“No magic involved,” I said. “I’m just wrapping up a job. Figured on heading back to Chicago this afternoon.”
She reached out and held my right hand with both of her gloved ones. “I wish you’d stay! There’s something you could help me with.”
“Really?”
Though there were no other patrons within a dozen tables of us, she leaned forward and whispered confidentially, “It’s the biggest story of my career. Scoop of the century.”
“What, are Liz and Dick splitting up?”
“Don’t be mean. Anyway, I’m off the Hollywood beat and back on Broadway where I belong.”
“Dallas isn’t Broadway.”
“No, but it’s home to the story that’s going to net this little Indiana girl a Pulitzer. I already have a book contract from Bennett.”
She meant Bennett Cerf, publisher of Random House, her fellow game-show panelist.
I said, “Why were you thinking about me, of all people?”
“Two reasons, really. One is for a favor, which is to ask you to contact a friend of yours.”
“Who?”
She raised a gloved hand, like a prim lady traffic cop. “Not yet. You need background first. But the other is to see if I can hire you.”
“For what?”
“For a bodyguard.”
“One of the things I’m known for,” I said, arching an eyebrow, “is famous clients of mine who’ve been killed, despite my best efforts. Amelia Earhart, Sir Harry Oakes, Mayor Cermak, Huey Long...”
“Judging by those last two,” she said coyly, “you must be something of a expert in the realm of political assassination.”
She had no idea that I was way ahead of her on that mysterious scoop she was dangling.
I asked, “Why would you need a bodyguard?”
Now both white-gloved hands patted the air, like Jolson milking the audience for an encore. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet. “We’ll get to that, we’ll get to that... Why don’t you have some lunch, and afterward, we’ll talk business.”
A waiter came over and I ordered a steak sandwich, rare, cottage cheese, and a Coke, which arrived quickly, and Flo and I made small talk throughout lunch. She had a teenaged son and daughter, and of course I had Sam, so that carried us a while. Despite her upbeat mood, she revealed she’d been through some rough times of late.
Two of her various marriages had been to a former actor and sometime Broadway producer named Frank Felton. Two years ago she had married him a third time. Over the years, depending on whether they were hitched or not, they had a sporadic radio show, Breakfast with Flo and Frank (the martinis and Bloody Marys going unmentioned) on WOR in New York. They’d also had one of the first open marriages I ever heard of, but that hadn’t kept them from getting divorced twice. Her other marriages had been to younger men, both pop singers, one famous, one not.
“I’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” she admitted. “Booze and pills... like poor Marilyn.”
“Not exactly like poor Marilyn, I hope.”
“No. I wouldn’t say I’m that far gone. But since I saw you last, I’ve checked in three times at Leroy Hospital to wean myself off the goodies.”
“So that’s just tomato juice, then?”
“No. I didn’t say I stopped drinking, just stopped drinking so much. Anyway, that’s how Frank and I got back together. He was taking the cure at the same time as me, and one thing led to another. I’d been doing the radio show alone, and, well, we’d always had such great success at WOR as a twosome.”
“I’m glad that’s going well for you.”
“Actually, it isn’t. Frank fell off the wagon badly. Nate, I can’t bring myself to divorce him again, but I should. You know how he would fill in for me when I was off on a story, doing the breakfast show alone?”
I didn’t, but I said, “Sure,” because celebrities hate it when you don’t know things about them.
“Well, sweetie, he went on the air drunk, oh, a bunch of times, and we got canceled. Can you imagine? Canceled. An almost twenty-year run, and in an eye blink, phffft. And that was a lucrative gig, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyebrows flicked up and down. “You know, the newspaper business isn’t what it used to be. I’m in about half as many papers now, although very soon that will change. That... will... change.”
We ate in silence briefly. She was searching diligently, ace reporter that she was, for one last shrimp in that salad.
I said, “So you’re back in Frank’s town house in Manhattan?”
“Yes. Had to sell the Beverly Hills house, the one on Roxbury where you and I worked on the Marilyn case, remember?”
“Like Chevalier says, I remember it well. The money that brought in should have helped.”
“No. We barely covered the mortgage. Oh, I don’t mean to poor-mouth. What’s My Line? is just a damn juggernaut. Can’t kill it with a stick. And... listen, there’s something else I need to tell you about. Right now. At the outset.”
At the outset of what? I wondered.
She leaned forward and this time used just one gloved hand to hold mine — well, I didn’t have a white glove on. But she held it.
“Nate, there’s a new man in my life.”
“You mean Frank.”
“I most certainly do not mean Frank. At my age, I may not need to divorce him over it — he has his chippies, he always has had. But I’m in love, really, truly in love, so there won’t be any funny business between us, this go-round, Mr. Nathan Heller. No hanky-panky.”
“Not even just hanky?”
She giggled. She was an easy mark for me in the laughter department. Squeezing my hand, then withdrawing hers, she said, “No hanky, no panky.”
The waiter cleared our dishes. Flo turned down an offer of coffee (as did I) and said, “We really need to go somewhere private to talk.”
It was getting more crowded now, as the lunch hour approached, and people would be recognizing her, coming over for autographs.
Frowning, she said, “We can’t go to my room. You’ll think I’m wacky, some paranoid fruitcake, but... I really think the CIA may be watching me.”
I didn’t tell her that they might be watching me, too.
“Why don’t we go outside,” I suggested. “There’s a garden patio overlooking St. Paul Street.”
“Oh, yes, with the sculpture. They can’t bug the great out-of-doors, can they?”
“The great out-of-doors is full of bugs, silly.”
She laughed at that. I told you.
The Empire Room emptied into a brick patio housing a lush garden, in a vaguely Japanese fashion, above street level on the west side of the hotel, with squared-off areas for various flora including a pair of fifteen-foot magnolias. Center stage, at the lower of two tiers, was a rotating abstract stainless steel and gold-plated sculpture called A Wishing Star, twelve feet high, fifteen feet in diameter, reaching for the sky like a massive benign claw. We took a backless stone bench near a small reflecting pool.
“You remember how I began in this business,” she said. “That I was the youngest woman ever to work the crime beat in Manhattan?”
“Oh yes,” I said, though I needed no reminding. She still interrupted her columnist duties to cover famous murder trials, like Sam Sheppard and the recent Finch-Tregoff barn burner.
“But this, Nate, this is the big one. You’ll never guess what.”
“Kennedy.”
That seemed to startle her. “How did you know?”
“Well, first, this is Dallas. It’s kind of the case around here, y’know? And second, I didn’t just run into you, Flo. I heard from a friend that you were in town, and that you were poking into the assassination. And came looking.”