Too Many Bullets

One

At the end of this narrative, certain guilty people go free. You may even feel I’m one of them. Some will pay, while others will not, enjoying the unearned happy remainders of their lives. And any reader inclined to dismiss everything ahead as a conspiracy theory might keep in mind that conspiracy — like robbery and rape, murder and treason — is a real crime on the books. History, I’m afraid, is a mystery story without a satisfying resolution.

But know this: I did get some of the bastards.

The sullen sky seemed to know something we didn’t. Fog lingered over a wind-riled sea under a gray ceiling while a mist kept spitting at us like a cobra too bored to strike. Gun-metal breakers shooting white sparks rolled in like dares or maybe warnings.

It was a lousy day at Malibu Beach, so of course Bob Kennedy was helping his ten-year-old son Michael build a sandcastle while twelve-year-old David swam against the tide — like Mr. Toad, going nowhere in particular — and nine-year-old Mary and eleven-year-old Courtney laughed and danced in the relentless surf.

U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy wore an unlikely loud pair of Hawaiian swim trunks and a nubby short-sleeve shirt as light blue as his eyes. I had on borrowed red swim trunks and my own Navy blue polo, the patriotic complement of my pale Irish complexion undone by a tan realized lazing around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel on better days.

I was, and for that matter still am, Nathan Heller, president and founder of the A-1 Detective Agency out of Chicago, putting time in at our Los Angeles branch. In such instances the Pink Palace (as the Beverly Hills Hotel was known) provided me with a bungalow, a perk for the A-1 handling their security. I’d come out this afternoon to this private stretch of sand at my friend Bob’s request.

None of us called him Bobby, by the way. Not even Ethel, who was in the beach house playing Scrabble with two other kids of theirs, sixteen-year-old Kathleen and fifteen-year-old Joe. Normally all of them would be frolicking in the California sun, only of course there wasn’t any. The wife and older siblings had shown enough sense to come in out of the chill wind off the ocean, away from fog drifting over the water like the smoke of a distant fire.

Bob Kennedy was forty-two and I was a year younger than Cary Grant, a fit 185 pounds with my reddish brown hair graying only at the temples. Bob was fit too, five ten and slender, wiry in that way that keeps you going. But he’d been campaigning his ass off and had admitted to me he’d damn near collapsed after doing 1,200 miles in twelve hours — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Watts, San Diego and back to L.A.

“Ethel and I slept till ten today,” he’d admitted.

I was here filling in. Ex-FBI man Bill Barry had come down with Montezuma’s Revenge after the Cesar Chavez swing, and tonight at the Ambassador Hotel I would mostly be at Ethel’s side when her husband was braving crowds. I was already wishing I hadn’t said yes and the frosty breakers rolling in and the spitting wind had nothing to do with it.

Bob had called last night.

I said, “Bill was in charge of security, right?”

That familiar nasal high-pitched voice came back with, “Uh, right. That’s right.”

“How many people does he have working for him?”

“None.”

“What does that mean, none?”

“Bill’s all the security I need.”

“Oh, that’s crazy. I can bring half a dozen guys along and—”

“No. The hotel took on extra guards. They have something like seventeen men in uniform lined up.”

“Okay. How much LAPD presence?”

“None.”

“Does that mean the same thing as the other ‘none’?”

“It does. Nate, police presence sends the wrong message. Anyway, I, ah, am not on the best of terms with Chief Reddin.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Oh, He’ll be there, pursuant to availability.”

That caustic sense of humor often caught me off guard, and before I could muster a comeback, he said quickly, “Come out and have lunch with us around noon and we’ll talk more.”

He’d already told me he was staying at film director John Frankenheimer’s. My name would be left at the guard shack where you entered the Malibu Colony. Well, at least the director of Seven Days in May maintained some security.

The two girls in their swim caps and one-piece swimsuits were splashing each other and laughing and now and then their joyful yelps would escalate into little girlish screams.

Bob tousled Michael’s hair and left him in charge of castle building, then joined me on our towel-spread patch of beach.

“That’s the one consolation if I lose,” he said.

That famous boyish face had deep lines now and the blond-tinged brown hair had gray highlights.

“What consolation is that?”

“Spending more time with my kids.”

“You really think you might lose?”

He shrugged a little. “Touch and go. And if I do win, there’ll be a world of bitterness to overcome.”

“McCarthy you mean.”

Bob nodded. “Already a lot of resentment from Gene and, uh, his young supporters.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “My son is campaigning for him.”

“Good for him. How old is Sam now?”

“Twenty-two. Another year of college and he’ll be draft fodder.”

Bob’s mouth tightened. “Not if I can help it.”

Sam, my only child, was a senior taking Business Administration at USC. He still lived at home in Bel Air with my ex-wife and her film director husband, who was no John Frankenheimer but did all right. When I was in town, Sam would bunk in with me at my Pink Palace bungalow. We’d go to movies, concerts, sporting events; he’d let his old man buy him good meals. We got along well.

“Fuck you, Dad!” he’d said this morning.

I had just told him about my call from Bob. That I’d be working security for the RFK campaign tonight.

Sam was a good-looking kid, by which I mean he resembled me, excluding his shoulder-length hair and mustache (and MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT t-shirt and bell-bottom jeans). I suppose twenty-two wasn’t really a kid, but when you’re a year younger than Cary Grant, it seems like it. We rarely argued and hadn’t talked politics beyond both being against the war in Vietnam, neither of us wanting him to go off and die in a rice paddy.

I hadn’t discouraged his work for the McCarthy campaign. And when Bob announced his candidacy, late in the game, I didn’t reveal how I felt about the two Democratic candidates... that I considered RFK way more electable than that aloof cold fish Eugene McCarthy. Richard Nixon, who had been batting away all comers in the Republican primaries, was a tough, seasoned candidate who’d be hard to beat, though his lack of charisma would be a boon to a Kennedy running against him.

We were in the living room of my pink-stucco bungalow, a modest little number with rounded beige and brown furniture, vaulted ceiling, fireplace, and sliding glass doors onto a patio. I was on the couch and my son stood ranting and raving before me.

“Haven’t we had enough of these goddamn Kennedys? Eugene McCarthy puts his career on the line, takes on a sitting president and shows America that evil S.O.B. LBJ is vulnerable! Your Bobby sees what Senator McCarthy has pulled off and decides to just, just... horn right in!”

“I’m not going to argue with you, son.”

“Of course not, because you know damn well that Bobby Kennedy doesn’t have a single solitary idea, much less a plan, on how to get us out of the goddamn Vietnam quagmire!”

I sighed. “McCarthy can’t beat Nixon, Sam. Hell, he can’t beat Hubert Humphrey for the nomination. But Bob could beat ’em both.”

Sam was pacing now. “How long ago was it your ‘Bob’ was saying he’d back Johnson, despite all the anti-Vietnam talk? He’s a phony, Dad. A goddamn fucking phony. Just another politician. Another Kennedy.”

The last thing I wanted in the world was for my son to go to Vietnam. But sometimes I thought the military wouldn’t be such a bad experience for him.

Of course, he’d have to live through it.

“This isn’t worth us working ourselves into a lather,” I said. “Bob is an old friend, and he’s in a jam with his security guy dropping out. This is just a job, a favor really, for a friend.”

His chin crinkled; he looked like a baby with a mustache. “Are you going to vote for McCarthy if he gets the nomination?”

“Are you going to vote for Humphrey if he gets it?”

His eyebrows rose and hid in his hair. “Fuck no! Why even vote in that case?”

“Oh, I don’t know. To save your spoiled ass?”

He threw his hands up in sullen surrender. “I’ll get my things. You’re heading back to Chicago tomorrow, right? I’m going back home now. Good fucking bye.”

I could have told him what I believed would happen, which Bob Kennedy surely already knew. Even if Bob won delegate-rich California, that left New York, where many resented the way he’d put his presidential bid above his senatorial duties. Bob did not have a lock on the convention by any means, but even if the Kennedy magic and emotion didn’t sway the delegates to him, he could almost certainly squeeze the vice presidency out of Humphrey and move that old liberal away from Johnson’s war policy and onto the RFK anti-war view.

The presidency would be Bob’s, though maybe not till 1976 — a year that had a ring to it. But what did I know about politics, except that aldermen could be bribed?

Sitting next to me on the beach with his knees up, Bob said casually, “I’m thinking of offering McCarthy secretary of state.”

“Gene or Joe?”

Bob’s laugh was short but explosive. “A dead secretary of state would be easier to handle.”

Even now Bob took heat over his time as a counsel on McCarthy’s infamous investigative committee; but he’d always stayed loyal to Tailgunner Joe, who was a longtime friend of the Kennedy family. Less well-known was that Bob had gathered the facts that guaranteed McCarthy’s censure by the Senate.

“With everything at stake,” I said, “you seem pretty cool-headed to me.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“Oh?”

He was looking at the sea or maybe his kids or both. “Much as I dislike campaigning, it’s going well. I get a good feeling from the people — finally they’re not wishing I were Jack... or imagining I am him. I think I’m finally out of my brother’s shadow. Making it on my own.”

“You are, Bob. You really are.”

His eyes turned shyly my way. “Nate, I, uh... know we’ve had our differences. The, uh, Marilyn situation in particular. All the Castro nonsense. My judgment wasn’t always... well, I appreciate you putting that behind us. Still my friend. Helping me out.”

“Don’t work so hard,” I said. “I already stopped and voted on my way here.”

That Bugs Bunny grin. “Ah. But how did you vote?”

I allowed him half a grin in return. “That’s between me and my conscience. Of course you know what my conscience is.”

A nod brought his hunk of hair in front along with it. “That gun you carry. An ancient nine millimeter Browning, isn’t it?”

His look said he remembered the weapon’s significance: my father killed himself with it when I disappointed him by joining the Chicago PD and dancing the Outfit’s tune for a time.

“I think your father would be proud,” he said, “of how you turned out.”

“Not sure you’re right. But your father surely must be pleased.”

“Hard to tell. Hard to tell.”

The old boy’s ability to speak had been impaired since his stroke almost ten years before.

Bob’s eyes went to the sea again. “But, uh, about that conscience of yours. The artillery I mean.”

“What about it?”

“You still carry it?”

“I do.”

“I don’t want you doing that tonight.”

My laugh was reflexive. “Well, surely Bill Barry’s been packing all this time.”

“No.” The voice was firm, the blue eyes on me now, ice cold and unblinking. “I haven’t allowed it and he’s honored my request.”

“Well, I’m not about to!”

His chin neared his chest. “Look, there’s no way to protect a candidate on the stump. No way in hell. And if I’m lucky enough to be elected, there’ll be no bubble-top bulletproof limo like Lyndon’s using. What kind of country is that to live in? Where the President is afraid to go out among the people?”

I was shaking my head, astounded. “Jesus, Bob, what kind of morbid horseshit is that?”

He stared past me with a small ghastly smile. “Each day every man and woman lives a game of Russian roulette. Car wrecks, plane crashes, choke on a fucking fish bone. Bad X-rays, heart attacks and liver failure. I’m pretty sure there’ll be an attempt on my life sooner or later, not so much for political reasons but just plain crazy madness. Plenty of that to go around.”

