your vocation, honey. You should work for the FBI. Better still, the CIA. A quick-thinking broad like you would make a swell honey-trap.'
Ugh,' grimaced Summer. I hate honey.' Nimmo got up from his seat. Don't take it personally. Where are you going?' she asked.
I need to make a quick call,' he said, but in the phone booth in the back of the deli, his fingers raced through the phone book until his nail was underlining an F. Pierce at 200 Riverside Drive, Apartment 1010, New York, New York, Telephone RI 9-3359. It was like his numbers had come up. He took out a matchbook and scribbled down the address and telephone number.
You look happy,' she observed, when he came back.
He sat down and, handing her fifty dollars under the table, said, It's going to be a great New Year.'
Chapter 24
It's a Wonderful Life
Having paid off Summer, Jimmy Nimmo returned to the Shelburne Hotel to take a shower and change his clothes. While he shaved, his mind tried out various permutations of his next course of action. By the time he was in the shower, the possibilities had come down to his entering 200 Riverside Drive after midnight when, according to Summer, the doorman went off duty, and taking the self-service elevator up to the tenth floor, where he would let himself into the apartment of Franklin Pierce and, at gunpoint, have the occupant call Johnny Rosselli on the telephone, before blowing his brains out on the carpet. No one would pay much attention to the sound of a gunshot on New Year's Eve - not even the sensitive folks who lived on Riverside Drive. He even knew where to get hold of Rosselli. The gangster was planning to spend the evening in the Fontainebleu's La Ronde Supper Club, with Sam Levenson, Ben Novack, and Dick Shawn. Nimmo thought it was just possible that with a .38 pressed against his ear, Jefferson might say how and when and where he planned to assassinate Jack Kennedy, although by now Jimmy Nimmo had sufficient respect for the marksman to conclude that he would be doing well if he got through the door to Jefferson's apartment, and shot him dead. With a professional killer such as Tom Jefferson, it was probably best to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.
And if Jefferson should be out somewhere, celebrating New Year, then so much the better, thought Nimmo: he would wait for him, settle down with a drink, and sap the guy as he came through the door. Then he could tie him up and try a little Q and A. Because whichever way he looked at it, just to know the details of Jefferson's plan would have neatly cauterised the stump of any bleeding doubts that might follow on from Jefferson's amputated life. They were probably the same doubts that might make Giancana forget to be grateful, and maybe inhibit him from paying Nimmo the remainder of his money. Money that was going to buy him a pretty good retirement.
Nimmo came out of the shower and dried himself vigorously. For the first time in a long while Duke Ellington was back in residence inside his head, and there was a big band swing in the way he moved across the room to answer the telephone.
It was the Massachusetts State House in Boston whom Nimmo, posing as a member of the Secret Service Protective Research Section, had telephoned the previous day to enquire about the Board of Overseers that Kennedy was possibly scheduled to visit on 9 January. Kennedy's trip to Boston had seemed almost unimportant beside New York, but he had felt it necessary to explore every possibility. The person with whom he had spoken earlier, a Mrs Hichborn, had adamantly told Nimmo that there was no such thing as a Board of Overseers in the new State House or, for that matter, the Old State House, which was a very different building. There was just the state legislature, formally named the Massachusetts General Court, and the House of Representatives. In her near English accent that reminded Nimmo of Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs Hichborn explained how she had been racking her brains to solve Agent Nimmo's mystery, and that she had made a special journey into the office on a Saturday morning because she now believed she knew what must have happened.
I've worked here for seventeen years, Agent Nimmo, and sometimes, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, I tend to think of the Boston State House as the hub of the solar system. So I hope you'll excuse me if I wasn't more obviously helpful when you telephoned yesterday. Last night I thought and I thought, and I said to my husband, I simply cannot believe that the Secret Service would make something like this up. There must be a Board of Overseers somewhere in Boston. Well, my husband, Allen, works in the Widener Library at Harvard University, and he said that there's a Board of Overseers at Harvard, of course, which is the senior governing board of the university, and which holds a bimonthly meeting in the faculty room of University Hall. Well, of course Senator Kennedy, who's an old Harvard man, is, like three other Harvard men who were President of the United States, a member of that same Board of Overseers. He has been since nineteen fifty-seven when, Allen tells me, he was elected to the board with the largest vote ever obtained by a candidate, getting over seventy per cent of votes cast by Harvard alumni the world over.
