Too Many Bullets

Six

The Hall of Justice in Los Angeles dated to the mid-’20s, a fourteen-story Beaux Arts box on Temple Street between Broadway and Spring. Pollution had tinged its classically decorated white granite a dingy gray, but tourists still took pictures of the massive structure they knew from TV — Dragnet, Perry Mason, Get Smart.

The celebrity defendants who had passed through the grand marble-walled lobby with its towering columns and high gilded ceiling might as well have been a reservations list at Chasen’s — Charlie Chaplin (paternity suit), Errol Flynn (statutory rape), Robert Mitchum (marijuana bust).

Today a current denizen of the ornate edifice’s 750-cell jail was being tried for murder in one of its seventeen courts, the defendant a nobody who’d become an instant if reviled celebrity himself. And the basement had hosted the autopsy of a famous paramour of the victim, whose own post-mortem examination took place at the hospital where he died.

Tucked away with a number of others in a waiting room for witnesses, I found myself sliding in on a bench next to a lovely brunette of about forty, slender but curvy in a blue navy suit and baby-blue silk blouse. Hair tucked back in a discreet bun, big brown eyes lightly made up, Nita Romaine wore pink lipstick, the only holdover from when I’d first seen her in the Royal Suite at the Ambassador Hotel, nine months ago.

“You never write,” I said, “you never call.”

Her smile was warm if embarrassed. “You never write. You never call.”

I played at looking hurt, but kept my near-whisper light. “You were in Chicago. Well, Chicago area, anyway. I saw the ads. Pheasant Run Playhouse in St. Charles. Opposite Captain Kirk, wasn’t it?”

She shook her head, embarrassed but amused. “No — Mr. Spock. Visit to a Small Planet. You could have looked me up.”

“You didn’t look me up.”

“You could have bought a ticket.”

“Didn’t have a date.”

“Too bad. You might’ve finally got lucky.”

I didn’t expect to laugh here at the Hall of Justice today. But I did, a little. “Took Bob to bring us back together.”

We both knew that was also what had kept us apart. It didn’t need to be said: we’d met cute, like in a movie romance, but the film that followed had been a horror show.

I nodded toward the others in the several rows behind us, narrow pews on loan from a small country church. “I don’t recognize anybody. Busboys from the Pantry, I think, unless they’re Chavez’s Mariachi band. And isn’t that the hotel man, a maître d’ I guess, Karl something? Who guided Bob off stage and...”

To the Pantry.

“Yes,” she said. “No famous faces, though.”

No Ram lineman, no Olympian, no New York columnist.

“Just ours,” I said.

She pointed a gently accusing forefinger. “You’re the famous one. ‘Private Eye to the Stars.’”

I held up a palm. “A minor celebrity at best, and if you ever use that shopworn phrase again, I’ll spank you.”

“Promise?”

I laughed again. “That’s a good sign.”

“What is?”

“We’re flirting again. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

She shook her head. “Wouldn’t put money on it. We’re just flirting ’cause we’re nervous. At least I am. This is my first murder trial.”

“Except for that Perry Mason episode. Case of the Sinful Starlet, wasn’t it?”

The smile that got out of her was sweet and warm. “That wasn’t what the episode was called. And I didn’t play the starlet.”

“Their loss.” I smiled too.

But right then our conversation ran out of steam — we were sobered by the circumstances, and genuinely embarrassed we’d both sort of ducked each other since that awful night.

Finally she leaned close and asked, “Have you kept up?”

Was that Chanel Number 5?

“With what?”

“With what do you think? The case. The trial. All the ins and outs of it.”

“No.”

The big brown eyes got bigger. “Oh, I have! How could you not?”

“Just didn’t.”

That wasn’t entirely true. I had glanced at the stories in the paper, particularly the ones about Sirhan Sirhan and his defense team, one lawyer’s name jumping uncomfortably out at me; and also checked out who the chief prosecutors would be, thinking D.A. Evelle Younger himself might handle it. But he’d assigned a deputy D.A. instead. You could bet Younger would be driving from the back seat.

We sat quietly for a while.

Then she asked, “Think we’ll ever put it behind us?”

“Maybe after today.”

We sat quietly again, but just for a few moments.

“Next time I’m in your part of the world,” she promised, “I’ll call.”

“Good. Same here.”

“You in town this time for long, Nathan?”

I shook my head. “Heading back tonight, but I’ll be back in early April — A-1’s doing some hiring. You can call me at the office, or at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” I got a card from my wallet and wrote a phone number on it; I already had her contact info, unused so far. “We really will get together.”

Another empty promise?

“We definitely will... oh! This is me.” A uniformed guard was summoning her from the doorway. “Watch my purse will you? This may take a while.”

But it didn’t. She wasn’t gone longer than ten minutes, coming back with an expression that fluctuated between confusion and irritation. Now the guard was curling his finger at me — I was next. I slid out of the bench and handed her the purse as she stood there fuming.

“What a fucking crock,” she said.

That jarred me a little. She’d never said that on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched.

“Bunch of bullshit.” Her eyes were huge, white all around, and her pink-coated lips were tight. “Why didn’t they ask me about the girl in the polka-dot dress?”

She had me there.

Then she rushed off, her low heels clicking like castanets, which got the busboys’ attention or maybe it was her nice hip motion; in any case, the uniformed guard almost had to jump out of the way.

From the witness stand, I got my first good look at the players. The gallery was full, of course, for the hottest ticket in town. Three middle-aged men in dark suits sat at the prosecution table and three more middle-aged men in dark suits sat at the defense, like interchangeable parts. By way of stark contrast, the defendant seemed at first to be wearing white pajamas, but that was some kind of prison garb he’d been provided. He looked very small, this swarthy bushy-haired man, with his eyes wide like a child at the zoo and his mouth hanging open like the monkey house was really interesting.

When I took the witness stand, Deputy D.A. David Fitts approached me with his shaggy black eyebrows arched and the small mouth under a pendulous nose in the grooved oval face pinched in an O, emitting questions like Alice’s caterpillar spelling out vowels in smoke. All very measured, but the queries covered only why after the speech I hadn’t stayed at Bob’s side (I was helping Ethel down from the stage), why catching up with the candidate was slow (the human traffic jam), what I had heard (“something like firecrackers”) and what I had seen (the defendant shooting, Bob falling).

This interrogation seemed insufficient to me, lacking detail in what I was asked, limiting what I could answer. At once I understood Nita’s frustration, but didn’t share it, really. I knew an open-and-shut case when I saw one. And I had seen this one from the inside.

However.

The lead defense attorney, Grant Cooper, was a big name in greater Los Angeles, a former president of the California Bar, a smiling quipster to the press, an “Attorney to the Stars” (ouch), and a criminal defense lawyer who had never lost a client to the gas chamber.

More significantly, his non-movie-star clients included a number of prominent gangland figures, including Johnny Roselli, who had been a key player in Operation Mongoose, the CIA plan to collaborate with major mobsters to assassinate Fidel Castro. John and Robert Kennedy had not initiated the scheme, but they’d signed off on it.

Cooper’s was the name that had jumped out in my sketchy perusal of the Sirhan Sirhan coverage in the papers. His mob mouthpiece reputation was no secret — he’d had to come aboard Sirhan Sirhan’s defense at the last minute because he was representing Roselli in a Beverly Hills Friars Club card-cheating case.

Oddly, the noted defense lawyer rather resembled the Deputy D.A. — similar long face and steel-gray hair and thick black eyebrows, but more years on him and wearing black thick-rimmed glasses snatched off the corpse of Buddy Holly. The similarity of the two lawyers, like the symmetry of the defense and prosecution tables, made it look like there was only one side to this trial.

Cooper approached the witness stand — this particular dark suit was almost certainly Sy Devore (“Tailor to the Stars”) — and mellifluously asked why the plans to take candidate Kennedy through a back stairway, to a second waiting crowd of supporters, had been changed to that route through the Pantry.

His implied point: If the path through the Pantry was last-minute that would suggest the defendant had shot the Senator without premeditation. The defense had stipulated on Day One that Sirhan Sirhan indeed shot Kennedy, and were apparently attempting to prove diminished capacity to keep their client from sucking cyanide. The curly-haired punk didn’t like this tactic and, if the papers were accurate, occasionally got mouthy about it in court, to the judge’s gavel-hammering displeasure.

Right now, however, Sirhan Sirhan sat mute with a slight but noticeable and vaguely imbecilic smile going. So he might not have wanted to admit being nuts, but his demeanor leaned otherwise.

I said to Cooper and the court, “The change of plan came together ten or fifteen minutes before the speech, to accommodate a press conference in the Colonial Room, past the east end of the Pantry. But even so, the Senator would’ve had to come back up and through the Pantry to get to the press conference.”

“He would have gone through the Pantry anyway?” Cooper asked, as if this were news to him. And maybe it was.

“Yes.”

He chewed on that, said, “No further questions,” and headed back to the defense table and resumed his seat.

Then as I passed by into the aisle, Sirhan Sirhan’s defense attorney, Grant Cooper, discreetly winked at me.

Two months later, give or take, I was lounging in the living room of my bungalow at the Pink Palace with my stocking feet up on a coffee table and my eyes on the Huntley-Brinkley Report on the 24” TV that angled to the right of the unlighted fireplace. I swore at Huntley, who had an annoyed school-teacher way about him, finished off the rum-and-Coke I’d made myself, pointed the remote at the set and killed NBC’s nightly news.

Last week, Sirhan Sirhan had been convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy; this morning, six days later, the assassin got sentenced to die in the lethal gas chamber. Why, were there gas chambers that weren’t lethal?

I got up and started building a fresh rum-and-Coke at the wet bar, wondering why I couldn’t get no satisfaction out of that little bastard’s well-deserved fate.

Admittedly, I had a complicated view of such things. I was against the death penalty because I didn’t trust the state or federal government to get my tax refund right, let alone go around killing people in my name who might be guilty. I had done away with the occasional bad person on my own initiative, but then I trusted my own judgment.

On the other hand, what fucking doubt was there about that little wild-haired prick killing my friend?

And yet.

A day had not gone by since that slick mobbed-up shyster Grant Cooper winked at me in court that I hadn’t found myself grinding my teeth over it.

Somebody knocked at the bungalow door.

Here’s how paranoid I was. Though a successful businessman — president and owner of a private investigation agency with offices in three major cities and relationships with smaller firms in half a dozen others, who hadn’t done any field work to speak of in several years — I still kept my nine millimeter Browning automatic next to my car keys and Ray-Bans in their hard-shell case on the little table next to the front door. I did it in Chicago, and I did the same here in my home away from home.

Such paranoia at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where my own A-1 handled the security and the bungalow’s front door had a peephole, might seem ludicrous. But on one occasion, LAPD cops had rousted me here, where I’d had a few other tight moments, so I was... cautious.

I wouldn’t have needed to be — the beautiful woman on my doorstep was no Trojan Horse. Anyway, I had Trojans handy in the bedroom.

“Nathan,” Nita said. She was the kind of woman who could look upset and great at the same time. “Can I come in?”

“May you come in,” I said, stepping aside for her.

Her hair didn’t do that Marlo Thomas flip now, the black tresses brushing her shoulders in a Jeanie Shrimpton layered look. Her turquoise knit short-sleeve shirt, corduroy pants and tan leather boots would have been boyish but for what she stored inside them. The pink lipstick had given way to a dusty rose shade, and her eye makeup was about as subtle as it got in 1969.

She froze for a moment, noticing the nine mil on the little table. “Is that... are you... afraid of something, someone...?”

“That’s just a gift from my late father,” I said.

Big dark eyes looked at me, trying to make sense of that.

“I’m a sentimental soul,” I explained, taking her by the elbow and walking her to the couch. I’d left my rum-and-Coke on a coaster on the coffee table.

Looming over her a bit, I asked, “Can I get you something?”

“Ginger ale,” she said numbly.

As if we were still back in the Royal Suite.

I put together a glass of Canada Dry on ice and handed it over, then sat beside her. I slipped my arm along the upper edge of the couch but respected her space.

“What’s wrong, Nita?” Didn’t take a master detective to deduce it must be something to do with the Sirhan death sentence.

“I’ve almost called you a dozen times.” She was shaking her head, the layers of black hair shifting here, settling there, like tectonic plates before an earthquake. Looking at the fireplace with no fire in it, she said, “It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Being part of a trial like that and not hearing what the other witnesses have to say.”

“You didn’t miss anything where I was concerned,” I said. “I didn’t share anything you don’t already know.”

The big brown eyes flew to me. “I bet they didn’t ask you much. Either side!”

That was true and I admitted it.

“I told them everything,” she said, “and they wrote it all down, but they never asked me about any of it in court! Not really.”

“What are you talking about, Nita?”

She leaned close, gripped my left hand tight. “I heard gunshots coming from someplace not far from my right, when Sirhan was already being subdued by you and those other men, several feet in front of me! Shots at my right, Nathan, with people falling all around me, a man sliding down a wall making a bloody smear like a fucking snail. Then... then Senator Kennedy lying on the floor, on his back, bleeding. And I’m screaming, ‘Oh no! Oh my God, no!’”

She lurched into my arms and hugged tight, her lips near my left ear as she said, in a ragged whisper, “Next thing I knew, I was ducking down, in utter shock about what was happening... then... then... I passed out.”

She wept into my shoulder. I held her. After maybe a minute, she slipped from my embrace and dug a hanky out of her pants pocket. Her scant eye makeup was running and she dried her eyes and wiped them off, embarrassed suddenly. She composed herself. Held the hanky in her lap in two hands, swiveled toward me on the couch.

“I passed out,” she said, “but only for seconds. Still, when I woke up? My clothes were rumpled, even torn, damp in patches, and my belt was gone and one of my shoes missing. I wasn’t hurt bad, really, but I seemed to ache everywhere. I could tell... could tell I’d been... trampled.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. Gently. Giving my eyes to hers. “It’s all right,” I said, as people do when it isn’t.

She went on: “I... I saw Mrs. Kennedy, Ethel, kneeling by her husband. He was on his back, sort of... staring up. She was trying to comfort him. I never saw anything so sad, but also... nothing ever so horrifying. I started to... to scream, and I ran out of there and back through that corridor, behind the stage. Yelling, ‘They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him! Oh my God, he’s dead! They’ve killed him!’”

She held her arms to herself, shivering.

“They?” I asked.

She nodded, nodded, nodded. “Yes, they, they, they. I said ‘they’ because I knew there was more than one shooter involved!”

That hit me like a punch.

Her brow was knit, her eyes finally not wide. “And, Nathan, the police didn’t want to hear it, the FBI didn’t want to hear it, and they didn’t ask me about any of it in court, not really! Cut me off if I tried to give them one more word than I was asked for.”

“Who, that defense counsel — Cooper?”

“Both sides! And Sandy Serrano wasn’t even called as a witness!”

“Who’s Sandy Serrano?”

She grabbed my hand and squeezed. Indignation had given way to desperation. “Somebody you have to talk to, Nathan. Somebody you need to talk to right now. About the girl in the polka-dot dress.”

