Too Many Bullets

Twelve

The following morning at the A-1 office in the Bradbury Building, I rounded up Fred Rubinski and got my other two partners on a conference call — Lou Sapperstein in Chicago and Bob Hasty in Manhattan.

“So,” I said, rocking back in my desk chair, “we don’t have a client.”

From the speaker phone, Lou said, “How much do we have invested in this?”

Lou had been my boss back in Chicago on the Pickpocket Detail in the early ’30s. He was past retirement age and understandably skeptical about throwing good money (or time) after bad.

“I’ve only been on it for a few days,” I said. “We can walk away clean.”

Bob Hasty, half a decade younger than me, said from our office at the Empire State, “Who you trying to kid, Nate? You have a lot more invested than a few days. We all know Bobby Kennedy was your friend.”

Hasty had worked Homicide in D.C., which is where I knew him from, when he was with Bradford Investigations, with whom the A-1 was affiliated. I’d hired him away to run the New York office.

In the client chair, a third of a cigar stuffed in his face, Fred asked, “What’s the upside here? If we decide to pursue this thing just to be good goddamn citizens or something?”

“Better publicity,” I said, “than helping Errol Flynn beat that statutory rape rap.”

Fred grunted. “Old news.”

Lou said, “I wouldn’t care to see you dead, Nate.”

“Nor would I,” I admitted.

“But,” the speaker phone went on, “if there’s more to this than just some lone-nut Arab taking out a pro-Israel politician, you’ll be wading into dangerous, murky waters.”

I said, “You left out ‘bloody.’”

Fred said, “From what you’ve told me, Nate, the LAPD either botched this out of sheer incompetence or they’re covering something up for their pals at the CIA. How is making enemies of either of those fine upstanding institutions good for business?”

“With a client,” I said, “we have a certain amount of cover, not to mention funding. As it is, all I have are suspicions. That’s why we’re talking, fellas. Staying on this is hard to justify.”

“No it isn’t,” Hasty said. “You’re the boss. You are the A-1, both in the public perception and in the legal sense.”

With a tinge of reluctance, Lou’s voice announced, “Hasty’s right. We three partners put together don’t add up to your percentage of the business. It’s not a democracy. This is your decision, Nate.”

A knock at the inner office door prompted a “Yes?” from me.

Our receptionist, Evie, apparently between auditions, stuck her pretty blonde head in. “There’s a gentleman out here to see you, Mr. Heller. He doesn’t have an appointment but seems to think you’ll see him. What should I...?”

“What’s his name?”

“Ronald Kiser.”

Fred and I exchanged glances. A reporter for Life magazine both here and abroad, Kiser had been the Sirhan Sirhan defense team’s investigator. He was an interesting guy, having trained as a Jesuit before winding up a married journalist. I knew him a little, the A-1 having provided security for him when his insider reports on Vatican II got him death threats.

I signed off with Sapperstein and Hasty and told Evie to send Kiser in. And I asked Fred to stick around, which he did, repositioning himself on the sofa under the wall of framed press accounts and signed celebrity photos, leaving the client chair empty and waiting.

Kiser came confidently in, a youthful forty or so, a short but formidable figure in a conservative gray suit and darker gray tie; under a blond burr haircut and behind dark-rimmed glasses, the pleasant blue-eyed features on his round face often wore a smile. But not today.

“Mr. Heller,” he said as he approached the desk and held out his hand. “Apologies for just dropping by.”

I got up, shook the offered hand, and reminded him that he was Ron and I was Nate and to have a seat.

I gestured to my partner on the couch. “I believe you know Fred Rubinski.”

They nodded to each other, as Kiser settled into the client’s chair.

“I was sorry to read about Drew Pearson’s passing,” he said in a steady baritone. “He was a force of nature. And you knew him well, I know. Did a lot of work for him over the years.”

“That’s so. He was a damn tightwad and a hypocritical old Quaker, but I’ll miss him.”

“You’d been doing a job for him lately, I understand.”

I nodded. “How is it that you...?”

“Grant Cooper mentioned it. Well, warned me, I suppose.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them with a handkerchief; though possibly myopic, his gaze was direct. “Are you, uh, going back east for the funeral?”

“No. We’re sending flowers.”

Kiser leaned in, folded his hands and set them on the edge of my desk. “If I might ask... are you intending to go forward with your investigation?”

“Jack Anderson tells me the Washington Merry-Go-Round column won’t be pursuing that line of inquiry, so... no.”

“Would you be open to taking on a new client in the matter? Life wants a series of articles and so does Paris Match. Plus, I’m going to be writing a book about the case. I can’t think of anyone more qualified and appropriate than you to be out there gathering info while I start the writing. With something this topical, it’s important to strike while the iron is hot. I can meet your standard fee and cover all expenses as well.”

Fred was sitting on the edge of the couch. With the stub of cigar stuffed in his cheek, he looked like Edward G. Robinson playing a managing editor in a ’30s movie.

“I need to know where you’re coming from,” I said, coolly, “before I can decide anything.”

A smile made a brief appearance before retreating. “Well, Time/Life has authorized a ten-thousand-dollar retainer to get us started. Would that be sufficient?”

My partner was salivating, but I needed to make sure this wasn’t some kind of payoff. Kiser had been part of a defense team that just might have sold their client down the river. Maybe this offer was about finding out what I’d learned and hushing it up.

“Excuse me, Ron,” I said, and went over to Fred and took him by the arm, eased him up from the couch, and walked him out.

On the other side of the door, I said, “Talk about deus ex machina.”

He blinked at me. “What the fuck language is that?”

“Latin, and I’ll let you know whether it means stroke of luck or screwed sideways.”

Back in my office, I resumed my position behind the desk and asked, “Tell me, Ron — how did you come to be the investigator for the Sirhan Sirhan defense?”

Well, my first reaction was strictly emotional. After the news bulletin about the shooting knocked me on my ass, I cried and cursed and threw a glass across the room, wanting to do something, anything, besides just sit in front of the TV choking on rage and sorrow. So I pulled myself together and called Life’s L.A. bureau and got enlisted on the spot.

First assignment was to head out to interview Sirhan’s brother at his apartment in Pasadena. This was maybe twenty-four hours after the assassination. I had a photographer along but the brother wouldn’t cooperate, and he later told the police we’d tried to strongarm him. Which was bullshit. The cops ignored that as well they should. I believe that was the last good decision on the case the LAPD made.

Next I got a call from Al Wirrin, the ACLU’s chief counsel in Los Angeles. An assassination isn’t a free speech issue, obviously, but Wirrin wanted to make sure Sirhan got a fair trial.

‘Is it true Grant Cooper’s a pal of yours?’ Wirrin wanted to know.

A top-flight criminal lawyer like Cooper was just what Sirhan Sirhan would need. I said I knew Cooper, which I did from several stories I’d worked on involving him, and then sort of horse-traded — told Wirrin I’d put Cooper in touch if Wirrin could get me in to see Sirhan.

Did I know Cooper had represented mob guys? Sure I did. I didn’t think much of it at the time — he was dealing with Phil Silvers in that Friars Club card-cheating case and that didn’t make Cooper a comedian, did it? Later, I had some second thoughts... when was that? When we wound up with two mob-connected lawyers on the team. This other one had been Mickey Cohen’s mouthpiece. That was a bit unsettling, but what really bothered me was Cooper’s approach. How so? Well, he was one of those hale fellows well met, all smiles and friendly personality, adding up to nothing much.

Look, in Cooper’s defense, we couldn’t have had any more eyewitness evidence against Sirhan if God had taken snapshots, so it wasn’t like we were trying to deny this was the guy who shot Bobby Kennedy. It’s just... the defense team took the LAPD’s word on everything. Cooper didn’t challenge them once!

And if I’d bring something up, like the possibility of a second shooter, or a conspiracy, Cooper’d just brush it off — took everything the prosecution handed us at face value. He was fine with stipulating to the killing. He said his only concern was saving ‘this wretched boy’s life.’

So the defense emphasized the psychological side of things, exploring Sirhan’s mental and emotional state, leading up to and including the killing. As far as actual evidence was concerned, Cooper had a very poor grasp of it.

I was told to gather all the background material on Sirhan I could to establish the defendant’s mental state for the psychiatrists and psychologists working the case. I wound up interviewing Sirhan almost every day for six months before, during and after the trial... far more often than any of the attorneys did.

Like any good interviewer, I kept things open and friendly, and after a while Sirhan loosened up. I heard it all — his life story, all his aspirations, his dreams, his high hopes, his dashed hopes.

He’s no idiot. Quite intelligent, really. Well-read, books all over his little cell. If I used a big word on Monday, on Tuesday he’d use it back to me, correctly. Our conversations went all sorts of places, religion, philosophy, politics... but he never veered from his story that he did not remember killing Robert Kennedy. He didn’t deny it — he even said, ‘I must have done it!’ But he didn’t remember a damn thing.

Hell no, I don’t think he did it alone! He was such an unlikely assassin... kind of a chickenshit, really. Like when he worked as a grocery boy in Pasadena and got pissed off at the owner, and claimed he called the guy a goddamn son of a bitch. ‘You said this to his face?’ I asked him. Sirhan said, ‘No, I said it under my breath, so he wouldn’t hear me.’ What the hell kind of macho assassin is that?

