Marilyn Monroe’s chief malady, insomnia, has never afflicted me. I’m one of those lucky asleep-when-my-head-hits-the-pillow types. But last night, I had tossed and turned, and been up and down, pacing about inside and out of my Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow. This must have been what life was like for people with a real conscience.
The only conscience I normally relied on was an ancient nine-millimeter Browning automatic, which I kept well-oiled and in good repair. It had a special resonance for me-the gun my radical leftist father killed himself with on the occasion of my making it onto the graft-happy Chicago PD back in the late ’20s. I rarely carried it anymore, and didn’t even have a shoulder holster along. Right now the nine-millimeter was serving as a decorative touch on the nightstand next to the little radio alarm clock and two empty Coke bottles. The caffeine in that soda pop had been an accomplice in my sleepless night.
Conflict of interest didn’t begin to cover my situation. Marilyn was my client, and while I hadn’t betrayed the specific job I was doing for her-tapping her own phones-I had passed along to Bobby (and to a lesser degree Lawford) certain incidental information I’d obtained.
Specifically, that I had learned from Hollywood’s favorite electronic eavesdropper, Roger Pryor, that everybody and his duck were already bugging Marilyn’s little Fifth Helena hacienda. But I hadn’t shared that information with my client. On the other hand, she hadn’t told me she was planning to be First Lady.
Marilyn had attracted the attention of my friend Bobby Kennedy’s worst enemies, including Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa. Over the years, I had gone to considerable lengths to make Giancana think I was, if not a friend, at least not an adversary, just as Hoffa remained unaware I’d secretly been in Bobby’s employ.
Added to that were the contacts I’d arranged between the Kennedy and Giancana camps to help get Jack elected. Plus, of course, facilitating deals with various devils in an effort to remove the one mutual enemy of the Kennedys and the mob-the prime minister of Cuba, a certain Fidel Castro.
My involvement in the Castro affair had been limited, if pivotal. The idea was that mobsters-not just Giancana of Chicago but Santos Trafficante of Miami and Carlos Marcello of Louisiana-still had people on the ground in Cuba, despite having had their casinos and drug-running operations shut down by the new (and very Communist) regime. So getting close enough to Castro to permanently remove him from office shouldn’t have been tough.
Only it hadn’t happened yet, despite some farcical attempts including poisoned food, lethal fountain pens, and exploding cigars-apparently somebody thought the way to take down a Marxist was to employ Marx Brothers techniques. In the meantime, less amusing events had challenged Cuba-United States relations, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the missile crisis. All in all, I was happy not to have played a bigger part in any of these travesties and tragedies.
Only now my unhappy role as an occasional intermediary between the warring Kennedy and organized crime camps had been stirred up to the surface by Jack Kennedy’s frat-boy lust, giving me a sleepless night worthy of the object of that lust.
At least Hoffa was safely in Detroit and couldn’t summon me to his presence. With Giancana you never knew, since he had his own Hollywood fixation and was lately banging the cutest of the cloying McGuire Sisters, Phyllis.
I don’t know when I finally got to sleep, but I didn’t wake up till almost noon, so I skipped breakfast and went straight for lunch at the Polo Lounge. By the time I parked the Jag downtown in the garage near our office, it was pushing 2:00 P.M.
At the Bradbury Building, on the southeast corner of Third and Broadway, we had expanded to four suites on the fifth floor. Two were for our agents (the current term for operative), another for my partner, Fred Rubinski (who ran the branch), with my office in back and a conference room in front. We’d done away with the open bullpen approach for our eight male and two female agents, who used cubicles now, to give clients some semblance of privacy.
We certainly could have afforded more modern accommodations-the five-story brownstone dated to 1893-but I dug the old digs. In fact, the baroque Bradbury was so perfect for our line of work that Hollywood kept using it for crime pictures. We had rented out my office, which sometimes sat vacant for months anyway, for half a dozen films, including I, the Jury and Double Indemnity -the latter a laugh because my partner looked like a bald, slightly less homely Edward G. Robinson.
Directors and cameramen loved the interior of the Bradbury with its ornamental wrought-iron stairwells and balconies, globed light fixtures, open brick-and-tile corridors, and caged elevators with all their ancient mechanical innards on display. My favorite touch didn’t show up in black-and-white (they never seemed to shoot color here): a huge skylight that for much of the day would bounce golden white light off the echoey lobby’s glazed floor.