Nita met Sandra Serrano when the girl was co-chair of the Kennedy Youth in Pasadena, where Sandra lived with her aunt and uncle and worked at an insurance agency. Wrapping things up for the now defunct campaign, Nita and Serrano had shared their experiences about the night of the shooting.

We were able to meet with Sandy mid-evening at a cozy Mexican restaurant on Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena. The beckoning neon dated back a quarter of a century:

We shared a round of horchatas (a delicious blend of rice, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon) before ordering the meal I’d promised the two former RFK campaign workers. We were in a brown faux-leather booth under two framed prints, one depicting every US president in cameo portraits up through JFK, who was central in a bigger oval, a similar framed print of Presidéntes de México alongside. The lighting was low, old Mexican-style paintings adorning the pale yellow half-walls above wood paneling, with piped-in Mariachi music.

Sandy (as she insisted I call her, though calling me Mr. Heller) was attractive, zaftig, just out of her teens, her dark hair short but full, eyes large and bright. Her demeanor was serious, befitting the subject of our conversation, her navy dress on the demure side.

Nita and I were across from her in the booth.

“You remember how crowded the Embassy Ballroom was,” Sandy said. “How hot. How stuffy. I went outside and sat on the landing of a stairway alongside the building... sort of like a fire escape, but not the pull-down kind, you know? Wood, painted white. Sat away from the door on the edge, above the stairs.”

I nodded. “About what time was this?”

“Eleven-thirty or so. Nice and cool out there, and I’d been sitting, oh, for maybe five minutes when two guys and a girl came up the stairs and I kind of scooched over and gave them room to pass, you know? The girl seemed nice enough, excusing herself. She was maybe five foot six, dark bouffant hair, not as dark as mine, but dark. She was kind of stacked. Cute. Pretty, but with a turned-up nose.”

“Two guys with her, you said.”

“Yes, with long hair, kind of bushy, but it wasn’t that Sirhan Sirhan, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was a white guy. Average height. Kind of messed-up looking, like he could use a haircut, and had maybe slept in his clothes — what we call a borracho.”

I’d heard that word. “Drunk, you mean?”

Sandy shook her head. “No, more like... somebody who just doesn’t... look right, somehow. Kind of... out of it.”

“What about the other guy?”

“Not white. Mexican American, I think. I know because I am one. Gold sweater over a white shirt. Why a sweater on a hot night like this, I got no idea.”

“How old were they?”

She thought about that. “Early twenties, I’d say, all of ’em. They were definitely together, definitely a group. Oh, and the girl was poured into this white dress with black polka dots.”

Nita and I exchanged a glance.

“Anyway,” Sandy said, “I was just sitting there relieved to be out of that hothouse ballroom and away from the crowd, enjoying the cool air. Then around midnight or a little after, that girl kind of... burst out of the building and I darn near jumped out of my skin. Her, and the guy in the gold sweater, sort of tumbled out on top of each other. Almost trampled me.”

Trampled, like Nita in the Pantry while she was unconscious.

“Now this is the part nobody wants to believe, Mr. Heller,” Sandy said, small white teeth barely visible behind tight lips, her chin crinkling. She leaned across. “The girl, when she almost stepped on me? She stopped a second and says, ‘We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him!’”

Sandy let air out, shuddered, then had another sip of horchata. Raised her eyebrows and set them back down, as if she could hardly believe what she was about to share.

“So I say, not taking it seriously, ‘Who did you shoot’? And she says, ‘We’ve shot Senator Kennedy!’ And I say, ‘Oh, yeah, right.’ Then the polka-dot-dress girl goes running down the stairs with that gold-sweater guy coming right after her, the borracho one not with them. Scrambled off toward the parking lot and into the dark.”

Nita squeezed my hand under the table.

Incredibly, Sandy’s story that night had only begun. Starting with the early morning hours of the shooting, she’d been interviewed five times by the LAPD, at both Rampart Division Station and Parker Center, had participated in a videotaped reconstruction of her account, and even watched a police-organized fashion show of potential polka-dot dresses, none of which were right.

“A few weeks after the Senator’s death,” she said, “I was interviewed one last time, by a police lieutenant named Manuel Hermano, who says, call me ‘Manny.’ At first he seemed very nice — took my aunt Maggie and me out for dinner. A steak dinner, downtown. Bought me two drinks, even though I was underage. Kind of winking about it. I’m 21 now. Then he asked me again about what I saw, and I went over it for the thousandth time. He suggested I take a lie detector test, and go on the record once and for all, so I wouldn’t have to go over the same ground again and again. I said okay. Maybe it was the drinks. After that, he drove us to Parker Center.”

There she was escorted by Hermano into a small interview room and strapped into a chair with a polygraph machine nearby. After some routine questions, Hermano told her aunt to wait outside, and a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal began. Designed, Sandy said, to badger her into “admitting” she had made up her story. She was just one of over a dozen girls who had made up such tales, “Manny” told her, to get publicity for themselves and money from newspapers.

“He said I owed it to the Senator’s memory,” Sandy said, “and to his wife, not to shame a great man’s death by making up a story. He said Senator Kennedy was probably in the room there with us right now, listening to me lie. I insisted what I said I saw and heard really happened, that I didn’t care what his stupid thingamajig machine said, but it was all true.”

The young woman’s dark eyes were unblinking as she said, “He kept trying to push me into saying I lied, even though I hadn’t. In the end I just wanted to get out of there. Finally I said, well, maybe what I’d heard some other witnesses say colored my story. I wasn’t the only one talking about a girl in a polka-dot dress, you know. And that was as close to a lie as I told, because that wasn’t true. But it seemed to be enough for him, finally. Mr. Heller, there was a girl in a polka-dot dress — and I can give you the name of a policeman — a good one, an honest one — who can verify that.”

At my bungalow at the Beverly Hills, Nita and I sat on the couch and this time we both had ginger ale, our shoes off and feet on the coffee table.

Like Hermano, we’d fed Sandy at the restaurant, not steak but some good Mexican food, though nobody had much of an appetite. Nita and the young woman talked about friends of theirs who’d been on the campaign and what they were up to now. Nothing about what Sandy had told us earlier.

Hardly any lights were on in the living room. We were sitting close.

“I have some money,” Nita said, out of nowhere.

“What?”

“I might be able to hire you. I know you’re expensive, but—”

“Your money’s no good here, lady.”

She got up and stretched. Not unpleasant to watch. “Would you mind if I borrowed your shower? I’ve had a long day.”

“Be my guest. It’s off the bedroom.”

I could hear the needles of water dancing, not loud enough to interfere with the call I made. It would be a little late in D.C., but I didn’t care. The operator connected me to a home number that not everybody had.

I didn’t identify myself. I just said, “Tell your boss if he’s still up for it, I’m on the Kennedy job and not to fuck me on the expenses.”

“Done,” Jack Anderson said.

I hung up and she was in the bedroom doorway wrapped in a towel. And then she wasn’t wrapped in a towel.

Some have said I’m a randy shallow son of a bitch and that any beautiful woman can have me with a glance. That may be an exaggeration, but no woman was ever more beautiful than this. Her damp hair hung like tendrils to the shoulders of a figure tanned except where a skimpy bikini had prevented arrest for public nudity, its ghost so white it made startling decorative touches of the pert-nippled areolas and the wispy dark triangle. Her belly had a plumpness that only made her seem ripe, and Elizabeth Taylor would have wept to see a woman with a face that could wear no makeup at all and do it so well.

“You won’t think less of me in the morning?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “But your stock is rising right now.”

Seven

To hike Mount Hollywood Trail, most tourists and locals alike began at the rear of the parking lot at Griffith Observatory and headed up through the Berlin Forest, planted about two years before to honor Los Angeles’ new sister city. At this stage of its existence, the “forest” (announced by a sign as such) was just a scattered collection of sapling pines. Most visitors to this vast, rambling park with its winding trails, rugged chaparral, and looming lush mountain vistas would pass through this clearing unimpressed and hike on to more spectacular views of the Hollywood sign, downtown L.A., and the iconic domed Observatory itself.

The view from the bench where the policeman sat wasn’t half-bad, though. The day was sunny but cool, the smog burned off till tomorrow, a mild wind ruffling the shrubs and grasses, their bleakness in the sun-blanched dirt brightened by wild-flowers.

The cop wore the familiar navy blue LAPD uniform, complete with regulation belt, holstered weapon, baton, and handcuffs. Rounded cap with visor held in his lap, feet firmly on the ground (ready should duty call), he stared out at an impressive view of the city he served, lorded over by the Hollywood sign, which looked tiny from here. His expression, however, was not one of wonder... unless he was wondering how he wound up a cop, and a cop meeting that dreaded breed of citizen, a private detective.

I joined him on the bench. Sturdy-looking, older than forty, this was likely a veteran of several decades on the department, light blue eyes close-set, high forehead emphasizing the squared-off oval where his pleasant features resided. His metal name tag (a new addition to the uniforms) said: SHORE.

He recognized me, from the papers I guess, and slid his hand over for me to shake as if it were a secret document he was passing. That would come later.

Griffith Park was on Shore’s beat, though I doubt he covered all four-thousand-some acres of it in his L-car (one-officer patrol) out of Highland Park Division. That a veteran cop like this was working there made him a real cop — not a rookie, burnout or soon-to-be retiree marking time in a safe environment like San Fernando Valley (aka Sleepy Hollow). But it couldn’t have been where he was assigned the night of the killing — that would have been Rampart Division.

Still, this was the police officer whose name Sandy Serrano had given me last night, to corroborate her story. I’d called him this morning, from my office at the A-1 in the Bradbury Building. Sergeant Peter Shore recognized my name, which meant he had a few questions.

“Sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Shore,” I said. “Sandy Serrano gave me your number. She speaks highly of you.”

His voice came back medium range with the self-controlled, neutral modulation that comes with the job. “Miss Serrano is a nice young woman. I assume this is about the Robert Kennedy matter?”

Anyway, I think he said “matter” — might have been “murder.”

“It is,” I said. “I’m looking into it for a journalist. Anything you choose to share would be strictly confidential — ‘source close to the case’ sort of thing.”

“What kind of journalist?”

“A famous one who wonders why a nice kid like Sandy Serrano got handled like a suspect, not a witness.”

“...I’ll talk to you, Mr. Heller. I’m on duty this afternoon, but we could meet.”

The park was moderately busy but the Berlin Forest held no fascination for the hippie hikers and vacationing families strolling by, though the former picked up the pace (likely holding, and on their way to a scenic high) and the latter included fathers sometimes pointing out to the mothers and offspring the reassuring police presence (just like Adam-12!).

I asked, “What were you doing at the Ambassador? You work out of Highland Division, correct? Wasn’t that way off your beat?”

He’d been staring almost tranquilly out at the city spread before us, but now his face turned to mine and his eyes were intense. They were, oddly, a similar shade of light blue to Bob’s.

“Not at the time,” he said. “I was at Rampart Station then. I got transferred later last year — but I’ll get to that.”

“All right. Sorry. Tell it your way, please.”

He turned back to the rugged western drop-off out of which a modern city somehow emerged.

As senior patrol sergeant at Rampart Station, about to head out on my shift, I get tagged at the last second to take over Night Watch. Before settling in at a desk for the long haul, I make a quick cigarette run to this liquor store on Eighth and Fedora. I’m about to head back when I hear an All-Unit call come in: ambulance shooting at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard — the Ambassador. And I’m directly across the street from the hotel’s rear driveway!

All I have to do is make a U-turn and I’m in the back parking lot, upper level at the southwest quadrant of the place. I get out of the car and damn near get swallowed up by people running from the hotel like it’s on fire, taking off in every direction on foot, weaving around cars trying to pull out.

I’ve barely stepped from my patrol car into this mass confusion when an older Jewish couple, in their sixties, comes rushing up.

Both at the same time they say, ‘We saw something! We saw something!’

They are almost hysterical. I yell, ‘Slow down, folks! What happened?’

Understand, at this point I didn’t know the Senator had been shot, only that there’s been a shooting at the hotel. But already the crowd chaos told me this isn’t any ordinary shooting.

The man’s breathing hard now and the woman does most of the talking.

She says, ‘We were about to leave out that side door, near the Embassy Room, onto that little balcony... with stairs going down? When this young couple comes barreling out from the ballroom in a gleeful state, and the girl bumps right into me! Late teens, early twenties, happy as a lark, singing out, “We shot him! We shot him!”

‘I yell at her, “You almost knocked me down!” Then realizing what I just heard, “Who did you say got shot?”

‘And this girl says, “Kennedy! We shot him! We killed him!”’

Mr. Heller, I’ve been a cop for over twenty years, and not much fazes me, but you know how it’s said something can make your blood run cold? Mine sure as hell did. I knew at once what the commotion was about. What the shots fired and ambulance call were about.

Another Kennedy had been killed.

So I say, ‘This couple, can you describe them?’

The old gal says the girl was white, early twenties, bouffant-type light brown hair, wearing a white dress. That lady knew fashion all right — she was very detailed in her description, dress soft sheer fabric, three-quarter sleeves, small black polka dots, dark shoes. Male was Caucasian, tall, twenty to twenty-two, very thin build, blond curly hair, wearing brown pants, gold shirt.

One thing I know, Mr. Heller, from a lot of years on the police department, is that remarks made spontaneously after a crime or an accident are very seldom colored by people’s imaginations. I knew these were valid descriptions, and jotted them right down word for word.

And this old gal, though still worked up, was perfectly rational, like that fashion-show laundry list indicates.

I ask the couple for their names and the man says, ‘We’re the Bernsteins,’ and I write that down. First names, too, and contact info, but I... I’m sorry, I can’t recall anything but ‘Bernsteins,’ and, well... you’ll see. Best I give you this as it came.

So then they lurch off and just get swallowed up in the crowd, people still running and milling and bumping into each other. Hollering, screaming. Just insane.

I notice a Rampart Station juvie detective I know, who’s heard the radio call and is trying to help out. I tear the sheet from my notebook and give it to him to hand over to the Chief of Detectives. At my patrol car I radio in a Code One and tell the Night Watch lieutenant I’ll set up a Command Post... which the first supervisory patrol officer on scene is required to do... and put out All Points Bulletins on the two suspects, descriptions as given by the Bernsteins, adding only that the direction taken by the suspects is unknown.

I get help from a dozen sheriff’s deputies who’d been counting primary ballots across the street in the IBM Building. They’d just wrapped up their work when they heard the sirens and came over to see if we needed help. A godsend. I put them on getting identifications and license numbers of everyone entering or leaving the hotel grounds.

I ask Communications Division to send some men, a minimum of six two-men units, as fast as they can. As they show up, I give them their assignments, logistical officer on the telephone, a log officer, radio officer, set up a perimeter and... uh, oh, yes. Certainly, Mr. Heller. Only what pertains to the Bernsteins.

Understood.

Later I hear from Communications that the description they have is of a small male Latino in his mid-twenties with bushy hair, light build, blue jacket and jeans and tennis shoes. Do I have anything to add, I’m asked.

I say, ‘That isn’t the description I put out.’

The dispatcher wants to know where I came up with these suspects and I say from two reliable witnesses, an older man and his wife. That we have their name and addresses. A detective from juvie has a sheet of paper I gave him, with the name and address and phone of those witnesses.

