“You never write,” I said, “you never call.”
Her smile was warm if embarrassed. “You never write. You never call.”
I played at looking hurt, but kept my near-whisper light. “You were in Chicago. Well, Chicago area, anyway. I saw the ads. Pheasant Run Playhouse in St. Charles. Opposite Captain Kirk, wasn’t it?”
She shook her head, embarrassed but amused. “No — Mr. Spock. Visit to a Small Planet. You could have looked me up.”
“You didn’t look me up.”
“You could have bought a ticket.”
“Didn’t have a date.”
“Too bad. You might’ve finally got lucky.”
I didn’t expect to laugh here at the Hall of Justice today. But I did, a little. “Took Bob to bring us back together.”
We both knew that was also what had kept us apart. It didn’t need to be said: we’d met cute, like in a movie romance, but the film that followed had been a horror show.
I nodded toward the others in the several rows behind us, narrow pews on loan from a small country church. “I don’t recognize anybody. Busboys from the Pantry, I think, unless they’re Chavez’s Mariachi band. And isn’t that the hotel man, a maître d’ I guess, Karl something? Who guided Bob off stage and...”
To the Pantry.
“Yes,” she said. “No famous faces, though.”
No Ram lineman, no Olympian, no New York columnist.
“Just ours,” I said.
She pointed a gently accusing forefinger. “You’re the famous one. ‘Private Eye to the Stars.’”
I held up a palm. “A minor celebrity at best, and if you ever use that shopworn phrase again, I’ll spank you.”
“Promise?”
I laughed again. “That’s a good sign.”
“What is?”
“We’re flirting again. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”
She shook her head. “Wouldn’t put money on it. We’re just flirting ’cause we’re nervous. At least I am. This is my first murder trial.”
“Except for that Perry Mason episode. Case of the Sinful Starlet, wasn’t it?”
The smile that got out of her was sweet and warm. “That wasn’t what the episode was called. And I didn’t play the starlet.”
“Their loss.” I smiled too.
But right then our conversation ran out of steam — we were sobered by the circumstances, and genuinely embarrassed we’d both sort of ducked each other since that awful night.
Finally she leaned close and asked, “Have you kept up?”
Was that Chanel Number 5?
“With what?”
“With what do you think? The case. The trial. All the ins and outs of it.”
“No.”
The big brown eyes got bigger. “Oh, I have! How could you not?”
“Just didn’t.”
That wasn’t entirely true. I had glanced at the stories in the paper, particularly the ones about Sirhan Sirhan and his defense team, one lawyer’s name jumping uncomfortably out at me; and also checked out who the chief prosecutors would be, thinking D.A. Evelle Younger himself might handle it. But he’d assigned a deputy D.A. instead. You could bet Younger would be driving from the back seat.
We sat quietly for a while.
Then she asked, “Think we’ll ever put it behind us?”
“Maybe after today.”
We sat quietly again, but just for a few moments.
“Next time I’m in your part of the world,” she promised, “I’ll call.”
“Good. Same here.”
“You in town this time for long, Nathan?”
I shook my head. “Heading back tonight, but I’ll be back in early April — A-1’s doing some hiring. You can call me at the office, or at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” I got a card from my wallet and wrote a phone number on it; I already had her contact info, unused so far. “We really will get together.”
Another empty promise?
“We definitely will... oh! This is me.” A uniformed guard was summoning her from the doorway. “Watch my purse will you? This may take a while.”
But it didn’t. She wasn’t gone longer than ten minutes, coming back with an expression that fluctuated between confusion and irritation. Now the guard was curling his finger at me — I was next. I slid out of the bench and handed her the purse as she stood there fuming.
“What a fucking crock,” she said.
That jarred me a little. She’d never said that on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched.
“Bunch of bullshit.” Her eyes were huge, white all around, and her pink-coated lips were tight. “Why didn’t they ask me about the girl in the polka-dot dress?”
She had me there.
Then she rushed off, her low heels clicking like castanets, which got the busboys’ attention or maybe it was her nice hip motion; in any case, the uniformed guard almost had to jump out of the way.
From the witness stand, I got my first good look at the players. The gallery was full, of course, for the hottest ticket in town. Three middle-aged men in dark suits sat at the prosecution table and three more middle-aged men in dark suits sat at the defense, like interchangeable parts. By way of stark contrast, the defendant seemed at first to be wearing white pajamas, but that was some kind of prison garb he’d been provided. He looked very small, this swarthy bushy-haired man, with his eyes wide like a child at the zoo and his mouth hanging open like the monkey house was really interesting.
When I took the witness stand, Deputy D.A. David Fitts approached me with his shaggy black eyebrows arched and the small mouth under a pendulous nose in the grooved oval face pinched in an O, emitting questions like Alice’s caterpillar spelling out vowels in smoke. All very measured, but the queries covered only why after the speech I hadn’t stayed at Bob’s side (I was helping Ethel down from the stage), why catching up with the candidate was slow (the human traffic jam), what I had heard (“something like firecrackers”) and what I had seen (the defendant shooting, Bob falling).
This interrogation seemed insufficient to me, lacking detail in what I was asked, limiting what I could answer. At once I understood Nita’s frustration, but didn’t share it, really. I knew an open-and-shut case when I saw one. And I had seen this one from the inside.
However.
The lead defense attorney, Grant Cooper, was a big name in greater Los Angeles, a former president of the California Bar, a smiling quipster to the press, an “Attorney to the Stars” (ouch), and a criminal defense lawyer who had never lost a client to the gas chamber.
More significantly, his non-movie-star clients included a number of prominent gangland figures, including Johnny Roselli, who had been a key player in Operation Mongoose, the CIA plan to collaborate with major mobsters to assassinate Fidel Castro. John and Robert Kennedy had not initiated the scheme, but they’d signed off on it.
Cooper’s was the name that had jumped out in my sketchy perusal of the Sirhan Sirhan coverage in the papers. His mob mouthpiece reputation was no secret — he’d had to come aboard Sirhan Sirhan’s defense at the last minute because he was representing Roselli in a Beverly Hills Friars Club card-cheating case.
Oddly, the noted defense lawyer rather resembled the Deputy D.A. — similar long face and steel-gray hair and thick black eyebrows, but more years on him and wearing black thick-rimmed glasses snatched off the corpse of Buddy Holly. The similarity of the two lawyers, like the symmetry of the defense and prosecution tables, made it look like there was only one side to this trial.