“About time,” he’d said, adding, “I have a story to tell,” followed by an odd little inappropriate laugh, huh-hah-hah.
He had a matching metal chair waiting for me with a small Styrofoam cooler between. Lurching to his feet as I emerged from the Jag, he wore a rather childish striped t-shirt, khaki shorts and sock-free sneakers, a slightly pudgy six-footer with a pleasant, boyish face, dark brown hair and a skinny mustache riding an overbite smile. I made him for his mid-to-late twenties.
I was in a seersucker sport coat over a sports shirt, splitting the difference between casual and business. He had a can of Brew 102 in his left hand as he offered his right for me to shake, which I did. He squeezed hard then went limp dishrag at the close.
“I saw you interviewed on Jack Paar,” he said, then added that late-night host’s famous catchphrase, “I kid you not!” Followed by the huh-hah-hah.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was a while back. Got to meet Charley Weaver and Dody Goodman.”
He sat in the creaky metal chair and gestured for me to help myself to its mate. “Did you get their autographs?”
“Uh, no. Charley Weaver is not a real guy.”
“Well, sure he is.”
“I mean, he’s an actor. It’s a role he plays. Thank you for talking to me, Mr. Cesar.”
“My friends call me Gene.”
“And I’m Nate.”
“Hey, feel free to help yourself to a beer.”
“I just might, a little later.” No way in hell. Brew 102 was a local beer that had somehow managed to capture the taste of smog.
“Listen,” my pal Gene said, “I should apologize for not inviting you in. But the place is a mess. Joyce, the wife, left me for a clarinetist last week.”
“Well, that’s a shame.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I’m pitiful when it comes to housework. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m a slob or something. Anyway, it’s nice out here. Nice day.”
This was Southern California. Of course it was a nice day, as long as you weren’t drinking Brew 102. Which incidentally was called that, the brewery claimed, because they had to try 101 times before they hit perfection.
“A jazz player,” Gene said.
“Pardon?”
“The clarinetist. Tough to compete with.”
“I can see where it would be.”
He swigged 102. “She took the kids. Do you think that’s fair? She runs off with a clarinetist and snags the kids, too?”
“Seems a little much.”
A dog barked down the street.
“You know I seen you that night,” Gene said, eyes narrowing. “But I was too wrapped up in my work to introduce myself or anything. But you was in that crowd behind us, Bobby Kennedy and me.”
“I noticed you as well,” I said. But the truth was, he’d mostly been a blur in a gray uniform and cap, one of those invisible people we don’t really see as we move through our daily lives. And my attention had been elsewhere than on a nonentity good guy like Gene Cesar.
“You know I always wanted to be a police officer,” he said, sending a distant look past me. “Studied police science at community college. But security guard’s as close as I ever got. See, I had an ulcer going back to high school. I was 4-F because of it. You was a Marine, right? And a police officer? Before being a private eye?”
He had read some of the articles. I said all of that was correct, then began the daunting task of keeping Gene here on track.
“So,” I asked, “how long have you been doing security work?”
A shrug. A sip. “That’s only part-time. I saw an ad and jumped at it — I was in deep shit for money at the time, I mean, two little kids? A mortgage? Huh-hah-hah. Really I’m mainly a maintenance plumber out to Lockheed in Burbank. You got to have a security clearance from the Defense Department for that, you know. You’re on call for that whole goddamn facility, when you’re on duty. It’s like... like being in the military.”
Lockheed in Burbank, aka the Skunkworks, was the home of the U-2 spy plane. Could this plump plumber somehow be tied to the CIA? No, that was ridiculous...
I asked, “When did you start with Ace Guard Service?”
“About six months before that night at the Ambassador.”
His first deception: from the LAPD documents, I knew Thane Eugene Cesar had started at Ace in late May ’68, a few days before the assassination.
“Could you tell me about that night, Gene?”
“Sure. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, is it?”
“No it isn’t.”
I work days at Lockheed, mostly. I’m on nights this week because of vacations, you know, filling in. But on June the fourth I get home, like usual, about 4:30 P.M. Supervisor from Ace calls and wants me to work a shift from six to two in the morning at the Ambassador. I’m tired, havin’ already worked a full day at the plant, but the Supe twists my arm.
I get to the hotel about six-oh-five P.M. and report to the head of security there, William Gardner, who posts me at the main doors of the Embassy Ballroom. I’m standing at the main door of the ballroom and at about eight-thirty, quarter till nine, Jack Merritt... another Ace guard?... says to me, ‘You know, I got a funny feeling there’s gonna be big trouble here tonight,’ and I look at him and say, ‘Why?’ And he says, ‘I just got that feeling.’ I just laugh that off, but maybe he knew something I didn’t, huh-hah-hah.
Around nine, Gardner moves me downstairs to the Ambassador Room to mingle with the crowds and keep an eye on things. And, you know, keep them from going upstairs to the Embassy Room, which is already filling up. Anyway, I’m only there maybe twenty minutes. Then Gardner comes back down and takes me up to the kitchen area.
At nine-thirty, I get reassigned to the east doors of the Pantry, which lead to the Colonial Room, where the press is. At maybe eleven-fifteen, I get moved to the swinging double doors to the west, near the backstage of where the Senator is speaking. Nobody replaced me at the east doors, by the way. Anybody could have walked in during the hour before the shooting — I couldn’t exactly monitor both ends of that damn Pantry. Where I was stationed was kind of cool, though... How so? Well, I could hear Milton Berle cracking jokes and makin’ Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier split a gut, laughing.
Yeah, I guess you could say I was distracted. Sure, that Sirhan character could have wandered in. Yes, I was supposed to be checking badges and passes, but like I said, I couldn’t be at both ends of that Pantry at once, could I?
When the Senator comes down from the hotel through the Pantry, east end, on his way to make his speech, I hold back the crowd as best I can. Then I position myself by those double doors waiting for the Senator’s return.
When the speech is over — they pumped it in on loudspeakers in the kitchen — I go through the swinging doors and pick up the Senator in that slanted backstage hallway, a couple feet from the double doors. That maître d’ is leading Bobby by the right hand into the Pantry and I fall in behind ’em and take hold of his right arm, just below the elbow, with my right hand. We all just start pushing through the crowd. No, no, Kennedy never even looked at me. He was looking ahead at the people and cameras.
I’m right behind him all the way down to the stainless-steel serving table, on his right side, and when we get there, he reaches out and turns to the left to shake hands with some busboys. My hand sort of broke loose, away from his arm, and of course I grab it right back again because people was all over the place.