Too Many Bullets

Sixteen

Someone was stroking my hand.

My eyes came open, lids going up like reluctant curtains, and sunlight was filtering painfully in through the foliage hugging the bungalow. I resisted the urge to close my eyes again and instead took stock.

I was on top of the bed, on the comforter, with Nita’s side looking slept in. Right now Nita was sitting beside me, studying me, her smile one of concern. My eyes burned and sludge was creeping through the inside of my skull like the Blob looking around for Steve McQueen to smother.

“What time is it?” somebody said. Me, apparently. The words had not come trippingly off my tongue. More like tripped.

“A little after ten,” she said. “If we want breakfast at the Lounge, you should get up and throw yourself together. They stop serving at eleven.”

I sat up. It was no harder than lifting the back end of a Buick by the bumper. “What... what time did I get in?”

“I’m not sure. I went to bed early, around ten, and you must’ve crawled on top of the covers sometime after that, and didn’t wake me. You’re fully dressed, by the way.”

I was! Still in the navy blazer, Polo shirt, gray slacks, even my shoes.

Nita seemed a little amused if still concerned. “You must have really tied one on.”

Her dark hair was ponytailed back and she was wearing no makeup at all; even in her early forties, she put every one of the Classic Cat girls to shame. Her pale pink PJs took pity on my burning eyeballs.

“What were you up to, anyway?” she asked lightly. “You didn’t leave a note or anything... sorry. I don’t have a right to—”

“Sure you do,” I said. “I was picking up strippers at the Classic Cat on Sunset.”

She made a face and slapped my chest gently. “Oh, you. Get dressed. Let’s have breakfast.”

We did.

I took time to shower and shave and, by the time I threw on a fresh Polo, light blue sport coat and navy slacks, I was functioning again. A good thing, too, because Nita’s daisy-print denim jeans, not at all offset by her white blouse, might have made my eyeballs fall out.

Then, when we were having a cup of coffee in the bungalow breakfast nook, I told her everything that had happened yesterday, leaving a few choice bits out, like Marguerite’s bare-ass dance in her little Sunset Marquis living room. Even so, there was plenty for Nita to get wide-eyed about and the part I liked best was when she gave me shit for going out without a gun. I couldn’t remember another woman ever doing that.

“This Bryant character said he gave you a sedative,” she said through angry little white teeth. “What kind of sedative...?”

I touched the front of my right elbow where it still hurt some. “Scopolamine, probably. Maybe sodium pentothal. Probably threw in a few of his hypno tricks.”

“What could he have found out?”

I shrugged. “Not much, really. For once it’s a blessing I’m not a better detective — I don’t have anything that would elude any decent investigator. Worst of it might be confirming I’ve been working to expose what really happened in the Pantry.”

She added a little more cream to her coffee. “Seems to me,” she said, a sip later, “he’s confirmed his own complicity. Isn’t drugging you an admission of guilt?”

Shook my head. “Not really. That lardbucket has all kinds of things he wants kept concealed. Just because Bryant told Betty and Veronica he programmed Sirhan doesn’t make it true. And, anyway, he doesn’t seem to have told them that, exactly — they think he hypnotized that bushy-haired little Palestinian for the cops or maybe the prosecution.”

“Where does that leave you?”

I raised my cup of coffee in salute. “Now that I’m human again, I’m going to drop by the Sunset Marquis and have a little chat with Marguerite. If I can turn her against the doc, I’ll have something to hold over him. There’s no way she could have had any idea she might be an accessory after the fact to a political assassination.”

She cocked her head. “Couldn’t she?”

“I don’t follow.”

She was smiling as she leaned in. “Nate, didn’t you tell me there was something about her that was nagging at the back of your mind?”

“Yeah.”

Nita opened a palm. “She’s a curvy brunette in her early twenties, right?”

“Right.”

“With a pug nose?”

My mouth dropped open and words came out. “Oh. She could be the girl...”

“...in the polka-dot dress.”

Nita insisted on going with me. Maybe because of what she’d said, I slipped off the jacket and slipped on the hip-holstered nine millimeter. The jacket wasn’t custom-tailored for that, but I was returning to the scene of the crime and certain corners needed cutting.

We crossed the nondescript Sunset Marquis lobby, decorated by a scattering of framed black-and-white rock band photos — I knew some of the groups because of my son Sam (Byrds, Doors, Turtles) — to the simple front desk. Seated behind it reading Rolling Stone was a handsome brown-eyed guy in his late thirties, very tan, in a blue blazer and white YARDBIRDS t-shirt.

He looked up and gave us a polite smile. “Help you, folks? We have suites available. It’s only suites here, no single rooms.”

“Is Marguerite in?” I asked. I’d never got a last name.

He smiled, tossed the newspaper-style magazine on the desk; he looked a little like Tom Jones, the singer, not the Albert Finney character. “That’s her stage name,” he said. “Her real name is no secret, though. It’s Elaine Nye. But she’s out.”

“Are you the manager?”

“Manager. Owner. Chief-cook-and-bottle-washer. Well, not really cook, though.”

“When do you expect her?”

“Three weeks?” It was a question. “She’s got a booking.”

“Happen to know where?”

“Sure. Vegas.”

“Would you know where in Vegas?”

A shrug. “Could be any one of half a dozen places. Check the Vegas Yellow Pages.”

“Let my fingers do the walking?”

“Yeah. I’m not being a smart-ass — I just really don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“She left this morning. Her and a carload of luggage. Doesn’t travel light, Elaine.”

I got a twenty out of my billfold and slid it across the counter like a card I was dealing in Twenty-one. “I’d like a look at her room, if I could.”

“You’re Nate Heller, aren’t you?”

This fucking Private Eye to the Stars thing was getting to be a pain in the ass.

I said, “Yeah. Twenty not enough?”

He waved that off. “Don’t want your money. You’re a friend of Hef’s, right?”

I blinked. “I am.”

“Hefner’s a friend of mine, too. I built this place as a hotel to go along with the Playboy Club on Sunset. His out-of-town talent stays here. Listen, I’ll let you look around in Miss Nye’s digs, but you can’t take anything.”

He fetched a young woman in the office behind him to take over and walked us out and across the Astroturf that edged the pool, past assorted pale druggies, to Marguerite’s room. Elaine’s room. He unlocked the door with a master key and gestured for us to go on in.

The only thing that had changed was the grass on the coffee table, absent now; even the Herb Alpert LP was still on the record player, silent now. Nita watched, arms folded, exchanging a nervous smile with the manager/owner, and I checked around. The clothing in the closets and chests of drawers was a little light; the owner was right — she’d taken a lot with her. How many tops did a topless dancer need? The refrigerator had been divested of anything that might spoil. Three weeks had probably been a decent guess.

My search came up with nothing.

The only thing I found was a matchbook in the ashtray on the coffee table. It said:

Different Strip.

That I took, with the manager/owner’s permission.

Our next stop was close by: the American Institute of Hypnosis. Nita went in with me and I approached the desk, where Alice the redheaded receptionist in the black-rimmed, probably window-glass glasses beamed at me like the old friend I was. This time about half of her bosom was on display in a green and pink geometric dress. The upper half! Get your mind out of the gutter...

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Heller.” I never saw so many goddamn teeth. “Dr. Bryant is attending a seminar and then a retreat. He won’t be back until next week.”

“A seminar where, if I might ask.”

“Sure. Ask away!”

“Where is the seminar?”

“Didn’t I say? Vegas.”

“Know where he’s staying or anything?”

A shrug. “Just Vegas.”

Back out on the street, Nita said, “Did you see the rack on that girl?”

“I missed it,” I said. “I was too wrapped up in the teeth. You don’t do auditions on the weekend, do you?”

“No.”

“Good. Then I have a sudden urge for a Las Vegas getaway.”

She took my arm and cuddled up right there on Sunset in front of God, the hippies, the winos and everybody. “Aren’t you afraid of taking me with you into the lion’s den?”

“I’m afraid not to take you. The lions might come looking.”

We packed quickly, didn’t even change our clothes. By one P.M. we were on our way via Route 66, with a stop for gas and burgers at Roy’s Café & Motel at Amboy, and on to Highway 91, mountains and occasional little towns breaking up the desert monotony. The Jag was air-conditioned but we barely needed it, the weather in the low eighties. We played cassette tapes of Frank Sinatra by way of preparation for my return to a town I’d known since it was a bump in the road before Ben Siegel transformed it into modern Las Vegas, getting killed for his trouble.

Nita slept the last hour or so, waking up in time to see the sign announcing

just as desert desolation was getting muted by dusk and a flowering of neon began. Initially it was gas stations and mom-and-pop hotels, like the Galaxy and Desert Rose and Lone Palm; but then came the spread-out casinos with their elaborate signs and black-letters-on-white marquee attractions: HACIENDA (Comedy Riot 1969, Hank Henry and Topless Models); TROPICANA (Folies Bergère, Julie London); ALADDIN (Minsky’s Burlesque ’69, Ink Spots); DUNES (Casino de Paris, Mills Brothers); FLAMINGO (Paul Anka, Myron Cohen); and at left, where we turned in, CAESARS PALACE (Anthony Newley, David Frye).

Set back from the Strip, Caesars’ crescent-shaped central tower was fronted by a curved casino with symmetrical wings that swung outward, vaguely suggesting a Roman forum. A vertical plaza of Italian cypress trees and towering fountains bathed in turquoise light sprayed columns of water. At the passenger drop-off larger-than-life statues — Greek, Roman, and Renaissance figures mixed with shameless abandon — guarded enormous front doors.

Inside, body builders in Roman soldier garb and curvy ersatz Liz Taylor-style Cleopatras greeted us. To the left an underlit, stingily ventilated reception area encouraged guests not to wait for their rooms to be readied but rather to enter the cool bright sunken casino where slot machines and gambling tables sang their tuneless percussive song. Sexy waitresses in toga dresses were delivering guests gratis cocktails beneath a domed ceiling and a massive crystal chandelier in the shape of a Roman medallion.

Our room, however, was ready and turned out to be a modest example of the fourteen-story tower’s 680 rooms: decorated in a style that might best be characterized as Spartacus Meets the Jetsons, the blue shag-carpeted (with matching furnishings) split-level suite had a dining area, grand piano, crystal chandelier, assorted statuary, and spiral staircase that led to a balcony encircling the living room. The sleeping quarters included a round bed, a mirrored wall and a Jacuzzi. The walls were mostly patterned gold, though at one point were interrupted by a red wall any San Francisco whorehouse would be proud of.

We stood in the living room hand in hand, like two pimply teenagers trying to get up the nerve to go into the homecoming dance.

I asked, “Decadent enough for you?”

“Nearly,” she said.

We got into swimwear, robes and sandals and went down to the Garden of the Gods, a vast swimming pool designed in the shape of a Roman shield. The pool was lined with towering white columns, lights at the base of which made nighttime swimming a dreamy, romantic affair. We were not the only couple down here but crowded it wasn’t. The most impressive effect, however, came from a full moon, lording over it all like a massive glowing poker chip.

Nita’s long dark hair was pinned up, her curvaceous figure nicely displayed in a hot pink Peter Max-type print one-piece. My trunks were green and black Tiki-style. Together we were stylishly headache inducing.

We leaned against the side of the immense pool and kicked gently at the nearly bath-warm water and tried not to feel like we were on vacation. Wasn’t easy, with that full moon reflecting off the rippling water’s surface.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

“Try to get a line on this supposed seminar of Bryant’s. And we should be able to catch up with Marguerite or Elaine or whatever she’s calling herself at the Pussycat A Go-Go.”

Her dark eyes widened. “You, uh, want me to stay behind for that? Might be hard to work your charms on a ‘dame’ with a date along.”

