“I sure did.”
“You be careful, Nate. Don’t get cocky.”
“I thought you liked me cocky.”
“That Mac Wallace character has important friends.”
“Does he, now?”
“I hear he works for Big Oil.”
“No, he’s with an electronics company.”
She shrugged. “One of the girls who dated him says he works for that nut with the window.”
“What nut with what window?”
“Some Big Oil guy who owns the Texas School Book Depository. You know, where Oswald shot his rifle out the window? If you believe that shit. Anyway, this Big Oil guy removed the window and made some kind of display out of it, in his home. Like it was a damn...” She shuddered. “... trophy or something.”
She had my attention.
I said, “Who told you this?”
“One of the girls I know from the old Carousel days. Rose Cheramie. She said they tried to kill her, too.”
“Who tried to kill her?”
“Some of the shooters who got Kennedy. Look, you gotta consider the source. Rose is a junkie.”
“She’s at the club now? I don’t remember a Rose dancing.”
“No, she’s working a club in Waco this week, I think.” She drew in smoke and then let it out her nose in twin trails. “Shit, what is it with that goddamn Kennedy thing? Why can’t everybody forget about it and get on with their goddamn fucking life?”
“You mean, like those tourists at the Carousel?”
“Yeah, them, and these damn reporters. I’ve had this one, this really famous one actually, hounding the hell out of me.”
“Who?”
She shrugged, irritated a little. “You know that showbiz columnist, the one that’s on that dumb game show Sunday nights?”
I sat up sharply. “You don’t mean Flo Kilgore, do you?”
Flo had written an article exposing the chicanery surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe; based largely on my investigative work, the piece might have won the Pulitzer, if her editor hadn’t spiked it, giving in to pressure from the Kennedy White House.
“Yeah, that chinless dame,” Janet said. “I’m surprised you didn’t run into her at the Statler, ’cause that’s where she’s staying. What’s that show she’s on? I’ve Got a Secret?”
“What’s My Line?,” I said numbly.
“Well, I’ve got a secret... I got a bunch of ’em.” She pointed at one pert bare breast. “And I intend to keep ’em to myself. I’ll live longer that way.”
Looked like I wasn’t leaving Dallas just yet.
Chapter 8
The soaring Statler Hilton had a Space Age look that screamed 1960s but was already almost ten years old. Its twenty stories were home to 1001 rooms and as many hotel employees, its innovations including conference rooms on lower floors, a mammoth ballroom with no pillars, and a heliport “taxi” service for the rich, though most guests were more impressed by the 21-inch custom TVs by Westinghouse in every room. The front of the hotel was the fork of its Y-shape, a concave facade that looked as cool as a cocktail but had the unintended by-product of creating an eddy that scooped up any trash blowing down the street to circulate by the front entrance like soiled confetti.
On a more positive note, that concave front also allowed for a Vegas-like drive off Commerce Street, and I pulled my rental Galaxie in and got myself out. It was mid-morning, a sunny, pleasant day, not as humid as other trips of mine to Dallas. I had a room here that I hadn’t slept in for the last two nights.
That meant I was in the brown H.I.S. suit I’d worn interviewing Captain Peoples in Waco, not to mention during my dustups with Mac Wallace. So my clothing was a little ripe, even if I had showered occasionally over the past several days, though I hadn’t bothered shaving yet this morning. The doorman must have been used to eccentric Texan millionaires — they said H. L. Hunt went around in near rags — and gave me no attitude as I handed him my keys for the valet parking.
After wandering through an impressive lobby with atomic-design carpet and floating staircases, I selected an elevator in facing banks under a futuristic metal lighting grid, all very Buck Rogers, but on the rear wall was a map of Texas that seemed somehow a relic. The ride up was accompanied by Mantovani’s strings butchering “I Believe in You” — another of this hotel’s innovations, but not a welcome one: elevator music.
My room, 714, at first seemed to have no bed, just modern furnishings in rust, yellow, and brown (with matching abstract-shape drapes) dominated by a couch, which Detective Heller deduced was actually a twin bed with one side flush to the wall, along which propped-up cushions provided seating for two, facing the TV opposite.
I took a long, hot shower, letting the jetting water drill me like a friendly machine gun. First thing this morning, at my request, Janet had removed the adhesive strips that had mummied around me, supporting my ribs. The ER doc at Parkland had been good enough to have a sweet-looking young brunette nurse shave away the body hair before he’d applied the bandages. I’d been in so much pain, I barely noticed her.
So the strips had come off, and I was sore, but I was still on Demerol tablets, cutting the dose in half to keep me alert. And to make the pills last longer.
I finally shaved, splashed on some Prince Matchabelli aftershave (Black Watch), slipped into some dark-gray Jaymar Sansabelt slacks, a gray-striped Van Heusen shirt with a dark-gray narrow knit tie, and a Madisonaire sport coat from Lytton’s in Chicago.
I looked goddamn good and nowhere near my age, even if I did feel far older, the ribs aching, the bruising mercifully covered up. But I should pass muster with a certain very famous lady.
Not that I had a date lined up with her or anything. I just knew she was one of the other guests in another of the thousand rooms in the Statler. But this female was no stranger to me, and I knew she would just be getting around to breakfast about now — a quarter to eleven. And her breakfast would be a martini.
I can’t always be right — she was having a Bloody Mary.
In my defense, she had skipped breakfast and gone straight to lunch, a shrimp salad with Thousand Island dressing. She sat alone at a table for four, tucked in a corner of the vast and currently underpopulated Empire Room, the restaurant that converted to a showroom with name entertainment after dark. The furnishings were modern here, though the tables wore linen cloths, and the room was on the bright side, the partition walls bearing Mondrian-style plastic squares of color — red, aqua-green, black, white, yellow — like the Playboy Club’s sidewalk-spanning entryway.
I hadn’t seen her in two years but she looked just fine, if every year of her age — mid-forties — her brown hair in a forehead-baring bouffant, her nice slender shape in a piebald shift; she wore starry earrings and a single strand of pearls that was vivid against her alabaster complexion. No Texas sunning for her.
This was Flo Kilgore, New York Herald Tribune show-business columnist, nationally syndicated and a genuine household name, primarily due to her spot on the panel of What’s My Line?, the hit Sunday night game show.
Flo glanced up at me with blank disinterest on her heart-shaped face, apparently assuming I was a waiter, then her big blue eyes widened and brightened, her cheeks dimpling, her smile pretty and dazzling white, if thin-lipped, over her only bad feature, the weak chin that Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson made such cruel fun of.
“Nate! You’ve been on my mind!” She scooched her chair back and got to her feet, holding out arms with white-gloved hands. “Have I conjured you?”
I gave her a kiss on the cheek and a hug, and took the chair next to her that she gestured to as she settled back in.