“Nice work if you can get it,” I said.
Unashamed, he refolded the Playmate and got to his feet. “I have a boss who can appreciate the finer things.”
I pointed to the magazine in his hand. “Those girls in there are young enough to be your daughter.”
“I don’t have a daughter, Nate.” He nodded toward the door and did Groucho with his eyebrows. “He’s in a mood. Hell, he’s always in a mood. You shoulda warned me about the guy.”
“What mood would you be in, doing rallies on streets with high windows all around, if you were him?”
“Oh, that doesn’t faze Mr. Kennedy. Hell, he sits up on the backseat of a convertible like a beauty queen, waving and giving the crowd that sad-puppy smile. Sometimes he stands on the roof of a parked car to see ’em better. It’s like he’s askin’ for it.”
That sounded like Bobby. “So are Hoover’s boys cooperating?”
The ex-cop nodded. “I call them every morning, like you arranged, and they give me the latest death threats. Steady stream of ’em, Nate. Or do you think Hoover’s just trying to look vigilant for his old boss?”
“I don’t think J. Edgar gives two shits about what his ‘old boss’ thinks.”
Bill jerked a thumb at the closed door nearby. “Well, you tell your friend, in future, to listen to me about security measures, would ya? Then maybe I’d have better things to do with my time on this assignment than pound my pud in the john to Miss October.”
Bobby heard me come in and met me at the door, shaking my hand and giving me his shy, almost bucktoothed smile, which with his rather high-pitched voice suggested an Ivy League Bugs Bunny. “It’s been too long, Nate. Too long. Can I, uh, get you something to drink?”
I asked for a Coke and he yelled out to a Kennedy Girl to get us both one. She swiftly returned with a warm smile and two chilled bottles. Then she was gone and we were shut inside the hotel bedroom, which was smoke-free — Bobby was not a smoker, actually was adamantly against it, though he clearly didn’t forbid his staff. He wasn’t much of a drinker, either, as the sodas indicated, though he was by no means a teetotaler.
We exchanged a few pleasantries as I tried to get used to how skinny he looked. I hadn’t seen him since late October ’63, though I’d talked to him on the phone a few times, post-assassination, and he’d seemed himself. But in the flesh, he appeared to have shrunk, all but swimming in the white shirt and black trousers. Almost a year later, and he was still wearing black. His face seemed sunken, gaunt.
“Tell me, Nate, do you really have something to talk over with me, or, uh, did Steve Smith just want you to come and give me a pep talk — get me off my duff and into this thing?”
“I really do have something to talk about. And I don’t think it’s going to boost your spirits any. Just don’t jump out that window, when you hear. Anyway, some college girls down there would just catch you and drag you off to have their way with you.”
That made him smile, although his eyes lacked their usual spark. “Doesn’t, uh, sound half-bad.”
I gestured toward the muffled roar. “If you’re not up for this race, why the hell did you get in it?”
Everything had happened so recently — he hadn’t even announced his candidacy until August 22, and only resigned as attorney general at the beginning of the month.
His face tried to remember how to summon a big smile. “Remember what Steve McQueen said in The Magnificent Seven, Nate?”
“Don’t believe I do.”
“About the man who jumped into the cactus? ‘It, uh, seemed like a good idea at the time.’”
That gave me a chuckle. “And now you find you have no taste for jumping into cactuses.”
“Or caucuses.” He sighed, gave up a tiny shrug, then sipped at his bottle of Coke. “They say I’m a carpetbagger, and, uh, well, they have a point — I did move out of New York in the sixth grade. The party bosses in New York hate my guts, and the Jews think I’m anti-Semitic, like my old man.”
I raised a finger. “Don’t forget the far left. They think you’re a ruthless McCarthyite.”
He nodded glumly. “That’s why I don’t want to go after that nice old man, Keating, and have the press hang that ‘ruthless’ sign around my neck again.”
“Hell, they’ll do that anyway.” Outside, the murmur seemed to be building, a low dull throbbing with occasional accents of shouts or laughter. “Maybe you owe it to that crowd out there to give it the ol’ college try. Tell ’em Keating is a Commie or a dog-fucker or something.”
He’d been sipping the Coke and almost choked on that as he laughed. He set the bottle on the little table next to him, on an issue of Newsweek with his sullen picture on the cover. “You’re still a pisser, Nate.”
I was loosening him up. Good.
I shrugged. “So who cares, if they’re here for Jack? You’re the one who’s here, man. Don’t disappoint ’em.”
He was studying me carefully, his smile still there, but having melted some. “Okay, uh, so that’s your pep talk, Coach Rockne. But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
“No.” I met his eyes, those bluer-than-Jack’s blue-green eyes. “You know the subject we haven’t discussed, the few times we’ve talked lately.”
“... I do.”
“You also know that I’m probably one of the few people who’s not in government, the Mob, the John Birch Society, or some Cuban exile group who knows that a conspiracy took your brother’s life.”
He said nothing. He wasn’t looking at me now. He was staring past me, into the past maybe or God knew where.
I kept my voice even, and didn’t push. I let the words do that. “What went down last year in Chicago, Bob, just twenty days before your brother was killed, involved the same sorry cast as Dallas. I even met Oswald, briefly.”
His eyes flashed to life. “What?”
I nodded. “And guess who introduced him to me? Jack Ruby.”
Now the eyes tightened. “The hell you say. Where?”
“Where else? A strip club. Not in Dallas or New Orleans, but on South Wabash, in Chicago, a little less than a month before the tragedy.”
“What was discussed?”
“It had to do with that Hoffa matter I told you about, which isn’t pertinent. What is pertinent is that Ruby, and Oswald, who were chummy as hell by the way, knew who I was, in the greater scheme of things.”
“Don’t be coy, Nate.”
“This room is secure?”
“Your man says it is.”
“Then it’s secure.” I sipped Coca-Cola. Rolled its sweetness around in my mouth, swallowed, and said, “Ruby knew I was instrumental in putting Operation Mongoose in motion. Bragged me up to Oswald, who’d been rabble-rousing at the University of Illinois, Urbana, pretending to be a Commie.”
Bobby’s hands had been on the arms of the chair like a king at his throne. But now those hands tightened into bony, veiny things. The darkness of the room dropped shadows into the hollows of his face and the skull beneath the skin was apparent. Seconds ticked by as he sat there brooding as the words Operation Mongoose hung in the air between us.
“In large measure, Nate,” Bobby finally said, “that’s why I haven’t come forward. Why I have in my own, uh, measured way gone along with this Warren Commission travesty.”
That made me sit up. “Don’t tell me you knew who Oswald was, before the assassination?”
His silence spoke volumes.
“Jesus! You... you knew that Oswald was part of Mongoose?”
A man in his thirties should not have been capable of so world-weary a sigh. “Well, I knew that Oswald was one of ours. A CIA asset, an FBI asset. You don’t just defect and trot off to Mother Russia like Oswald did, then a year or so later traipse back into the country and get a warm welcome from the State Department.”