“I’ve seen the crime scene.”
“You only think you have. Look, there’s somebody at that hotel you should talk to. Let me make a call. Think a doddering old boy like you might be able to get yourself out of bed in the middle of the night?”
“Sure. To pee.”
“Or not to pee is the question. I’ll call you at the Beverly Hills — usual bungalow?”
“Yup,” I said, and gave him the direct phone number.
“It’ll be around two A.M.,” he said. “That’s a working kitchen, obviously, and any other time but the middle of the night would be hard to arrange, not to mention noisy as hell.”
“I’ll wait for your call. In the meantime, how about I messenger over this packet of photos and documents?”
“It’s a plan.”
I had an early dinner with Nita at Musso & Frank’s — with plenty of film/TV industry people around for her to smile at — then followed her Fiat in the Jag out to Studio City and her little house where we loaded up enough things to move her in for a week or two at the bungalow. She’d pick up her mail every couple of days and check her service for messages. This was only Day Three of my investigation and our relationship, but things were moving fast.
We went to bed early and mostly lay there talking, getting to know each other better, and she began questioning me about the famous crimes and infamous people I’d encountered over the decades. I didn’t tell her everything because there were more dead men and lively women than could reasonably be believed, even with the bullet scars and my enduring good looks as evidence.
Her family history bore echoes of my own: born in Brooklyn, daughter of Jewish immigrants from Europe, previous generations suffering murders, pogroms and brutal discrimination that finally chased her father’s family out of Russia.
We were still talking when my travel alarm went off at one-thirty A.M. I got up, threw off my pajamas and got into fresh underwear, button-down Polo, slacks and Italian loafers, tossed some water on my face, toweled off, and was about to go out when she sat up, her breasts challenging her nightie.
“Aren’t you taking a gun?” she asked.
“I’m going to a hotel, not the Alamo.”
“We’ve both been to that particular hotel before. And you have a way of getting yourself in Dutch. Or were those stories you told me bullshit?”
“There were elements of truth.”
But she did have a point. I was wading into some choppy waters, inhabited not by sharks but the likes of the Company and the mob and maybe even a Palestinian assassin or two.
So I put my holstered nine millimeter on my right hip — shoulder slings were just too damn uncomfortable at my age — and tossed on a Pierre Cardin sport coat over it.
She said, “You know what Miss Kitty tells Matt Dillon don’t you?”
“No. What?”
“Matt... be careful.”
“What if my name isn’t Matt?”
“Be fucking careful.”
Walking through a hotel in the middle of the night, particularly a sprawling one, makes a haunted house out of it and a ghost of you. Of course, a tragedy haunted the Ambassador, turning it into a collective terrible memory. Would Hollywood’s Hotel ever recover? I wondered. Was the Cocoanut Grove on its way to yesterday? Already a certain seediness was showing, as if the grand old palace was slowly rotting from within.
My footsteps were a ghost’s, too, silent on the red-and-black carpet, the after-hours low lighting dulling the yellow of walls and pillars, fountains shut off and gurgling faintly as if in final death throes, leather furnishings and scattered ferns and an occasional classical statue or grand piano adding to the ghostly aura, objects from the past refusing to give way to the present.
The Embassy ballroom, when I moved through with my footsteps like echoing gunshots, was barely lighted at all, despite the chandeliers hanging like crystalline jellyfish, and when I stepped through the curtains just beyond where Bob had urged us on to Chicago, the slanted corridor’s ebony was spookily disrupted by the outline in light of the double doors we’d gone through to where Sirhan Sirhan had been waiting.
I pushed through to my past where the faint blue glow of buzzing fluorescent lighting awaited. So did a little man in a white bucket cap, red-and-white aloha shirt, chino shorts and sandals. Studying a clipboard of fanned-back pages, Will Harris wore round-lensed wireframe glasses and looked a little like a white Sammy Davis Jr.
“We have about an hour,” he said by way of greeting, “before the cleaning crew comes in.”
Right now, the big adjacent kitchen was as abandoned as the one on the Titanic right before it went down. The Pantry, with only Will and me populating it, still seemed small.
I went over to him — he was standing near where Bob had fallen — and we shook hands, a quick but firm handshake.
“Try to imagine,” Will said, eyes large and buggy behind the lenses, “eighty human beings jammed into this space.”
We were in the most open area of the Pantry, with only an ice-cube-making machine to the right compromising the space and with the kitchen itself off to the left. The major difference, besides the absence of bleeding bodies, was the floor wasn’t filthy. Perhaps what had happened here had shamed the hotel into treating this space with respect.
“I don’t have to imagine it,” I said. “I was one of them.”
“My point being,” he said, peering over the top of the wire-rim glasses, “the notion that once the shooting started anyone would see much of anything but bedlam is specious at best.”
“If you got through those pilfered papers,” I said, nodding to the clipboard in his hands, “you know the LAPD came up with ten sightings of the girl in the polka-dot dress, several with Sirhan.”
He pointed to the stainless-steel serving table. “Yes, including that they were both standing up there, waiting... well above eye level. Who would be looking in their direction, not Robert Kennedy’s?”
I shrugged. “The girl was a curvy number, they say. But getting a look at the next president of the United States might upstage her.”
Will clunked the clipboard down on the ice-making unit. “Let’s start with the ‘official’ bullets, according to this prosecution shill Wolf... who I personally warned Deputy D.A. Fitts about, although he probably already knew, after that Kirsch case.”
The little criminalist held up two fingers — whether a hippie peace sign or Nixon’s victory gesture was in the eye of the beholder. “We have two bullets entering RFK’s right back. These remained lodged in the body. That’s bullets One and Two.”
Now he held up three fingers. “Another bullet entered the victim’s right back with an exit wound out the right front. This passed through a ceiling tile and was lost in the ceiling interstice. Bullet Three.”
Four fingers. “Another bullet passed through your friend’s suitcoat, right shoulder, on an upward path, not entering his body but going on through to strike victim Paul Schrade in the forehead. Thankfully not fatally. Bullet Four.”
Five fingers. “Another shot hit the right hip of bystander Ira Goldstein. Bullet Five.”
Two hands employed now, chest-level against the aloha colors, a forefinger of the left added to the displayed five digits of the right. “Another bullet entered Goldstein’s left pant leg but not his body, struck the cement floor and hit another bystander, Erwin Stroll, in the left leg. Bullet Six.”
Seven fingers. “Another bystander, William Weisel, was struck in the stomach. Again, not fatally. Bullet Seven.”
Eight. “Another bullet first hit a ceiling tile, then wounded bystander Elizabeth Evans in the forehead. Bullet Eight.”