I looked like a business executive in my lightweight gray Botany 500 suit and coffee-colored Churchill snap-brim; but the ancient Bradbury almost made me feel, at least momentarily, like a private eye again.
We were looking to add two more agents, and Fred had been interviewing prospects all morning. When I got there, he corralled me to join in on four more interviews, after which we sat in my office and reviewed the notes and files on the candidates and settled on two, neither ex-LAPD. One was late of the military police and the other had been on the San Diego force. We had standards.
I was behind my desk, and the windows were open, except for one hugging a bulky air conditioner, currently silent since the day was nicely cool. The office reminded me a little of my first office at Van Buren and Plymouth in Chicago. All that was missing was the El noise.
Cannonball Fred, in a dapper brown suit and brown-and-yellow striped tie, not narrow enough to suit current fashion, was plopped on my couch blending in with the brown leather. His feet were up on the armrest and he was contemplating smoke rings he was blowing, courtesy of a fragrant cigar.
“Somebody should kill that fuckin’ Castro,” he said.
I blinked. “What?”
His eyes locked onto me, unblinking in his homely mug. “Do you know how much these smuggled Havanas cost me? Ten bucks apiece!”
“I’m glad we’re doing well enough to support your habit.”
He blew another ring and watched it dissipate. “You have business left to do out here? If you’re in the mood, I can line you up with a famous client or two. They all want you on the case, since that Life magazine spread.”
“No,” I said. “I’m already doing a little job for Marilyn.”
“Miss Monroe?” His grunt had something lascivious in it. “You’ve always had a thing for her.”
“Who doesn’t? I’m using Roger Pryor on it.”
“Wanna tell me about it?”
“Naw. Nothing. Wants her phones tapped. She’s having studio trouble.”
Fred’s smirk gave him a froggy look. “Yeah, so I been reading. Those cocksuckers in Fox publicity are tearing her down better than they built her up in the first place.”
“My money’s on Marilyn.”
“I dunno. Never bet against utter bastards.”
He grunted again as he hauled his squat self off the couch, and shooed cigar smoke toward an open window. I didn’t mind the expensive smell and told him so.
“So when are you heading back?” he asked, at the door to the conference room.
“Not sure. Few days maybe.”
“If you change your mind, I can always use you around. Just take meetings with our more illustrious clients, then we’ll turn the real work over to the youngsters.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
Fred nodded and trundled out, shutting the pebble-glassed door behind him.
I guess I sat there for half an hour trying to figure out if there was anything I should be doing for Marilyn, and not getting any farther than I had in my insomniac state last night. Maybe it was time to book my flight back to the land of stockyards and deep-dish pizza. But first I reached for the phone to call my ex-wife, and arrange to see Sam one more time before heading home.
The girl manning our phones next door informed me there was no answer, and I was hanging up, glumly, when two big guys in dark brown suits came in, hats in hand. They were both at least six foot, and together were working on a quarter ton, beefy but not fat, with perpetual five o’clock shadows. They had frequently broken noses and ears that stopped short of cauliflower but showed signs of battering.
Yet I had a hunch neither one had ever been a prizefighter. And I didn’t suppose they were extras from some crime picture being shot here, either, wandered in looking for the catering table.
You told them apart mostly by their hair-one had a butch and a bright expression while the other had what the Vitalis commercials called greasy kid stuff, slicked back. And dumb eyes.
The bright-looking one stepped forward.
“We didn’t make an appointment, Mr. Heller,” he said apologetically.
His voice was surprisingly mellow, just as his suit was surprisingly well-pressed and not cheap. His friend with the dumb eyes was similarly well-attired.
“No breach of protocol, gents,” I said, rising behind my desk. “I don’t have a secretary out here. This is just an office I use when I’m in town. What can I do for you?”
The leader said, “We wondered if you would be available sometime this afternoon to meet with somebody.”
His associate chimed in: “We can wait till five, should you want.”
They looked like thugs, yes, but nicely dressed thugs, and if I was being taken for an old-fashioned ride, this was the most polite attempt ever.
“Would you like to sit down, boys?” I asked, gesturing to the client chairs. “And tell me about it?”
