You're nobody 'til somebody kills you

Sixty-four

Half an hour later Marilyn was sitting in the living room of the guesthouse, perched on the edge of the sofa, hugging herself tightly. She didn’t realize that the position was pushing her breasts up out of her sweatshirt so that there was a lot of pale cleavage for the cops and technicians to stare at.

I called Detective Stanze over to one side and said, “Do you think we could get your men to stop drooling over Marilyn’s tits for five minutes?”

“Come on, Eddie,” he said, “it’s Marilyn Monroe, for chrissake. You don’t want them looking then get her to cover up.”

“Can I move her to the main house?”

“No,” he said, “this is where everything happened, and I want her here.”

He was pissed at me for calling him to the scene with two dead men on the ground. Or maybe it was because the FBI had gotten him yanked from the case, and here he was back in it again.

“Let me through!” I heard Fred Otash shout from the kitchen.

Stanze heard it, too, and he craned his neck and said, “Let him in.”

Moments later Otash came stalking into the living room.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded, looking at me. “I thought you told me she was out of town.”

“She was,” I said, “I didn’t expect her back here.”

“And these two just happened to pick today to take you out of the picture?” Otash asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They said they killed the desk clerk, and grabbed Danny, and now I was a big enough pain in the neck that they had to kill me, too.”

“So they killed Danny?” Otash asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t get a firm answer out of them and then … they were dead.”

“No, not ‘and then they were dead,’” Stanze said. “You killed them.”

“So they wouldn’t kill us.”

“What I want to know is how you killed one with a frying pan and one with a gun?”

“I told you already.”

“Yes, I know,” Stanze said, “but it doesn’t sound logical to me.”

“None of this has seemed logical to me,” I said, “especially the part where you pulled your men from the hospital.”

“I told you that wasn’t my decision, but I have to follow orders.”

“No matter who they come from.”

“They came from my boss!”

“And where did his orders come from?” I demanded.

“Ah!” Stanze said, and stormed off into the kitchen.

“How the hell are we going to find out what happened to Danny now?” I asked.

“There’s only one place we can get answers from,” Otash said.

“Where?”

“The FBI. The problem is, how to get the FBI to talk to us?”

“I don’t know,” I said as a thought hit me, “I might have to make a few calls.”

“To who?”

“Tell you later, but I’ve got another question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“These guys claimed they didn’t know anything about Jerry gettin’ clobbered,” I said.

“Well, if that’s true, then who slugged Jerry, and why?”

“Those are the questions.”