The Empty Glass Page 3

  “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.

  6.

  The flashlight was cheap, but that was okay. I didn’t need a good one. I paid for it at True Value and put it on the shotgun seat, took Temple to Wilshire and San Vicente back down to the numbered Helenas and the Brentwood hacienda.

  “Relative humidity is sixty-two percent,” said the man on the Rambler radio. “The temperature humidity index stands at seventy-three, and the wind is calm. Marilyn Monroe is dead, apparently from an overdose of sleeping pills. An investigation is ongoing, but here is the statement from Deputy Coroner Cronkite . . .”

  The day was ending, the lights in the basin below the spray of palms spreading out like fire in a grid under the sky. There was a moon. You could see the smaller lights from cars along the highway winding like a silver river through the trees.

  I parked past the scalloped gate in the wall on Fifth.

  • • •

  Now you ask why I returned, because I care about my job, but there are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience, Doc, and I couldn’t stop thinking of that little red memory book. It seemed to contain the solution to a mystery. All right, and I was covering my ass. Curphey knew something. He knew that people who overdose on chloral smell of pear; he knew that anyone with all those Nembutals in her stomach would have been yellow inside. He knew what it meant that we’d found no refractile crystals. But he didn’t like that I knew—or had noticed—all this. He was playing some kind of a game, and I didn’t want to get screwed the way that I’d been screwed before.

  So go back through the microfilm, Doc, and in January you will see images of me testifying at the hearings, along with the headline:

  ACCUSED OF WILLFUL MISUSE OF OFFICE!

  Curphey was charged with nine counts involving the removal of organ tissue from bodies during postmortem examinations in cases that involved accidents or “mystery deaths.” That’s what the paper called them. He had asked for the tissue to be removed even when the organs were not involved with the cause of death; the relatives of the deceased were never told how their dear ones were mutilated.

  County Board of Supervisors chairman Frank G. Bonelli testified that his office received more complaints about the coroner’s department than any other agency, and Supervisor Hahn called for an explanation of “pig pen” conditions in the LACCO sto
rage room at 754 Kohler.

  I knew that storage room; I had taken the tissue samples there, but that’s not what I told the jury.

  After we won, we all went out to celebrate on the county’s dime, which led to the images that you have surely seen, Doctor. You’ve heard of the L.A. Mirror?

  “Of course.”

  “My wife, of all people, believed what they wrote. Which is why she kicked me out—”

  “Stick to the point,” you say.

  Okay: The cul-de-sac was dark.

  A cop stood outside the gate, a kid puffing out his chest like a bird.

  “Evening,” I said.

  “Evening, sir.”

  “Need to get inside.”

  “There’s a sign on the door. Says ‘Any person breaking into or entering these premises will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.’”

  I showed him my badge. “LACCO.”

  “I can read. I am under orders not to let in anyone else from the coroner’s office.”

  “I work for Curphey.”

  “Orders from Curphey: no one inside.”

  “Look, I’m in a bit of trouble—”

  “Buddy. Read my lips, okay. Get the fuck out of here.”

  “I just hoped that—”

  “What part of ‘get the fuck out of here’ don’t you understand?”

  “The ‘fuck’ part,” I said. “I flunked biology.”

  He reached for his gun.

  “All right.” I raised my hands and backed up. “Don’t get all Gary Cooper on me.”

  I put the car in reverse, right arm around the passenger seat as if it were a girl, and looked back through the window. I was careful not to clip the cars parked on both sides of the street as I pulled into a dark driveway, then took a right out of Fifth.

  On Carmelina, I parked and sat and thought and needed to stop thinking. I got in trouble when I thought, but then so did Galileo. Not to mention Jack Paar.

  I got out of the car.

  There were no streetlights, so I walked under the dark jacarandas down Sixth to another cul-de-sac. There was a locked gate to the right. It fronted on a driveway. I vaulted over it, walked along the strip of land between the driveway and another house, and through the backyard all the way to Miss Monroe’s pool.

  I took a left and walked along the narrow lawn to the window of the room where she had died. The glass had already been broken the night before, so I pulled myself up and dropped down inside.

  • • •

  And here the tape breaks. It’s at 12583. “Fuck,” you say, and stub your Chesterfield, trying to splice it together. Then you feed it back through the reels and hit RECORD.

  “So you climbed inside.”

  “I found the diary where I’d left it, Doctor, under the pillow in the Telephone Room, and when I picked it up I remembered what Jo had said about the bathroom and the carpet.”

  “What about it?” you ask.

  “Well, she’d said there was a bathroom in the housekeeper’s room and mentioned the height of the carpet pile. And suddenly I knew what all this meant.”

  “What did it mean?”

  I went into Eunice Murray’s room and flipped the switch, but the power had already been shut off. I shone the flashlight around. The room was neat, orderly, the same layout as Marilyn’s, the bed against the left wall. On the opposite side of the bed, near the window overlooking the pool, a door on the left led into a bathroom that connected to the Telephone Room.

  So let’s get this straight, Doctor: Mrs. Murray said she’d woken up because she needed to use the bathroom. That (she claimed) was how and why she’d seen the light under Marilyn’s door. But why would she have gone into the hall when her bathroom was accessible through her own room?

