“If I can.”
“Could you ask Pearson to straighten out this nonsense about me returning to the LAPD as some sort of CIA sneak? These conspiracy kooks are trying to make it sound like I was brought back and planted into the RFK case so I could steer things around to a point where no one would discover a conspiracy. That’s just not so!”
He opened the door onto the hall for me.
“These clever types are already getting together and cookin’ up nonsense,” he said, “looking to profit by demanding, ‘What really happened? What really happened?’ Couldn’t have been one little man with a gun! Ready and willing to float their theories to a public that craves answers as big as their fallen hero.”
Sounded to me like Manny believed in conspiracy after all.
Nine
I arranged to meet a certain controversial medical examiner at four P.M. at the Otomisan, a hole-in-the wall diner on East First Street in Boyle Heights. Just east of downtown Los Angeles near Little Tokyo, across the L.A. River, the Heights had provided a post-war home for a large Japanese-American community. A handful of red booths faced a counter with a dozen red-cushioned stools, vinyl seating split like sideways smiles. Vintage Japanese prints with grim faces shared the walls with wartime family photographs of smiling ones, despite stark backgrounds of barracks and barbed wire.
Thomas Noguchi said, “This area is one of the few places where my people could live in L.A., after World War Two, when they were released from the internment camps.”
His English was precise with the lilt of a Japanese accent.
“Were you shoved into one of those camps, Dr. Noguchi?”
We were sitting across from each other in a booth; the middle-aged Japanese woman in an indigo-blue cotton top and matching slacks kept a discreet eye on us as she fussed behind the counter, these two suspiciously well-dressed men ordering beer and nothing else. It was the kind of place that had regulars and we weren’t those.
About forty, Dr. Noguchi — his round, pleasant face not really fitting that slender, almost skinny frame — looked damn near dapper in a dark, sharp, wide-lapelled suit, his wide, thick-knotted tie navy striped with narrow white. His hairline, no gray in the black, curved above a high forehead naturally, not receding, at least not yet. Thick black eyebrows arched in permanent curiosity.
He shook his head. “No, Mr. Heller. I came over from Tokyo in 1952. But my wife Hisako and her family were in detention camps. I fear this history is fading for the current generation.”
“Boyle Heights is a little off the beaten path for me,” I said. “I don’t mind meeting here, but I have a hunch you don’t live in Little Tokyo.”
“I do not. My wife and I have a nice two-story residence on Oxford in the Wilshire District.”
“Can’t be the Sapporo beer,” I said. We’d already been served the bottles and glasses. “They sell that all around town.”
He chuckled. “No. And it is too early to dine. Why I selected this setting we will get back to. First, let us discuss your topic of interest — my autopsy of Robert F. Kennedy.”
I poured beer into my glass. “Might I begin by asking, Doctor, if the findings of your autopsy had anything to do with your recent firing?”
That invoked a modest Buddha smile. “It did. But there were sixty-one charges against me, including that I reveled in the publicity following the assassination. A jealous rival had me singing and dancing in my office while the Senator lay dying. Elated at the thought I would soon become famous.”
“That seems unlikely. But admittedly we’ve just met.”
The tiny smiled widened a bit. “I have read of you, Mr. Heller. They call you the Private Eye to the Stars... well, they are calling me the Coroner to the Stars now, so perhaps we have something in common. And yet I would imagine yours is not an appellation you have encouraged.”
“No,” I admitted. “But handling Marilyn Monroe’s autopsy made yours inevitable, I’m afraid.”
He filled his glass. “An inherent irony is not lost on me,” he said. “I had performed the autopsy on Miss Monroe six years before, and now found myself making the death examination of an alleged lover of hers.”
I knew more about that than I would share with the deposed medical examiner.
“Bob was a friend,” I said. “I think you know I was there that night, in the Pantry.”
He nodded, took a sip of beer.
Finally he said, “We speak of these people as if they descended from Mt. Olympus. But their frail humanity is something with which I am all too familiar in my profession.”
“And in mine,” I said. “I was Bob’s bodyguard that night. But he insisted I not carry a gun. If I had, you might have conducted a different autopsy.”
His eyes, a washed-out gray, conveyed great sadness. “To me, your friend and his brother represented the greatness of America. I respected their style, their leadership, the way they reached out to all ethnic groups as if to say, ‘You too are Americans.’”
I smiled just a little — probably as close to a Buddha smile as I had in me. “His brother Jack fought in the Pacific, you know.”
“I know. As did you, Mr. Heller. Bronze Star, I believe?”
“You do your homework.”
“Even a doctor to the dead must do so. But in all honesty, I encountered you in my more casual reading. You do not appear to have made the medical journals.”
I swallowed some good Japanese beer. “No. More like True Detective and Confidential.”
“You are too modest. More than once in Life, at least once in Look. And the Sunday supplements. You harbor no resentment toward the Japanese?”
“Do you harbor resentment over the internment of your wife and her folks? I’m guessing yes but you don’t obsess about it. What good would it do? There’s an emperor and some generals I wouldn’t mind knocking around some.”
“We have that in common as well.” He sipped beer again. “Speaking of journalists, you said on the phone you were looking into the case for Drew Pearson. What, might I ask, is Mr. Pearson’s agenda?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, he got on the wrong side of this thing by blasting Bobby Kennedy politically in the weeks before the assassination.”
The dark eyebrows flicked up and down. “Unfortunate timing.”
“Drew does know there’s some talk of a possible second shooter, which he may touch upon, but that’s not the focus. He just wants to be able to discuss the tragedy accurately while elevating the memory of Robert Kennedy.”
Noguchi touched his chest, lowered his head an inch or two. “It needs scant elevation in these quarters, despite the dancing I’m said to have done.”
“Do you know why the results of your autopsy were withheld for many months and given to Sirhan’s defense at the last minute?”
“I know only that it wasn’t my doing.”
He told me his story.
At Good Samaritan Hospital, at 3 A.M. on June 6 last year, the medical examiner had made his way through a heartbroken crowd whose vigil had turned into mourning. A security guard guided Noguchi and two deputies to the hospital’s autopsy room. A team from the M.E.’s office was already there — investigator, chief autopsy assistant, photographer, with instructions to secure the appropriate hospital charts and X-rays and assemble the surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy’s life. Also present were staff members of Noguchi’s and the D.A.’s.
Noguchi had been advised by trusted peers from around the country that if Kennedy died, the medical examiner must take charge before the federal government rushed in, as they had after the JFK assassination, which had resulted in the President’s body being flown to D.C. for an autopsy (by unqualified military doctors) so flawed it generated immediate cover-up rumors and conspiracy theories.