I guess I must have been goggling at him. “If you think somebody’s going to take a shot at you—”

The blue eyes tightened. “I won’t have everyday people getting caught in my crossfire. Not for discussion, Nate. If you want out, I’ll understand.”

The girlish cries from the water’s edge turned suddenly into screams, shrill and frightened and punctuated with Mary’s “Daddy! Daddy!” while Courtney called out, frantic, “David’s in trouble!”

And the boy was too far out there, floundering, much too far, and Bob sprang to his bare feet and accidentally caused a wall of the sandcastle to crumble as he flew across the beach and ran splashing into the water and dove into the crashing waves.

The undertow had the child. His sisters were dancing in the surf again, but a wholly different dance now, fists tight and shaking. I got to my feet feeling as helpless as the young girls. So much tragedy had visited this family! Dread spread through me like poison.

I staggered to the edge of the beach where surf lapped, as if there might be something I could do. There was: the two children hugged me, sobbing, and I hugged back. Terrible moments passed, the waves roiling as if digesting a meal.

Then Bob and the boy popped up, the father having hold of his son, and wearing a vast smile in the churning tide. Both were on their feet by the time they reached the edge of the surf, the child coughing up water, the man bracing him, a scarlet red smear across Bob’s forehead from a cut over one eye. Both bore skinned patches here and there from where they’d gone down to the pebbly bottom in the water just deep enough to drown.

I was there to help but Bob smiled and waved me off, his arm around the boy as the little party trooped back toward the starkly modern white house, boxy shapes spread along as if spilled there, their many picture windows on the ocean like silent witnesses.

The interior of the Frankenheimer beach house was all pale yellow-painted brick walls enlivened by striking modern art, bright colors jumping. The living room and dining room were separated by framed panels of glass that added up to a wall. From the stereo came the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, the Association, adding a soft-rock soundtrack. During the buffet lunch, the film director’s lovely brunette wife, actress Evans Evans, circulated slowly in a hippie print dress, making all their guests feel important, which they probably were.

Bob was buttonholed by several apparent political advisors I didn’t recognize as well as two Teds I did — his brother Edward Kennedy, who I’d never met, and Theodore White, the Presidential historian I’d seen on TV. The kids were on the patio with a college boy who’d been hired to look after them. The children, bored with eating, were fussing over David and his Band-Aid badges of courage.

Ethel, who I’d been told was pregnant but didn’t look it in her white sleeveless almost-mini dress, approached me with a smile, bearing a small plate of appetizers that didn’t seem touched. Her words didn’t go with her smile: “I suppose Bob told you not to carry a gun.”

“He did.”

She shook her head. “I wish you wouldn’t listen to him. He’s getting more and more death threats. I’m getting worried.”

“He’s stubborn about it.”

A weight of the world sigh was followed by a quick angry grimace. “He’s so darn fatalistic. Just resigned to accept what comes. Yesterday — in Chinatown, in San Francisco, in a convertible, as usual? A string of firecrackers went off and I thought they were shots and practically jumped out of my skin. I ducked down to the floor, just frozen. Bob? He just kept smiling and shaking hands. Barely flinched.”

She shook her head, laughed a little, and was gone. That may have been the worst laugh I ever heard.

A row of televisions had been brought in, and guests huddled around the screens after lunch to keep tabs on the sporadic network coverage; exit polls were coming in and the news was promising. Bob was not among the watchers.

I found him out by the circular pool, stretched between two deck chairs, napping. He looked like hell, a cut over his eye from the drowning rescue, as unshaven as a beachcomber. He was in another polo and baggy shorts and sandal-shod bare feet.

An easy mellow voice said, “Not the best image for our favorite candidate.”

I glanced to my right. John Frankenheimer — in a crisp pale yellow linen shirt, sleeves rolled up, and fresh chinos — might have been one of his own leading men. He stood a good three inches taller than my six feet, his black hair only lightly touched with white at the temples, his heavy eyebrows as dark as Groucho’s only not funny. We’d met but that’s all. He motioned me over to a wrought-iron patio set with an umbrella. I brought along a rum and Coke; he carried a martini like an afterthought.

“At least he cleans up good,” I said.

“He does. And takes direction.” He took a sip. “Or anyway he does now.”

“What do you mean he does now?”

His shrug was slow and expressive. “A while back, his guy Pierre Salinger flew me from California to Gary, Indiana, where Bob was speaking. To shoot a campaign spot. And I’m not cheap.”

“I believe you.”

“Bob said he only had ten minutes to give me, and I said then why fly me out from California? The result was awful — the camera caught his hostility. Later he called me at my hotel and asked if we could try again. I said we could if he gave me an hour and a half to show him how not to project cold arrogance. He took that on the chin, and I went over and did the spot fresh, and we’ve been friendly ever since.”

“He’ll need makeup for that cut.”

He studied his slumbering subject. “I’ll give it to him. Saved his son, I hear. He is one remarkable guy. Ever hear about how he taught himself to swim? Jumped off a boat in Nantucket Sound and took his chances.” Chuckled to himself. “Then when Bob and Ethel honeymooned in Hawaii, he saved some guy from drowning.”

“He should’ve been a lifeguard.”

“This country could use saving.”

I sipped. “You’re following the campaign with a camera crew, I understand?”

He nodded. “Yes, for a documentary but also to grab footage for more campaign spots. He’ll need both to beat Tricky Dick. You’ve known Bob a long time, I take it.”

“We go back to the Rackets Committee. And before.”

That seemed to confuse him. “You worked for the government, back then?”

“Not directly. I have a private investigation agency in Chicago. We have a branch here. The A-1.”

And that seemed to amuse him. “Oh, I know who you are. ‘Private Eye to the Stars.’ How many stories has Life magazine done about you, anyway?”

“Too many and not enough.”

His laugh was a single ha. “Too many, because it’s like James Bond. Him being a spy is an oxymoron.”

“Or just a moron. And not enough, because publicity is good for business. Do I have to tell a film director that?”

He gestured with an open hand. “Necessary evil.”

I leaned in. “John... your film The Manchurian Candidate? Stupid question, but... do you think that could happen in real life?”

His smile came slowly and then one corner of it twitched.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

Bob was coming around.

“Star needs makeup,” Frankenheimer said, getting to his feet. “And better wardrobe.”

I needed to find a bathroom to put on my Botany 500 for tonight. I’d have to leave my nine millimeter Browning at the Ambassador desk to be locked in their safe. When I emerged I found Bob looking similarly spiffy in a blue pin-striped suit and white shirt. Frankenheimer was in the process of expertly daubing stage makeup on the candidate’s scraped, bruised forehead.

In the background, Ethel was giving orders to that college kid to deliver her children to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where they rated two bungalows to my measly one. We would be driven by Frankenheimer to the Ambassador and Ethel, not ready yet, would follow in another vehicle.

The film director’s car turned out to be a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Even though I had made Life a couple of times, this would be my first ride in one. Frankenheimer, who’d seemed so cool before, betrayed himself otherwise on the Santa Monica Freeway with his bat-out-of-hell driving. When he accidentally raced right by the Vermont off-ramp and got snarled up in the Harbor Freeway exchange, he swore at himself and pounded the wheel.

“Take it easy, John,” Bob said from the backseat. “Life is too short.”

Two

At just after seven, Frankenheimer was tooling his silver Rolls along Wilshire, his enthusiasm behind the wheel curtailed by downtown traffic and red lights. Bob and I, a couple of his advisors opposite us in the limo seats, watched Los Angeles slide by like postcards. With the sun still up but heading down, this was what the movie people called Magic Hour, when dusk painted the City of Angels with a forgiving brush. Young people owned the sidewalks, college kids in preppie threads, hippies friend or faux in huarache sandals, boots motorcycle or cowboy, hair straight, curly, shoulder-length or longer (as the song went), Quant cut or rounded Afro. Minis on the go-go, would-be rockers in Cuban heels, heads bobbing with beaded bands, hooped earrings, rainbow colors (clothes and people), peace signs and raised fists, nothing quite real in a twilight where the fireflies were neon. Times they were a changing, and the man in back next to me seemed to be wondering where he fit in.

“Your people, Bob,” I said.

“Some of them. McCarthy has the A and B students. I have to settle for the rest.”

At left the Brown Derby’s giant bowler, half-swallowed by its mission-style expansion, squatted on a corner. Our destination was at right, past a white obelisk looking like a pillar of salt left behind by God in an Art Deco mood—

— with a bronze statue of a scantily clad goddess at its base posed, they say, by Betty Grable.

On a city block’s worth of landscaped grounds between Wilshire and West Eighth Street, at the end of an endless drive, sprawled the Ambassador, a city within the city. Its twenty-four unlikely acres in downtown L.A. included tennis courts, Olympic-size pool and golf course. Eight coral-colored stories spawning wings were home to twelve-hundred-some rooms, restaurants, movie theater, post office, beauty and barber salons, shop concourse and the palm-swept rococo Cocoanut Grove, where Rosemary Clooney was headlining.

From its Jazz Age beginnings, including half a dozen Academy Award ceremonies until well after World War II, the Ambassador had been Hollywood’s favorite movie-star haunt — from Harlow, Gable and Crosby to Marilyn, Sinatra and Lemmon. But in an era where Jane, not Henry, was the reigning Fonda, the Ambassador seemed about as up to date as when Charlie Chaplin was in residence.

Still, it didn’t seem like anything could kill the old girl. In these times, the Ambassador depended on tourist trade, business seminars and political events — tonight, in addition to the optimistic Kennedy campaign’s planned victory celebration, were two election night parties, Democrat Alan Cranston and Republican Max Rafferty for nominations in the upcoming Senate race.

Frankenheimer drove around to a rear door off the Cocoanut Grove’s kitchen, parked back there and said he needed to check on the guerrilla film crew he’d positioned in the Embassy Room. The rest of our little group went up the freight elevator to the fifth floor, where Bob and Ethel had been staying in the Royal Suite during the California campaign. Tonight two more rooms had been added, 511 across the hall, a war room for aides and advisors, and 516 for invited press, down the hall a ways.

I stayed near the candidate, either at his side or just behind him while he dropped by the press room where he smiled in his shy way, shaking hands here and there. The twenty-five or so journalists packed into the room, which had been cleared of its bed, included some of the most famous in the country — Pete Hamill of the New York Post, columnist Jimmy Breslin, Jack Newfield of the Village Voice, and that unlikely patrician sportswriter George Plimpton.

The smoke was no thicker than the fog had been over the Pacific this morning, and the rumbly murmur of voices trying to be heard might have been Jap planes making a comeback. A small open bar had been set up to accommodate the large gathering, doing a mighty business.

Breslin and Hamill somehow managed to buttonhole Bob. Both knew me a little and granted me the kind of nod a New York celebrity grants a Chicago nobody, and started in telling the candidate what he needed to do to win in New York. Youthful Hamill, with a shock of reddish red hair to rival Bob’s brown mop, grinned and smoked and leaned in aggressively, like an off-duty Irish cop.

“You better score a knockout tonight, champ,” Hamill said, “if you wanna make a dent in all this anti-you shit.”