“No thanks,” the leader said. “We got a parking place right out front. We can wait.”
“Fellas, I’m confused…”
The wide forehead beneath the butch crinkled. “Uh, could I ask you something, Mr. Heller?”
“Okay.”
“Is it safe to talk in here?”
Truthfully, at this point, I wasn’t sure. I motioned him over with a curled finger, and-after tearing off a page with a couple of scribbled phone numbers-pushed my scratch pad across, then pointed to the pencil nearby.
He nodded, took it, and on the pad wrote two words: Mr Hoffa.
So much for safely in Detroit.
I motioned for him to return the pencil, he did, and I wrote: Wants to see me?
And he nodded. The guy with the dumb eyes was frowning, as if this entire exchange had been something mysterious.
Did I mention I didn’t even have my shoulder holster along? Not that it mattered, since my nine-millimeter had moved from the nightstand to between shirts in my suitcase, to prevent alarm on the part of Beverly Hills Hotel housekeeping.
“I’ll be glad to go,” I said, getting out from behind the desk, “right now. But you don’t have to chauffeur me. I have my own wheels.”
The two men exchanged troubled glances.
I said, “You can either write down the address where I’m supposed to go, or I’ll come around to where you’re parked and you can lead me.”
The guy with dumb eyes was shaking his head, not at me but at his associate, who was thinking it over.
“Fine,” the leader said finally, ignoring his associate’s vote. He got the pad and pencil again. “I’m gonna write it down, but you might wanna follow us over, like you said. We should escort you up to the suite.”
“All right,” I said.
I was still enough of a private eye, I guess, to resist getting in a car with a couple of muscle boys, even if they weren’t going to bother pulling a gun.
As it turned out, the pair were probably just being helpful, since the suite in question was at the Ambassador Hotel, which was home to over twelve hundred rooms. The massive, many-winged hotel had been refurbished a few years ago, and modernized, but it still resembled a palace that had somehow been dropped from the sky near Wilshire Boulevard, on a lawn as well-manicured and vast as Forest Lawn.
From the parking lot I was ushered like a dignitary with bodyguards through a massive lobby awash in yellow, with pillars, leather furnishings, and scattered ferns, all set off by red-and-black carpeting. Fairly elegant surroundings for the roughneck boss of the Teamsters union, but Jimmy never liked to deny himself, when he was on the road, anyway.
The room at the end of a golden hall on an upper floor was a case in point-the presidential suite, with richer shades of gold and elegant French gilded furnishings and creamy wall-to-wall carpet. In a massive parlor with a chandelier and plush drapes, and a stereo and television that shared an improbably antique-looking cabinet, a kidney-shaped writing table had been turned into a paper-strewn desk by the small, broad-shouldered man at work there.
Well-tanned, about fifty, Jimmy Hoffa was barking into the phone, “I can’t get away now. It’ll have to wait… You want me to send who? No way. That son of a bitch could start a war in a vacant lot… I’ll be there tomorrow. Do what the fuck you have to! You’re not a child!”
He said a quick good-bye, all but slammed the phone down, then looked up, grinned at me, waved my chaperones away (they went out), and rose to his full five feet five, extending his open hands as if in welcome to a prodigal child.
“Nate Heller!” he said, moving like a friendly gorilla across the expanse of carpet to meet me halfway. We shook hands, and his grip, as usual, was a vise. “How the hell long has it been, a year, two years?”
“You know what they say, Jim, about time passing fast when you’re having fun.”
“I don’t believe in fun. I believe in hard work, and to me I guess that’s fun. Let’s see if we can find someplace comfortable to sit in this dump.”
He was wearing a nice enough blue gabardine suit, off the rack, but his trousers were highwater-style, exposing the white socks that were part of his everyman persona (“Colored socks make me sweat”). His dark hair was glossy, cut short, standing up like the quills of a pissed-off porcupine. There was something vaguely oriental about his rough-hewn, heart-shaped face, and that he exuded that mystical quality called charisma could not be denied.
I was half German Jew and half mick, and he was Dutch-Irish, which from the start had given us a bond. And my father’s unionist activities had been a big plus, back when I went to work for the Teamster boss.