  Then I went inside Marilyn’s room. I put the flashlight on the floor facing the hall and closed the door. The carpet pile was so high that it scraped against the underside of the door when I closed it.

  The carpet hid the light.

  “I don’t think this adds up to much,” you say.

  “I think it adds up to a lot.”

  There are logical problems with Mrs. Murray’s testimony, Doctor; there was a four-hour gap between the time the docs arrived and the call to the police. We found no yellow color in the digestive tract, and no refractile crystals: no evidence that Marilyn had ingested pills. The body showed dual lividity, which indicates that it was moved.

  “So?” you say.

  “Why was the body moved?”

  “Let’s stick to the subject at hand,” you say. “You found the diary in the Telephone Room. Did you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  I sat on the deathbed. The flashlight illuminated MEMORIES on the cover. I felt the red leather, saw gold on the edge.

  And opened it.

  THE BOOK OF SECRETS

  7.

  February 2, 2:01 a.m. I hear clicking on the line. 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?!!!

  Mrs. Murray is padding around in her slippers I can hear her padding through the door and once I thought about getting up and going to talk but don’t feel like it. I called a few people. NO ONE was home, or they were all ignoring me. They always ignore me so all I have left is YOU, Diary!!

  They are following me I know it there are wires in the walls I have called Fred and there are bugs. I don’t mean insects.

  Tonight I went to dinner at the beach house and Danny helped me with the notes. I still have them in my purse:

  1. What is it like to do your job?

  2. Are you going to keep J. E. H.?

  3. What is next for Cuba?

  I was late I am always late so they expected it. We drove to where the highway is Beach Road under the bluffs and went down the hill through the gate into the room and they were eating dinner at the table when I walked in. Some of them, like the surfers Pat hates, were barefoot.

  Peter said, “Drink?”

  I was already drunk but “yes” I took the glass and everyone said hi and Peter introduced me to the General.

  The chair to the left of the General was empty and that was my plate. I mean the one that was untouched and napkins and silverware beside it and the glass near the candelabras where a Polaroid camera sat and it was new. They were taking pictures.

  “Nice to meet you.” I hardly looked at the General. I sat and pretended that I didn’t care and wasn’t impressed. He pretended the same, dear Diary.

  Diary, I had another glass and the room got warm and I giggled at a joke someone had made. I wasn’t looking at the General and wondered if he was laughing.

  Then I turned to him.

  The General was looking across the table at Peter, his mouth smiling but his eyes were not and saw me staring at him and I think his smile died. He looked serious. Well, Diary, lust is more serious than anything.

  He kept staring. I kept the glass against my lips. It became a Point that I was making with that lipstick, a Thing I did like ice on nipples. It drove men MAD!!!! Well, just press a glass to lips and let the color bleed on crystal and keep it there and see what happens.

  It happened to him. Well, that Adam’s apple bobbed and he reached under the table and touched my thigh it sparked with the static from the helicopter that landed behind the house and you know the neighbors just hated the sand in their pool!!!!

  I jumped and champagne spilled and he took his hand away and “Oh gosh sorry let me” and wiped my dress with his napkin and realized what he was doing and looked up with Peter pouring more champagne, his sister laughing though angry at the surfers and all that damn sand from bare feet and dropped the napkin he was shrugging like the awkward altar boy you know he was, Diary!!!!

  I turned to the General.

  “What,” I said, “is n
ext for Cuba?”

  • • •

  Down the long line of the beach I could see the lights of the Pier and the farther pier in the fog off the ocean, the Ferris and merry-go-round where I’d once stood watching couples on the tilting chairs. Well, I’d eaten cotton candy and worn the wig and wandered the city to buy a wedding ring. Well, the salespeople were rude. They didn’t know who I was. I had a black wig on and they didn’t care.

  Sometimes I don’t think straight.

  “I didn’t want to say it back in the house,” the General said. I could hardly hear over the waves. You could hear sounds on the highway and music drifted over the waves. You can hear things that way. I know that!!! (Even voices.) “You just have to stop calling,” he said.

  “He calls me when he needs to.”

  “That’s different. He has different needs.”

  “How different than mine?”

  “He’s a busy man.”

  “I’m busy, too, for fuck’s sake. You think I’m not? But I know what matters in life. I make time for other people.”

  “Tell that to your mother.”

  “Oh, now that was a low. That was really a low—”

  “I’m sorry. Look—”

  “He gave me his number. He said I could call. And suddenly it doesn’t work. So I have to call the fucking switchboard?”

  “You have so many people,” he said. “There must be thousands.”

  It wasn’t true. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time but men don’t have the nerve to call, not the right ones. And once in a while I meet a nice guy and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have to be from Hollywood he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a few drinks and go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: “Oh my God I’m going to fuck Marilyn Monroe” and he can’t get it up.

  “I understand,” the General said. “But you have to stop calling him. From now on, why don’t you try calling me?”

  He took my hand and I felt sparks more than static and looked at him and was it a truly kind face in the light from the houses? The houses were along the bluffs and the children that I always watched played around the nets but it was dark where we stood so I couldn’t really see him. So was it kindness or just the reflection of something?