Bob chuckled but his eyes were already weary. “What is all this New York animosity about, anyway? My guys say it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

Hamill grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “Face it, Bob — New Yorkers are haters! They can work up an unbelievable amount of bile. They resent wakin’ up in the morning.”

Breslin, a fleshy-faced bulldog who always seemed half in the bag, leaned in, raving, ranting. “It’s the goddamn Jews! Ya gotta get through to the Jews if you want a shot!”

Trying to conceal his distaste, Bob swept back his bangs and said, “Personally, I’d like to get through to the New York Times,” and excused himself and we got out of there.

Right across the hall from the Royal Suite, 511 was almost as packed as the press room, in this case with aides in no-nonsense work mode. No bar in here but plenty of cigarette smoke, and little phone stations had been set up everywhere, with a bank of three TVs against one wall. The overall murmur was muffled out of respect to those on the phone. In this nearly all-male room, a sea of rolled-up white shirts and a few suits of campaign spokesmen, those not phoning were huddled in little groups, strategizing. Frank Mankiewicz, Bob’s campaign press secretary, seemed in charge of what reminded me of a wire room.

Mank, who I’d met a few times, was a former journalist whose late father had written Citizen Kane, the most famous newspaper movie of all. I wasn’t sure if that was ironic or just fitting. Someone once described Mank as a rumpled little guy who might have been a used-car salesman, but his dark eyes were as shrewd as they were sad and his high forehead seemed to tell you a good-size brain resided.

“Good,” Mank said to Bob, “you’re here. I’ve got Senator McGovern on the line. He’s got excellent news for you from South Dakota.”

Bob went to a nearby phone and I stayed back with the press secretary. I asked him why he wasn’t with the journalists.

“Half the time I am,” Mank said. “But this room is even more important. We’re feeding the media that didn’t make the trip. Look, uh, Nate, make sure Bob spends time on a speech. When he wins tonight, and goddamnit he will, every network will be covering him. That victory speech needs to sing. He’ll listen to you.”

“You do know I’m just a bodyguard. And not even allowed a gun.”

Mank touched my suitcoat sleeve. “He likes you.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. You never kiss his ass. And you never ask about his brother.”

Bob came back smiling, raising a fist chest high. “More votes than McCarthy and Humphrey combined. Got both the farmers and the Indians. Carried some of the Indian precincts one hundred percent!”

A smile was buried somewhere in Mank’s furrowed puss. “Exit polls say the same about the blacks and Mexicans.”

Bob nodded and his smile faded. “If I could just shake loose of McCarthy. I shouldn’t be on street corners in Manhattan begging for votes when I could be chasing Humphrey’s ass all over the country.”

“Ass” was unusually salty language for Bob.

“Bob,” Mank said through a battle wound of a smile, “I told you this would be an uphill struggle.” Then he patted his candidate on the shoulder and went back to work.

Next stop was the Royal Suite, entering into the expansive sitting room, a celebrity cocktail party where laughter rose like bubbles in a glass. The maybe one hundred supporters, stuffed in the space with its own bank of TVs and bar, were blissfully unaware of the frustration their hero was suffering on a night that seemed headed to victory.

The eclectic mix encompassed L.A. Rams tackle Rosey Grier and decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, astronaut John Glenn and Civil Rights activist John Lewis, labor leader Cesar Chavez and comedian Milton Berle. Plenty of Kennedy people, too, including Pierre Salinger and Bob’s sisters Pat Lawford and Jean Smith with her husband Steve, a trusted RFK confidante. Others were familiar but I couldn’t connect with names. No sign of brother Ted, though the four Kennedy kids from out at Malibu — David, Michael, Courtney and Mary — were winding through the crowd as if in a garden maze, in pursuit of waiters with trays of hors d’oeuvres.

This was where Frankenheimer had wound up, chatting with a guy with white curly Roman hair and black eyebrows; Bob said this was On the Waterfront screenwriter Budd Schulberg. Listening politely, cocktail in hand and trying not to look bored, was a slender curvy beauty about forty. For a moment I thought she was the film director’s actress wife, but no. Her flipped-up, lightly sprayed brunette bob was maybe too young for her, but there were worse sins. She looked familiar to me, or was that wishful thinking?

Frankenheimer, like everybody else, had noticed Bob come in and motioned for him to come over. As his appendage, I made the trip.

We said quick hellos minus any introduction of the brunette, who was either famous enough that I should have known her or dismissed by these two chauvinists as window dressing. But she had a nod and a pink lipstick smile that encouraged me to ignore the twenty-year gap between us. My self-esteem went up.

So did Frankenheimer’s eyebrows, as he gestured Nero-style with a downward thumb. “Bob, I checked out the Embassy Room — must be nearly two thousand people crammed in. Security guards and fire marshals are routing the overflow into the ballroom downstairs. I wish the fucking networks would declare a winner — the natives are getting restless.”

“With these new computerized voting machines,” Bob said, “you know it’s going to be damn slow. Could be midnight before we know.”

The director shuddered. “Hope to hell you’re wrong. It’s stifling down there. People may start passing out. And frantic! Chavez has a marimba band going at times. At least I’m getting good footage — lots of cute girls in straw hats, white blouses, blue skirts, red sashes. Chanting ‘Sock it to me, Bobby.’”

“Well, that’s embarrassing,” he said with a shudder.

The brunette spoke for the first time. “For the record, I did not wear a straw hat for the occasion, or a sash.” She did have a white blouse on, silk, and a navy skirt, short but by no means mini.

Bob gave her a half-smile. “I never dreamed you had, Miss Romaine.”

Now I remembered her.

I noted that she seemed at ease in front of the candidate; being here made her somebody in the campaign.

Schulberg was saying, “If you win big tonight it’ll be thanks to black and brown people. Don’t forget that, Bob, if you find yourself making a victory speech. You’re the only white man in this country they trust.”

“If Drew Pearson hasn’t changed that,” Bob said glumly, referring to a column that laid the Martin Luther King wiretap at his feet.

Frankenheimer said, “Bob, what’s this about me going up with you on that postage-stamp stage for your big speech? You don’t want to be seen with me!”

Bob gave him the “What’s Up Doc?” grin. “I can’t be too particular, campaigning.”

“A Hollywood director standing next to you on that dais is lousy for your man-of-the-people image. Surround yourself with Chavez and that guy from the Auto Workers, Schrade. Best I just wait back behind the stage till you finish.”

Bob thought about that for a second, then said, “When I say, ‘Let’s go on to win it in Chicago,’ or something to that effect, you go collect your Rolls. Wait for us by the kitchen, then drive us to the factory.”

“What factory?” I asked.

“The Factory,” Frankenheimer said, addressing the slow student in the classroom. “Nightclub over on North LePeer that Salinger has a piece of.” To Bob he said, “I’ll have a table waiting for you and Ethel with Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Jean Seburg, Andy Williams...”

The glittery list went on. How did Bob’s man-of-the-people image fit in with jet set hobnobbing and riding around in a Rolls-Royce?

Misreading me, Bob said, “You can skip the nightclub baloney if you like.”

“That,” I said, “is exactly the kind of place you need a bodyguard.”

The brunette, who’d been taking all this in, flashed me a chin-crinkly smile and said, “Who do you think you’re fooling, Nate? You just want to meet Sharon Tate.”

So she remembered me, too.

“Well,” Bob said to me, almost irritated, “I don’t need a bodyguard here. I’m obviously among friends. I’m going across the hall to check on Ethel and maybe get away from this madness for a while.”

I fell in after him, but he turned and raised a warning forefinger, then wound through the bodies casting smiles and nods like manna to the masses, and went out.

I turned and Frankenheimer was gone. Schulberg, too.

That left the brunette, whose cocktail glass was empty.

“Let me get that freshened for you,” I said, wanting to be useful to somebody.

“Sure. Ginger.”

“And what, seven?”

“No. Ginger and ginger.” Her very dark brown eyes flicked with amusement in their near Cher setting. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Sure I do. You’re on TV.”

“Guilty. Just guest shots and bits. Never did land a series for all the pilots I shot.”

“In the war?”

Her laugh was nice, throaty but feminine. “I fought a different war than you.”

We were threading through the rolled-up white shirt sleeves toward the bar where a Chicano guy in a tux jacket was making drinks for a steady crowd and wishing he were anywhere else.

“I Dream of Jeannie,” I said. “Harem girl, right? Bewitched. Salem-style witch, only glamorous?”

Her mouth was wide, in a nice way; it widened further in a smile no whiter than a Bing Crosby Christmas. She said, “You don’t look like somebody who watches that kind of pap.”

“If the pap has Barbara Eden or Elizabeth Montgomery in it, I’ll lower myself. Now, if you had a juicy role on a McHale’s Navy, I’d never know.”

We were in line at the bar.

“I’ve been on that and worse,” she confessed. “Now, you? You look more like the Have Gun — Will Travel type.”

I wished I were traveling with a gun. “Maverick’s more my style.”

The cat eyes narrowed. “Weren’t you a consultant on Peter Gunn? Wasn’t that based on you?”

“That’s the rumor. And I do remember you, Miss Romaine. Nita. But not entirely from situation comedy appearances.”

It had been a good five years, and only that one evening. A very nice evening though. Ships that docked in the night.

We were at the counter now and the bartender gave Nita her ginger ale and made me a rum and Coke; and I made a friend forever stuffing a five spot in his tip jar.

The chairs and couches were long gone but we found a corner to sit in, on the floor, like kids at an after-prom party. She sat with her knees up and a lot of her pretty tanned nylon-free legs showing. Like we said in the service, nice gams. They probably still said that on McHale’s Navy.

“I’m hoping,” she said, after a sip of her ginger ale, “that you remember me for more than my TV walk-ons. Neither Barbara nor Elizabeth are big on giving other girls much airtime.”

“Guess I haven’t seen you turn up on the tube lately,” I admitted. “But you’re still acting?”

The eyes were big and brown; the Cher makeup was overkill, as naturally lovely as she was. “My agent claims I am. Calling myself a ‘girl’ is a little sad, don’t you think? I’m at that age where casting directors say nice things that don’t include, ‘You’ve got the part.’”

“You look young to me.”

“Sure. But you’re, what? Sixty?”

A gut punch but I still managed to laugh. “Maybe, but then I never claimed to be a ‘boy.’”

“Oh, I know you’re a boy. I remember Vegas even if you don’t.”

I shrugged. “My memory is pretty good for a man of my advanced years.”

It had been a JFK campaign event. She’d been heading up the Young Professionals for Kennedy. I asked her if she was doing the same thing for Bob.

“Not quite. I’m attached to the Kennedy Youth campaign. Kind of a den mother for the actual girls out fundraising. I help with secretarial work, too. When you’re an actress in this town and don’t care to wait tables, typing a hundred words a minute comes in handy.”

Smoke drifted overhead forming a cloud that promised no rain, despite the room’s pre-thunder murmur.

“About Vegas,” she said.

“What about Vegas?”

“I was a little drunk.”

“Not on ginger ale you weren’t.”

“Well, I wasn’t drinking ginger ale. Tonight is work, so I’m not drinking. What I mean about Vegas is... uh... I’m not always that easy.”

“Oh, hell, I am,” I said.

That made her laugh.

