“Back off! Let me get up.”
He edged away, holding out his palms. “Certainly. I helped her bring you here. I, uh, had to give you a sedative. You began to get violent in your sleep and yet I couldn’t rouse you. You may feel some aftereffects. You may want to call for a ride. Can I do that for you?”
“Fuck you,” I said to him, and grabbed the blazer and got into it as I stumbled out of his office and into the unpopulated waiting room, the redheaded receptionist gone. I crossed the distance to the door, which seemed like a very long way.
“Mr. Heller!” he called.
But I was gone.
Out on the Strip was darkness streaked by headlights and neon, hippie kids milling, laughing, smoking, long-haired creatures of the night. I somehow got to my Jag around the corner and sat in it for a while before attempting to drive.
I touched the back of my neck.
I had turned down the joint and I had turned down a drink, but when I’d given into that kiss, and she’d pricked me on the neck, I should have known.
Something in her nail polish hadn’t been by Maybelline.
Part Four
Welcome to Survival Town
April 1969
Sixteen
Someone was stroking my hand.
My eyes came open, lids going up like reluctant curtains, and sunlight was filtering painfully in through the foliage hugging the bungalow. I resisted the urge to close my eyes again and instead took stock.
I was on top of the bed, on the comforter, with Nita’s side looking slept in. Right now Nita was sitting beside me, studying me, her smile one of concern. My eyes burned and sludge was creeping through the inside of my skull like the Blob looking around for Steve McQueen to smother.
“What time is it?” somebody said. Me, apparently. The words had not come trippingly off my tongue. More like tripped.
“A little after ten,” she said. “If we want breakfast at the Lounge, you should get up and throw yourself together. They stop serving at eleven.”
I sat up. It was no harder than lifting the back end of a Buick by the bumper. “What... what time did I get in?”
“I’m not sure. I went to bed early, around ten, and you must’ve crawled on top of the covers sometime after that, and didn’t wake me. You’re fully dressed, by the way.”
I was! Still in the navy blazer, Polo shirt, gray slacks, even my shoes.
Nita seemed a little amused if still concerned. “You must have really tied one on.”
Her dark hair was ponytailed back and she was wearing no makeup at all; even in her early forties, she put every one of the Classic Cat girls to shame. Her pale pink PJs took pity on my burning eyeballs.
“What were you up to, anyway?” she asked lightly. “You didn’t leave a note or anything... sorry. I don’t have a right to—”
“Sure you do,” I said. “I was picking up strippers at the Classic Cat on Sunset.”
She made a face and slapped my chest gently. “Oh, you. Get dressed. Let’s have breakfast.”
We did.
I took time to shower and shave and, by the time I threw on a fresh Polo, light blue sport coat and navy slacks, I was functioning again. A good thing, too, because Nita’s daisy-print denim jeans, not at all offset by her white blouse, might have made my eyeballs fall out.
Then, when we were having a cup of coffee in the bungalow breakfast nook, I told her everything that had happened yesterday, leaving a few choice bits out, like Marguerite’s bare-ass dance in her little Sunset Marquis living room. Even so, there was plenty for Nita to get wide-eyed about and the part I liked best was when she gave me shit for going out without a gun. I couldn’t remember another woman ever doing that.
“This Bryant character said he gave you a sedative,” she said through angry little white teeth. “What kind of sedative...?”
I touched the front of my right elbow where it still hurt some. “Scopolamine, probably. Maybe sodium pentothal. Probably threw in a few of his hypno tricks.”
“What could he have found out?”
I shrugged. “Not much, really. For once it’s a blessing I’m not a better detective — I don’t have anything that would elude any decent investigator. Worst of it might be confirming I’ve been working to expose what really happened in the Pantry.”
She added a little more cream to her coffee. “Seems to me,” she said, a sip later, “he’s confirmed his own complicity. Isn’t drugging you an admission of guilt?”
Shook my head. “Not really. That lardbucket has all kinds of things he wants kept concealed. Just because Bryant told Betty and Veronica he programmed Sirhan doesn’t make it true. And, anyway, he doesn’t seem to have told them that, exactly — they think he hypnotized that bushy-haired little Palestinian for the cops or maybe the prosecution.”
“Where does that leave you?”
I raised my cup of coffee in salute. “Now that I’m human again, I’m going to drop by the Sunset Marquis and have a little chat with Marguerite. If I can turn her against the doc, I’ll have something to hold over him. There’s no way she could have had any idea she might be an accessory after the fact to a political assassination.”
She cocked her head. “Couldn’t she?”
“I don’t follow.”
She was smiling as she leaned in. “Nate, didn’t you tell me there was something about her that was nagging at the back of your mind?”
“Yeah.”
Nita opened a palm. “She’s a curvy brunette in her early twenties, right?”
“Right.”
“With a pug nose?”
My mouth dropped open and words came out. “Oh. She could be the girl...”
“...in the polka-dot dress.”
Nita insisted on going with me. Maybe because of what she’d said, I slipped off the jacket and slipped on the hip-holstered nine millimeter. The jacket wasn’t custom-tailored for that, but I was returning to the scene of the crime and certain corners needed cutting.
We crossed the nondescript Sunset Marquis lobby, decorated by a scattering of framed black-and-white rock band photos — I knew some of the groups because of my son Sam (Byrds, Doors, Turtles) — to the simple front desk. Seated behind it reading Rolling Stone was a handsome brown-eyed guy in his late thirties, very tan, in a blue blazer and white YARDBIRDS t-shirt.
He looked up and gave us a polite smile. “Help you, folks? We have suites available. It’s only suites here, no single rooms.”
“Is Marguerite in?” I asked. I’d never got a last name.
He smiled, tossed the newspaper-style magazine on the desk; he looked a little like Tom Jones, the singer, not the Albert Finney character. “That’s her stage name,” he said. “Her real name is no secret, though. It’s Elaine Nye. But she’s out.”
“Are you the manager?”
“Manager. Owner. Chief-cook-and-bottle-washer. Well, not really cook, though.”
“When do you expect her?”
“Three weeks?” It was a question. “She’s got a booking.”
“Happen to know where?”
“Sure. Vegas.”
“Would you know where in Vegas?”
A shrug. “Could be any one of half a dozen places. Check the Vegas Yellow Pages.”
“Let my fingers do the walking?”
“Yeah. I’m not being a smart-ass — I just really don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“She left this morning. Her and a carload of luggage. Doesn’t travel light, Elaine.”
I got a twenty out of my billfold and slid it across the counter like a card I was dealing in Twenty-one. “I’d like a look at her room, if I could.”