The Empty Glass Read online

  THE EMPTY GLASS

  J. I. Baker

  BLUE RIDER PRESS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by James Baker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, J. I. (James Ireland).

  The empty glass / J. I. Baker.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-58731-7

  1. Monroe, Marilyn, 1926–1962—Death and burial—Fiction. 2. Motion-picture actors and actresses—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.A58645E47 2012 2012009187

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For my parents

  The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

  —John F. Kennedy

  Let’s play murder—or divorce.

  —Marilyn Monroe

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  1.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 1962

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  THE BOOK OF SECRETS

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  MONDAY, AUGUST 6

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 7

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8

  30.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 16

  36.

  37.

  MONDAY, AUGUST 20

  38.

  39.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 21

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 23

  57.

  58.

  59.

  60.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 24

  61.

  62.

  63.

  64.

  65.

  66.

  67.

  68.

  69.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 25

  70.

  THE BOOK OF SECRETS

  71.

  72.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1.

  After a while, everything started to blur.

  I felt that I’d spent hours, days, lying on the floor of this hotel room with my face against the wood and my eyes open wide as the air came through the vent near my head. The whoosh was all I heard—then the door closing, the keys in the lock, the footsteps on the floor stopping as I turned to see the patent leather shoes before my eyes, the stub of a cigarette dropped between them, burning.

  And then there was the gun.

  “Wake up.” Captain Hamilton pushed the Smith & Wesson into my neck. “I want you to write me a letter.”

  I don’t remember when or how I did it. The three (or was it four? Or five? Or ten? I don’t remember) Nembutals had knocked me out. The captain was out of focus, going double.

  He handed me the pen that she had used to write her own last words, and forced me to write mine. Reeling on the bed with his gun at my temple, I thought of the notes written on napkins and doors and windows and carpets that lined the shelves of Suicide Notes and Weapons. Now I was adding my own:

  Take care of Max for me. Tell him that I loved him. Tell him that whatever else his father did, he loved his son.

  “That’s good, Delilah.” He loomed over me. “Now you feel good?”

  I nodded.

  “Even better.” He handed me the bottle.

  I leaned forward, reached for the pills, and ended up with the gun. Ah, his shoulder had been injured, Doc. You know that.

  I don’t need to tell you that I shot him. I was on my back, elbows locked. He was bending down when the gun kicked, a black dime smoking on his chest. He reared, touched the hole, and stared at the fluid that glistened like oil on his finger. “Oh, I know what this is,” he said as he fell.

  I heard the sound his skull made.

  I know what happens when you die.

  • • •

  You sigh and rub your forehead. “All right.” You shake a Chesterfield from your pack and light it with a kitchen match. You drag and blow smoke to the ceiling fan with the bulb above the table, and I notice (not for the first time) how clammy and pitted your skin is. You’re a big man, Doc, like an aging football player, with the face and waist of a small-town cop. “Let’s go over this again,” you say. You adjust your wire-rimmed glasses and check the notes that you are keeping in the book near the Sony reel-to-reel, lying on the desk like a suitcase, rolling at RECORD. “You shot him.”

  “In self-defense. You see the bandages. You gave me the Novril.”

  “Is it working?”

  “For now.”

  You sit on one side of the table; I sit on the other. Between us, that reel-to-reel, a stack of used and unused seven-inch tapes, a glass ashtray, a vial of Novril, and your pack of Chesterfields. There is also a box with a label reading “Fitzgerald, Ben, Psych Eval.” It contains what you call “the evidence”:

  1. The Smith & Wesson

  2. A vial of Nembutal

  3. A piece of notebook paper reading “Chalet 52” and “July 28”

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

  5. Amahl and the Night Visitors

  6. A bag of ashes

  7. A new red MEMORIES diary.

  You pic
k up Item No. 1. “It had your fingerprints on it.”

  “Like I said, I shot him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did anyone do anything? Everything changed after she died.”

  “Who?”

  “The actress. I’ve told you this already.”

  “Tell me again.”

