“Thought when I come up with your home number, there in, where is it? Forest Park? Thought we’d finally connect. But you got one of them tape machines. Pretty fancy hardware.”
I gestured with my rum and Coke. “That guy James Bond, in the movies? He was based on me.”
He chuckled. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised. Your name turns up in the damnedest places.”
Peering over my own sunglasses, I said, “I know you’ve come a long way, Tex. So I’m going to do you the courtesy of lettin’ ya speak your piece.”
“And then you’re gonna tell me to haul my fat Texas ass out of here.”
“I would never insult a man’s home state.”
“You knew her, didn’t you?”
“Who?” But I knew who he meant.
He stared at my sunglasses with his sunglasses. “Anybody but me ever track you down, on this subject?”
“...No.”
“I mean, you been talked to enough. I dug back through the files. There was a time you gave plenty of interviews, droppin’ all them famous names.”
“Stirring up business.” I shrugged.
He made a click in his cheek, and his words made me sound like a pecan pie he liked the taste of. “Crony of Frank Nitti and Eliot Ness alike. At the Biograph when Dillinger got his. Pal of Bugsy Siegel’s.” He shifted his body from side to side, like he was really settling into this one-way conversation. “Were you really one of Huey Long’s bodyguards, night they plugged him?”
I sipped my drink. “Another proud moment.”
He filled his chest with air; it was like a dirigible inflating. Then he breathed it out, saying, “’Course, there are those people that say you got a line of bullshit a mile wide and two miles long.”
“Question is, how deep?”
“People that say you took all sorts of credit, for all sorts of famous cases, made yourself ten kinds of important, just to build up your business. That none of this wild shit you talk about ever really happened to ya. You really have an affair with Marilyn Monroe?”
I took my sunglasses off, tossed them on the grass. “I think you’re about there.”
The bathroom tile grin flashed again. “Out the door, you mean? Or knocked on my tail?... I figure your connection with Lindbergh’s how you and A. E. hooked up. You worked that kidnapping, a while, didn’t you? Only weren’t you still on the Chicago police, at the time?”
I sat up, swiveled and faced him. “Is there something you want? Or are you just another mosquito, buzzing around a while? Before you draw blood.”
“And get swatted? Can I just show you somethin’, ’fore I head out? I mean, I come a long way... from Dallas?”
He withdrew a piece of paper from the pocket of his paint-splotch shirt; unfolded, it was a photocopy of a fairly crude drawing, about on the level of a really poor police artist’s sketch.
“One of my associates has what you might call a modicum of art training,” he said, “and worked this up from a native’s description.”
The drawing, rough as it was, was clearly a portrait of a ruggedly handsome young man in a priest’s collar.
“Several natives we showed this to,” he said, “remembered this priest, though not his name. They say he had reddish-brown hair... kinda like yours must’ve been, ’fore the sides turned white. About your size... six foot... your build, ’fore you got that little paunch. No offense. Ain’t near the spare tire I’m carryin.’”
“Natives where?”
Now his smile turned sly. “Little bitty slice of paradise in the Pacific, no more’n five miles long, fifteen wide. In the Mariana Islands?”
I said nothing.
“’Course the first time I seen it,” he said, “it was about the opposite of paradise, Saipan was. Never saw such a landscape of total fucking devastation. You see, I was there with the Second Division.”
“Marine, huh?”
“Twenty-fifth Regiment. I was there when Captain Sasaki and five hundred other Jap sons of bitches tried to break through at Nafutan Point.”
“So I’m supposed to warm up to you now, ’cause you were a jarhead, too?”
“You know what they say — Semper Fi, Mac. Guadalcanal, weren’t you?”
I thought about cold-cocking him, but only nodded.
“Got out on a Section Eight, I understand. Funny. You don’t look like a nutcase to me.”
“You might be surprised.”
“Of course, according to that Look magazine article, it was battle fatigue. They even made you sound like a kind of hero, holdin’ off the Japs in a foxhole with your boxer pal, Barney Ross. He was a drug addict, wasn’t he? What a life you’ve led.” He folded the photocopy back up and returned it to his pocket. “You want me to leave now?”
I didn’t say anything. Another boat was streaking by; no pretty girl tailing this one, though.
“Nobody ever connected you to Saipan before,” he asked cagily, “did they?”
“No,” I admitted.
“I mean, you been talked to about her. You mentioned her in passing, to this reporter and that one. More of your celebrity name-dropping, to feather your business nest. I know you were her bodyguard for a while, in what, ’thirty-five? Least they didn’t bump her off under your nose, like they done with Mayor Cermak and the Kingfish.”
My hands were turning into fists. “I’m sure there’s a point to this.”
“But nobody ever noticed your name come up in the Mantz divorce proceedings. I never saw that in print anywhere — did you?”
“You have been digging.”
He gave a shrug of the head. “So have a lot of people, for a lot of years. I’ve made three trips back to Saipan so far... and I got another one coming up. I want you to come with me.”
I just laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“You know, there’ve been lots of expeditions...”
“They haven’t found squat.”
His smile was small but knowing. “So... you paid attention. You followed the news stories. You read any of the books?”
“No,” I lied.
“Not even Goerner’s? CBS news correspondent, that’s hot shit. Then there’s Davidson, and Gervais—”
“And you. Speaking of which, who the hell are you?”
“I won’t tell ya unless you shake my hand,” he said, shambling to his feet. “I mean, I already put up with more indignity than any good Texan had ever ought to suffer. If you won’t shake a fellow jarhead’s hand, then fuck you and goodbye, Nathan Heller.”
“I don’t know whether to throw your ass out,” I said, “or invite you in.”
“Well, make up your mind, pard. Either way, I come prepared for a good time.”
And he stuck the paw out again.
I laughed once, and shook the goddamn thing.
“Let’s go inside,” I said. The sun had gone under and the afternoon was slipping away, cool dark shadows shimmering on the waterway; no more pretty girls today.
His name was J. T. “Buddy” Busch, and he was from Dallas; there was oil money in his family, but he’d made his fortune in real estate. In recent years, he’d been pursuing various exotic business ventures more for “the sheer fucking fun of it” than profit.
Amelia had fascinated him since childhood, from when she was first in the news for crossing the Atlantic in 1928; officially the “captain,” she’d been a passenger to a male pilot and male navigator, though that fact was sluffed over, in the press. But later — five years to the day after Charles Lindbergh — she became the first woman to make a solo Atlantic crossing. Lady Lindy had set many records in her Lockheed Vega monoplane, her feminine yet tomboy image sending mixed but intriguing signals to a public that included a little son of Texas named Buddy Busch.
Buddy was an aviation buff who never learned to fly; later I learned he had retained his childish enthusiasms, as evidenced by movie posters (Tailspin Tommy), comic books (“Flyin’ Jenny”), and vintage model planes (Spirit of St. Louis) in a museumlike room of his Dallas near-mansion.