Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  “All mobsters hate the Kennedys.”

  “Right! Or that Ruby, the biggest police buff in Dallas and probably the Mob’s payoff man, never even met Officer J. D. Tippit?”

  I shifted on the hard stone of the bench. “Honey, you do understand this is a risky road you’re heading down?”

  She snorted a laugh. “Do you really think they’d kill a celebrity?”

  “Ask Jack Kennedy.”

  The rotating sculpture was making a slight squeak above the gentle lap of the reflecting pool.

  “Listen,” she said, softly, “I understand the danger, better than you know. Hell, I have eighteen phones in my town house, and I’m convinced every one is tapped! Or do you think I’m paranoid, like some people do?”

  “I don’t. I think this is chancy as hell, and if the kind of people are involved that seem to be involved … you might want to walk away.”

  She shook her head. “This story isn’t going to die as long as there’s one real reporter alive.” She sighed. “Nate, I know the perils.”

  “Perils? This isn’t a Saturday matinee serial, Flo.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Why do you think I was so happy to see you walk back into my life?”

  “My charm? My smile?”

  That did make her laugh, a musical ripple that went well with the reflecting pool. “Well, of course, darling … but mostly I want a big strong man to be my bodyguard, though I do need you to do a better job than you did for Mayor Cermak.”

  “That doesn’t set a very high standard. But have you had death threats? Or damnit—has someone tried—”

  “No! No. But there’s a disturbing pattern emerging just the same, as I dig deeper into this morass.”

  I frowned again. “What kind of pattern?”

  “A pattern of death. Probable murders, and outright ones. Faked suicides.”

  I felt the back of my neck prickle, as it had in Captain Peoples’s office.

  “Some of the witnesses I wanted to interview, Nate, aren’t available—they are conveniently deceased. Would you like a rundown? Probably just a partial one, because I don’t know of everyone involved, not yet anyway.”

  “Please.”

  The day after the assassination, Jack Zangretti—an Oklahoma mobster who ran a lavish illegal casino and motel—informed friends, “A man named Jack Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow, and in a few days, a member of the Frank Sinatra family will be kidnapped just to take some attention away from the assassination.” Frank Sinatra Jr., was kidnapped for ransom on December 8, 1963, making national headlines. No such headlines were made when simultaneously Zangretti was found floating in a lake with bullet holes in his chest.

  Bill Chesher, thought to have inside information linking Ruby to Oswald, died of a heart attack three months after the assassination.

  Hank Killam, a painting contractor who lived at Oswald’s boardinghouse, claimed that he had seen Ruby and Oswald together. His throat was cut when he was tossed through a department-store window, four months after the assassination.

  Four men met in Jack Ruby’s apartment after visiting Ruby in jail just a few hours after the killing of Oswald: Bill Hunter, a reporter from California; attorney Tom Howard; Dallas reporter Jim Koethe; and Ruby’s roommate, George Senator. The latter had disappeared, and the other three were dead. Hunter was “accidentally” shot by a police officer. Howard, forty-eight, died of a heart attack.

  “Jim Koethe was killed last week,” Flo said, “stepping out of his shower in his apartment here in Dallas. A karate chop to the neck. Place ransacked, but the only thing missing were the notes on the book he was working on—guess what the subject was?”

  “Places to see in Dallas?” I asked.

  She cocked her head, smug and serious. “What does all this sound like to you, Nate?”

  It sounded all too familiar. And the odor was reminiscent, too—the same smell as the convenient deaths in the Billie Sol Estes scandal.

  “A cleanup crew,” I said. “Removing witnesses, tying off loose ends.”

  “Acquila Clemmons would probably agree with you. From her front porch, she witnessed the killing of Officer Tippit. Saw two men—the gunman was short, kind of heavy, the other tall and thin in khaki trousers and a white shirt. Didn’t want to talk to me, because a Dallas PD officer warned her she might get killed on the way to work.”

  “Good advice.”

  “I’ve saved the best for last,” she said. “The strange tale of Warren Reynolds.”

  The Reynolds story began with Officer J. D. Tippit, shortly after two P.M. on November 22, reportedly cruising for suspects matching Lee Harvey Oswald’s description (as provided by the steam fitter, remember?). Officer Tippit pulled to the curb on Tenth Street, supposedly seeing a suspect matching the description. For some reason, Tippit got out of his squad car and came around to talk to the suspect but was shot and killed instead, falling near the front right fender. Two witnesses saw a man running from the scene. Neither identified Oswald as the runner.

