Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  I looked goddamn good and nowhere near my age, even if I did feel far older, the ribs aching, the bruising mercifully covered up. But I should pass muster with a certain very famous lady.

  Not that I had a date lined up with her or anything. I just knew she was one of the other guests in another of the thousand rooms in the Statler. But this female was no stranger to me, and I knew she would just be getting around to breakfast about now—a quarter to eleven. And her breakfast would be a martini.

  I can’t always be right—she was having a Bloody Mary.

  In my defense, she had skipped breakfast and gone straight to lunch, a shrimp salad with Thousand Island dressing. She sat alone at a table for four, tucked in a corner of the vast and currently underpopulated Empire Room, the restaurant that converted to a showroom with name entertainment after dark. The furnishings were modern here, though the tables wore linen cloths, and the room was on the bright side, the partition walls bearing Mondrian-style plastic squares of color—red, aqua-green, black, white, yellow—like the Playboy Club’s sidewalk-spanning entryway.

  I hadn’t seen her in two years but she looked just fine, if every year of her age—mid-forties—her brown hair in a forehead-baring bouffant, her nice slender shape in a piebald shift; she wore starry earrings and a single strand of pearls that was vivid against her alabaster complexion. No Texas sunning for her.

  This was Flo Kilgore, New York Herald Tribune show-business columnist, nationally syndicated and a genuine household name, primarily due to her spot on the panel of What’s My Line?, the hit Sunday night game show.

  Flo glanced up at me with blank disinterest on her heart-shaped face, apparently assuming I was a waiter, then her big blue eyes widened and brightened, her cheeks dimpling, her smile pretty and dazzling white, if thin-lipped, over her only bad feature, the weak chin that Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson made such cruel fun of.

  “Nate! You’ve been on my mind!” She scooched her chair back and got to her feet, holding out arms with white-gloved hands. “Have I conjured you?”

  I gave her a kiss on the cheek and a hug, and took the chair next to her that she gestured to as she settled back in.

  “No magic involved,” I said. “I’m just wrapping up a job. Figured on heading back to Chicago this afternoon.”

  She reached out and held my right hand with both of her gloved ones. “I wish you’d stay! There’s something you could help me with.”

  “Really?”

  Though there were no other patrons within a dozen tables of us, she leaned forward and whispered confidentially, “It’s the biggest story of my career. Scoop of the century.”

  “What, are Liz and Dick splitting up?”

  “Don’t be mean. Anyway, I’m off the Hollywood beat and back on Broadway where I belong.”

  “Dallas isn’t Broadway.”

  “No, but it’s home to the story that’s going to net this little Indiana girl a Pulitzer. I already have a book contract from Bennett.”

  She meant Bennett Cerf, publisher of Random House, her fellow game-show panelist.

  I said, “Why were you thinking about me, of all people?”

  “Two reasons, really. One is for a favor, which is to ask you to contact a friend of yours.”

  “Who?”

  She raised a gloved hand, like a prim lady traffic cop. “Not yet. You need background first. But the other is to see if I can hire you.”

  “For what?”

  “For a bodyguard.”

  “One of the things I’m known for,” I said, arching an eyebrow, “is famous clients of mine who’ve been killed, despite my best efforts. Amelia Earhart, Sir Harry Oakes, Mayor Cermak, Huey Long.…”

  “Judging by those last two,” she said coyly, “you must be something of a expert in the realm of political assassination.”

  She had no idea that I was way ahead of her on that mysterious scoop she was dangling.

  I asked, “Why would you need a bodyguard?”

  Now both white-gloved hands patted the air, like Jolson milking the audience for an encore. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet. “We’ll get to that, we’ll get to that.… Why don’t you have some lunch, and afterward, we’ll talk business.”

  A waiter came over and I ordered a steak sandwich, rare, cottage cheese, and a Coke, which arrived quickly, and Flo and I made small talk throughout lunch. She had a teenaged son and daughter, and of course I had Sam, so that carried us a while. Despite her upbeat mood, she revealed she’d been through some rough times of late.

