The Blonde (20 page)
Beverly Hills, August 1960
IN the one-room guest cottage at the back of the Moses property a telephone was ringing, and Walls glanced up warily from the small wooden desk where he had been transcribing old tapes. He was not a brilliant typist, and now that he was required to type often, he was a little surprised that it was commonly a feminine pursuit. Typing required strong hands and left the fingertips sore, especially today, when the temperature at noon had been over a hundred, and mellowed only slightly since. He was wearing nothing but white swimming trunks and sweating profusely, even though the windows were open, and despite a standing fan a foot from his body. He was annoyed at the phone’s intrusion, because he was sure that he had been on the verge of an idea, a perfect understanding of the inner criminal life of Marilyn Monroe—but whatever had been in his head a minute ago was gone now. He threw himself onto the floral bedspread and plucked the receiver from its resting place on the nightstand.
“Walls,” he said.
“Douglass?”
“Oh.” He pushed up onto his elbows, and silently cursed himself for answering in his curt office manner. The heat was making him stupid. “Anna. How are you?”
“I’m
hot
, but what does that matter? I’m on a
movie
set! I’m meeting all kinds of people, really interesting people. It took a month, but I’m not so afraid of them anymore. I’m almost one of them now—they treat me that way. It’s not like New York. I mean, it’s different here. Slow, kinda Western,
I guess. And movie people are sort of loose and odd, but in a good way, I think.”
“How is Miss Monroe treating you?”
“Oh, she’s nice. She looks after me. You know, always asks how they’re treating me. I always say wonderful, of course. She’s gone missing from the set a lot, which has caused trouble. Some resentment, you know? But I always stick up for her and say that it must be hard, having the whole picture depending on her looking her best and understanding every word in those long speeches. It’s true, too.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Hey, Doug?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think about me?”
“What? All the time.”
“Good! Because there’s something special I want to invite you to.”
“What is it?”
“This weekend. In Lake Tahoe. Frank Sinatra is performing there, and he invited the cast—you know, Miss Monroe and Mr. Gable and Mr. Clift and the rest of them. But Mr. Gable said he wouldn’t go unless the whole crew was invited, so we’re all invited now! Can you imagine that? Frank Sinatra invited us to his very own resort. It’s called Cal-Neva, because it’s right on the border between California and Nevada. Isn’t that clever? I’ve never even been to California.”
“That’s swell. Real big of him.”
“Will you come?”
“Me?”
“Yes,
you
. Who else would I be talking to? It’ll be romantic, don’t you think? You could stay with me. In my room, I mean. I mean: if you were worried about the resort not having any rooms left. Or—anything like that.”
He sighed, not meaning to do so audibly. Then he felt even worse for
his partial attentions to this girl over the past few months, since that night in New York in May when he’d carried her, drunk, up four flights to her Yorkville apartment. The poor thing, offering to let him sleep in her hotel bed, when her whole life she had been taught not to do that sort of thing. “It sounds nice,” he said.
“Oh,
good
. You’ll come?”
“Let me see if I can manage it.” He didn’t have the heart to ask her if Marilyn was going, and thought, not for the first time that day, that what he really needed was a tap on her phone in Reno. Then he would already know whether it was worth it to go to Tahoe or not.
“Doug?”
“Yes?”
He listened to her unsteady breath. “I miss you,” she said, reminding him, for some reason, of a three-minute egg broken open with the blunt edge of a spoon.
A fist sounded on the other side of the door to the cottage, splitting his attention. “You, too. Listen, I have to go now, but I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?”
“The show is on Saturday. Saturday the thirteenth of August. You got that?”
“Yes. Bye now.”
A washcloth lay on the nightstand, and he used it to wipe the sweat from his brow. He was still holding it when he opened the door and saw the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles division, Bertram Toll, a bear of a man in an unbelted trench.
“Agent Toll.”
He turned, his eyes traveling from Walls’s face, to the washcloth, and back again. “Taking it easy, Agent Walls?”
