“I’m guessing you didn’t let it stand there.”
He shook his head. “No, I went back to SUS HQ, where I was told, in no uncertain terms, that nobody from SUS had been to Rampart, much less removed copies of any report. And when I made more inquiries at the station, my superiors were openly uncooperative... and irritated.”
“What do you make of that?”
“Well, it’s a cover-up... but why?” Shore looked right at me and held his gaze there; before, I’d gotten glances out of him and nothing more. “It made no sense to me. A sloppy investigation is one thing, a mishandled, misguided attempt to avoid another Dallas situation... but doing something deliberately wrong? Why the hell?”
“You said ‘made’ no sense. Is it making sense now?”
He raised his hands to chest level, palms out, as if a gun were trained on him. “Mr. Heller, I haven’t been trying to find things out, you understand. No investigating on my own. After a while, you just try to keep your head down... not that it’s done me any good.”
“What things have you learned without trying?”
He sighed. Shook his head. Stopped like a man who’d dropped some things he was carrying and felt put upon, having to bend down and pick them up.
“Evidence from the case has been routinely destroyed,” he said, looking straight ahead again, “if it wasn’t going to be used in the trial. Thousands of interviews were trashed, only a few hundred preserved — what might have been important testimony, gone. Two months after the killing... just two damn months... several thousand photographs from the investigation were burned up.”
“What, by accident?”
A grunted chuckle. “Hardly. In a medical-waste incinerator at L.A. County General, is what I heard. On a similar note, a roll of photos from an eyewitness, who said he had shots of the shooting, were confiscated. Teenage shutterbug from Canada, seeing how things were done in these great United States. Whether those photos were among the burned, I couldn’t tell you. But none of the kid’s photos were brought forward at the trial. And a dozen witnesses at the Ambassador Hotel, not just the Bernsteins, saw the girl in the polka-dot dress, just weren’t important enough to make the grade.”
“And what about the Bernsteins?”
“Who knows? The note I gave that juvie detective disappeared. I asked him about it and he said he passed it along. But it’s gone, and nobody ever located that old Jewish couple, let alone questioned them.”
“I’m over sixty myself, you know,” I said with a smile. “And with a last name like Heller, I’m not Scandinavian.”
He smiled, too, slightly embarrassed. “No offense. Cops tend to size people up.”
“They do. And I’ve got you sized up as an honest one.”
“I... I appreciate that.”
I cocked my head forward to make him look at me. “How credible is it, to you, that this could’ve been a cover-up, right out of the gate? I’m from Chicago and even I have to question that.”
He shrugged. “You talked to Sandy Serrano. You know what she was put through. That polygraph examiner should’ve gone to jail for that. And, by the way, do you know who that polygraph examiner was?”
“Hermano. Lt. Manny Hermano, she said.”
“Right. He’s the lead supervisor at SUS.”
“So I guess it makes sense he questioned her.”
“Mr. Heller — doesn’t that name mean anything to you... Manuel Hermano?”
“No. Like I said, I’m from Chicago.”
His reply seemed, at first, like a non sequitur. “It’s no secret, you know, even among the rank and file, that the CIA and the LAPD are in bed together.”
No secret to me, either. I knew the Company had sub rosa ties with police departments all over America, swapping special training and equipment for ignoring surveillance and certain break-ins.
“And,” Shore was saying, “here’s an interesting little coincidence — Manny Hermano retired from the department a year and a half ago... after a big retirement dinner, all the top brass there... to go to work for a State Department agency, A.I.D. — Agency for International Development — training police forces in Latin America. That got a lot of locker room laughs.”
I wasn’t quite following this. “Why? Hermano doesn’t sound like a laugh riot to me.”
“Riot, maybe. He used to be called ‘Shoot ’em Up’ Manny. Killed eleven men in the line of duty — an LAPD record. Joke was, he was teaching ‘advanced interrogation techniques’ down south when most of his perps up north never lived to talk.”
“He retired, you said.”
“Got asked back in April ’68.”
A month after Bob had announced his run for president.
Shore turned to me and my face funhouse-mirrored in his sunglasses. “Said the State Department job wasn’t what he expected. The LAPD welcomed him back with open arms. Then after Senator Kennedy was killed, he’s heading up the task force to investigate the city’s most important crime of the century — the man in charge of preparing the case for trial and supervising the other investigators.”
A bit of a breeze kicked up and yucca and other shrubs shivered like the warmth was the cold.
“By the end of last summer,” Shore said, “my proficiency ratings, which have always been high, suddenly hit rock bottom. That can happen when there’s an official story some stubborn asshole won’t go along with.” Another shrug. “That’s just the way things are done. If they can’t get you to change your story, they ignore you, then discredit you, making shit up if they have to. Finally I got transferred out of Rampart to here. People around me who’ve cooperated with SUS got promoted. Me, I’ve been encouraged to seek premature retirement. Now I’m due to leave in July on a service pension.”
“You’re taking it better than I would.”
He flipped a hand in a dismissive gesture that I didn’t buy at all. “I have a sheriff’s job lined up in a little town in Missouri. I’ll do just fine. Why would I want to work for a department like this, after witnessing the most grotesque abuse of police power I could ever imagine?”
“Fair point.”
He took the sunglasses off and looked right at me with Bob’s blue eyes. “Listen, Mr. Heller, I’ve got a photo for you that you might like to have. They didn’t all get burned up at County General. It’s a decent shot of Robert Kennedy and you’re in it, too. You look grouchy, but you’re in it.”
He passed me the manila envelope and I shook out the photo. A single typed page was paper-clipped to it.
Shore said, “Those are some witness names you might want to check into — polka-dot dress sightings and three witnesses in the Pantry who claim to have seen a second gunman.”
“Yeeeeah,” I said dryly. “I believe I would.”
I lifted the paper-clipped page and had a look at the photo.
Bob was signing an autograph.
Signing it on a poster tube for that curly-haired, sleepy-eyed, party-crashing fan who had sneaked first into the Royal Suite and then into the Pantry.
Eight
The A-1 Detective Agency at the Bradbury Building, that venerable brownstone on the southeast corner of Third and Broadway, had in recent years expanded to five fifth-floor suites. The turn-of-the-century Bradbury’s interior was an improbable collection of wrought-iron stairwells and balconies, brick-and-tile corridors with glowing globe light fixtures, caged elevators that might have been designed by Jules Verne, and an atrium bathing the central court in golden-white sunlight via an expansive skylight. No question that the building was long on baroque charm but also in the tooth, and that we could have afforded something bigger and better or at least more modern.