I was dropping her at the Statler. She nodded and went in, while I went and parked.
Shortly thereafter, up in her room, perched side by side on her couch/bed, I said, “Ruby is right — don’t sit on this. Get it written and out there. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, we’ll all be safer.”
She was having a gin and tonic and I sipped at a bottle of Coke.
“I don’t know, Nate,” she said, frowning in thought, looking as cute as she was famous. “I owe Bennett a book. That’s much bigger than a story.”
“Doesn’t it take a year or more for one to come out?”
“Not with a hot topic like this. They’ll rush it — three months maybe, no more than five.”
“That’s a long time in Dallas. What about the Johnson stuff?”
“Think I should hold that back?”
“Probably. It’s beyond the pale, Ruby’s just speculating, and anyway that might get the whole project spiked. Remember what happened with the Marilyn story.”
“I’ll use my head.” She took my hand and squeezed. “This isn’t over, Nate.”
“Sure it is. Go home. Write your story or your book, whichever suits you. And go back to covering Liz and Dick, and what does and doesn’t flop on Broadway this season.”
She touched my chest with a gloved finger. “We’re going to New Orleans next.”
“No we aren’t.”
She nodded firmly, and her big blue eyes locked onto me. “Yes we are. Unless you want to send me there by myself.”
Fuck.
“Fuck,” I said. “All right. When?”
“I want to get my thoughts down in chapter form. Or maybe it’ll be an article, but anyway written. I’ll send you a copy, plus a dupe of the tape, and arrange for an interview with that Ferrie character. And maybe a few others in the ol’ Big Easy. Make it... two weeks from next Monday. I’ll book us a suite at the Roosevelt near the French Quarter. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I mean, we’ll talk on the phone, before then, but... when’s your plane?”
“Three hours.”
“Mine’s in two.” She gave me her sexiest smile, which was fairly sexy. “Did you know that there’s nothing more erotic to a girl reporter than a scoop?”
“I’ll take two scoops,” I said, and put my hands on her breasts.
Chapter 15
On Monday morning, back in Chicago, when I rolled into the A-1’s suite of offices around ten A.M., everyone was happy to see me, or at least pretended to be — I was, after all, the boss. Millie asked me how Dallas was and I told her great, and that I’d gotten her John Wayne’s autograph, but she merely informed me that John Wayne didn’t live in Texas. She was learning. Gladys dug down deep and found a smile for me and said she was pleased to have me back, and I chose to believe her, though mostly she just wanted to remind me about the eleven A.M. staff meeting, as if we hadn’t been doing that for decades.
I took my office manager up on her standard offer of coffee, and I was drinking it at my desk when Lou Sapperstein knocked shave-and-a-haircut, then leaned in without waiting for a response. His eyebrows were climbing his endless forehead, the dark eyes glittering behind the wire-frame bifocals.
I waved him in, and this big man in his seventies settled his still-brawny frame into the black leather client’s chair, his own cup of coffee in hand. He wore a pink button-down shirt, red necktie with matching suspenders, and navy-blue slacks, proof that Pop Art was injecting way too much color into the world.
He asked, “How about filling me in on your summer vacation?”
“It’s September, Lou.”
“Your skills of observation remain keenly honed. What the hell happened down on the Panhandle?”
“Dallas isn’t in the Panhandle.”
“Too bad, because it’s one of the few Texas terms I know. What gives?”
After our client, Mrs. Joseph Plett, had her double-indemnity claim belatedly honored, I’d been scheduled to come right back. All Lou knew was that I’d decided to extend my stay in Big D, having run into Flo Kilgore.
“I was just helping Flo out with a little investigative work,” I said, probably too casually.
“In Dallas,” he said, well aware Flo was an old flame of mine. “Covering a way-off-Broadway play, was she?”
“Not important.”
His jaw tightened. “It’s Kennedy, isn’t it? You took a left turn into that, out of the Billie Sol Estes thing. Or is that a right-wing turn?”
His skills of observation remained keenly honed, too.
“You talked to Bill Queen in the Manhattan office,” I said.
“I did. Also, over recent months, Miss Kilgore has received a lot of attention for her columns on the assassination. Thanks to her celebrity, she’s the most credible of those conspiracy kooks.”
“She’s not a kook,” I said, but didn’t add that it was a conspiracy.
“Is getting into that area wise, you think, after what happened?”
“After what happened?”
He sat forward, on the verge of losing a usually kept cool. “After you and your son almost got run down! Tell me you weren’t looking into other loose ends down there that got conveniently clipped off.”
The image of a once-pretty dishwater blonde floated across my mind — Rose Cheramie.
“I don’t keep much from you, Lou, but this time it might be better all around if—”
“Nate,” he said, shifting in his chair, “we just landed a huge insurance paycheck for a client by sniffing at a suspicious suicide tied to a bunch of suspicious suicides in Texas. We still have your friend Mac Wallace under surveillance in Anaheim, and—”
“Keep him that way.”
“How long?”
“Indefinitely. It’s okay, Lou. I get a good rate. I have an in.”
“Nate, it’s just... what are you getting yourself into? What are you getting the agency into?”
I raised a hand in a gesture that was half stop and half peace. “Lou, I have been encouraging Flo to shut down her investigation. She has more than enough to write a hard-hitting piece of journalism that will get her the respect she craves, and maybe make some useful waves.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Potentially it is, but it’s also potentially very high profile, and our role in it won’t hurt business one little bit.”
He sighed, nodded, leaned back. “You said you were encouraging her to shut it down, though?”
“Right. I’m meeting her in New Orleans two weeks from today for a few follow-up interviews, and then I promise you I will either convince her to write ‘thirty’ to this thing, or walk away.”
He was shaking his head. “Nate, I’m just an old Pickpocket Detail dick.”
“Right. You’re an old dick. I get that.”
“I feel like I should give you some fatherly advice right now, but you’re a little old for that, and I’ll be damned if I know what it is. What’s in New Orleans, anyway?”
“Besides Carlos Marcello, you mean? Possibly some of the people who killed Kennedy, or who helped kill him.”
“Jesus.” He shook his head again. “Jesus H. Christ. You’re going to get us all killed.”
“No. Honestly, Lou. I’m on top of this. Really.”
“Okay,” he said. He reached over and collected my empty coffee cup, just helping out his wife. “Okay... Uh, listen. It may not mean anything, but Mac Wallace isn’t in California.”
“What?”
“He flew out Saturday morning to Dallas. Does that matter? Your family is in LA, you’re in Chicago, your friend Flo is in New York. Who does that leave in Dallas?”
Fourteen or fifteen witnesses we’d interviewed.