feed, one merely placed a collar with a transmitting device around the coaxial cable, and it broadcast the signal. As long as our receiver — which was in our borrowed FBI van — remained within range, we could see what each camera saw. I didn’t place these collars on every camera, just the ones in the public areas of the hotel.
After I had gotten the cameras I wanted in the lobby and halls or the meeting areas, I was ready to ride up to the penthouse level, where Dell Royston had a suite reserved. I called Joe Billy on his cell phone and asked him to send a guard to key the elevator for me. Of course he sent the girl. She helped me get the stepladder onto the service elevator and used her passkey to enable it, then dashed back to the office. Apparently Joe Billy knew enough to flirt with her to keep her away from me, because I didn’t want an audience. I’ve worked with audiences before, but you have to devise a reason to go where you aren’t supposed to, and getting the bugs in place takes longer.
I collared the two video cameras in the corridor of the penthouse floor. I had a magnetic card in my pocket that would open any room door in the hotel. We had an encoder in our lock shop, and I had brought it along and Sarah had supplied the codes — but I didn’t have to use it because the maid was cleaning the suite I wanted. The door was standing open. I marched in, set up my stepladder, and began placing the bugs.
The maid was Puerto Rican, and I happen to be fluent in Spanish — which I learned for one of my very first CIA assignments— so we chattered away while I worked. I had my audience after all.
She was a genuinely nice young woman, in her early twenties, and had been in New York for only six months. Her name was Isabel. She told me her life story, about the boy waiting in San Juan, about her hopes and dreams for the future, while I put bugs in light fixtures and on top of furniture and behind pictures.
These bugs were battery operated and contained transmitters. To conserve battery power and prevent them from being detected by conventional sweep gear, they could be turned on and off via radio. Some of them were so tiny they were mounted on the head of a straight pin. I had them threaded through the cloth of my shirt pocket and pinned them in the top of the window drapes, near a hook that held the drape to the curtain rod.
At one point Isabel asked what I was doing. I told her that I was placing the new high-tech insect repellers. I showed her a bug, one enclosed in a four-inch-square sheet of clear plastic. I placed it on top of a dresser and pressed it down so that it wouldn’t move, and it became almost invisible in ordinary light. I pressed another into place behind the headboard of the bed while Isabelle told me all about the cockroaches of San Juan, of which she, like all natives, was justly proud.
After I had placed at least six bugs in each of the rooms of the suite, including two in each bath, I asked her to open the door to the adjoining suites on either side so I could also do them. No problem.
She stuck right with me, chattering away in Spanish. I asked about the upcoming convention. The hotel would be full, she told me, completely full.
“What do you think of a woman as vice president?” I asked, pretending I was Jack Yocke getting some deep background.
“I have met her, you know,” Isabel solemly informed me. “Zooey. She shook my hand.” She held up her right hand so I could see it. Just looking, you wouldn’t know that it had touched the anointed one. “It was in this hotel, just three months ago. I think she will be vice-president, and then the next president.”
“Would you vote for her?”
“Oh, yes. She is very brave. She lights up the room. She will make life better for women everywhere.” Isabel chattered on as I placed the bugs.
When I finished ten minutes later she was still talking politics. She pressed me for a promise to vote for Zooey. I refused, which made her adamant. Smiling, wishing I hadn’t brought up the subject, I thanked her, wished her luck, and made my escape.
As I waited for the service elevator I called Sarah on my cell phone. “All done,” I reported.
“Joe Billy has a pass for the truck.”
“Any trouble?”
“No. The management is worried about another failure next week. He told them we couldn’t come back next week if we were needed without a parking garage pass, so they gave him one.”
“Terrific.” Getting a place to park the van during the convention had been one of our highest priorities. I was worried that we would have to steal a pass or counterfeit one, since the City Hall office where street parking passes were issued was reputed to be hopelessly inundated with requests this late in the game.
“Guess who has a reservation at this hotel starting tomorrow?” Sarah said.
“Your ex.”
“I don’t have an ex, Carmellini. I’m still a virgin. How about Dorsey O’Shea?”
The virgin fastball went zipping by and I never saw it. Dorsey? My Dorsey? Did the yacht sink? “You sure?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“She must have heard you were going to be in town and couldn’t stay away.”
“Turn on the system,” I said mechanically and slapped the phone shut.
Dorsey O’Shea. Really!
What in the world is going on, anyway?
Willie Varner, Joe Billy Dunn, and I made our escape from the Hilton in the borrowed FBI van. We left Sarah Houston there to wallow in the lap of luxury for a whole night on her own dime. She had said that she was going to get a facial and massage in the spa. Whatever.
Joe Billy was driving. I had him drop me at the New York Public Library on Fifth. He and Willie wanted to find a cold beer, but 1 had too much on my mind.
I climbed the steps between the lions and stopped at the information desk. An hour later I was seated in a cubicle on the second floor with a stack of books in front of me. “Are you a student?” asked the lady who delivered the books.
“Oh, yes,” I lied. “I’m working on my master’s.”
“I thought so,” she said with the authority of one who knows everything, and wheeled her cart away.
The books were all on the California antiwar movement in the late sixties, early seventies. That seemed a good place to start.
I cut to the chase. I flipped to the back of each book and scanned the indexes for familiar names. Since you’re smarter than I am, you probably know the names I was looking for.
I found Zooey Sonnenberg in the first book I tried, a serious, poorly written tome published by an academic press somewhere. I flipped to the pages where her name appeared and read them carefully. She had made a splash in the antiwar movement, that was certain. Passionate and articulate, the daughter of a rich industrialist, she was a natural leader. She did outrageous things, got arrested once, twice, three times … no, five times, according to this author, picked targets for demonstrations, convinced everyone to follow her lead. She even demonstrated against her father’s company, accused them of war crimes. That got a lot of press.
The fifth book in the pile went further into detail, had extensive quotes from manifestos she had written. She was in all the other books I looked at, from a few paragraphs to a chapter or two. I merely scanned the information.
All in all, looking at it from the vantage point of thirty-plus years, it didn’t seem very earth-shattering. She had believed in a cause and fought for it. So? Isn’t that what America is all about?
Then I found another name I was looking for, one Michael Shea. Yep, he was there, helping write those manifestos. I even round him in one of the photos standing beside Zooey, who was skinnier and had more hair then than she did now. She wore it long and frizzy in those days and sported a set of granny glasses.
O’Shea was tall, skinny, and intense. Gawky. Had a scraggly mustache and hair down to his shoulders. He looked like your average hippie… until you looked at the eyes. That was a very smart guy. I wondered what he would have done with his life if he had lived. Sometimes life isn’t fair.
Just for the heck of it I tore the photo from the book, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket.
O’Shea’s wife, the bootlegger’s granddaughter, wasn’t mentioned. Not in the index of any book I examined. Maybe she was there, but she wasn’t famous and didn’t write manifestos or big checks or do outrageous things, and she died soon afterward.
None of the books mentioned O’Shea’s fatal car wreck.
I wondered if I should check on that. All I knew about it was what Dorsey had told me.
With the help of the desk clerk, I got into the microfiche files for the San Francisco Examiner. Found it finally, two paragraphs about O’Shea and his wife, a fatal car wreck in 1972 on the Pacific Coast Highway south of Big
