Ask Not

Chapter 1

September 1964

My son’s generation will always remember two key events of their teenage years — where they were when news came of President Kennedy’s assassination, and seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

I learned of the former in a guest room at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago — in the company of Miss November, fittingly enough. Soon, amid beauties with their mascara running, she and I had hunkered around a portable television with a little gray picture in a big shiny white kitchen. The latter broadcast I somehow missed, but Sam has made it abundantly clear over the years that the February 9 appearance of those four Liverpool lads on The Ed Sullivan Show was right in there with JFK getting it.

My son once told me that that joyful noise had signaled a rebirth for his generation, the Baby Boomers, granting them permission to smile and have fun and be silly again. But it also signaled the end of barbershops as we knew them and extended the fad called rock ’n’ roll through the rest of the century and beyond.

Unlike many of my contemporaries — I was a successful businessman in my well-preserved late fifties — I did not have disdain for the Beatles. They were a pretty fair combo, better than most of the little bands that had made the Twist a very big deal on Rush Street, and they seemed to have a sense of humor. Earlier this year, Sam had convinced me to take in their flick A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d liked it. More importantly, Miss November — who you may have calculated was younger than me — loved it.

The Beatles, through no fault of their own, had created a problem for me with Sam. He lived with his mother and my ex-wife (that’s one person) in Hollywood with her husband, a fitfully successful film producer. Normally Sam spent summers with me in Chicago, but he had begged off of June and July because his combo — yes, the Beatle bug had bit him hard — had a weekly pool party gig at a Bel Air country club that paid “incredible money” ($100).

“So what about August?” I’d asked him over the phone.

“August is cool. August is groovy. Everybody’s going on vacation with family, so we can’t take gigs anyway. Dad, are you okay with this?”

“It’s cool. Maybe not groovy, but cool.” I had maintained a strong relationship with my son by not insisting on having my own way. That’s right. I spoiled his ass. Divorced dads get to do that.

Have to do that.

And August had been swell. At a second-run theater in Evanston, we took in From Russia with Love, and before the film began I bragged about having met James Bond’s papa during the war.

“I doubt Ian Fleming was on Guadalcanal, Dad,” Sam had said skeptically over his popcorn.

“It was on Nassau,” I said. “He was doing spy stuff.”

“The stories you tell! How am I supposed to know when you’re bullshitting me?”

Another way I spoiled Sam was to let him swear around me. His mother hated it. Which I loved.

I sipped too-sweet Coke. “Someday you’ll appreciate your old man.”

“Hey, as dads go, you’re one of the cooler ones.”

Not cool, just one of the cooler ones. I’d settle.

Sam — actually Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr., but his mother and I decided one Nate around the house was plenty (more than enough, as it turned out) — had caught up with my six feet now. He had my late mother’s Irish good looks, the Jewish half of my heritage nowhere to be seen in either of us, and we looked enough alike to be brothers. If he had a really old brother.

Oh, and he had his mother’s brown hair, not my reddish variety. Cut in that Moe Howard bowl haircut the Beatles had bestowed on American males. Once upon a time I’d wished he would let that dumb crew cut grow out. Careful what you wish for.

“Listen, uh, Dad... I need to talk to you about college. I’m thinking about liberal arts.”

“Not business?”

“No. I want to be able to take music courses.”

Like the Beatles had ever studied music!

Sam was my only son. My only kid period. I had no desire to reshape him into Nathan Heller, Jr., even if that was his name. But I did have a successful business — the A-1 Detective Agency, here in Chicago and with branches in Los Angeles, New York, and more recently Las Vegas — and I hoped he’d eventually take it over.

Not as a detective — private eye days were long gone. Hell, they’d even canceled Peter Gunn. But the agency was a very profitable business indeed, and Sam would make a great executive — he was smart and personable and already pretty darn savvy.

“Music, huh?” I said lightly. “You’ll teach, then. What, marching band? Chorus? What’s the starting salary, thirty-five hundred a year?”

“Money isn’t everything, Dad.”

