Did I mention I didn’t even have my shoulder holster along? Not that it mattered, since my nine-millimeter had moved from the nightstand to between shirts in my suitcase, to prevent alarm on the part of Beverly Hills Hotel housekeeping.
“I’ll be glad to go,” I said, getting out from behind the desk, “right now. But you don’t have to chauffeur me. I have my own wheels.”
The two men exchanged troubled glances.
I said, “You can either write down the address where I’m supposed to go, or I’ll come around to where you’re parked and you can lead me.”
The guy with dumb eyes was shaking his head, not at me but at his associate, who was thinking it over.
“Fine,” the leader said finally, ignoring his associate’s vote. He got the pad and pencil again. “I’m gonna write it down, but you might wanna follow us over, like you said. We should escort you up to the suite.”
“All right,” I said.
I was still enough of a private eye, I guess, to resist getting in a car with a couple of muscle boys, even if they weren’t going to bother pulling a gun.
As it turned out, the pair were probably just being helpful, since the suite in question was at the Ambassador Hotel, which was home to over twelve hundred rooms. The massive, many-winged hotel had been refurbished a few years ago, and modernized, but it still resembled a palace that had somehow been dropped from the sky near Wilshire Boulevard, on a lawn as well-manicured and vast as Forest Lawn.
From the parking lot I was ushered like a dignitary with bodyguards through a massive lobby awash in yellow, with pillars, leather furnishings, and scattered ferns, all set off by red-and-black carpeting. Fairly elegant surroundings for the roughneck boss of the Teamsters union, but Jimmy never liked to deny himself, when he was on the road, anyway.
The room at the end of a golden hall on an upper floor was a case in point-the presidential suite, with richer shades of gold and elegant French gilded furnishings and creamy wall-to-wall carpet. In a massive parlor with a chandelier and plush drapes, and a stereo and television that shared an improbably antique-looking cabinet, a kidney-shaped writing table had been turned into a paper-strewn desk by the small, broad-shouldered man at work there.
Well-tanned, about fifty, Jimmy Hoffa was barking into the phone, “I can’t get away now. It’ll have to wait… You want me to send who? No way. That son of a bitch could start a war in a vacant lot… I’ll be there tomorrow. Do what the fuck you have to! You’re not a child!”
He said a quick good-bye, all but slammed the phone down, then looked up, grinned at me, waved my chaperones away (they went out), and rose to his full five feet five, extending his open hands as if in welcome to a prodigal child.
“Nate Heller!” he said, moving like a friendly gorilla across the expanse of carpet to meet me halfway. We shook hands, and his grip, as usual, was a vise. “How the hell long has it been, a year, two years?”
“You know what they say, Jim, about time passing fast when you’re having fun.”
“I don’t believe in fun. I believe in hard work, and to me I guess that’s fun. Let’s see if we can find someplace comfortable to sit in this dump.”
He was wearing a nice enough blue gabardine suit, off the rack, but his trousers were highwater-style, exposing the white socks that were part of his everyman persona (“Colored socks make me sweat”). His dark hair was glossy, cut short, standing up like the quills of a pissed-off porcupine. There was something vaguely oriental about his rough-hewn, heart-shaped face, and that he exuded that mystical quality called charisma could not be denied.
I was half German Jew and half mick, and he was Dutch-Irish, which from the start had given us a bond. And my father’s unionist activities had been a big plus, back when I went to work for the Teamster boss.
Jimmy was your classic roughneck made good. His coal-miner pop had died young, and his mother had polished radiator caps in an auto plant. By sixteen he was earning fifteen bucks a week unloading fruits and vegetables for a grocery chain, getting paid only for time worked and not time waiting for freight trains. He addressed that with a wildcat strike, earned the attention of the Teamsters, and had been on that payroll ever since.
The Teamsters was the only life he knew-he even met his wife on a picket line. In 1957 he became president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, replacing Dave Beck, who got busted for tax evasion. Hoffa, who never drove a truck, more than doubled the IBT membership, bringing in everybody from cafeteria workers to zookeepers. But the AFL-CIO expelled the union because of Hoffa’s ties to organized crime.
These ties I’d known about for a long time-the guy Hoffa put in charge of the union’s pension fund, Allen Dorfman, was Outfit through his stepfather, Red Dorfman, a onetime Capone crony and current Giancana one.
The McClellan Committee, with Bobby Kennedy as its chief counsel and John Kennedy as a member, had made a crusade out of nailing Hoffa over his mob connections. They’d gotten indictments on charges of trying to steal committee documents and bribing a staff lawyer-I’d been in the thick of that, but Hoffa hadn’t known I wasn’t on his side.
Anyway, somehow Hoffa beat it, though Bobby had been so confident about his case, he bragged he’d jump off the Capitol dome if he lost. Jimmy won. And sent Bobby a parachute.
“Tell me about Sam, Nate,” he said. “Did he play football last year?”
And we talked about my son, and my problems with Sam’s mother. One of Jimmy’s best qualities was his ability to remember people he’d met and spoken to at any length, and care (or anyway seem to care) about everybody and their families and problems-health, financial, what have you.
If you walked around with him in union circles in Any Town USA, he would stop and talk on a first-name basis with dozens of rank-and-file members. With anybody in leadership, he had personal histories down cold, chapter and verse.
“What brings you to Tinseltown, Jim?”
We were sitting on a spectacularly uncomfortable brocade couch.
“Hell, Nate, I been on the road all this month and it’s just starting. Negotiating God knows how many contracts, dealing with this latest bullshit case against me, this Florida thing? And, of course, lining up support for the big contract.”
“What contract is that?”
He cackled. His rather tiny eyes danced in the wide, rugged face. “The contract that has Bobby Kennedy’s asshole puckering! We’ve been working for months, for years, on a nationwide master contract, a bargaining agreement that’ll stop commerce in this country with a single strike order.”
“A single phone call from you, you mean?”
He grinned like a demented pixie. “That’s right. What do you think your old man would think about that?”
Jimmy always talked about my father like he’d known him. And I never broke it to Jim that my father would likely have considered him a monster and a disgrace to the unionist cause.
On the other hand, it was hard to deny Jimmy Hoffa was an effective labor leader, and that he’d negotiated generous contracts for his members.
“Listen,” he said, and he leaned over and patted my knee. “I know you’re a busy guy, important guy out here, not just in Chicago, these days. I’m proud of you, kid.”
We were roughly the same age, but he’d always called me “kid.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He hunched his shoulders in a Cagney-like way, a recurring mannerism. “Thing is, I just don’t want you to think I’m sticking my nose where it don’t belong.”
“How so, Jim?”
His eyes all but disappeared into folds of flesh. “I need a personal assurance from you. That is, of course, if I’m not overstepping the bounds of our friendship.”
“Oh-kay…”
The eyes tightened. They were hard and cold now. “I know you ran into somebody, the other day, who is doing some work for me.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. What else would Roger Pryor do but run to Jimmy? What would I have done in his situation?
