fiasco, so how do I get out of it with the smell of murder not sticking to me?”
His eyes tightened. He was thinking. Was that daylight at the end of the tunnel, or just another train?
I waved it all off. “And I’m not going to kill you, either. You’re small fry. You’re just a working stiff, like me. What I want are some names. Let’s start with Rosselli.”
“Wasn’t Rosselli. He’s in Vegas.”
“There are phones between LA and Vegas, I understand. Not car phones maybe, but phones.”
“No. Not Rosselli. It was… it was Giananca himself.”
That made sense. “And who called him? Lawford?”
“I don’t know. I honest to Christ don’t know. You’ll have to climb that ladder yourself, Heller.”
Then his brow creased with thought, and he leaned forward and his head almost hovered over the. 38, though his hands weren’t near it now.
“Or maybe,” he said, some desperation finally reading in his voice, “I can help you climb. Look. Say I help you. I know you liked that broad, and I had nothing against her either, if it hadn’t been me do it, it’d been half a dozen others, some spook, some Outfit guy, fuck, some intel fucker. I didn’t kill her, the poison somebody else provided did. You with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“I’ll be your inside guy. Trying to get an angle on somebody as high up as Giancana won’t be easy. But maybe I can do it. Maybe I can check in, and ask some questions. Maybe I can find out where this thing flowed from.”
“I’m thinking Hoffa.”
“Definite possibility.”
“But Giancana was fine with it.”
“Obviously.”
“And the CIA went along.”
“No doubt.”
“Okay.” I finished the beer. “Want another cold one?”
“I could use it.”
I went to the refrigerator, opened it, shut it, came back behind him, and stuck the needle of nicotine in his neck.
“ Now you’re a working stiff,” I said.
And thumbed the shit into him. I wouldn’t wear a bigger smile till I was a skull.
Just in case he got ambitious, I swiped the gun off the table and it clattered onto the linoleum floor and, luckily, did not go off. He wriggled around on the floor, clutching his neck like there was something he could do about it, bawling now, which at this point I was fine with.
I went over to the phone out by the couch and dialed Fred Rubinski.
“You can bring the boat around now,” I said.
“Check,” he said.
I went in to see how Roger was doing. He wasn’t unconscious but he had given up. His face looked white and terrible. Good. I retrieved the. 38, so he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory, ending his misery or mine.
Searching the place, I found the box of small white tape boxes in the closet, up on a hatbox shelf the way Marilyn’s tape recorder had been barely hidden at Fifth Helena.
And under some clothes in a bedroom dresser, I found a single red spiral notebook. Thumbing through, words written in Marilyn’s familiar flowing hand jumped out at me: Bay of Pigs, Castro, CIA, Sam Giancana.
I gathered all of the material and set it on the couch. Roger was dead, pretzeled on the floor, having shit himself, turning a light shade of blue.
Then I went into the living room, away from the stench, where a recliner awaited. Before getting comfortable, I switched the TV on. Turned the channel. Who the hell wanted to see Bonanza in black-and-white, anyway? Jack Benny was on, and I could use a laugh.
CHAPTER 24
That weekend-the one I’d spent helping Flo Kilgore put together an article that would be quashed, chatting with Dr. Ralph Greenson about his famous client, and evicting Roger Pryor from the A-1 Detective Agency safe house-had been a festive one for the Kennedy clan and their circle.
President Kennedy, his brother Robert, his wife Ethel, their many children, Peter and Pat Lawford, and their new best friend Pat Newcomb enjoyed a relaxing weekend at Hyannis Port. Much of Sunday (my really eventful day), they spent on the Manitou, a sixty-two-foot Coast Guard yacht. Photos reveal a smiling, happy clan, basking in the wind, spray, and sun.
On Monday afternoon I called the Justice Department and left my name and my number at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bobby returned the call the next day, about that same time. Our conversation was brief.
“I need to see you,” I said. “It’s private and it’s personal.”
“Ethel and the kids are still at Hyannis Port,” he said. “They will be next weekend, too. But I’ll be at Hickory Hill, batching it. Can you join me for lunch Saturday?”
McClean, Virginia, was a labyrinth of macadam roads. I had been to Hickory Hill, the Robert F. Kennedy estate, a number of times, but it was one of those places you always thought you’d missed. Then there it was, up a steep incline back from the road, a big whitewashed brick house in a lush setting of trees and landscaped lawn. The house, dating back to the mid-1800s, had a pool and tennis court. Also horses with the grooms to go with them, gardeners, cooks, nurses, and a butler.
Apparently, like the family, much of the retinue was absent. The dogs that usually roamed the place must have been in kennels, and certainly the butler had the weekend off, because Bobby himself-in a pale pink short- sleeve shirt and tan chinos-met me at the red front door. I was in a polo and slacks, equally casual.
He gave me a big, vaguely embarrassed smile, offered his hand for me to shake, which I did, smiling back at him, perhaps not with as much warmth as before. He led me through the formally furnished home out onto the back terrace. That’s where we had lunch-at least one cook was on duty-open-faced steak sandwiches with hash browns. Steaks cooked to order, of course. We both had ours medium rare.
“Pretty strange, isn’t it?” he said, with that embarrassed smile, after touching his mouth with a linen napkin. “I feel like a ghost haunting my own house.”
“I’ve seen it livelier.”
And, the half dozen times I’d been there, also usually on the weekend, it was. During the day, Bobby roughhousing with his kids, engaging them in touch football, tree-climbing and swimming. At night, social gatherings and outright parties with an eclectic mix, from Harry Belafonte teaching guests the Twist to Kremlin contact Georgi Bolshakov arm-wrestling with Bobby (and losing). Assorted Kennedy hangers-on like Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers in push-up contests with Bobby (and losing).
Neither of us wanted dessert, and we had cold bottles of Coke instead of coffee. The sun was high and hot and the bottles sweated and so did we.
The luncheon talk remained small, but after, when he walked with me-Cokes in hand, down past the big hickory with its tree house, usually inhabited by one of the countless kids-he brought up Marilyn, if obliquely.
“Pat is a wreck,” he said. “Peter, too.”
“Is their marriage going to make it?”
He flashed me a look that said perhaps I’d overstepped. But he answered it, frankly: “Until Jack’s been reelected, it will… I think Peter and his friend Sinatra had words.” He shook his head. “I’ve never shared their fascination with that man.”
He meant Jack and Peter with Sinatra.
“Frank’s one of the few performers on a par with Marilyn,” I said. “What they call superstars.”
“He’s a bully. Little would-be thug.”
Coming from the diminutive Bobby, thought by many to be worthy of a similar appellation, this might have been comical. Neither of us, however, was in a light mood. We settled at a white metal table with matching chairs by the swimming pool, the massive white rectangular poolhouse looming nearby like another D.C. monument. Not