Disregard that, I’m told. ‘The people that were right next to Kennedy say it was one man,’ the dispatcher tells me. ‘Your two witnesses might just have been getting out of the way so they wouldn’t get shot. You don’t want to get any talk started about some big conspiracy.’

Detective Inspector John Powers comes by and wants to know who was responsible for putting these descriptions of two suspects on the air. I say I was and brief him on my encounter with the Bernsteins.

‘Cancel that description,’ Powers says. ‘We don’t want to make a federal case out of this. We’ve got the suspect in custody.’

Yes, Mr. Heller, that’s exactly what he said — we don’t want to make a federal case out of it. You didn’t generally challenge Powers, by the way. He’s famous for carrying three or four guns.

I agree to cancel the APB on the male suspect, but insist we maintain the one on the girl in the polka-dot dress, who if nothing else might be a key witness. Powers doesn’t like it but has no choice. It was either that or relieve me of my post and he needed me there at that moment. But he had the last laugh, anyway. I later learned he contacted Communications directly and ordered the polka-dot APB yanked.

Anyway, I wound up manning that Command Post in that parking lot for twenty-three hours.

I asked Sgt. Shore, “Did you testify about any of this at the Sirhan trial?”

Midday, the park’s greens and browns and tans lolled in sunlight, and the hippies and tourists had been invaded by retiree couples, perhaps including the Bernsteins. Who knew? Not the LAPD.

“No,” the officer said. “Wasn’t questioned about it, either. Not by the prosecution or the defense. But I was instructed by my watch commander, last September, to prepare a follow-up report for SUS.”

“For who?”

He smiled a little, a traffic cop amused by someone trying to talk their way out of a ticket. “Not ‘who,’ Mr. Heller — ‘what.’ Special Unit Senator. Surprised you haven’t heard of that.”

“I’m playing catch up,” I admitted.

He slipped on sunglasses; I’d already put mine on.

“SUS is the ‘elite’ task force,” Shore said, “that investigated the assassination. I delivered a copy personally to their HQ. And I let them know I was available for an interview any time, at their convenience. No one ever called.”

“What became of the report?”

His grin was sudden and wide and had no humor in it. “Funny you should ask. I filed copies in my personal box at the station and at the watch commander’s desk and the Records section, too. A few days later a couple of things occurred to me that I’d neglected to put in, and I went back to pick up those copies and amend them. The one in my box was gone. I asked around and nobody knew anything. At SUS they claimed not to know what the hell I was talking about. But the Day Watch sergeant at Rampart said two plainclothes dicks from SUS came around and collected all the reports, including my initial one.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t let it stand there.”

He shook his head. “No, I went back to SUS HQ, where I was told, in no uncertain terms, that nobody from SUS had been to Rampart, much less removed copies of any report. And when I made more inquiries at the station, my superiors were openly uncooperative... and irritated.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Well, it’s a cover-up... but why?” Shore looked right at me and held his gaze there; before, I’d gotten glances out of him and nothing more. “It made no sense to me. A sloppy investigation is one thing, a mishandled, misguided attempt to avoid another Dallas situation... but doing something deliberately wrong? Why the hell?”

“You said ‘made’ no sense. Is it making sense now?”

He raised his hands to chest level, palms out, as if a gun were trained on him. “Mr. Heller, I haven’t been trying to find things out, you understand. No investigating on my own. After a while, you just try to keep your head down... not that it’s done me any good.”

“What things have you learned without trying?”

He sighed. Shook his head. Stopped like a man who’d dropped some things he was carrying and felt put upon, having to bend down and pick them up.

“Evidence from the case has been routinely destroyed,” he said, looking straight ahead again, “if it wasn’t going to be used in the trial. Thousands of interviews were trashed, only a few hundred preserved — what might have been important testimony, gone. Two months after the killing... just two damn months... several thousand photographs from the investigation were burned up.”

“What, by accident?”

A grunted chuckle. “Hardly. In a medical-waste incinerator at L.A. County General, is what I heard. On a similar note, a roll of photos from an eyewitness, who said he had shots of the shooting, were confiscated. Teenage shutterbug from Canada, seeing how things were done in these great United States. Whether those photos were among the burned, I couldn’t tell you. But none of the kid’s photos were brought forward at the trial. And a dozen witnesses at the Ambassador Hotel, not just the Bernsteins, saw the girl in the polka-dot dress, just weren’t important enough to make the grade.”

“And what about the Bernsteins?”

“Who knows? The note I gave that juvie detective disappeared. I asked him about it and he said he passed it along. But it’s gone, and nobody ever located that old Jewish couple, let alone questioned them.”

“I’m over sixty myself, you know,” I said with a smile. “And with a last name like Heller, I’m not Scandinavian.”

He smiled, too, slightly embarrassed. “No offense. Cops tend to size people up.”

“They do. And I’ve got you sized up as an honest one.”

“I... I appreciate that.”

I cocked my head forward to make him look at me. “How credible is it, to you, that this could’ve been a cover-up, right out of the gate? I’m from Chicago and even I have to question that.”

He shrugged. “You talked to Sandy Serrano. You know what she was put through. That polygraph examiner should’ve gone to jail for that. And, by the way, do you know who that polygraph examiner was?”

“Hermano. Lt. Manny Hermano, she said.”

“Right. He’s the lead supervisor at SUS.”

“So I guess it makes sense he questioned her.”

“Mr. Heller — doesn’t that name mean anything to you... Manuel Hermano?”

“No. Like I said, I’m from Chicago.”

His reply seemed, at first, like a non sequitur. “It’s no secret, you know, even among the rank and file, that the CIA and the LAPD are in bed together.”

No secret to me, either. I knew the Company had sub rosa ties with police departments all over America, swapping special training and equipment for ignoring surveillance and certain break-ins.

“And,” Shore was saying, “here’s an interesting little coincidence — Manny Hermano retired from the department a year and a half ago... after a big retirement dinner, all the top brass there... to go to work for a State Department agency, A.I.D. — Agency for International Development — training police forces in Latin America. That got a lot of locker room laughs.”

I wasn’t quite following this. “Why? Hermano doesn’t sound like a laugh riot to me.”

“Riot, maybe. He used to be called ‘Shoot ’em Up’ Manny. Killed eleven men in the line of duty — an LAPD record. Joke was, he was teaching ‘advanced interrogation techniques’ down south when most of his perps up north never lived to talk.”

“He retired, you said.”

“Got asked back in April ’68.”

A month after Bob had announced his run for president.

Shore turned to me and my face funhouse-mirrored in his sunglasses. “Said the State Department job wasn’t what he expected. The LAPD welcomed him back with open arms. Then after Senator Kennedy was killed, he’s heading up the task force to investigate the city’s most important crime of the century — the man in charge of preparing the case for trial and supervising the other investigators.”

A bit of a breeze kicked up and yucca and other shrubs shivered like the warmth was the cold.

“By the end of last summer,” Shore said, “my proficiency ratings, which have always been high, suddenly hit rock bottom. That can happen when there’s an official story some stubborn asshole won’t go along with.” Another shrug. “That’s just the way things are done. If they can’t get you to change your story, they ignore you, then discredit you, making shit up if they have to. Finally I got transferred out of Rampart to here. People around me who’ve cooperated with SUS got promoted. Me, I’ve been encouraged to seek premature retirement. Now I’m due to leave in July on a service pension.”

“You’re taking it better than I would.”

He flipped a hand in a dismissive gesture that I didn’t buy at all. “I have a sheriff’s job lined up in a little town in Missouri. I’ll do just fine. Why would I want to work for a department like this, after witnessing the most grotesque abuse of police power I could ever imagine?”

“Fair point.”

He took the sunglasses off and looked right at me with Bob’s blue eyes. “Listen, Mr. Heller, I’ve got a photo for you that you might like to have. They didn’t all get burned up at County General. It’s a decent shot of Robert Kennedy and you’re in it, too. You look grouchy, but you’re in it.”

He passed me the manila envelope and I shook out the photo. A single typed page was paper-clipped to it.

Shore said, “Those are some witness names you might want to check into — polka-dot dress sightings and three witnesses in the Pantry who claim to have seen a second gunman.”

“Yeeeeah,” I said dryly. “I believe I would.”

I lifted the paper-clipped page and had a look at the photo.

Bob was signing an autograph.

Signing it on a poster tube for that curly-haired, sleepy-eyed, party-crashing fan who had sneaked first into the Royal Suite and then into the Pantry.

Eight

The A-1 Detective Agency at the Bradbury Building, that venerable brownstone on the southeast corner of Third and Broadway, had in recent years expanded to five fifth-floor suites. The turn-of-the-century Bradbury’s interior was an improbable collection of wrought-iron stairwells and balconies, brick-and-tile corridors with glowing globe light fixtures, caged elevators that might have been designed by Jules Verne, and an atrium bathing the central court in golden-white sunlight via an expansive skylight. No question that the building was long on baroque charm but also in the tooth, and that we could have afforded something bigger and better or at least more modern.

But this was the City of Angels, where image is all, and the Bradbury was exactly right to convince clients seeking a private detective they’d come to just the right place. Hollywood surely did, as more crime and mystery movies had been shot here than in any studio in town, from Double Indemnity to D.O.A. We’d even rented out one of our old-fashioned pebbled glass interiors to I, the Jury, in 3D no less.

Meanwhile, back on the fifth floor, three of our five suites were given over to cubicles utilized by a dozen operatives (including three females), all former law enforcement; another suite was occupied by my L.A. partner, Fred Rubinski and myself (side by side in separate offices), a reception area out front with a secretary at one desk and a receptionist at the other. The remaining suite was a conference room large enough to hold a press conference or meet with studio executives.

Nathan S. Heller had come a long way from a one-room office over a blind pig on Van Buren by the El. I didn’t have to sleep in a Murphy bed in this one, either, although the leather couch was pretty comfy when a guy my age wanted a nap.

I still considered myself based in Chicago, though my longtime partner there, Lou Sapperstein, ran the day-to-day at the Monadnock Building; but I spent about a third of my time in L.A. now, and at least six weeks cumulative in New York at our Empire State Building office, overseen by Bob Hasty, also a partner. Lou and Fred both went back to my Pickpocket Detail days in the Loop; Bob I knew from when he’d done work for the A-1 through our D.C. affiliate, Bradford Investigations.

My extended time in L.A. had to do with exploiting the celebrity that had come with the Life and Look articles about our Hollywood clientele: Time, Newsweek and the wire services had also started noticing the admittedly unlikely number of newsworthy cases I’d figured in over the years. And of course it gave me an opportunity to spend more time with my son, who hadn’t said “Fuck you” to me in months.

I was behind my clutter-free desk and Fred was across from me in the client’s chair, an amiable balding bulldog whose resemblance to Edward G. Robinson came up more often than he would have liked. He was a sharp dresser, a habitué of Luigi’s Custom Tailor shop in Van Nuys, though right now he was in shirtsleeves and suspenders. He had a few years on me and retirement was his favorite subject.

But not today.

“You really think there’s anything good to be had,” he said, the cigar in his fingers furthering a thirties gangster vibe, “out of poking around in this thing?”

This thing, of course, was Bob’s murder.

“I have a client,” I reminded him. “A longtime one in Pearson, and all he wants is enough for a few columns that can get him back his liberal bona fides.”

“If he pays you,” Fred said, sticking the cigar in the hole in his skeptical expression. “Look. We haven’t had problems with the LAPD in years. We even have some ex-cops of theirs on the payroll. Why borrow trouble?”

I ignored that and flipped a hand. “You’re the one who followed the Sirhan Sirhan case in the press. I was in Chicago minding my own business. What’s your take?”

He grunted a laugh. “You were in that goddamn kitchen when the shit hit the fan. And you’re asking me?”

I didn’t say anything.

Fred put his cigar in the ashtray on my desk that was there for him and clients; I hadn’t been a regular smoker since the war. The real one.

He said, “Sorry. I know you and Bobby were tight. I got a big fat tactless mouth sometimes. I just don’t see what’s to be gained. Professionally or personally.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“What’s your take, Fred? This thing has every earmark of a police cover-up. Looks like they’re doing whatever it takes to quash any conspiracy talk.”

His shrug was slow, elaborate. “That’s easy. They’re lazy. Not the rank and file — it comes from above, the brass and the D.A. It’s a hell of a lot easier to prosecute a single individual for a crime than multiple defendants. All you gotta do is ignore evidence that doesn’t fit the story you’re tellin’, then make your conviction.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. They have one man in custody — do they want to explain another shooter or two, slipping through their fingers? Of course the D.A. wants a quick win that the public can buy.”

He threw a hand in the air. “Precisely.”

“But what about the defense team, Fred? What about that slick prick shyster winking at me? What the hell does Cooper think I’m in on, anyway?”

Fred shrugged again, not so elaborate. “You should ask him.” He held up two fingers with the cigar twirling smoke in between, Winston Churchill style. “But I’ll give you one thing — you can’t take the gun evidence too serious. Their forensics guy, this Wolf character, is famous for giving the prosecution whatever it needs. You remember the Kirsch case?”

“Didn’t make the Tribune.”

He filled me in. “Kirsch was a former Deputy D.A. who was tied up with a wife-swapping crowd in Long Beach. Some guy didn’t wanna give Kirsch’s wife back and Mister Deputy District Attorney shoots both of them in bed. His own bed, at that. It was a slam-dunk case till this Wolf character got caught sweetening the bullet evidence, and almost botched the whole thing.”

From the intercom came the voice of our thirty-year-old starlet/receptionist, who lent the A-1 a pretty face when she wasn’t doing a round of auditions.

“Your nine-thirty is here, Mr. Heller. In the conference room.”

“Thanks, Evie.”

I clicked off, and Fred said, “Your FBI buddy? Keeping things discreet?”

I nodded, getting up. “Yeah. He wouldn’t want to be caught consorting with the lowlife likes of us.”

Wes Grapp was the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Office, but before that he’d held the same post in Kansas City. That’s where we’d met, when I was working for the family in the Greenlease kidnapping case back in ’53. We’d gotten along well, sharing information with each other that helped the overall cause. For what good it had done.

Grapp had helped himself to the seat at the head of the table in the squarish room bisected by a conference table designed for a different space. The walls were bare flat plaster, pale green, no framed anything, as if to underscore the confidentiality of anything said here. The old-fashioned wooden blinds were drawn to keep sunlight and prying eyes out — after all, this nasty world of ours included binoculars and lip readers.

In his early fifties, Grapp dressed well — that gray suit was off-the-rack, but the rack was at Bullock’s Wilshire — and the pleasantness of the features on the long narrow oval of his face was compromised by a prominent nose and high forehead that rose to a dark, receding Nixon-ish hairline.

He got to his feet, extended a hand, but retained his head-of-the-table position. After the ritual handshake, firm but not showy on either of our parts, we both sat, me at his right, Daddy’s favorite son.

We exchanged small talk about family briefly, and the status of our mutual friend, Kansas City Cadillac dealer Robert Green-lease, who’d been ailing. Greenlease and his wife Virginia had endured the deaths of all three of their children, but Mrs. Green-lease was apparently finding solace in her church and charities.

“Not the best thing about our jobs,” Wes commented. “The tragedies, particularly the ones we have to sift through.”

