spilled foam off his gray coveralls. “What if I said this was a divorce case?”
“I’d say you’re full of shit. Who hired you, the studio?”
He shook his head, and the smile widened into a give-me-a-break-buddy grin. “Look, Nate-I have a client. And it’s not you. There’s such a thing as ethics and professional courtesy and conflict of interest and, you know, all kinds of factors at play.”
“This afternoon,” I said, “or tomorrow, I would have given you a call, telling you Marilyn wants her phones tapped. Wants tapes of all her calls. And you’d have said, ‘Sure.’ Or would you have told me no, because you already were doing a job involving her? That kind of ethics and professional courtesy and conflict of interest, Roger?”
His face went expressionless; then one caterpillar eyebrow jerked. “I could claim that… but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Right.”
“So… are you going to screw it up for me, and tell Marilyn she needs somebody to come in to sweep for bugs? Least you could do is give me the job.”
“Answer my question, Roger. You already have her phone tapped?”
“No.”
“The house…?”
“No. Just the bedroom. Master bedroom. I can pick up some stuff from other rooms from there. Small house for a big star.”
“Who’s your client?”
He shook his head, drank his beer, then leaned back with folded arms and a defensive posture. “No. I can’t do that.”
“Let me give you your options. First, I can tell Marilyn her house is bugged and help her get rid of the pests… and no you don’t get the gig. After which the A-1 can, in future, find some firm other than Pryor Investigative Services, Inc., to use for its surveillance work. How much do you bill us on the average year, do you suppose?”
“… And the other option?”
“You can tell me who your clients are, and I will give Marilyn a bullshit story about how she needs to be discreet in her pillow talk, because once she has her own phone tapped, it’s easy for somebody else to listen in.”
“Well, that’s true, actually.”
“And I will send you in to do the phone-tap job for me, as promised.”
He twitched something that was neither a smile nor a frown. “The thing is, Nate… I already got more than one client, here. It’s one of those situations where the commodity in question has a lot of interested buyers, and why not keep them all happy, and me prosperous?”
“You wanna give me the ethics speech again, Roger, the conflict of interest thing? I think maybe I missed part of it.”
He moved a palm against the air as if he were polishing it. “Anyway, Nate, these are not the kind of clients you pull anything on.”
“What, are you worried? Is this van bugged? Are your clients listening in on us?”
“Really, Nate. These aren’t pleasant people.”
I let an edge into my voice. “Who wants to hear Marilyn’s bedroom talk, Roger?”
“Well, you wouldn’t know the intermediary’s name, probably. But it’s… Christ on a crutch, Nate, it’s for Hoffa.” He whispered as if afraid his own machines might pick it up: “Jimmy fucking Hoffa.”
I frowned. “Jimmy Hoffa wants to know who Marilyn is diddling? The head of the Teamsters cares who a Hollywood sex symbol takes to bed?”
He made a palms-up gesture with his free hand. “I’m in the surveillance business, Nate. Mine is not to reason why. Mine is but to make the recordings and gather same and ship ’em the hell off.”
Hoffa wasn’t just a name in the headlines to me. Everybody knew him as a controversial labor leader with obvious ties to organized crime. But I knew him personally. In 1957 Hoffa had hired me to infiltrate the so-called Rackets Committee run by Senator John L. McClellan. I had done this, but with the full knowledge of Robert Kennedy, chief counsel of the Rackets Committee.
As a double agent, I’d done Hoffa a good share of harm, but the president of the Teamsters Union didn’t know as much. Jimmy still thought I was a dirty ex-cop from Chicago. And maybe I was. But I’d never really been his dirty ex-cop from Chicago.
Nonetheless, I knew better than most the dangers of tangling asses with the affable, ruthless Teamster boss.
As reel-to-reel tape hummed on the rack nearby, Roger was saying, “And I’m pretty sure Hoffa is in this with another guy nobody oughta try to fuck with. Old friend of yours, Nate-Chicago friend?”
“I have a lot of Chicago friends.”
“So I hear. And one of ’em is Sam Giancana, right?”
Warm though it was in the enclosed space, I felt a chill, and it wasn’t the beer and it wasn’t the floor fan.
From Hoffa we’d gone in an instant to the current operating head of the Chicago mob. Called “Mooney” by friends and foes alike (it signified his craziness), Giancana had started out a street punk on the Near North Side’s Patch, worked his way up to the Capone Outfit, where he became Tony Accardo’s bodyguard. Once the top chair was his, Giancana wrested the numbers racket from the colored gangsters and expanded every other criminal enterprise in the Windy City.
Now he was a well-dressed psychopathic moneymaking machine with all kinds of show business pals, including Frank Sinatra-it was enough to make me wish I hadn’t introduced the two of them.
“ Is he a friend of yours, Nate-Giancana?”
“We get along. Never really had any trouble with him.”
“That friendship you had with Frank Nitti, back when you were starting out, it’s held you in good stead.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “So Hoffa’s your client, and you think Giancana is, too. Why do they care who Marilyn is entertaining?”
He blinked at me, then grinned-amused, amazed. “You’re kidding, right? Marilyn’s your client, and you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
He had the goofy grin of a high schooler telling a pal about a girl who put out. “Her and the prez-that poon hound Jack Kennedy. You know the Kennedy boys, don’t you, Nate? More famous pals of yours. You bragged about your Rackets Committee days in the press enough.”
“I don’t brag. My press agent does.” I shrugged. “I’m aware Jack has a wandering eye.”
“Also a wandering dick.”
I grunted a laugh. Pawed the air. “But this is silly, Rodge. I mean, ridiculous. Marilyn and Jack Kennedy… the president… of the United States? They’re, what-having an affair?”
“You are a detective, Heller. Trust me on this one-I heard it with my own ears. Those aren’t tough voices to ID -unless maybe it was Vaughn Meader and Edie Adams havin’ fun with me.”
He was referring to a couple of well-known impressionists, the former a Kennedy mimic, the latter Ernie Kovacs’ sexy widow, who did a mean Marilyn.
I motioned with my half-empty beer can, the tapes whispering at me. Grinned at him. “Come on, Rodge. You’re saying the president of the United States himself just stops by Marilyn’s place, and partakes of a piece of ass, while the Secret Service waits on the front stoop? Don’t the neighbors mind?”
Pryor shrugged. “He doesn’t stop by her house.”
“Then how the hell do you know-”
“Tapes I heard are from… another place.”
“What other place?”
“Another place Hoffa’s guy asked me to cover.”
“Do I have to ask again?”
“Heller, honest to Christ, you don’t wanna know this.”
“Whose place, Rodge?”