“No. Working, actually,” Walls said, putting the washcloth behind his back, wishing he could cover up his bare chest and tight-fitting shorts. The
California sun had bleached his hair white-blond, which reminded him of the summer he turned twelve. “How’d you get in?”
“Your mother let me in.” He grinned. “I guess she liked my look.”
There was no explaining how little this kind of ribbing troubled Walls. “But why?”
“You forget you were invited to dinner tonight?”
“I was?”
“Gretchen made pork chops.”
“Oh.” Though he tried hard, Walls could surface nothing from his mental swamp regarding an invitation to dine with the Tolls. But he was feeling rather unlike himself—maybe the weather was getting to him, or maybe he was spending too much time trying to comprehend a woman who was routinely hours, even days late, and often forgot to put on underwear when she left the house. “I’m sorry—was she angry at me?”
“Nah. No such luck, kiddo—she’s been so pissed off with me for so many years there ain’t any left over for anybody else.”
“Oh, well … come in, then?”
“Thanks.”
Walls went to the tiny galley kitchen and fixed them each a gin-and-tonic—opening the door to the icebox only narrowly, so that his boss wouldn’t see that gin-and-tonics were pretty much the only thing he fixed there. When he came back, Toll was inspecting the detritus of his desk—the tangle of cords, the tape machine, the back issues of
Movie World
and
Life
, from which a blonde stared up at them, wearing an expression somehow sly and guileless at the same time.
“You’re not in love with her, are you?”
“Who?” Walls handed the drink to his boss, hoping that it didn’t slosh noticeably with his discomfort. For a moment, he felt sure everybody was listening in on everybody, and that he was about to be reprimanded for toying with the affections of a simple-minded girl who did makeup for a living.
“Marilyn.” Toll picked up one of the magazines, the cover of which offered her in a particularly cheesecake pose, and sipped his drink.
“Oh. No, no,” Walls replied quickly. “How could I? I don’t even know her. I don’t think anybody does.”
Toll shrugged, put the magazine down, and sat on the metal rolling chair, which forced Walls to perch, uncomfortably, on the corner of the bed.
“She’s not really Red, is she?”
“Don’t think so.” It pained him to say this, as he knew it was the main rationale for keeping a file on her, and his desire to understand what she and the Gent were up to had transcended some notion of how the case might bolster his own glory, and taken on the pure force of a desire to learn that which others wished him not to know.
“That bit with Khrushchev? Miller says ‘hi’?”
“She’s sort of a genius at being provocative—I don’t think it matters to her whether she means it. I’m fairly certain Mrs. Miller wasn’t sending a secret message to the Russians. I don’t think she’s even going to stay Mrs. Miller much longer. In either case, she and Arthur, they don’t think alike.”
When Toll laughed, his mouth went lopsided. “Is that what dooms a marriage? You should write a romance advice column, kid.”
Uncertain whether this was meant as a compliment or an indictment of his work for the Bureau, Walls said the only phrase that came to his mind. “Excuse me?”
“Listen,” Toll went on, crossing his legs and disregarding the question. “There’s a rumor going around town that she and the Kennedy kid are having a little fling.”
“Really?” Walls’s disingenuousness was a surprise even to himself, and he was suddenly unsure why he had been keeping his suspicions regarding the presidential candidate and the movie star a secret. Perhaps it was that, having felt so sure that he had witnessed something consequential between
them, and then having seen so little evidence of it for so long, he didn’t now want to spook her before she revealed her motives to him.
“Do I gotta do everything for you? Your mother is Mosey Moses, for chrissakes, she’s probably over there yakking about it right now.”
“Oh, I …” This was not the time, he knew, to be indignant, or point out that he was not paid to have chatty, alfresco lunches. “It makes sense,” he said cautiously. “Kennedy always struck me as a skirt-chaser.”
“God bless him. I’d sleep a little easier thinking that the man in the White House was getting laid, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied, not agreeing but not wanting to argue, and immediately wishing he could unsay the subservient phrase.
“Anyway.” Toll put aside his empty glass and shifted as though preparing to leave. “The Director is interested in anything to do with the Kennedys, so pay attention for once, would you?”