I’d told him on the phone just what tragedy I was starting to sift through. Which had made it clear we’d need to link up away from his office.

“I have an appointment this afternoon,” I said, “with Sgt. Manny Hermano. We’ve never met. He has an interesting reputation, considering he got entrusted with a high-profile investigation like Special Unit Senator.”

Grapp’s grin came quick and left the same way. “Yes, ‘Shoot ’em Up’ doesn’t sound like a nickname you’d generally find attached to somebody heading up the inquiry into the assassination of a major presidential candidate.”

“Particularly one named Kennedy.”

A nod. “Particularly one... yes. I would imagine you’re already aware that Sgt. Hermano has a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency going way back. Actually, so does his superior, Chief of Detectives Houghton. And that’s really all I can say on that subject.”

Not a surprise.

I asked, “What can you tell me, Wes?”

He might have just tasted something foul. “Just that our role at the Bureau has been frustratingly limited. Homicide is a violation of state law and, from the start, the LAPD asserted its jurisdiction. We did have, do have, underlying jurisdiction through civil rights statutes... and certain federal legislation passed after November 22, ’63.”

I nodded. “Covering violence against a candidate for federal office.”

His eyebrows went up and down, but his gray eyes remained placid. “Right. That pertains to the President, as well. Doesn’t go far enough. I’ve been pushing for Secret Service protection for presidential candidates ever since Dallas.”

“Maybe that will happen now.”

“Maybe.” That came out a sigh. “From the start of this one, absurd as it might seem, the LAPD called the assassination a strictly local matter. Still, I let Houghton know we’d be running a parallel investigation, and suggested two FBI agents accompany any of his teams in the field. He rejected that. Sgt. Hermano was to be point man. We were told everything had to go through him.”

“‘Everything’ covering what?”

His gesture might have been an M.C.’s introducing a guest artist. “All of our work. Scores of interviews around the country with anyone who’d known Sirhan since he came here as a child. In school, in Pasadena, or at the ranch in Corona, where he worked.”

“And this got you what?”

His smirk had no humor in it. “Nothing of much importance, for all our digging. Oh, I could give you Sirhan’s passport number, visa number, every damn number from Social Security to when he was booked at county jail. Even the serial number of his Iver Johnson revolver. Numbers that don’t add up to jack squat.”

I leaned forward. “And nothing of substance at all from those interviews?”

“Well. A gas station manager said Sirhan was a good worker, friendly and polite. The gent who employed him as a gardener said he was quiet and well-mannered. When he worked at a health food store, his fellow employee said they studied the Bible together and that Sirhan was ‘a really nice boy.’”

My turn to smirk. “Sounds like what the next-door neighbors say when some guy kills his whole family after his wife didn’t pass him the salt.”

“It does. There’s always people who never saw it coming... but this goes a little deeper. Sirhan was a member of the Rosicrucians, which Mayor Yorty inaccurately described as communist to paint Kennedy’s killer a Commie. But a friend at college who headed up the local SDS chapter said Sirhan rebuffed efforts to recruit him into that radical group. Other friends found him not particularly interested in communism or even politics in general. He was keen on his schoolwork, and later, in making money.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a political fanatic.”

The eyebrows went up again and stayed up a while. “Well, he comes across that way in the notebook found in his bedroom at his mother’s.”

That had caught my eye in the newspapers; hell, it caught everybody’s eye. “Where he wrote ‘RFK Must Die’ over and over again.”

Grapp nodded. “But here’s something the boys at SUS won’t mention — their top handwriting experts and ours couldn’t confirm it was Sirhan’s writing.”

“Do I detect some doubts, Special Agent Grapp?”

He shifted in his hard chair. “I just wish we hadn’t been elbowed out of this one. The fudged forensics from that perjurer Wolf make me suspect there may be something to this second shooter talk... or at least we could’ve put our people, who are the best after all, into finding out the truth of it or not.”

I smiled a little. “Somebody really doesn’t want a conspiracy on this one.”

“No, somebody doesn’t. Keep in mind everything we came up with went to, and through, Hermano. He was the total arbiter. He was the one who decided which witnesses were worth believing, and was the personal polygraph expert who browbeat that Serrano girl into submission, her and others. They sent portable tape recorders out on every single interview they conducted, you know — everything got on tape... sounds impressive, right? Only Hermano and the D.A. culled it from 3,000 hours to 300 hours, for use in the court case, and deep-sixed the rest. Burned them like they did those photos.”

“You heard about that, huh?”

“We don’t miss much at the Bureau.” He leaned forward. Almost whispering, he said, “But we do what we’re told, and it came from the top to play whatever game the LAPD had in mind.”

The top being J. Edgar Hoover.

Grapp sat back, his volume normal now. “I don’t have to tell you, Nate, that you don’t start with the perp and work backward, discarding everything that doesn’t apply to putting him away. It’s bad policing, and it’s bad science.”

The tableau in the Pantry flashed through my mind. “I saw that little bastard, Wes, banging away at the crowd... and I saw my friend fall, and lie sprawled on that filthy floor, his eyes staring into the inevitability of that moment. I’m not trying to clear Sirhan fucking Sirhan.”

He patted my forearm sleeve. “Good for you. But if you find he didn’t work alone, more power to you. Just don’t set out with your mind made up, one way or the other. And, Nate? Do I have to tell you to make sure Hermano thinks you’re on his side?”

“No, I get that. He didn’t leave a trail of dead suspects behind him because he’s open to discussion.”

Cops and crooks alike called Parker Center — the police administration building at 150 N. Los Angeles Street — the Glass House. TV and movie fans knew it well, from the revived Dragnet if nothing else, so it seemed somehow fitting that 803, the big room on the top floor, should be decked out as a sound stage. Training films and the like had been the goal here, the walls asbestos woven with chicken wire, bare stanchions climbing to the network of pipes and ducts of a high, open ceiling.

Right now, however, it had transformed into an enormous office, a bullpen of a dozen or more desks without cubicles, surrounded by file cabinets, interwoven with assorted tables, charts, evidence boards, and Xerox machines. But this space, obviously designed to be a center of activity, had a ghost-town look, with only a handful of plainclothes officers at their posts, desktops empty but for an occasional cardboard box, phones wrapped in their own disconnected cords. The air conditioning was almost chilly, minus human bodies to soak it up.

“Mr. Heller!” a voice called, echoing from the back of the room. “This way!”

A stocky, fireplug figure in a suit and tie stood behind a metal desk, gesturing for me to come. I went down the central aisle of this all-but-abandoned outpost to that desk, which was bigger than the others, and given rather more breathing room. To one side, various chairs were assembled in a meeting area facing an evidence board that had been cleared but for a few photos of the Pantry, Sirhan and other related subjects.

Manny Hermano came out from around his big metal desk with a hooked-up phone and a few files fanned out like a poker hand. That suit wasn’t cheap — Hart Schaffner & Marx maybe, a plaid olive number with a vest and darker green tie with red stripes.

He offered up a big white trying-too-hard smile under a nicely trimmed handlebar mustache, his dark thinning hair swept back over a rounded square face, his nearly black eyes bright behind glasses with heavy black frames, over which black thick eyebrows hovered.

We shook hands; he tried too hard there, too. But at least he was friendly.

“Have a seat, Mr. Heller,” he said. He gestured to one of the chairs by the now nearly blank corkboard evidence display.

I sat and he came over and pulled a chair around to face me, not too close, leaning forward a bit, his hands folded and dangling between his knees.

“So,” he said, his voice mid-range and husky, “Drew Pearson wants to tell the story of SUS.”

That was what I’d indicated in the phone conversation we’d had this morning when I set up our meeting.

I said, “To a degree. If I may be frank?”

“Please.”

“Basically, Drew wants to jump on the bandwagon, venerating Bobby Kennedy. He wrote some, well, unflattering things about Bob in the weeks before the shooting.”

Hermano nodded, smiled a little. “What seemed like fair game politically became embarrassing in an instant.”

“Shoot ’em Up” Manny was no chump. Grapp had filled me in: Hermano had a degree from UCLA, spoke French and Spanish fluently, and had authored a textbook on criminal investigation, teaching law enforcement classes one night a week at Los Angeles State College. And of course the CIA had used him as a teacher, too, in Latin America. Never mind what subjects.

“Mr. Heller,” he began, and I stopped him.

“Nate,” I said with a nod.

“Manny,” he said with a gesture to the green-and-red tie. “In a way, it seems strange you’d come to me to learn anything about this crime. You were in that Pantry, when it all went down — a trained observer.”

Was there something slightly arch in the way he said that?

“Being a trained observer only takes you so far,” I said. “I think you know, Manny, just what a madhouse that Pantry became.”

He shook his head sympathetically. “Never experienced anything like it myself, and I’ve been in more than a few tense situations in my twenty-two years on the job. All those shots fired, the chaos, so many people crammed in that small space. Unimaginable.”

I opened a hand to him. “So you understand why the point of view of an investigator of your stature is of interest.”

Yes, I was kissing ass.

He smiled again, a bandito in a sharp suit; leaned back and folded his arms. “And my conclusion, formed from a distance, and yours at the scene, are surely the same. You saw that little bastard blasting away, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Testified to that effect.”

“I did. I believe I talked on the phone, from my Chicago office, to one of your people, by way of pre-trial preparation.”

He nodded. “That’s right. We were selective about who we advised the District Attorney to call among the eyewitnesses. There were so many of them, and a witness of your stature was high on our list.”

My ass’s turn to be kissed.

I said, “That was the primary role of SUS — case preparation.”

“Correct. That and researching the suspect and his background. Which we did thoroughly — to the tune of over three thousand interviews, and the longest, largest and most expensive criminal investigation in LAPD history.”

I tried to look impressed. “And what did you learn?”

He flipped a hand. “Sirhan was clearly a self-appointed assassin. He decided that Bobby Kennedy was no good, because he was pro-Israel and powerful. And Sirhan was going to kill him, at whatever the cost.”

“Premeditation, then.”

“No question. And he wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time, nor was he legally insane. And we found absolutely no evidence of a conspiracy in this crime. Believe me, we tried.”

I cocked my head. “Yet some say a conspiracy was indicated. Eyewitnesses—”

“The unreliable ones,” he cut in, some edge now, “we worked on till we proved them false, or they modified their statements when we accused them of publicity seeking. That Serrano girl was a flake. There was a waiter, this kid DiPiero, who claimed seeing Sirhan with a good-looking girl in the Pantry. But we wound up identifying the woman who we determined was where this polka-dot-dress nonsense started.”

This was news to me. “Oh, then you found her, the girl in the polka-dot dress?”

He bolted to his feet and went to the evidence board where he snatched off an 8x10 from the surviving scraps. Proudly, he walked over and handed it to me.

“That’s her. Schulte. Valerie Schulte. She was in the Pantry that night, all right, just not with Sirhan. Maybe you saw her.”

I hadn’t, but that didn’t mean anything. But what did strike me as meaningful was the absurdity of this attractive young woman — a blonde who resembled Sandra Dee — being identified by anybody as a dark-haired girl in a white dress with black polka dots. In addition to her hair color, the Schulte girl was wearing a green dress with yellow polka dots.

Oh, and she was on crutches, her right leg in a cast.

He folded his arms and smirked, pleased with himself. “Took forever to get that kid DiPiero to come around and make the right I.D.”

I decided then and there not to take Manny’s night course in criminology.

I said, “Anything you care to share on the ballistics side?”

He batted at the air. “Oh, Wayne Wolf is a real pro. He can make forensics evidence get on its hind legs and bark. He worked all night, making a match from a bullet at the scene to Sirhan’s gun! He’s not the top man over at the lab, you know, but I knew to request him.”

I bet he did.

I said, “You confirmed that Sirhan was seen using a gun of the correct make at various shooting ranges?”

A decisive nod. “That’s right. We gathered 40,000 cartridge casings and Wolf examined every one of them, looking for a match.”

“How many did he come up with?”

“Well, uh... none. But that was a long shot, wasn’t it?”

Forty-thousand long shots, apparently.

I glanced around — only three desks were inhabited. All the cardboard boxes suggested moving day or a mass firing.

“Looks pretty slow around here now,” I said. “But I’m surprised with the trial over, and the death sentence delivered, you haven’t shut down already.”

He shrugged. “Oh, by last September we cut back from forty men to twenty, and we’re phasing out now. Should be out of here by end of July, with everybody back to their regular assignments. We’re waiting to see if Mr. Cooper files an appeal, but confidentially we’re told that’s unlikely.”

What struck me as unlikely was having an assurance like that from the defense attorney after a murder conviction.

“Well,” I said, getting to my feet, “I think that’s all I need. Thanks, Manny. It’s been enlightening.”

He walked me down that central aisle in the movie sound stage that had housed this farce.

A firm hand settled on my shoulder as we walked. “Listen, Nate. There’s a favor you could do me.”

“If I can.”

“Could you ask Pearson to straighten out this nonsense about me returning to the LAPD as some sort of CIA sneak? These conspiracy kooks are trying to make it sound like I was brought back and planted into the RFK case so I could steer things around to a point where no one would discover a conspiracy. That’s just not so!”

He opened the door onto the hall for me.

“These clever types are already getting together and cookin’ up nonsense,” he said, “looking to profit by demanding, ‘What really happened? What really happened?’ Couldn’t have been one little man with a gun! Ready and willing to float their theories to a public that craves answers as big as their fallen hero.”

Sounded to me like Manny believed in conspiracy after all.

Nine

I arranged to meet a certain controversial medical examiner at four P.M. at the Otomisan, a hole-in-the wall diner on East First Street in Boyle Heights. Just east of downtown Los Angeles near Little Tokyo, across the L.A. River, the Heights had provided a post-war home for a large Japanese-American community. A handful of red booths faced a counter with a dozen red-cushioned stools, vinyl seating split like sideways smiles. Vintage Japanese prints with grim faces shared the walls with wartime family photographs of smiling ones, despite stark backgrounds of barracks and barbed wire.

Thomas Noguchi said, “This area is one of the few places where my people could live in L.A., after World War Two, when they were released from the internment camps.”

His English was precise with the lilt of a Japanese accent.

“Were you shoved into one of those camps, Dr. Noguchi?”

We were sitting across from each other in a booth; the middle-aged Japanese woman in an indigo-blue cotton top and matching slacks kept a discreet eye on us as she fussed behind the counter, these two suspiciously well-dressed men ordering beer and nothing else. It was the kind of place that had regulars and we weren’t those.

About forty, Dr. Noguchi — his round, pleasant face not really fitting that slender, almost skinny frame — looked damn near dapper in a dark, sharp, wide-lapelled suit, his wide, thick-knotted tie navy striped with narrow white. His hairline, no gray in the black, curved above a high forehead naturally, not receding, at least not yet. Thick black eyebrows arched in permanent curiosity.

He shook his head. “No, Mr. Heller. I came over from Tokyo in 1952. But my wife Hisako and her family were in detention camps. I fear this history is fading for the current generation.”

“Boyle Heights is a little off the beaten path for me,” I said. “I don’t mind meeting here, but I have a hunch you don’t live in Little Tokyo.”

