“All three are dead,” I said to him, “goddamnit.”
Jesus looked reproachfully at me from his crooked frame for my language.
Shep sighed. Nodded. “We could have used that Michael Winn alive.”
“That’s the curly-haired one’s name?”
“Yeah. The other one has a bunch of names, mostly Cuban. You all right?”
I nodded. “I’d like to get out of here. Can you have this mess cleaned up for us, or do we need to go official?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Shep said. “They must have had at least one car to haul the three of us out here. Let’s see if we can commandeer it and find our way back to town.”
Nita clung to me.
“Any town but Survival,” I said.
Twenty
That evening, after sleeping all day, we again went down to the Garden of the Gods pool for a swim. Mid-evening, when most couples were out gambling or dining or being entertained by showbiz royalty, we were among a handful of twosomes languorously lounging in water just cool enough to contrast with the desert warmth under a starry sky with moonlight making the surrounding Roman columns glow. The major difference between us and the other couples — I was not the only older male with a younger female, you understand — was that the dreamy atmosphere was compromised by our recent living nightmare.
We sat kicking a little on the edge of the pool where the dripping aftermath of swimming a few laps quickly evaporated. Sinatra was singing “Fly Me to the Moon” on the sound system. Nita was in her Peter Max-print bathing suit, hair up again, and I was in the green-and-black Tiki trunks. It was almost if this were the night before and we had blinked away the intervening events. Leaning her hands on cement, bent over toward me a bit, she said, “Should we talk about it?”
My hands were on my thighs. “About almost getting killed? Or what I had to do to stop it?”
Her smile was tiny. “I’ve been on so many TV shows, from Maverick to Man from U.N.C.L.E., where the, uh, bullets were flying. Only once before in my life was I exposed to the real thing.”
“The Pantry.”
“The Pantry. And even that seemed unreal. But this morning... just hearing the sounds of it, then seeing the aftermath. Two men you...”
“I killed three. You only saw two of the bodies. Yes. Like the Pantry. Do you think less of me?”
She clutched my arm. “No! No. You saved us. My God, you saved us. But I know now what... just how serious what I asked you to do really was.”
“You mean looking into Bob’s murder?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“And now you want me to stop?”
Her eyes, in modified Cher makeup, popped. “Yes! No. I... I don’t know.” She let go of my arm. “It’s just so fucking real now...”
“We use to call it battle fatigue. Or shell shock. There are other terms these days.”
“For...?”
“For the stress and distress that follows combat.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that what that was?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what else.”
“Nathan!” She clutched my arm again. Whispered: “He’s here.”
“What? Who is?”
She bobbed her head just past me. “Your friend. From this morning... Shep.”
I looked where she was looking. Shep, in Ray-Bans, a fresh Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, was sitting in a deck chair at a little metal table under an umbrella that was apparently protecting him from moon burn. Same little metal table as before. A foot in a sandal rested on a knee. He raised a hand in a motionless wave. Offered his gap-toothed smile.
“Checking up on us,” I said.
“Because he’s your friend,” she said.
“Because he’s my CIA handler. I’m an asset... unless I’ve become a liability after Survival Town.”
Now she grabbed my hand and squeezed. “Oh, Nate. Tell me he’s a friend.”
“Sure. He’s our friend. He gave us a ride back, didn’t he, in that Chevy I hotwired? Better than the car trunks we got stuffed in going out there.”
“I’m... afraid.”
“Good. Just don’t go to pieces on me.” I nodded to a small adjacent pool from which steam rose. “Why don’t you relax in the whirlpool a while. I’ll see if he wants something.”
She did that as I got out, fetched my towel and used it, then padded over to a waiting deck chair by Shep under the umbrella. I wrapped the towel around my shoulders. It was cooler tonight than last. Conversation echoed around us, unintelligible.
I said, “You look none the worse for wear.”
Indeed his side-of-the-head contusion seemed already to have healed.
“I’m okay,” he confirmed. “How are you two kids doing?”
“Well, this kid is over sixty and slept like a stone since I saw you last, just to stay afloat... as we say here at the Garden of the Gods.”
“Stones don’t float. But, yeah. That was rough this morning. I should have been more help.”
“You kept Nita safe while I took care of business. That was enough.”
He nodded. Searched for the right thing to say and came up with: “We need to talk.”
I grinned. “The worst four strung-together words in the English language, though usually coming from a woman. Let me guess. I’m to drop this. All of it.”
He nodded. “I’ll take it from here. Now it’s a matter of inner-agency house-cleaning.”
“Better find a big broom. Taking Bob Kennedy down required a major covert operation, a team much larger than just that curly-haired kid and the tall Cuban in the gold sweater. Maybe start with the bartender in the makeshift bar downstairs who dispensed dosed drinks to Sirhan. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a second girl in a polka-dot dress — that dress and its polka dots may have been a hypnotic trigger for Sirhan. Then there’s somebody in a maroon coat watching the door onto Sandy Serrano’s fire escape where the gold-sweater guy and the polka-dot-dress girl entered, accompanied by Michael Winn... or maybe that was the similarly curly-haired, programmed Sirhan himself. That door later became the exit for two of them. In the Pantry, of course, there was Thane Cesar, whose mission was to maintain his grip on Kennedy, and hold him in place while the gold sweater guy likely did the close-up shooting. Or perhaps Thane did some of that, but certainly not all five shots — he was just too exposed.”
Shep took off the Ray-Bans and tossed them with a clunk onto the metal table; his dark-blue eyes fixed on me coldly.
I went on: “The assassin couldn’t really fire into a crowd that included Cesar and other conspirators. That’s why Sirhan was shooting blanks, creating the diversion of all diversions, meaning someone else fired into the crowd to make it look like Sirhan’s bullets were real. After all, bystanders getting hit is what really sold it. Trajectory indicates this additional shooter was standing on that serving table with the Nye girl — the curly-haired Winn, right? Whose resemblance to Sirhan may have been part of a Plan B or C. Sirhan shooting like that created confusion, utter pandemonium, sending potential eyewitnesses to the floor, covering their heads, unsure of what they’d seen or even if they’d seen anything.”
“Sounds,” Shep said quietly, “like a pretty bold scheme.”
“Oh, it was bold, all right — bolder than Dallas, which is saying something. And yet similar — a perfect patsy, multiple shooters, a public event ripped apart by gunfire. A hell of a finale to a decade of assassination.”