“You’re doing weddings?” I ask.
“Six Presidents, forty-two kings, countless ambassadors… and Miriam Mendelsohn’s bridal party, complete with a reunion shot of her Pi Phi pledge class,” Kenny says, all excitement and no shame.
“You’re serious?”
“Don’t laugh, Wes — I work two days a month, then get to go sailing all week. All I gotta do is make ’em look like the Kennedys.”
“They’re really beautiful,” Lisbeth says, examining the photos.
“They should be,” Kenny says, straightening one of the frames. “I pour my heart into them. I mean, life doesn’t just peak in the White House, right?”
I nod instinctively. So does Lisbeth, who reaches out and straightens another frame. Just over her shoulder, on a nearby end table, I spot one of Kenny’s most famous photos of Manning: a crisp black-and-white shot of the President in the White House kitchen, fixing his tie in the reflection of a shining silver water pitcher just before his first state dinner. Turning back to the wall of brides, I find a blond beauty queen looking over her own shoulder and admiring her French braid in the mirror. The new shot’s just as good. Maybe even better.
“So how’s the Kingfish?” Kenny adds, referring to Manning. “Still mad at me for taking the shot?”
“He’s not mad at you, Popeye.”
“Really? You tell him you were coming here?”
“You crazy?” I ask. “You have any idea how mad he is at you?”
Kenny laughs, well aware of his social standing in the Manning house. “Some laws are immutable,” he says, pulling a thick three-ring binder off the end table with Manning’s picture. “White used cars sell best… strip clubs only shut down if there’s a fire… and President Leland Manning will never forgive the man who gave him this…” Flipping open the three-ring binder, Kenny reveals a plastic-encased, pristine copy of the most famous presidential photo since Truman held up the Dewey Defeats Truman headline: the black-and-white Cowardly Lion shot — Manning in mid-scream at the shooting, tugged down in the pile as the CEO’s wife became his human shield.
“God, I remember seeing this on the front page the next day,” Lisbeth says, sitting in one of the armchairs as he lowers the binder onto her lap. “This’s… it’s history…”
“What paper?” Kenny asks.
“Palm Beach Post,” Lisbeth replies, looking up.
“Yep, that was me. Another few thousand dollars I’ll never see.”
Reading the incomprehension on Lisbeth’s face, I explain, “Since Kenny was working for the AP at the time, they made all the money from the reprint sales.”
“Hundreds of newspapers and forty-nine magazine covers — all for bubkes,” Kenny says. “Meanwhile, that college kid NASCAR hired to take some shots for their Web site? He was freelance, lucky schmuck. Made $800,000—eight hundred thousand—and he missed the shot!”
“Yeah, but who’s the one who got the Pulitzer for the full sequence?” I point out.
“Pulitzer? That was a pity vote,” Kenny interrupts. “I didn’t squeeze the shutter in a hail of gunfire. I panicked at the noise and accidentally hit the button. Manning’s only in three of the frames.” Turning back to Lisbeth, he adds, “It happened so fast, if you looked away and then looked back, you missed it.”
“Doesn’t look like you missed anything,” Lisbeth says as she turns past the first page of the book and stares down at the double-page spread of contact sheets filled with sixty or so tiny black-and-white shots, each one barely bigger than a postage stamp.
“If you keep flipping, there should be six more — eight rolls total, including reaction shots,” Kenny says. “I’ve got most of them blown to 8 x 10, but you said the library was looking for some new angles, so…” From his pocket, he pulls out a photographer’s loupe — a small, round magnifier to see the details of the photos — and hands it to Lisbeth.
For a half second, she forgets that she introduced herself as library staff. “No… no, that’s great,” she says. “With the ten-year anniversary of the shooting coming up, we just want an exhibit that does more than reprint the same old stuff.”
“Sure, that makes perfect sense,” Kenny says dryly, his Popeye eye narrowing as he calmly stares me down. “With two years to go, it’s much smarter for you to come all the way to Key West than to have me make a few copies and mail them to you at the library.”
Lisbeth freezes. So do I. The Popeye eye is barely a sliver.
“No bullshit, Wes. This for you or for him?” Kenny asks. He says him in that tone that people reserve for God. The same tone we all used during our days in the White House.
“Me,” I say, feeling my throat go dry.
He doesn’t respond.
“I swear, Kenny. On my mom.”
Still nothing.
“Kenny, please—”
“Listen, that’s my phone,” Kenny interrupts, even though the house is dead silent. “Lemme go grab this call. I’ll be upstairs if you need me. Understand?”
I nod, holding my breath. Kenny pats me on my scars like a godfather, then disappears up the staircase, never looking back. It’s not until I hear his upstairs bedroom door close that I finally exhale.
Lisbeth pops open the notebook’s binder rings with a metallic thunk. “You take the loupe — I’ll take the 8 x 10s,” she says, unlatching the first eight sheets and sliding them my way.
Kneeling over the cocktail table, I put the loupe over the first photo and lean in like a jeweler studying a diamond.
The first shot is a close-up on the limo just as we pulled into the pits of the racetrack. Unlike the video at Lisbeth’s office, the background here is crisp and clear. But the camera’s so close up on the car, all I see are the backs of a few NASCAR drivers’ heads and the first row of people sitting in the stands.
One picture down… 287 to go…
62
We’re looking for Kara Lipof,” Rogo said, stepping into the messy room that was as wide and long as two side-by-side bowling lanes.
“Two to the right,” a male archivist with a phone number written on his hand said as he pointed his thumb two desks away.
Housing all eight archivists in a shared space with nothing but a metal bookshelf to separate each desk from the one next to it, the room was littered with paper on every desk, shelf, chair, computer monitor, mini-fridge, and window ledge. Fortunately for Rogo, the paper didn’t cover the plastic nameplate on the front of Kara’s desk.
“Kara?” Rogo asked warmly, always preferring to charm.
From behind her desk, a woman in her early thirties with auburn hair and a trendy floral-print blouse looked up from her computer screen. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” Rogo replied, adding a smile. “I’m Wes Holloway — from the personal office. I spoke to you yesterday about Ron Boyle’s files.” Before she could register any difference in Wes’s and Rogo’s voices, Rogo added the one thing guaranteed to get her attention. “The President wanted to know if you’d pulled them together yet.”
“Yes… of course,” Kara said, fidgeting with the piles on her desk. “It’s just… I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were coming to pick them up.”
“You said there were 36,000 pages to copy,” Rogo added, keeping the smile as he repeated the details Wes gave him. “We figured if we came down here and flipped through them first, we’d save you on the Kinko’s bills.”
Kara laughed. So did Dreidel, just for effect.
“You have no idea how much you’re saving my life right now,” Rogo added. “Thanks to you, I’ll actually live to my twenty-third birthday. Okay… twenty-fifth. Twenty-ninth, tops.”