When I would get into the idea of possible involvement of others in the assassination, he would get evasive. I think he was lying about that. But I don’t think he was lying about not remembering the shooting itself.

Even Dr. Diamond couldn’t break through that. Who? Dr. Bernard Diamond — the shrink the defense team brought in to ascertain Sirhan’s mental state... to try to learn what happened through hypnosis. Diamond almost immediately found out Sirhan was an incredibly easy subject. Went under so fast, so deep, that keeping him conscious enough to answer questions could be tricky.

You’re right, Nate — achieving that kind of rapid hypnotic state does generally indicate prior hypnosis. But as far as Diamond was concerned, he seemed to be more interested in implanting ‘memories’ than recovering them.

After countless sessions, Diamond came to what I consider to be an unlikely conclusion — that Sirhan programmed himself to kill Robert Kennedy. Diamond based this in part on Sirhan having fallen off a horse back in ’67. No serious injuries but occasional blurred vision and some chronic pain... and the loss of a lifelong dream to become a jockey.

The fall seemed to engender changes in behavior — the talkative, polite Sirhan turned withdrawn and irritable. During this period, Sirhan saw numerous doctors, without relief. He also became interested in self-hypnosis and mysticism. He joined the Rosicrucians, an organization that is itself fascinated by the occult and mysticism. There’s a three-month gap leading up to March ’68, by the way, where Sirhan just drops out of sight.

I believe Sirhan really doesn’t remember shooting Robert Kennedy, that he probably killed Kennedy in a trance and was programmed to forget that he’d done it, and also programmed to forget the names and identities of others who might have helped him do it.

During the trial, I wanted Grant Cooper to at least expose the jury to this possibility, and share various clues that Sirhan was, in fact, not himself that night, that he might have been acting under other influences, possibly programmed under hypnosis. We had tape-recorded all of Sirhan’s hypnotic sessions, so those could have been played for the jury, who could make up their own minds.

But Cooper said, ‘They’re never going to believe that! Anyway, I’d be a laughingstock. Drop it.’ That was a huge disappointment to me during the trial. Even Dr. Diamond backed off from that theory, that Sirhan was a ‘Manchurian Candidate.’ I’m not sure why — I think because he didn’t want to look silly.

“Instead,” Kiser said, “Dr. Diamond fell in with the other defense psychologists in saying Sirhan was a paranoid schizophrenic. But Cooper’s whole approach, of pleading diminished capacity, sailed over the jury’s heads.”

I’d been leaned back in my desk chair, taking all this in. Kiser seemed to be finished, so I asked, “What are you after from me, Ron?”

He bounced a fist off my desk — not enough to make anything jump, but making his point. “Keep digging. Keep looking. The whole idea of a conspiracy was ignored in that trial. Actively kept out by the defense! In the meantime, I’ll get to work on my book, my insider’s look at the case and how it played out in court, and my own investigation, as far as it got. So. What do you say?”

“I say make the check out to the A-1.”

“Good. Good. Where will you start?”

“By asking if you can get me in to talk to Sirhan Sirhan.”

“I can try.”

“Try hard. In the meantime, I’ll look into that ‘Manchurian Candidate’ angle you mentioned.”

The morning fog had long since burned off and the sky over the beach in Malibu was a perfect, nearly cloudless light blue over a gray-blue ocean so calm it seemed to shimmer more than roll, the surf brushing in against the sand in a foamy teasing tickle. It was in the low sixties and my suitcoat was unbuttoned and I’d left my shoes and socks in the Jag. The geometric modern house nearby might have been a set left over from a science-fiction movie. This was a perfect day in a part of the world where perfect days were one thing that didn’t require special effects. Who wouldn’t be happy here?

“When Bobby Kennedy was killed,” the tall, movie-star-handsome film director said, “the lights in a part of me went out, too.”

John Frankenheimer might have still been standing here where I’d left him almost a year ago, only now the loose shirt and chinos were pastel, not earth tones. His left hand was in a pocket and his right hand held a shot glass with an inch or so of golden brown liquid in it. You didn’t have to be a detective to figure out that was Scotch.

“With Bob,” he went on, “I felt I was part of something. That I could change the world. He made an idealist out of me. Then suddenly he was gone and nothing mattered.”

He was just a little drunk.

“We’re thinking of moving to France,” he said. “Evans and I have always loved Paris.”

He was referring to his actress wife, the redundantly named beauty Evans Evans, that gorgeous brunette who would have made any husband’s life tolerable anywhere. Wichita, Kansas, for example, where he’d told me they’d be heading next week, to start production on his new film — The Gypsy Moths.

“I’m looking into the possibility,” I said, “that Sirhan Sirhan was Laurence Harvey.”

In The Manchurian Candidate, Harvey had portrayed a brainwashed innocent programmed through hypnotism by Communists to assassinate a presidential candidate.

Frankenheimer gave me a sharp look that had a smile in it for just a moment. “George always said our movie was possible. I’m not saying he was wrong.”

George Axelrod, the screenwriter of The Manchurian Candidate.

The director shrugged in elaborate cynicism. “But suppose that is what happened to Bob? Who’s going to do something about it? Nixon?”

“Maybe I’ll do something about it.”

He chuckled and finished his drink. “You really take this private eye shit seriously, don’t you, Heller?”

“I have my moments.”

“I need another drink.”

In my opinion he didn’t, but I followed him back to the coldly futuristic house anyway. Soon we were sitting by the pool where I’d seen Bob napping on a beach chair less than a year ago. And a lifetime.

The lovely wife, in a bright orange-and-black print top and pale yellow shorts, brought me a rum and Coke I appreciated but hadn’t asked for — in a glass, on ice, with a lime slice. She’d remembered how I’d liked it from my previous visit last June. To her husband she delivered a fresh couple of inches of Scotch and threw in a secret look to me that said she was worried about him. He’d married well.

I was pretty prosperous now, but still couldn’t picture needing a swimming pool with an ocean in my back yard. Of course I was more Chicago than Hollywood, so I cut my host some slack. Their ways were different out here.

“Something odd,” Frankenheimer said, “that sticks with me.”

“Oh?”

“The press reported that Sirhan Sirhan was inspired to kill Bob after seeing him in a documentary with a pro-Israel stance. I made that documentary.”

Jesus.

“But something doesn’t add up,” he said.

What did in this thing?

“That documentary aired two days after Sirhan’s journal entry where he writes ‘RFK Must Die’ over and over. How does a documentary that hasn’t been broadcast yet inspire an assassination?”

I had no answer for that. No one did.

“How well did you know Bob, Nate?”

“Pretty well. Better than some.”

He was looking past the pool at the ocean. “You know what I liked about him? That he was funny. That he was shy. That he was dedicated. How he would listen for a long time and then respond quick, right to the point. He loved that movie, you know.”

“Manchurian Candidate?”

Frankenheimer nodded. “So did Jack. His brother.”

Glad he cleared that up.

The director clicked in his cheek. “We wouldn’t have got it made without Jack.”

“Oh?”

“Nobody in town wanted to touch it. Too controversial. Too far out. I had Sinatra all lined up to star in it and he and Jack were still close at that time. Frank approached him and Jack said he loved the book. He had only one question — who’s gonna play the mother? Frank said we’re going after Angela Lansbury and Jack thought that was perfect. We had a deal with United Artists the next day.”

“I’m surprised you got Jack Kennedy’s okay.”

“Why’s that?”

“MK-ULTRA isn’t exactly the United States government’s shining hour.”

Frankenheimer frowned in surprise. “How much do you know about that, Nate?”

“I know it’s an expansion of Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke, which both studied using hypnosis in interrogation. Some say they were looking for a way to manipulate foreign nationals into carrying out political assassinations. How come you know about it, John?”

He saluted me with his glass. “You first.”

I had to gather my thoughts a little, but finally I said, guardedly, “Back in ’53, I had a client, a CIA scientist, who was a part of MK-ULTRA, and who wound up going out a high window and taking everything he knew about the program with him. That’s all I can say on the subject, but I know about MK-ULTRA, all right.”

“Another botched bodyguard assignment, Nate?”

I pretended that didn’t cut. “Why, didn’t you ever have a box-office flop, John?”

“Not one that went out a high window.” He raised the hand that didn’t have a drink in it, palm out. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“No. That was an honest enough response. So it’s your turn — how is it you know about MK-ULTRA? I don’t figure it’s made Variety or the Hollywood Reporter yet.”

His gaze was hard. “I think you know.”

“Yeah. I think I do. I don’t figure that novel you based your movie on was the be-all and end-all. You’d have researched the hell out of it. That would be your way.”

Slowly he nodded. “We hired a consultant. On paper he was impressive — Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, head of the American Institute of Hypnosis, one of the acknowledged founders of modern hypnotherapy. He worked for the military during the Korean War, counteracting enemy brainwashing, and after that for the CIA in the area of psychological warfare — mind control, behavior modification. A number of prominent attorneys have used him as a consultant on major cases, including F. Lee Bailey on the Boston Strangler. And he’s consulted on several other motion pictures, though not as major as ours.”

“Impressive — on paper. How about off the page?”