I batted that away. “I’ve charmed that girl all she’s going to get. I might get rough with her, and if that would give you a bad opinion of me, then maybe you should go up and laze around our debauched suite till I get back.”

Her eyes narrowed and so did her smile. “No, I think I’d like to see you at work. Might give me a better sense of just what I’m getting into.”

“Not a bad idea at that.”

“...is that guy looking at us?”

“You’re worth looking at, but what guy?”

“Right behind us, past the columns and under a big umbrella at a little table. Unless you don’t think it’s suspicious, avoiding the sun after dark. But you’re the private eye.”

I glanced behind me. The man seated at the metal table saluted me with his drink — a Gibson, no doubt. He was at the far edge of middle-age, with a gap-toothed resemblance to actor Robert Morse of How to Succeed in Business. But the business Edward “Shep” Shepherd was in was spying.

Of course, in those orange Bermuda shorts and that Hawaiian short-sleeve sport shirt — not to mention the sandals without socks — he might have been on vacation. On the other hand, I would imagine he might turn up at many a vacation spot with business in mind. He was a man of medium height, medium build, medium in every way, his blond hair mostly gray now.

“Shit,” I said softly.

“Someone you know,” she said. Not a question.

“Old friend. The kind you hope never to run into.”

“Too late to duck him.”

“I wouldn’t bother trying. Swim a little. I’ll be back.” With any luck.

She nodded, flashed me a look of concern, then swam off.

I got out, went for my towel nearby, dried off a little and padded over to where Shep was sitting, waiting. I pulled up a deck chair.

“Nathan. Imagine running into you like this.”

“Imagine.”

“How’s that boy of yours doing? Sam? Still in school?”

“Still in school.”

“My two are grown and turning me into a grandfather.”

“And you’re in Vegas why?”

He sipped his drink. Yup, a Gibson, the onion long gone. “Helping out the Atomic Energy Commission on a few matters. Now I’m catching up with an old friend.”

“And here I thought we weren’t speaking.”

“Well,” he drawled, hauling out that Southern accent he leaned on when he was playing nice, “I was hopin’ I might make our past differences up to you by puttin’ you on the right track.”

“What track is that?”

His smile showed no teeth; in fact it was barely a smile at all. “Thought it might interest you to know that the same cabal behind Jack’s death? Is also responsible for Bobby’s. Smoke?”

He offered me a Chesterfield from the pack. He was talking about the two Kennedy brothers, in case you fell asleep in the second reel.

“No thanks,” I said. “I gave up smoking after Guadalcanal. But then you know that. You know everything, don’t you, Shep?”

He raised a palm. The smile widened to that gap-toothed Bobby Morse look. “I’m not here to tell you to stop doing what you’re doin’. In fact, I hope to point you in the right direction. What needs to be done is better comin’ from you than me, because I have certain waters I have to swim in. And you’re never sure in such waters who’s a minnow and who’s a piranha.”

Laughter from down a ways echoed across the pool.

“Colorful,” I said. “Mind spelling it out?”

He sipped the Gibson. “You care for somethin’ to drink, Nate? There’s a little gal in a toga around here somewhere.”

“No thanks. Tell me about minnows and piranha, Shep.”

“Certainly.” He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. “Now where was I? Ah, yes. So the same rogue elements in the Company who took JFK down are involved in the RFK kill. That simple. And that complex.”

The Company, of course, was Shep’s employer — the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Okay,” I said. Casual. Stomach clenched.

A toss of a hand. “Let’s start with a piece of information I don’t have. Are you still friendly with Bob Maheu?”

Robert Maheu had been, when I met him, a Washington DC private investigator, a former FBI man who counted the CIA among his clients. He had contacts within organized crime circles and I had reluctantly worked with him in lining up certain key mob figures in the misbegotten plan to take Fidel Castro out. Obviously that effort failed, and I now viewed Operation Mongoose as less than my finest hour.

“Maheu and I were never friends,” I said. “I was pleasant, I was professional, but he’s a reckless, dangerous son of a bitch.”

Shep’s eyebrows rose slowly, as if heading to his scalp to hide. “Do you know what your non-friend Maheu is up to now?”

I shrugged. “He’s right here in Vegas, isn’t he? Running casinos for Howard Hughes?”

For those who have been living beneath a rock: business magnate Howard Hughes was a record-setting pilot, engineer, film producer, kazillionaire, and did I mention a crazy-ass eccentric recluse? In recent years he’d extended his financial empire to include Las Vegas real estate, hotels, casinos, and media outlets, moving in at the Desert Inn in ’66. In seclusion.

“Yes,” Shep said, “but Maheu looks after more than just casinos. You met with Thane Cesar, I understand?”

That Shep knew this didn’t surprise me. He’d known I was in Vegas, hadn’t he?

“Yes,” I said, “but what does a nonentity like Cesar have to do with Howard Hughes?”

A young woman’s laugh bounced across the water.

He leaned forward. Pointed a gentle forefinger. “Nate, I’m not going to connect the dots for you. But I am gonna provide you with a few extra dots. Let’s start with Thane Cesar making occasional trips to Vegas where he’s tight with a Hughes employee name of Hal Harper.”

I frowned. “Hal Harper? Former LAPD guy? Lost his job in that police brutality scandal?”

A nod, a smile. “That’s the one. These days he heads up Hughes’ personal security detail. Say, uh... didn’t you do some work for Howard Hughes yourself, years ago?”

I nodded. “Must have been ’47, ’48. Hughes hired me to deal with a starlet who was blackmailing him after their relationship went south.”

The eyebrows went up again. “Were you successful in that endeavor?”

I shrugged. “I paid her off. Warned her that I thought Hughes was capable of just about anything, and to cut her losses accordingly. Which is why I never did another job for him. We never had words or anything — just told him it wasn’t my kind of gig and he accepted that.”

Another gap-toothed smile, a shake of the head. “That explains something.”

“What?”

He gestured open-handedly. “Why Hughes has expressed respect for you. I think you should have a little talk with him, Nate.”

“Easier said than done.”

Shep cocked his head. “Maybe not for you.”

“And why would I want to talk to that screwball?”

“Maybe to see just what Thane Cesar is to the Hughes organization. Oh, and to ask him how it was that he came to hire damn near all of Bobby Kennedy’s staff after the assassination. You did know that, didn’t you?”

“...I did not.”

He raised the forefinger again, but in a teacherly fashion this time. “First talk to Maheu. He may be able to get you to Hughes. Insist that he try.”

I was confused, but I managed, “All right.”

He looked out at the pool. “That’s a nice looking gal you got there.”

Nita was swimming, her stroking arms graceful, her kicking feet rhythmic.

“I like her,” I said.

“You should show the little lady a good time. Take her out tonight.” Shep slipped his hand into the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and came back with two tickets. “My treat. Anthony Newley and David Frye at 9 P.M. Dinner show. Like the kids say, be there or be square.”

He handed them to me.

Who doesn’t like free tickets to a top Vegas show? But how much, I wondered, were these free tickets going to cost me?

Seventeen

A Circus Maximus waiter took us to a booth in a row of VIP seating elevated just behind the packed perpendicular-to-the-stage long tables where you got to know your neighbor a little too well. On the other hand, Nita and I found ourselves practically swimming in our plush gold-leather approximation of a Roman chariot, where a RESERVED card with “Heller Party” on it meant I probably could have skipped the generous tip.

The walls of the thousand-seat supper club, lined with pillars and statuary, were decorated with golden legionnaire shields. Actual (well, ersatz) Roman soldiers were positioned along the red-velvet-curtained stage, keeping an eye on the crowd, hands on the hilts of their swords. Possibly they were there to keep out the Ritz Brothers, who were working the nearby Nero’s Nook lounge. Those boys could get rowdy.

The crowd was a well-dressed one and we fit right in. Her hair up, Nita was a curvy knockout in a slim sequined black evening dress with bare arms. I was in a gray Botany 500 suit, cut to accommodate the shoulder-holstered nine millimeter. I hoped the Roman guards wouldn’t notice.

The grub was good. Nita partook of the Boneless Breast of Poulet de Bresse, which was Capon Breast in Sour Cream Sauce on Savory Rice (much better than unsavory rice) and I had the Broiled Filet Mignon Caesar Augustus with Champignons in a Triumphal Laurel Wreath. Rare.

We’d started with marinated herring and closed with Baked Alaska, after which Nita said, “What the hell are we doing here, Nate?”

“I saw Newley in Roar of the Greasepaint on Broadway,” I said. “He’s terrific.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

I said with a shrug, “I’m surprised myself. I figured either Shep would show up personally or we’d be sharing this booth with somebody else. Somebody significant.”

“Such as?”

“No idea.” Really, I did have a hunch.

She leaned close enough for me to make out the Chanel No. 5 even in a room that was already smoky. “This isn’t your style, is it? You’re more the small jazz club type.”

“Or blues den, in Chicago. Yes, that’s right. Playboy Club’s as close as I come to this, and their showroom back home’s fairly intimate. This Ben Hur hokum is designed for the tourist trade.”

That amused her. “Then why are we here?”

An affable mid-range male voice said, “Because this is the house that Jimmy Hoffa built, and Nate gets comped on his room... Sorry. Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

The owner of that voice slid into the booth on my side. His hairline a memory, the brown of the surviving sides turning gray, Robert Maheu looked like just another vacationing businessman in his conservative blue suit, white shirt and red-and-blue striped tie. A tad heavyset, he was a pleasant, dark-blue-eyed, usually smiling individual whose knob nose and reflective bald head gave him a vague resemblance to actor Karl Malden.

But this was no vacationer — as Howard Hughes’ surrogate, he was one of the real movers and shakers in Vegas. Hell, in Nevada. And the reason for this VIP booth was mostly his presence, not that of the almost famous private eye and his sort of well-known actress companion, to whom I introduced him.

Maheu said, big smile, charming as hell, “You look very familiar to me, Miss Romaine. Have we met?”

“You might have seen me on TV,” she said, smiling, pleased to be nearly recognized. “I’m an actress.”

“She’s been on every one of your favorite shows, Bob,” I told him. “You watch all the ones with pretty girls, right?”

He said to her, “Don’t listen to him. I’ve been happily married since 1941 to the lovely Yvette. Have you ever done a Mission: Impossible?”

“I have,” she said, nodding, brightening further.

I said, “He’s bragging now. That show’s based on him and his DC agency. He used to assemble teams for the Company.”

He leaned across me and smiled, whispering to Nita: “That’s CIA... Of course your private detective friend here was the inspiration for Peter Gunn, so I can’t really hope to one-up him.”

She asked, “What did you mean about Jimmy Hoffa?”

Maheu grinned; he had a great smile. “Tell the girl, Nate.”

“Hoffa put twelve million into Caesars,” I said. “They couldn’t get financing anywhere else. Borrowed it from the Teamsters Pension Fund.”

“Hoffa’s a great man,” Maheu said, meaning it. “But Nate’s probably told you all about that.”

She shook her head, looked from him to me. “No, he hasn’t.”

I said, “I did some work for him, oh, back in the fifties.”

Was Maheu being cute? Could he know that I’d been working undercover for Bob when I got in good with Hoffa? That was still the kind of thing a guy could get killed over.

Maheu’s smile softened into something vaguely menacing and his attention was off Nita and onto me. “I would think you’d be looking hard at Jimmy Hoffa about now, Nate... in regard to Bobby Kennedy’s passing, I mean.”

What a very creepy way to put it: as if RFK had died in his damn sleep or something.

“Hoffa has an alibi,” I said, a little arch.

Maheu’s bald head reflected light. “You mean, he’s been inside Lewisburg for over two years, with another, what? Eleven to go? Are you telling me he couldn’t reach out and make something happen from behind bars?”

“I don’t rule anything out,” I admitted.

