“I’d say you’re full of shit. Who hired you, the studio?”
He shook his head, and the smile widened into a give-me-a-break-buddy grin. “Look, Nate-I have a client. And it’s not you. There’s such a thing as ethics and professional courtesy and conflict of interest and, you know, all kinds of factors at play.”
“This afternoon,” I said, “or tomorrow, I would have given you a call, telling you Marilyn wants her phones tapped. Wants tapes of all her calls. And you’d have said, ‘Sure.’ Or would you have told me no, because you already were doing a job involving her? That kind of ethics and professional courtesy and conflict of interest, Roger?”
His face went expressionless; then one caterpillar eyebrow jerked. “I could claim that… but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Right.”
“So… are you going to screw it up for me, and tell Marilyn she needs somebody to come in to sweep for bugs? Least you could do is give me the job.”
“Answer my question, Roger. You already have her phone tapped?”
“No.”
“The house…?”
“No. Just the bedroom. Master bedroom. I can pick up some stuff from other rooms from there. Small house for a big star.”
“Who’s your client?”
He shook his head, drank his beer, then leaned back with folded arms and a defensive posture. “No. I can’t do that.”
“Let me give you your options. First, I can tell Marilyn her house is bugged and help her get rid of the pests… and no you don’t get the gig. After which the A-1 can, in future, find some firm other than Pryor Investigative Services, Inc., to use for its surveillance work. How much do you bill us on the average year, do you suppose?”
“… And the other option?”
“You can tell me who your clients are, and I will give Marilyn a bullshit story about how she needs to be discreet in her pillow talk, because once she has her own phone tapped, it’s easy for somebody else to listen in.”
“Well, that’s true, actually.”
“And I will send you in to do the phone-tap job for me, as promised.”
He twitched something that was neither a smile nor a frown. “The thing is, Nate… I already got more than one client, here. It’s one of those situations where the commodity in question has a lot of interested buyers, and why not keep them all happy, and me prosperous?”
“You wanna give me the ethics speech again, Roger, the conflict of interest thing? I think maybe I missed part of it.”
He moved a palm against the air as if he were polishing it. “Anyway, Nate, these are not the kind of clients you pull anything on.”
“What, are you worried? Is this van bugged? Are your clients listening in on us?”
“Really, Nate. These aren’t pleasant people.”
I let an edge into my voice. “Who wants to hear Marilyn’s bedroom talk, Roger?”
“Well, you wouldn’t know the intermediary’s name, probably. But it’s… Christ on a crutch, Nate, it’s for Hoffa.” He whispered as if afraid his own machines might pick it up: “Jimmy fucking Hoffa.”
I frowned. “Jimmy Hoffa wants to know who Marilyn is diddling? The head of the Teamsters cares who a Hollywood sex symbol takes to bed?”
He made a palms-up gesture with his free hand. “I’m in the surveillance business, Nate. Mine is not to reason why. Mine is but to make the recordings and gather same and ship ’em the hell off.”
Hoffa wasn’t just a name in the headlines to me. Everybody knew him as a controversial labor leader with obvious ties to organized crime. But I knew him personally. In 1957 Hoffa had hired me to infiltrate the so-called Rackets Committee run by Senator John L. McClellan. I had done this, but with the full knowledge of Robert Kennedy, chief counsel of the Rackets Committee.
As a double agent, I’d done Hoffa a good share of harm, but the president of the Teamsters Union didn’t know as much. Jimmy still thought I was a dirty ex-cop from Chicago. And maybe I was. But I’d never really been his dirty ex-cop from Chicago.
Nonetheless, I knew better than most the dangers of tangling asses with the affable, ruthless Teamster boss.
As reel-to-reel tape hummed on the rack nearby, Roger was saying, “And I’m pretty sure Hoffa is in this with another guy nobody oughta try to fuck with. Old friend of yours, Nate-Chicago friend?”
“I have a lot of Chicago friends.”
“So I hear. And one of ’em is Sam Giancana, right?”
Warm though it was in the enclosed space, I felt a chill, and it wasn’t the beer and it wasn’t the floor fan.