His sigh turned into a rueful laugh. “A flake. His ‘institute’ is an office on the sleaziest stretch of the Sunset Strip. Already this year the California Board of Medical Examiners found him guilty of using hypnosis to examine more than just the minds of female patients, which got him a five-year probation.”

My eyebrows were up. “And this was your consultant?”

He shivered, sipped his Scotch. “I shouldn’t have used him for research — I should have researched him. Oh, he was knowledgeable, all right, and helpful as hell. I think there are few secrets in that world of hypnosis and mind fucking that he doesn’t know. But he’s an oddball to say the least. Amish beard. Weighs about four hundred pounds. Quotes the Bible here and Dr. Kinsey there.”

“‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’”

Frankenheimer sent the rest of his Scotch down his throat. “I wouldn’t encourage you to look into him, Nate, if it wasn’t for a radio program I happened to hear in the early morning hours after the shooting.”

“I couldn’t sleep, either.”

He stared at the sun-glimmering surface of the pool. “I was up all night, twisting the radio dial in search of any news about Bob and his condition, the arrest of the assailant, any damn thing. I stumbled onto a phone-in show on KABC and who should be the guest, but my old associate... Dr. Joseph W. Bryant.”

I frowned. “This was about the assassination?”

“Not directly. But when the subject came up, briefly, Bryant made an offhand comment that gave me a chill.”

“Yeah?”

Dark mournful eyes fixed on me. “Bryant said it sounded to him like the assassin may have been acting under a post-hypnotic suggestion.”

Thirteen

On its bluff jutting into San Francisco Bay, San Quentin Prison would have offered inmates a spectacular vista if its high walls hadn’t denied them of it. What it provided instead over four-hundred-thirty-two acres were barbed wire, gun towers, and four massive cell blocks, its welcoming white-and-black castle-like facade a cruel joke. A fifth cell block, the maximum security one, was euphemistically called the Adjustment Center, as if perhaps chiropractors were on staff and not grizzled guards.

Accompanied by one of the latter under a clear blue mid-afternoon sky — I’d had a pleasant three-hour drive here — I passed by a guardhouse through an area of administrative buildings and staff housing. We strolled through the prison’s original gate, a portico erected to accommodate a horse and buggy — San Quentin was, after all, built in 1852 (by prisoners who would then inhabit it) — and entered a plaza with a chapel on the right and cell blocks to the left; up ahead was the hospital.

In the old tower that housed Death Row, I met with Inmate B-21014 in a small off-white visitation room while two guards waited just outside. The slightly built figure sat at a modern wooden table, his left wrist cuffed through a metal loop. The walls were a pale yellow and, behind the seated figure, two windows let daylight filter in through trees and barred windows. His gaze was serene but I had to squint a little through the sun to get a fix on him.

Self-composed but with a nervous, embarrassed smile, he’d have seemed childlike if he’d been any smaller. His hair had been trimmed back to subdue the wild, bushy look, and he wore a blue denim prison fatigue top and blue jeans with black canvas shoes. His skin tone was the kind of bronze the white kids on Malibu Beach would kill for.

I had seen Giuseppe Zangara — he preferred being called Joe (“I’m American citizen!”) — in his cell in Miami in 1933. He had been the same size — 115 pounds, five feet five — with the same faint smile. Another little foreigner who had shot his way into history. The déjà vu of it curdled in my stomach like a bad meal.

Abruptly — almost making me jump — the prisoner got to his feet as best he could and bowed, awkwardly clasping his uncuffed hand to the other as if in prayer.

“Sirhan Sirhan,” he said, head lowered.

“Nathan Heller,” I said, and thrust my hand across the small table and he accepted it. He gave it a politician’s pump, three firm shakes that belied his otherwise shy manner.

His small smile seemed poised to break into laughter, though it only did so once — through much of our meeting, it remained the same. It was the bewildered smile of someone who couldn’t quite believe what was happening to him.

He said, “You are working with Mr. Kiser, I understand.”

“I am,” I said, as we both sat. “With Grant Cooper not seeking an appeal, Mr. Kiser has picked up the ball. He’s not an attorney but, as what’s left of your defense team, he’s interviewing possible representation for you.”

“And writing his book,” Sirhan said.

A tinge of amused contempt there.

“And articles,” I said, somewhat defensively. “He’s funding these efforts, after all. May we begin?”

“Might I ask a question first, sir?”

“Of course.”

His head cocked to one side. “You were one of those who tried to stop me, sir, were you not?”

“Yes.”

The smile again. “Then why would you try to help me now?”

I served up half a grin. “I’m being paid to.”

He laughed. “The American way.”

“Yes. But you’d be wise to keep in mind that Robert Kennedy was a friend of mine.”

His face lengthened the smile away. His head gave a quick snap of a bow. “Sir, I share your sorrow.”

“Then let’s start there. What did you think of Robert Kennedy?”

He was a prince, sir, Robert Kennedy — heir apparent to his late brother’s throne. I admired him very much. I loved him, sir. For all the poor people in this country, he was the hope.

And I stand with the poor people of this country, sir. The minorities. I am a poor person myself. I am not rich. Otherwise, sir, would I be in this position?

After the Arab-Israeli war, I had no identity, no hope, no goal, nothing to strive for. I simply... gave up. No more American Dream for me. I was an Arab! A foreigner in this country, sir. An alien. A stranger. A refugee.

That was the setback I suffered, sir. After the Arab-Israeli war, I could see that everybody in America loved a winner... and when the Israelis won, it made a loser out of me. And I did not like that one bit.

When my sister came down with leukemia, I would come home after college classes to take care of her. When she died, I became terribly depressed. I quit school. Worked as a waiter, a cook, gardener, gas station attendant. I hung around the racetracks, gambled a little. One day I saw a note on the bulletin board at Santa Anita offering a position as an exercise boy. I had always dreamed of becoming a jockey. It meant a new start! I was into life, sir, not death — watched horses being born. Such a life-affirming experience.

One foggy Sunday, my horse was flying and I couldn’t make the turn — saddle was loose or something. I never felt the fall. No pain, sir — I was unconscious. Next I knew I was in a hospital bed with a concussion. Stitches under my chin and next to my eye.

My family says I changed. It’s true I felt different. I wasn’t the same.

When did I buy the gun? That would be early last year, sir. This was my first purchase of a gun, but I was familiar with them because of Cadet Corps training in high school. I fired M-16s, 45s, 22s. I could tear a gun apart and put it back together. We used to have competitions. And I could shoot.

When I heard reports of Kennedy’s pledge to send jet bombers to Israel... that was in May, sir, I believe... it made me terribly mad. This man I admired seemed suddenly a villain to me. A killer who wanted to throw bombs on people and destroy them and their country. The very weapons he condemned in Vietnam, he would donate to Israel! It seemed paradoxical to me, sir. I could not believe it.

I could have shot him right then, I was so terribly mad. But only in my mind, not in deed. The notebook? I believe the notebook is mine. I just don’t remember writing those things.

I frankly don’t remember much of that time at all, sir, leading up to the shooting. If the horses had been running that night, I would have been down at the track. But they weren’t and I went downtown to watch a Jewish group’s parade celebrating the one-year anniversary of their victory in the Six-Day War. I’m not sure whether I was just going to watch or heckle or what — I wasn’t going down there to shoot anybody. I know that much, sir. But I had misread the advertisement and found the parade was going to be held the next night.

Yes, sir, I will try to remember as much as I can. But it is like a dream. No, not a nightmare, not till the very end.

I park my car and start wandering around. I notice lights are on in a storefront window and crash a celebration for a Republican candidate running for U.S. Senate. It’s not much of a party, though. Someone suggests a better one going on for another Republican candidate at the Ambassador Hotel across the street. I go over there. That’s where things start to get dreamlike.

I recall a Mexican band, a lot of brightness, a lot of people. I’m getting tired, it’s getting hot, very hot. I want a drink. I see a makeshift bar and a bartender in a white smock. Looks like Abbott in Abbott and Costello, but Latin. We don’t speak, we just nod. I seem to know him. He gives me a Tom Collins in a tall glass. I drink it while I am walking around. It goes down like lemonade. I guzzle it and order another. He makes it and I walk around and after I drink I come back and it’s like a routine between us. Like I’m a regular customer of his. When he sees me coming back, he knows what I want.

I begin to feel even more sleepy. I’m no drinker, I’m small, and it gets to me. Woozy, I go out to my car. I’m surprised I make it there. I feel too drowsy to drive and decide to go back and get some coffee. I’m told I took my .22 Iver Johnson from the glove compartment and moved it into my pocket. But I don’t remember doing that.

Don’t remember walking back to the hotel either, sir, but I must have. I do remember some of what followed. I start searching for coffee. I need coffee bad. I ask about coffee at the bar and an attractive woman sitting there says she knows where the coffee is. She takes me by the hand and leads me behind the stage where Senator Kennedy is speaking.

She is so pretty. I decide to try to pick her up. I’m fascinated by her looks. I’m getting very sexual ideas about this girl and make up my mind I’m going to make it with her tonight. She doesn’t lead me on — it’s my job to woo her. She never says much, but she’s very erotic. I feel consumed by her. She is a seductress with an unspoken availability. Yes, sir, a white dress with black polka dots.

