Max Allan Collins
Too Many Bullets
For DAVE THOMAS
friend and collaborator.
Today’s topic...
“Success was so assured and inevitable
that his death seems to have cut into
the natural order of things.”
“This could very easily happen.”
“If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot.”
Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time and contradictory source material will allow), fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones — all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.
Part One
The Path Through the Pantry
June 1968
One
At the end of this narrative, certain guilty people go free. You may even feel I’m one of them. Some will pay, while others will not, enjoying the unearned happy remainders of their lives. And any reader inclined to dismiss everything ahead as a conspiracy theory might keep in mind that conspiracy — like robbery and rape, murder and treason — is a real crime on the books. History, I’m afraid, is a mystery story without a satisfying resolution.
But know this: I did get some of the bastards.
The sullen sky seemed to know something we didn’t. Fog lingered over a wind-riled sea under a gray ceiling while a mist kept spitting at us like a cobra too bored to strike. Gun-metal breakers shooting white sparks rolled in like dares or maybe warnings.
It was a lousy day at Malibu Beach, so of course Bob Kennedy was helping his ten-year-old son Michael build a sandcastle while twelve-year-old David swam against the tide — like Mr. Toad, going nowhere in particular — and nine-year-old Mary and eleven-year-old Courtney laughed and danced in the relentless surf.
U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy wore an unlikely loud pair of Hawaiian swim trunks and a nubby short-sleeve shirt as light blue as his eyes. I had on borrowed red swim trunks and my own Navy blue polo, the patriotic complement of my pale Irish complexion undone by a tan realized lazing around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel on better days.
I was, and for that matter still am, Nathan Heller, president and founder of the A-1 Detective Agency out of Chicago, putting time in at our Los Angeles branch. In such instances the Pink Palace (as the Beverly Hills Hotel was known) provided me with a bungalow, a perk for the A-1 handling their security. I’d come out this afternoon to this private stretch of sand at my friend Bob’s request.
None of us called him Bobby, by the way. Not even Ethel, who was in the beach house playing Scrabble with two other kids of theirs, sixteen-year-old Kathleen and fifteen-year-old Joe. Normally all of them would be frolicking in the California sun, only of course there wasn’t any. The wife and older siblings had shown enough sense to come in out of the chill wind off the ocean, away from fog drifting over the water like the smoke of a distant fire.
Bob Kennedy was forty-two and I was a year younger than Cary Grant, a fit 185 pounds with my reddish brown hair graying only at the temples. Bob was fit too, five ten and slender, wiry in that way that keeps you going. But he’d been campaigning his ass off and had admitted to me he’d damn near collapsed after doing 1,200 miles in twelve hours — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Watts, San Diego and back to L.A.
“Ethel and I slept till ten today,” he’d admitted.
I was here filling in. Ex-FBI man Bill Barry had come down with Montezuma’s Revenge after the Cesar Chavez swing, and tonight at the Ambassador Hotel I would mostly be at Ethel’s side when her husband was braving crowds. I was already wishing I hadn’t said yes and the frosty breakers rolling in and the spitting wind had nothing to do with it.
Bob had called last night.
I said, “Bill was in charge of security, right?”
That familiar nasal high-pitched voice came back with, “Uh, right. That’s right.”
“How many people does he have working for him?”
“None.”
“What does that mean, none?”
“Bill’s all the security I need.”
“Oh, that’s crazy. I can bring half a dozen guys along and—”
“No. The hotel took on extra guards. They have something like seventeen men in uniform lined up.”
“Okay. How much LAPD presence?”
“None.”
“Does that mean the same thing as the other ‘none’?”
“It does. Nate, police presence sends the wrong message. Anyway, I, ah, am not on the best of terms with Chief Reddin.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Oh, He’ll be there, pursuant to availability.”
That caustic sense of humor often caught me off guard, and before I could muster a comeback, he said quickly, “Come out and have lunch with us around noon and we’ll talk more.”
He’d already told me he was staying at film director John Frankenheimer’s. My name would be left at the guard shack where you entered the Malibu Colony. Well, at least the director of Seven Days in May maintained some security.
The two girls in their swim caps and one-piece swimsuits were splashing each other and laughing and now and then their joyful yelps would escalate into little girlish screams.
Bob tousled Michael’s hair and left him in charge of castle building, then joined me on our towel-spread patch of beach.
“That’s the one consolation if I lose,” he said.
That famous boyish face had deep lines now and the blond-tinged brown hair had gray highlights.
“What consolation is that?”
“Spending more time with my kids.”
“You really think you might lose?”
He shrugged a little. “Touch and go. And if I do win, there’ll be a world of bitterness to overcome.”
“McCarthy you mean.”
Bob nodded. “Already a lot of resentment from Gene and, uh, his young supporters.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “My son is campaigning for him.”
“Good for him. How old is Sam now?”
“Twenty-two. Another year of college and he’ll be draft fodder.”
Bob’s mouth tightened. “Not if I can help it.”
Sam, my only child, was a senior taking Business Administration at USC. He still lived at home in Bel Air with my ex-wife and her film director husband, who was no John Frankenheimer but did all right. When I was in town, Sam would bunk in with me at my Pink Palace bungalow. We’d go to movies, concerts, sporting events; he’d let his old man buy him good meals. We got along well.
“Fuck you, Dad!” he’d said this morning.
I had just told him about my call from Bob. That I’d be working security for the RFK campaign tonight.
Sam was a good-looking kid, by which I mean he resembled me, excluding his shoulder-length hair and mustache (and MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT t-shirt and bell-bottom jeans). I suppose twenty-two wasn’t really a kid, but when you’re a year younger than Cary Grant, it seems like it. We rarely argued and hadn’t talked politics beyond both being against the war in Vietnam, neither of us wanting him to go off and die in a rice paddy.