Not a good sign.
“I can’t take any more,” she said.
“You have a room here?”
She nodded. Something like a smile formed. “But you’re not... not getting lucky tonight, Nate.”
“Nobody is. Let me take you.”
She was on the third floor, where I walked her to the door. She faced me with both hands in mine. I kissed her forehead.
“Do you ever get to Chicago?” I asked.
She nodded. “A gig now and then. Dinner theater.”
“Call me when you’re in town.”
“I will. A-1 Detective Agency, right?”
“First in the Yellow Pages.”
She gave me a kiss on the mouth. Quick. Again, the start of something or the finish? Would this tragedy bind us or separate us? Who could say...?
She slipped inside with a little girl’s wave.
Back on the fifth floor I almost bumped into two phone company employees in coveralls who were hauling the extra phones out of the press room. The door to 511 was open and it was empty in there, some trash on the floor but nothing like the Pantry’s, the workmen pulling wires from the wall and coiling them up, routinely professional as if this night were like any other.
When they had gone, 511 was empty. I went to that bathroom where so many political confabs had gone down just hours ago and where Nita and I put the speech together from Bob’s notes. A shaving kit had been left behind — electric shaver, aftershave, powder. The bath towels were fresh, only hand towels had been used.
Impulsively, I got out of my suit and piled it and underwear and socks with my shoes outside the can, where they’d be away from the moisture. My belt was lost to history. Then I took a long shower, good and hot; hand soap was still in its wrapper. This was one of those tubs with showerhead and curtains affairs. I didn’t close the curtains and the mirror fogged up. I had to towel off the glass before using the electric shaver and then splashing on some Mennen’s.
When I put my shirt and suit back on, they were dry. They didn’t smell wonderful, but you can’t have everything. Just having them not damp made all the difference. I felt close to human, which was nothing to feel proud about.
I returned to the Royal Suite. Several familiar faces were among those sitting on the floor around the TV, others in chairs and the pulled-over couch — John Lewis shaking his head, George Plimpton with golf-ball eyes, drinking in the latest news. This was nowhere I wanted to be.
Instead I walked aimlessly, almost prowling the sprawling hotel — taking the elevator down to the massive yellow lobby with its pillars and fountains and its red-and-black carpet, leather furniture, assorted ferns. Anywhere you went, it seemed, police were on hand; but not once was I asked for I.D.
The Embassy Ballroom was crawling with scavengers, gleefully gathering souvenirs, posters, banners, rejecting any straw hats with snapped brims and insisting only on the best examples, tossing the others aside. The platform had been taken down. Removed like Bob on his gurney or the gunman into custody. I walked across where we’d all stood and slipped through the golden curtains into the dark corridor and took the trip down the slight incline to those double doors.
I’d expected to see the yellow crime-scene tape common to California but fairly rare elsewhere. But none had been used. I entered, pausing to note the bullet holes in the wood framing. The slugs had, as Nita said, been flying; of course that bushy-haired shooter had been blasting haphazardly away.
I’d expected lab rats would be crawling around the Pantry while the real vermin quivered in their hidey-holes; but the forensics team was already gone, as if the importance of the crime had intimidated them away. Or maybe they were off getting an early breakfast from a more appetizing source. All those policemen around and no police work in progress. The LAPD wasn’t everything Jack Webb cracked it up to be.
At any rate, the place was empty, nothing but the dirty floor, rusty ice-making machine and those steel-topped serving carts in a row. Hard to imagine all those people stuffed in here. The kitchen itself, nearby, was quiet. It was about four in the morning and room service was unavailable now and prep for breakfast not yet started.
Tape on that filthy concrete at my feet marked off where Bob and the others had fallen after the bullets took them down. But a single rose lay in the midst of Bob’s taped-off position. On the wall a homemade sign — apparently predating the shooting, a welcoming for the candidate — said: THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.
Finally I took a cab out to Frankenheimer’s place in Malibu, where I’d left my car. I rode in silence and darkness and the dawn was thinking of happening when the cabbie let me out.
The director was standing on the beach in chinos, a loose shirt and bare feet, hands in his pockets, staring out at the ocean. In the middle of an irregular band of yellow along the horizon burned the bright button of the sun, starting its rise into cloud cover that would soon mute it. The water, calm as pebbled glass, its purple highlighted gold, didn’t know it was day yet.
I walked out to him.
He glanced at me, tall, tan, in Ray-Bans. His body still faced the ocean. “Nate Heller.”
“Yeah. The bodyguard. You oughta make a movie about me. Some very famous people died on my watch. I worked for Huey Long, you know.”
That was almost a smile. “I didn’t know. But don’t beat yourself up. Bob wouldn’t allow security to carry guns, ever.”
“Tell me about it.”
“...He’s not going to make it.”
“No. Digging a bullet out of his brain, we probably don’t want him to. A vegetable doesn’t make much of a president.”
The Ray-Bans stared at me. “Are you that cynical, Heller?”
“I’m trying to be.”
He nodded a little, getting that, shifting his eyes back to the sea.
It was six A.M. when I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow. Lights were on, and I hadn’t left them that way. For the hundredth time I wished that nine millimeter were under my arm. I told myself the A-1 agents handling security at the Pink Palace made it unlikely there was a threat.
But I went in tensed.
Someone lay stretched out on the couch opposite the fireplace, where flames danced; last night had been cold and today so far was no different. My son threw a blanket off and ran to me. He looked at me with red eyes, his face eerily like mine forty years ago. Like Frankenheimer, he was in his bare feet, but otherwise a McCarthy t-shirt and jeans.
Lower lip quivering, voice quavering, he said, “Dad, I’m so sorry.”
And he hugged me, hugged me hard. My arms went around him. That was when some tears slipped out and mingled with the borrowed aftershave. But for the first time since the gunfire, I was smiling.
Bob didn’t die for another day. He was 42. I was already on my way back to Chicago, taking an afternoon flight out on the fifth. If the cops wanted an interview, they knew where to find me.
Five
By one A.M. Friday, June 7, over a thousand mourners were already lined up along East 51st Street, waiting to get into St. Patrick’s, the Gothic cathedral where Bob’s body lay. Among them were college kids with hair like my son’s, black folks including vets in uniform and sometimes wheelchairs, assorted Puerto Ricans and Asians and white people too, all kinds of Americans rich, poor and in between. The church would open at 5:30 and they would begin filing past the pale mahogany coffin on the black steel frame, with the TV cameras and their glaring lights intruding much as they had in the Pantry.
The press and the people were poised to witness the pomp and circumstance of a funeral mass, but I wouldn’t be among them. My mother had been a Catholic but she died young and I never attended a mass in my life, and wasn’t about to start now. My father, who’d been an apostate Jew running a political bookstore on the South Side, had considered my sweet gentle mother’s beliefs nonsense, or else he wouldn’t have committed suicide over his only son, the crooked cop.