“I do not. My wife and I have a nice two-story residence on Oxford in the Wilshire District.”

“Can’t be the Sapporo beer,” I said. We’d already been served the bottles and glasses. “They sell that all around town.”

He chuckled. “No. And it is too early to dine. Why I selected this setting we will get back to. First, let us discuss your topic of interest — my autopsy of Robert F. Kennedy.”

I poured beer into my glass. “Might I begin by asking, Doctor, if the findings of your autopsy had anything to do with your recent firing?”

That invoked a modest Buddha smile. “It did. But there were sixty-one charges against me, including that I reveled in the publicity following the assassination. A jealous rival had me singing and dancing in my office while the Senator lay dying. Elated at the thought I would soon become famous.”

“That seems unlikely. But admittedly we’ve just met.”

The tiny smiled widened a bit. “I have read of you, Mr. Heller. They call you the Private Eye to the Stars... well, they are calling me the Coroner to the Stars now, so perhaps we have something in common. And yet I would imagine yours is not an appellation you have encouraged.”

“No,” I admitted. “But handling Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy made yours inevitable, I’m afraid.”

He filled his glass. “An inherent irony is not lost on me,” he said. “I had performed the autopsy on Miss Monroe six years before, and now found myself making the death examination of an alleged lover of hers.”

I knew more about that than I would share with the deposed medical examiner.

“Bob was a friend,” I said. “I think you know I was there that night, in the Pantry.”

He nodded, took a sip of beer.

Finally he said, “We speak of these people as if they descended from Mt. Olympus. But their frail humanity is something with which I am all too familiar in my profession.”

“And in mine,” I said. “I was Bob’s bodyguard that night. But he insisted I not carry a gun. If I had, you might have conducted a different autopsy.”

His eyes, a washed-out gray, conveyed great sadness. “To me, your friend and his brother represented the greatness of America. I respected their style, their leadership, the way they reached out to all ethnic groups as if to say, ‘You too are Americans.’”

I smiled just a little — probably as close to a Buddha smile as I had in me. “His brother Jack fought in the Pacific, you know.”

“I know. As did you, Mr. Heller. Bronze Star, I believe?”

“You do your homework.”

“Even a doctor to the dead must do so. But in all honesty, I encountered you in my more casual reading. You do not appear to have made the medical journals.”

I swallowed some good Japanese beer. “No. More like True Detective and Confidential.”

“You are too modest. More than once in Life, at least once in Look. And the Sunday supplements. You harbor no resentment toward the Japanese?”

“Do you harbor resentment over the internment of your wife and her folks? I’m guessing yes but you don’t obsess about it. What good would it do? There’s an emperor and some generals I wouldn’t mind knocking around some.”

“We have that in common as well.” He sipped beer again. “Speaking of journalists, you said on the phone you were looking into the case for Drew Pearson. What, might I ask, is Mr. Pearson’s agenda?”

I shrugged. “Frankly, he got on the wrong side of this thing by blasting Bobby Kennedy politically in the weeks before the assassination.”

The dark eyebrows flicked up and down. “Unfortunate timing.”

“Drew does know there’s some talk of a possible second shooter, which he may touch upon, but that’s not the focus. He just wants to be able to discuss the tragedy accurately while elevating the memory of Robert Kennedy.”

Noguchi touched his chest, lowered his head an inch or two. “It needs scant elevation in these quarters, despite the dancing I’m said to have done.”

“Do you know why the results of your autopsy were withheld for many months and given to Sirhan’s defense at the last minute?”

“I know only that it wasn’t my doing.”

He told me his story.

At Good Samaritan Hospital, at 3 A.M. on June 6 last year, the medical examiner had made his way through a heartbroken crowd whose vigil had turned into mourning. A security guard guided Noguchi and two deputies to the hospital’s autopsy room. A team from the M.E.’s office was already there — investigator, chief autopsy assistant, photographer, with instructions to secure the appropriate hospital charts and X-rays and assemble the surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy’s life. Also present were staff members of Noguchi’s and the D.A.’s.

Noguchi had been advised by trusted peers from around the country that if Kennedy died, the medical examiner must take charge before the federal government rushed in, as they had after the JFK assassination, which had resulted in the President’s body being flown to D.C. for an autopsy (by unqualified military doctors) so flawed it generated immediate cover-up rumors and conspiracy theories.

Conducting this important autopsy at the Good Samaritan was fine with the medical examiner — conditions in the basement at City Hall were cramped and dire. Noguchi had been begging for better conditions, making enemies of his bosses by telling the press that in his facility rats outnumbered microscopes.

“Senator Kennedy’s body lay on the table,” Noguchi said, “under a sheet. After removing the bandages from the deceased’s head, I turned to the surgeons and asked what had become of the hair shavings — the scalp hair around the wounded area, shaved off before surgery? I knew that might contain critical evidence.”

Noguchi had sent an investigator scurrying to the operating room to check; his emissary discovered the hospital staff had retained those little clumps of hair, which Noguchi’s man placed in an evidence envelope.

“In the autopsy room I made an unusual request,” Noguchi said. “Not normal procedure by any means, and the only time in the thousands of autopsies I have performed that I asked for the deceased’s face to be covered. This was done with a towel. I needed to proceed with my work undistracted by my feelings for the Senator. I observed a moment of silence, head bowed in the traditional Japanese manner of respect. Then I began my work at the feet and worked my way to the head.”

I frowned. “That isn’t normal procedure either, is it, Doctor? Isn’t the reverse more typical?”

He nodded, twice. “Yes, Mr. Heller, but this approach, slow, careful, can uncover important evidence overlooked if the wound gets all the attention.”

First studied was a through-and-through gunshot, underneath and somewhat to the back of the right armpit. Traveling at an angle, the bullet (not recovered) exited through the front right shoulder.

Second to be examined was another wound an inch or so from the first; it surprisingly had not traveled in the same direction, rather crossing to lodge in soft tissue near the spinal column at the back of the lower neck. With a finger and thumb, Noguchi had removed the deformed .22 caliber bullet.

Third was the fatal bullet, its exact path impossible to probe. It had entered the skull an inch to the left of the victim’s right ear, shattering into metallic shards. These fragments could not be matched to Sirhan’s gun — to any gun — beyond establishing the caliber (.22). Unburned powder grains formed a circular pattern on the victim’s right ear.

“This was unquestionably the most meticulous autopsy I ever performed,” Noguchi said. “But, ironically, that very thoroughness led to a credible conspiracy theory, which did not endear me to my already vociferous critics.”

The clumps of scalp hair retrieved at the medical examiner’s instance had revealed gunpowder residue. And not just metallic elements, but soot.

Soot in the forensics sense is a collection of unburned grains of powder, burned grains of powder, and metallic fragments.

“Doctor,” I said, leaning forward, “I saw it myself — the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun was at minimum a yard away from Kennedy. Soot in the hair means the kill shot was within inches of Bob’s head. Or closer.”

With an almost pixieish smile, Noguchi asked, “Mr. Heller, are you familiar with the expression, ‘in a pig’s eye?’”

“I am. Also in a pig’s ass.”

“Well, the test I ran involved neither one — in this instance, it was a pig’s ear. Actually, seven of them.”

Seven pig’s ears had been attached to as many padded muslin heads simulating skulls. With earmuffs at the ready, Noguchi directed a plainclothes detective to shoot at each faux skull, first a firm contact shot, second moving back a quarter inch... then half an inch... one, two, three, four inches.

“At three inches from the right mastoid area,” Noguchi said, “we had a perfect match for the tattooed pattern of unburned-powder grains on the victim’s right ear. And the shape of the entrance wound was nearly identical.”

Noguchi’s autopsy findings were not the only indication Sirhan may not have been the sole shooter: four bullets were fired at RFK, three hitting him, another tearing through his clothing; five other victims behind Bob were also shot (none killed), all the bullets recovered; and three more slugs wound up in the ceiling tiles. That indicated the trajectory of twelve bullets at the scene, with Sirhan’s revolver holding only eight.

“Too many bullets,” I said.

“So it would seem. But the LAPD insists the excess can be written off as ricochets. And you know better than most, Mr. Heller, the extent of the crowded excitement in that Pantry. What did the eyes of witnesses actually see? Did no one see what actually happened?”

I thought about that. Then: “Sirhan would’ve had to lunge toward Bob close enough to make the kill shot, not be noticed by anybody, and then lurch back into his prior position, to have fired at the distance witnesses reported.”

“So it would appear.” He opened a palm, tentatively. “The only other possibility would seem to be a second gunman, shooting from behind at close range, then slipping immediately away, attention diverted by Sirhan shooting from farther away, in front.”

Soon it would be the supper hour and Japanese-American patrons in modest Western street clothes were trailing in; the little mom-and-pop diner would soon be filled, the bubbling oil for tempura welcoming an obviously regular clientele.

“Do you mind my asking,” I ventured, “what sort of charges were brought against you? Your professionalism seems apparent to me. You must have a dark side I’m not sensing.”

That Buddha smile returned. “You see my smile? I was accused of wearing this expression in the midst of mass disasters. I reportedly threatened a fellow employee with a knife. I dreamed aloud of how I might become even more famous if only a jetliner would crash into a hotel. And I longed to perform a live autopsy on my boss.”

“Who doesn’t?”

He leaned gently forward. “I suggested we meet here, Mr. Heller, because no other restaurant in town displays photographs of the detention camps. I was a child in Yokosuka when you were fighting in the Pacific. Would the residue of a not distant past erect a barrier between us? Would you assume a Japanese coroner had somehow botched so important an autopsy?”

“Of course not.”

“I see that in your case, or at least sense it. But the ridiculous charges against me are what a friend has called ‘plain, old-fashioned prejudice.’ Or do you think I’m simply paranoid, thinking there are people out to get me because I’m Japanese?”

“I do not. I can’t imagine you’re going to let them get away with it, either.”

His nod was on a tilt. “I’ve taken my case to the Civil Service Commission of our fair city... or at least we will see how ‘fair’ it is at the hearing I’ve demanded.”

On the street, I asked the deposed medical examiner one last question.

“What does your gut tell you about the Robert Kennedy killing, Doctor?”

He didn’t hesitate in answering: “My gut tells me Sirhan acted alone. But my ‘gut’ is not enough — forensic science must concern itself only with the known facts. Based on that, I cannot support the conclusion that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.”

Nita wrapped up a guest shot on a new show that would be on in the fall, Marcus Welby, M.D., and just before eight P.M. dragged into my Pink Palace bungalow looking like a patient. But she was ready to be discharged after a shower and freshening up, decking herself out in a gold-red-and-black tunic top and black flared pants. I got into a two-toned striped yellow shirt with matching tie and a golden brown blazer, if you’re interested. My pants did not flare. Much.

We dined at the hotel, in the timeless Polo Lounge with its dark green-and-white walls and tartan-plaid carpet, its horseshoe-shaped private booths overlooking the garden patio where lights on trees seemed to twinkle in time to the tinkling piano making background music out of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Johnny Mercer and other standard bearers.

We shared the twenty-bucks-plus Beverly Hills Salad De Luxe, a decadent concoction of crab legs, shrimp, avocado, tomato, romaine lettuce, and Thousand Island dressing. I mean to make no judgment about my female companion, but she ate most of it. I was busy recounting the encounters I’d had since seeing her a thousand years ago this morning — Fred Rubinski and Wes Grapp at the A-1, Manny Hermano at Parker Center, and Thomas Noguchi at the Boyle Heights diner.

This would be our third night together, assuming she stayed over once again. I’d learned quite a bit about her. She’d been married to a director — I inwardly cringed because my ex-wife was now married to one of that breed, although hers did film, and Nita’s TV — but she made a point of it having been over for years. She had no kids and informed me, too lightly, she was “cheerfully barren,” the result of an illegally performed abortion in her teen years.

“And now,” she said, “after a fairly successful run, even if I never did land a series... I’m at a crossroads.”

“Really? Paused for a train, or just waiting for your turn at an all-way stop?”

“Take today,” she said, dismissing my question for the smart-ass rhetorical thing that it was. “A pretty decent role. A woman with some scary symptoms that Robert Young explained away. Nice man, by the way... a little moody. Anyway, I’m just a throw-away, filler stuff, really.”

“What about ‘there are no small parts, just small actors’?”

“Stanislavski knew what he was talking about. But I’m afraid even the small parts will dry up for this small actress. Nate, I’m... going to be forty-three in a month. Tell anyone and I’ll have to kill you.”

I waved that off. “Don’t worry, honey. Knowing that, I’m not about to be seen in public again with an old bat like you.”

That made her laugh. I liked that I could make her laugh. And I liked her. She was upbeat and sad, a tougher combo to pull off than the ingredients of the Salad De Luxe. Which was excellent, by the way. She’d started talking, leaving room for me to eat, finally.

“Truth is,” she said, “I’m heading into that no-gal’s-land of ingenue roles I’m too old for and character parts I’m too young for.”

“Didn’t you say something once, about needing a sugar daddy?”

Her smile was almost a kiss. “That’s what I was hinting at.”

We laughed about that, and variations on the theme, as we kissed and petted like kids — not in the Polo Lounge, but on top of my made bed at my bungalow in the low lighting that was kind to a miserable old bastard like me and a supple not-young doll like her. I fondled and kissed her in intimate places that are none of your fucking business and she did the same with me. We undressed each other, which was sexy if awkward, and then were under the sheets.

After some quick clean-up in the bathroom, she returned in just bra and panties, neither terribly substantial, just pink fluff really, and crawled under the covers and went almost instantly asleep. I took another shower, warm not hot, got into my pajamas, black silk, and padded out in my slippers to get myself a ginger ale in the darkened living room. I preferred Coca-Cola but the caffeine was not a risk worth taking. As an afterthought, I added some vodka.

I took my glass out on the patio. The night was cool enough that the robe was a good idea. I sat at a glass-topped, white wrought-iron table. Put my right ankle on my left knee and exposed some ankle. That the patio was smallish made it feel protected. Beyond a low stone wall lay a gently rustling tropical garden whose greenery was enlivened by exotic flowers, palm trees lording over all against an unimpressed deep blue sky, its starry tiara askew.

She made me jump a little, she’d been so quiet, slipping out onto the patio in a pink Beverly Hills Hotel bathrobe. It fit her nicely, belt knotted at bellybutton, feet bare, dark brunette hair tousled, no makeup at all.

As she sat on the wrought-iron chair next to me, she was laughing lightly.

I tried out a tiny grin. “Am I that funny?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t remember ever being with a man who wears pajamas. Much less silk ones.”

“You, on the other hand, seem simply made for terrycloth. Luckily I had a lady’s robe handy.”

“Luckily,” she agreed. “Some past guest must have left it.”

I nodded. “Another sweet young thing who’d probably never seen an adult male in silk jammies before.”

“Except maybe in the movies.”

“Except maybe in the movies. Just how many men not in jammies have you been with, young lady?”

“Did you want a full report on my past amorous liaisons, Mr. Heller?”

“We have time, Ms. Romaine.”

“I doubt that. You think I rolled up all those TV credits without staring at a ceiling or two?”

It was all very light but there were contradictory undercurrents. Melancholy. Fondness. Regret. Loss. Possibility.