Said the kid with two well-off parents.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t wanna teach. I don’t know what I want to do, maybe keep playing my music...”

His music. The last time I looked, “his” music was the Beach Boys, Beatles, Chuck Berry, and, what was that instrumental group? The Adventures? Surf music. Jesus God.

“... or something else, maybe, but not... business.”

He said the word the way a Republican says Democrat.

“You know I’ll support you any way you want to go, son. But you might, I’m just saying might, want to—”

“It’s starting,” Sam said, meaning the movie, or anyway the previews.

And it was starting. The first major struggle between father and son, at least since back when he wanted to stay up and watch Johnny Carson on school nights.

So August flew by, and we went to the fights and to ball games and more movies and had plenty of great food with an emphasis on Gino’s pizza. We loafed around my Old Town bachelor pad and watched my color TV with its impressive 21-inch screen. I even arranged for an afternoon tour of Hef’s mansion, just to give Sam a little hint of what being a successful businessman might bring.

Anyway, it was September now. This was Saturday and Labor Day was Monday. Back in Beverly Hills, school had been in session a couple days already, but I’d arranged for Sam to stick around so I could give him his seventeenth birthday present.

The Beatles were performing tonight at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. This was the hottest ticket in town, the latest stop on a twenty-four-city, thirty-two-day tour. Tickets were going for $2.50, $3.50, and $4.50. A really great dad, with just the right connections, might be able to score his kid one of those tickets. But I could top that.

Just like the Beatles could top Elvis Presley, whose first Amphitheater appearance had required two hundred policemen, for security — three hundred fifty cops were being put on for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, plus a couple hundred firemen with half a dozen ambulances standing at the ready. But celebrities like these required personal security as well, for their Midway Airport arrival, their Stock Yard Inn press conference, and the concert itself.

And that was where the A-1 Detective Agency came in. Alan Edelson, who was handling press arrangements in Chicago, said Brian Epstein himself had requested me. I pretended to be impressed, and later really was, when my son informed me that Epstein was the boy wonder who had discovered and signed the Beatles. Mr. Epstein had apparently read of me across the pond in a News of the World story about Hollywood’s “Private Eye to the Stars.”

In reality I remained Chicago’s private eye to anybody with a fat wallet, and spent at most maybe three months in California spread out over an average year. But Life and Look magazine articles, focusing on star clients like Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and the late Marilyn Monroe, had made a minor celebrity out of me.

Normally as president of the A-1, I would have left this job to my staff and whatever add-ons from other agencies we might require. Sure, I’d likely stop around, shake a famous hand to provide the celebrity reassurance (and the A-1 a photograph), then go on my merry way.

But attending to the Beatles personally gave me an opportunity to maybe be a hero to my son.

We skipped the madhouse at Midway Airport because I knew the best opportunity for Sam to meet his real heroes was at the Saddle and Sirloin Club, the Stock Yard Inn’s restaurant. The medium-sized Tudor-style hotel itself was at Forty-second and Halsted, adjacent to the amphitheater. Sam and I were already there — half a dozen of my agents were doing the actual security work — when the Beatles arrived in a phalanx of blue uniforms.

The dining room — a replica of an old English inn with oaken paneling arrayed with hunting prints — was jammed with linen-covered tables at which only invited reporters whose credentials had been checked were allowed. Screaming teenagers outside held back by sawhorses made a kind of muffled jet roar. Blue cigarette smoke drifted lazily in contrast to a general air of tension. Every table had a photographer on his feet with flash camera ready.

They were so young, these four superstars who took chairs at a microphone-strewn banquet table on a modest platform. With the exception of Ringo Starr, who was maybe five seven, the others were around six feet, slender, smiling, amused. They wore sharp unmatching suits in the mod British style, Paul and Ringo in ties, John with his collar buttoned, George unbuttoned. A row of cops, their caps with badges on, were lined up behind them, as if not sure whether to protect or arrest.