“Or anyway,” I said, “I used to be, before I got so elderly.”

Her mouth pursed up like a kiss was coming, but it was a promise not kept. “I bet you still do all right with the ‘girls’ — or maybe the ladies. Are you married, Mr. Heller?”

“No. Why, don’t you keep up with my press?”

She put a hand to her bosom. “No, I’m sorry, since the acting roles slowed I’ve had to cancel the clipping service.”

I shrugged. “I can catch you up easy enough. I have one ex-wife and one son who, this morning, said ‘Fuck you, Dad,’ because he’s for Eugene McCarthy. How about you?”

“No children. One ex-husband. I’m fussier about husbands now. I’m looking for a prospect about, oh, sixty, who is very well-fixed. What they used to call a sugar daddy.”

I nodded sagely. “You know, I have certain connections at a prosperous private detective agency. I could arrange a bargain rate for locating such a rare catch.”

We sat and talked that way for a while. We laughed quite a bit. I didn’t recollect her being that funny back in Vegas, but then she admitted being tight that night. I said that’s just how I remembered her, with a sexual tinge that got me playfully slapped on the sleeve. I did not tell her that I also recalled how beautiful she had looked naked with neon-mingled moonlight coming in the windows of my Flamingo bedroom.

Barbara Eden and Elizabeth Montgomery who?

About then I noticed the guy ordering over at the bar — about five-eight, average build, in gray slacks and a dark sweater over a button-down white shirt on this hot June night. Tan with curly bushy black hair including sideburns, his eyes striking me as both furtive and sleepy. Two PRESS badges clipped together around his neck with what I recognized even at a distance was one of the PT-109 tie clips that Bob and his people sometimes handed out.

“You need another refill?” I asked Nita as I got to my feet. She didn’t, and I added, “Well, save my place. I need to freshen mine.”

Other than the guy in the sweater with the double press passes, the bar was in a momentary lull. I stepped up just as the Chicano bartender announced, “Scotch and water, sir,” handing a glass to his curly-haired customer.

Conversationally, I asked, “What paper?”

“Uh, pardon?” He blinked at me, hooded eyes going suddenly wide.

“What paper are you covering this for?”

“Uh... freelancer. Something this important, you know, someone will want it.”

“You have any I.D. you can show me, besides those press passes?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Senator Kennedy’s security chief. Let’s see your I.D.”

He smiled nervously. “Okay, you got me.”

“Have I.”

“I’m just a fan. Bluffed my way in. Snatched a couple of passes. So sue me.”

I nodded sideways toward the door. “You’re on your way out. Leave the drink.”

He had a trembling look now, his voice defensive. “Oh yeah? Let’s see your credentials!”

I put my glass on the counter while the bartender watched with amused interest. I plucked the Scotch and soda glass from the guy’s grasp and set it down, too. Then I took the curly-haired interloper by an upper arm and walked him out quick enough that he barely maintained his balance and during our exit I only had to say “Excuse me” two or three times.

In the hall, I shoved him against the wall and patted him down. Clean. Then I walked him down to the elevators.

“I’m just a fan!” he said.

“Then you can keep the tie-clip but give me the press passes.”

Pouting, he slipped them off his neck and handed them over. I pushed the elevator button and we waited.

He said, “You’re not a very nice man.”

The elevator doors opened.

“I get that sometimes,” I said, and shoved him in.

The elevator doors closed on him.

Returning to the Royal Suite, I found Nita in the corner where I’d left her; she was hugging those nice legs.

I crouched and gave her an apologetic smile.

Her big brown eyes got bigger. “What was that about?”

“An interloper. Harmless fan. But it’s indicative.”

“Of what?”

“The slipshod security around here. Look, I have to get back to the Senator. He doesn’t like it, but he needs somebody looking out for him. And I’m elected.”

Her pink-lipstick smile was mildly mocking. “Did you have to run against anybody in the primary?”

“Yeah. Peter Gunn.”

We shared a smile, then I was moving.

I found Bob in the Royal Suite’s master bedroom, where some of his closest cronies were crowded around the TV sitting on pulled-over chairs or on the floor while David Brinkley on screen echoed Bob’s irritation with California’s new computerized voting machines. Ethel, looking young and fresh, was seated on the foot of the bed in an orange-and-white minidress with white stockings. Bob was pacing off to one side like an expectant father, though his wife was less than three months along.

He saw me enter and came over, sticking a fresh stick of Beech-Nut peppermint gum in his mouth and chewing it into submission. “What are you doing here, Nate?”

“Haven’t you heard? I work here.”

I told him about the curly-haired interloper but he didn’t seem too concerned. Still, he didn’t shoo me away. Instead, he said, “I need some space.”

He went out into the hall, which was largely empty, and I kept an eye on him but gave him plenty of room. He had gone from this morning’s easy grace to animal prowling his cage. He paced in thought, pausing to scribble notes about his speech on a little pad, tucking it away and then punching a fist in a hand repeatedly as he resumed his trip to nowhere.

Finally some reporters noticed him and gathered around. Bob leaned his back to the wall.

From one reporter came, “What do you think of the returns so far?”

“I can’t comment on that yet.” His arms were folded, his eyes on the carpet, his tone barely audible.

Another voice: “Looks like a long road ahead. How do you feel about having to deal with all the politics and politicians?”

His eyes came up and, surprisingly, brought a smile along. His voice picked up traction, too. “Oh, I like politicians. I like politics. Like to hear a favorite quote of mine and my father’s? ‘Politics is an honorable adventure.’ Know who said that? Lord Tweedsmuir. Anybody know who that is?”

No one did, me included.

Bob said, “He was a Scottish statesman who wrote under the name John Buchan — wrote The 39 Steps.”

They scribbled as he headed back to the Royal Suite and I fell in alongside him.

I said, “39 Steps. Isn’t that the old Hitchcock picture?”

“It is. You ever read Buchan?”

“No. I don’t read thrillers.”

“Oh?”

“I live them.”

He liked that. He was smiling and laughing and his hand was on my shoulder as we entered the Royal Suite.

Three

Time had ceased to have meaning. Our corner of the fifth floor of the Ambassador Hotel was like Las Vegas only not fun and you weren’t losing anything but your mind.

Bob would wander to 511 and check in with advisors and aides who clustered in intense little groups. He’d pace, chew gum and scribble in his notebook. Sit sullenly against the wall on the floor, then come to life when new information came in, all of it favorable and yet never favorable enough.

I tried not to dog his heels, keeping him in close sight but never breathing down his neck, and only getting snippets of conversations when he dealt with Mank and various advisors and aides.

The only place they could achieve privacy in this loony bin was the can, where for conferences Bob would sit on the sink counter, Mank take the lid-down toilet and whoever else was in there perch along the tub’s edge. Then they’d close themselves in and I’d just watch the door like the next frustrated guy in line for the facilities.

And of course those who actually had that need found themselves scurrying for standing room or immediate seating in either the press room or Royal Suite. This would have been comical if it hadn’t just added to this bizarre crawling along at a frantic pace.

Bob himself would move from 511’s political whirl to the Royal Suite’s festivities, only briefly nodding and bestowing a few words to the swarming celebrities before slipping into the master bedroom where he would again sit on the floor against a wall and maybe smoke a cigarillo and sporadically make more notes on his speech in progress.

On these Royal Suite visits, tagging after Bob, I’d send my eyes searching out Nita and she would smile at me and I would smile back and shrug. It was as if we were both wondering whether our brief time together was a continuation of, or the finale to, our Flamingo fling.

The two networks called the primary election for Bob at eleven. By then Bob was back in room 511, where I heard Mank say, “If L.A. County holds up, some of McCarthy’s team’ll be ready to jump ship. The nomination belongs to whoever can get to the undeclared delegates headed to Chicago. Time to call in Jack’s markers, Bob.”

Bob always looked uneasy when his brother was mentioned in terms of political capital, but he nodded. Grimaced a little, but nodded.

A crewcut bespectacled advisor said, “We need to get our guys off the media calls and onto phoning delegates. ASAP.”

Everybody nodded but me, the invisible man, but when Mank said to Bob, “We need to find somebody to type up that speech,” I materialized to chime in: “How about Nita Romaine?”

Mank and Bob looked at me as if Bob’s dog Freckles (who was among the Royal Suite guests) had spoken. The crewcut guy explained for me: “One of our staffers.”

“Hundred words per minute,” I said.

“Fetch her,” Mank said. Then to Bob: “Get your notes together. Be sure to thank everybody, Chavez, Schrade, Unruh, Rosey, Rafer. Hit the black vote hard. And talk about your admiration for Don Drysdale.”

“Who?”

Mank’s eyes flared. “Jesus, Bob! If America finds out you don’t follow baseball, we’re screwed. Drysdale pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight!”

Unfazed, Bob said to me, “Nate, have Miss Romaine add something to that effect. How we hope we’ll have as much good fortune in our campaign as Don Drysdale did tonight.”

The crewcut advisor was already on the move. “I’ll rustle up a typewriter.”

Mank took Bob by the arm and started gently hustling him out. “Time to do the network interviews. We’ve got both Mudd and Vanocur chomping at the bit.”

Roger Mudd was CBS and Sander Vanocur was NBC.

In the outer Royal Suite, Nita was in the middle of a conversation with Rosey Grier when I stole her away. I explained the situation and she got on board immediately, no qualms or nerves. Took a while for that advisor to organize a little portable typewriter, but then we were in business.

We soon had to ourselves the much-envied office space that was Room 511’s bathroom. Nita stood at the sink counter typing on a little electric Smith-Corona plugged into a shaving socket while I sat in a dignified manner on the lid-down stool, dictating from Bob’s hurried notes as best I could. Some whole paragraphs were crossed out, words substituted and phrases rewritten, but what was left seemed fine. I made sure Drysdale got a mention, even though I had almost as little interest in baseball as Bob. I was a boxing fan.

Her work completed, Rita handed me several sheets and said, “I kind of feel like we’re a part of history.”

“We are,” I said, “if Bob’s the next president. Otherwise we won’t rate a footnote.”

“Oh, he’ll win. I know he will.”

I was less convinced, but then she was Hollywood and I was Chicago.

In the Royal Suite, the good news had launched the cocktail party into the stratosphere. Nita re-upped while I went to the master bedroom to deliver the speech pages. I cracked the door and Bob was standing right there, getting into his suitcoat. It was a little startling. Apparently his interviews hadn’t taken any longer than us typing up his speech.

“You scared me, Nate,” he said lightly. “That’s not a bodyguard’s role.”

I slipped inside. He’d been at the full-length mirror on the other side of the door, making himself presentable. We moved a little deeper into the room. The crowd had cleared but for his son David, a little man in a striped tie, blue blazer and gray slacks, sitting on the edge of the bed watching his dad with glowing pride. The twelve-year-old had a few small Band-Aids on his face from this morning’s near tragedy.

Still at the mirror, Bob glanced over the pages. “This seems fine. Doesn’t need to be the Gettysburg Address.”

The door opened tentatively and it was Ethel, looking very girlish in her pink dress and white stockings.

“Even in my own bedroom,” she said with mock annoyance, “I can’t find a little privacy.”

She closed the door and straightened her husband’s tie, tugged at his coat, then adjusted his pocket hanky.