  So I do:

  “I woke to the sound of the knock on the door and sat up in the light from the neon sign that snaked along the wall outside the window,” I say. “An empty carton of moo goo gai pan sat beside me; I hadn’t thrown it out. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamt the knock or actually heard it. I didn’t have a phone—”

  “Hang on.” You are frowning. Something is wrong with the Sony. The wheels have stopped. You hit REWIND, then PLAY, and I hear my voice:

  “—touched the hole, and stared at the fluid that glistened like oil on his finger—”

  You hit STOP and look up at me. “Like oil?”

  I nod.

  “It glistened like oil, Ben?”

  “It’s a simile.”

  “Who do you think you are, Edna Ferber?”

  But you can’t hear my voice on the tape anymore. This is where the recording stopped. There is nothing but static. You make minor adjustments to the machine and try it again: REWIND, STOP, PLAY.

  It doesn’t work. You hit it with the heel of your hand.

  REWIND, STOP, PLAY.

  My voice: “Why did anyone do anything? Everything changed after she died.”

  You pause the tape and look at me. “Now pick up where you left off.”

  “Give me a cigarette first.”

  “I thought you quit.”

  “That was yesterday.”

  You give me a cigarette.

  And a Novril, too: for the pain.

  After a while, everything starts to blur.

  “Tell the truth this time,” you say.

  “I already told you the truth.”

  “So tell it again.”

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 1962

  2.

  I woke to the sound of the knock on the door and sat up in the light from the neon sign that snaked along the wall outside the window. An empty carton of moo goo gai pan sat beside me; I hadn’t thrown it out. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamt the knock or actually heard it. I didn’t have a phone.

  “Hello?”

  The knock again, then a voice:

  “Ben?”

  It sounded like Inez.

  “Coming.”

  The seventh-floor apartment was fifty bucks a week, furnished, which meant a hard bed with a history and springs that whined when you turned over; yellow curtains with plastic linings that smelled of cigarettes; a carpet into which a sort of hopelessness had settled, like dust; and a sign on the door reading: LOCK THE DOOR BEFORE YOU SLEEP.

  As if I needed the reminder.

  My small bedroom was connected to what the brochures had called the “living area” by a short hallway that contained a water closet. By “living area,” they meant a used couch, a hot plate, and bare bulbs that flickered in the endless cycling of uneven electricity. The door leading out to the stairs was on the left as I walked from the bedroom. I stared through the peephole: a fish-eye view of Inez. She was the night clerk in the lobby bar.

  “Who’s it?”

  “Call for you, Señor Ben.”

  I unlocked the door. “Is Max all right?”

  “Is not your son.”

  “My wife?”

  “Not your wife, Señor Ben. Is work. You coming?”

  “I need to get dressed.” I was wearing boxers that weren’t so white anymore. I slipped on an undershirt and stepped into the pants on the floor and pulled suspenders with a snap over my shoulders. Then I checked my face in the mirror that hung, framed like a photograph, to the left of the door: the shock of black hair, the pale skin, the bleary eyes and bluish stubble.

  The broken clock on the elbow of wall between the couch and kitchenette read 2:15.

  It was always 2:15.

  There was cold coffee on the hot plate from the night before, so I poured it into a cup with the ring around the rim. Housekeeping wasn’t my strong point, and I don’t like cold coffee. But it helped me avoid smoking, which for me was like trying to fly.

  I knew the packet of Kents sat in the wastebasket under the sink. I had tossed it there the night before. I grabbed it, along with the half-eaten sandwich I now figured I might need. Today was supposed to be Day One of my new smokeless life, but I told myself that Kents got rid of the tar.

  Tar is what kills you.

  • • •

  The phone sat on the desk in the dimly lit bar you reached through the double doors off the fading lobby. The bar served as both the Savoy’s unofficial reception area and, well, the bar. It had ripped black leather cushions on metal stools, plastic napkin holders, and pressed-tin walls. The red lightbulbs made the place look like a Holland whorehouse.

  Behind the bar, Inez answered the phone and sold cigarette packs with tickets slipped inside. You collected enough, you could buy a toaster. She had tacked pictures of actors she admired up and down the walls: the wrestler El Santo, Cantinflas, and Dolores del Rio, whose name meant (she said) “Sadness of the River.”