Sam was in a suit similar to what the Beatles were wearing, but it was a Maxwell Street knockoff I bought him, not a Carnaby Street original; like George, he wore no tie and his collar was open. His shoes were something called Beatle boots that a lesbian might have worn to an S & M party. Not that anyone cared, I was in a dark-gray suit by Raleigh with a black-and-gray diamond-pattern silk tie. And Florsheims, not Beatle boots.

Before the questioning could begin, I approached the raised table with Sam at my side, and introduced myself to McCartney.

“You’re the private eye,” he said, pleasant if not overly impressed. He was smoking. They all were. My God, they were young. Not far past twenty. Just four years or so older than Sam.

I handed him my card. “These are my private numbers, if you need anything or there’s any problem at the hotel.”

After the concert, they would be staying, briefly, at the O’Hare Sahara awaiting their Detroit flight later tonight.

“Obliged,” McCartney said.

I took a shot. “This is my son — Sam. You mind signing something for him?”

They were all agreeable, signing a cocktail napkin. Sam was frozen, so I mentioned he was in a band himself.

“Watch what you sign, man,” Lennon said, as he was autographing the napkin. He winked at Sam, who took the flimsy paper square and nodded and said thanks to all of them. They had forgotten him already, but I will always remember that they were nice to my son.

“Have you fellas given any thought to what you’re going to do when the bubble breaks?”

“Well,” Lennon said, “we’re gonna have a good time.”

“We never plan ahead,” Harrison said.

“How about your retirement, or buying into a big business?”

“We already are a big business,” Lennon said, “so we don’t have to buy into one.”

That was a smart-ass reply, which the reporter well deserved, but Lennon’s lilting accent took the edge off. Americans were suckers for a British accent; there was something seductive about it. I’d been with a couple BOAC stewardesses myself.

“What do you think of Chicago?”

Gesturing as he spoke, McCartney said, “I’m looking forward to seeing the gangsters with their broad-brimmed hats and wide ties.”

I’m sure the cute Beatle considered that a gag, but the day before, a restaurant got blown up on Mannheim Road for resisting the protection racket, and two mob factions were currently shooting at each other over control of gambling on the North Side.

Anyway, the lads were funny and made monkeys out of any number of smug reporters. Sam wore a big grin throughout, holding onto that cocktail napkin with both hands.

The concert started at 8:30, but the Beatles didn’t come on right away. The vast high-ceilinged chamber was packed with fifteen thousand audience members, most of them teenagers, chiefly girls, often with beehive hairdos. They didn’t scream much during the four opening acts — a couple of nondescript combos, an out-of-place R & B singer, and a long-haired blonde who looked like she belonged in the audience — and I started to wonder what all the fuss was.

I’d been told the audience would scream so loud, you couldn’t hear a damn thing. I was hearing these opening acts much better than I cared to. When the blond girl wrapped up her short set, meaning the headliners were next, the screaming kicked in, the sound like a burning building with flames eating away.

Finally at 9:20, the Beatles emerged, led onto the stage by Chicago cops, coming down stairs off to one side. Grinning and waving, the three front men strapped on their guitars — Ringo getting behind his drums on a little stage-on-the-stage — and the place went wild. Stark raving mad. Like the Playboy mansion the day JFK was shot, lots of mascara was running. The shrieking was unbelievable. That muffled jet roar wasn’t muffled now — the damn jet was flying around in circles in the place, which was almost possible, since they held indoor drag races in here. There were six hundred thousand square feet of it, after all, currently filled by thousands of girls having a nervous breakdown.

We had front-row seats and could almost hear the music. Well, Sam seemed to hear it just fine — he was singing along to “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout” and all the rest.

I officially joined the older generation by covering my ears. Oddly I could hear the music better that way, particularly the bass guitar and drums. The damn thing seemed to go on forever. I thought I might weep. Finally it was over — thirty minutes that had earned these four twenty-year-olds a grand a minute.

When the Beatles fled the stage, I took advantage of my security status to enlist a cop to lead Sam and me out a side exit while the audience was still on its feet screaming and crying. As for me, my ears were ringing. It was like I had a seashell up to either ear and could hear waves pounding the shore.

