“I’m doing background research for a Life magazine article on the Robert Kennedy assassination. That’s why I’m here. Cesar was a witness.”
He sighed, then decided to say, “We bring him in for this and that. He’s reliable. Anything else you want to know, Heller?”
“No. Thanks. That’s helpful.”
“We aim to please.” He glanced upward. “Just so you know — there’s security to go through.”
“I thought you were the security.”
He grinned. His teeth were large and yellow with crooked incisors. “Oh, I’m just the start of it.”
Harper wasn’t kidding. The elevator door opened onto a guard desk in a partitioned-off entryway with its own door behind the uniformed, armed sentry, a white-haired, barrel-chested individual who looked like Pat O’Brien in a bad mood. The desk had two phones and a logbook. That was it.
“I frisked him,” Harper said. “He’s wearing a shoulder rig but I got the gun. This is Nathan Heller. Mr. Hughes is expecting him.”
Grouchy Pat O’Brien came around and gave me another frisk. Then he had me sign in — name, time of arrival, a space for time of departure. The other names on my page were delivery men or hotel workers, and they had each filled a box specifying what they delivered. Maheu wasn’t among those who’d signed in, backing up his claim that he never dealt with Hughes in person.
Harper got back on the elevator and the door closed him in as the white-haired guard said, “You can enter Penthouse One now.” He unlocked a door in the partition and the hotel hallway, what was left of it, was there with a door with a peephole.
I supposed the thing to do was knock, so I did. I got eyeballed through the peephole, then the door cracked open and I said, “Nathan Heller to see Mr. Hughes.”
The door came open and a crew of four middle-aged men in white short-sleeve shirts and dark ties and slacks were bustling around what had been a hotel bedroom before being transformed into an office with several desks, an IBM typewriter, Xerox machine, telecopier, two four-drawer files, and a paper shredder.
Without a word I was shown to a door by one of the middle-aged men, who said to it, “Mr. Heller is here, sir.”
“Send him in,” came a gravelly but firm mid-range male voice. It certainly did not sound like the voice of a reclusive eccentric who avoided human contact.
The middle-aged man said softly, “Mr. Hughes doesn’t shake hands. Don’t be offended.”
“Do my best,” I said.
He unlocked the door and I went in, the door closing tight behind me, the medicinal smell almost overwhelming.
This was a bedroom without a bed, rather small — perhaps fifteen by seventeen — with blackout curtains and the only light a flickering television somewhere to my right, sound down. My eyes took a few moments adjusting to the near darkness cut by the TV’s strobing effect, but soon I could make out my host.
In a well-worn black Naugahyde recliner with big wooden TV trays on either side of him, Howard Hughes sprawled out tall and naked and damn near as bony as a concentration camp corpse. The male member that had once plunged proudly into one beautiful starlet after another was now a withered relic nestling helplessly against a skinny leg like a baby bird against the side of its nest. His fingernails were as long as a Chinese emperor’s and his shoulder-length stringy gray hair and matching beard would have challenged the grooming habits of the most careless hippie.
“My apologies, Mr. Heller,” he said, gruff but affable, “but this is a necessary procedure for me.”
The lanky, scrawny figure was in the process of rubbing his exposed spotted flesh with a paper towel soaked in alcohol from a bottle; wadded-up discarded towels were on the floor around him like big grotesque snowflakes. On the TV tray to his right were various magnifying glasses, a telephone with an amplifier, and a stack of lined yellow pads with fresh pencils. The other TV tray had several neat stacks of filled yellow pads, a TV remote, a roll of paper towels, and a box of Kleenex. A paper bag on the floor near the chair brimmed with used tissues, and a silver bell resided on the tray, presumably to summon aides. A couple of air purifiers were going, also on the floor.
“You catch me at a bad moment,” Hughes said, as he rubbed himself down, pausing only to apply alcohol to a fresh paper towel. “But, trust me — if you knew what I know about germs, you would take similar measures yourself.”
An interesting point of view, considering everything in this place was covered with a layer of dust. Magazines and newspapers were stacked up along the walls and in the far corner were capped, stacked Mason jars of a yellow fluid. I didn’t think it was apple juice.
“Please, Mr. Heller,” Hughes said, gesturing with a bony hand at the end of a bony arm. “Have a seat. I’ve prepared one for you.”
There was indeed an armchair, the seat and back draped with power towels. I sat.
“Be sure to speak up,” he said. “I’m hard of hearing.”
For all the grooves in that face, for all the loose flesh and those sunken eyes, the once handsome man he’d been could still be made out. He’d retained his mustache and, from time to time in our conversation, he would smile, as if to reassure me that within that husk was the man for whom I’d done a job, once upon a time.
“I seldom meet with people,” he said, rubbing an elbow with an alcohol-drenched paper towel, “but I was struck by your integrity, when we first did business.”
I smiled. “My integrity doesn’t come up all that often.”
The sunken eyes managed to tighten in their sockets. “Well, I recognize it when I see it. You found the job I asked you to do distasteful, and by God it was. Maheu and his scurvy little private dicks picked up performing that kind of task for me. Did whatever I asked. And while I value Bob Maheu, I don’t respect him. Best you not repeat that.”
“That’s between the two of you, sir.”
He rubbed a shoulder with a soaked paper towel. “You wanted to talk to me about Bobby Kennedy. About his murder.”
“I’m researching a piece about the assassination for Life magazine.”
“Well, that’s fine. That’s good.”
Not what I expected. “If I might ask, sir... Why do you feel that way?”
He grinned like a skull. “Well, half the Life staff is CIA and can, if necessary, be handled. But I’m not thrilled that the Kennedy boy was taken out. He was a cocky little punk, but at least he was on my side with this damned atomic testing out here. Nixon isn’t, or Humphrey either!”
His voice was surprisingly strong.
“The Atomic Energy Commission,” he said, “started in exploding nuclear devices near here back in ’51, above ground, while assuring the public everything was hunky-dory.”
I nodded grimly. “Who can say how many people died due to fallout from those ‘safe’ explosions?”
He nodded the same way; he’d forgotten all about rubbing himself with alcohol. “International treaty put a stop to it in ’63, but the AEC bastards just moved the tests underground.”
“I suppose that’s better than up top.”
A skinny arm gestured around him. “I’d barely moved in here, Nate, when those sons of bitches set off an atomic bomb beneath the Pahute Mesa, rocking buildings all over Las Vegas, including this one! Then they blasted a 4,000-foot trench in the desert floor, a month later. This shit is bad for tourism, and it’s bad for my health!”
The latter, of course, being his major cause for concern.
He was saying, “My science people put a report together linking radiation leakage to mutations, leukemia, cancer, you fucking name it.”
“And you went to Bobby Kennedy about this?”