“Don’t say that. Hello?” Inez’s voice was suddenly bright. “This is Inez Victor. Jessica Victor’s mother. Jessie’s mom, yes. I’m calling from New York. Amagansett, actually—”
“Oh good,” Billy Dillon said. “Doing fine. Amagansett to King Crab.”
“Jessie? Darling? Can you hear me? No, it’s a little gray. Raining, actually. Listen. I—”
Inez suddenly thrust the receiver toward Billy Dillon.
“Never open with the weather,” Billy Dillon said as he took the receiver. “Jessie? Jessie honey? Uncle William here. Your mother and I are flying down to Honolulu tonight, we wanted to put you in the picture, you got a minute? Well just tell the crab cups to stand easy, Jess, OK?”
“Oh shit,” Billy Dillon said on the telephone in the Pan American lounge at the Los Angeles airport, when Dick Ziegler told him that Paul Christian had called the police from the Honolulu YMCA and demanded that they come get him. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ shit, I better let Harry know.” By that time Harry Victor had already spoken to the Teamsters in Bal Harbour and was on his way to a breakfast meeting in Houston. Billy Dillon had hung up on Dick Ziegler and tried three numbers in Florida and five in Texas but Harry was somewhere in between and there was no time to wait because the flight was re-boarding. “Oh shit,” Billy Dillon kept saying all the way down the Pacific, laying out hand after hand of solitaire in the empty lounge upstairs. Inez lay on the curved banquette and watched him. Inez had watched Billy Dillon playing solitaire on a lot of planes. “Why not trot out the smile and move easily through the cabin,” he would say at some point in each flight, and the next day Inez would appear that way in the clips, the candidate’s wife, “moving easily through the cabin,” “deflecting questions with a smile.”
“I have to admit I wasn’t factoring in your father,” Billy Dillon said now. “I knew he was a nutty, but I thought he was a nutty strictly on his own case. In fact I thought he was still looking for himself in Tangier. Or Sardinia. Or wherever the fuck he was when he used to fire off the letters to Time demanding Harry’s impeachment.”
“Tunis,” Inez said. “He was in Tunis. He moved back to Honolulu last year. A mystic told him that Janet needed him. I told you. Listen. Do you remember before the Illinois primary when you and Harry and I were taken through the Cook County morgue?”
“Twenty-eight appearances in two days in Chicago and those clowns on advance commit us to a shake-hands with the coroner, very definitely I remember. Some metaphor. What about it.”
“There was a noise in the autopsy room like an electric saw.”
“Right.”
“What was it?”
“It was an electric saw.” Billy Dillon shuffled and cut the cards. “Don’t dwell on it.”
Inez said nothing.
“Don’t anticipate. This one isn’t going to improve, you try to look down the line. Think more like Jessie for once. I tell Jessie Janet’s been shot, Janet’s in a coma, we’re not too sure what’s going to happen, you know what Jessie says? Jessie says ‘I guess whatever happens it’s in her karma.’ ”
Inez said nothing.
“In … her … karma.” Billy Dillon laid out another hand of solitaire. “That’s the consensus from King Crab. Hey. Inez. Don’t cry. Get some sleep.”
“Watch the booze,” Billy Dillon said about three A.M., and, a little later, to the stewardess who came upstairs and sat down beside him, “I’m only going to say this once, sweetheart, we don’t want company.” When first light came and the plane started its descent Billy Dillon reached across the table and took Inez’s hand and held it. Inez had told Billy Dillon in Amagansett that there was no need for anyone to fly down with her but flying down with Inez was for Billy Dillon a reflex, part of managing a situation for Harry, and he held Inez’s hand all the way to touchdown, which occurred at 5:37 A.M. Hawaiian Standard Time, March 26, 1975, on a runway swept by soft warm rain.
6
I WAS trained to distrust other people’s versions, but we go with what we have.
We triangulate the coverage.
Handicap for bias.
Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation.
Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak. What follows is essentially through Billy Dillon’s filter.
“This is a bitch,” Billy Dillon remembered Dick Ziegler saying over and over. Dick Ziegler was still wearing the wrinkled cotton suit in which he had flown in from Guam and he was sitting on the floor in Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s living room spreading shrimp paste on a cracker, covering the entire surface, beveling the edges.
Billy Dillon remembered the cracker particularly.
Billy Dillon could not recall ever before seeing a cracker given this level of attention.
“A real bitch. This whole deal. She was perfectly fine when I left for Guam.”
“Why wouldn’t she have been,” Inez said.
Dick Ziegler did not look up. “She was going up to San Francisco Friday. To see the boys. Chris and Timmy were coming up from school, she had it all planned.”
“I mean it’s not a lingering illness,” Inez said. “Getting shot.”
“Inez,” Dwight Christian said. “See if this doesn’t beat any martini you get in New York.”
“You don’t exhibit symptoms,” Inez said.
“Inez,” Billy Dillon said.
“I add one drop of glycerine,” Dwight Christian said. “Old Oriental trick.”
“She’d already made a dinner reservation,” Dick Ziegler said. “For the three of them. At Trader’s.”
“You don’t lose your appetite either,” Inez said.
“Inez,” Billy Dillon repeated.
“I heard you the first time,” Inez said.
“What’s the trouble here,” Dick Ziegler said.
“About Wendell Omura,” Inez said.
“Ruthie’s on top of that.” Dwight Christian seemed to have slipped into an executive mode. “Flowers to the undertaker. Something to the house. Deepest condolences. Tragic accident, distinguished service. Et cetera. Ruthie?”
“Millie’s doing her crab thing.” Ruthie began spreading crackers with the shrimp paste. “To send to the house.”
“That’s not just what I meant,” Inez said.
“I hardly knew the guy, frankly,” Dick Ziegler said. “On a personal basis.”
“Somebody must have known him,” Inez said. “On a personal basis.”
Dwight Christian cleared his throat. “Adlai still a big Mets fan, Inez?”
Inez looked at Billy Dillon.
Billy Dillon stood up. “I think what Inez means—”
“Jessie still so horse crazy?” Ruthie Christian said.
“Horse crazy,” Billy Dillon repeated. “Yes. She is. You could say that. Now. If I read Inez correctly — amend this if I’m off base, Inez — Inez is still just a little unclear about—”
Billy Dillon trailed off.
Now Ruthie Christian was arranging the spread crackers to resemble a chrysanthemum.
“This is a delicate area,” Billy Dillon said finally.
Inez put down her glass. “Inez is still just a little unclear about what Wendell Omura was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai at seven in the morning,” she said. “Number one. Number two—”
“Tell Jessie we’ve got a new Arabian at the ranch,” Dwight Christian said. “Pereira blue mare, dynamite.”
“—Two, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai with a Magnum.”