We came around to an ocean of cars — the lot held four thousand and was at capacity — but the kids hadn’t started to stream out yet, lingering inside in the afterglow of Beatle hysteria. All across the lot, parents were standing by cars, waiting, smoking, the little red tips bobbing like fireflies in the night.

A fairly short walk away, my car was parked across from the Stock Yard Inn on South Halsted. Short walk or not, I was well aware that this was the South Side, an area tougher than a nickel steak, not that the Saddle and Sirloin Club had served up any nickel steaks lately.

The nearby stockyards consumed a sprawling area between Pershing Road on the north, Halsted on the east, Forty-seventh on the South, and Ashland Avenue on the west — close to five hundred acres. Still, you could neither hear nor smell those thousands of doomed cattle, unless you counted the fragrant aroma wafting from the Saddle and Sirloin.

“You want me to get that napkin framed up for you?” I asked Sam.

“You won’t lose it or anything, will you?”

“No. I can be trusted with evidence.”

“That would be fab.”

Engines starting up, mechanical coughs in the night, indicated the teenagers were finally exiting the amphitheater for their rides. The wide street was still largely empty, though, as we jaywalked across, making no effort at speed.

We paused mid-street for a car to go by in either direction. Across from us, my dark-blue Jaguar X waited patiently, with its hubcaps and everything — not bad for this part of town.

“I’ll just hold on to it for now,” he said, meaning the napkin. It was still in his hands like the biggest, luckiest four-leaf clover any kid ever found.

He would be seventeen later this month, but I had that same surge of feeling for him I’d first experienced holding him in my arms at the hospital. I was studying him, trying to memorize the moment, slipping an arm around his shoulders, and he tightened, hearing the engine before I did.

It came roaring up from our left, where somebody had been parked on the Stock Yard Inn side, a light-blue Pontiac Bonneville, screaming down the street like those girls at the amphitheater. The vehicle, even at this stupid speed, was no danger to us, but we began to move a little quicker across our lane.

“Dad!”

Headlights were bearing down on us. The Pontiac had swerved — not swerved, swung into our lane, as if we were its targets.

Maybe we were.

The damn beast was right on us and it clipped me a little but it would have been much worse if Sam hadn’t tackled me and shoved me out of harm’s way. I glimpsed a blur of a dark-complected face in the window of the Pontiac as it whipped by, dark eyes glaring at me as if I were the one who’d hit him. Well, I had, a little.

Sam and I both landed hard on the pavement, and I had taken some impact, a glancing blow but still painful, on my left hip.

I was on my other side and Sam was hovering, saying, “Dad, Dad” over and over, as I managed to sit up, pointing.

“Son! Get that license number! Can you see it?”

I was too dazed — all I could see were red halos around taillights.

But Sam was nodding. He stared after the receding vehicle. It had disappeared by the time he got a pencil out of somewhere and jotted the number down on the back of his precious cocktail napkin, which was already rumpled and wadded from when he’d clutched his fists and tackled me to safety.

He had tears in his eyes. I’ll never know if it was out of fear for himself or concern for me or sorrow over his ruined Beatlemania artifact.

But I’d lay odds on the latter.

He helped me up and drunk-walked me the few steps to the Jag. Another car went by, slow, the driver giving us a dirty look. We were just a couple of lushes lurching across the street.

Nobody had seen the incident, at least nobody who bothered to come help or anything. I told Sam to drive, fishing out the keys for him, and he helped me into the rider’s side. Now the stream of amphitheater traffic was picking up, slowed by traffic cops. Like they say, where was a cop when you needed one?

“I’m going to get you to a hospital,” Sam said over the purr of the Jag. “What one should I go to? I don’t know this part of town.”

“Just get us back to Old Town. I didn’t get hit that bad.”

“Dad, no!”

“Son, I’ll be bruised up, and my chiropractor will make a small windfall out of me. But I’m fine. Drive.”

We’d gone about half a block when he said, “Shouldn’t we call the cops? We should go back to that Stock Yard hotel and call the cops.”

“No.”

“What was wrong with that guy? Was he drunk?”