A big shining coffee urn and cups are back there and I pour coffee for us. I remember wondering how I’d pay for it. Then a man with a clipboard and a big, full face, who seems to be in charge, points in the direction of the Pantry and the girl acknowledges his instructions.

I follow her like a puppy into the Pantry, still sleepy, very sleepy. Bright lights, shiny surfaces. I’m flirting with her and she sits on the steel table with her back to the wall. Her thighs, her legs, are right there in front of me. I am just looking at her, trying to take her beauty in. Trying to figure out how to hit on her. That’s all I can think about, how I’m fascinated by her looks. She’s sitting, I’m standing. Busty, looks like Natalie Wood. Never says much. It’s so very erotic. I’m consumed by her.

Then she pinches me. It’s startling — like a wake-up call. Like when you’re stuck with a pin. It snaps me out of my doldrums and yet I’m still sleepy. She points back over my head and says, ‘Look, look, look!’ I turn around or did she spin me around? There are people coming through the doors. I am puzzled about what she is directing me to. Doesn’t seem relevant, just people streaming in. She keeps motioning toward the back, more and more animated.

No, I wasn’t thinking about Senator Kennedy! Didn’t even know he was in the hotel. Then I am dreaming I am at a target range. I didn’t know I had a gun but I saw targets, circles, circles. I think I fired off one or two shots. They say I called Bobby Kennedy a son of a bitch, but I don’t remember doing that.

The next thing I remember is people on top of me, choking me, and getting my ass kicked... You were there, sir.

You must remember that part.

“Even after only a handful of sessions,” Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas told me, “it became clear to me that Sirhan Sirhan is no paranoid schizophrenic. No psychotic. Not at all.”

I was seated across an uncluttered desk — a single notebook, a pen, a phone — from San Quentin’s senior psychologist in his small wood-and-plaster office with the only other furniture a chaise longue with a chair at its head, patient/shrink style. With luck I wouldn’t be asked to lie down. The wall behind him bore framed diplomas from Stanford, NYU, University of Louisville, UCAL Berkeley and Heidelberg University. Mixed in were a portrait of his wife and kids and a fancy ribboned certificate that said he’d been a Lieutenant Commander in the Estonian Army.

About fifty, Simson-Kallas was slender, a man of average height but with nothing else average about him — not the blond hair that left most of his head bald with a curly shock in back, not the penetrating close-set dark eyes under fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows nor the prominent nose, full lips and rounded chin. His houndstooth jacket and white turtleneck announced him as his own man.

So did his opinions about Sirhan Sirhan.

In what I assumed was an Estonian accent — vowels over-pronounced — he spoke above tented fingers.

“Paranoid schizophrenics,” he said, “are almost impossible to hypnotize. They’re too suspicious, they don’t trust anybody, not even friends or relatives. They can’t concentrate, they can’t follow instructions. They make poorest subjects for hypnosis.”

The accent had him dropping articles here and there, too. Not always but enough to add to the foreign feel.

I said, “Sirhan is supposedly in the most easily hypnotized group.”

The caterpillars rose. “Oh yes. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I’ve ever met. He is grade five on hypnotism scale — less than ten percent of Americans rate grade five. When defense psychiatrist, Dr. Diamond, gave him a post-hypnotic suggestion, Sirhan jumped around like a monkey and climbed cell bars.”

I grinned. “I don’t know, doctor. I’ve seen that kind of thing in nightclub acts, where the subject is just going along with the gag.”

“That is possible,” he granted. “Sirhan could have been clowning or trying to fool them. He had little respect for Dr. Diamond, who like several others on the defense team was a Jew. As an Estonian émigré, it didn’t take me long to gain Sirhan’s trust — my people are neutral on the Middle East. He was extremely eager to talk to me. I tested him and found his IQ was 127, not the 89 presented at the trial. That low score came from his not trusting the Jewish doctors testing him.”

I said, “Yours can’t be a popular opinion in law enforcement circles.”

He shrugged. Folded his hands. Rested them on the blotter. “I have not advertised it, but I’m working on a lengthy affidavit outlining my findings. The chief psychiatrist here agrees with me — he too does not see Sirhan as psychotic or paranoid schizophrenic. Nothing in Sirhan’s test responses indicate that.”

I frowned. “That diagnosis was at the heart of the trial.”

His dark eyes flared. “Conduct of mental health professionals in this case is appalling! Errors, distortions, even probable manipulations of facts. That trial was, and will go down as, the psychiatric blunder of century.”

“It could be argued,” I said, “that Sirhan’s attorney, Cooper, was just pursuing the best legal strategy. To present Sirhan to the jury as mentally ill and protect him from the death penalty under California law.”

He waved that off. “The assumption that the jury could not accept a defense of hypnotic programming is absurd in this case. The grounds were substantial. Not taking that approach is unjustifiable on a tactical basis.”

I wasn’t sure he was right about that, but didn’t press it, asking, “What about the general belief that you can’t commit an act under hypnosis that you wouldn’t do otherwise?”

“There are numerous famous cases that put the lie to that belief. If a hypnotized subject is convinced, for example, that he is acting in self-defense, of course he will kill.”

I opened a hand. “Sirhan seems to think he was dreaming of being at a target range.”

Simson-Kallas nodded. “And he frequented such ranges — had done so that very day. This is consistent with programming. So is his show of superhuman strength that night, his serene expression as he emptied his gun on the crowd, his composed, relaxed behavior at the police station after his arrest — all of this is consistent with a hypno-programmed state.”

“What about this girl in the polka-dot dress? A kind of handler, you think?”

He nodded three times. “Yes, and a trigger. You can be programmed that if you meet a certain person, or see something specific, you go into a trance. Those drinks were almost surely drugged. An individual under the influence of barbiturates, particularly with increased dosage, would go through three stages: a slight sedative effect... a more pronounced cloudiness, even amnesia... then slurred speech, disrupted thought patterns, poor coordination, with a lack of awareness of painful stimuli. All of these conform to Sirhan’s behavior that night.”

“There’s talk of self-hypnosis.”

“Yes, and he has practiced that.” He lifted a forefinger. “But this young man is not devious enough to have killed Robert Kennedy on his own, under any circumstances. He was prepared by someone. He was hypnotized by someone. He was there to draw the attention of the others in that Pantry. His role was to provide an obvious simple explanation to the crime that would prevent others from asking questions.”

I cocked my head. “And he did have a motive.”

Just one nod this time, some sadness in it. “Sirhan does display great emotional distress reliving his childhood in Israel, when he lived in an area that took heavy bombing during the ’48 Arab-Israeli conflict. He witnessed atrocities that scarred him, no question.”

“So he does have definite deep feelings about Palestine and Israel.”

This nod was in slow motion. “He does. To me, however, his comments about Arab-Israeli politics have a strangely rote feel — like an actor reciting his lines. He doesn’t speak with the hesitancy and rephrasing common in genuine expressions of thought and emotion.”

I was nodding now. “Which could have been played upon by his programmers. How long would that kind of programming take?”

He frowned. “I would say a few months. There seems to be a period of about three months leading into the assassination where Sirhan’s movements are largely unknown. That programming wouldn’t require him disappearing off the face of the earth, being shipped off somewhere into the hands of some mad doctor. No, it might be akin to a job he took, meaning he would not drop entirely out of sight from his friends and family. But many hours each day would be devoted to this programming.”

I locked eyes with him. “The question is, doctor, would he have been a willing participant?”

The caterpillars rose again. “More to the point is, how willing? I have attempted to get through the barrier concerning those three missing months and get nowhere. Just that during that time he isn’t working and at night occasionally sees friends from his college days, spends time with his family... but what of the days?”

“Let’s get back to ‘How willing?’”

A one-shoulder shrug. “He may have thought he was involved in study of mysticism, magic, philosophy, metaphysics, all areas of interests of his, dating back at least to his interest in the Rosicrucians. Perhaps he was told he could play a role in pro-Arab activism. And he might have known he was being prepared to participate in an assassination. None of that matters.”

That rocked me back. “Well, of course it matters!”

He calmed me: “I mean, in the sense of understanding that Sirhan Sirhan was deprived of a fair trial. That he was at best manipulated by unknown programmers under false pretenses, or at worst was just another cog in a wheel.”

“But an important cog.”

Another nod, again of the slow-motion variety. “An important cog. How do they say it in the old private eye movies, Mr. Heller? He was set up to be a patsy... to take the fall?”

That got a smile out of me — not much of one, but a smile. “What do you think, doctor?”

A long sigh. “I think Sirhan Sirhan has always been a loser. He failed at Pasadena City College. He played horses and lost. He wanted to be a jockey and fell off a horse. He finally found a role he was suited for.”

“Political assassin?”

“Arab hero. He likes to say he doesn’t remember killing Robert Kennedy, yet he takes pride in helping Arab refugees by doing so. And yet...”

“And yet?”

“He is willing, eager, for me to hypnotize him and find out what really happened. He says over and over, ‘I don’t know what happened. I know I was there. They tell me I killed Kennedy. But I don’t remember!’ It is the only time an emotion really comes through.”

I let some air out. “He does recount everything in a frustratingly passive way.”