“This poking around,” she said.

“Hope you enjoyed it.”

“Not what I mean. Looking into... what you’re looking into. It sounds like I got you into something... dangerous.”

“Danger is my business. Trouble is my middle name. Granted, they laugh at my passport...”

“I mean it, Nate. This is big. Full of risk. I shouldn’t have... what I mean is... You can stop here. You can stop now. Before we can’t sit out here like this without wondering what every rustle of leaves is about.”

“Nita. That’s lovely of you to say. And you are the one who got me pulling at a string or two on the sweater. But it’s turned into a job, for a longtime client. Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought you up to speed. Perhaps you’re the one unnecessarily at risk.”

“I’d like to stay... up to speed. Help you, if I can. If it makes sense.”

We sat quietly. She reached for my drink and sipped.

“That’s more than ginger ale,” she observed.

“A hint of vodka.”

“More like a kick.”

Fronds rustled, but nobody tried to kill us.

“Before you were born,” I said, “my first job as a private investigator took me to Miami. I’d been a plainclothes detective before that, youngest on the Chicago PD, and I’d attracted some attention. Got me clients right off the bat. One of them was Anton Cermak.”

“Who?”

Maybe she was past forty, but she was still so very young.

I said, “The mayor of Chicago. He got himself in trouble with the Outfit.”

“The what?” “You’re a child. The Chicago crime syndicate. He got in bed with the wrong faction and he tried to have a man called Frank Nitti killed.”

“Him I’ve heard of. He was on The Untouchables. I did one of those.”

I decided not to tell her that Eliot Ness had been a close friend. That could wait. This wasn’t about name-dropping. Not that she’d know many.

“Anyway, young lady, if you check the history books, a little foreign guy with bushy hair and a dark complexion took a pot shot at Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who I assume you’ve heard of. This was not long after FDR won the presidency. The assassin’s name was Zangara and he had some half-assed political motive, anarchy or some such bullshit.”

“But he didn’t kill Roosevelt. That much I know.”

“He didn’t kill Roosevelt. The history books say Giuseppe Zangara missed and accidentally hit Mayor Cermak, who was shaking hands with the President Elect at the time. Zangara was a Sicilian who thought he was dying of cancer, by the way, and they say his family lived well after Giuseppe went quickly to the chair. There was a second shooter at Miami, ready to back him up. Pretty standard procedure for certain types of assassinations. Bottom line, Mayor Cermak was killed just a few weeks after two of his crooked cops were sent to shoot Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. They’d pulled in another cop for back-up without telling him the score. That was me. That was what initiated me going private. I had to go to the hospital where Frank Nitti lay fighting for his life and convince him I wasn’t in on it. Did I mention Cermak had hired me as a bodyguard?”

Halfway through that she had clutched my hand.

I looked at the stars. “What do they call that feeling — déjà vu, right? Well, all day long I’ve been feeling it, and I think I felt it that night in the Pantry, too, wrestling with that little bushy-haired prick, but I didn’t let it in. But Nita... I’ve been here before. And the Cermak kill went down in front of a crowd of people, a packed amphitheater, and everybody saw it and nobody saw it, not really. So I have come full circle, baby, and I don’t like it. It’s like I’ve spent all these years learning everything and nothing.”

She got up and came over and sat in my lap and put her arms around me and buried her face in my neck. I could feel the tears.

Muffled, she said, “Is that all true?”

“Yes. It’s true. You are a child.”

She stayed on my lap with her arms around me, but she pulled away to look at me with the big brown eyes in the lovely makeup-free face. “How far are you going to take this?”

“Us? Or this?”

“Both.”

“Far as I can get away with.”

“It’s cute when you call me ‘Baby.’”

“Is it?”

“Very Bogart.”

“Him you’ve heard of.”

“Tell me something.”

“I’ll try.”

“Can a sixty-something man get it up twice in one night?”

I lifted her off my lap.

“Let’s go in and see,” I said.

Ten

The Riviera Country Club, a verdant ribbon between Pacific Palisades and the Pacific Ocean, had been around since the late ’20s, a haven from L.A. traffic and a sanctuary of solitude interrupted only by the crack of metal or hardwood golf heads connecting with balatá-coated balls. That and, of course, the cries, moans and obscene outbursts of frustrated members and guests. Arnold Palmer called the Riviera “one of the great tests of golf.” I called golf itself a colossal pain in the ass.

I disliked the so-called sport with the intensity of those who loved the game, but playing it, and playing it well enough not to be an embarrassment, was a requirement of doing business in certain circles. So was losing more holes than you won.

The main clubhouse, a rambling array of light-tan, red-roofed Mission-style structures, offered the expected balcony view of the driving range, chipping area, putting green, and practice bunker. The bar afforded a tucked-away, high-ceilinged, predominantly male refuge of mahogany paneling, piped-in Rat Pack music, and two-tone green-striped upholstered easy chairs in little private groupings, matching chairs at tables and on higher legs at the bar. You could get shit-faced here in style.

I’d ascertained their 8:30 A.M. tee time by way of a call to Grant Cooper’s law office, pretending to be a colleague. But I had no desire to chase Sirhan Sirhan’s attorney and his prosperous peers around the golf course, dodging balls and navigating white-bark trees. Eighteen holes, plus dropping off their clubs and freshening up in the locker room, should put them at this posh version of the traditional nineteenth hole before lunch.

From the balcony beyond the bar, I’d seen their pair of golf carts storm the citadel, and twenty minutes or so later they trooped in, four men in their early sixties wearing pricey casual clothes intended for men half their age (though few could have afforded them) — lightweight sports jackets with large-collar button-down shirts, stripes or solids or in Cooper’s case brown-and-orange plaid. Their flared slacks, tastefully gray or tan, offset the offenses. I was in a light-blue-and-white-striped sport coat, navy tie, and white slacks, so I was only marginally less guilty.

I had commandeered an easy chair by a fireplace — neither I nor it were lit, even if I was deep into my second vodka gimlet. As the foursome collected cocktails at the bar, I caught Grant Cooper’s eye. Took him a second or two to make me, but then I smiled — applying medium wattage — and waved him over. He reflexively returned the smile and excused himself with his peers, an uplifted hand conveying he’d only be a short while.

The prominent attorney was tall and slender with a deeply grooved oblong face, eyes glittering dark behind heavy black-framed glasses, his steel-gray hair swept back above a high forehead. He set a martini down on the coffee table between us.

“Mr. Heller,” he said in a baritone with an edge, as I stood and we shook hands across that low-riding table. “I believe we’ve never met outside the courtroom.”

“That’s correct.” I gestured to an easy chair positioned opposite. “Would you sit for a moment? I have a few things I’d like to go over with you.”

Cooper shrugged, affable if wary. “Nothing unpleasant, I trust. I already took a beating on the back nine.”

He sat. Folded his arms and got comfy, resting an ankle on a knee. White leather loafers — Pierre Cardin, I’d wager — and orange silk socks. “Don’t recall seeing you here before. Are you a member?”

“No, my L.A. partner, Fred Rubinski, is. I’m in Chicago more often than not.”

“The A-1 Detective Agency, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about the Sirhan case.” I briefly explained I was doing background research for Drew Pearson.

“Pearson has a reputation,” he said through a slice of a smile, “as something of a muckraker, Mr. Heller. Bit of a scandalmonger.”

“Make it ‘Nate.’”

“And ‘Grant.’” He produced a pipe from one sport coat pocket and a tobacco pouch and matches from the other. “Is that why he’s digging into the RFK assassination? To pay tribute now that Bobby Kennedy has acquired sainthood status?”

I pretended to be mildly amused by that. “Exactly. And you’re in a position to share an insider’s look at the case.”

A thick black eyebrow arched. “More so than the late Senator’s personal bodyguard?”

“That’s not something I’d care to advertise.”

“But you were there that night, which is more than I could say.”

“I was in the Pantry,” I admitted, “but like most people present, I don’t really know what I saw. It was like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera but with guns.”

A smile flickered. “Well, one gun, anyway.”

I put on a thoughtful face, not at all adversarial. Sat forward, hands loose in my lap. “Actually, that’s something I’ve been wondering. Could there have been a second gun, do you think?”

He waved that off as he waved out his match, his pipe lighted. “Nonsense. Conspiratorial bunk.”

“But couldn’t you at least have raised the possibility in court?”

A curt head shake. “Going down that path would’ve killed us out of the gate.”

Of course, they’d been “killed” anyway.

Staying reasonable, I said, “I’ve spoken to Medical Examiner Noguchi. He says there were powder burns on, and behind, Bob’s right ear. That and the other gunshot wounds indicate the shooter stood right behind him. And we both know Sirhan was in front of him, several yards away.”

The attorney gestured with pipe in hand, the exhaust fumes aromatic in a way that said money. “You said it yourself, Nate — that was a madhouse. No two people reported the same thing, and my client was under attack even as he kept blasting away. Weren’t you one of the men who tackled him, and didn’t it take Rosey Grier and the rest of an impromptu football team to take that little assassin down?”

Sirhan’s lead defense attorney’s description of his client: “that little assassin.”

“Took a group effort, all right,” I said. “That runt was almost supernaturally strong. But I’m wondering — meaning no criticism, just trying to put things in perspective — why you didn’t bring the autopsy evidence into court?”

He studied me.

Finally, coldly, he said, “We got hold of it very late.”

“Still,” I said, “you didn’t really use Dr. Noguchi’s findings at all, beyond establishing homicide.”

Cooper seemed openly irritated now; both feet were on the floor and he was edging forward on his comfy chair. “I wouldn’t trust that little Jap farther than I could throw him, though I wouldn’t mind trying. He’s a self-aggrandizing, publicity-seeking former Medical Examiner these days, you know.”

I squinted at him, as if I didn’t already have him well in focus. “But you kept the autopsy photos out...”

The heavy eyebrows hiked. “Because that grotesque material would have been obscenely prejudicial to the jury!”

“Those autopsy photos would have demonstrated the kill shot came from behind — you could have absolved your client of the murder itself, if not the general assault.”

Cooper goggled at me. “Absolved him of the murder of a man he killed in front of dozens of witnesses? My goal wasn’t to try in vain to plead the innocence of somebody who stood a few feet from the Senator and emptied a gun at him, wounding five others in the process!”

“What was your goal, Grant?”

His brow knit. “To prove diminished capacity and keep him out of the goddamn gas chamber.”

“How did that work out?”

Cooper reared back, his eyes flaring behind the heavy black frames. “How did your bodyguard assignment work out, Heller?”

I raised a surrender palm. “Fair enough. Then can I assume, with a client on Death Row, you’re going to appeal?”

He grunted. “Why bother? The judge ran a tight ship. We did our best. Do you think I enjoy losing a client to the gas chamber? It’s never happened to me before.”

A sentence of death never happened to Sirhan Sirhan before either, but that “little assassin” wouldn’t get a second crack at improving his batting average. Not courtesy of a crusading defense attorney who didn’t bother mounting an appeal after suffering a Death Penalty verdict.

“Neither one of us,” I admitted, “served our clients all that well.”

“On that much we can agree.” He seemed about to get up, clearly annoyed that a conversation that began well had so quickly degenerated.

I raised a hand as if I were being sworn in, in court. “I have just a few other things.”

He frowned. “I notice you’ve not been taking notes on this journalistic fishing expedition.”

“Would you prefer I did? I wanted to keep things informal. Off the record. Strictly background.”

For a moment he thought, then: “No. That’s all right. Go on.”

“Why did you stipulate to the ballistics evidence?”

He flinched, taking a rabbit punch the ref missed. “Mr. Heller...”

“Nate.”

“Nate. It was irrelevant to our defense. We stipulated to almost everything evidentiary that the prosecution introduced.”

So I’d noticed.

“You almost certainly could have kept the ‘RFK Must Die’ notebooks out,” I said. “They were seized in an illegal search, after all. And even if you couldn’t, you could have questioned whether Sirhan wrote them — no handwriting expert could say that he did. And this Wolf character is a notorious ballistics hack for the prosecution, narrowly escaping a perjury charge in the Kirsch case. Yet you made no effort to impeach his ‘expert testimony.’”

“I thought I’d made clear,” Cooper said tightly, “that our goal was strictly one of proving diminished capacity. Our client wasn’t always happy with us on that score... there were, as you may know, some outbursts from him in court. He claims, not entirely convincingly, that he has amnesia about the shooting itself. The path we took seemed the only way to save his life. And, yes, we failed to do that.”

I tossed down the rest of my gimlet and got to my feet. “Yeah, yeah, and I stink as a bodyguard and maybe we can buy each other drinks or play eighteen holes sometime and meanwhile we’ll just write it off as the cost of doing business, that little prick taking the fall for Christ knows how many other shooters in that pantry.”

He bristled, looking up at me. “The cost of doing business... in what way, for God’s sake?”

“Oh I don’t know. The cost of you not doing jail time for possession of stolen Grand Jury transcripts in that Friars Club card-cheating scandal. Of avoiding disbarment over what the LAPD has on you. Of keeping your big-league mobster clients like Johnny Roselli happy, though what’s in it for them I couldn’t tell you. Not yet anyway.”

Now he was on his feet, tall enough to glare right at me, dark eyes sparking under black eyebrows that blended into the upper black rims of his glasses in twin thick strokes as if applied by a master caricature artist.

“Those are the kind of careless remarks, Nate, that can get you in trouble in court... and out of court.”

“Is that a threat, Grant? Have you forgotten that I’m from Chicago? That I know Johnny Roselli, too?”

He got very close; I could smell the English Leather. He spoke softly, almost whispering.

“Maybe you need to think, Mr. Heller, about whether you want everything I know about Operation Mongoose and certain anti-Castro efforts on your late friend Bob’s behalf coming out before you get too goddamn fucking mouthy.”

“Well, I guess I know at least one thing, Mr. Cooper.”

“Oh?”

“Why you winked at me in court.”

I gave him a cocky little salute and got the hell out of there. But I just might have been shaking a little.

After lunching with Nita at Canter’s on North Fairfax — she had auditions all afternoon — I headed back to my A-1 office to take meetings unrelated to the Kennedy inquiry. But midday Will Harris, our forensics consultant, returned a call I’d left the day before. Will had retired from the FBI last year and opened up shop in Pasadena as a freelance criminalist. He’d been recommended to us by Wes Grapp.

I told him I was researching the RFK assassination for Drew Pearson and would like to go over some photos and documents with him — the material Sgt. Shore had slipped me out at Griffith Park the other day.

Will was past fifty but sounded younger thanks to enthusiasm and a boyish tenor. “I guess I know why you’re calling me about it.”

“Do I?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“You really don’t know? My last job for the Bureau was helping work the crime scene at the Ambassador just hours after the killing. I took my twenty-year retirement the next week.”

I leaned back in my desk chair. “That may be a helpful coincidence. Can you make it to the Bradbury Building yet today?”

Instead of answering that, he said, “How would you like a tour of the crime scene?”

“I’ve seen the crime scene.”

“You only think you have. Look, there’s somebody at that hotel you should talk to. Let me make a call. Think a doddering old boy like you might be able to get yourself out of bed in the middle of the night?”

“Sure. To pee.”

