“Roger, you mean,” I said.
“Yeah. You recommended him to me, or anyway your partner, Rubinski, did. I used Pryor a couple of times now and he seems reliable. He is reliable, Nate?”
“Far as it goes. He’s for hire, like all of us.”
He hitched his shoulders. “Well, Pryor told me you saw where he was parked and looked over his setup and guessed right away that he was, uh, doing a little eavesdropping on a certain female, who is I understand a friend and maybe a client of yours.”
“Marilyn is a friend, and a client.”
“Roger says he made you aware of the fact that our glorious president is fucking her. And I think maybe his brother is, too.”
I blinked. “What, you mean Ted?”
“No! Bobby.”
My head bobbed back, like I’d taken a punch. Then I almost laughed. “That’s just silly, Jim. Bob’s a family man. You know that.”
“You want to see the list I got of the women he’s screwed since January?”
“No thanks.” Knowing this was hateful wishful thinking on his part, I said, “So then-you got Marilyn and Bobby on tape, too?”
His face scrunched into a cagey mask. “Maybe. I don’t think that’s really your business.”
He’d brought it up.
But why press it, and anyway, this was horseshit. I just wasn’t in a position to tell Jimmy what I knew to be true-that Bobby’s only role here was to shut down the JFK/MM affair. A typical Kennedy family hatchet-man assignment.
Jimmy waved a hand, smiled, shrugged. “Let’s not get off the track, kid. You want a beer or a Coke or anything? There’s a wet bar, too.”
“No thanks, Jim.”
He leaned forward-what was that, Jade East? “The question I want to ask, one friend to another, is whether you have told your client what you know.”
“You mean, have I told Marilyn that her house is bugged?”
Anxiety clenched his features. “That her house is bugged, yes.”
“No. It doesn’t strictly speaking have anything to do with the job she’s hired me to do, and Roger is a colleague and, out of professional courtesy… no. I haven’t told her.”
But I might. Hadn’t decided. Had been all up night thinking about it, but hadn’t decided…
Jimmy was grinning his Chinaman grin again. “That’s good, Nate, that’s good. Now here’s what I want you to do, kid. I want you to stay in touch with little Miss Seven Year Itch. I want you to stay friendly.”
“Well, we are friends. But I’m heading back to Chicago.”
He waved a finger, like a cross schoolmaster. “No. You are not. You are staying out here and cozying up to that immoral little broad and seeing what she has to say about Bobby and his cunt-hound brother.”
“Jim-you’ve got the place bugged already…”
His voice, already hard, hardened, and words machine-gunned at me: “Listen, she’s not stupid. If she’s having her own phone bugged-yeah, Roger told me; don’t be naive-then she knows there’s a possibility of being eavesdropped upon. So she probably will spend time with you elsewhere. Maybe at your bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Maybe outside her place at her swimming pool. But if in some part of the house that ain’t bugged, like where the washing machines are, she starts talking while they’re churning? She spills anything incriminating about Bobby and Jack, I want to know.”
“Jim-please. She’s my friend. Like you’re my friend.”
“Some things are bigger than other things.” His mouth moved as if he was tasting something foul. “These two privileged pricks, never did an honest day’s work in their lives, have singled me out as some kind of fucking cancer, rich kid bastards. And that cocky little shit, Bobby? You’ve seen him go out of his way to embarrass me in public, you know how he dogs my ass, it’s a goddamn vendetta, and it’s got to stop. It is going to stop.” He worked at removing his scowl, and shrugged. “This is a harmless thing, anyway, what I’m suggesting.”
“Harmless?”
“Yeah. We get information on what kind of sorry immoral lowlifes these two brothers are, and we either embarrass their ass out of office, or they straighten up and honor agreements and deals they have made with certain individuals, myself included. You know a little about the Castro situation. Was I a good American on that one, Nate, or was I good American?”
“You were a good American,” I said.
“You should hope this works because otherwise it could get ugly.” Very quietly, he said, “I damn near killed Bobby’s punk ass a couple years back, remember?”
I remembered. I’d stopped it. But Jimmy didn’t know that.
His upper lip peeled back and his smile was a skull’s. “Next time I’m going after the brother.”
The casualness of that was chilling. “But why Jack? Bobby’s the one causing the trouble. Bobby’s the one you hate.”
“You gotta cut off the head of the snake to get rid of the rattle, kid. That lecherous liar Jack, if he would do us the favor of ceasing to exist? You really think a President Lyndon Johnson’s gonna hang onto Bobby Kennedy as his attorney general?”
He straightened without standing, digging his hand in his pocket. Christ, was he going for a gun or a knife or something?
No-he was peeling hundreds off a fat roll. “Here. Off the books, the way we both like it. A thousand as a retainer do the trick?”
The son of a bitch was going to pay me to betray a client, and a woman I very much liked. I should have shoved the bills down his damn throat.
“Thanks, Jim,” I said, and found a place for them in my wallet. “Anything else?”
CHAPTER 8
So I decided to stay on a while in Hollywood. My partner Fred was thrilled at the prospect, and my son Sam seemed pleased, too, though neither of them factored into my decision.
Keeping Jimmy Hoffa happy did. With surveillance in play, I’d need to see Marilyn a few times to justify the thousand I’d taken from the labor leader.
Not that I’d wanted to take it, nor did I have any intention of betraying Marilyn to Hoffa or anybody else. I’d been provided the number of an LA attorney to whom I was to file my reports-these would be bogus, of course, but I’d have to make a few. The point was to stay alive, and seem to be cooperating.
Beyond that, I wanted to get Marilyn alone, or anyway in some area of her home where a conversation would not make it onto tape-by the pool or in her garden, maybe.
The morning after the Ambassador confab, Roger Pryor put in my phone tap, Marilyn having arranged for both Mrs. Murray and handyman Norman to be away. So early that afternoon, I called her private line-if a line tapped by its owner and Christ knew how many others might still be called private-and said I’d like to stop by and check up on the work my subcontractor had done.
“Oh, please come, Nate!” a very upbeat Marilyn said. “I have so much to tell you.”
“Things are going well, then?”
“Wait till you hear.”
This time when I tooled the Jag down the dead end of Fifth Helena and pulled up to the double wooden gates, they stood open, and I was able to roll into the small courtyard and park next to a two-tone green Dodge and a BMW. The latter wasn’t Marilyn’s-she drove a Caddy, which was probably in the free-standing garage-so she had a visitor. Last time I’d come casually dressed, but the lady of the house was a client now, so today I was in a light- olive Cricketeer suit with a darker green tie and yellow button-down shirt, though I dispensed with a hat.
The ocean breeze was ruffling the stand of eucalyptus trees that made the second line of defense after the
