Cooper approached the witness stand — this particular dark suit was almost certainly Sy Devore (“Tailor to the Stars”) — and mellifluously asked why the plans to take candidate Kennedy through a back stairway, to a second waiting crowd of supporters, had been changed to that route through the Pantry.
His implied point: If the path through the Pantry was last-minute that would suggest the defendant had shot the Senator without premeditation. The defense had stipulated on Day One that Sirhan Sirhan indeed shot Kennedy, and were apparently attempting to prove diminished capacity to keep their client from sucking cyanide. The curly-haired punk didn’t like this tactic and, if the papers were accurate, occasionally got mouthy about it in court, to the judge’s gavel-hammering displeasure.
Right now, however, Sirhan Sirhan sat mute with a slight but noticeable and vaguely imbecilic smile going. So he might not have wanted to admit being nuts, but his demeanor leaned otherwise.
I said to Cooper and the court, “The change of plan came together ten or fifteen minutes before the speech, to accommodate a press conference in the Colonial Room, past the east end of the Pantry. But even so, the Senator would’ve had to come back up and through the Pantry to get to the press conference.”
“He would have gone through the Pantry anyway?” Cooper asked, as if this were news to him. And maybe it was.
“Yes.”
He chewed on that, said, “No further questions,” and headed back to the defense table and resumed his seat.
Then as I passed by into the aisle, Sirhan Sirhan’s defense attorney, Grant Cooper, discreetly winked at me.
Two months later, give or take, I was lounging in the living room of my bungalow at the Pink Palace with my stocking feet up on a coffee table and my eyes on the Huntley-Brinkley Report on the 24” TV that angled to the right of the unlighted fireplace. I swore at Huntley, who had an annoyed school-teacher way about him, finished off the rum-and-Coke I’d made myself, pointed the remote at the set and killed NBC’s nightly news.
Last week, Sirhan Sirhan had been convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy; this morning, six days later, the assassin got sentenced to die in the lethal gas chamber. Why, were there gas chambers that weren’t lethal?
I got up and started building a fresh rum-and-Coke at the wet bar, wondering why I couldn’t get no satisfaction out of that little bastard’s well-deserved fate.
Admittedly, I had a complicated view of such things. I was against the death penalty because I didn’t trust the state or federal government to get my tax refund right, let alone go around killing people in my name who might be guilty. I had done away with the occasional bad person on my own initiative, but then I trusted my own judgment.
On the other hand, what fucking doubt was there about that little wild-haired prick killing my friend?
And yet.
A day had not gone by since that slick mobbed-up shyster Grant Cooper winked at me in court that I hadn’t found myself grinding my teeth over it.
Somebody knocked at the bungalow door.
Here’s how paranoid I was. Though a successful businessman — president and owner of a private investigation agency with offices in three major cities and relationships with smaller firms in half a dozen others, who hadn’t done any field work to speak of in several years — I still kept my nine millimeter Browning automatic next to my car keys and Ray-Bans in their hard-shell case on the little table next to the front door. I did it in Chicago, and I did the same here in my home away from home.
Such paranoia at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where my own A-1 handled the security and the bungalow’s front door had a peephole, might seem ludicrous. But on one occasion, LAPD cops had rousted me here, where I’d had a few other tight moments, so I was... cautious.
I wouldn’t have needed to be — the beautiful woman on my doorstep was no Trojan Horse. Anyway, I had Trojans handy in the bedroom.
“Nathan,” Nita said. She was the kind of woman who could look upset and great at the same time. “Can I come in?”
“May you come in,” I said, stepping aside for her.
Her hair didn’t do that Marlo Thomas flip now, the black tresses brushing her shoulders in a Jeanie Shrimpton layered look. Her turquoise knit short-sleeve shirt, corduroy pants and tan leather boots would have been boyish but for what she stored inside them. The pink lipstick had given way to a dusty rose shade, and her eye makeup was about as subtle as it got in 1969.
She froze for a moment, noticing the nine mil on the little table. “Is that... are you... afraid of something, someone...?”
“That’s just a gift from my late father,” I said.
Big dark eyes looked at me, trying to make sense of that.
“I’m a sentimental soul,” I explained, taking her by the elbow and walking her to the couch. I’d left my rum-and-Coke on a coaster on the coffee table.
Looming over her a bit, I asked, “Can I get you something?”
“Ginger ale,” she said numbly.
As if we were still back in the Royal Suite.
I put together a glass of Canada Dry on ice and handed it over, then sat beside her. I slipped my arm along the upper edge of the couch but respected her space.
“What’s wrong, Nita?” Didn’t take a master detective to deduce it must be something to do with the Sirhan death sentence.
“I’ve almost called you a dozen times.” She was shaking her head, the layers of black hair shifting here, settling there, like tectonic plates before an earthquake. Looking at the fireplace with no fire in it, she said, “It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Being part of a trial like that and not hearing what the other witnesses have to say.”
“You didn’t miss anything where I was concerned,” I said. “I didn’t share anything you don’t already know.”
The big brown eyes flew to me. “I bet they didn’t ask you much. Either side!”
That was true and I admitted it.
“I told them everything,” she said, “and they wrote it all down, but they never asked me about any of it in court! Not really.”
“What are you talking about, Nita?”
She leaned close, gripped my left hand tight. “I heard gunshots coming from someplace not far from my right, when Sirhan was already being subdued by you and those other men, several feet in front of me! Shots at my right, Nathan, with people falling all around me, a man sliding down a wall making a bloody smear like a fucking snail. Then... then Senator Kennedy lying on the floor, on his back, bleeding. And I’m screaming, ‘Oh no! Oh my God, no!’”
She lurched into my arms and hugged tight, her lips near my left ear as she said, in a ragged whisper, “Next thing I knew, I was ducking down, in utter shock about what was happening... then... then... I passed out.”
She wept into my shoulder. I held her. After maybe a minute, she slipped from my embrace and dug a hanky out of her pants pocket. Her scant eye makeup was running and she dried her eyes and wiped them off, embarrassed suddenly. She composed herself. Held the hanky in her lap in two hands, swiveled toward me on the couch.
“I passed out,” she said, “but only for seconds. Still, when I woke up? My clothes were rumpled, even torn, damp in patches, and my belt was gone and one of my shoes missing. I wasn’t hurt bad, really, but I seemed to ache everywhere. I could tell... could tell I’d been... trampled.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. Gently. Giving my eyes to hers. “It’s all right,” I said, as people do when it isn’t.