By all accounts, Senator Kennedy takes his administrative obligations very seriously. The next meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers is ten thirty a.m. on January ninth. If the Senator does come here to the State House - and it's still by no means certain that he will, I might add - it won't be until the late afternoon, possibly around five thirty p.m., when he'll make a speech to the whole two-hundred-and-eighty-member Great and General Court. If he does come, then we'll be very honoured of course, not least because it will be his first formal speech since his election on November eighth.'
When Mrs Hichborn finally stopped talking, and Nimmo had got through thanking her for coming in on a Saturday morning to tell him her news, and apologising for his stupidity in making such an elementary mistake, he got dressed, walked quickly out of the hotel, and more or less ran to the public library, where an assistant helped him to find a reference book on America's universities.
Harvard's Old University Hall, where the Board of Overseers were scheduled to meet, was in Harvard Yard, which comprised two enormous quadrangles of lawns and trees surrounded by various undergraduate dormitories. One look at the photograph of Harvard Yard told Nimmo all he needed to know about where Tom Jefferson was planning to shoot John F. Kennedy. With the front of University Hall overlooked by no fewer than three or four hundred windows, not to mention ten rooftops, and a bell-tower, it would have taken an army of Secret Service agents to have made the Yard safe for the President-elect to walk in. Harvard Yard looked like a sniper's alley, with John F. Kennedy a sitting duck. It was true, there were plenty of tall buildings and windows on Park Avenue, but in New York Kennedy would be out of a building and into a limousine in the blink of a sniper's eye. Not much chance for a shot there. Going back to Harvard University, however, would be like a Roman general accorded a triumph. Surely Kennedy would want to savour the moment. Surely he would want to shake a few hands, maybe even speak to some students. College students were an undisciplined lot even at the best of times. How could the Secret Service ever hope to deal with them? Harvard had to be the place where Jefferson would strike.
Excuse me, Mister Nimmo?'
Nimmo looked up from the book he was examining and into the face of a largish man, with crew-cut grey hair, and wearing a tan polar-style coat, with a wool-faced lining and hood, and a hefty zip that was open to reveal a three-piece grey-green plaid suit.
Who wants to know?'
The man doffed his hat and, grinning, shook his head. I was waiting in the lobby of your hotel, sir. But when you dashed out, well, I'll tell you, you caught me by surprise, sir. I only just managed to see you duck in here, and then I'm afraid I lost you for a while.' The man took out a little wallet that he opened for Nimmo's inspection. My name is Goldman, sir. I'm with the FBI. I was hoping that I might have a quiet word with you, sir.'
This is as quiet as it gets in New York,' said Nimmo.
Goldman glanced around uncomfortably, affecting disinterest in the book about Harvard that Nimmo held open in his hands. Perhaps,' he whispered, this is a little too quiet. There is something about a library that doesn't exactly encourage free and frank conversation. Look, what do you say we go across the street and go find ourselves a cup of coffee?'
Nimmo looked at his watch like a man getting ready to time a race. It was eleven thirty, and he had nowhere special to go. But just about the last thing he needed now that he was so close to finding Tom Jefferson was to end up down at the FBI's offices on 3rd and 69th, answering a lot of awkward questions. So he winced and said, I'm afraid that I have a lunch appointment.
Come on. Please. Look, you used to be in the job. You know how it is. Just a few minutes of your time and then I'll leave you alone.'
All right,' agreed Nimmo, closing the book. Just a few minutes sounded about right. It couldn't very well be anything too awkward if that was all the time Goldman required of him. Following the burly FBI agent out of the