His eyes widened. “I certainly wouldn’t. If Bobby Kennedy had gone on to be president, Jimmy Hoffa couldn’t hope for any kind of mercy. But one of these days Nixon just might pardon him.”

“Nixon hasn’t done that yet.”

Maheu lighted up a cigarette — a filtered Kool. “Closer to reelection time he might. A Teamsters endorsement would go a long, long way, next time ’round. But enough politics.” He beamed at my date. “Say, Miss Romaine, I should apologize. The plan was, I would join you folks for supper but then I got tied up with the doggone Atomic Energy Commission.”

“It was quite good,” Nita said.

He let some smoke out. “I’m sure it was. But I’ve taken a few too many trips around that menu already.” He patted his tummy.

“Why the Atomic Energy Commission,” she said, “if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Don’t mind at all. It’s a public concern, and especially a concern of my boss’s. They stopped the aboveground testing but the underground testing continues, and it’s very dangerous. A health conscious man like Howard Hughes takes notice of such things.”

That last had just a hint of mockery in it. A hint.

“So, Nate,” he said, “how is it you rate so high with my boss?”

I tossed a hand. “Mr. Hughes? I did a job for him once, years ago, and he was happy with the outcome.”

Maheu leaned back into the booth, folded his arms, shook his head, consigning his Kool to an ashtray. “Well, I’ve done some jobs for Mr. Hughes myself, y’know. This is kind of a cute story, Nita... is it all right if I call you ‘Nita,’ Miss Romaine?”

“Certainly.”

“Is that short for Anita?”

“It is.”

First I heard of it.

“Anyway,” he said, sitting forward, folding his hands prayerfully on the white linen tablecloth, “when we made the move to Las Vegas, Mr. Hughes wanted to travel by night and arrive before dawn. I set up a decoy operation to have a fake Hughes seen leaving the Ritz in Los Angeles, taking the press along with him. But our train had brake problems and repairs meant we’d sit on the tracks for hours and arrive in Las Vegas possibly as late as the afternoon. In broad daylight. That would not do with Mr. Hughes. In the middle of the night, I arranged for another train to take us to Vegas at a cost of $18,000. It was an executive decision that I knew might cost me my job. But Mr. Hughes was thrilled with how I handled things.”

“And that,” I said, kidding on the square, “set the stage for you to buy all these casinos for him?”

A twitch of a self-satisfied smile. “Oh yes. The Desert Inn, of course. But also the Sands, the Castaways, the Frontier, the Silver Slipper... we still haven’t closed the Stardust deal, but we bought the Landmark and, in Reno, Harold’s Club. And of course, among other properties, we bought the CBS affiliate here, KLAS, because Mr. Hughes wanted to ensure that movies would air all night... and be titles of his choice.”

“Mostly,” I said, “movies he produced at RKO.”

“Is it true,” Nita asked, eyes narrowed, “that initially Hughes was just renting the Desert Inn penthouse, and before Christmas the management tried to kick him out to make room for the holiday high-rollers? And your boss said, ‘Buy the hotel’?”

Maheu’s smile was as big as it was friendly. “That one’s a legend. Really, Mr. Hughes had a half-billion windfall on his TWA deal and needed to avoid suffering a huge tax bite. That’s the only thing he fears more than germs, y’know — the taxman.”

Nita laughed, then got serious. “How did Las Vegas feel about your boss rolling into town and taking over?”

“The town welcomed him! Vegas needed redemption from its gangster roots — from the beginning, local and state government here was infiltrated by mobsters.” Maheu winked at me. “Of course, don’t tell anyone I had meetings with Moe Dalitz and Johnny Roselli today, Nate.”

Dalitz was the powerful mobster who my old buddy Eliot Ness ran out of Cleveland in the Thirties, and Roselli was Chicago’s conduit to Vegas, likely getting a piece for them (and himself) out of every deal Maheu cut for Hughes.

Maheu’s affable manner gave way to pride. “I’ve made Mr. Hughes the third-largest landowner in the state, right behind the federal government and the state power company.” He pretended this was for Nita, but I was the real audience. “If he wants someone fired, I do the firing. If he wants something negotiated, I do the bargaining. If he has to be somewhere, I appear in his place.”

Nita frowned. “He really is a recluse, then.”

“He is. I go out into the world for my boss. I deal with congressmen, governors, bankers, Presidents, and, sure, the occasional mobster. I travel in a private jet, throw parties for two hundred people without a thought about what kind of germs they might carry. I can walk into any major hotel in this nation and let a stranger carry my bags and step onto an elevator with other strangers and go up to my comfortable suite without immediately taking a bath. And yet I’ve never met the man.”

Nita’s eyes popped. “What?”

Too casually, he said, “I’ve never met Howard Hughes. Oh, I have a direct line from my office at my home, and speak to him ten, fifteen, thirty times a day. We exchange lengthy handwritten notes, constantly. He sees only his doctors, cook, waiter, and one of his lawyers. And yet, Nate, he wants to see you.”

“He does?”

Maheu nodded. “Mr. Hughes will see you tonight. In person. He’s a night owl, you know. An insomniac of the first order. I like to think he doesn’t meet with me because he doesn’t want me to see what he looks like, plain and simple — how his germophobe ways have reduced him to something that doesn’t go at all well with his still sharp mind and incisive business sense. Otherwise, it might hurt my feelings, Nate... that he wants to see you.”

The curtain rose and the full orchestra, seated off to the right, began to play “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

Around midnight, I dropped Nita off at Caesar’s Palace, suggesting she grab a nap while I was gone, if she wanted to go striptease-clubbing with me later.

She arched an eyebrow. “Like that’s a mission I’d send you off on alone.” She threw me a wink as she climbed out, no small feat in that form-fitting black evening dress.

The casino resort home of Howard Hughes just up the Strip combined cheapness with opulence, formed as it was out of cinder blocks but finished with sandstone. Guiding the Jag up the driveway, I passed under an old-fashioned ranch-style horizontal sign that said Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn in script against a cactus logo. After the excesses of Caesar’s, the DI (as locals called the place) seemed almost restrained. Almost.

Its 300 guest rooms were behind the main building in wings that surrounded a figure-eight swimming pool. I strolled through the lavish pink-and-green resort, its interiors redwood with flagstone flooring, past the ninety-foot-long Lady Luck bar that overlooked the casino, which was going full-throttle at the witching hour.

Maheu had said Hughes’ security chief Hal Harper would be waiting for me at the southeast corner of the building by the elevators in back and he was — the tall, broad-shouldered, paunchy ex-cop was pacing and smoking like an expectant father. He wore a rumpled brown suit over a tan sport shirt and apparently hadn’t been told that even Jack Webb wasn’t wearing fedoras anymore. Must have been how Harper managed a pale complexion in this sunny clime.

He saw me coming, produced something meant to be a smile that came off a grimace, dropped his cigarette into the standing ashtray by the elevators (no smoking around Mr. Hughes), and grunted, “Heller.”

“Good to see you, Hal,” I said, which it wasn’t.

Harper was a brutal thug who lost his job for beating up suspects years ago — as a rookie he’d specialized in Zoot Suiters back in the ’40s and moved up in later years to black offenders (frankly, just being black was enough to offend Harper). We’d intersected but never tangled, though that was a small miracle.

“Gotta pat you down,” he said.

“Fine. I’m heavy. You can take the gun if you give it back.”

He nodded, slipped the nine millimeter Browning from my shoulder holster and shoved it in his belt, bandolero-style. Gave me a full frisk and, at no extra charge, a whiff of his multiple packs a day habit.

Bored with his life in general and me in particular, Harper pressed the elevator button and the door opened almost immediately, as if not wanting to offend him. I followed him onto the empty car and watched as he inserted a key into what would have been the ninth floor button if it hadn’t been replaced with a keypad lock. He turned the key and we started up.

He said, “Mr. Hughes doesn’t allow in many visitors.”

“So I hear.”

“Just be prepared. He’s sick and you might be surprised by his, you know, condition. Don’t say nothing. Make like he’s normal.”

I was making like Harper was normal, wasn’t I?

I said, “Discretion is my middle name. Actually, that’s just an expression. My middle name is Samuel.”

He looked at me, squinting like he’d never encountered humor before. Or maybe a squint was all that deserved.

We stopped at the third floor. A young couple in casual clothes, laughing, started to get on and Harper held up a traffic-cop palm.

“Next car,” he said with unnecessary menace.

They just looked at him like he’d splashed water in their faces and he hit the DOOR CLOSE button and they were shut out. We started up again.

“Say, Hal. You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Thane Cesar, would you? Thane Eugene Cesar? You might know him as Gene.”

He looked at me slow. We were between the fifth and sixth floors. He pushed the stop button — a cute little stop sign image that didn’t go with the abruptness of our halt.

Harper gazed at me dead-eyed. “Gene does some work for the Hughes organization, time to time. Why do you ask?”

“I’m doing background research for a Life magazine article on the Robert Kennedy assassination. That’s why I’m here. Cesar was a witness.”

He sighed, then decided to say, “We bring him in for this and that. He’s reliable. Anything else you want to know, Heller?”

“No. Thanks. That’s helpful.”

“We aim to please.” He glanced upward. “Just so you know — there’s security to go through.”

“I thought you were the security.”

He grinned. His teeth were large and yellow with crooked incisors. “Oh, I’m just the start of it.”

Harper wasn’t kidding. The elevator door opened onto a guard desk in a partitioned-off entryway with its own door behind the uniformed, armed sentry, a white-haired, barrel-chested individual who looked like Pat O’Brien in a bad mood. The desk had two phones and a logbook. That was it.

“I frisked him,” Harper said. “He’s wearing a shoulder rig but I got the gun. This is Nathan Heller. Mr. Hughes is expecting him.”

Grouchy Pat O’Brien came around and gave me another frisk. Then he had me sign in — name, time of arrival, a space for time of departure. The other names on my page were delivery men or hotel workers, and they had each filled a box specifying what they delivered. Maheu wasn’t among those who’d signed in, backing up his claim that he never dealt with Hughes in person.

Harper got back on the elevator and the door closed him in as the white-haired guard said, “You can enter Penthouse One now.” He unlocked a door in the partition and the hotel hallway, what was left of it, was there with a door with a peephole.

I supposed the thing to do was knock, so I did. I got eyeballed through the peephole, then the door cracked open and I said, “Nathan Heller to see Mr. Hughes.”

The door came open and a crew of four middle-aged men in white short-sleeve shirts and dark ties and slacks were bustling around what had been a hotel bedroom before being transformed into an office with several desks, an IBM typewriter, Xerox machine, telecopier, two four-drawer files, and a paper shredder.

Without a word I was shown to a door by one of the middle-aged men, who said to it, “Mr. Heller is here, sir.”

“Send him in,” came a gravelly but firm mid-range male voice. It certainly did not sound like the voice of a reclusive eccentric who avoided human contact.

The middle-aged man said softly, “Mr. Hughes doesn’t shake hands. Don’t be offended.”

“Do my best,” I said.

He unlocked the door and I went in, the door closing tight behind me, the medicinal smell almost overwhelming.

This was a bedroom without a bed, rather small — perhaps fifteen by seventeen — with blackout curtains and the only light a flickering television somewhere to my right, sound down. My eyes took a few moments adjusting to the near darkness cut by the TV’s strobing effect, but soon I could make out my host.

In a well-worn black Naugahyde recliner with big wooden TV trays on either side of him, Howard Hughes sprawled out tall and naked and damn near as bony as a concentration camp corpse. The male member that had once plunged proudly into one beautiful starlet after another was now a withered relic nestling helplessly against a skinny leg like a baby bird against the side of its nest. His fingernails were as long as a Chinese emperor’s and his shoulder-length stringy gray hair and matching beard would have challenged the grooming habits of the most careless hippie.