  Two of her various marriages had been to a former actor and sometime Broadway producer named Frank Felton. Two years ago she had married him a third time. Over the years, depending on whether they were hitched or not, they had a sporadic radio show, Breakfast with Flo and Frank (the martinis and Bloody Marys going unmentioned) on WOR in New York. They’d also had one of the first open marriages I ever heard of, but that hadn’t kept them from getting divorced twice. Her other marriages had been to younger men, both pop singers, one famous, one not.

  “I’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” she admitted. “Booze and pills … like poor Marilyn.”

  “Not exactly like poor Marilyn, I hope.”

  “No. I wouldn’t say I’m that far gone. But since I saw you last, I’ve checked in three times at Leroy Hospital to wean myself off the goodies.”

  “So that’s just tomato juice, then?”

  “No. I didn’t say I stopped drinking, just stopped drinking so much. Anyway, that’s how Frank and I got back together. He was taking the cure at the same time as me, and one thing led to another. I’d been doing the radio show alone, and, well, we’d always had such great success at WOR as a twosome.”

  “I’m glad that’s going well for you.”

  “Actually, it isn’t. Frank fell off the wagon badly. Nate, I can’t bring myself to divorce him again, but I should. You know how he would fill in for me when I was off on a story, doing the breakfast show alone?”

  I didn’t, but I said, “Sure,” because celebrities hate it when you don’t know things about them.

  “Well, sweetie, he went on the air drunk, oh, a bunch of times, and we got canceled. Can you imagine? Canceled. An almost twenty-year run, and in an eye blink, phffft. And that was a lucrative gig, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her eyebrows flicked up and down. “You know, the newspaper business isn’t what it used to be. I’m in about half as many papers now, although very soon that will change. That … will … change.”

  We ate in silence briefly. She was searching diligently, ace reporter that she was, for one last shrimp in that salad.

  I said, “So you’re back in Frank’s town house in Manhattan?”

  “Yes. Had to sell the Beverly Hills house, the one on Roxbury where you and I worked on the Marilyn case, remember?”

  “Like Chevalier says, I remember it well. The money that brought in should have helped.”

  “No. We barely covered the mortgage. Oh, I don’t mean to poor-mouth. What’s My Line? is just a damn juggernaut. Can’t kill it with a stick. And … listen, there’s something else I need to tell you about. Right now. At the outset.”

  At the outset of what? I wondered.

  She leaned forward and this time used just one gloved hand to hold mine—well, I didn’t have a white glove on. But she held it.

  “Nate, there’s a new man in my life.”

  “You mean Frank.”

  “I most certainly do not mean Frank. At my age, I may not need to divorce him over it—he has his chippies, he always has had. But I’m in love, really, truly in love, so there won’t be any funny business between us, this go-round, Mr. Nathan Heller. No hanky-panky.”

  “Not even just hanky?”

  She giggled. She was an easy mark for me in the laughter department. Squeezing my hand, then withdrawing hers, she said, “No hanky, no panky.”

  The waiter cleared our dishes. Flo turned down an offer of coffee (as did I) an
d said, “We really need to go somewhere private to talk.”

  It was getting more crowded now, as the lunch hour approached, and people would be recognizing her, coming over for autographs.

  Frowning, she said, “We can’t go to my room. You’ll think I’m wacky, some paranoid fruitcake, but … I really think the CIA may be watching me.”

  I didn’t tell her that they might be watching me, too.

  “Why don’t we go outside,” I suggested. “There’s a garden patio overlooking St. Paul Street.”

  “Oh, yes, with the sculpture. They can’t bug the great out-of-doors, can they?”

  “The great out-of-doors is full of bugs, silly.”

  She laughed at that. I told you.