“Like he’s reciting from a book. And where are the details? Yes, there’s a girl he wants to sleep with, and the Tom Collins drinks and the coffee in the urn, but what else? A psychologist looks for details. If a person is involved in a real situation, there are always details. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, Mr. Heller. Other murderers I’ve interviewed speak with great expression and in horrific detail about their crimes.”

“And all you get out of Sirhan,” I said, “is that he was hoping to get laid.”

“Well, he did get screwed,” the doctor said.

Fourteen

Nita was still sleeping the next morning when I made the call from the bungalow’s living room to attorney F. Lee Bailey in his Boston office. We were old friends — I’d been his investigator on the Sam Sheppard re-trial a few years ago and the A-1 had handled a few minor things for him in the meantime. I told Lee only that I was trying to get a bead on Dr. Joseph W. Bryant and he didn’t pry about the reason.

“Well, I can tell you this about him,” he said in his mellow courtroom baritone. “Bryant may be the most brilliant man alive in the field of hypnotism — certainly the most knowledgeable and imaginative.”

“How did a New England lawyer happen to connect with a Hollywood hypnotist?”

“Back in ’61, in San Francisco,” Bailey said, “Melvin Belli put on a hypnosis seminar for trial lawyers with Bryant the star attraction. Bryant hypnotized three of us, myself included, and instructed us to hold out our right arms while he droned on about how our arms were feeling numb. I was just waiting for something interesting to happen, and only sensed my arm being lightly rubbed. When Bryant brought us around, we each of us had hypodermic needles stuck through the fleshy part of our arms.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not a bit. He informed us this was an example of hypnosis as anesthesia. The punctures had not caused bleeding. He removed the needles painlessly, sent us to our seats and resumed the lecture. That, Nathan, is what brought Dr. Bryant to my attention.”

“And then you pulled him in on the Boston Strangler case.”

“Yes, but before that to assess another strangler — the so-called Hollywood Strangler, Harvey Bush, who’d killed three elderly women. Bryant’s theory was that Bush hated his mother and was killing her over and over. In Bush’s cell, with the prisoner in a hypnotic trance, I played the role of the mother. The son of a bitch attacked me and if Bryant hadn’t been there to grab him, Bush would have made victim number four out of me.”

“Were you in a dress like Tony Perkins at the end of Psycho?”

“Very funny, Nathan. Now as to the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, it was Bryant himself who nearly became a victim. After repeatedly telling the hypnotized DeSalvo that the victims represented him strangling his daughter over and over — for diverting his wife’s love from him to her — DeSalvo clutched Bryant by the throat. Bryant grabbed his attacker’s shoulders and shouted, ‘Sleep!’ And that did the trick.”

“Well. He would seem to be the genuine article.”

“Oh, he’s that, all right. But I’d never use him in court. Wouldn’t dare put him on the stand.”

“Why not?”

“He’s too damn full of himself. A pompous ass. A showboat.”

Of course Lee had been called all those things, too.

“And then,” the attorney went on, “there’s his sexual proclivities, which any competent prosecutor would use to impeach him. He’s on probation now for hypno-hanky-panky with female clients. And his receptionists are a parade of bosomy bimbos right out of a Russ Meyer movie — they last in their well-paid jobs only as long as they can take it. Apparently not all women are attracted to tubs of lard.”

“That heavy, is he? I heard 400 pounds.”

“An exaggeration. Really, I wouldn’t put him past 380.”

“Can you buy this character working with the CIA?”

“Hell, Nathan, he bragged about it! That doesn’t make it necessarily true, of course — he’s an insufferable egotist and shameless grandstander.”

Again, charges that were frequently leveled against Lee, but I was too gentlemanly to point that out.

“Let’s just say,” Lee said, “his eccentricities do not outweigh his genius.”

I thanked the attorney for his help, rang off, and went into the bedroom. The shower was going in the adjacent john. I stepped in there just as Nita was stepping from the shower looking like Botticelli’s Venus but black-haired and better. I helped her dry off and maybe we fooled around before getting into casual clothes and taking breakfast in a booth at the Polo Lounge.

Nita was eager to catch up on my visit to San Quentin — she’d been asleep when I got back last night — and took it all in with wide eyes and smart questions. But when our food arrived, our conversation stopped and she seemed blue, only eating half of her veggie Eggs Benedict.

I’d had no trouble putting away the Dutch apple pancake and figured whatever was troubling her could be dealt with by me expressing a little interest. “Any auditions today?”

That only made her look more glum. Her youthful green-and-black striped top was upbeat but she was bringing it down.

“Yes,” she said, her smile pained. “A salesgirl on Here’s Lucy. At her age, Lucille Ball tends to hire older younger actresses, so I have a shot. Nate, I’ve auditioned every day this month and haven’t landed a damn thing.”

“What about that Marcus Welby?”

“That audition was last month. The shoot was this week. Nate, I’m just too... too in between — not an ingenue, not a matron. I feel like I’m chasing my tail.”

I reached across and patted her hand. “Let me do that for you.”

She smiled, laughed a little, but withdrew her hand. “I’m just frustrated, that’s all. And I’m not doing you any good, either.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

She sighed. “I mean... begging you to take on Bobby’s assassination. If there’s nothing there, it’s a waste of time. If there is something there, it’s dangerous. No, fucking dangerous.”

“Look. I have a client, paying real money. I’m not working for you, I’m working for him. And when I’m finished with this thing, why don’t you come back to Chicago with me.”

She smirked. “Chicago? What’s in Chicago?”

That hurt. “Well, me.”

Her expression melted. Now she reached for my hand. “Oh, I’m sorry. Sweetie, I’m sorry...”

“There’s a lot of theater back home and I have connections. They shoot movies there all the time. Think about it.”

She was nodding. “I will. I definitely will.”

Soon she was off in her little Fiat after a bit part in a sitcom, an episode of which I would only watch if she were in it.

In the yellow pages I found the office of the American Institute of Hypnosis at 8833 Sunset Boulevard and spoke with a pleasantly ditsy receptionist, making an appointment for two P.M. That allowed me time to call Ron Kiser and bring him up to speed on my conversations with Frankenheimer, Sirhan Sirhan and Dr. Simson-Kallas. But he had nothing new for me.

The afternoon was cool and I met it in a lightweight navy blazer, Polo shirt, gray slacks and Italian loafers. I parked the Jag on Larrabee and walked toward Sunset and around Mad Man Muntz’s off-kilter rectangular glass box on the corner with its beautiful girls in fishnet stockings and short skirts ready to sell you a four-track car audio system. The Strip’s sidewalks had no shortage of hippie kids, but this was nothing compared to what it would be after dark, when the Whisky a Go Go up the street drew them like bees to honey. Or maybe sheep to grass.

I strolled past a long white building across the top of which in red were the words

next to a marquee promising BIGGEST TOPLESS SHOW IN THE WEST. Next door, as if on another planet, a wide, almost dignified two-story building presented itself, its lower facade brown brick, above which, under a row of windows, it said

against the smooth pale concrete face of its upper floor. At right — comprising a vertical third of the structure — a checkerboard of windows made room below for the white front door a few steps up from the street.

This was the Sunset Strip, all right.

I went into a waiting room big enough for a dozen and inhabited by a lone receptionist at a desk that had a phone and date book on it and nothing else. The mahogany paneling didn’t quite go with the Scandinavian modern chairs lining the walls, their oak frames bearing green cushions. On one wall in a massive frame, each phrase stacked, were the words:

and

On the opposite wall in a matching massive frame was a photographic portrait hand-colored of (if the bronze plaque below could be believed) Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, Jr. This was a photo circa late ’50s or early ’60s and depicted its heavyset subject in a black business suit and tie, black-rimmed glasses, short brown hair high on a round, puffy-cheeked head. Like the building, almost dignified.

I crossed wall-to-wall carpeting to the reception desk, where a redhead in a green low-cut red-paisley dress was beaming at me with full, red-lipsticked lips and bright copper-eye-shadowed green eyes behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses like Bryant’s in his portrait, apparently strictly to suggest professionalism. Her bosom, a third of which was showing with the braless rest no mystery, would make a lesser man gasp. I merely goggled.

“Nathan Heller,” I said. “I have a two o’clock with Dr. Bryant.”

“You’re with life!” she burbled. Her smile was so wide the number of toothpaste-ad white teeth showing seemed improbable.

I didn’t understand her at first, then got it: I’d said on the phone I wanted an interview for Life magazine.

“Sit where you like, honey,” she said, gesturing, jiggling. Her flesh was white with faint red freckles. “The doc’ll only be a minute.”

“I like the view from here.”

Even more teeth! “I bet you do.”

“I don’t believe the size...”

“Oh, they’re real!”

“...of this place. How many people work here, miss?”

“Call me Alice.” She took off the glasses and tossed them on the desk, to lessen the distance between us. “How many work here, regular? Two. The doc and I. Other doctors come and go. Mostly it’s patients. A lot of patients, but he cleared the afternoon for you.”

“Only two people on staff? A facility this size?”

“Well, there’s a lot goes on upstairs. A recording studio with a control room, TVs, multiple tape decks. A closed-circuit set-up to treat three patients at once, at locations anywhere in the country. Examination rooms, patient rooms. We have more couches than a furniture store.”