“Or not to pee is the question. I’ll call you at the Beverly Hills — usual bungalow?”

“Yup,” I said, and gave him the direct phone number.

“It’ll be around two A.M.,” he said. “That’s a working kitchen, obviously, and any other time but the middle of the night would be hard to arrange, not to mention noisy as hell.”

“I’ll wait for your call. In the meantime, how about I messenger over this packet of photos and documents?”

“It’s a plan.”

I had an early dinner with Nita at Musso & Frank’s — with plenty of film/TV industry people around for her to smile at — then followed her Fiat in the Jag out to Studio City and her little house where we loaded up enough things to move her in for a week or two at the bungalow. She’d pick up her mail every couple of days and check her service for messages. This was only Day Three of my investigation and our relationship, but things were moving fast.

We went to bed early and mostly lay there talking, getting to know each other better, and she began questioning me about the famous crimes and infamous people I’d encountered over the decades. I didn’t tell her everything because there were more dead men and lively women than could reasonably be believed, even with the bullet scars and my enduring good looks as evidence.

Her family history bore echoes of my own: born in Brooklyn, daughter of Jewish immigrants from Europe, previous generations suffering murders, pogroms and brutal discrimination that finally chased her father’s family out of Russia.

We were still talking when my travel alarm went off at one-thirty A.M. I got up, threw off my pajamas and got into fresh underwear, button-down Polo, slacks and Italian loafers, tossed some water on my face, toweled off, and was about to go out when she sat up, her breasts challenging her nightie.

“Aren’t you taking a gun?” she asked.

“I’m going to a hotel, not the Alamo.”

“We’ve both been to that particular hotel before. And you have a way of getting yourself in Dutch. Or were those stories you told me bullshit?”

“There were elements of truth.”

But she did have a point. I was wading into some choppy waters, inhabited not by sharks but the likes of the Company and the mob and maybe even a Palestinian assassin or two.

So I put my holstered nine millimeter on my right hip — shoulder slings were just too damn uncomfortable at my age — and tossed on a Pierre Cardin sport coat over it.

She said, “You know what Miss Kitty tells Matt Dillon don’t you?”

“No. What?”

“Matt... be careful.”

“What if my name isn’t Matt?”

“Be fucking careful.”

Walking through a hotel in the middle of the night, particularly a sprawling one, makes a haunted house out of it and a ghost of you. Of course, a tragedy haunted the Ambassador, turning it into a collective terrible memory. Would Hollywood’s Hotel ever recover? I wondered. Was the Cocoanut Grove on its way to yesterday? Already a certain seediness was showing, as if the grand old palace was slowly rotting from within.

My footsteps were a ghost’s, too, silent on the red-and-black carpet, the after-hours low lighting dulling the yellow of walls and pillars, fountains shut off and gurgling faintly as if in final death throes, leather furnishings and scattered ferns and an occasional classical statue or grand piano adding to the ghostly aura, objects from the past refusing to give way to the present.

The Embassy ballroom, when I moved through with my footsteps like echoing gunshots, was barely lighted at all, despite the chandeliers hanging like crystalline jellyfish, and when I stepped through the curtains just beyond where Bob had urged us on to Chicago, the slanted corridor’s ebony was spookily disrupted by the outline in light of the double doors we’d gone through to where Sirhan Sirhan had been waiting.

I pushed through to my past where the faint blue glow of buzzing fluorescent lighting awaited. So did a little man in a white bucket cap, red-and-white aloha shirt, chino shorts and sandals. Studying a clipboard of fanned-back pages, Will Harris wore round-lensed wireframe glasses and looked a little like a white Sammy Davis Jr.

“We have about an hour,” he said by way of greeting, “before the cleaning crew comes in.”

Right now, the big adjacent kitchen was as abandoned as the one on the Titanic right before it went down. The Pantry, with only Will and me populating it, still seemed small.

I went over to him — he was standing near where Bob had fallen — and we shook hands, a quick but firm handshake.

“Try to imagine,” Will said, eyes large and buggy behind the lenses, “eighty human beings jammed into this space.”

We were in the most open area of the Pantry, with only an ice-cube-making machine to the right compromising the space and with the kitchen itself off to the left. The major difference, besides the absence of bleeding bodies, was the floor wasn’t filthy. Perhaps what had happened here had shamed the hotel into treating this space with respect.

“I don’t have to imagine it,” I said. “I was one of them.”

“My point being,” he said, peering over the top of the wire-rim glasses, “the notion that once the shooting started anyone would see much of anything but bedlam is specious at best.”

“If you got through those pilfered papers,” I said, nodding to the clipboard in his hands, “you know the LAPD came up with ten sightings of the girl in the polka-dot dress, several with Sirhan.”

He pointed to the stainless-steel serving table. “Yes, including that they were both standing up there, waiting... well above eye level. Who would be looking in their direction, not Robert Kennedy’s?”

I shrugged. “The girl was a curvy number, they say. But getting a look at the next president of the United States might upstage her.”

Will clunked the clipboard down on the ice-making unit. “Let’s start with the ‘official’ bullets, according to this prosecution shill Wolf... who I personally warned Deputy D.A. Fitts about, although he probably already knew, after that Kirsch case.”

The little criminalist held up two fingers — whether a hippie peace sign or Nixon’s victory gesture was in the eye of the beholder. “We have two bullets entering RFK’s right back. These remained lodged in the body. That’s bullets One and Two.”

Now he held up three fingers. “Another bullet entered the victim’s right back with an exit wound out the right front. This passed through a ceiling tile and was lost in the ceiling interstice. Bullet Three.”

Four fingers. “Another bullet passed through your friend’s suitcoat, right shoulder, on an upward path, not entering his body but going on through to strike victim Paul Schrade in the forehead. Thankfully not fatally. Bullet Four.”

Five fingers. “Another shot hit the right hip of bystander Ira Goldstein. Bullet Five.”

Two hands employed now, chest-level against the aloha colors, a forefinger of the left added to the displayed five digits of the right. “Another bullet entered Goldstein’s left pant leg but not his body, struck the cement floor and hit another bystander, Erwin Stroll, in the left leg. Bullet Six.”

Seven fingers. “Another bystander, William Weisel, was struck in the stomach. Again, not fatally. Bullet Seven.”

Eight. “Another bullet first hit a ceiling tile, then wounded bystander Elizabeth Evans in the forehead. Bullet Eight.”

I said, “Your fourth, sixth and eighth trajectories make damn little sense.”

He batted the air as if at an irritating fly. “They’re not mine — it’s that clown Wolf again. Here’s just one example — that fourth bullet had to pass through the Senator’s suitcoat, at an 80-degree upward angle. Schrade would need to be nine feet tall to take that hit where he was standing.”

I thought about all of that. “Sirhan’s .22 held eight bullets. Sounds like the prosecution had to make eight bullets sing and dance to keep the count down.”

Will gave up half a grin. “And they did it with audacious imagination — have to give ’em that. But let’s keep the count going, shall we?”

“Who’s stopping you?”

He tapped the first page of the clipboard where it rested on the stainless steel counter. “The autopsy indicates two bullet tracks in the victim’s brain from one entry point — in court, the prosecution took care to call the two bullets ‘fragments,’ as if they added up to one. Not to confuse a layman, but a twelve-millimeter ‘fragment’ from the victim’s brain could not have fit through the barrel of a .22 revolver. I don’t believe it was a frag, rather a flattened .22 bullet... which of course adds a ninth bullet.”

“Forensics experts might disagree on that,” I pointed out.

“Possibly — one like Wolf, in the bag for the prosecution, sure as hell would... and did.” The little man in the bucket hat glanced around. “Let’s have a look at those swinging double doors where you and the Senator and his party came in.”

We took the few steps over there and I frowned. “This door frame looks new — did they paint it?”

“It is new. The original had a pair of bullet holes here, about two inches apart...” He pointed to the center door frame, about his shoulder level. “...one above the other.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I remember noticing that in the photos.”

Will indicated the left vertical side of the door frame, where a photo had shown two LAPD officers identifying two more bullet holes, a bit lower than the center post ones, staggered.

“There was also a small caliber bullet lodged in the door jamb,” Will said. “If you’re keeping track, we’re up to fourteen bullets now. And that doesn’t address the ceiling tiles, which you may note all look fresh and clean... replaced after a number of tiles were removed as evidence.”

I reared back. “Why would they be considered evidence unless they had bullet holes?”

“You’re not as dumb as you look, Nate. Of course, you might expect those tiles, and that original doorframe, to be in the evidence locker at Parker Center.”

“And they aren’t?”

“No, they’ve all been destroyed. Recently, right after the trial. Space issues is the reason given. That wasn’t information I dug out of the material you gave me — I still have sources at the LAPD. But let’s be generous. Let’s say I’m wrong and only one bullet entered Robert Kennedy’s brain and fragmented. Let’s say any bullet holes in the ceiling tiles were ricochets made by the official bullets. That still brings us up to...” He counted on his fingers.

“Call it too many bullets.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Listen, if I can get my hands on Wolf’s test bullets, who knows what I might find? But I can tell you this much right now — at least two .22 caliber guns were used here. The kill shot came from behind, close-up, but you knew that. The surviving gunshot victims were mostly in front of RFK. And it’s highly unlikely any of Sirhan’s bullets hit the Senator... if Sirhan was firing bullets.”

I frowned. “What else could he have been firing?”

“Blanks. Creating a diversion, one hell of a distraction. And with another shooter or two in the room, would you have wanted Sirhan firing willy nilly at a crowd you were part of? Eyewitnesses report his weapon producing long, visible flames, some recall getting hit by the residue of what might have been flash-burn paper.”

I’d been one of them.

At the east end of the Pantry, a sturdy-looking blond man in his early forties in a gray suit and thin blue tie came suddenly in; he had the confidence of someone who worked here and I wondered for a moment if he’d come to toss us out. Then I recognized him, though we hadn’t exactly met: this was the hotel man who had led Bob off the stage and later joined in with Grier, Johnson, Plimpton and me, among others, in subduing Sirhan.

“Nathan Heller,” Will said, gesturing to me with one hand and indicating the newcomer with the other, “this is Karl Uecker, maître d’ at the Cocoanut Grove.”

Uecker came forward with a tight smile and we shook hands, traded nods. I said I remembered him and he said he remembered me.

With a hand on the maître d’s shoulder, Will smiled and said, “Karl arranged this for us tonight. And I wanted you to chat with him about what you both witnessed.”

I said, “I’d like that.”

Karl nodded and started right in, his German accent thick but easily penetrable: “I was guiding the Senator by the hand, you know. I believe I was closest of anyone to him, with the exception of the security guard, who was just behind us.”

I asked, “Did Sirhan at any time position himself behind the Senator? If so, did you see him fire his weapon?”

“No! No! He was never an inch from Kennedy’s head — that’s ridiculous. I would have seen it. And for that little man to get close enough for that, he would’ve had to pass by me, and he didn’t! After his second shot, I get hold of Sirhan very tight and push him against the serving table while the Senator staggers back, hit.”

Will said, “Tell him the important part, Karl. The part you weren’t asked about on the witness stand.”

His light blue eyes were wide. “That guard has his gun out! I don’t think many people saw that. And I yell at him, ‘You must be crazy to wave a gun around in this chaos!’”

I’d seen that, too!

With a satisfied smile, Will said to me, “That security guard, Thane Cesar, was in a perfect position to take those shots from behind your friend Bob. Maybe you’d like to talk to Mr. Cesar? I made a few calls and can give you his address.”

“Please,” I said.

Eleven

Chicken ranches, dairy farms and apricot orchards dominated the Conjeo Valley back when Thousand Oaks — a tourist court got out of hand — surrounded a farm that rented trained animals to the movies. By a decade ago, it had developed into a quiet community of several thousand, known for extending a warm welcome to film productions in the market for typical Americana. The L.A. suburb’s population now numbered near thirty thousand, thanks in part to the technology-driven Newbury industrial park.

Yucca Lane, a short narrow excuse for a working-class street, had never attracted Hollywood (or any) attention, its shabby little houses hiding behind coyote brush and other scrubby native greenery. I tooled my Jag around a massive gnarled oak that stood mid-lane like an ancient witch playing traffic cop. Then I pulled into the driveway behind the yellow mid-’60s Chevy Chevelle, a muscle car starting to look a little flabby.

The same might be said of its apparent owner, who sat in a metal lawn chair under the overhang of the entry area of the low-slung modest gray clapboard-and-brick ranch-style adorned with a small, struggling lawn.

When I’d called Thane Eugene Cesar’s number, he started out wary but warmed up when I introduced myself over the line. He said he’d read some articles about me and was fine with me stopping by. His attitude did not change when I explained, almost as an afterthought, that my reason for coming was to gather background information on the RFK assassination for a national columnist.

“About time,” he’d said, adding, “I have a story to tell,” followed by an odd little inappropriate laugh, huh-hah-hah.

He had a matching metal chair waiting for me with a small Styrofoam cooler between. Lurching to his feet as I emerged from the Jag, he wore a rather childish striped t-shirt, khaki shorts and sock-free sneakers, a slightly pudgy six-footer with a pleasant, boyish face, dark brown hair and a skinny mustache riding an overbite smile. I made him for his mid-to-late twenties.

I was in a seersucker sport coat over a sports shirt, splitting the difference between casual and business. He had a can of Brew 102 in his left hand as he offered his right for me to shake, which I did. He squeezed hard then went limp dishrag at the close.

“I saw you interviewed on Jack Paar,” he said, then added that late-night host’s famous catchphrase, “I kid you not!” Followed by the huh-hah-hah.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was a while back. Got to meet Charley Weaver and Dody Goodman.”

He sat in the creaky metal chair and gestured for me to help myself to its mate. “Did you get their autographs?”

“Uh, no. Charley Weaver is not a real guy.”

“Well, sure he is.”

“I mean, he’s an actor. It’s a role he plays. Thank you for talking to me, Mr. Cesar.”

“My friends call me Gene.”

“And I’m Nate.”

“Hey, feel free to help yourself to a beer.”

“I just might, a little later.” No way in hell. Brew 102 was a local beer that had somehow managed to capture the taste of smog.

“Listen,” my pal Gene said, “I should apologize for not inviting you in. But the place is a mess. Joyce, the wife, left me for a clarinetist last week.”

“Well, that’s a shame.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I’m pitiful when it comes to housework. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a slob or something. Anyway, it’s nice out here. Nice day.”

This was Southern California. Of course it was a nice day, as long as you weren’t drinking Brew 102. Which incidentally was called that, the brewery claimed, because they had to try 101 times before they hit perfection.

“A jazz player,” Gene said.

“Pardon?”

“The clarinetist. Tough to compete with.”

“I can see where it would be.”

He swigged 102. “She took the kids. Do you think that’s fair? She runs off with a clarinetist and snags the kids, too?”

“Seems a little much.”

A dog barked down the street.

“You know I seen you that night,” Gene said, eyes narrowing. “But I was too wrapped up in my work to introduce myself or anything. But you was in that crowd behind us, Bobby Kennedy and me.”

“I noticed you as well,” I said. But the truth was, he’d mostly been a blur in a gray uniform and cap, one of those invisible people we don’t really see as we move through our daily lives. And my attention had been elsewhere than on a nonentity good guy like Gene Cesar.