From Hoffa we’d gone in an instant to the current operating head of the Chicago mob. Called “Mooney” by friends and foes alike (it signified his craziness), Giancana had started out a street punk on the Near North Side’s Patch, worked his way up to the Capone Outfit, where he became Tony Accardo’s bodyguard. Once the top chair was his, Giancana wrested the numbers racket from the colored gangsters and expanded every other criminal enterprise in the Windy City.
Now he was a well-dressed psychopathic moneymaking machine with all kinds of show business pals, including Frank Sinatra-it was enough to make me wish I hadn’t introduced the two of them.
“ Is he a friend of yours, Nate-Giancana?”
“We get along. Never really had any trouble with him.”
“That friendship you had with Frank Nitti, back when you were starting out, it’s held you in good stead.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “So Hoffa’s your client, and you think Giancana is, too. Why do they care who Marilyn is entertaining?”
He blinked at me, then grinned-amused, amazed. “You’re kidding, right? Marilyn’s your client, and you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
He had the goofy grin of a high schooler telling a pal about a girl who put out. “Her and the prez-that poon hound Jack Kennedy. You know the Kennedy boys, don’t you, Nate? More famous pals of yours. You bragged about your Rackets Committee days in the press enough.”
“I don’t brag. My press agent does.” I shrugged. “I’m aware Jack has a wandering eye.”
“Also a wandering dick.”
I grunted a laugh. Pawed the air. “But this is silly, Rodge. I mean, ridiculous. Marilyn and Jack Kennedy… the president… of the United States? They’re, what-having an affair?”
“You are a detective, Heller. Trust me on this one-I heard it with my own ears. Those aren’t tough voices to ID -unless maybe it was Vaughn Meader and Edie Adams havin’ fun with me.”
He was referring to a couple of well-known impressionists, the former a Kennedy mimic, the latter Ernie Kovacs’ sexy widow, who did a mean Marilyn.
I motioned with my half-empty beer can, the tapes whispering at me. Grinned at him. “Come on, Rodge. You’re saying the president of the United States himself just stops by Marilyn’s place, and partakes of a piece of ass, while the Secret Service waits on the front stoop? Don’t the neighbors mind?”
Pryor shrugged. “He doesn’t stop by her house.”
“Then how the hell do you know-”
“Tapes I heard are from… another place.”
“What other place?”
“Another place Hoffa’s guy asked me to cover.”
“Do I have to ask again?”
“Heller, honest to Christ, you don’t wanna know this.”
“Whose place, Rodge?”
“… Lawford’s place. That big beach mansion out Santa Monica way.”
“ Peter Lawford’s place.”
“What other Lawford is there?”
“Peter Lawford, the actor, who’s married to Pat Kennedy, the president’s sister… That Peter Lawford’s place.”
“I told you. A detective. There’s four bedrooms in that joint. All covered. Funny thing is, even with famous people? Listening to people screw? Bores the fuckin’ tears out of me, at this point in my jaded career.”
I finished the beer, then said, “Gimme another
.”
He selected another Schlitz, like I gave a damn what brand, opened it with the church key. It foamed nicely. I drank.
And thought.
Roger and I didn’t have to discuss why Jimmy Hoffa and Sam Giancana might want incriminating tapes on JFK, although their real mutual enemy was brother Bobby, who had made a hobby out of targeting organized crime, and was an old, hated adversary of both men.
Finally, with a glance at the wall of recorders, I asked, “Why so many tapes rolling, Roger? One little blonde woman, one little bed, one little microphone?”
He looked mildly surprised that I’d figured out the significance of that. “Well, you know, with these electronics, you need a backup.”
“Right. What, six, eight backups? What’s this about, anyway?”
“Like I said, I… got a couple other clients.”
“Wanting the same… commodity?”
“Same sort of stuff, yeah.”
“Are they really good clients? The kind of clients who give you maybe half the work your agency does, that type client?”
“Nobody gives me more business than the A-1, Nate, you know that. You and Fred are good to me. You’re great.” He shook his head, his expression ominous. “But this is not shit that you need to know.”