Oh, the stories those couches could tell.

The phone rang and she said excuse me and smiled (she was the kind of girl whose smiles were almost always accompanied by a shrug), putting on the unneeded glasses to make an appointment for a private session. I strolled over and had a closer look at Dr. Bryant’s portrait. He reminded me of someone. Oliver Hardy minus the Hitler mustache? I’d try not to become his Stan Laurel.

“Mr. Heller!”

The commanding voice came from a tall fat man in a yellow polyester sports coat with a knotted red neck-scarf and red-and-black-and-yellow plaid pants and pointed brown shoes who stood filling a doorway behind the receptionist at her desk, his fists at his waist like Superman. His glasses were rimmed in heavy red and thick lenses magnified his dark eyes, his shaggy rust-brown hair swept back, the blister-pale Ollie face framed by an Amish beard. He looked like the host of an oasis in a mirage when you’d been crawling across the desert a really long time.

He didn’t look much like his framed portrait of maybe ten years ago, but this was Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, Jr., all right, pushing at 400 pounds hard, putting the hippo in hypnotist.

“Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, Jr.,” he confirmed pleasantly as he proffered his hand. I took and shook it, a clammy thing reminiscent of a pet’s rubber squeeze toy.

He gestured for me to enter and I did, with him closing the door behind us. The office was good-size, its walls at right arrayed with framed diplomas and clipped magazine and newspaper articles about its inhabitant; at left were framed posters of three films — Tales of Terror with Vincent Price, Dementia 13, and The Manchurian Candidate, on all of which he’d been a consultant. A shrink’s couch was against the back wall. To the right of his desk, where he could swivel, was a console with microphones and push buttons and knobs and dials arranged in a wide V. The area in back of the console was curtained but glass could be glimpsed where the curtains joined.

“You would be the famous Private Eye to the Stars,” he said jovially as he settled into his chair. He was like a department store Santa with questionable intentions.

“That does follow me around,” I said, taking the client’s chair he’d indicated with a pudgy palm. Or was that “patient’s” chair? At least I wasn’t shown to the couch.

“I suppose it’s inevitable we should meet,” he said, a twinkle in the lens-magnified eyes.

“Is it?”

“Private Eye to the Stars,” he said with a modest flourish of a hand, “meets Hypnotherapist to the Stars.”

I didn’t know of any celebrities he’d treated and the framed pictures on the wall didn’t include any. Maybe he’d been on some of the film sets.

Still, he must have read something in my expression because he added, “I refer of course to the celebrity likes of Albert DeSalvo and Carl Coppolino.”

The Boston Strangler and a convicted wife murderer.

I smiled, nodded, said, “Our mutual friend Lee Bailey sends along his regards.”

“Very kind of him.” Bryant was reaching for a pipe in a holder of several. “We shared some very interesting, and if I might say, hair-raising experiences. I can share some of those with you, if you like, for your article.”

“Not necessary. Lee has already filled me in.”

He lighted a match. “If you wish a direct quote or another point of view, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“I’d like to talk to you about hypnosis,” I said, taking out a pad and pen, to pretend to take notes, “as it pertains to therapeutic work.”

“Certainly.”

“I notice you list criminology,” I said, with a gesture toward his outer office, “as one of your specialties.”

A confident nod. “I’m very much an expert in the use of hypnosis in criminal law.” He had the pipe going now. The smoke smelled pleasant, floral and sweet. And expensive.

“Of course,” he continued, “I’m probably the leading expert in the world on hypnosis itself. It’s hardly surprising the LAPD would call upon me from time to time. Or the lawyerly likes of Melvin Belli and our friend Lee.”

I asked, “How would you define hypnotism for the layman?”

Bryant rocked back, challenging his chair. “Hypnotism is an increased concentration of the mind, a supreme relaxation of the body, and an enhanced susceptibility to suggestion. Sometimes drugs are employed, but often not.”

“You offer sex therapy as an option, I see.”

He nodded several times, firmly. “Sex and religion are my chief interests, hypnotism merely a means to an end. Seeing that term ‘sex therapy,’ you most likely took notice of how physically attractive my receptionist is... and, this is off-the-record you understand, but I admit to making a habit out of hiring my current bed partners as receptionists.” He chuckled. Puffed his pipe. Leaned across chummily. “When a relationship breaks up, I need to cast for both roles, so to speak.”

Yuck.

I asked, “You did a Playboy interview, didn’t you?”

His grin didn’t have as many teeth in it as his receptionist, but it was Cheshire-like just the same. “I did. But then you’re a friend of Hugh Hefner yourself, aren’t you, Mr. Heller? Perhaps I should call you ‘Nate’ and I should be ‘Bill.’”

“Sure, Bill. Yes, Hef is a client. Going way back. And, well... I’ve dated a few Playmates and Bunnies in my day.”

“Or rather in your nights.” His smile was as cute as a kitten. A dead kitten. “I am convinced the best way to get to know a woman, really know her, is at a deep emotional level. This requires sexual intercourse, of course. Oh, don’t mistake me for some sort of sybarite. I’m an ordained priest in the Old Roman Catholic Church, which some dismiss as a fire-and-brimstone sect, and a frequent guest preacher at fundamentalist churches all around Southern California. That you can quote me on.”

“Perhaps we should get back to the kind of subjects Life magazine is interested in as opposed to Playboy.”

He let out a single Ha! “Yes. Perhaps we should!”

I said, “You mention religion as your other obsession. What does religion have to do with hypnotism?”

The big buggy eyes got bigger and buggier. “Only everything! The prophets produced their visions by a form of auto-hypnosis and, in the Middle Ages, most of the prophets who heard the voice of God actually disassociated their own voices and heard themselves. Many elements of hypnosis remain in religion today — the chanting testimonials, the flickering candles, the cross as a fixation point.”

This mumbo-jumbo I couldn’t care less about, but I said, “Interesting. Let’s back up, though. I could really use some background about your work for the government.”

He waved his pipe like he was in the backseat of a convertible in a parade. “Certainly. During the Korean conflict I was chief of all medical survival training for the United States Air Force, which translates to ‘Brainwashing Section.’ Accomplished great things there. Stateside, I established this institute in 1955, started our teaching program in 1958, and in 1960 began publishing a medical journal devoted to our work here.”

“By ‘great things,’ do you mean your groundbreaking work in brainwashing? Both in rehabilitating our military personnel who’d been prisoners of the enemy and developing techniques that could be used against those enemies?”

He stiffened just a little, scratched the Amish beard at the chinny chin chin. “That’s substantially correct. But you understand I can’t provide detailed information about any of it — we’re talking about research and events that remain classified years later. Definitely top secret.”

I tossed a casual hand. “Perhaps you could talk in more general terms. For example, how does one go about brainwashing a subject?”

He thought about that briefly, then pontificated: “Well, you have to have control over the person, either lock them up physically or dupe them into cooperation. You may have to use a certain amount of physical torture or else deploy what we might call mental gymnastics. And there is the use of long-term hypnotic suggestion, probably drugs, and so on. Under these situations, where you have all this going for you — like in a prison camp or in a controlled seemingly positive environment — you can brainwash a person to do just about anything.”

“Literally anything?”

He gestured with pipe in hand. “Come now, Nate — you’re not naive. The government programs people to kill all the time — enlists them into the army, tells them killing is for their country’s own good, and the recruits, the draftees, don’t doubt any of that a bit. And Uncle Sam doesn’t have to use hypnosis to put it over.”

I nodded. “It becomes rote. The way Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, for example?”

He looked hurt for a moment, a big put-upon baby, then scowled, looking nothing like a baby at all. “I am not going to comment on that case because I didn’t interview that particular subject.”

“Not for the LAPD? Not for the CIA?”

“Not for anybody!”

I leaned in. “The chief psychologist at San Quentin suspects you did.”

His mouth tightened into a sphincter. “I just told you I didn’t hypnotize Sirhan. I don’t have an opinion because I didn’t treat him. You’ve got a lot of misconceptions about hypnosis and here you are, trying to find some ammunition to put that same old crap out, that people can be hypnotized into doing all these weird things and so on... the old Svengali stuff... and I am not going to be party to it, not for Life, not for Playboy, not for the Journal of the American Institute of Hypnosis! I don’t want to be quoted by you at all. I don’t want to be in your goddamn article. Because I have no desire to be laughed at.”

I turned over a hand. “You’ve had to bump up against ridicule from the beginning of your career, Bill, and you’ve fought back with facts. What is your opinion? Did Sirhan indulge in self-hypnosis, as one of his defense psychiatrists believes? Or was he programmed to kill? Brainwashed by an expert?”

He got to his feet; it was like watching a film of a building implosion play backward. “This has been gone over fifty million times. If that’s all that you have got to interview me about, you are wasting my time and yours. This interview is over.”

He came around the desk, and I wondered if this soft-looking but nonetheless heavyweight creature was going to take a swing at me.

No. He stormed out — of his own office!

For a big fella he moved fucking fast. He was halfway down the reception area by the time I slipped past Alice, who looked up with big green eyes and asked, “Did you want to schedule another appointment?”

I did not answer.

He was out the door already and by the time I got outside, I couldn’t see him, looking side to side and across the street and...

