The Blonde (17 page)

“Hell yes. I want to show off my new baby. Just get on the next plane, will you?”

“Jack, I can’t—”

“Tomorrow then,” he interrupted, suddenly formal and cold. Wherever he was, he was no longer alone. “Thank you,” he said, and hung up.

Carefully she returned the receiver to its cradle. She stared at the shiny black handle a few seconds, as though it might tell her what to do. What would Alexei have her do? He’d told her to play her hand cautiously—for now, he said, the important thing was making sure the affair continued, keeping Jack comfortable in her presence, and observing whatever she could of his character and intentions along the way. Later her assignment could become more specific, he had implied, as though referencing a bill that might never come due. But she was another year older and less girlish every day, and she could no longer convince herself that she had infinite time, even when she was drunk. If she finished the movie quickly and painlessly she would be much freer to spy on Jack. However, she had fixed upon the notion that she might glean information of special importance if she went now, when the convention was on and candidate Kennedy was feeling reckless.

There were only three other people at the bar—a couple who had been pressed against each other since she arrived, and a man drinking by himself, who glanced over at her about the average amount. She could see Clark, beyond them, standing at the craps table. The glass of whiskey was in his other hand, but his grip had become indifferent. His attention was on the dice, and his brow flexed in concentration. The muscles of his face were strong and taut, and they were lit from behind by the ghost of experience. He looked very much like a father, the kind who is slightly beyond the law, especially when it is necessary to protect his family.

Just then he glanced toward the bar, and smiled when he saw how Marilyn had been watching him. With the hand that held the whiskey, he gestured for her to join him. The thrum of slot machines got quiet as she floated
through the civilian crowd of afternoon drinkers and hopeless dreamers and risk junkies, to the craps table, where Clark welcomed her by placing a firm palm on her shoulder blade.

“Whoever he is, he’d better treat you nice.” Clark’s hand slipped to the small of her back, and he leaned in close, so that his whiskey breath warmed her ear. “If he doesn’t, you let me know, all right? And I’ll sort him out,” he told her in a low, gravelly voice, before kissing her softly, not quite on the mouth but not fully on the cheek, either. She closed her eyes to any longing the kiss—or the sentiment—stirred.

“You ever thrown dice before?” he asked. Like that, the sweet haze of intimacy had evaporated, and for a moment she thought she might cry. She wanted to go back, have his protection again, the way his daughter, if Kay carried a girl, would have his protection.

“No,” she replied.

“Well, we’re gonna see if you’re as lucky as you look.”

“Okay.”

The dealer acknowledged her with a faint bow from across an illuminated stretch of green as Clark took her hand and brought her into the table. The dice were red, oversized like stage props, and as she looked at them she made a private promise that if they were lucky for her, then she wouldn’t need to go to Los Angeles, she would stay here, and everything would work out without her chasing around after Jack. Then she reversed herself, and decided that if she was lucky, that was a sign she should follow the lead immediately. But she shouldn’t have brought the dice into the matter, because she already knew what she was going to do. That brush of Clark’s lips had sealed it—she would go, as soon as possible, to the place where Jack was, to do Alexei’s bidding as best she was able.

FOURTEEN

Beverly Hills Hotel, July 1960

“WHERE is everybody, Charlie?” Marilyn chewed her lower lip and leaned against the small corner bar at the Polo Lounge and tried not to seem like a woman being stood up, despite the fact that she’d been drinking alone for some hours already. She was wearing a simple candy-pink dress with a fitted waist, thin straps, and a U-shaped back that she’d had her dressmaker lower five inches. The bartender—a lean kid with a Latin look who’d been wiping his rag over the bar a few feet from where she sat—came in close. “I mean, it’s kinda quiet tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He folded his arms against his side of the bar and gazed at her. “Guess they’re all downtown, or watching on the television.”

“Think they’ve made an announcement yet?”

“There’s a radio in the kitchen,” he offered. And then, more enthusiastically: “I’ll go ask if they’ve heard anything!”

Before she had the chance to tell him she’d appreciate it, he dashed off to procure her information, and she felt a little sorry for him when she saw that his efforts were to be in vain. The concierge appeared just afterward, tucking his graceful hands behind his back as he approached to tell her—so quietly that she might not have understood him if she didn’t already know what the message would be—that a man was waiting for her.

“It’s Kennedy!” the bartender exclaimed, as he burst through the small door that led to the kitchen. “Kennedy won the nomination!”

“Thanks, Charlie.” She smiled and dangled her fingertips as she left.

Outside, the heat of the day had mellowed, and darkness descended over
the protective flora that surrounded the hotel. The concierge indicated a silver Mercedes convertible with the top up, idling close to the high shrubbery.

“You will call us if you need a ride home, won’t you, Miss Monroe?”

“Yes, thank you, Sal.”

The air was perfumed with night-blooming jasmine, and she inhaled and set her hips rocking as she proceeded to the snubbed-nose sports car. She climbed into the passenger seat without glancing at the driver, and from the corner of her eye she did briefly mistake him for Kennedy. When she realized he wasn’t, she let the dopey smile slide off her face. “Jack told me he’d pick me up,” she said.

The driver’s only acknowledgment was a bob in his throat, and he turned his eyes away and put the car in gear. Anyone could see they were related—it was as though Jack’s face had been squished between the pages of a book, and come out thinner and slightly deformed. He was smaller, too, and less tawny, but he was also handsomer—the lines of his features were smooth and strong, like a statue, and his eyes were a clear, moral blue. His skin was much younger, except for his forehead, which was prematurely lined. When they took off down the slope toward Sunset, his foot was so heavy on the accelerator that her body got knocked back against the seat.

“You must be Bobby,” she said, once it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be the first to speak.

“I’m Robert.”