Interesting-he’d already told me Hoffa and Giancana were involved. This was something or somebody more dangerous?
“Roger, I’ll just find out myself, other ways-you mentioned I was a detective, remember? But that will waste time and piss me off and, by the way, cost you your favorite meal ticket. Like we used to say downstairs at the PD in Chicago, when we got the goldfish out… the rubber hose? Spill.”
He spilled. One set of tapes, he said, was for the LAPD’s notorious Intelligence Division.
That was a surprise. “Don’t they have their own surveillance experts?”
“Yeah, but this they don’t want traced back to them. Frankly, I think it’s a job they’re doing for Fox. The movie studio?”
“I know what Fox is. Why wouldn’t Fox go directly to you?”
“Everybody’s got layers of protection, these days, Nate. Nobody wants anything coming back on them.”
“I’ll remember that. Who else?”
“Who else what?”
“Who else are you making goddamn tapes for?”
“You really don’t want-”
I grabbed him by the front of his coveralls, fists full of cloth. “You shouldn’t give a girl a beer, Roger. We lose all sense of propriety. Now, when I toss you into those fucking tape recorders, you won’t get hurt that bad, probably. But your toys might get broken. Wouldn’t that be sad?”
“Nate! Stop it!” He pulled away from my grasp and flopped back on the couch. “Come on. We’re friends. Business associates.”
“Is that rack of shit screwed in? Or will it tip over?”
“I do certain sub-rosa jobs.”
“All your jobs are sub-rosa.”
“Not this sub-rosa.”
“What are we talking about, Roger?”
“… Spooks.”
I blinked. I admit it-I blinked.
“Roger, you’re not talking about ghosts.”
“No.”
The Company. CIA. Christ, why would they care who Marilyn was fucking? The FBI I could understand-everybody knew J. Edgar Hoover and the Kennedy brothers were not each other’s biggest fans. That Hoover kept a legendary cache of dirt on the rich, famous, and powerful.
“And… that’s it? That’s the client list?”
The shaggy eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Jesus, Nate, isn’t it enough?”
“That’s a lot of tapes you got spooling.”
“Well, of course, one set’s for me. For the safe-deposit vault. You never know when you, uh, you know… you need to know?”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Sorry about getting rough,” I said.
“It was the beer.”
“No. It’s Marilyn. I like her. And I don’t like seeing all these dark clouds gathering around her. So this conversation, Roger, it never happened. I will call you tomorrow at your office-you’ll be in? Good. And we’ll set up you going over to her place, and putting the tap on for her.”
“Okay. You mind if I check on my other stuff, while I’m there, if she isn’t looking?”
I belched. The beer.
“Let your conscience be your guide, Roger,” I said, and climbed out of the van.
CHAPTER 4
At first blush, Roger Pryor’s assertion that the president of the USA and the reigning sex goddess of Hollywood were having a torrid affair sounded crazy to me.
But Pryor’s seemingly outrageous claim did have a certain credibility. The beach mansion of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Lawford (or was that Mr. and Mrs. Patricia Kennedy?) would make the ideal love nest-after all, Marilyn was friendly with the Lawfords and lived maybe fifteen minutes away. You had to accept that the president’s own sister would look the other way, but the men in that family did whatever they wanted, so that didn’t necessarily ring false. Nor did Roger’s apt if indelicate description of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a “poon hound.”
Not that I was a close pal of Jack Kennedy’s. I knew his brother Robert pretty well, and my dealings with the family went back to Chicago in the mid-1940s, around when old Joe Kennedy bought the mammoth Merchandise Mart. Either an incorrigible rascal or a flaming asshole (depending on who you asked), the Kennedy patriarch was still in the liquor business at the time.
That Joe Kennedy had been a bootlegger starting in the mid-twenties, with a fleet of trucks and an armada of boats, was no secret in my circles; his specialty had been shipping liquor into the U.S. from abroad. Such connections allowed him to make legal distribution agreements immediately after Prohibition for Gordon’s gin and other brand-name liquor and spirits. Even as ambassador to Britain, before the war, he’d used his position to further his booze-importing interests, when he wasn’t busy pitching isolationism.