Jimmy was your classic roughneck made good. His coal-miner pop had died young, and his mother had polished radiator caps in an auto plant. By sixteen he was earning fifteen bucks a week unloading fruits and vegetables for a grocery chain, getting paid only for time worked and not time waiting for freight trains. He addressed that with a wildcat strike, earned the attention of the Teamsters, and had been on that payroll ever since.
The Teamsters was the only life he knew-he even met his wife on a picket line. In 1957 he became president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, replacing Dave Beck, who got busted for tax evasion. Hoffa, who never drove a truck, more than doubled the IBT membership, bringing in everybody from cafeteria workers to zookeepers. But the AFL-CIO expelled the union because of Hoffa’s ties to organized crime.
These ties I’d known about for a long time-the guy Hoffa put in charge of the union’s pension fund, Allen Dorfman, was Outfit through his stepfather, Red Dorfman, a onetime Capone crony and current Giancana one.
The McClellan Committee, with Bobby Kennedy as its chief counsel and John Kennedy as a member, had made a crusade out of nailing Hoffa over his mob connections. They’d gotten indictments on charges of trying to steal committee documents and bribing a staff lawyer-I’d been in the thick of that, but Hoffa hadn’t known I wasn’t on his side.
Anyway, somehow Hoffa beat it, though Bobby had been so confident about his case, he bragged he’d jump off the Capitol dome if he lost. Jimmy won. And sent Bobby a parachute.
“Tell me about Sam, Nate,” he said. “Did he play football last year?”
And we talked about my son, and my problems with Sam’s mother. One of Jimmy’s best qualities was his ability to remember people he’d met and spoken to at any length, and care (or anyway seem to care) about everybody and their families and problems-health, financial, what have you.
If you walked around with him in union circles in Any Town USA, he would stop and talk on a first-name basis with dozens of rank-and-file members. With anybody in leadership, he had personal histories down cold, chapter and verse.
“What brings you to Tinseltown, Jim?”
We were sitting on a spectacularly uncomfortable brocade couch.
“Hell, Nate, I been on the road all this month and it’s just starting. Negotiating God knows how many contracts, dealing with this latest bullshit case against me, this Florida thing? And, of course, lining up support for the big contract.”
“What contract is that?”
He cackled. His rather tiny eyes danced in the wide, rugged face. “The contract that has Bobby Kennedy’s asshole puckering! We’ve been working for months, for years, on a nationwide master contract, a bargaining agreement that’ll stop commerce in this country with a single strike order.”
“A single phone call from you, you mean?”
He grinned like a demented pixie. “That’s right. What do you think your old man would think about that?”
Jimmy always talked about my father like he’d known him. And I never broke it to Jim that my father would likely have considered him a monster and a disgrace to the unionist cause.
On the other hand, it was hard to deny Jimmy Hoffa was an effective labor leader, and that he’d negotiated generous contracts for his members.
“Listen,” he said, and he leaned over and patted my knee. “I know you’re a busy guy, important guy out here, not just in Chicago, these days. I’m proud of you, kid.”
We were roughly the same age, but he’d always called me “kid.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He hunched his shoulders in a Cagney-like way, a recurring mannerism. “Thing is, I just don’t want you to think I’m sticking my nose where it don’t belong.”
“How so, Jim?”
His eyes all but disappeared into folds of flesh. “I need a personal assurance from you. That is, of course, if I’m not overstepping the bounds of our friendship.”
“Oh-kay…”
The eyes tightened. They were hard and cold now. “I know you ran into somebody, the other day, who is doing some work for me.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. What else would Roger Pryor do but run to Jimmy? What would I have done in his situation?
“Roger, you mean,” I said.
“Yeah. You recommended him to me, or anyway your partner, Rubinski, did. I used Pryor a couple of times now and he seems reliable. He is reliable, Nate?”
“Far as it goes. He’s for hire, like all of us.”
He hitched his shoulders. “Well, Pryor told me you saw where he was parked and looked over his setup and guessed right away that he was, uh, doing a little eavesdropping on a certain female, who is I understand a friend and maybe a client of yours.”
“Marilyn is a friend, and a client.”
“Roger says he made you aware of the fact that our glorious president is fucking her. And I think maybe his brother is, too.”
I blinked. “What, you mean Ted?”
“No! Bobby.”