“My apologies, Mr. Heller,” he said, gruff but affable, “but this is a necessary procedure for me.”

The lanky, scrawny figure was in the process of rubbing his exposed spotted flesh with a paper towel soaked in alcohol from a bottle; wadded-up discarded towels were on the floor around him like big grotesque snowflakes. On the TV tray to his right were various magnifying glasses, a telephone with an amplifier, and a stack of lined yellow pads with fresh pencils. The other TV tray had several neat stacks of filled yellow pads, a TV remote, a roll of paper towels, and a box of Kleenex. A paper bag on the floor near the chair brimmed with used tissues, and a silver bell resided on the tray, presumably to summon aides. A couple of air purifiers were going, also on the floor.

“You catch me at a bad moment,” Hughes said, as he rubbed himself down, pausing only to apply alcohol to a fresh paper towel. “But, trust me — if you knew what I know about germs, you would take similar measures yourself.”

An interesting point of view, considering everything in this place was covered with a layer of dust. Magazines and newspapers were stacked up along the walls and in the far corner were capped, stacked Mason jars of a yellow fluid. I didn’t think it was apple juice.

“Please, Mr. Heller,” Hughes said, gesturing with a bony hand at the end of a bony arm. “Have a seat. I’ve prepared one for you.”

There was indeed an armchair, the seat and back draped with power towels. I sat.

“Be sure to speak up,” he said. “I’m hard of hearing.”

For all the grooves in that face, for all the loose flesh and those sunken eyes, the once handsome man he’d been could still be made out. He’d retained his mustache and, from time to time in our conversation, he would smile, as if to reassure me that within that husk was the man for whom I’d done a job, once upon a time.

“I seldom meet with people,” he said, rubbing an elbow with an alcohol-drenched paper towel, “but I was struck by your integrity, when we first did business.”

I smiled. “My integrity doesn’t come up all that often.”

The sunken eyes managed to tighten in their sockets. “Well, I recognize it when I see it. You found the job I asked you to do distasteful, and by God it was. Maheu and his scurvy little private dicks picked up performing that kind of task for me. Did whatever I asked. And while I value Bob Maheu, I don’t respect him. Best you not repeat that.”

“That’s between the two of you, sir.”

He rubbed a shoulder with a soaked paper towel. “You wanted to talk to me about Bobby Kennedy. About his murder.”

“I’m researching a piece about the assassination for Life magazine.”

“Well, that’s fine. That’s good.”

Not what I expected. “If I might ask, sir... Why do you feel that way?”

He grinned like a skull. “Well, half the Life staff is CIA and can, if necessary, be handled. But I’m not thrilled that the Kennedy boy was taken out. He was a cocky little punk, but at least he was on my side with this damned atomic testing out here. Nixon isn’t, or Humphrey either!”

His voice was surprisingly strong.

“The Atomic Energy Commission,” he said, “started in exploding nuclear devices near here back in ’51, above ground, while assuring the public everything was hunky-dory.”

I nodded grimly. “Who can say how many people died due to fallout from those ‘safe’ explosions?”

He nodded the same way; he’d forgotten all about rubbing himself with alcohol. “International treaty put a stop to it in ’63, but the AEC bastards just moved the tests underground.”

“I suppose that’s better than up top.”

A skinny arm gestured around him. “I’d barely moved in here, Nate, when those sons of bitches set off an atomic bomb beneath the Pahute Mesa, rocking buildings all over Las Vegas, including this one! Then they blasted a 4,000-foot trench in the desert floor, a month later. This shit is bad for tourism, and it’s bad for my health!”

The latter, of course, being his major cause for concern.

He was saying, “My science people put a report together linking radiation leakage to mutations, leukemia, cancer, you fucking name it.”

“And you went to Bobby Kennedy about this?”

He nodded emphatically and I wouldn’t have been surprised if his skull fell off and rolled across the floor to me. “We did. And he took our $25,000 campaign contribution, all right. Of course, I gave $100,000 each to Nixon and Humphrey, too. You learn to hedge your bets in Vegas.”

Right then I knew: If Hughes was being straight with me — and I thought he was — there was no percentage in him being part of a plot to assassinate Bobby Kennedy.

I asked, “Do you know a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar? He’s supposed to have done work for you out here. And he was standing right behind Bob Kennedy when the fatal shot was made... from behind.”

He waved a parchment-skinned hand. “Cesar’s some minor leg-breaker. One of Maheu’s nasty little elves. We have need for that kind of thing, from time to time.”

“Maheu’s man?”

“Yes. He worked for Maheu’s security firm in L.A. What’s it called? Bel Air Patrol.”

“I’ll look into that.”

He sat up slightly in the recliner; it was a skeleton rising from a tomb. “Nate, if the CIA’s behind this, you won’t get very far. We both know that. If they’re behind it.”

“Somebody funded it,” I said. “Who do you think that could have been?”

He folded his hands above his exposed penis. “I could guess, but then so could you. Mobsters, spooks, right-wingers, military-industrial complex? Take your pick. Of course, I may have funded the thing.”

“What? You...?”

His shrug damn near creaked. “Maheu’s my man who deals with the CIA. If they wanted the Kennedy brat gone, he might well have facilitated it. I don’t dirty myself with politics anymore, local or national. Too damn distasteful.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

He reached for his TV remote with a gnarled hand. “Is there anything else, Nate? Good to see you again after so many years. But, uh... well, KLAS is airing The Outlaw in fifteen minutes.”

Owning a TV station had its perks.

Eighteen

In a cluttered stretch of the Strip between a coffee shop and motel, with rent-a-car and steakhouse signs shouldering in for attention, the most notorious dance club in Vegas nestled, its sign rising above all the others — the giant head of a cartoon black cat, black letters outlined in pink neon,

against startling yellow, a marquee below promising

(a band, apparently) and

Nita and I left the Jag in the parking lot behind the pink-and-gray vertical striped bunker that was the club and walked around front to go in under the black-and-white striped canopy.

In her sleeveless honeycomb dress with white hose and yellow low heels, Nita looked remarkably fresh for the long day we’d had; of course she’d grabbed a nap while I called on a nude old dude who saved his piss in jars, and that can be disconcerting. But I’d showered and shaved back at Caesar’s before getting into my navy blazer (cut to conceal a hip holster with a .38), white turtleneck, gray slacks and slip-ons. Nita claimed I looked presentable and who was I to contradict her?

We were, after all, going out to an “in” place known for getting its second wind after the earlier tourist crowd was long gone. Around two A.M., Sin City’s showgirls, musicians, dealers, and even headliners rolled in after work to party at the Pussycat. Though there was a race book attached, and a small casino area with half a dozen blackjack tables and a couple dozen slot machines, this was mostly a rock ’n’ roll dance club, where topless go-go girls gyrated on stage, echoed by fully clad patrons on a packed, good-size dance floor.

Just inside, to the right, was a wall of framed photos depicting various bands that had played here. Again, thanks to my son, I recognized about a third of the names, among them Sly and the Family Stone, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Just beyond this were celebrity snapshots — Ike and Tina Turner giddily happy, Bobby Darin looking like a hippie, James Brown apparently bored and other famous faces, sometimes on the dance floor, other times laughing it up at the small pink-tableclothed tables. Right now out there, Johnny Carson was dancing, a trifle awkwardly, with a grateful, sexy Juliet Prowse.

The smoke in the room was a mix of tobacco and weed; as basically a non-smoker — I only revert under stress — it didn’t appeal. We secured a table on the front edge of the dance floor, ordered drinks — Coke for me, ginger ale for Nita, as we were not here to party — and took in the entertainment.

Stark Naked and the Car Thieves were alternating their own compositions (“Can You Dig It,” “Nice Legs, Shame About Her Face”) with covers (“Don’t Worry Baby,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry”). They wore matching brown pantsuits and orange-and-white scarfs, which I felt sure my son would have said was surprisingly corny for a band with such a cool name. Cool in his opinion.

The interior design of the place was given over to current psychedelic tastes — the bar that faced the stage was red padded faux leather and behind the bartenders, above the rows of bottles, a giant sparkly version of the club’s black cat logo rode a sparkly red wall. A side wall was given over to black-light Fillmore posters, glowing under fluorescent blue, another was red-draped, one was a vast red-and-black checkerboard, the stage backed with an array of circular designs in every color not in the rainbow. A mirrored ball right out of a 1920s nightclub in Berlin reflected all this back at a crowd of bare-armed, wonderfully miniskirted young women and ridiculously oversize-collared and flare-trousered men of various ages.

I wondered if I could have felt more out of place. Johnny Carson didn’t seem to be having any trouble fitting in. Of course he had his own clothing line.

Right now a single dancer was go-going centerstage under red lights and a strobe effect, the band positioned off to her left, stealing looks at her. Slender, curvy in a nicely narrow-waisted way, she seemed happy to be cavorting in her near altogether, shaking her long straight red hair, her firm pert breasts bouncing along, the gold lamé panties just barely sufficient to avoid arrest.

The band was playing an organ-dominated instrumental, the old bump-and-grind replaced by a more dreamy feel yet with an insistent beat. From behind red velvet curtains to the dancer’s right emerged two more naked-but-for-panties dancers, already swinging their arms and hips, as if they’d come to work boogeying, a blonde just as lovely as the redhead, and a brunette who was larger breasted, her hair a shoulder-length bob of wings and curls. Perhaps a little older than the others, she had a lot of personality... and a pug nose.

I nodded to Nita, acknowledging this as Elaine Nye, aka Marguerite.

And it didn’t take the topless dancer long to spot us — we were seated along one side of the dance floor and were only occasionally blocked by Johnny and Juliet and the other dancers. Miss Nye’s expression, just for a flash, broke character and betrayed alarm. But I smiled at her and waved a piece of paper. A green horizontal piece of paper inscribed 100. Now she smiled, too.

Two more songs from Stark Naked and the Car Thieves ensued with the go-go girls going through a range of dances: hitchhiker, Watutsi, loco-motion, pony, mashed potato, frug. It all seemed very freeform but they were all doing the same dance, so there was a nice minimal sense of choreography.

When the girls left, the band added vocals to their mix and — in about fifteen minutes, wrapped in a sheer red robe and with a red bra on — Elaine Nye came regally out from backstage and found a chair to join us at our little table.

“This is my friend Nita,” I told her. “Nita, this is Marguerite.”

“Call me Elaine,” she said with a frozen smile. “I’m only Marguerite at the Classic Cat in L.A. Listen, a couple of things.”

Cheerily I said, “Yes?”

“First, I don’t get off till five. Which means we don’t get off till after that, if you catch my drift. And second, threesome costs more — even B.Y.O.B.”

Nita asked, “Bring your own bottle?”

“Bring your own babe,” the dancer said to her. Then to me: “And there’s one more thing. Mister, I didn’t drug you or anything. You passed out, must’ve been tying one on or something, and I helped get you to the doc’s. He said he could get you back on your feet. That’s all I know so don’t bother going there. I did you a favor. That’s between you and the doc and leave me the fuck out of it.”

My right hand rested on the table, still kind of waving the hundred, clutched between the thumb and middle finger of my right hand. “No, that’s not going to fly, Elaine.”

An eyebrow went up. She was a pretty thing, a little hard, but I even liked the pug nose, or maybe what it might represent. I handed her the C-note. When she had it, I clutched her wrist. Hard.

The other eyebrow joined the first one up near her hairline.

“You were party to a kidnapping,” I said, softly, smiling a little. “And what’s worse, it was mine.”

“Listen, mister—”

“You listen. I will overlook that you slipped me a nail-polish Mickey Finn. We’ll just let that slide by.”

Her eyes flared. “What the hell do you want then?”