His cronies in the booze game included such underworld luminaries as Owney Madden and Frank Costello, and his Prohibition-era mistress had been the widow of late gangster Larry Fay, the guy F. Scott Fitzgerald based Gatsby on. When money-magnet Joe finally sold his liquor business in ’46, the major buyer was New Jersey gangster Abner “Longie” Zwillman.
It was said that Old Joe only got out of the liquor business because of the pending congressional race of his son Jack, who had become the clan’s golden boy after Joe Jr. bought it in the war. Others said the decision grew out of a Chicago mobster with Kennedy ties getting shot in the head in January of ’46 in front of the Tradewinds on Rush Street.
That Joe’s middle son Bobby had made a name as a racket buster on the McClellan Committee was a source of amusement to cops and disgust to crooks. In fact, Zwillman’s 1959 suicide (or was it a mob rubout?) happened in the shadow of a Bobby Kennedy subpoena-ironic coincidence, or cause and effect?
Anyway, I knew Jack only slightly, although a job I did had made me popular with him-I was the guy Old Joe chose to “take care of” the president’s first marriage.
In ’47, the first-term congressman wed a Palm Beach socialite named Dulcie Something, a quickie justice-of-the-peace deal that was probably one part impulse and two parts gin, Gordon’s or otherwise. Within days, the marriage disintegrated, and Old Joe hired me to handle it. I found a local Palm Beach attorney with the right (wrong) reputation, and together-with money and matches-we gave Dulcie amnesia and made the wedding documents in the local courthouse disappear.
Shortly after, I got a nice phone call from Jack, thanking me, and he expressed his gratitude in person a few times, once in Chicago at a Palmer House event, again in Vegas when we were both guests of Sinatra at a show at the Sands. Later, Jack was on the Rackets Committee, too, but not involved to the extent Bobby was, and in that capacity never mentioned or even vaguely referred to what I’d done for him. And for two grand.
We�
��d most recently socialized not long before he won the presidency-September of 1960, when he was campaigning hard to win Illinois, which of course he did, thanks to Sam Giancana, Mayor Daley, and a bunch of people in graveyards around the greater Chicago area whose civic duty had them voting above and (from) beyond.
One of JFK’s biggest supporters in Chicago was Hugh Hefner, perhaps America’s most unlikely Horatio Alger story, a shy would-be cartoonist who became the sophisticated king of a twenty-million-dollar empire. Hef, only in his early thirties, was the scourge of moralists and the envy of thirteen-year-old boys of all ages.
He had basically taken the format of the slick men’s magazine Esquire, where he’d once held a lowly sixty-buck-a-month position, and to its big-name fiction and fashion tips and automotive write-ups and sexy cartoons added a younger, more rebellious touch…
… and a monthly nude pinup-the centerfold spread of supposed “girls next door,” the likes of whom would have kept most healthy men at home and not seeking fame and fortune in the big city like Hef.
The first “Playmate” had been Marilyn Monroe, but Hef had merely bought magazine publication rights to one of her infamous calendar photos. Nonetheless, Marilyn’s image on the cover-and in the sideways pinup-made the first issue a smash back in ’53. Now, less than ten years later, Playboy was outselling Time and Newsweek.
I take the liberty of calling Hugh M. Hefner “Hef” because we were friendly, if not friends. For five years now, the A-1 Agency had been on a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-year retainer for Playboy, which got hit with threats, scams, and various lawsuits that required immediate access to the kind of investigative services we offered. Not a year had gone by that we hadn’t eaten up that retainer and more.
The Playboy Mansion, as Hef called it, was on North State Parkway, two blocks from Lake Michigan on the Chicago Gold Coast. The iron-fenced turn-of-the-century four-story brick-and-limestone structure, once a showplace of the rich and famous, had by the Depression become a shabby apartment house. Just a year before, Hef had shown me around the huge, unoccupied and quite dingy structure.
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