...Jesus, he was right next door, heading into the Classic Cat, home of the biggest topless show in the West.

Fifteen

I followed him. I wasn’t exactly sure why — I’d probably gotten everything out of him I might expect to, but the hypnotist shrink had bolted from his office in what seemed like panic. His next move might prove of interest, so out on the Strip I walked past the Classic Cat’s valet parking and went in under the marquee to enter between two bouncers in tux vests, skinny black ties and bulging muscles. No cover charge, a freestanding sign immediately told me, but the unlisted price of the two-drink minimum would no doubt make a strong man blanch.

It took me a moment before I realized I’d been in here before — not when it was a strip joint, but the Jerry Lewis Restaurant, which the comedian had opened to thumb his nose at his old partner who had Dino’s elsewhere on the Strip. The decor had been luxurious but the fare average, and now Dean Martin was still dishing up drinks and food while his old partner’s joint was offering topless dancers and a little combo playing Louis Prima castoffs, and Jerry didn’t even get a slice.

Remodeled into a fairly plush nightclub, the Classic Cat was a long, rather narrow space. The foyer had a coat room to the right, some offices, and a display area of life-size posters of dancers interspersed with framed 8x10 blow-ups of celebrities on visits to the premises — Jim Arness, Adam West, Bob Crane, Doug McClure, and (oddly) Lana Turner. Pool balls were clacking at left, a bar separating this area from a small stage with seating. Past Roman columns the space opened up to accommodate a black-curtained sea of pink-cloth-covered tables facing a large stage angled across the upper left corner. Occasional cursive pink neon high on walls reminded patrons where they were and guided them to the restrooms and exits.

I did not spot Dr. Bryant in the smaller stage area, where a blonde with enormous piles of hair danced pert-breasted topless in a glittery G-string and matching heels while a bored Latin in a tux played a rhumba number on a grand piano, the band in the main room far enough away to do little more than provide a discordant contrast. The audience was sparse but attentive, some college boys in letter jackets between classes and a few actors in sport coats between gigs... way between, in some cases.

The main showroom was perhaps a third full, mostly businessmen and tourists, women among the latter group, giggling embarrassedly, their men keeping the drinks coming. The dancer here had a ton of brunette hair framing a lovely face and spilling down her bare back. Tanned all over, she was coyly covering her breasts with her arms while she wore only the lower half of a Dorothy Lamour pastel sarong as she managed to summon considerable grace swaying in heels before a zebra backdrop while the little combo (Raul and the Revelations) butchered “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Somehow she was bridging the South Sea Islands and Darkest Africa just fine and when she entwined her hands behind her head it was as if to make sure we could all see her natural gifts included no scars where breast met bone or around the edges of prominent puffy areolas. The nipples themselves were scolding fingertips. God had made all that, not a plastic surgeon. Nice going, God.

I was standing off to one side and she noticed me. I admit I was staring — she was a striking woman but also something about her was nagging at my mind — and she smiled just a little across the vastness of the room. Or was I just another dipshit patron imagining a stripper had just connected with me?

The good doctor in his yellow sport coat and knotted red scarf was seated at a table near the stage, but didn’t seem to be watching the production. He overwhelmed his chair, a bear on a unicycle. A waitress pretty enough to perform here delivered Bryant a drink that he hadn’t had time to order; it was a silly looking thing in a tall glass with a bunch of fruit pieces on a cocktail stick. He ignored it, but my impression was this was a regular customer’s automatic order.

On stage, the tall busty brunette — well, she was in heels, so maybe she wasn’t tall exactly, perhaps five six — was wrapping up her set. Soon she was deftly scooping up dollar bills that had been tossed on stage during her performance, bowing to her applause, and slipping off.

An M.C. in a striped sport coat, white slacks and out-of-date early Beatle haircut emerged from somewhere to tell his microphone that they’d just seen the incredible Marguerite and that next on the Classic Cat main stage would be that sweet Southern belle, Dixie. The zebra backdrop went up and a Confederate flag unfurled down. Pixie-haired Dixie, blonde, strutted out wearing a Johnny Reb cap and a gray excuse for a vest and a red bikini bottom. Also, for those keeping score, red cowboy boots. The band began to play a bump-and-grind version of “Dixie” and for comic relief sang out, “I wish I was in Dixie!” at appropriate inappropriate moments, which prompted her to smile and waggle a finger at them and her bottom at the audience.

I settled in at a table toward the back. A stunning redhead waitress took my order for a rum and Coke.

“Why aren’t you up on the stage?” I asked her, just being friendly.

“I’m saving myself for my wedding night,” she said dryly.

I had that coming.

Dixie was still strutting, her vest not yet doffed, when Marguerite came out from a stage door wearing a long diaphanous black robe over her stripper garb. She walked straight to Bryant and sat, and he leaned in, talking to her intently. Now and then he would stop and sip his stupid drink through a straw. Marguerite just listened, then shrugged, got up and went back the way she came.

That might have been a failed negotiation for a table dance, but I didn’t think so. Those two seemed to know each other.

Bryant sat through Dixie’s three numbers, not watching the stage, just leaning on an elbow and occasionally sipping through his straw. There was something childish about him. Like Fatty Arbuckle in the silent movies — you know, the cheerful fat man who got accused of rape.

A chirpy voice asked, “Table dance, mister?”

The pert-breasted blonde from the smaller stage, weighted down with all that hair and wrapped up in a white gossamer robe open over a sparkly bra and matching G-string, beamed down at me. She looked so young I was ashamed of myself. Nonetheless, I asked her how much and she said five dollars. I told her I had ten for her if she would just sit down and kept me company for a while.

“Actually, I’m glad to sit down,” she said.

“And I’m glad for the company.”

She looked at me with big sky-blue eyes under over-the-top fake eyelashes and light blue eyeshadow. “My name’s Susie. Are you from L.A. or just visiting?”

“I’m from Chicago.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a private detective.”

That stopped her for a moment. “I don’t have any married boyfriends, actually. At least, if I do, I don’t know it. And if I did know it I wouldn’t want to talk about it, even for ten dollars.”

“I’m not on that kind of job.”

“What kind of job are you actually on?”

“You see that fat slob, Susie?”

“I see that overweight gentleman, yes.”

“Do you know him? He works next door. He’s a hypnotist.”

“I know who he is. Actually, I worked for him a while.”

I blinked. “As a receptionist?”

“How did you know?”

“I told you I’m a detective.”

“He was always trying to... you know. Fuck me. Actually.”

“And you didn’t want to actually fuck him.”

“No! Would you?”

“Hell no. What was he like?”

“Horrible. Sweaty. A real bragger.”

“What would he brag about?”

She made a disgusted face that still managed to be cute. “About helping the police and stuff. He actually said he caught the Boston Strangler.”

“Did he.”

“And some other strangler. And you know that terrible man who killed Bobby Kennedy?”

“Sirhan Sirhan?”

“Yes, Sirhad Sirhad. He said he actually hypnotized him.”

“Did he.”

“He did. For the police, probably. He works with the police a lot. He said he actually helped put him away, Sirhad Sirhad.”

Sometimes you strike gold in the most unlikely places.

I got out my billfold and gave her a twenty.

“I don’t have change,” she said apologetically.

“Actually, Susie,” I said, “I don’t need any.”

“You’re nice.” She got up, leaned in, gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Best twenty dollars I’d spent in a long time.

A dancer I’d seen in Chicago, Haji, was doing her exotic thing on stage, Raul and his Revelations struggling to cope with Martin Denny’s “Misirlou.” She proceeded to perform a belly dance that was too good for this clip joint.

In the middle of Haji’s act, Bryant got up and went out fast, his beeline not taking him anywhere near me, though I ducked down just the same. When he made it to the door, I got up to follow him again, but somebody put a hand on my sleeve.

“Baby please don’t go,” Marguerite sang, doing Cher. She had the same kind of low, throaty voice, not at all like Susie’s chirp but at least as appealing. And she was just enough older than Susie to make me not feel immediately guilty.

I asked, “Did you have something in mind?”

Marguerite was in a sleeveless white top and a black-and-white checked miniskirt and white vinyl go-go boots with a matching white purse on a chain strap slung over her shoulder. She was probably twenty-one, twenty-two — in this day and age that was the equivalent of forty.

“I thought we made a connection,” she said archly. “You looked at me, I looked at you. Remember?”

“I remember,” I said. “Very ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’”

“I don’t know what that is,” she admitted and sat.

“An old guy reference,” I said and sat. “You don’t look like you’re getting ready to go back on stage.”

“No. I was just filling in for somebody. I’m done for the day.”

“I’m Nate, by the way. Or Nathan. Want a drink before you head home?”

“Why not?”

I motioned my wait-for-her-wedding-night waitress over and ordered up a Harvey Wallbanger for Marguerite and a second rum and Coke for me.

She put her hands together piously; she had very long, very red, very pointed fingernails. “I saw you talking to Susie.”

“Nice kid.”

“Little young for you.”

“So are you.”

Her shrug was ageless. “But not jailbait young. The management pretends not to know she’s on fake I.D. I’ve never seen Susie talk to a man for so long a time. You must be quite the conversationalist.”

“I’m fucking articulate, haven’t you noticed?”