“Uh-huh. How old are you? I mean, you’re just a baby, it’s kinda hard to imagine you’re old enough to be his brother.”

“I’m thirty-four.”

She gasped happily. “How about that, we’re the same age. You were born in ’26?”

“’I was born in ’25.”

“Oh.”

His gaze was focused on the road, rather fiercely, and he did not seem to
think the fact that they were almost the same age was remotely interesting. She didn’t either, and afterward gave up trying to make him like her, and instead watched the palazzos of Beverly Hills fall away as they sped west. They drove silently onward, and she wondered where they were going, and if he needed directions, and decided it was too much trouble to offer.

After he’d turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, he said, “I didn’t want to be the one to pick you up, either.”

“Then why did you?”

He shrugged. “Jack said you were important, and I’m his campaign manager.”

They didn’t speak again. Having brought the car to an abrupt halt at a row of beach houses that fronted the highway, he stepped out and tossed the keys to one of the men—they were dressed like the help, but they were also broad enough to be muscle—and strode through the front gate. Marilyn waited in the passenger seat until the man who had caught the keys came over and opened the door for her.

“He’s a real charmer,” she said.

The man replied with a neutral “Yes, ma’am.”

The sounds of celebration were loud enough to reach her on the road, and she was relieved to think that it was a big party. Behind her were the palisades, crowned with a row of gangling palms, and though the houses obscured the ocean, she could already smell its salt.

The living room was crowded, but she saw Jack right away. His magnetism was destabilizing; the whole room bent toward him. There were plenty of movie people she recognized from around town, but there was another element, too—serious, fast-talking men in suits that were slightly too large, and women who dressed primly in red or white or blue and whose small, bright diamonds were only occasionally visible. The gathering possessed a special vitality, as though those present had been party to a momentous event, and knew themselves to be, for a short, blessed while, at the center of everything.
She watched Bobby make his way through the rings of friends and sycophants to whisper in his brother’s ear. Neither Kennedy suffered bad tailoring—both wore dark pants and jackets that were fitted to the slim family build. They looked good next to each other, with those faces that had been made from the same stuff, and when Jack lifted his gaze and saw her leaning against the wall on the far side of the room, the smile she wore was genuine.

“Marilyn, I didn’t know you were coming.” She glanced up at the sound of a lightly aristocratic voice, and recognized the ingratiating smile of Peter Lawford. A long time ago, before she was with Joe, he’d had his agent call her for a date, but she had thought him too pretty, and later she heard he’d married rich. A girl called Patricia Kennedy. Marilyn hadn’t known much in those days, and had promptly forgotten all about it. “You look marvelous,” he told her, kissing her on the cheek and showing her his hopelessly British teeth. Up close, there was a quality in his heavy brows and drooping mouth that wanted too much to be liked.

“Thank you. It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? I guess you’re here to celebrate with your brother-in-law.”

“That, and this is my house.”

“Is it?” She tried not to seem impressed, or to wonder at herself for never being smart enough to marry into money. Real money, not the kind you earn yourself.

“Will you have a drink?”

“Yes.”

Peter forged a path through the thicket of bodies, holding on to Marilyn’s wrist in such a way that her bracelets were pressed uncomfortably against her skin. At the bar, he ordered daiquiris for both of them. “That’s what the candidate is drinking,” he said as he raised his glass to eye level.

The drink didn’t square quite with her idea of Jack, but when she tasted the first sip of sugary, limey rum she understood. The room was full of people wearing Kennedy boaters at rakish angles, their good-looking faces
aglow with inclusion. They had left downtown, the dreary Biltmore, and the homely conventioneers, and found themselves in California, which reflected some inner notion of themselves. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“I mean for all of us. He looks like us, doesn’t he?”

“You mean, he’s a star? That’s what the old man always says,” Peter replied genially as he studied the party over the rim of his glass. “Of course, I’m supposed to stop saying things like that. That’s one way they aren’t like us, you know. They aren’t gossips. They can talk politics till the cock crows, but gossip they turn their sharp Irish noses up at. I keep telling them it’s the same thing, and they keep looking at me pityingly and saying, ‘Oh, Peter, do shut up.’ ”

“That’s not very kind.”

“They don’t really care about kind,” he replied, and though his tone remained jovial there was a wounded cast to his features that could not be covered over with jokes.

“Where’s the senator’s wife?”

“Back in Washington. She hates politics—it depresses her, she says, having to listen to all those normal people. She’s worse than the rest of them, a terrible snob, likes everything just so. That, and she’s knocked up.”

“Oh?”
What a bastard
, Marilyn thought, and tried not to feel envious of his wife.

“Yes, and Jack likes traveling as a bachelor. You’d never believe it, from all the photos of them in the press as a perfect family and so forth, but he is
rather
a ladies’ man. But there I go again. You know us movie people—can’t keep our mouths shut.” He gulped his drink, and raised his arm in salute. “Hey there, Jack!”

Jack was approaching them, very slowly, his progress impeded by much backslapping. “Fine party, Peter,” he said, shaking Peter’s hand and patting his shoulder as though they were only casually acquainted.

“Have you met Marilyn? She’s quite a chap.”

“Not in person.” Jack beamed at her. Even close up he seemed magnified, shinier and more beautiful than everybody else. “Although I feel I know you from your pictures.”

“Congratulations.” She returned his smile. “Didn’t you win some game show tonight or something like that?”

“Yes, something like that. Peter, wasn’t there music before? Put on a record, would you?”

Neither Jack nor Marilyn turned to look at Peter as he slinked away. They remained like that, eyes on each other, until a song started, the swelling of strings eliciting delighted yelps from Lawford’s guests. The host, despite his babbling, was an expert taker of hints, and Marilyn noted that he drew Janet Leigh onto the dance floor just as Frank Sinatra began to sing.