very early on I tried tasting the stuff that seemed to work like magic on my father and all these random women. And, though it made me gag at first, it didn’t take long to realize that the sickness you felt disappeared fast enough if you swallowed it. It became something more than warm and more than soothing. It changed the way you thought about yourself.

It changed the world.

Mornings, my father always grabbed the Benzedrine that he would buy in tubes and, swallowing the soaked paper inside, he would say, “I will never do this again.” He always seemed to mean it, but it happened anyway. It happened because the lights were blooming in the restaurants and taverns. They made the trash cans and alleys between bars look good, and he knew that just one drink would kill the haze, making everything better and clear. Would allow him, finally, to sort out what was wrong and give him the strength to continue.

Not merely to continue: to thrive.

I don’t need to tell my story here. You’re not interested. Neither am I. All you need to know is that he was working as a bean huller in San Bernardino when he disappeared. He got a bean hull in the eye. You almost couldn’t tell the eye was no good, when the doctor was through with it, but it ate at him.

He was angry and grew angrier. He drank even more, chasing the long evenings with Benzedrine in the afternoons. “I will never do this again,” he said on the morning that he disappeared. He had scheduled an appointment with a labor organizer, and before he left he took a swig of Teacher’s from the bottle that hung from the window on a string. He thought I hadn’t noticed.

He vanished, as they put it, “without a trace.” A few items about the disappearance of Milo Fitzgerald appeared in the local paper, but they, too, vanished in a few days, and from that point onward I was nothing if not conscious of the gap between the life I knew, and the life the world acknowledged.

Which is why, of course, I looked for my father in
The Book of the Unknown Dead
that day. Had he been one of the hobos? The man who had jumped? The one in the back of the limo?

“But I never finished,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Curphey called.”

•   •   •

H
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 looked up, narrowed his eyes, and said, “May I call you right back?” He hung up and nodded at me. “Sit down, Ben.”

I did.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”

“You have?”

“What you said about the diary.”

“What about it?”

“You said it was in the Monroe home. But Captain Hamilton sent his men to her home and found nothing.”

Captain Hamilton.

“You didn’t take it, did you?”

I lied: “No.”

“Where is it?”

I said nothing.

“Look, I understand the pressures here, Ben. Really. Which is why you should relax. You
deserve
to. You haven’t had a break in quite a while.”

“It’s been busy.”

“I know. But a man has to live. A man has to take care of himself. I worry that you’re not.” He slid an envelope emblazoned with the LACCO logo across the desk.

“Open it.”

I did: It contained one round-trip TWA ticket to Cleveland.

“Cleveland?”

“I want you to go on vacation, and not think about your job. And not worry about Marilyn Monroe. So we’ve arranged for you to spend some time in Cleveland. At the Pick-Carter. You heard of it?”

“I’ve hardly even heard of Cleveland.”

“It’s a lovely hotel. You can only do your job when you’re thinking clearly.”

“I’m thinking clearly.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t believe me.”

A voice at the door: “Dr. Curphey?”

He looked up. “Yes?”

His secretary. “May I see you for a second, please.”

Curphey looked at me as he left the office.

I tapped my finger on his desk and looked around, at the window, the TV, the golf clubs . . . and the bookshelf:

Volumes of history, psychology, forensics . . . and
The Enemy Within
by Robert Kennedy.

Bingo.

I took the book down from the shelf and opened it.

“Dear Dr. Curphey,” read the inscription on the inside plate: “With thanks and gratitude. Yours ever, Bobby.”

24.

I
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. The Monroe diary sat to my right. It was late, I didn’t know what time, and I was alone except for the bum who slept with his head on crossed arms two tables ahead. He kept moving in his sleep, snakelike. A severe librarian sat behind the desk in the middle of the room.

I lit a cigarette. I dragged and tried to tamp the ash, but there was no ashtray. I set the butt on the edge of the desk and returned to the book.

In 1955, Robert Kennedy was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, also known as the McClellan Committee. Senator John McClellan, D-Arkansas, was chairman. The investigation into Teamster president Dave Beck and, later, Jimmy Hoffa began when the subcommittee started nosing into mob and Teamster involvement in the manufacturing and distribution of clothes for the military.

The dues and savings of the Teamsters were being used by Teamster leaders, President Beck in particular, to buy homes, racehorses, Sulka robes, “twenty-one pairs of nylons, outboard motors, shirts, chairs, love seats, rugs, a gravy boat, a biscuit box, a 20-foot deep freeze, two aluminum boats, a gun, a bow tie, six pairs of knee drawers.” The money was also being loaned to people like Morris “Moe” Dalitz, former member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, who used it to build the Desert Inn and Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.

