Again, charges that were frequently leveled against Lee, but I was too gentlemanly to point that out.
“Let’s just say,” Lee said, “his eccentricities do not outweigh his genius.”
I thanked the attorney for his help, rang off, and went into the bedroom. The shower was going in the adjacent john. I stepped in there just as Nita was stepping from the shower looking like Botticelli’s Venus but black-haired and better. I helped her dry off and maybe we fooled around before getting into casual clothes and taking breakfast in a booth at the Polo Lounge.
Nita was eager to catch up on my visit to San Quentin — she’d been asleep when I got back last night — and took it all in with wide eyes and smart questions. But when our food arrived, our conversation stopped and she seemed blue, only eating half of her veggie Eggs Benedict.
I’d had no trouble putting away the Dutch apple pancake and figured whatever was troubling her could be dealt with by me expressing a little interest. “Any auditions today?”
That only made her look more glum. Her youthful green-and-black striped top was upbeat but she was bringing it down.
“Yes,” she said, her smile pained. “A salesgirl on Here’s Lucy. At her age, Lucille Ball tends to hire older younger actresses, so I have a shot. Nate, I’ve auditioned every day this month and haven’t landed a damn thing.”
“What about that Marcus Welby?”
“That audition was last month. The shoot was this week. Nate, I’m just too... too in between — not an ingenue, not a matron. I feel like I’m chasing my tail.”
I reached across and patted her hand. “Let me do that for you.”
She smiled, laughed a little, but withdrew her hand. “I’m just frustrated, that’s all. And I’m not doing you any good, either.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
She sighed. “I mean... begging you to take on Bobby’s assassination. If there’s nothing there, it’s a waste of time. If there is something there, it’s dangerous. No, fucking dangerous.”
“Look. I have a client, paying real money. I’m not working for you, I’m working for him. And when I’m finished with this thing, why don’t you come back to Chicago with me.”
She smirked. “Chicago? What’s in Chicago?”
That hurt. “Well, me.”
Her expression melted. Now she reached for my hand. “Oh, I’m sorry. Sweetie, I’m sorry...”
“There’s a lot of theater back home and I have connections. They shoot movies there all the time. Think about it.”
She was nodding. “I will. I definitely will.”
Soon she was off in her little Fiat after a bit part in a sitcom, an episode of which I would only watch if she were in it.
In the yellow pages I found the office of the American Institute of Hypnosis at 8833 Sunset Boulevard and spoke with a pleasantly ditsy receptionist, making an appointment for two P.M. That allowed me time to call Ron Kiser and bring him up to speed on my conversations with Frankenheimer, Sirhan Sirhan and Dr. Simson-Kallas. But he had nothing new for me.
The afternoon was cool and I met it in a lightweight navy blazer, Polo shirt, gray slacks and Italian loafers. I parked the Jag on Larrabee and walked toward Sunset and around Mad Man Muntz’s off-kilter rectangular glass box on the corner with its beautiful girls in fishnet stockings and short skirts ready to sell you a four-track car audio system. The Strip’s sidewalks had no shortage of hippie kids, but this was nothing compared to what it would be after dark, when the Whisky a Go Go up the street drew them like bees to honey. Or maybe sheep to grass.
I strolled past a long white building across the top of which in red were the words
next to a marquee promising BIGGEST TOPLESS SHOW IN THE WEST. Next door, as if on another planet, a wide, almost dignified two-story building presented itself, its lower facade brown brick, above which, under a row of windows, it said
against the smooth pale concrete face of its upper floor. At right — comprising a vertical third of the structure — a checkerboard of windows made room below for the white front door a few steps up from the street.
This was the Sunset Strip, all right.
I went into a waiting room big enough for a dozen and inhabited by a lone receptionist at a desk that had a phone and date book on it and nothing else. The mahogany paneling didn’t quite go with the Scandinavian modern chairs lining the walls, their oak frames bearing green cushions. On one wall in a massive frame, each phrase stacked, were the words:
and
On the opposite wall in a matching massive frame was a photographic portrait hand-colored of (if the bronze plaque below could be believed) Dr. Joseph W. Bryant, Jr. This was a photo circa late ’50s or early ’60s and depicted its heavyset subject in a black business suit and tie, black-rimmed glasses, short brown hair high on a round, puffy-cheeked head. Like the building, almost dignified.
I crossed wall-to-wall carpeting to the reception desk, where a redhead in a green low-cut red-paisley dress was beaming at me with full, red-lipsticked lips and bright copper-eye-shadowed green eyes behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses like Bryant’s in his portrait, apparently strictly to suggest professionalism. Her bosom, a third of which was showing with the braless rest no mystery, would make a lesser man gasp. I merely goggled.
“Nathan Heller,” I said. “I have a two o’clock with Dr. Bryant.”
“You’re with life!” she burbled. Her smile was so wide the number of toothpaste-ad white teeth showing seemed improbable.
I didn’t understand her at first, then got it: I’d said on the phone I wanted an interview for Life magazine.
“Sit where you like, honey,” she said, gesturing, jiggling. Her flesh was white with faint red freckles. “The doc’ll only be a minute.”
“I like the view from here.”
Even more teeth! “I bet you do.”
“I don’t believe the size...”
“Oh, they’re real!”
“...of this place. How many people work here, miss?”
“Call me Alice.” She took off the glasses and tossed them on the desk, to lessen the distance between us. “How many work here, regular? Two. The doc and I. Other doctors come and go. Mostly it’s patients. A lot of patients, but he cleared the afternoon for you.”
“Only two people on staff? A facility this size?”
“Well, there’s a lot goes on upstairs. A recording studio with a control room, TVs, multiple tape decks. A closed-circuit set-up to treat three patients at once, at locations anywhere in the country. Examination rooms, patient rooms. We have more couches than a furniture store.”
Oh, the stories those couches could tell.
The phone rang and she said excuse me and smiled (she was the kind of girl whose smiles were almost always accompanied by a shrug), putting on the unneeded glasses to make an appointment for a private session. I strolled over and had a closer look at Dr. Bryant’s portrait. He reminded me of someone. Oliver Hardy minus the Hitler mustache? I’d try not to become his Stan Laurel.
“Mr. Heller!”
The commanding voice came from a tall fat man in a yellow polyester sports coat with a knotted red neck-scarf and red-and-black-and-yellow plaid pants and pointed brown shoes who stood filling a doorway behind the receptionist at her desk, his fists at his waist like Superman. His glasses were rimmed in heavy red and thick lenses magnified his dark eyes, his shaggy rust-brown hair swept back, the blister-pale Ollie face framed by an Amish beard. He looked like the host of an oasis in a mirage when you’d been crawling across the desert a really long time.