Her dusty-rose lipsticked lips puckered into a nice smile. “You do have a way with words.”

She had Cher eye makeup on to go with her voice, but it gave me a pang — she looked uncomfortably like Nita on our first meeting in the Senator’s suite at the Ambassador.

“What on earth,” Marguerite asked, leaning in, “was there to talk about with that airhead? I mean, she’s sweet, and probably a fun little piece of tail. But she makes Goldie Hawn look like a rocket scientist.”

“That’s just an act. Goldie Hawn is very smart.”

“Susie isn’t. You can’t have taken that much time negotiating your way into her panties. What’s your game?”

“You seem to want to know a lot about me.”

She lifted her chin and looked down at me; she had a cute pug nose. “You do interest me. Most men in the afternoon sit close to the stage. You were halfway out the door. You ashamed to be looking at naked young women, Nathan?”

“Utterly.”

“Do you spell that with two d’s?”

We both laughed. I was liking her. She was smart, maybe not Goldie Hawn smart, but not bad for a place like this.

“Actually... to borrow Susie’s word,” I said, “I was inquiring about your next door neighbor — Dr. Bryant?”

Her eyebrows went up but her eyelids didn’t. “Ah. Our friendly neighborhood shrink. What about him?”

“Ask me what I do for a living first.”

“What do you do for a living first?”

Goldie Hawn had nothing on her.

“I’m a detective. Private. Just checking up on him for a client.”

She poked a long red nail at me, like she was about to tickle the tip of my nose. “So that’s why you’re here. Not to look at naked girls. To find out about Dr. Bryant. And here I thought I was the one you were interested in!”

Our drinks arrived.

“If I were interested in you,” I said, “how much might it run? If you have a college fund or something.”

She just looked at me. Had I offended her?

“A hundred dollars,” she said. “My place isn’t far. But let’s have our drinks first. At these prices, we can’t afford not to. And, anyway, I’m just getting to know you.”

After a five-minute stroll from the Classic Cat up tree-lined Alta Loma, ending in a cul-de-sac, an unlikely garden oasis materialized just steps away from the chaos of the Strip. Once I’d taken in its Spanish-inspired white exterior walls and orange-tile roof, and gone arm-in-arm with Marguerite through the canopied entrance—

— the residential hotel gave off a distinctly druggy cast. Beyond its unadorned open reception area, the large patio and pool welcomed skinny long-haired pasty-faced rockers in black t-shirts and black jeans clinging to shadows and sprawling on lounge chairs beneath patio umbrellas like vampires shy of the sun. English accents buzzed here and there like mosquito nests, and now and then a familiar show biz face would appear among the hippie rabble — Mike Nichols, Bill Cosby, Van Heflin. And me without my autograph book.

The rooms were off the pool and Marguerite was in one of them. The furnishings were (as advertised on a cheap sign outside) attractive, but in a modern way that had immediately dated. The place had a kitchenette and the walls bore posters of Marilyn by Warhol, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, and The Doors at the Whisky a Go Go.

My hostess led me to an orange floral sofa without armrests in front of a low-slung glass-topped coffee table that had marijuana makings spread out like do-it-yourself party favors.

Marguerite perched next to me, rolled a joint, lit it, offered it to me, I declined, and she said, “You aren’t one of those stuffy older generation types, are you?”

“I’m not a narc. That’s the best I can do.”

She laughed. I wasn’t crazy about the sweet smell of the smoke, but it wasn’t an issue.

Helpfully, she asked, “Can I get you something to drink? I could make you a Seven and Seven.”

“No thanks.”

She made a mock “hurt” face. “Oh. All business. Boring!”

“Business first. Fun time after.”

“All right. Let’s see the color of your money.”

I got out my billfold and gave her a crisp hundred.

“Fancy!” she said and tossed it folded onto the coffee table. She slipped an arm around my shoulder. “You want to fool around? Or did you want to know more about the doc?”

“Let’s start there. Anything you care to share.”

She frowned coquettishly at me. “What do you want to know for? Some husband whose wife got hypnotized and then came home with a hickey? He’s really harmless, the doc. He puts them under and feels them up and, you know, Chubby gets a chubby.”

“This isn’t about that. It’s more about his work for the LAPD and the CIA.”

I’d laid that out there bluntly but she didn’t flinch.

“I imagine Susie told you about how he caught the Boston Strangler,” Marguerite said. “Or anyway says he did.”

“Yeah. And the Hollywood Strangler, too.”

“He’s big on stranglers, the doc. And that rich guy who killed his wife, Bryant helped the defense with that one, too, he says. But the guy went down for it anyway. The doc says if he’d been brought in sooner he could’ve got that guy off.”

“Not in a sexual way, I hope.”

“Ha! I should hope not. Listen, I hope I didn’t lure you out here under false pretenses. I don’t really know anything more than Susie probably already told you, about him helping the LAPD. As far as the CIA goes, he brags about that a lot, but isn’t, you know, specific.”

“Susie mentioned Sirhan Sirhan.”

That stopped her for a moment, but just a moment. “The creep who shot Bobby Kennedy? The doc did say something about that. I think he hypnotized that guy for the prosecution, getting ready for the trial or something.”

“Funny. His name doesn’t turn up anywhere in the court transcripts, and several other hypnotists and psychiatrists do.”

She shrugged. She placed the joint in an ashtray and cuddled up. “Now you know everything I know.”

“About the doc, maybe.”

“I dig older guys, y’know.”

“Do you.”

She kissed me; it was a sticky, sexy thing, but when she put her tongue in my mouth, it tasted like weed. Still, it went on a while and those long nails clawed sensually at my hair and then one pricked teasingly the back of my neck just as the kiss ended.

“Ow,” I said, softly, with a smile.

“You just sit there. Did you like my zebra dance? At the Cat?”

“It was swell.”

“You just sit there!”

She got off the couch and padded over to a portable stereo on a stand. She knelt and thumbed through LPs in a rack below, and in that short white skirt was something to see. She made her selection and started it playing. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass — “A Taste of Honey.”

There was no striptease. She just stepped out of the black-and-white miniskirt, kicked it away, and then out of her sheer panties and kicked those away too, then pulled the sleeveless white top off and smiled a little, well aware of the impact her full breasts could have on a man. Now all she wore were the white go-go boots, and she began a little pony dance.

Goddamn, she was a lovely thing. Unlike the poolside rockers, she was tan everywhere except where her bikini had kept her legal, and her pubic bush was a defiant thing, curling black against white flesh, as wild and tangled as the garden grounds of the Marquis.

And I won’t lie to you. I was hard. I considered fucking her to keep things honest — you know, credible. To demonstrate that this was about more than just me pumping her, so to speak, about Bryant.

Maybe if she hadn’t been brunette. Maybe if she hadn’t looked a little like Nita, maybe I could have been the old randy Nate Heller. But seeing this incredible, available young thing (definitely not sweet young thing) in the altogether only made me think of Nita. Had I really gotten this old? Or had I finally grown up?

Now I was the one being hypnotized, by her undulating hips, by the swaying ripe fruit of her breasts, by the promise of red slightly-smeared-from-that-kiss lips as she inserted a finger in her mouth and sucked on it and widened her eyes in an effect both comic and erotic. But I would be damned if I’d fuck her.

And I didn’t.

But to be honest with you, it wasn’t my sudden superior moral sense, not entirely. It had much more to do with the world going bleary and me passing out.

When I woke up it took me a full minute at least to get my bearings. I was groggy, a mental thickness cut only by the blinding blade of a headache. I sat up and tried to recognize the surroundings. The lights were low, only a desk lamp on and the shape of a man, a big man, seated behind the lamp’s glow.

“Are you feeling better, Mr. Heller?”

Bryant!

And this was Bryant’s office...

I was stretched out on the patient’s couch. My blazer was off and slung over a chair nearby. My mouth was cottony and my alertness was coming back but the headache had gone from a blade to banging. My right arm hurt at the joint. I got into a sitting position and my hands found my head as I leaned over, wondering if I was going to puke. Somehow I managed not to.

The fat man in the yellow sport coat, the red scarf loose around his neck now, came over into the dim desk-lamp light. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“You just take it easy now,” he said. “Marguerite called me, worried about you. You passed out, for some reason. With a man your age, why that could be a stroke!”

“Back off! Let me get up.”

He edged away, holding out his palms. “Certainly. I helped her bring you here. I, uh, had to give you a sedative. You began to get violent in your sleep and yet I couldn’t rouse you. You may feel some aftereffects. You may want to call for a ride. Can I do that for you?”

“Fuck you,” I said to him, and grabbed the blazer and got into it as I stumbled out of his office and into the unpopulated waiting room, the redheaded receptionist gone. I crossed the distance to the door, which seemed like a very long way.

“Mr. Heller!” he called.

But I was gone.

Out on the Strip was darkness streaked by headlights and neon, hippie kids milling, laughing, smoking, long-haired creatures of the night. I somehow got to my Jag around the corner and sat in it for a while before attempting to drive.

I touched the back of my neck.

I had turned down the joint and I had turned down a drink, but when I’d given into that kiss, and she’d pricked me on the neck, I should have known.

Something in her nail polish hadn’t been by Maybelline.