“I got all of this last instance secondhand,” Flo admitted. “Domingo isn’t giving interviews. By the way, Betty Mooney? The Carousel Club stripper who alibied the possible shooter in the Reynolds attempted murder? She was arrested by the Dallas police this February for disturbing the peace, and hanged herself in her jail cell. Using her toreador pants.”
“That’s quite a list.”
“Oh, it’s longer. There are more in New Orleans, where Oswald lived right before moving to Dallas, and where Ruby often went to troll for new strippers. That’s my next stop.”
I held up both hands. “Whoa, Nellie. Let’s stick with Dallas for now.”
Her eyes flashed and her smile winked sunlight. “Then you’ll help me?”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
“I have several witnesses to interview. And if you could get Jada, or Janet Adams, to talk to me, and maybe line me up with a few others among Jack Ruby’s girls, that would be fantastic. I’m not as flush as I once was, but I can offer a thousand a week. A week here, then a week or maybe two in New Orleans. What do you say?”
“I say I need to think about it,” I said. “I’ve been away from the office and have to check in, and see what’s on my desk.”
“Is whatever-it-is-on-your-desk bigger than the Kennedy assassination?”
“No, but it’s safer. Whatever-it-is.”
She tried to pull off a pout. “You’d just leave me here, to my own devices?”
“Just a poor little defenseless girl reporter? Give me the weekend. Don’t you have to fly back to New York and do your show Sunday night?”
“Yes,” she admitted with a nod, “I’m booked out tomorrow morning. But I’ll be back at the Statler by this time Monday.” She sat forward, her gloved hands girlishly in her lap. “Oh, Nate, please consider it. You’re the perfect man for this job.”
“I’ll call you in New York late Sunday night. After the broadcast.”
She kissed me on the mouth.
Then she gave me an impish look that should have seemed silly from a woman her age but wasn’t at all. “Now, don’t get any ideas, Nathan Heller.”
But I had a lot of ideas, none of them, for once, having to do with getting laid.
And most of them had to do with the VIP whose blessing, even permission, I would need before saying yes to the girl reporter.
Chapter 9
“You’d think I was the fucking Beatles,” Bobby Kennedy said, holding back a sheer curtain, looking out the hotel-room window at the mass of people on the street ten stories below, their murmur like an insistent surf on a reluctant shore. The jacket of his black suit was off, waiting neatly laid out on the bed, and he wore a black tie on a white shirt whose shirtsleeves were rolled up, in a perhaps misguided rich-kid attempt to connect with workingmen.
“And that’s a bad thing?” I was seated in a comfortable chair nearby, sipping the Coke I’d been provided by a staffer. “They love you, Bob. Yeah yeah yeah.”
He smiled humorlessly, shaking his head, the familiar tousle of dark-brown hair bouncing. “Don’t kid yourself, Nate. They’re here for him. They’re here for him.”
He let the curtain take the window, brightness still filtering into a gloomy bedroom with no lights on. He seemed to prefer the shadows.
In half an hour, the Democratic candidate for senator of New York would be addressing this crowd, supposedly getting them stirred up, but right now that was hard to imagine, as he dropped dejectedly into the chair opposite me, slumping there.
Days ago I had heard about the funk Bobby was in from Bill Queen, the ex-NYPD cop and current Manhattan branch A-1 agent who was Kennedy’s personal bodyguard. Senatorial candidates didn’t get Secret Service protection, even when the candidate’s brother was an assassinated president.
Bill was also how I was able to get in to see Bobby without any red tape, a phone call getting me right to Steve Smith, Bobby’s campaign manager (and brother-in-law). And now I was sitting in the bedroom of a suite at the Statler — the venerable and very non-Space Age Statler in Buffalo, New York, that is. Not Dallas, out of which I’d flown yesterday afternoon.
About fifteen minutes ago, after working my way up from the lobby showing my ID to half a dozen interested parties, I’d entered the suite, where a bustling bunch of aides were in the outer area, some sitting, some pacing, almost all smoking. Included in this group was my man Bill, but also Steve Smith, the only guy in the room with his suit coat on, though his narrow red-and-blue striped tie was loosened.
Smith was a dark-haired, athletic-looking guy in his thirties, a former hockey goalie with a wry sense of humor and an unflappable nature. Like the others in this mostly male clubhouse (a few “Kennedy Girls,” secretarial types, all young and pretty, were tagging along with clipboards and pencils here and there), he was in shirtsleeves and looked frazzled for a guy normally cool.
The air was blue from cigarettes, so I said by way of greeting, “This must be that smoke-filled room I’ve heard so much about.”
“Nate,” Smith said, grinning. “Welcome to the monkey house.”
He looked a little bit like the young Joseph Cotten, though with a wider face. He offered a hand and I shook it, then he curled a finger for me to join him in as quiet a corner as the campaign hubbub would allow.
“Maybe you can get Bob out of his funk,” he said. “He likes you.”
“Doesn’t he like you anymore, Steve?”
“Right now he doesn’t like anybody much, including himself. This campaign has hardly started and we’re already getting kicked in the ass.”
My forehead frowned and my mouth smiled. “I can’t believe that. I mean, that guy Keating is well-liked enough, I guess, but he’s basically the smiling uncle you dodge at Christmas.”
Smith was shaking his head. “Don’t count Keating out. He’s a Republican but he’s a liberal one, and that makes him credible in this state. Good voting record.”
I nodded toward the street. “There’s a mob scene going on out there. They’re crazy about our blushing boy. Took me half an hour to push my way through.”
And it had — out on Delaware Avenue at Niagara Square, old and young, men and women, blacks and whites, strained against the police lines.
“Don’t be fooled,” Smith said. “A good share just want to see a Kennedy in the flesh — that’s no guarantee they’ll vote for him.”
“It’s a start.”
“Yeah,” he said with a humorless smirk, “but they haven’t heard him talk yet.” He spoke in a barely audible whisper. “Nate, the little fella’s been stinking on ice. He’s flat, and when he isn’t flat, he’s screechy. He’s nervous and he mumbles. Oh, he’s loud enough when he’s snapping at reporters, and you can sure hear that he’s got nothing bad to say about his opponent.”
“Doesn’t he want to win?”
The campaign manager shrugged in exasperation. “I don’t know at this point, Nate. I really don’t know. Maybe you can reason with him. I just know he’s blowing it.”
“So why bust your ass for the guy, Steve?”
“Because Jean wants me to,” he said, referring to his wife, who was also Bobby’s sister, of course. “Anyway, it’s like I always say — ask not what the Kennedys can do for you, ask what you can do for the Kennedys... You can go on in, if you can get past your own man. Bobby knows you’re stopping by.”
Bill Queen was indeed sitting in a chair near the bedroom door, a bald mustached paunchy guy in his fifties in a brown suit and brown-and-yellow tie who was Central Casting’s idea of a cop, and Central Casting was right. He was reading Playboy magazine, or anyway looking at the busty blonde in the centerfold.