Robert Kennedy, crusader, crossed the country in search of more information. His first stop: Los Angeles. His first contact: Captain James Hamilton of L.A.’s Intelligence Division.

Kennedy met Hamilton and Lieutenant Joseph Stephens, chief of the Police Labor Squad, on November 14, 1956. He talked to members of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. He talked to Anthony Doria, mobster Johnny Dio’s friend. He heard about members of the Retail Clerks of San Diego who had been beaten by goons. He heard about the hoods who had tried to take over the L.A. Union of Plumbers and Steamfitters.

There were unsolved murders, bodies in barrels, and the story of the L.A. union organizer who had been told to “stay out of San Diego.” Messages on cocktail napkins: “Stay out of San Diego.” Phone calls: “No San Diego or you die.”

But the man went to San Diego. He intended to organize jukebox operators. He stayed at the Beachcomber Motel. And one night, after a few drinks at the bar, he was ambushed on the way back to his room. Knocked on the back of the head with a blackjack. When he woke, he was lying on Black’s Beach. A seagull pecked at his head, blood on its beak. He sat up, waved the birds away—and that was when he felt the pain in his backside.

He wanted to get out of San Diego. He never should have gone to San Diego. But the pain was so bad that he couldn’t drive. He called the ambulance. At the hospital, they removed a cucumber from his rectum. It still had a price sticker on it. Back in his car, at the hotel, a note on the passenger seat read:

“Next time it will be a watermelon.”

I put the book down and went in search of timelines and logistics. I combed through the last few copies of the
L.A. Times
, tracking the Kennedys’ whereabouts from August 4 to yesterday.

And this is what I found:

Bobby had been scheduled to speak at the American Bar Association Conference on Monday, August 6, so he spent the weekend with Ethel and kids at the Bates Ranch in Gilroy, three hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles. On Saturday, Marilyn’s last day, everyone went horseback riding.

On Sunday, Bobby attended mass at 9:30
A.M
. in Gilroy. “He was without his usual flashy smile and shook hands woodenly with those that welcomed him,” one paper said. “Perhaps the cares of the administration are weighing heavily on him.”

Perhaps.

I also found this from Dorothy Kilgallen’s column in the
New York
Journal American
:

Marilyn Monroe’s health must be improving. She’s been attending select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the town again. In California, they’re circulating a photograph of her that certainly isn’t as bare as the famous calendar, but is very interesting. And she’s cooking in the sex-appeal department, too; she’s proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his prime. So don’t write off Marilyn Monroe as finished.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. The librarian stood above me, wiry gray hair and granny glasses. Dark suit. “Sir,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t smoke in here.”

“I wondered why there were no ashtrays.”

“Anyway, we’re closed,” she said, checking her wrist with one swift gesture. She had a little mustache. “It’s ten
P.M
.”

“I didn’t notice the time. I’ve been reading.”

“And smoking. We’re closing.”

“I need to use the men’s room.”

She told me where it was. I picked up the Monroe diary and noticed, as I stood, that the homeless man’s right wrist had slipped from his black coat. On it: an expensive wristwatch.

•   •   •

T
he bathroom door was ajar. The light would not turn on. I heard dripping in the darkness and touched things I didn’t want to touch as I made my way to what I hoped were the urinals.

I flushed and stepped back outside.

I walked into Zoology and, through the parallel stacks, saw the homeless man going methodically through my briefcase. He was lifting it up by the handle, shaking out the papers inside, then bending to the floor.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize he was looking for the diary. They were
all
looking for it. I was carrying it, nervous: What would they do to get it? I paged to the entries I had not yet read and ripped out as much as I could. I shoved them into the back of my trousers, slipped
The Book of Secrets
between
The Vertebrate Body
and
The World of Plankton
, and walked toward the front room.

The man was gone.

So was my briefcase.

25.

T
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 when I left the car. I figured I was being followed, but I never saw anyone on the sidewalk, with or without a camera. I never saw anyone across the street—at least not at first. The tavern had a sort of stucco, almost adobe, wall. That much I remember. And red neon in dark windows. That’s what you can see in the first of the photos they took of me, the photo you have here, Doctor, in the stack of evidence:

4. A stained manila folder containing a number of 8 × 10 photographs

In the third photo, taken twenty minutes later, you can see I am leaving the tavern.