  She handed me the phone.

  “Ben here.” I slipped the cigarette into my mouth.

  “Fitz.” It was the department administrator, Seldon. “It’s nuts over here. We need you.”

  “Time is it?”

  “Five. Need you down here.”

  “The office?”

  “Brentwood. One-two-three-oh-five Fifth Helena Drive.”

  “Come again?”

  He gave me the address. I wrote it down.

  “Someone died,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  “Someone famous.”

  He told me who it was. I remembered reading scandal-sheet stuff about a film she hadn’t finished. I had the copy of Life magazine with her last interview: “It might be kind of a relief to be finished,” she had said. “It’s sort of like, I don’t know, some kind of yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again.”

  “Think it’s maybe a . . . no, Billy,” Seldon said. “Daddy’s okay. Go back to bed, okay? Sorry.” Back into the receiver: “Family stuff. I woke the kids.”

  “You woke me, too.”

  “Need next of kin.”

  “I don’t handle next of kin.”

  “You’ll handle it today.”

  I was a deputy coroner with clerical functions, overseeing Suicide Notes and Weapons. Sounds simple, but sometimes a suicide note is written on part of the floor, a door, mirrors, whole sections of walls. You could walk through the Sheriff’s Evidence Room and see doors propped against the shelves, covered with lipstick, reading: “Dear Andrew. Tell the children I loved them.”

  “Hurry,” Seldon said.

  I tried. It took ten minutes to get the Rambler started. It was a used ’58 I had purchased through the classifieds. The seller had asked me to assume his contract, which I did without knowing the abuse it had taken. It was like a battered wife that way; it ran like one, too.

  I patted my pockets for a match.

  Tomorrow would be Day One.

  • • •

  The green wooden gate outside the house sat in the middle of a stucco wall covered with bougainvilleas. It hid the property from the street, though I could see the Spanish tiles on the roof of the garage. No name on the mailbox. It was modest enough. I wondered why she’d bought it. The most famous woman in the world, with all the money that implies, but instead of a mansion in the Hills, she’d bought a one-floor hacienda in Brentwood.

  This one-floor hacienda in Brentwood.

  I parked in the cul-de-sac on the fifth of the numbered Helenas, tossed what was left of the third Kent to the tar, and carried my briefcase through the photographers and reporters with their pr
ess credentials lodged like playing cards in hatbands. Not to mention the neighbors gathering in their tea-rose flannel housecoats.

  The sun was coming up. There were low-pressure systems in Utah and Nevada, and a southerly wind: That’s what the radio said. It was going to be another scorcher.

  Two cops flanked the gate.

  “Morning, officers. Ben Fitzgerald. Deputy coroner.”

  “You’re already inside.”

  “What?”

  “LACCO is already inside.”

  “Not true.”

  “Is so. Taking pictures. A woman.”

  “A woman? You ask for credentials?”

  “No.”

  I flashed my credentials. “What does this say?”

  “Mr. Benjamin Fitzgerald, deputy coroner, L.A. County Coroner’s Office.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Fun job.”

  “You bet.”

  I walked through the living room to a hallway that led into a bedroom too small for all the people inside it now—maybe fifteen square feet. I can’t remember how many; they kept coming and going. Maybe five? Then six or seven. And two or three; then seven again. A man popped his head through the door and told someone named Don to come into the kitchen, and Don stopped dusting the dresser for prints and stepped on a Sinatra record.

  There were bags and boxes from I. Magnin’s and Bullock’s on Wilshire all over the floor. Leicas flashed as photographers took shots that would vanish tomorrow. Cops drew lines with chalk, covering the floor with a canvas cloth. My eyes darted from the detective dusting shattered glass to the copy of Horticulture beneath the bed to the rubber gloves spotted with liquid and the pills embedded in carpet fibers, but all of this—and everything—stopped when I saw the actress.

  She was lying facedown on the bed, clutching a phone. A sheet was pulled up to her shoulders. You could see the ash-blond hair fried from too many treatments. The cord snaked underneath her body. Her fingernails were blue. The cause of death seemed obvious: an overdose. Except—