My head bobbed back, like I’d taken a punch. Then I almost laughed. “That’s just silly, Jim. Bob’s a family man. You know that.”
“You want to see the list I got of the women he’s screwed since January?”
“No thanks.” Knowing this was hateful wishful thinking on his part, I said, “So then-you got Marilyn and Bobby on tape, too?”
His face scrunched into a cagey mask. “Maybe. I don’t think that’s really your business.”
He’d brought it up.
But why press it, and anyway, this was horseshit. I just wasn’t in a position to tell Jimmy what I knew to be true-that Bobby’s only role here was to shut down the JFK/MM affair. A typical Kennedy family hatchet-man assignment.
Jimmy waved a hand, smiled, shrugged. “Let’s not get off the track, kid. You want a beer or a Coke or anything? There’s a wet bar, too.”
“No thanks, Jim.”
He leaned forward-what was that, Jade East? “The question I want to ask, one friend to another, is whether you have told your client what you know.”
“You mean, have I told Marilyn that her house is bugged?”
Anxiety clenched his features. “That her house is bugged, yes.”
“No. It doesn’t strictly speaking have anything to do with the job she’s hired me to do, and Roger is a colleague and, out of professional courtesy… no. I haven’t told her.”
But I might. Hadn’t decided. Had been all up night thinking about it, but hadn’t decided…
Jimmy was grinning his Chinaman grin again. “That’s good, Nate, that’s good. Now here’s what I want you to do, kid. I want you to stay in touch with little Miss Seven Year Itch. I want you to stay friendly.”
“Well, we are friends. But I’m heading back to Chicago.”
He waved a finger, like a cross schoolmaster. “No. You are not. You are staying out here and cozying up to that immoral little broad and seeing what she has to say about Bobby and his cunt-hound brother.”
“Jim-you’ve got the place bugged already…”
His voice, already hard, hardened, and words machine-gunned at me: “Listen, she’s not stupid. If she’s having her own phone bugged-yeah, Roger told me; don’t be naive-then she knows there’s a possibility of being eavesdropped upon. So she probably will spend time with you elsewhere. Maybe at your bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Maybe outside her place at her swimming pool. But if in some part of the house that ain’t bugged, like where the washing machines are, she starts talking while they’re churning? She spills anything incriminating about Bobby and Jack, I want to know.”
“Jim-please. She’s my friend. Like you’re my friend.”
“Some things are bigger than other things.” His mouth moved as if he was tasting something foul. “These two privileged pricks, never did an honest day’s work in their lives, have singled me out as some kind of fucking cancer, rich kid bastards. And that cocky little shit, Bobby? You’ve seen him go out of his way to embarrass me in public, you know how he dogs my ass, it’s a goddamn vendetta, and it’s got to stop. It is going to stop.” He worked at removing his scowl, and shrugged. “This is a harmless thing, anyway, what I’m suggesting.”
“Harmless?”
“Yeah. We get information on what kind of sorry immoral lowlifes these two brothers are, and we either embarrass their ass out of office, or they straighten up and honor agreements and deals they have made with certain individuals, myself included. You know a little about the Castro situation. Was I a good American on that one, Nate, or was I good American?”
“You were a good American,” I said.
“You should hope this works because otherwise it could get ugly.” Very quietly, he said, “I damn near killed Bobby’s punk ass a couple years back, remember?”
I remembered. I’d stopped it. But Jimmy didn’t know that.
His upper lip peeled back and his smile was a skull’s. “Next time I’m going after the brother.”
The casualness of that was chilling. “But why Jack? Bobby’s the one causing the trouble. Bobby’s the one you hate.”
“You gotta cut off the head of the snake to get rid of the rattle, kid. That lecherous liar Jack, if he would do us the favor of ceasing to exist? You really think a President Lyndon Johnson’s gonna hang onto Bobby Kennedy as his attorney general?”
He straightened without standing, digging his hand in his pocket. Christ, was he going for a gun or a knife or something?
No-he was peeling hundreds off a fat roll. “Here. Off the books, the way we both like it. A thousand as a retainer do the trick?”
The son of a bitch was going to pay me to betray a client, and a woman I very much liked. I should have shoved the bills down his damn throat.
“Thanks, Jim,” I said, and found a place for them in my wallet. “Anything else?”