“I want you to accompany us to the FBI and share everything you know about Dr. Joseph W. Bryant.”

Her features tightened. “What is it you think I know?”

I shrugged. “You tell me. But I figure you either have, or used to have, a polka-dot dress in your closet.”

That chilled her. The blood drained from her face and she tried to talk but nothing came out. Nita and I were staring coldly at her and that couldn’t have been fun.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked her.

“Some... some kind of investigator or something.”

Apparently I’d finally found somebody from Hollywood who didn’t see me as the Private Eye to the Stars.

“Elaine,” I said, “the doc told you and your friend Susie, back at the Classic Cat, that he’s the hypnotist who programmed Sirhan Sirhan.”

She shook her head and all that brunette hair seemed to shiver. “He told us a lot of crazy things. He’s a regular of ours. Digs threesomes. We see him together, all the time, and he brags about all sorts of—”

“No. You know it’s more than talk. You helped him kidnap me, remember? You do know that kidnapping is a Class A felony? If I go to the FBI about that—”

Her hands came up, palms out, and it stopped me.

She leaned in, looked at me, looked at Nita and back to me. Her voice was very soft and had a tremor, like a poor radio transmission.

“All right,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about anything else — no girl in the polka-dot dress shit. Get me? That night... you know what night I’m talking about... I did what I was asked to and had no fucking idea where it was going. None. I was high and thought I hallucinated it all for the longest time. Now I’m in it up to my ass and... I’ve kept my head down and now you’re asking me to... I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I kept my voice low and steady. “I have friends at the FBI. I have enemies at the LAPD and in the CIA, but I’m tight with the FBI. And if I give them your name with my belief about what all you’ve been involved in, they will come looking for you, and they will land hard. You’ll be in that proverbial world of hurt, which is right where you don’t want to be.”

Her features wrinkled up like a crushed paper cup, and she glanced back toward the stage and then at me. “You don’t understand. He’s here. He’s here tonight. Right now!”

“Who is here?”

Her words came in a rush. “The doc!” She leaned closer. “Look, like I said, I work till five. I’ll go with you to the FBI. Just don’t say anything to the doc. He’ll be out of here before me. All he handles is the intermission, puts on his little show, and then he’s gone. You need to crawl into some quiet corner where he can’t see you.”

And she got up and scurried backstage.

Nita and I looked at each other.

“What the hell?” I asked her, blinking.

“What the hell?” she asked me, blinking back.

But we took Elaine’s advice and went back to the bar and found the most out of the way spot over at one end and settled in, not knowing what to think.

That was when Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, in a red coat and yellow tie worthy of a ringmaster, came through the red backstage curtains as if he had brought them along with him. His flared pants were a bright floral print and he wore a corny gold sultan’s turban. The audience laughed and a few whistled and one or two cheered and got a smiling bow out of him. The doc had clearly performed here before. With his Coke-bottle glasses magnifying his eyes, Bryant brought to mind Shemp in the Three Stooges playing a swami. I saw Carson at a table with a showgirl, amused, perhaps by the Carnac the Magnificent turban.

Standing at the top of the dance floor in his full six three and nearly four-hundred pounds — the stage behind him, the band on a break and the go-go girls, too — he said, “For those of you who don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself — I am Dr. Charles W. Bryant, M.D., J.D., F.A.I.T.H., F.A.C.M.H. That’s a lot of alphabet soup that spells out the world’s most prominent hypnotherapist.”

His pause and lifted chin, thrusting his Amish beard forward, prompted applause and more hooting and such. Nita and I had our backs to him, watching in the mirror behind the bar.

“But do not fear,” Bryant said. “I also have a degree of sorts in show business — starting out as I did as Tommy Dorsey’s drummer.”

Chuckles.

“And tonight we’re here at the Pussycat A Go-Go to have some fun.” He began to pull chairs away from tables and made a row of four of them facing the audience, saying, “I am looking for four female volunteers! If you have participated in one of my demonstrations before, please do not raise your hand.”

The doc filled the chairs with young women, all of whom were fetching examples of the female gender, no surprise in a room filled with off-duty showgirls.

Soon the hypnotist was putting them under: “Your arms are limp as a rag doll. Your legs are limp as a rag doll. You are deeper and deeper relaxed. Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper relaxed...”

He then put them through their paces, telling them to stand with their hands free, heels together. Then to look up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath. To close their eyes and start breathing normally and then count. Told them, when he touched each one on the shoulder, that he wanted them to visualize themselves as steel, and himself as a magnet, pulling them toward him — he did this with each lovely woman individually, and they would fall forward where Bryant would catch them.

“One way to cop a feel,” I said to Nita, who smirked and nodded.

All of it was a pretty common hypnotist schtick. He told them their arms were made of stone and they were unable to force them down; he got them laughing as they watched a funny movie; had them cheering a racehorse on and then hiding the winnings; feeling pricked by a nonexistent pin and jumping accordingly; then thinking they were naked — two of the women didn’t bother covering themselves with their hands.

“Showgirls,” I said to Nita.

“Or strippers,” she said.

Finally he told them they were now wearing bikinis and it was time to dance. They did, rivaling anything the go-go girls had to offer, albeit a clothed version. In the miniskirts it was still fairly racy.

As the four women, post-trance, returned to their tables, Bryant encouraged applause from the audience, who again hooted and hollered and clapped.

“That concludes the entertainment portion of our presentation,” he said, in a more serious manner. Or as serious as a guy in a red coat and turban could be. “Now it’s time for the commercial announcement.”

That produced light laughter.

He spoke briefly of his clinic on the Sunset Strip and mentioned his other locations — San Diego and San Francisco — before announcing his seminar beginning tomorrow at the Flamingo: “The Bryant Method and Technique of Hypno-Analysis.”

Very somber for a man in a stupid hat, he said, “This is a course for doctors of medicine, of osteopathy, and registered nurses, thirty of whom have signed up. I will be discussing treatment of Anxiety, Frigidity, Impotence, Homosexuality, Insomnia, Kleptomania and, of course, the Walking Zombie Syndrome.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Cotard’s Syndrome,” Nita said matter of factly. “People who think they are dead but are walking around.”

“You might be too smart for me.”

“I might.”

Bryant was saying, “I am accepting six volunteers to participate in what I call Instant Therapy. Before your very eyes, I will take a case history, administer the Bryant Association Test, arrive at a diagnosis, and affect a cure, in any one of the afflictions I just mentioned. Follow-up may be needed at my Los Angeles location, but a basic cure is guaranteed, demonstrated for the medical professionals in attendance. You will pay the same amount as they — $175 for the course, including lunch and a cocktail party on the day you are scheduled.”

This guy was the most dangerous kind of huckster — a knowledgeable con man.

“It’s psycho-surgery,” he said off-handedly. “Much like removing a bullet. You’ve got to find out what you’re looking for — the bullet, that is, the traumatic incident, and sew up the wound with positive reinforcement.”

He got his seminar participants, practically rushed by beauties, a few of whom he had to disappoint, two of which had been his subjects earlier. He wrote their information down.

I said to Nita, “That ‘bullet’ business hits a little too close to home.”

“Your doc’s a clown,” she said thoughtfully, “but no laughing matter. Even after all that burlesque, I can believe he could’ve made a robot assassin out of Sirhan.”

Bryant returned the chairs to the tables and slipped backstage. At the same time Elaine Nye in silver lamé panties and all that fetching skin came through the red velvet curtains onto the stage, bouncing out dancing to the band playing “Gloria.”

Nita said, “Maybe we should slip out and come back for Elaine later. I wouldn’t want us to be seen by Bryant.”

“I’m afraid if Elaine doesn’t see us sitting out here,” I said, “she might just take off.”

Nita nodded. “Young women like her can disappear awfully easily these days. A change of name, and poof.”

I gave her a look. “They can disappear more ways than one. I have to make that clear to her.”

Nita nodded again.

We found the most out-of-the-way table we could and settled there, ordering another round of soft drinks. Still, I made sure Elaine, on stage, noticed us; but generally I felt we were tucked away where Bryant wouldn’t make us. Elaine had indicated he’d be out of here now that the intermission show was over.

That was when a massive presence loomed over us.

“Mind if I join you?” Dr. Joseph Bryant asked. He was out of the red jacket and in a more discreet herringbone leisure suit, apparently the work of Omar the Tentmaker.

“Please,” I said. “Sit.”

He did, making the chair disappear. “I hope you enjoyed my little presentation, Mr. Heller.”

“It was a dandy. How do you hang on to your M.D. license, anyway? Instant Analysis? Jesus.”

A pudgy paw waved that away. “The patient signs off on the session, and the document defines ‘Instant Analysis’ as simply a first session. No, I’m fine with the AMA. They approve of me and my work wholeheartedly.”

I grunted. “So they approve of drugging and kidnapping? Even without a prescription?”

The smile between the big bug eyes behind the glasses and the Amish beard was thick-lipped and wet, no more disturbing than a bad X-ray. “That’s why I wanted to speak to you, Mr. Heller. Why I’m interrupting your evening out. Would you mind introducing me to your charming friend?”

“Not at all. This is Nita Romaine. You may have seen her on television.”

His smile widened. “I believe I have. I Dream of Jeannie?”

I should have known. A guy with a sultan’s turban in his wardrobe was bound to watch that show.

Nita admitted, “I did several of those. I hope you enjoyed them.”

“Oh, I did, dear. I did.” He turned to me, serious. “Mr. Heller, your assumption that I had you narcotized in some fashion the other day, that’s simply not the case. Marguerite called me to lend a hand, after you passed out. And I did.”

“Yes, and I want to thank you...”

“No, that’s quite all right.”

“...for not giving me a post-hypnotic suggestion during your intermission spiel and start me clucking around the room like a chicken.”

Nita smiled.

Bryant looked offended.

“My arm still hurts,” I said, “where you gave me that shot of God knows what. Did you find out what you wanted to know? I’d hate for you to go to all that trouble for nothing.”

He stood and the chair fell behind him, as if he’d made it faint under his weight. “I told you I gave you a sedative. You got violent. And I can see that you have a streak of violence in your nature, and it’s a pity I don’t have a slot left tomorrow in my seminar so that you might receive instant analysis. You could certainly use it.”

He stormed out through a side exit.

Elaine on stage had noticed this. She was smiling and doing her go-go thing, but a tightening around the eyes gave her away. The other two dancers came back on and she slipped off through the red curtains.

She emerged from backstage perhaps five minutes later in a thrown-on-looking blue-striped blouse and denim shorts. She leaned a hand against our table and said, “I’m gonna talk to the manager. Tell him I’m sick or something. Okay? And we’ll go see your pals at the FBI. Are they open at this hour?”

“It’s Vegas,” I said. “Everybody’s open at this hour.”

That got a tiny smile out of her and she went back to the bar, where the bald middle-aged manager was back talking to the bartenders. She was explaining animatedly and he was nodding, shrugging, obviously giving her the go-ahead. It was about four-thirty A.M. now and things were winding down.

I followed Nita and Elaine out that side door, and we walked around the parking lot at the rear of the building. Dawn wasn’t far away but you’d never know it — night was a blackness alive with the fireflies that were the city’s thousands of neons. I was unlocking the Jag when I got grabbed.

I heard Nita squeal and had a glimpse of her standing on the rider’s side being held from behind by a guy who I recognized at once, even though I’d only seen him that one night, that key night: the curly-haired fan who’d infiltrated the Royal Suite, and who’d later gotten an autograph from Bob on a poster tube in the Pantry.

And there was Elaine, backing away, looking distressed but not scared, actually giving me a little “I’m sorry” shrug before fading away.