“Now you look like a president,” she said.

“Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves,” he said.

His twelve-year-old son rushed over.

“You’re a winner again, Dad!” the boy bubbled. “Aren’t you excited?”

Bob knelt and ruffled his son’s hair. “Over the moon,” he said.

Impulsively, the boy kissed his father on the cheek as the mother looked on fondly, their springer spaniel coming out of somewhere to dance around them, and I got the hell out. I was enough of a sleuth to detect a private family moment when I saw one.

I caught up with Nita in what might have been the go-go party at the start of a Laugh-In episode. She was talking to Milton Berle near a pocket of dancing, giddy laughter adding grace notes to “Cry Like a Baby” on the stereo.

As I drew her away, I said, “Stick with me — unless you wanna know if the rumors about Uncle Miltie are true.”

She smirked at that, looking more than a little like Stefanie Powers. “Where are we off to?”

“I’m getting you on that stage. You’ve earned it.”

“I think you’re just trying to get lucky.”

“I think you’re right.”

In five minutes, around 11:45 P.M., the candidate’s entourage of key journalists, union officials, advisors and aides assembled in the narrow hallway, like fraternity brothers stuffing a phone booth sideways. As the candidate’s bodyguard, I was waiting for Bob and his wife at the master bedroom door, Nita just behind me to one side.

Big Rosey Grier and lanky Rafer Johnson approached and introduced themselves, as if that were necessary. But in fact we hadn’t met. Firm handshakes were exchanged, Grier’s massive hand swallowing mine like a largemouth bass gulping down a minnow.

“Mr. Heller,” Grier said, “I understand you’re filling in for Bill Barry tonight.”

“I am.”

Olympian Johnson said, “Well, we’re here to back you up all the way, Mr. Heller.”

“Make it Nate,” I said, “and you’re Rosey and you’re Rafer and we’re all buddies here. With luck we won’t be needed. I think you know, Miss Romaine, Rosey. She just helped type up the candidate’s victory speech.”

Grier smiled and nodded at Nita, and told her how everybody needed to pitch in and make this happen, when we heard, slightly muffled on the other side of the door, Ethel say, “Ready?”

The couple was no doubt checking that mirror one last time.

Bob’s slightly muffled voice came: “Ready.”

The crowded hallway parted like the Red Sea and the Kennedy couple made their way to the front of the pack where Mank waited. Nita and I tagged after.

At the elevators, Bob said to his press secretary, almost sighing, “Mank, it’s late and I’m beat. Let’s take the freight elevator again and avoid pushing through the crowd.”

Bob was the boss.

We went down with the candidate and his wife, Mank, Grier and Johnson also making the trip. We came out at the edge of the bustling main kitchen.

The rumpled press secretary took me aside and pointed. “Around there’s the way to the stage, through what they call the Pantry, an adjacent serving area. We’ll be going through there on the way, and back again, after, to get to the temporary press room.”

“I better check it out.”

“Yes you should.”

I entered into a long narrow passageway representing just the kind of grubby space you hope wouldn’t be part of any restaurant kitchen: bare sandy-colored cement floor, dirty blanched walls, a rusty ice machine and shelves of unwashed glasses on one side opposite a row of three steel serving tables, one all but covered by trays of unwashed dishes. Beyond that was an archway onto the main kitchen where Chicano busboys and cooks wore white smocks like medics on the edge of an accident scene; they stood clustered together, obviously eager to see the famous Kennedy.

Among them, with a holstered sidearm, was a pasty-faced security guard in a brown uniform and dark cap. So there was some security, at least. A few network TV cameramen were posted, too. At the east end was a door that I went through into an area with restrooms and the rear doors of the Colonial Room, labeled PRESS. At the west end, where we’d be returning from the Embassy Room stage, were double doors opening onto the backstage area, an unadorned narrow corridor with a slight slope.

Not loving any of that, I returned to Mank and said, “Looks fairly clear. Lot of kitchen staff, though. I could frisk them.”

“No need,” Bob said, stepping forward. “Let’s get out there.”

The waiting crowd agreed: “We want Bobby! We want Bobby!”

A campaign advance man, two hotel personnel and I led the way through this so-called Pantry — an insult to diners everywhere — with Bob and Mank behind me followed by Ethel, Rosey and Rafer, Nita in the next row, as our small army of key advisors and union leaders and bigtime reporters like Hamill and Breslin trooped through the unappetizing area. Some of those Chicano workers surged out from the kitchen to shake hands and get autographs. Bob accommodated them. Then from behind the wall of brown faces and white aprons came that self-professed dark-curly-haired fan I’d hustled out upstairs, a tube of some kind in his hands.

I got him by the arm and was yanking him back, but he appealed to Bob, “Please! I have a campaign poster for you to sign, Senator Kennedy!”

“It’s all right, Nate,” Bob said, nodding to me to let go of the guy, and scrawled an autograph on the tube itself. I hauled the fan out of Bob’s path and said through my teeth, “Don’t let me see you again,” and he scurried away. No surprise finding a rat in this kitchen.

That security guard hadn’t done a damn thing about it, and I got in his face and said, “Sharpen the hell up.”

“Yes, sir,” he mumbled. His face had a soft look, gray, the color of wet newspaper.

Nita clutched my arm, but her eyes were looking at me differently. “Nate, you’re scaring me.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.

Bob himself was in the lead now and, in a few eye blinks, we were through the double doors and up the slight incline within that featureless corridor. Then Grier, Johnson and I went through a door into the Embassy Ballroom, followed by Bob and Ethel, and the “We want Bobby” chant quickly transformed into cheers.

We’d come out to the left of the stage. After a moment of getting our bearings and registering the ballroom’s overwhelming heat, we went up three creaky stairs onto the spongy platform, red-white-and-blue bunting over us and gold curtains to our backs, thunderous applause and cheers engulfing us in waves rivaling the ones that had almost consumed Bob and son David a hundred years ago this morning.

I was already sweating and I wasn’t alone. The TV lights at the back of the room were burning hot, blinding bright, but that only ignited an adoring explosion from a crowd trapped in this sweltering space for hours. Bodiless heads and waving arms created a surreal scene out of Dali with red and blue and white balloons bouncing up to the curved ceiling with its glittering chandeliers while below straw hats seemed to bob in the crowd, as if tossed to float in the waters of some other time and place.

The chant of “We want Bobby!” had resumed with an edge of hysteria, and the candidate tried for long moments to rein them in. The mood was both exhilarating and frightening — this crowd loved their man so much they might tear him to pieces. The stage beneath the feet of the twenty-or-so of us crammed there felt as if it might give way at any moment, which seemed only to add to the anxiety-edged thrill.

When Bob was finally able to begin his speech — which was frequently interrupted by cheers of “Kennedy power!” and “Bobby power!” — he thanked everybody Mankiewicz had told him to, and more. Drysdale got his mention and so did the family dog. Ethel came last, and Bob embarrassedly said to her with a fond glance, “I’m not doing this in any order of importance.” She beamed of course.

“Our speech sounds pretty good,” Nita whispered. She was holding my hand.

I said, “For a list.”

It improved. He went on to say the showing in the cities and the suburbs and the rural areas indicated how well the campaign could do all around the country.

“We can get past the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society,” he said, “whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or over the war in Vietnam. We can start to work together again. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country... Now my thanks to all of you, and it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”

Joyful screams again swept the room.

Bashful Bob flashed a grin and the V-for-Victory/Peace Sign, then turned to his right to go toward where that doorway into the Embassy Room had led all of us onto the stage. But a hotel staffer called out, “This way, Senator,” and guided him toward the rear curtains into the corridor behind. That got me clogged up momentarily with the others on the stage, reorienting ourselves to follow Bob and the hotel man, and when I had almost caught up, Ethel was having trouble back there getting down. I jumped to the floor to help her.

When that was safely accomplished, the pregnant woman said, “Never mind me. Help the Senator.”

I sensed her behind me as I slipped through the supporters, reporters and aides, Nita included, attempting to catch up with Bob, stray balloons from the ballroom popping underfoot. The candidate and my unofficial bodyguard assistants, Rosey and Rafer, were going down the gentle slope to the double doors beyond which awaited the narrow Pantry passageway.

Our group now entered an area crammed with staffers, reporters, photographers and gawkers. Bluish fluorescent lights cast an eerie glow, as a smiling Bob — up ahead — stopped to shake hands with white-coated kitchen staff between the big ice-making machine and the three lined-in-a-row service tables where a clump of people stood, some standing up on the things.

Back toward the east end of the passage that goddamn fan with the poster tube had stuck around, standing next to a cute curvy girl in a white dress with black polka dots; better company than he deserved, and no accounting for taste. A throbbing “We want Bobby!” seeped through the walls from the nearby Embassy Room, adding to the frenzy of an experience that seemed at once sped up and slowed down.

This halting progress was further stalled by a radio reporter. Bob glanced back, raised his eyebrows, then looked past me, no doubt at Ethel. Barely audible over the crowd’s drone came a pointless question: “Senator, how are you going to counter Mr. Humphrey and his delegates?”

Bob told the man’s microphone, “Just get back into the struggle,” and did his best to press on.

That puffy gray-faced security guard was finally doing his job, just behind Bob, trying to help move him through the gaggle, guiding him with a hand on his right arm. The press of the burgeoning crowd, infested by teenage girls shrilling, “We want Bobby!” overwhelmed me in the small space for a moment, and I had all but lost sight of Bob when a young-sounding voice yelled, “Kennedy, you son of a bitch!”

Then came the first pop, and I thought at first another balloon had burst, followed by another. Then a rapid volley — pop-pop-pop-pop-pop — like distant gunfire or Chinatown firecrackers.

Not balloons.

Bob jerked forward, his hands flying up toward his face, then his arms went over his head as if in surrender and he fell backward onto that filthy gray concrete floor, almost as if he had slipped on it. Tall Paul Schrade, the UAW guy, went down, too, bleeding from the forehead. People were diving out of the way and onto the cement where Bob already sprawled, blood running down the side of his face, recent cheers and applause supplanted by immediate cries and shouts.

The security guard had his gun out and I yelled at him to put it away: “Too many people in here!” Five feet or so beyond the fallen senator stood a small swarthy man with a big gun; his dark blue jacket and dark bushy hair initially made me take him for that fan from before, but no, that guy was at the other end of the Pantry and this one right here was smaller, almost tiny.

For a frozen moment the shooter maintained his position as if he were between rounds at a firing range, and I pushed through and practically crawled over the people scrambling to find safety in the small space and I probably damn near trampled several, but I dove at the little bastard and shoved him against one of the steel serving tables and yanked the fucking gun from his grasp and slammed it onto the steel table. He looked at me with big blank almost-black eyes, buttons sewn on a doll’s face, and that nothing expression was as strange as anything I’d ever seen. I punched him hard, twice, hard right-hand punches and that zero expression didn’t change. But now I had him pinned and others were converging, and at the forefront were Grier and Johnson. So was that hotel man who’d guided Bob.

That should have been the end of it, but despite the blankness of his expression, he was squirming, trying to get loose, and my God he was strong, so much power in such a little bastard!