“You know I always wanted to be a police officer,” he said, sending a distant look past me. “Studied police science at community college. But security guard’s as close as I ever got. See, I had an ulcer going back to high school. I was 4-F because of it. You was a Marine, right? And a police officer? Before being a private eye?”

He had read some of the articles. I said all of that was correct, then began the daunting task of keeping Gene here on track.

“So,” I asked, “how long have you been doing security work?”

A shrug. A sip. “That’s only part-time. I saw an ad and jumped at it — I was in deep shit for money at the time, I mean, two little kids? A mortgage? Huh-hah-hah. Really I’m mainly a maintenance plumber out to Lockheed in Burbank. You got to have a security clearance from the Defense Department for that, you know. You’re on call for that whole goddamn facility, when you’re on duty. It’s like... like being in the military.”

Lockheed in Burbank, aka the Skunkworks, was the home of the U-2 spy plane. Could this plump plumber somehow be tied to the CIA? No, that was ridiculous...

I asked, “When did you start with Ace Guard Service?”

“About six months before that night at the Ambassador.”

His first deception: from the LAPD documents, I knew Thane Eugene Cesar had started at Ace in late May ’68, a few days before the assassination.

“Could you tell me about that night, Gene?”

“Sure. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, is it?”

“No it isn’t.”

I work days at Lockheed, mostly. I’m on nights this week because of vacations, you know, filling in. But on June the fourth I get home, like usual, about 4:30 P.M. Supervisor from Ace calls and wants me to work a shift from six to two in the morning at the Ambassador. I’m tired, havin’ already worked a full day at the plant, but the Supe twists my arm.

I get to the hotel about six-oh-five P.M. and report to the head of security there, William Gardner, who posts me at the main doors of the Embassy Ballroom. I’m standing at the main door of the ballroom and at about eight-thirty, quarter till nine, Jack Merritt... another Ace guard?... says to me, ‘You know, I got a funny feeling there’s gonna be big trouble here tonight,’ and I look at him and say, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘I just got that feeling.’ I just laugh that off, but maybe he knew something I didn’t, huh-hah-hah.

Around nine, Gardner moves me downstairs to the Ambassador Room to mingle with the crowds and keep an eye on things. And, you know, keep them from going upstairs to the Embassy Room, which is already filling up. Anyway, I’m only there maybe twenty minutes. Then Gardner comes back down and takes me up to the kitchen area.

At nine-thirty, I get reassigned to the east doors of the Pantry, which lead to the Colonial Room, where the press is. At maybe eleven-fifteen, I get moved to the swinging double doors to the west, near the backstage of where the Senator is speaking. Nobody replaced me at the east doors, by the way. Anybody could have walked in during the hour before the shooting — I couldn’t exactly monitor both ends of that damn Pantry. Where I was stationed was kind of cool, though... How so? Well, I could hear Milton Berle cracking jokes and makin’ Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier split a gut, laughing.

Yeah, I guess you could say I was distracted. Sure, that Sirhan character could have wandered in. Yes, I was supposed to be checking badges and passes, but like I said, I couldn’t be at both ends of that Pantry at once, could I?

When the Senator comes down from the hotel through the Pantry, east end, on his way to make his speech, I hold back the crowd as best I can. Then I position myself by those double doors waiting for the Senator’s return.

When the speech is over — they pumped it in on loudspeakers in the kitchen — I go through the swinging doors and pick up the Senator in that slanted backstage hallway, a couple feet from the double doors. That maître d’ is leading Bobby by the right hand into the Pantry and I fall in behind ’em and take hold of his right arm, just below the elbow, with my right hand. We all just start pushing through the crowd. No, no, Kennedy never even looked at me. He was looking ahead at the people and cameras.

I’m right behind him all the way down to the stainless-steel serving table, on his right side, and when we get there, he reaches out and turns to the left to shake hands with some busboys. My hand sort of broke loose, away from his arm, and of course I grab it right back again because people was all over the place.

Now, I just happen to look up right then and I seen an arm and a gun stick out in front of us, out of the crowd, y’know? Five shots get fired off, I seen the red flash from the muzzle, and I duck because I was as close as Kennedy was. So close I got powder in my eyes from the flash! I grab for Bobby, throw myself accidentally off-balance and fall back against the ice-making machines. Then the Senator falls right down in front of me and I turn around and I seen blood coming down the right side of his face and I scramble up to my feet, draw my gun and go to the Senator. I look up and Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson and a bunch of people — you was one of them, wasn’t you, Nate? — are beating the shit out of this Sirhan guy. I was scared. I admit it. I was shaking, you know, physically shaking, the way you feel after a car accident. Another security guard stops me and says, ‘Let’s get out in front of this and stop the pandemonium.’ We get out of there.

No, I did not see Sirhan’s face. He was so short, he was standing behind other people and all I could see was his hand and the gun poking out.

Didn’t get a good look at the gun, no. I knew it wasn’t a .38 when it went off, because I’ve shot a .38 and a .22 and you can hear the difference.

Oh, I’d say I was four feet from the gun when it went off and Senator Kennedy was two or three feet.

“Did anyone,” I asked, “come up and squeeze between you and the Senator during all the bedlam?”

“No. People was getting shot and falling, though. It was crazy. Just fucking crazy.”

(Among the pilfered LAPD materials was the transcript of a radio interview with Thane Eugene Cesar fourteen minutes after the shooting, which concluded thusly: “What kind of wounds did the Senator suffer?”

“Well, from where I could see, it looked like he was shot in the head and the chest and the shoulder.”

This made Cesar the only witness to describe accurately the location of RFK’s three wounds.)

I asked, “Were you carrying your own weapon that night, Gene?”

He shook his head. “I had a .38 that Ace issued me. They like the larger caliber. Better stopping power.”

“Did the LAPD confiscate that weapon?”

Another head shake. “No. Or the sidearms of the other two security guards in the room, neither. Those guards was plain-clothes, by the way. I was the sole man in uniform.”

“According to police reports, you owned a .22 like Sirhan’s, but sold it months before? Is that right?”

“It is. A Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver. Sold it for fifteen bucks to Jim Yoder, a Lockheed pal who was getting ready to retire and move to Arkansas, which he did... You sure you don’t want a beer?”

A baby was crying somewhere.

“No thanks.” I shifted in my metal chair and it squeaked. “Gene, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I was Robert Kennedy’s security chief that night.”

His eyes popped like a squeeze doll’s. “Jeez. Shit. I didn’t know.”

I smirked in self-reproach. “Kind of makes us both bodyguards who dropped the ball.”

His soft face turned hard. “I don’t accept that! And you shouldn’t either, Nate. I know all about Bobby refusing to have any armed security seen with him. Gardner, the Ambassador security chief, made that clear. The Senator did not want to be photographed that way!”

“Oh, I know.”

His turn to smirk. “Bobby probably woulda had a shit fit if he seen an armed guard like me sidling up behind him, huh-hah-hah. I was told in no uncertain terms I was strictly there for crowd control. But that Pantry was so packed and risky, he was probably glad for any help. No, you shouldn’t feel guilty about that. I don’t.”

“No sleepless nights?”

He slapped at the air. “Hell no. Well... I had my share of nightmares, dreamin’ I was back in that sardine can with bullets flying every fucking which way. But Senator Kennedy got himself killed with his dumb-ass ideas about keeping the cops out and security to a minimum. Hope I don’t offend you saying so.”

“Not a RFK fan?”

That overbite smile looked at once childish and sinister. “I definitely wouldn’t have voted for Bobby Kennedy because he had the same ideas his brother John did, and JFK sold this country down the river. I think all of them Kennedys are the biggest crooks who ever walked the earth. They literally gave the country away to the Commies, the minorities, the Blacks.”

I twitched a smile. “A Nixon man, then.”

He slapped the air again. “Oh, fuck him, too. I voted for Wallace!”

George Wallace, the notorious segregationist ex-governor of Alabama, had won five states in 1968 with his third-party campaign.

My host gulped some beer, sat forward. “Shit, man, I worked my ass off for ol’ George — passed out handbills, made donations, you name it. Bobby Kennedy getting shot isn’t the tragedy — George Wallace losing the election is the tragedy!”

I squinted at him. “Yet you were right there, protecting Bobby Kennedy that night. Risking your life to do so.”

He leaned back, slapped his pudgy chest. “Because it was my job! Just because I don’t like Democrats don’t mean I go around shooting them every day, huh-hah-hah.”

How often did he shoot them, I wondered?

“Sorry,” he said, and that soft face that had turned hard softened back down. “If you was his security chief, you must’ve been a Kennedy man. I don’t mean no offense.”

“None taken. Like you, I was just doing my job. Filling in for a guy.” I smiled and lied through my teeth: “Can you imagine how much better off we’d be in this country with George Wallace as president?”

He toasted me with his 102. “Fuckin’ A. That Wallace didn’t take shit off nobody! I’m fed fucking up, and a lot of people I work with feel the same. Shove us too far and, one of these days, we’re gonna fight back. If we can’t do it at the ballot box by getting the right man in to straighten this shit out, then we’ve got to take it in our own hands. I can’t see any other way to go!”

“I hear you.”

He squinted at me, the upper lip with the skinny mustache curling. “The black man, these past four to eight years, has been shoving this integration shit down our damn throats... so we’ve learned to hate him, the black man. And one of these days, at the rate they’re goin’, there’s going to be a civil war in this country. It’s going to be white against Black... and let me tell ya, huh-hah-hah — the blacks ain’t never gonna win!”

SUS chief Robert Houghton, in a news release announcing the shutting down of the official investigation, had said, “No one with far right-wing connections was inside that kitchen pantry.”

Good to know.

“Why the hell,” Nita asked, “would Cesar be so candid?”

We were tucked away in a corner of the multi-tiered Miceli’s, perhaps Hollywood’s most popular Italian restaurant. The walls were brick, the woodwork carved, the windows stained glass, the ceiling a nest of hanging Chianti bottles, the tablecloths red-and-white checkered, and the red leather of the booths of a vintage going back to the defunct Pig ’n’ Whistle from which they had been salvaged when my old Chicago crony Carmen Miceli opened the place in 1949.

“Maybe I’m a brilliant interviewer,” I said.

We were sharing an antipasto salad and a bottle of Campione Merlot.

“Perhaps he’s trying reverse psychology,” Nita said, frowning. She looked young and cute in her gold-red-black print tunic top. The Cher-style eye makeup was over and now the big brown eyes were helped only by some minor mascara and a little light green eye shadow. Her dark hair was back in a ponytail.

“You mean,” I said, “if my new best friend Gene Cesar killed Bob Kennedy, he figures to sound innocent by being open about his contempt for the victim. Interesting.”

She gave me half a smirk. “You make it sound silly but there might be something to it.”

“Another possibility,” I said, forking a black olive, “is the guy’s a dope.”

“If he’s a dope, who would trust him with an important assignment like this?”

I chewed the olive and swallowed. “Excellent point.”

I had already filled her in on a phone conversation I’d had at the office with forensics guy Will Harris, reacting to Gene Cesar saying he’d got powder in his eyes due to Sirhan’s gunfire. Will said this was impossible at the three-foot range Cesar claimed; however, the powder could have been blowback... from Gene’s own gun barrel.

I’d also asked Will to check on the sale of Cesar’s .22 to his Lockheed pal who moved to Arkansas. Maybe we could buy it back and do some testing. He was on it.

“My buddy Gene,” I said to Nita, “was just behind and to the right of Bob when the shots were fired. If he’s telling the truth about where he was, relative to Bob, then either the shooter had to be between him and Bob, or Gene did it himself.”

She frowned in thought. “Could he just be remembering it wrong? You said his various statements — particularly about the shooting itself and the immediate aftermath — are inconsistent.”

“They are. The LAPD materials include four distinct versions — not wildly different, but... different. Sometimes Gene gets knocked down, other times he doesn’t. Sometimes the maître d’ bumps into him, other times he doesn’t know who it is, just ‘somebody.’ But we can be sure about his positioning — there’s strong evidence he was standing very damn close behind Bob.”

“What evidence?”

I gestured with a breadstick. “Cesar was wearing a clip-on tie. Photos of him earlier that night confirm as much. And remember that terribly sad photo of Bob on his back and the busboy comforting him? Cesar’s clip-on tie is on the cement near Bob’s outstretched right hand.”

Her hand came up to her mouth. “As if... as if... in a moment of struggle...”

“Bob yanked the tie off his assailant’s neck.”

She pushed her share of the salad aside; put her chin in a hand and an elbow on the tabletop. “You think Cesar was some kind of... hit man?”

I flipped a hand. “Could be part of a radical right-wing group. A second shooter assigned to make sure Bob bought it if Sirhan failed. Or Gene could have taken advantage of the moment to put one into a public figure he despised.”

She made a face. “None of that sounds right.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

Her perfect eyebrows went up. “Could it have been an accident? Cesar draws his gun in response to Sirhan’s shooting and it goes off and kills the very person he’s trying to defend?”

“What, three times? Actually, four, ’cause one went through Bob’s clothing without hitting him.”

She pursed her lips. “Okay. Not a good theory.”

“Not a good theory. But what is?”

We shared a pizza (Miceli’s Special, “Everything But the Oven”). Somehow we managed to come up with both an appetite and some conversation unrelated to the tragedy that brought us together. She’d had another round of auditions today and was up for a role on The Brady Bunch. And she had a callback on Mannix.

Over the last of the wine, I said, “We’re obviously getting somewhere.”

“You mean in our relationship?”

I smiled a little. “Sure. But what I mean is, whatever was really going on in that Pantry is starting to show itself. So far I’ve just been sniffing around the edges of this thing. But I have enough now to put the entire weight of the A-1 behind a full-on investigation, and talk to my pal Wes Grapp at the FBI, assuming the Bureau isn’t a part of a government cover-up. And then of course there’s Pearson, who’ll be up for funding it, considering just how big this is.”

“That sounds like good news,” she said.

“Doesn’t it?”

We toasted.

Back at the bungalow a call was waiting for me — Jack Anderson. Didn’t matter what time I got in, I was to get back to him. Pleased with what I had to tell him, I dialed direct from the bedroom phone. Nita, already in her nightie, was pillow-propped up next to me as she read Airport.

“Jack,” I said after he answered. “Good to hear from you. I wanted to report in, anyway.”

“Afraid that’s no longer necessary.”

“Oh?”

A long silence. A sigh.

He said, “I take it you haven’t heard the news.”

“What news?”

“Drew... Drew had a heart attack this morning.”

“Oh hell.”

“Died on his way to the hospital.”

The world without Drew Pearson in it was suddenly a smaller place.

“Damn... I’m sorry.”

Weary sadness oozed across the wire like a gas leak. “We’ll talk later, Nate, but that’ll have to be the end of this current assignment. I’m going to be picking up the reins on the column and working to just keep the boat afloat... if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.”

My hand was tight on the receiver. “Jack, I’m getting somewhere on this thing. Are you sure...?”

“For now, at least, yes. Timing isn’t right, and even if it was, I don’t know if I have access to the funding. You need to face it, Nate. The RFK inquiry is kaput.”