It’s hard to identify me in the first shot—they did not use a telephoto lens, and the name on the photo reads “Milo,” which is not my name.

But in the third shot . . .

“Can I do you for?” the bartender said. Like a bartender in a movie, he had a handlebar mustache and a neat red bow tie and was wiping out the inside of a pint glass with a white towel.

“Wild Turkey, Joe. Neat.”

“How’d you know my name is Joe?”

“It’s the name on the bar.”

“I’m not
that
Joe.”

He poured.

I smelled the damp hops. I saw the wood scored with pierced hearts and names of long-ago loves, the black lines from burned cigarettes and damp rings from a century’s worth of bottle bottoms. Wet cardboard cases of beer were stacked before the bathroom you could reach just past the pool table. The circular fan set high in the wall at the end of the hall blew out, I somehow knew, into the back of a parking lot where you would find a Dumpster filled with orange rinds and the greasy remains of onion rings and wax paper that had once lined the red plastic baskets.

I lit a cigarette.

“There a phone here?”

“Of course.”

There was always a phone. It was set in the dark wall near the front door and the cigarette machine. Inside was a light and a little seat near the dangling phone book.

I called Jo.

The phone, you know, kept ringing. Each ring was followed by a click. The smoke curled and rose to the top of the booth.

“Hello?” A man’s metallic voice.

I swallowed. “Jo there?”

“Who’s calling?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Who is this?” he said.

I hung up.

I put a dime into the Wurlitzer to the right of the front door and played B-7, “Young World,” by the good Ricky Nelson. I didn’t care that he was on that TV show people made fun of. He could really tear it up.

I went back to the bar, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the pages I had torn from the diary.

You had to put the pieces together. The writing wasn’t always legible. There were random scrawled words and names, like “HORSE BOOK OPEN” and “Roberta Linn.” Much of it did not make sense, but the stuff that
did
make sense made clear that, the weekend before Marilyn died, she had gone out to the place that Sinatra owned, a place half in California and half in Nevada, hence its name: Cal-Neva Lodge.

The Nevada half featured gambling. You stepped past the exact geographical point where the states changed in the hall and found yourself in a casino once frequented by the likes of Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Clara Bow, and William Randolph Hearst.

On the weekend of July 28 and 29, Sinatra was performing in the Celebrity Showroom. He’d invited Marilyn to come, she wrote, “just for kicks.” But it wasn’t kicks. She had taken a lot of pills. She wrote about taking them as Sinatra sang “September Song” and there was champagne and vodka as the room blurred and music faded and she looked up to see a chandelier and ceiling tiles falling from the rain the night before. The tiles were falling on her. She was certain. And one tile became two. And three. Until—

Now there was a flash from the street outside: lightning? No.

A camera?

I carried the pages to the front door and looked out.

Duane Mikkelson, the guy from the
Mirror
, was taking pictures through the window on the sidewalk. He had the same Chiclet teeth that I remembered, crammed into the same gums that were too high when he smiled. The same sunglasses, even at night; the same fedora with the same press pass in it.

I carried the pages past the pool table into the bathroom.

It was dim and green, like an aquarium but without water. No windows.

I locked the door. There was one stall. The toilet inside hadn’t been flushed since Grant took Richmond. I shut the cover and stood on it, reaching up for the ceiling tiles. They were all square-shaped and mostly stained with water that had turned yellow. I pushed one up, slid it over, pushed the pages I had ripped on top of another tile inside, then pulled the first tile back over the space.

Dust filtered down. I coughed, wiped my hands against my pants, and jumped off the toilet.

Back at the bar, I saw another flash.

“It’s this one, see, Doc?” I point to the second picture in the file. “It’s closer; you can see me better, though the name on the photo here is, again, ‘Milo.’”

In the third picture, I am standing outside and staring toward the camera, holding my hands above my eyes like an admiral. What you can’t see is the car—my car—below the lens. The windows had been shattered, the doors opened, and the seats slit with razors.

My empty, torn briefcase sat on the front seat.

Enter
that
into evidence, Doc.

“It isn’t evidence,” you say.

“Oh?”

I stepped over the shattered glass, slipped onto the car seat, put the key in the ignition.

But the Rambler didn’t start.

I heard thunder. I looked back to the bar and, through the drops on the window, saw the bartender at the door.

And that was when the cab pulled up.