Breathing hard, I yelled, “Take him, Rosey, take him!”

As others were closing in, Grier picked the shooter up and slammed him with professional skill onto that serving table with a whump! Trays of unwashed dishes danced.

But that allowed the little bastard to, damn!, snatch back that gun, a .22 revolver!

All of us who were on top of the punk talked over ourselves: “Get the gun, get the gun!” “Get the fucking gun!” “Rafer, get the goddamn gun!”

But our captive was shooting again, orange-blue flames licking out the barrel of the .22, and bystanders were falling like clay pigeons over five or six seconds that felt like forever. The blank-eyed gunman kept firing even as Rosey Grier and several others of us struggled with him. Finally he was clicking on an empty chamber.

Then the big lineman wrested the gun away from the little man, whose squirming finally stopped as he stared blankly at the ceiling, as if those bluish fluorescent tubes above held a secret.

Five wounded besides Kennedy were slumped on the floor here and there, in various postures of pain and shock, getting help from whoever was nearest. The end of the shooting and capture of the assailant did not bring a lull of quiet. Instead pandemonium descended, screams, cries, obscenities, wails of “Not again!” and “No!”; but also a scurrying for help, medical and police.

A white-jacketed busboy — a small dark man whose agonized expression was everything the other small dark man’s hadn’t been — was kneeling as if in prayer, or maybe in prayer, by the fallen Bob on the floor, spread-eagled as if nailed to a cross waiting to be raised into proper crucifixion position, precious blood pooling like spilled wine and shimmering, reflecting the popping flashbulbs and positioning of TV lights.

For just a moment I knelt next to him, because I could see a near-hysterical Ethel being escorted up to him by Mank, and I would soon be in the way.

Then he said the last thing he ever said to me: “Is everybody okay?”

Four

Grier and Johnson had the gunman pinioned on the stainless steel cart, the little man no longer squirming like an unruly child but lost in a motionless daze. It took more than three of us to subdue him — Plimpton, Breslin, a Kennedy aide and the hotel man who’d guided Bob off the stage also piled on at one point. But the footballer and decathlete had taken charge and were now, in a way, protecting the assailant, as a good number of the seventy or eighty people piled into this so-called Pantry clearly wanted blood for blood.

I was wondering if the little shooter was hyped-up on something — the dilated pupils seemed to indicate that. Might help explain the superhuman strength.

With Ethel kneeling at Bob’s side now, I went back over to the site of the struggle, taking my belt off. I had Grier hold the little man down as Johnson and I cinched my belt around our captive’s ankles, even as an angry mini-mob bore down.

“We want him alive,” I said, the two black faces dripping sweat looking at me curiously. “Or do you want another Oswald?”

“We don’t want another Oswald!” Grier said with a forceful head shake in the midst of all this.

Somebody heard that and echoed, “We don’t want another Oswald!” Several others repeated this new mantra.

Nonetheless a male voice shouted, “Kill him!” Other voices joined in: “Kill him! Kill him now!”

Peace-loving supporters consumed with rage pressed in trying to pummel our captive, reporter Hamill in the lead, several at a time taking looping swings around us, punching, kicking, one grabbing the shooter’s leg and twisting it.

As if a mosquito had bit him, the gunman said, “Stop that — you’re hurting my leg,” and it understandably infuriated his attackers.

Yet we pushed them away somehow, and Breslin shamed fellow New Yorker Hamill back: “Think you’re fucking Jack Ruby or somethin’?”

Bob’s brother-in-law/advisor, the collegiate-looking Steve Smith, was yelling, “Please clear the area! Please don’t panic. Everything is all right.”

Of course the circumstances were anything but all right, though over the din of swearing and screaming, a woman’s voice could be heard: “Pray!”

At least two persons were already doing that — the fallen man’s wife, kneeling at his side, and the man himself, whose blood-streaked hands cradled a rosary to his chest.

Finally a quartet of uniformed cops came in and collected the shooter from us and carried him out, holding him over their heads like a football hero after the game. Poor baby had a broken finger and a sprained ankle.

I was dispatched to find a doctor. I made my way through the double doors and into the featureless corridor and up onto the platform, empty of people now, devoid of triumph. The cheers of minutes before were wails and shrieks now, hysteria spreading like a brushfire. Kennedy Youth girls in red, white and blue ribbons and jaunty straw hats hugged each other and sobbed; a few were on their knees praying. A big black guy in a dark suit that might have been a circuit-riding preacher’s was pounding the wall with his fists, yelling up to a sky somewhere beyond the chandeliers, demanding, “Why, oh Lord? Why again? Why another Kennedy?” A college longhair with an RFK peace button was shouting, “Fuck this country! Fuck this fucking country!”

On stage, using the same microphone Bob had, I asked in that time-honored cliched way, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Smith came up onto the stage behind me. He leaned in to the mic and said, “Please clear the ballroom, so we can get medical help to the Senator and other victims.”

Soon a doctor — the husband of a Kennedy campaign worker — was bending down by Bob, who seemed awake but as dazed as his attacker had been. The doctor reached behind Bob’s head, felt around. Bob’s face tightened. Moments later the doctor’s hand came back with a bloody forefinger.

He said, “This will remove cranial pressure.”

The victim’s wife had gone off to get a bag of ice for the medic and, on her return, Bob said softly, “Oh, Ethel.”

Shortly thereafter two ambulance attendants rolled a gurney in. Bob protested weakly: “Don’t lift me... please don’t lift me.” But they did anyway, gently, and then wheeled him out. The other major player in the drama had departed the stage.

Now the Pantry was again just an embarrassing display of a celebrated hotel’s questionable kitchen practices, its floor littered with trash and cigarettes and a good man’s blood.

In the melee I’d lost track of Nita. Not surprisingly, many had, when the shots were firing every which way, just scattered for their lives. Nita was not among the victims and that was a good goddamn start. I returned to the fifth floor, in hopes of finding her, which I quickly did.

In the living room of the Royal Suite, the victory party was now a vigil, a mix of Kennedy staffers, celebrities, activists and a few reporters who had gathered, waiting for updates.

Nita was sitting on the floor in the same corner where we’d first chatted. Legs up, she was hugging them to her, arms clasped under her knees; what remained of the Cher-like makeup was tear-streaked racoon smears, pink lipstick gone, the big brown eyes fixed in a hollow unblinking stare. She looked like hell, frankly, but just seeing her alive and unharmed was the first welcome sight since the gunfire rang out down in Pantry hell.

I joined her, taking my previous spot against the wall. Sat with my legs outstretched and one ankle over the other; got out of my suitcoat and piled it next to me. My shirt was soaked. I loosened my tie. The suite’s air-conditioning helped. But I felt like I’d awoken from a terrible dream to find myself drenched in night sweats.

The TV in the background was playing the victory speech Nita had typed up, an ironic ghost haunting the place. This much smaller group than before huddled around the TV but for a few haggard souls filling the suite’s Danish modern furniture, little of which I’d even noticed when the cocktail party was in full swing.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said. Her voice was small. From such a self-assured woman, this was as startling as a scream.

I didn’t say anything. I thought I knew what she meant by ashamed: ashamed to be an American. For killing our own, our boys in Vietnam, our leaders at home. Ashamed to be a human being. If God created Man in his image, what kind of monster must He be? If we were the top species on this ant-farm planet, we must be the work of an underachiever among Supreme Beings.

But I was wrong. That wasn’t it.

“I ran,” she said, barely audible. “So many gunshots all around me and I panicked and ran out of there. Right as he was being struck down like his brother.”

She started to cry, but they were dry, wrenching sobs, tears long since spent, and I drew her close and held her to me. She considered herself a coward, like I thought myself a failure. Some fucking bodyguard. I should never have let Bob talk me into going into this unarmed.

But for all the self-recrimination, I knew: when somebody was willing to lay his life on the line to take yours, you were going to die.

Someone switched the channel and the speech Nita typed up started in again.

“I wish they’d quit playing that,” she said into my chest. “I can’t stand hearing it. I just can’t stand hearing it.”

As if she’d willed it, the speech was interrupted. On the TV Frank Mankiewicz was speaking outside the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, saying the operation was still underway and taking longer than anticipated.

Not a good sign.

“I can’t take any more,” she said.

“You have a room here?”

She nodded. Something like a smile formed. “But you’re not... not getting lucky tonight, Nate.”

“Nobody is. Let me take you.”

She was on the third floor, where I walked her to the door. She faced me with both hands in mine. I kissed her forehead.

“Do you ever get to Chicago?” I asked.

She nodded. “A gig now and then. Dinner theater.”

“Call me when you’re in town.”

“I will. A-1 Detective Agency, right?”

“First in the Yellow Pages.”

She gave me a kiss on the mouth. Quick. Again, the start of something or the finish? Would this tragedy bind us or separate us? Who could say...?

She slipped inside with a little girl’s wave.

Back on the fifth floor I almost bumped into two phone company employees in coveralls who were hauling the extra phones out of the press room. The door to 511 was open and it was empty in there, some trash on the floor but nothing like the Pantry’s, the workmen pulling wires from the wall and coiling them up, routinely professional as if this night were like any other.

When they had gone, 511 was empty. I went to that bathroom where so many political confabs had gone down just hours ago and where Nita and I put the speech together from Bob’s notes. A shaving kit had been left behind — electric shaver, aftershave, powder. The bath towels were fresh, only hand towels had been used.

Impulsively, I got out of my suit and piled it and underwear and socks with my shoes outside the can, where they’d be away from the moisture. My belt was lost to history. Then I took a long shower, good and hot; hand soap was still in its wrapper. This was one of those tubs with showerhead and curtains affairs. I didn’t close the curtains and the mirror fogged up. I had to towel off the glass before using the electric shaver and then splashing on some Mennen’s.

When I put my shirt and suit back on, they were dry. They didn’t smell wonderful, but you can’t have everything. Just having them not damp made all the difference. I felt close to human, which was nothing to feel proud about.

I returned to the Royal Suite. Several familiar faces were among those sitting on the floor around the TV, others in chairs and the pulled-over couch — John Lewis shaking his head, George Plimpton with golf-ball eyes, drinking in the latest news. This was nowhere I wanted to be.

Instead I walked aimlessly, almost prowling the sprawling hotel — taking the elevator down to the massive yellow lobby with its pillars and fountains and its red-and-black carpet, leather furniture, assorted ferns. Anywhere you went, it seemed, police were on hand; but not once was I asked for I.D.

The Embassy Ballroom was crawling with scavengers, gleefully gathering souvenirs, posters, banners, rejecting any straw hats with snapped brims and insisting only on the best examples, tossing the others aside. The platform had been taken down. Removed like Bob on his gurney or the gunman into custody. I walked across where we’d all stood and slipped through the golden curtains into the dark corridor and took the trip down the slight incline to those double doors.

I’d expected to see the yellow crime-scene tape common to California but fairly rare elsewhere. But none had been used. I entered, pausing to note the bullet holes in the wood framing. The slugs had, as Nita said, been flying; of course that bushy-haired shooter had been blasting haphazardly away.