I’d been grabbed the same way as Nita, somebody clutching both my arms from behind. I thrust my elbows back, hard, got an “Ooooof!” out of it and the hands released me. I spun and lost half a second realizing this dope in the fedora was Hal Harper, the security guy who worked for the Hughes organization. He threw a punch that I ducked and I swung a fist into his balls and got a satisfying yelp out of him. Even more satisfying was how he went down on his knees and tried not to cry.

That was when somebody else to the left side of me knocked my ass out.

Nineteen

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

The sound, rhythmic but not musical, was not at once identifiable. A crunch, a raspy scooping of sand or maybe gravel or just any hard material, and then a rattling thud.

Not close, or at least not nearby. Or was it just something I was dreaming?

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

I opened my eyes and was staring into a child’s scorched face — no, not a child, a mannequin kid’s disembodied head, a boy with almost feminine features, smiling a little, not at all concerned about being badly burned or separated from his body. I was on my side, head aching from the blow that knocked me out, hands tied behind me, secured — bound somehow, as were my ankles, by rope. Looked like lengths of clothesline. Behind me it would be the same.

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

I was in last night’s clothes, save for the blazer, missing in action somewhere, the empty .38 holster still on the belt of the gray slacks, which like my white turtleneck were smudged with dirt in random non-design. My shoes were gone, too, my socks on.

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

I swung myself into a sitting position and found I was not alone. In my immediate field of vision was a family of mannequins — the rest of the boy was on its side over to the left, the apparent parents near toppled armchairs they’d been dumped from and flung halfway across a table, the man grinning and armless (his upper limbs scattered here and there in the featureless room), the woman in two pieces like the Black Dahlia, both husband and wife attired in burnt-black unidentifiable clothing. A few pieces of living room furniture were upended here and there. A window had no glass though the brick fireplace looked fine, and the walls were blank but for one askew framed portrait of Jesus — one of those idealized 1950s portraits of the son of God. At least the eyes didn’t follow you.

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

What the fuck was that?

I should know but I didn’t. I craned my neck and realized I had company in addition to the J.C. Penney window dummies. Nita, pinned-up hair come undone and hanging, her honeycomb dress and white hose splotched with dirt, lay on her side, hands behind her, ankles bound like mine, unconscious but breathing. Beyond her was another figure, male, in a sport shirt and slacks, also on his side but facing away from us, his wrists secured by a length of clothesline, ankles, too. Shoes gone.

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

Somehow I got my stockinged feet under me and stood and hopped like a fucking rabbit over to Nita. She was still very much out, but the man was moving, coming around. I hopped to the other side of him, and damn! It was Shep! Shep Shepherd, my CIA buddy. He had a contusion along one side of his face and looked generally roughed up.

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

I leaned toward him as best I could. Speaking in a whisper came automatically: “What the fuck, Shep?”

He blinked a bunch of times, gathering the pieces of his consciousness together. He gave me an embarrassed gap-toothed smile.

“They... they grabbed me at my hotel.” He was whispering, too. “Parking lot. This bunch... they must work for the rogue Company faction, ones behind all this...”

“At least one of them was at the Ambassador. I think he may be the shooter. Hal Harper’s another. Is there a woman with them? Young woman, good-looking?”

“N-no. Not even an ugly one.”

“This one’s no dog. Topless dancer, stripper from L.A. — she’s the polka-dot dress girl.”

“Hell you say.”

“I was getting ready to take her in to the FBI and she seemed to be cooperating, but she must’ve got a phone call off to these pricks. How many?”

“Three that I saw.”

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

“I’m gonna get down there with you. See if you can untie me. I hope you were a fucking Boy Scout.”

We got back to back, wrist to wrist. It was hot, not humid, but still hot enough that we hadn’t been at it long at all before we were sweat soaked. He worked on the knotted rope binding me. It probably didn’t take him more than three minutes, but it felt like forever.

Thwack, scoop, rattle, whump.

I sat up and untied my ankles. “I think I know what that sound is.”

“So do I. They’re digging holes.”

“Just for shits and giggles, right? Not graves or anything.”

“Yeah. Just for fun. Do you know where we are?”

I started untying Shep’s wrists. The knots were tight and tough. “Atomic City, maybe? The little fake town the government built and dropped an H-bomb on, just to see what would be left?”

“You’re close. This is Survival Town. Nothing much was left of Atomic City, so they built a second one, better.”

“Survival Town.”

Shep nodded. “Pride of Yucca Flats. We’re an hour or so outside Vegas. They made it complete with cars, power lines, even people... well, bogus people. Concrete-block structures. Reinforced brick buildings. Reinforced masonry homes, like this one.”

As I worked at his bonds, I was listening and not just to him. “They stopped digging.”

“Taking a break maybe.”

I heard footsteps in sandy earth, growing closer. I wasn’t quite done with Shep’s wrist ropes and just patted him on the leg, then went over where I’d been before and resumed my position. I made only one adjustment: I took the decapitated kid’s head along.

I heard a voice outside call out: “I’m getting my lighter! Think I left it in the kitchen! Be right back...”

The shell of the kitchen was adjacent, no door separating us, so when he stepped inside the house through the doorless doorway, his footsteps on the disrupted floorboards were like cries of pain.

“Here it is,” he muttered, to himself.

I could see him: the ex-cop, Harper. He was in a short-sleeve yellow shirt, brown slacks and that out-of-date fedora. He got a pack of smokes from his breast pocket — Chesterfields. A .38 was stuffed in his waistband, mine I thought. Lighting up with his recovered Zippo, he looked toward where we were and, apparently, decided to check on us.

He stepped into the living room and I flung the kid’s head at him. It clocked him good, right in the forehead, but wasn’t enough to put him on his back though it startled the hell out of him and he was off-balance, in the doorway, when I threw myself at him. I got him by the knees and took him down with a whump and then climbed up his prone body like a ladder and collected the .38 along the way.

His eyes were huge when my face was in his and his mouth came open as I shoved the barrel of the snub-nose Police Special into the flesh where his jaw met his throat and I could see the flame in his open mouth as the bullet traveled up through his brain and out his skull.

That had worked out just fine. The shot wasn’t loud at all — between his fat neck and the journey through his head and out, it barely rivaled a cap gun.

Back in the living room, I didn’t take the time to help Shep finish with his wrists, figuring he could finish that up himself and undo his ankles, too. Muffled though that shot had been, it still might have been loud enough to draw the others to us — two at least.

So I said to him, “Take care of Nita,” who was starting to come around.

With my .38 in hand, I stepped over and around Harper’s corpse in the doorway. I bent down and with my left hand took the lighter from his dead fingers, then lifted the pack of Chesterfields from his breast pocket. I shook out a smoke one-handed and fired it up. Did I mention since after the war I only smoked in combat situations?

I sucked some of the cigarette into my lungs and went over to peek out the non-existent kitchen door.

Survival Town had no streets anymore. No sense of organization at all — just a brick building here and a frame two-story there, a few spiny Joshua trees, some scattered yucca, clumps of mesquite, and two assholes digging graves in the middle of it all. One was a dyed-blond Hispanic, tall enough to be Sandy Serrano’s guy in the gold sweater on the steps outside the Ambassador, though right now he was just in a t-shirt and jeans, splotched with occasional dirt and sweat stains from the hard work he was doing. He looked bushed. Poor baby.

The other was the dark-curly-haired fan who’d crashed the party back at the Royal Suite last June, and who in the Pantry had got the last autograph that Robert Kennedy ever gave. He was working on his own hole — one of three right in a row — the other grave in progress having been the late Harper’s responsibility.

They were taking a beer break. They’d brought a cooler along to our murders. Well, why not be comfy no matter what the situation? Good to stay hydrated. Tired, the pair drank their beer and laughed and joked and leaned on the handles of their shovels with one hand and (between chugs) cradled cans of Blatz in the other. Me, I just smoked my confiscated Chesterfield and thought about my next move.

They were a good twenty feet from me and the range of a .38 like my spare piece was only reliable at around six, and I wasn’t somebody who spent his spare time at a firing range, so I played it the best I could.

I burst out and thrust the gun toward them and yelled, “Get those fucking hands up, right now!”

The blond went for a gun in his waistband and the dark curly-haired one did the smart thing and just turned and ran off, putting more space between himself and my .38. The blond fired off a round that didn’t come anywhere near me and I sent one back at him, which he caught in the belly, doubling him over. I would rather have got him in the head but body mass was my friend in this case.

He stumbled and fell and almost wound up in the grave he’d dug, but not quite. Maybe in the movie.

As for the fan, he was heading for shelter, going into a two-story frame house, which looked like something the Big Bad Wolf could have blown down in one huff or anyway puff. Still, there had been a lot of desert wind out here since the founding of Survival Town and well over a decade since an H-bomb had been dropped nearby, so maybe the place was sturdier than you’d think. It was possible he’d assumed a window position to pick me off, so I ran low in serpentine fashion at the structure, which had either been unpainted at the time of the blast or the bomb or the wind had blown off every scrap of paint.

No gunshot came my way.

That didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t seen him pull a pistol and hadn’t noted one in his waistband or in a holster either. He was in a dark blue t-shirt and jeans and it was possible at a distance that a weapon had blended in. It was possible he was unarmed. But probable he was carrying.

When I got to the doorless front door, I plastered myself to one side, my back to the outer wall, and listened. Listened. And listened some more.

No sound of footsteps, no heavy breathing. It was a two-story house and he may have run upstairs to lie in wait. Or he could have been more professional than I took him for and done any one of a number of smart things — he’d been part of a pretty goddamn skillful team to take Bob Kennedy out the way they’d done. A murder in a packed room, a programmed patsy, a security guard accomplice to hold the victim in place for his slaughter!

Not an amateur, then.

I went in low and fast and hit the deck. Found myself in a living room with a family greeting me with blank stares and friendly smiles — more mannequins, Mom and Dad sharing a couch, a boy on the floor with his upended train set, a girl with her legless, one-armed doll. Only the little girl was twisted impossibly at the waist and the little boy’s arms were nowhere to be seen and Mom was on her side with a scorched, tattered lamp shade next to her and Dad’s head was turned toward the window, as if he’d seen the atomic blast coming.

On my feet again, I prowled, room by room, easing into each, pausing to listen for any sign of life, watching the floorboards to seek a path where I wouldn’t make a sound or anyway much of one. Most rooms were empty, the walls bare and distressed and smeared with dirt. The apparent kitchen was just a counter and some cabinets. Ceilings were partially exposed to their wooden framework. A room toward the back had a mannequin man and woman under the covers of a double bed. They looked embarrassed, but none the worse for wear despite an H-bomb.

That left the second floor.

A paint-peeling white wooden staircase, enclosed on the right, rose with the occasional step missing like a sideways grin shy a few teeth. No way to head up there silently. But at least that side wall could be leaned against...

I started up doing just that and the wood beneath my stockinged feet whined as if that little boy had finally noticed his train set wasn’t right. The open passageway at the top of the stairs could be filled at any moment with that curly-haired fan with a gun blasting away like Sirhan Sirhan in the Pantry, only this time it wouldn’t be blanks.

Then finally I got to the top and only a hallway awaited, and it occurred to me that this was a typical American home of the Fifties but built on the cheap and had been turned by an atomic bomb into a kind of tenement. But I didn’t have time to look for irony in the rubble of a mad doctor’s experiment. Somewhere in the back of my combat-addled brain I knew that I shouldn’t kill this curly-haired motherfucker.

No.

I needed him alive, to talk, to tell the whole story, to help me make a joke out of the inherently absurd Lone Gunman theory and expose, finally, finally, fucking finally, the conspiracy that had taken my friend from me and twisted my country’s future into old hawks and young druggies.

He popped out of a doorway, at the far end of the hall, firing — he did have a gun! — and again I hit the deck but he was running right at me, desperate bullets flying just over my head and around me when the floorboard gave and like terrible teeth came up around him and the building swallowed him.