“Don’t know.”

“It was almost like he was trying to hit us!”

More likely me. Sam hadn’t been on the planet long enough to make my kind of enemy.

We stopped at an all-night drugstore to pick up some Anacin, four pills of which I popped, chasing them with a Coke. Despite all that caffeine, I was asleep when Sam pulled behind my brick three-story on Eugenie Street, one block north of North Avenue. I woke up just as he was pulling the Jag into my stable-turned-garage. The main building, par for this side street, was narrow and deep with not much of a backyard.

I lived on the upper two floors, the ground level a furnished apartment the A-1 used for visiting clients and as a safe house. Sam was still helping me walk as we entered in back through the kitchen and across the dining room into the living room, an open space with off-white wall-to-wall carpet and a wrought-iron spiral staircase. The plaster walls, painted a rust orange, had select framed modern artwork, and one wall was a bookcase with as many LPs as books. Furnishings ran to overstuffed couches and chairs, some brown, some green.

I settled into my brown-leather recliner and used the phone on the table where the TV Guide and remote control also lived.

“You know, old married people like me,” my longtime partner Lou Sapperstein said gruffly, “aren’t necessarily up at this hour.”

“It’s not even midnight. You still got friends in Motor Vehicles?”

“I have friends everywhere, Nate. Even in Old Town.”

“Do you have friends in Motor Vehicles who work night shift?”

“Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“Yeah, I’m a riot. Rowan and Martin got nothing on me. I’m going to give you a license plate to have your friend run. And I want to know right now. Not tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Lou said, no more kidding around. “I got a pencil. Go.”

I gave him the number.

Twenty minutes and two glasses of rum later, I picked the phone up on first ring.

“Pontiac Bonneville,” Lou said. “’61. Light blue.”

“That’s the one.”

“Stolen earlier this evening.”

“Big surprise.”

“Found abandoned within the last half hour on the South Side.”

“Within, say, half a mile of the International Amphitheater?”

“You are a true detective, Nathan Heller. What’s this about?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe something.”

I’d already gotten the nine millimeter from the front closet and rested it on the TV Guide.

Lou was saying, “If there are any prints on that vehicle, we’ll know tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“I have friends who work Sundays. I have all sorts of friends.”

“This is where I came in,” I said, thanked him, and hung up.

Sam was sitting on the nearby couch, leaning forward, hands clasped. He looked worried. A little afraid. He’d watched me go to the shelf to fetch the Browning automatic and its presence in the room, near my reach, was palpable.

“What’s this about, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe a joyrider. Or a drunk. Or a husband who didn’t like the art-study photos I took of him for his wife.”

Sam was well aware of what I did for a living, though we both knew it had been a long, long time since I had shot pictures through motel windows. Although my agents still did.

“Dad, are you sure you’re all right? I think we should get you to an emergency room.”

“An emergency room at a Chicago hospital on a Saturday night? That’s more dangerous than that street we crossed.”

He smiled a little. “That was a close one. That was terrible.”

“I’m sorry about that napkin.”

“It’s okay.”

“No. It isn’t. I’m going to call that guy Epstein in London and get you a signed photo.”

“You don’t have to.”

But something had jumped in his eyes.

And eventually I did get him the photo, personally signed to him, and another to me for the A-1 office wall.

Right now, though, more pressing matters were on my mind. Specifically, that swarthy face that blurred by in that Bonneville; but not so blurry that I didn’t recognize him.

I was damn sure — well, pretty sure — that he was a Cuban who’d been arrested in November of last year by the Secret Service. I’d been working with them at the request of a friend of mine who was so famous that if I’d told my son, he would have accused me of bullshitting again.

Three weeks prior to the shooting of the President in Dallas, a similar scheme had been hatched, and thwarted, in Chicago. I had hauled in two Cuban suspects and delivered them to the Secret Service, who had let them go after JFK’s motorcade through the Loop was canceled. I’d never seen either of the Cubans again.

Until tonight, anyway, when one of them tried to run me down outside the Stock Yard Inn.