I’d told him on the phone just what tragedy I was starting to sift through. Which had made it clear we’d need to link up away from his office.
“I have an appointment this afternoon,” I said, “with Sgt. Manny Hermano. We’ve never met. He has an interesting reputation, considering he got entrusted with a high-profile investigation like Special Unit Senator.”
Grapp’s grin came quick and left the same way. “Yes, ‘Shoot ’em Up’ doesn’t sound like a nickname you’d generally find attached to somebody heading up the inquiry into the assassination of a major presidential candidate.”
“Particularly one named Kennedy.”
A nod. “Particularly one... yes. I would imagine you’re already aware that Sgt. Hermano has a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency going way back. Actually, so does his superior, Chief of Detectives Houghton. And that’s really all I can say on that subject.”
Not a surprise.
I asked, “What can you tell me, Wes?”
He might have just tasted something foul. “Just that our role at the Bureau has been frustratingly limited. Homicide is a violation of state law and, from the start, the LAPD asserted its jurisdiction. We did have, do have, underlying jurisdiction through civil rights statutes... and certain federal legislation passed after November 22, ’63.”
I nodded. “Covering violence against a candidate for federal office.”
His eyebrows went up and down, but his gray eyes remained placid. “Right. That pertains to the President, as well. Doesn’t go far enough. I’ve been pushing for Secret Service protection for presidential candidates ever since Dallas.”
“Maybe that will happen now.”
“Maybe.” That came out a sigh. “From the start of this one, absurd as it might seem, the LAPD called the assassination a strictly local matter. Still, I let Houghton know we’d be running a parallel investigation, and suggested two FBI agents accompany any of his teams in the field. He rejected that. Sgt. Hermano was to be point man. We were told everything had to go through him.”
“‘Everything’ covering what?”
His gesture might have been an M.C.’s introducing a guest artist. “All of our work. Scores of interviews around the country with anyone who’d known Sirhan since he came here as a child. In school, in Pasadena, or at the ranch in Corona, where he worked.”
“And this got you what?”
His smirk had no humor in it. “Nothing of much importance, for all our digging. Oh, I could give you Sirhan’s passport number, visa number, every damn number from Social Security to when he was booked at county jail. Even the serial number of his Iver Johnson revolver. Numbers that don’t add up to jack squat.”
I leaned forward. “And nothing of substance at all from those interviews?”
“Well. A gas station manager said Sirhan was a good worker, friendly and polite. The gent who employed him as a gardener said he was quiet and well-mannered. When he worked at a health food store, his fellow employee said they studied the Bible together and that Sirhan was ‘a really nice boy.’”
My turn to smirk. “Sounds like what the next-door neighbors say when some guy kills his whole family after his wife didn’t pass him the salt.”
“It does. There’s always people who never saw it coming... but this goes a little deeper. Sirhan was a member of the Rosicrucians, which Mayor Yorty inaccurately described as communist to paint Kennedy’s killer a Commie. But a friend at college who headed up the local SDS chapter said Sirhan rebuffed efforts to recruit him into that radical group. Other friends found him not particularly interested in communism or even politics in general. He was keen on his schoolwork, and later, in making money.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a political fanatic.”
The eyebrows went up again and stayed up a while. “Well, he comes across that way in the notebook found in his bedroom at his mother’s.”
That had caught my eye in the newspapers; hell, it caught everybody’s eye. “Where he wrote ‘RFK Must Die’ over and over again.”
Grapp nodded. “But here’s something the boys at SUS won’t mention — their top handwriting experts and ours couldn’t confirm it was Sirhan’s writing.”
“Do I detect some doubts, Special Agent Grapp?”
He shifted in his hard chair. “I just wish we hadn’t been elbowed out of this one. The fudged forensics from that perjurer Wolf make me suspect there may be something to this second shooter talk... or at least we could’ve put our people, who are the best after all, into finding out the truth of it or not.”
I smiled a little. “Somebody really doesn’t want a conspiracy on this one.”
“No, somebody doesn’t. Keep in mind everything we came up with went to, and through, Hermano. He was the total arbiter. He was the one who decided which witnesses were worth believing, and was the personal polygraph expert who browbeat that Serrano girl into submission, her and others. They sent portable tape recorders out on every single interview they conducted, you know — everything got on tape... sounds impressive, right? Only Hermano and the D.A. culled it from 3,000 hours to 300 hours, for use in the court case, and deep-sixed the rest. Burned them like they did those photos.”
“You heard about that, huh?”
“We don’t miss much at the Bureau.” He leaned forward. Almost whispering, he said, “But we do what we’re told, and it came from the top to play whatever game the LAPD had in mind.”
The top being J. Edgar Hoover.
Grapp sat back, his volume normal now. “I don’t have to tell you, Nate, that you don’t start with the perp and work backward, discarding everything that doesn’t apply to putting him away. It’s bad policing, and it’s bad science.”
The tableau in the Pantry flashed through my mind. “I saw that little bastard, Wes, banging away at the crowd... and I saw my friend fall, and lie sprawled on that filthy floor, his eyes staring into the inevitability of that moment. I’m not trying to clear Sirhan fucking Sirhan.”
He patted my forearm sleeve. “Good for you. But if you find he didn’t work alone, more power to you. Just don’t set out with your mind made up, one way or the other. And, Nate? Do I have to tell you to make sure Hermano thinks you’re on his side?”
“No, I get that. He didn’t leave a trail of dead suspects behind him because he’s open to discussion.”
Cops and crooks alike called Parker Center — the police administration building at 150 N. Los Angeles Street — the Glass House. TV and movie fans knew it well, from the revived Dragnet if nothing else, so it seemed somehow fitting that 803, the big room on the top floor, should be decked out as a sound stage. Training films and the like had been the goal here, the walls asbestos woven with chicken wire, bare stanchions climbing to the network of pipes and ducts of a high, open ceiling.
Right now, however, it had transformed into an enormous office, a bullpen of a dozen or more desks without cubicles, surrounded by file cabinets, interwoven with assorted tables, charts, evidence boards, and Xerox machines. But this space, obviously designed to be a center of activity, had a ghost-town look, with only a handful of plainclothes officers at their posts, desktops empty but for an occasional cardboard box, phones wrapped in their own disconnected cords. The air conditioning was almost chilly, minus human bodies to soak it up.
“Mr. Heller!” a voice called, echoing from the back of the room. “This way!”
A stocky, fireplug figure in a suit and tie stood behind a metal desk, gesturing for me to come. I went down the central aisle of this all-but-abandoned outpost to that desk, which was bigger than the others, and given rather more breathing room. To one side, various chairs were assembled in a meeting area facing an evidence board that had been cleared but for a few photos of the Pantry, Sirhan and other related subjects.