I’d expected lab rats would be crawling around the Pantry while the real vermin quivered in their hidey-holes; but the forensics team was already gone, as if the importance of the crime had intimidated them away. Or maybe they were off getting an early breakfast from a more appetizing source. All those policemen around and no police work in progress. The LAPD wasn’t everything Jack Webb cracked it up to be.

At any rate, the place was empty, nothing but the dirty floor, rusty ice-making machine and those steel-topped serving carts in a row. Hard to imagine all those people stuffed in here. The kitchen itself, nearby, was quiet. It was about four in the morning and room service was unavailable now and prep for breakfast not yet started.

Tape on that filthy concrete at my feet marked off where Bob and the others had fallen after the bullets took them down. But a single rose lay in the midst of Bob’s taped-off position. On the wall a homemade sign — apparently predating the shooting, a welcoming for the candidate — said: THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.

Finally I took a cab out to Frankenheimer’s place in Malibu, where I’d left my car. I rode in silence and darkness and the dawn was thinking of happening when the cabbie let me out.

The director was standing on the beach in chinos, a loose shirt and bare feet, hands in his pockets, staring out at the ocean. In the middle of an irregular band of yellow along the horizon burned the bright button of the sun, starting its rise into cloud cover that would soon mute it. The water, calm as pebbled glass, its purple highlighted gold, didn’t know it was day yet.

I walked out to him.

He glanced at me, tall, tan, in Ray-Bans. His body still faced the ocean. “Nate Heller.”

“Yeah. The bodyguard. You oughta make a movie about me. Some very famous people died on my watch. I worked for Huey Long, you know.”

That was almost a smile. “I didn’t know. But don’t beat yourself up. Bob wouldn’t allow security to carry guns, ever.”

“Tell me about it.”

“...He’s not going to make it.”

“No. Digging a bullet out of his brain, we probably don’t want him to. A vegetable doesn’t make much of a president.”

The Ray-Bans stared at me. “Are you that cynical, Heller?”

“I’m trying to be.”

He nodded a little, getting that, shifting his eyes back to the sea.

It was six A.M. when I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow. Lights were on, and I hadn’t left them that way. For the hundredth time I wished that nine millimeter were under my arm. I told myself the A-1 agents handling security at the Pink Palace made it unlikely there was a threat.

But I went in tensed.

Someone lay stretched out on the couch opposite the fireplace, where flames danced; last night had been cold and today so far was no different. My son threw a blanket off and ran to me. He looked at me with red eyes, his face eerily like mine forty years ago. Like Frankenheimer, he was in his bare feet, but otherwise a McCarthy t-shirt and jeans.

Lower lip quivering, voice quavering, he said, “Dad, I’m so sorry.”

And he hugged me, hugged me hard. My arms went around him. That was when some tears slipped out and mingled with the borrowed aftershave. But for the first time since the gunfire, I was smiling.

Bob didn’t die for another day. He was 42. I was already on my way back to Chicago, taking an afternoon flight out on the fifth. If the cops wanted an interview, they knew where to find me.

Five

By one A.M. Friday, June 7, over a thousand mourners were already lined up along East 51st Street, waiting to get into St. Patrick’s, the Gothic cathedral where Bob’s body lay. Among them were college kids with hair like my son’s, black folks including vets in uniform and sometimes wheelchairs, assorted Puerto Ricans and Asians and white people too, all kinds of Americans rich, poor and in between. The church would open at 5:30 and they would begin filing past the pale mahogany coffin on the black steel frame, with the TV cameras and their glaring lights intruding much as they had in the Pantry.

The press and the people were poised to witness the pomp and circumstance of a funeral mass, but I wouldn’t be among them. My mother had been a Catholic but she died young and I never attended a mass in my life, and wasn’t about to start now. My father, who’d been an apostate Jew running a political bookstore on the South Side, had considered my sweet gentle mother’s beliefs nonsense, or else he wouldn’t have committed suicide over his only son, the crooked cop.

I would mourn Bob in my own way.

That wouldn’t include riding the funeral train, with its famous faces and lots of food and drink, though I caught glimpses on TV of the stir the trip caused. A million mourners lined the Penn Central tracks on the 226-mile journey, Boy and Girl Scouts, factory workers and nuns, firemen and brass bands, people hanging from water towers, Little Leaguers in uniform, men with hats off and women clutching male sleeves, citizens brandishing hand-lettered signs (“We Love You, Bobby!”), impromptu public choruses singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That, I understand, is what Andy Williams sang at the mass I’d passed on. I’d been offered a seat both in church and on the train, but said no thanks to both, respectfully.

Glad I did. The twenty-one railcars took over eight hours to get from New York to Washington, D.C. I’d flown from Chicago that morning to our nation’s capital, and was at Arlington for the burial, where I wound up waiting several hours in a drizzle too meager to be metaphorical. The public showing along the way meant the funeral train hadn’t made it into D.C.’s Union Station till after nine P.M., the free food and booze long since run out.

I watched with bitter amusement at Arlington as cemetery officials rushed to change their plans to an evening interment. Floodlights were positioned around the open grave as members of the military handed out thousands of candles, one of which I accepted, now that the half-hearted rain had fizzled out. A nearly full moon hung discreetly over the cemetery, as if any less illumination, or any more, might be disrespectful.

When the funeral motorcade entered the cemetery around ten-thirty, the crowd lining the lane lighted their candles to guide the way. As somebody who got there early, I had a ringside seat when Steve Smith and aides I knew from the Ambassador hoisted the casket and made it somewhat clumsily up the hill to the knoll where Bob’s brother Jack was buried. Bob would rest about thirty feet away.

The service was brief, conducted by the Archbishop of New Orleans, filling in for another high Catholic mucky-muck who’d got sick on the train, the Almighty apparently having a sense of humor similar to mine. John Glenn folded the American flag that had been draped over Bob’s casket and presented it to brother Ted, who handed it off to Bob’s eldest son, Joe, who passed it to his shell-shocked mother. It all should have moved me but only made me feel irritated. I wished that bushy-haired little bastard, Sirhan Sirhan (as we all now knew his name to be), was the one going into the ground, just nowhere near Jack Kennedy.

Leaving, I spotted Peter Lawford and Sidney Poitier and Shirley MacLaine and Lauren Bacall and others of their rarified ilk, including a stringy-haired hippie who turned out to be Bobby Darin, under bright floodlights hovering like spots focused on a dark stage. George Plimpton and John Lewis and Mrs. Martin Luther King, among newsworthy others, trudged off with all the lightness of step of the Bataan death march.

I looked for Nita but no luck. I hadn’t heard from her since that night. Probably she’d had sense enough to stay in L.A. There was, as the police like to say, nothing to see here.

But I had an excuse — Bob had been a friend and I had a right to say goodbye. After all, wasn’t I the trusted bodyguard who fucked up? And, hell, I was going to be in D.C. anyway. A longtime client here had left word at the Mayflower for me to come see him.

The next morning was beautiful and warm and the sun had finally banished the overcast gray, encouraging us to move on from the latest tragedy. This was 1968, after all, and we had more horrors to brace ourselves against. Like a Democratic convention where Robert Kennedy’s delegates would have to choose between cold fish Gene McCarthy with his high-school principal charisma, and passé politico Hubert Humphrey, that too eager-to-please overage needy child.

And hovering over everything were the gleaming eyes, dark jowls and sly smile of a would-be president oblivious to the scream of B-52s, the whir of machine-guns, the swoop of fighter jets, and the pop-pop-pop of firefights, so far away and yet right here.

Georgetown’s shade trees let enough sun through their branches to make interesting patterns of shadow on the well-worn brick sidewalk. The cab had let me out at 1313 29th Street, a Federal-style, brass-appointed, faded yellow-brick residence commanding the corner. Formed from two smallish three-story edifices joined by a central projecting wing, this was the domain of a syndicated columnist whose dozen employees surely felt at home in these onetime slave quarters.

Drew Pearson maintained a quiet dignified residence on one side and on the other a noisy sprawling newsroom where typewriters chattered, newswires tickered their tape, and phones rang and rang and rang, a dozen young men and women moving through all of it in a stop-and-start dance.

Greeting me at the door with a slight, polite smile was a fleshy but not fat man in his mid-forties, about as tall as me, with an oval head, dark hair combed over, sideburns going white. His face was pleasant with light blue eyes a teenage girl would die for, in herself or a boyfriend. His dark suit and tie might have been on loan from a funeral director. On this trip that seemed about right.

“Nate,” Jack Anderson said. “Condolences on the loss of your friend.”

He offered a hand to shake. I took it, thanked him, gave it back.

Legendary legman Anderson had been with Drew Pearson for decades, a real feat, since Jack was a Mormon who didn’t work Sundays, deadlines and breaking news be damned. Or maybe darned.

I followed him inside to the landing separating the two halves of the house.

I said, “Normally I’m met by somebody better-looking than you.”

As long as I’d known him, Pearson had enlisted one fetching young secretary after another to be his latest “fair-haired girl,” traveling with him on lecture dates and out-of-town TV bookings and so on. These were not full-blown affairs (so to speak), rather father-and-daughter relationships that occasionally got incestuous. Pearson’s wife Luvie looked the other way and so did the staff.

Anderson, who was no prude (even if a Mormon with only one wife), glanced back at me as we went down the few stairs into the office area.

“Margaret, I’m afraid, is long gone,” the legman said, referring to the last of the fair-haired girls I’d encountered here. “She left us to get involved with Civil Rights down South.”

“Good for her.”

Unlike several of Pearson’s other “cutie pies” over the decades, pleasantly plump Margaret of the rosy cheeks and long black hair had never succumbed to my charms.

As we cut through the bullpen of desks and file-cabinet-rowed walls where young worker bees buzzed oblivious to our presence, Anderson and I went through into an alcove off of which Pearson’s office nestled. The bullpen and its offshoot small offices were air-conditioned, which the artificial-cooling averse Pearson grudgingly allowed. I slipped out of my Botany 500 jacket and draped it over an arm, anticipating a warm welcome.

Not from Pearson himself, who was pounding away on a battered Smith Corona portable on a metal stand near his desk. He didn’t care if Eisenhower dropped by; if Pearson was in the middle of something at the machine, Ike could wait.

Anderson hadn’t knocked or announced us. Just walked in, pulled up a chair while I took one opposite the desk in this den of an office, slinging my jacket over the back. The dark plaster walls were arrayed with autographed celebrity photos (political and Hollywood) and some framed political cartoon originals with Pearson appearances. To the left, over a working fireplace (not lit, thankfully), a rural landscape hung slightly crooked and obviously amateur. Windowsills were piled with books, between stacks of which a cat snoozed, not bothering to wake up for the new entrants.

An electric fan on a windowsill proved itself no real substitute for air-conditioning, and Pearson was in a short-sleeved pale yellow shirt with a bow tie as crooked as the rural landscape. You could see the cheap thing clipped on. Ah how the mighty had fallen, or anyway stumbled. He was in fewer papers these days, and unless my son had heard me bitching about my sometime client’s stinginess, Sam like most of his age group had no idea who this household name of yesterday was.

A jar of Oreos towered over the cluttered desk, one of the Mormon’s Quaker boss’s few indulgences. Light drinking was another, and fair-haired girls used to be.