“She’s going to Tahoe this weekend.”
“What?” A moment before, Toll’s attention had been anywhere but on Walls, but he assessed him with a sharp gaze now.
“Frank Sinatra invited her. He’s performing at some lodge,” Walls began slowly, as though putting the facts together as he spoke. “Isn’t he campaigning for Kennedy? His whole crew is. I mean, they’re friends, aren’t they?”
“Ah, yes.” Toll interlaced his fingers and cupped his knee. “The Rat Pack is now the Jack Pack; I think Gretchen mentioned something like that.”
“Well, Sinatra invited the whole crew of the movie she’s making. But that’s strange, when I think about it. Doesn’t that make it seem like somebody’s trying to cover something up?”
“You mean, it’ll look less like Jack Kennedy’s friend invited Marilyn Monroe to Tahoe for the weekend if it’s Frank Sinatra inviting the whole crew of some movie to see his show?”
Walls nodded. “Odd, too, that Sinatra invited her. She must know him, they’ve both been in the business so long. But he’s friends with DiMaggio,
and back when she was divorcing Joe, it was Sinatra who found him a private dick, helped him break into the apartment where he thought she was with another man. Of course, they got the wrong place, that’s why it ended up in
Confidential
, and later in front of a grand jury.” He was getting excited just talking about her, lining up the facts he’d collected, fitting them together. “They aren’t close that I know of, and she doesn’t have much reason to like him, so there must be something more to the invitation.”
“Agent Walls.” Toll paused and lowered his chin so that it doubled. “The Director is interested in
anything
to do with Kennedy. If this man could be the next president of the United States, it’s the Bureau’s business to understand any threat to him. And if he’s having an affair with a woman who may have communist sympathies, however unlikely, we must endeavor to keep ourselves informed. It will be good for all of us at the division if you can get something definitive. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me you’re going to Tahoe, Agent Walls.”
“Yes, sir,” Walls replied, more energetically this time.
“Good man. Call my girl, have her set you up with plane tickets, equipment, whatever you need.”
“Thank you, sir.” Walls walked him to the door, and for a moment they stood on the threshold, gazing into the volatile atmosphere. The Santa Anas had picked up, knocking palm fronds from their high perches, so that they lay like Paleolithic wreckage all over the deck. A member of his mother’s staff circled the pool, scooping them up. “Tell Gretchen I’m sorry about dinner.”
Several seconds of silence followed as Toll gazed out at the property—the rigidly rectangular lawns, the white gravel, the aquamarine pool, the statuary, and the pergolas. “So this is how Lou Moses lives,” he said eventually, as he drew a cigarette from his jacket and tried—vainly, at first—to get it lit. Whether this comment was irrelevant, or a kind of answer to Walls’s apology, was unclear.
The smell of Toll’s cigarette smoke lingered even as he crossed the patio, and Walls, invigorated despite the humiliation of having had to play dumb for his superior, returned to his cottage, made himself another gin-and-tonic, and sat back down at his desk. The first sound that came through the headphones when he pressed
PLAY
was high, slightly cracked laughter, and then he heard Marilyn saying, “I’ve never fooled anyone, darling. Sometimes I’ve just let men fool themselves.”
Reno, August 1960
“THAT sounds wonderful.” Marilyn wrapped the coiled telephone cord around her finger and gazed out at the Sierras, which had been purple and green when she first saw them a month ago, but now in mid-August were ablaze with forest fires. “Absolutely wonderful. Thank you, Frankie.”
She half listened to Frank as he continued to tell her about his Lake Tahoe resort, how much she’d like it, and what she should wear. With the receiver tucked between her shoulder, she left the bedroom of her suite in the Mapes Hotel and returned to the living room, where Arthur was pretending to write for one of the Magnum photographers Huston had hired to document the making of the movie. Not Cartier-Bresson, but the other one—the woman with the Freudian accent and boy’s haircut. Arthur was wearing black-rimmed glasses, not his usual ones, and using a pack of cigarettes as a prop.