  The Empire Room emptied into a brick patio housing a lush garden, in a vaguely Japanese fashion, above street level on the west side of the hotel, with squared-off areas for various flora including a pair of fifteen-foot magnolias. Center stage, at the lower of two tiers, was a rotating abstract stainless steel and gold-plated sculpture called A Wishing Star, twelve feet high, fifteen feet in diameter, reaching for the sky like a massive benign claw. We took a backless stone bench near a small reflecting pool.

  “You remember how I began in this business,” she said. “That I was the youngest woman ever to work the crime beat in Manhattan?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, though I needed no reminding. She still interrupted her columnist duties to cover famous murder trials, like Sam Sheppard and the recent Finch-Tregoff barn burner.

  “But this, Nate, this is the big one. You’ll never guess what.”

  “Kennedy.”

  That seemed to startle her. “How did you know?”

  “Well, first, this is Dallas. It’s kind of the case around here, y’know? And second, I didn’t just run into you, Flo. I heard from a friend that you were in town, and that you were poking into the assassination. And came looking.”

  “What friend?”

  “Janet Adams.”

  “Jada! I haven’t gotten anywhere with her.” She sat forward, half turning toward me, with that shark-eyed look great journalists get when they smell a lead. “Can you help me on that front? There are a flock of Ruby strippers I haven’t been able to get to. My God, that would be fantastic…”

  “Slow down,” I said, holding up a palm. “I might be able to help. First, fill me in. I want to know what you’ve been up to.”

  Her smile was smug but cute. “Keep an eye on the papers next week. That’ll show you what I’ve ‘been up to.’”

  “Which is?”

  She gave me a pixie look, like she’d gotten away with a cookie or two from that jar on top of the refrigerator. And with those gloves, no fingerprints.

  She said, “I’m running a story that showcases Jack Ruby’s Warren Commission testimony.”

  I frowned at her. “The Warren Commission report isn’t coming out till the end of the month. And it’s considered Top Secret. And you have an inside source?”

  “I do. And you know not to ask.”

  “I know not to ask. So what does Ruby say that’s so newsworthy? I’m not somebody who buys that screwball feeling sorry for Jackie Kennedy and just blowing his stack … even if Ruby is a guy known for blowing his stack. It just never included killing people in a police station basement before.”

  She sat up straight on the bench, folding her white-gloved hands in her lap, like a little girl at a very proper function. “Last June, Ruby was interviewed in his jail cell by Earl Warren himself, and Gerald Ford, a congressman from Michigan, a crony of the President’s. Ruby has a kind of ostentatious way of speaking, convoluted … like Jerry Lewis trying to sound smart in an interview.”

  “I know,” I said, nodding. “I know Jack.”

  Her eyes flashed sharply, then narrowed shrewdly. “I know you know him, Nate … and we’ll get back to that. But the thing is, Ruby kept dodging questions, and saying his life was in danger, and that he wanted to be taken to Washington, D.C., where it would be safer for him to talk freely.”

  “His jail cell here in Dallas is bugged, obviously.”

  “Obviously. But the chief justice told him that a D.C. transfer was impossible, because the Commission didn’t have police powers, couldn’t protect him properly.”

  “That’s bullshit. Just bring in the FBI!”

  “Right,” she said, with a dismissive shrug, then her manner grew intense. “Ruby also kept mentioning LBJ, saying what a wonderful, great man our President was, and that he just knew LBJ could set things straight about him.”

  “Hmmm. What do you make of that?”

  Her smile was tiny and merciless. “I believe Ruby knows things that he believes he can use to trade his way off Death Row.”

  “But not in Dallas.”

  “Not in Dallas. Ironic, isn’t it? He was like an unofficial member of the PD here, the best friend a Dallas copper ever had, comping them at the Carousel, fixing them up with his girls. Probably the local mob’s bagman, which explains why he was around the station so often, and had such easy access.”

  I was nodding. “He certainly didn’t have any trouble waltzing into that police station the morning they moved Oswald.”

  “No.” She made an openhanded gesture. “But now he sits in a Dallas jail cell, where every dirty cop in town can get to him. If he talks, and not just his usual gibberish, he can wind up as dead as Oswald. As dead as Jack Kennedy.”