I was on my hands and knees and crept over to the ragged hole the floor had made in itself and there he was, on his back, with one of the floorboards he’d taken with him, sticking up through his chest in jagged bloody judgment like Christopher Lee on a bad day. He wasn’t quite dead yet, and blood was pumping out of him, onto the wooden stake, joining the dripping red that the tip of the thing had taken with it and was now oozing back to him. The face under the dark curly nest of hair was contorting and his hands were reaching toward me, as if for help.

The only thing I could do for him was shoot him in the head, which I did. But to be honest with you, that was more for me than him.

Outside, I tossed my smoke and headed to my little home away from home where Shep was on the floor holding a shivering Nita to him. Hotter than hell though it was, she might have been freezing. I relieved him of her and handed the gun off to him as she folded herself to me and I held her.

“All three are dead,” I said to him, “goddamnit.”

Jesus looked reproachfully at me from his crooked frame for my language.

Shep sighed. Nodded. “We could have used that Michael Winn alive.”

“That’s the curly-haired one’s name?”

“Yeah. The other one has a bunch of names, mostly Cuban. You all right?”

I nodded. “I’d like to get out of here. Can you have this mess cleaned up for us, or do we need to go official?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Shep said. “They must have had at least one car to haul the three of us out here. Let’s see if we can commandeer it and find our way back to town.”

Nita clung to me.

“Any town but Survival,” I said.

Twenty

That evening, after sleeping all day, we again went down to the Garden of the Gods pool for a swim. Mid-evening, when most couples were out gambling or dining or being entertained by showbiz royalty, we were among a handful of twosomes languorously lounging in water just cool enough to contrast with the desert warmth under a starry sky with moonlight making the surrounding Roman columns glow. The major difference between us and the other couples — I was not the only older male with a younger female, you understand — was that the dreamy atmosphere was compromised by our recent living nightmare.

We sat kicking a little on the edge of the pool where the dripping aftermath of swimming a few laps quickly evaporated. Sinatra was singing “Fly Me to the Moon” on the sound system. Nita was in her Peter Max-print bathing suit, hair up again, and I was in the green-and-black Tiki trunks. It was almost if this were the night before and we had blinked away the intervening events. Leaning her hands on cement, bent over toward me a bit, she said, “Should we talk about it?”

My hands were on my thighs. “About almost getting killed? Or what I had to do to stop it?”

Her smile was tiny. “I’ve been on so many TV shows, from Maverick to Man from U.N.C.L.E., where the, uh, bullets were flying. Only once before in my life was I exposed to the real thing.”

“The Pantry.”

“The Pantry. And even that seemed unreal. But this morning... just hearing the sounds of it, then seeing the aftermath. Two men you...”

“I killed three. You only saw two of the bodies. Yes. Like the Pantry. Do you think less of me?”

She clutched my arm. “No! No. You saved us. My God, you saved us. But I know now what... just how serious what I asked you to do really was.”

“You mean looking into Bob’s murder?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And now you want me to stop?”

Her eyes, in modified Cher makeup, popped. “Yes! No. I... I don’t know.” She let go of my arm. “It’s just so fucking real now...”

“We use to call it battle fatigue. Or shell shock. There are other terms these days.”

“For...?”

“For the stress and distress that follows combat.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Is that what that was?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what else.”

“Nathan!” She clutched my arm again. Whispered: “He’s here.”

“What? Who is?”

She bobbed her head just past me. “Your friend. From this morning... Shep.”

I looked where she was looking. Shep, in Ray-Bans, a fresh Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, was sitting in a deck chair at a little metal table under an umbrella that was apparently protecting him from moon burn. Same little metal table as before. A foot in a sandal rested on a knee. He raised a hand in a motionless wave. Offered his gap-toothed smile.

“Checking up on us,” I said.

“Because he’s your friend,” she said.

“Because he’s my CIA handler. I’m an asset... unless I’ve become a liability after Survival Town.”

Now she grabbed my hand and squeezed. “Oh, Nate. Tell me he’s a friend.”

“Sure. He’s our friend. He gave us a ride back, didn’t he, in that Chevy I hotwired? Better than the car trunks we got stuffed in going out there.”

“I’m... afraid.”

“Good. Just don’t go to pieces on me.” I nodded to a small adjacent pool from which steam rose. “Why don’t you relax in the whirlpool a while. I’ll see if he wants something.”

She did that as I got out, fetched my towel and used it, then padded over to a waiting deck chair by Shep under the umbrella. I wrapped the towel around my shoulders. It was cooler tonight than last. Conversation echoed around us, unintelligible.

I said, “You look none the worse for wear.”

Indeed his side-of-the-head contusion seemed already to have healed.

“I’m okay,” he confirmed. “How are you two kids doing?”

“Well, this kid is over sixty and slept like a stone since I saw you last, just to stay afloat... as we say here at the Garden of the Gods.”

“Stones don’t float. But, yeah. That was rough this morning. I should have been more help.”

“You kept Nita safe while I took care of business. That was enough.”

He nodded. Searched for the right thing to say and came up with: “We need to talk.”

I grinned. “The worst four strung-together words in the English language, though usually coming from a woman. Let me guess. I’m to drop this. All of it.”

He nodded. “I’ll take it from here. Now it’s a matter of inner-agency house-cleaning.”

“Better find a big broom. Taking Bob Kennedy down required a major covert operation, a team much larger than just that curly-haired kid and the tall Cuban in the gold sweater. Maybe start with the bartender in the makeshift bar downstairs who dispensed dosed drinks to Sirhan. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a second girl in a polka-dot dress — that dress and its polka dots may have been a hypnotic trigger for Sirhan. Then there’s somebody in a maroon coat watching the door onto Sandy Serrano’s fire escape where the gold-sweater guy and the polka-dot-dress girl entered, accompanied by Michael Winn... or maybe that was the similarly curly-haired, programmed Sirhan himself. That door later became the exit for two of them. In the Pantry, of course, there was Thane Cesar, whose mission was to maintain his grip on Kennedy, and hold him in place while the gold sweater guy likely did the close-up shooting. Or perhaps Thane did some of that, but certainly not all five shots — he was just too exposed.”

Shep took off the Ray-Bans and tossed them with a clunk onto the metal table; his dark-blue eyes fixed on me coldly.

I went on: “The assassin couldn’t really fire into a crowd that included Cesar and other conspirators. That’s why Sirhan was shooting blanks, creating the diversion of all diversions, meaning someone else fired into the crowd to make it look like Sirhan’s bullets were real. After all, bystanders getting hit is what really sold it. Trajectory indicates this additional shooter was standing on that serving table with the Nye girl — the curly-haired Winn, right? Whose resemblance to Sirhan may have been part of a Plan B or C. Sirhan shooting like that created confusion, utter pandemonium, sending potential eyewitnesses to the floor, covering their heads, unsure of what they’d seen or even if they’d seen anything.”

“Sounds,” Shep said quietly, “like a pretty bold scheme.”

“Oh, it was bold, all right — bolder than Dallas, which is saying something. And yet similar — a perfect patsy, multiple shooters, a public event ripped apart by gunfire. A hell of a finale to a decade of assassination.”

A curvy blonde mini-toga-ed waitress delivered a Gibson and a rum and Coke. I hadn’t even seen Shep order them. He signed for it, gave her a wink, and she was gone. He shoved my rum and Coke over to me and plucked the onion from the Gibson and popped it in his mouth. Chewed lazily.

He flipped a hand toward my drink. “Go ahead and refresh yourself, Nate. Nothing in that but Coca Cola and Bacardi, I promise. I’ll even taste it, if you like.”

“I’ll take you at your word, Shep.” I took a sip. They weren’t scrimping on the Bacardi. “So let me guess. You want me to leave this to you. Let you clean house and cover up and then I don’t have to worry about having an unexpected aneurysm or a fall from a height or maybe get a sudden urge to turn the Jag’s motor on with the garage door down.”

“I won’t lie to you,” Shep said. “I believe this to be a rogue CIA operation, in which case consider who the assets involved might be — the LAPD, right-wing assholes, Cubans, the Hughes organization, the mob, just to scratch the surface. You need to be satisfied with what you’ve got, Nate — that you removed from the face of the earth the scum who killed Bobby in that Pantry.”

On the sound system Dino was singing, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.” Brittle laughter made a sophisticated laugh track.

“I won’t lie to you, Shep. As President, Bob planned to overhaul the Company but good, and he meant to uncover his brother’s assassins and the spooks and gangsters who sent them. So I don’t think this necessarily is a ‘rogue operation.’”

“You expect me to confirm that?”

I didn’t bother answering. “Here’s the thing, Shep — I’m not convinced your presence in the Atomic desert this morning wasn’t to guide me, and stage-manage me.”

That seemed to amuse him. “Really? To what purpose?”

“As you said, to satisfy me. That I’d wiped out the literal killers of my friend. Who just happened to be some highly questionable assets of the Company’s — cut-outs who could use cutting out. Two birds, one stone kinda thing. Besides... you’ve got the goods on me — I killed those three at Survival Town, and you hung onto the gun.”

He twitched a smile. “With your fingerprints on it, yes.”

I leaned on an elbow. “That’s what got me thinking, Shep. Why as tired as I was I didn’t get right to sleep, when we got back this morning. What really got me thinking. I handed you that .38 and somehow I never got it back.”

He tossed his head, opened a hand. “Let’s say you’re right. You’re not right, Nate. You are a trusted asset of mine and a valued friend, but... let’s say you’re right. What would you set out to do, at this juncture? Remove every player? Kill Thane Cesar and Elaine Nye and Bob Maheu and Dr. Hypno and Howard Fucking Hughes and whatever LAPD stooges and mobsters helped facilitate this plot you’ve cooked up in your imagination? How about CIA directors past and present? Allen Dulles is already dead, but you could settle up with Dick Helms. Where would it end?”

He sat forward suddenly.

Through his teeth, he answered his own question: “I will tell you where it would end. With you dead.”

“Maybe I’ve lived long enough.”

He smiled and it quickly turned into a sneer. “I don’t think that’s sincere, old chum. I think you enjoy your fame and your money and your Jag and your Beverly Hills bungalow and your Playboy pad back home and your precious coast-to-coast A-1 Agency. And I also think you value the lives of your son and maybe that little gal in the whirlpool over there... Take it easy!”

I was halfway out of my chair.

The dark-blue eyes narrowed at me. “Do you think I am personally threatening you, or am I merely letting you know what others might do? The things that might well happen beyond my control? All I can do is to advise you, as an old, dear friend, to be satisfied with what you have accomplished and move on with your life. Even Nate Heller can’t kill them all.”

“I could make a good start,” I said, looking right at him.

An unconcerned shrug. “Yes, you could probably manage that. I am better looked after than most, but you could. And my wife Sheila and my two grown children, Bradley and Susan, who you have known for years, with whom you’ve broken bread, would be terribly sad to lose me. Just as those you love would be devastated by your tragic demise. But neither of us, Nate, are young men. As you pointed out, we’ve lived plenty of life.”

I said nothing.

That gap-toothed grin returned. “What is the point, Nate? Do you know for a fact that Sirhan Sirhan was some kind of innocent victim in this, and is rotting unfairly away in his prison cell? Or is it just as likely he came on as a willing participant and any programming was designed to ensure his discretion and success? I mean, Jesus! This farce has already faded into history, Nate, not even a year later!”

He stood. Finished his Gibson. Put on his Ray-Bans.

“Let history be history, Nate,” Shep said. “Don’t go around rewriting it.”

He slipped into the night and I joined Nita in the whirlpool. The air was cool enough that the warmth of the water felt good.

Nita asked, “What was that about?”

I told her.