But like all of us, Drew Pearson was growing older. No, old. He remained lanky if bonily so now, not the robust presence of before. His short-trimmed hair clung to the sides and in back, snow-white now, dwarfed by a chrome dome. To go with his egg-shaped head, he had a little Poirot mustache, also white, no longer waxed.

Pearson finished his page, all but ripped it from the Smith Corona and tossed it on the desk. He swiveled to me and unleashed his well-modulated, midrange voice.

“Nathan, how is that son of yours?”

I shrugged. “Healthy. Lots of hair. He was going to vote for Gene McCarthy, but I think now maybe his candidate is Bobby Kennedy.”

A curt nod, pursed lips. “Not realistic, then.”

“What kid in his early twenties is?”

“Tell him McCarthy votes with the gas and oil lobby. He can count on Humphrey for good old-fashioned liberal values.”

“Okay.”

That was it for small talk. Not his forte.

“Drew, you don’t have to pretend you liked Bob Kennedy. I’m from Chicago. Politics are just another racket as far as I’m concerned.”

“Cynicism makes an undignified fallback, Nathan.”

“At the circus it’s best you work with a net. You never trusted Bob because he worked for that other McCarthy, a hundred years ago — Joe. And Bob never liked you because you attacked his father in 1960. Now that another son’s in the ground, what’s the goddamn difference?”

The Quaker did not like that kind of language. His blue eyes — that same ice blue as Anderson’s — widened momentarily, but he didn’t comment on my profanity.

Instead he said, “Bobby might have grown into it. But he was too young to be president.”

“You don’t get any older than he is now.”

That didn’t change Pearson’s dismissive attitude. “The kids only liked him for that shaggy hairstyle.”

I rested my right ankle just above my left knee. “Have you seen Gene McCarthy’s hairstyle? It’s about as pre-Beatle as they get.”

Pearson shrugged that off. It was almost a shudder.

“McCarthy’s finished,” Pearson said. “He said too many bad things about Bobby. It’s not fair but he’ll be seen as having blood on his hands.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, but I knew the old boy had a better sense of where the political winds blew than most, myself certainly included.

Anderson, who’d been sitting quietly with his arms crossed over his suitcoat like an usher on break, said to his boss, “I recall what you said about Bobby, when you interviewed him after—”

“After his brother made him Attorney General, yes.” The columnist looked up, as if that were where he kept his memory; he sneered a little. “‘A gimlet-eyed, cold young man who sits in his shirt sleeves with his tie undone.’”

Said the gimlet-eyed, cold old man sitting in his shirt sleeves with his clip-on askew.

“Speaking of blood on somebody’s hands,” I said, not putting any edge on it — that wasn’t necessary, “you sure spent last month working Bob over.”

Those ice-blue eyes flashed again and the little white mustache twitched. “I’m complimented, Nathan. That you’re following my column even now.”

“Sure. It’s fun to see a knife wielded well when you’re not the victim. A whole installment, free of anything approaching news, about how ruthless Bob was. All about how his old man once said, ‘Bobby hates the way I hate.’”

He sniffed, a much-ingrained habit. “I’ve never made a secret of my preference in this race. Hubert’s an old friend. How was I to know we’d have another Kennedy martyred on us?”

“Tough break for you.”

Speaking of knives, I’d dug mine in deep enough. No need to say it out loud: everyone in this room knew Pearson served as Lyndon Johnson’s hatchet man and Hubert Humphrey’s cheerleader.

Anderson, who had a measured, reasonable style even when he was defending his boss, said, “Nate, what we ran about Bobby was absolutely accurate. Whatever, whoever, our sources might have been.”

I grunted a laugh. “Things that happened in 1963, when Bob was Attorney General, were somehow news in May ’68? Ancient history suddenly ‘stop the presses,’ right before the Oregon primary?”

Which RFK had lost, the first election defeat ever for a Kennedy.

Pearson sniffed again. “Your late friend bought a primary in Indiana last month... just as his brother Jack did a West Virginia primary, once upon a time — with Papa Joe’s urging... and money.”

“This just in — the latest from 1960.”

The columnist sat forward, bristling, spewing words: “With young Kennedy pandering so shamelessly after the black vote, it’s only responsible to reveal how AG Robert Kennedy authorized the wiretap of Martin Luther King’s office and home!”

That juicy tidbit would have gone from J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI to LBJ in the Oval Office to this un-air-conditioned one I was sitting in while a bored cat snoozed.

Anderson raised his eyebrows, his expression otherwise cool. “Bobby’s campaign saw to it that his speech in Indianapolis, the night King was assassinated, got plenty of play in the media.”

Bob hadn’t handled the King wiretap controversy at all well, his defense coming across as self-serving hair-splitting. He’d claimed only wanting to prove to J. Edgar that King wasn’t a Commie threat, insisting he’d never approved bugging the Civil Rights leader’s hotel rooms — office and home only. Gene McCarthy had pounced on that like a hungry hound tossed a T-bone.

The hotel room bugging, whoever approved it, was an obvious effort to put King in bed with a female not his wife — a supple secretary or star-struck supporter. Which you might think a public figure like Pearson, dallying with his own “fair-haired girls,” would be hesitant to use. You’d be wrong. Hypocrisy was the lifeblood of D.C.

Anderson said, “You can’t fault us, Nate, for telling the truth. What do you expect from journalists?”

“Is that a trick question?”

The legman ignored my dig. “When I wrote about the involvement of Jack and Bobby Kennedy in the Castro assassination plots... this ‘Operation Mongoose’... there was no denial from your friend’s quarters.”

How could there be? It was true. And I’d been in it up to my neck.

I tossed Anderson a look and another to Pearson. “You two gents do realize Bob isn’t running anymore. And that I am only here in town because he was my friend and they were burying him yesterday.”

Pearson’s palms patted the air and Anderson shifted in his chair uncomfortably. The cat stirred but didn’t give a damn.

The columnist said, “My fair-game criticisms of your late friend, in the heat of battle, now puts me in an awkward position with my readership.”

“Liberals,” I said, “in the process of canonizing another slain Kennedy.”

A mustache twitch. “Precisely.”

“And here you sit with bloody hands.”

Sniff. “Overstated, but... yes. I may have been unduly harsh, writing about him. He was not my candidate, after all. His intrusion into the race, the factionalism he created, surely would have paved the way for Richard Nixon to sail into power. And that I couldn’t allow! I felt the young Kennedy had to be stopped.”

“This just wasn’t the way you had in mind.”

The air seemed to go out of him. His voice returned unusually soft, minus any energy. “Where other people were concerned, I knew young Kennedy to be exceedingly thoughtful, even... kind. His ruthlessness he brought only to his enemies.”

Anderson said, quietly, “But not to you, Drew. In that debate with McCarthy, he was asked about your story of him signing off on the King hotel wiretaps. He could have called you a liar but he didn’t. He appeared evasive, and it did him no favors.”

Pearson seemed to have genuine regret in his expression and voice as he said, “He was for the common man — you have to give him that.”

Anderson turned back to me. “We’re going to publish a memorial tribute by way of an open letter from Drew to his grandson, who was a McCarthy supporter.”

That resonated, of course.

Pearson said, “I’ll speak of Bobby Kennedy’s loyalty, his idealism, his courage. And my television broadcast this week will be devoted to the tragic loss of this true leader.”

I grinned and I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. “Swell. You have a plan. Won’t work on everybody, but your hands will look a little cleaner. What does any of it have to do with me?”

Anderson moved his chair a little and faced me more directly. “You were Bobby’s friend. And you are, let’s face it, among the most famous private investigators in America.”

“Which is like being the tallest midget,” I said. “So what?”

Leaning forward a little, Pearson said, “Jack has been looking into the Kennedy assassination.”

“Which one?”

“JFK,” Anderson said, not missing a beat. “Most of what’s surfaced to date has been courtesy of kooks on the one hand and wild-eyed leftists on the other. No responsible, credible journalist has taken it on. Someone should. Someone has.”

“You.”

“Me,” Anderson said, his smile barely there yet cocky as hell. “But it’s a slow go. I’m dividing my time between our regular D.C. beat and occasional trips to Dallas, New Orleans and elsewhere.”

I frowned at him. “What does that have to do with Bob’s murder? You’re not suggesting there’s a connection?”

“Anything is possible,” Anderson said. “Which is about the only sure bet in this game. But I can’t widen my inquiry to include your friend’s killing. Adding L.A. to the mix? And there’s no apparent link except that two brothers, two much-loved political figures...”

“And hated.”

“...and hated figures were struck down in their prime by what the likes of the Warren Commission would have us believe is a ‘lone nut’ assassin.”

“I did some of my own investigating into the JFK kill,” I said, “back in ’64. And we can sit down for an interview about it, Jack, one of these days.”

Though I wouldn’t be sharing some of what I did, since not all of it was strictly legal. Like removing one of the likely shooters, who wasn’t named Oswald.

“But dream on,” I continued, “if you think this is another Dallas... Sometimes a train going into a tunnel is just a train going into a tunnel. And sometimes it really is a lone nut with a gun.”

Anderson said, “Some of our stringers in L.A. say the official police investigation is not only incompetent, but reeks of a cover-up.”

My head rocked back, almost as if I’d been slapped. “A cover-up of what?”

With a one-shoulder shrug, Pearson said, “No idea. But it would appear there are too many bullets. The assassin’s gun only held eight rounds, but many of the witnesses report substantially more shots.”

“Eyewitness accounts are notoriously worthless.”

“Even yours, Nate?” Anderson asked. “You were there.”

At least he didn’t say that like the announcer on that old history re-enactment TV show.

“I heard a lot of shots,” I admitted. “I can’t tell you how many, but enough to nail five bystanders and the target. I am not shocked to hear that the LAPD is somewhat less efficient than television would have you believe.”

Then I sat forward. Any more so and I’d fallen out of the chair.

“But, yes,” I went on, “I was fucking there, and I saw the shooting go down. That bushy-haired little bastard blasted away and I saw it, heard it, smelled it.”

“Some witnesses talk of a second shooter.”

I pounded his desk and the lid on the Oreo jar jiggled and the cat looked up. “I wish there had been a second shooter and that it was me, putting at least one into Sirhan Sirhan, a murderer so guilty they named him twice.”

Anderson hung his head and shook it a little.

“All we’re asking,” Pearson said, “is that you look into it. Or even just assign one of your people to keep tabs on the LAPD.”

Anderson said, “An ex-LA cop, perhaps. With lines into the department.”

“I’ll pay double the daily rate,” Pearson said, “and start with a ten-thousand-dollar retainer. We’ll keep you on as long as the inquiry generates stories. I’ll give you a check here and now.”

My sigh sounded like somebody opened a furnace door. “Much as I would like your money, since no famous client of mine has ever been tighter with a dollar... but no. Gentlemen. I was fucking there. I saw Sirhan shooting. I saw Bob on that dirty kitchen floor in pain in a pool of blood. Clutching a god-damn rosary. I saw five others bleeding there, too. The creep called Bob a son of a bitch and then he shot him. What more do you want?”

“The truth,” Anderson said.

I stood. Got back into my jacket. “No. You’re looking for cover. You smeared a good man and you want me for damage control. No thanks.”

Nobody had to show me out.

I knew the way.