  “What do you want from me, Flo? Besides the bodyguard gig.”

  She placed a hand on my shoulder. Her eyes were intense in a different way now. This was a personal gaze, from one friend to another. From one lover to another.

  “Nate, you grew up on the West Side of Chicago. Your best friend was Barney Ross, and Barney was, and is, a good friend of Jack Ruby’s. I finagled a very short interview with Ruby at his trial. Nate, Ruby likes me. He’s a fan of What’s My Line?”

  “He’d make a great ‘mystery guest.’”

  For once she didn’t laugh at a dumb gag of mine. “I want to talk to him again. In depth. Away from his jail cell. But he’s been politely declining through his attorney.”

  Melvin Belli, one of the top defense men in the nation.

  I shrugged. “I’m not that tight with Jack. We aren’t really friends. I did a job for him, a long time ago, but…”

  “But Barney Ross is still a good friend of Ruby’s. If Barney put the word through that Jack should talk to me, and that you will be along as Barney’s surrogate, maybe … just maybe … I can get the interview that will crack this case.”

  She had a hell of a reporter’s mind, this kid from Indiana, this game-show celebrity, this gossip columnist.

  Shaking her head, she was saying, “I know it sounds unbelievable, Nate, but I am convinced there was a conspiracy behind Jack Kennedy’s murder.”

  Should I tell her that she was preaching to the choir? That last year I had helped the Secret Service shut down an attempt on JFK’s life that had been mounted in early November, just twenty days before Dallas? That the players had been the same—the Mob, rogue CIA, exiled Cubans, right-wing crazies?

  She was saying, “My source inside the Warren Commission says the results are going to be laughable. They are all too anxious to show that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone, unaffiliated assassin, and Ruby a psychopath who, by the way, has no real connection to the Mafia.”

  I shook my head. “I know the government’s been selling the lone-nut theory on Oswald, but how can they deny Ruby’s connection to the Mob? He’s a mobster, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The whole thing smells fishy to this girl reporter. Nate, it’s too convenient and simpleminded that some nut kills the President of the United States, then escapes from that little trifling matter to kill a policeman, only to be apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every tenet of police procedure, then to be murdered himself under extraordinary circumstances.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I’ve been digging,
Nate, and I’ve come up with incredible stuff, starting with the police log that chronicles their minute-by-minute activities. Police Chief Curry was in the first car of the motorcade, and when he heard the shots, his first command was to get a man to the top of the overpass and see what happened there.”

  “I’ve never heard this.”

  “Of course not. Because the next day, Chief Curry told the press that the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository, and that his first order had been to surround and search that building.”

  I frowned in thought. “But in reality his first real concern was the overpass and that grassy slope the President’s car was moving toward when the fatal shots were fired.”

  She was nodding, nodding, nodding. “At about eight miles per hour, yes. Here’s something else for you to chew on. The police radio description of Oswald came from an eyewitness, a Howard Brennan, a steam fitter sitting on a concrete wall more than a hundred feet from the sixth-floor corner window that Oswald supposedly shot from.”

  Then Flo told me a darkly amusing story about how she and her husband Frank had reenacted the assassination from a window of their swanky five-story town house in Manhattan.

  “Frank used a broomstick for a rifle,” she said, “and I went down and outside to East Sixty-eighth Street. I stood approximately where the steam fitter had, hoping none of the neighbors were watching, and let me tell you, Nate, describing a suspect seen from that distance proved impossible.”

  “This was in broad daylight?”

  “Yes, and the steam fitter claimed he saw Oswald walking around inside the depository, with no change in height when he came over to fire his shots. Well, it’s been definitely proven that the assassin had to kneel to fire.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Oh, Nate, and there’s so much more! I’ve got evidence indicating the rifle used wasn’t a Carcano but a Mauser—there was a fucking switch! And do you really think it’s credible that Jack Ruby killed Oswald out of love for Kennedy?”