She said nothing as I gave her an only slightly condensed, censored version of my conversation with Shep, her eyes widening and narrowing as was appropriate, and toward the end — when various possible deaths came up, including mine and hers — her eyes filled with tears. None rolled down her cheek, however — she was, as they say, made of sterner stuff.

“We’ve gone as far with this as we can,” I said. “Sirhan Sirhan is on Death Row, whether he belongs there or not, and no matter how many people disappear in the desert, Bob Kennedy is gone forever.”

She thought about that, then said, “So... what now?”

“Well, we’re in Vegas,” I said with a shrug and the best smile I had left in me. “Why don’t we get married? I figure our odds are better in a wedding chapel than a casino.”

She shrugged too, smiled a little.

“I’m game,” she said.

Robert Kennedy had grown up hero-worshiping Herbert Hoover, was closer than any of his siblings to his ruthless business tycoon father, began his legal and political career supporting Joe McCarthy’s anti-Commie witch hunt, urged victory over Communism in Vietnam in the early ’60s, and participated in a plot called Operation Mongoose to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow the Cuban government.

Like Joe E. Brown said at the end of Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect.

But my friend Bob evolved perfectly into a crusader for the poor and a Vietnam dove, embracing the anti-war protest movement of the Younger Generation. Someone once said that he “felt the deepest, cared the most, and fought the hardest for humanity — crying out against America’s involvement in the Vietnam war, championing the causes of blacks, Hispanics, and Mexican-Americans, and crusading against the suffering of children, the elderly and anyone else hurt or bypassed by social and economic programs.”

And it got him killed.

Why were any of us surprised? He seemed to have been waiting for it to happen, daring Fate to repeat itself after the murder of his brother Jack.

But of course Fate didn’t kill Jack or Bob — men did, and some made it happen while others allowed it and covered it up and in other ways aided and abetted. Shep Shepherd was right. I couldn’t find and remove every co-conspirator in this evil morass any more than a surgeon, however skilled, could root out the cancer in a patient riddled with the stuff.

Over the years, from a distance, I kept track of many of those I’d encountered in my brief RFK murder inquiry. With a private investigative agency at my beck and call, it wasn’t difficult.

Several in law enforcement who participated in the cover-up — Manny Hermano for one — were rewarded for their efforts, earning themselves better jobs and sometimes government contracts. Hermano left the LAPD (for the second time) and became a teacher and I suppose passed his wisdom on. He died in 2009 in Palm Desert, California.

In 1971 forensics expert and prosecution shill Wayne Wolf was promoted to head of the LAPD Crime Lab, in as fine an example of the Peter Principle as I’ve ever seen. Upon his retirement from the LAPD he became president of Ace Guard Services — the firm that had dispatched Thane Eugene Cesar to the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968. He died in 2012 in North Hollywood. I never met him.

Sgt. Pete Shore, a cop who lived up to the idealized LAPD of Jack Webb’s Dragnet, got pushed into early retirement and took a position as a small-town sheriff in Missouri. Former FBI man and criminalist Will Harris made no secret of his opinion that Sirhan Sirhan was not a lone shooter, giving many interviews on the subject; he died in 2007 after a distinguished teaching career.

Thomas Noguchi, “coroner to the stars,” was reinstated on July 31, 1969. Over a long, attention-attracting career, he performed autopsies on Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate, Janis Joplin, David Janssen, Divine, William Holden, and John Belushi, among other show biz luminaries. These were some of the famous co-stars in his story but they only made one guest appearance each.

Grant Cooper, lead attorney in Sirhan Sirhan’s defense, also enjoyed a celebrated career, but by the time of his death in 1990 his reputation had been tainted by rumors that he’d thrown his most famous case. Nor was his prestige enhanced by the Friars Club card cheating scandal, where his chief client was mobster Johnny Roselli.

Over the years, evidence continued to surface that undermined the notion of Sirhan as the lone assassin. Bullets recovered at the crime scene, for instance, could not be matched to Sirhan’s gun. And then there was the ever-climbing number of bullets, which some had adding up as high as eighteen. An audio expert identified thirteen shots on a recording of the assassination.

“The gunshots,” the audio expert said, “are established by virtue of my computer analysis of waveform patterns, which clearly distinguish gunshots from other phenomena. This would include sounds that to human hearing are often perceived as exploding firecrackers, popping camera flashbulbs or bursting balloons.”

The thirteen shots captured on tape indicated some were fired too rapidly, at intervals too close together, to have come from Sirhan’s weapon alone.

In 1977, Dr. Joseph W. Bryant was found dead in his room at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas shortly after being summoned to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Though no autopsy was performed, his death was ruled natural causes, although rumors persist that the doc died by gunshot. What’s one bullet more or less at this point?

Bryant, it was learned after his demise, had been an associate of JFK-assassination suspect David Ferrie. He had taught hypnosis techniques to Ferrie, and they had both been members of the same obscure religious sect. Such odd coincidences (or “coincidences”?) seemed to turn up everywhere in this case. For example, Sirhan Sirhan had worked with the brother of Arthur Bremer, would-be George Wallace assassin, at the racing stables in Santa Anita.

Was it a coincidence that Thane Eugene Cesar worked for the Hughes organization at Lockheed? Or that Cesar had been employed by Hughes’ man Maheu at the Bel Air Patrol security firm? Cesar dropped out of sight for a time, turning up in 1994 in the Philippines, his last known place of residence. He passed a lie detector test for a journalist who became his agent. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Cesar died on September 11, 2019. His agent was asking $25,000 an interview.)

Elaine Nye married Korean War veteran Jack Hart in Hollywood in 1973. Jack wrote several well-known rock songs and, as an agent, represented at various times Eddie Cochran, Rosemary Clooney, and Glenn Campbell. According to his son from his first marriage, Jack claimed to have worked for the CIA in mind-control experimentation. At some point in the ’70s (according to Elaine’s daughter from her first marriage), the couple was on the run from the FBI, hiding out in Missouri with relatives. Elaine liked to brag that she’d been the polka-dot-dress girl — she would wear the dress once a year just to piss her husband off. Once she had wanted to wear the dress to church and Jack, who was somewhat abusive, had forbidden it. They split up and she became a nurse, an alcoholic, and a fundamentalist Christian, not necessarily in that order. She died in 2013.

Robert Maheu was fired by Howard Hughes in 1970. He stayed in Vegas, establishing Robert A. Maheu and Associates and becoming, according to reliable sources, one of Las Vegas’s leading citizens. Sketchier sources claim Maheu liked to take credit for masterminding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Mission: Impossible man died of congestive heart failure at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas in 2008.

Jack Anderson took over Drew Pearson’s Washington Merry-Go-Round column and over time became as well-known as his late mentor. His mob-centric theory on the assassination of John F. Kennedy brought him criticism from mainstream media, but experts on the subject find much to admire in his thinking and research. He never took on the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, although his work on the Watergate conspiracy got him targeted for assassination himself.

Film director John Frankenheimer — while he never again reached the heights of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May — remained a successful moviemaker till his death in 2002.

Shep Shepherd died in his sleep in Washington, D.C., in 1975.

After he left Las Vegas, Howard Hughes moved to the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Managua in Nicaragua. An earthquake in December 1972 sent him to the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand Bahama Island, where he lived his last four years. In 1972, Clifford Irving claimed he’d co-authored the reclusive Hughes’ autobiography. Hughes denounced the writer in a teleconference; a postal investigation led to Irving’s indictment and subsequent fraud conviction. Hughes died on April 5, 1976, onboard a Learjet.

In September 1969, Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas was informed his examinations of Sirhan Sirhan must cease. An assistant warden wrote, “I am concerned that Dr. Simson appears to be making a career out of Sirhan.” Simson-Kallas resigned in protest and went into successful private practice. He died in Monterey, California, in 1987.

In 1994, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey’s client, Claude DuBoc, accused of drug dealing, agreed to forfeit his assets as part of the plea bargain. But Bailey had transferred nearly six million dollars of those assets into his own accounts. He was disbarred in Florida in 2001 and Massachusetts followed suit in 2003. Later appeals to be admitted to the bar in Maine were unsuccessful. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Bailey died in 2021.)

In the 1980s, Sandra Serrano — administering a child care center in East Los Angeles — stayed active in politics, successfully running the election campaign for a leading Latina politician. When she loaned the candidate living expenses, Sandra arranged to pay herself back from campaign funds. The state sniffed out irregularities in the campaign’s finances and the Los Angeles D.A. charged Serrano with embezzlement. Forty thousand dollars of legal fees later, she entered a nolo contendere plea, accepting conviction but not admitting guilt.

Serrano hadn’t spoken in public about the assassination since June 1968. But researchers had unearthed tapes of the nasty interrogation by Hermano, and a documentary filmmaker sought her out. Serrano was told by the authorities if she stayed silent about June 5, her felony conviction would be reduced to a misdemeanor.

For two decades she never spoke in public about the assassination night, nor did she reveal the names of those in government who bargained for her silence; but she has since reaffirmed her original story about the girl in the polka-dot dress.

Scott Enyart, a young high school student at the time, shot three rolls of photographs at the Ambassador the night of the assassination and was perfectly positioned in the Pantry to record the tragedy. On his way out, the police stopped him and confiscated his film; he was told they’d process it for use in the trial. None of the photos made a courtroom appearance. He fought for two decades to get the photos back. When they were finally being delivered to him, the courier’s car was broken into and the photos stolen.

In 1972, when the death penalty was banned in California, Sirhan Sirhan’s sentence was modified to life in prison. The Board of Parole Hearings found Sirhan suitable for parole in 1975, but rescinded his parole grant. The Board conducted fifteen subsequent hearings, in which they found Mr. Sirhan unsuitable for parole. (EDITOR’S NOTE: On August 27, 2021, the Board conducted Mr. Sirhan’s sixteenth hearing and found him suitable for parole. Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the recommendation.)

The bullets fired in the Pantry killed not just Robert Kennedy but the once grand Ambassador Hotel itself, though the latter’s death was a slow one. A misguided 1970s renovation spearheaded by Sammy Davis Jr. included shag carpet, disco ball and purple decor, the hotel finally closing its doors in 1989. Following a lengthy battle involving the L.A. school district and new owner Donald Trump, much of the hotel was torn down in late 2005 and early 2006. The educational complex rising on the site included remnants of the old hotel — the coffee shop now a teachers’ break room, the Cocoanut Grove an auditorium, and the Embassy Ballroom a library named for Paul Schrade, who had been instrumental in securing the property to build what is now known as the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.

On the last day of his life, Bob Kennedy saved a boy from drowning. What about that boy, that Kennedy son, who I watched him drag to shore? David died of a drug overdose in 1984. In 1997, his brother Michael, accused of having an affair with the family’s teenaged babysitter, died playing football on the Colorado ski slopes. Kathleen fared better, being elected lieutenant governor of Maryland, and Joe won his Uncle Jack’s congressional seat.

My son Sam runs the A-1 now, out of the Chicago office. Nita and I spend a good deal of time in Boca Raton, which we call our second home — the first is in suburban Oak Brook, although we still sentimentally consider the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow our real “first home.”

For the first five years or so of our marriage, Nita stayed busy with the budding indie film industry in Florida, and of course we’d go back to Los Angeles for pilot season. She never landed a series but even now does occasional guest shots. Like me, she’s almost famous.

Our house is on a waterway and we often sit with a cocktail and watch the boats go in this direction and then that. Pretty young things water-ski by and I give them wistful looks like most old men do, and Nita tolerates that. Mostly these days she types up these memoirs from the yellow pads I scrawl them on. Me, I take on a job now and then, and occasionally settle an old score.

So if you are one of the bastards who helped take Bob Kennedy down, don’t get cocky. I might get around to you yet.