  The first such witness, Warren Reynolds—who owned and operated Reynolds Motor Company on Jefferson Boulevard, just west of the murder scene—pursued the man, heading south on Patton Avenue, but lost him a block later.

  Two months after the assassination, after news reports identified him as a Tippit witness, Reynolds was questioned by the FBI. He said that Oswald was definitely not the man he saw fleeing, gun in hand, from the Tippit killing.

  Two days later, at nine P.M., Reynolds went into the office of his car dealership. The lights were out, the fuse apparently blown. Someone waiting in the darkness shot Reynolds in the head, point-blank.

  Miraculously, Reynolds stumbled to the telephone and summoned help, and survived the shooting. A petty local criminal, Darrell Wayne Garner, was arrested, but was freed after a young woman named Betty Mooney gave him an alibi.

  “Betty Mooney,” Flo said, “was one of Jack Ruby’s strippers.”

  Shortly after, Reynolds’s ten-year-old daughter was nearly abducted. Threats and further intimidation followed.

  “Earlier this year,” Flo said, “Reynolds changed his story. He decided the man he saw fleeing was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Domingo Benavides, seeing Tippit’s body in the street, had stopped behind the squad car and rushed up to help, calling in the shooting on the dead officer’s own radio. He found two spent cartridges, .38 autos, which he initialed for Dallas officer J. M. Poe. The casings were apparently replaced with .38 Super cartridges, which would work in a .38 revolver—the .38 autos would not. Domingo’s initials were absent from the Super cartridges, as well.

  More problematic was the description of the shooter that Domingo provided, that of a suspect with dark, curly hair and clothing and physical attributes that didn’t match up with Oswald’s.

  “Domingo was the closest witness on the scene, by the way,” Flo said.

  Domingo began receiving death threats, but it was his look-alike brother, Eddy, who was killed—shot in the head in February ’64.

  “I got all of this last instance secondhand,” Flo admitted. “Domingo isn’t giving interviews. By the way, Betty Mooney? The Carousel Club stripper who alibied the possible shooter in the Reynolds attempted murder? She was arrested by the Dallas police this February for disturbing the peace, and hanged herself in her jail cell. Using her toreador pants.”

  “That’s quite a list.”

  “Oh, it’s longer. There are more in New Orleans, where Oswald lived right before moving to Dallas, and where Ruby often went to troll for new strippers. That’s my next stop.”

  I held up both hands. “Whoa, Nellie. Let’s stick with Dallas for now.”

  Her eyes flashed and her smile winked sunlight. “Then you’ll help me?”

  “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “I have several witnesses to interview. And if you could get Jada, or Janet Adams, to talk to me, and maybe line me up with a few others among Jack Ruby’s girls, that would be f
antastic. I’m not as flush as I once was, but I can offer a thousand a week. A week here, then a week or maybe two in New Orleans. What do you say?”

  “I say I need to think about it,” I said. “I’ve been away from the office and have to check in, and see what’s on my desk.”

  “Is whatever-it-is-on-your-desk bigger than the Kennedy assassination?”

  “No, but it’s safer. Whatever-it-is.”

  She tried to pull off a pout. “You’d just leave me here, to my own devices?”

  “Just a poor little defenseless girl reporter? Give me the weekend. Don’t you have to fly back to New York and do your show Sunday night?”

  “Yes,” she admitted with a nod, “I’m booked out tomorrow morning. But I’ll be back at the Statler by this time Monday.” She sat forward, her gloved hands girlishly in her lap. “Oh, Nate, please consider it. You’re the perfect man for this job.”

  “I’ll call you in New York late Sunday night. After the broadcast.”

  She kissed me on the mouth.

  Then she gave me an impish look that should have seemed silly from a woman her age but wasn’t at all. “Now, don’t get any ideas, Nathan Heller.”

  But I had a lot of ideas, none of them, for once, having to do with getting laid.

  And most of them had to do with the VIP whose blessing, even permission, I would need before saying yes to the girl reporter.

  CHAPTER

  9

  “You’d think I was the fucking Beatles,” Bobby Kennedy said, holding back a sheer curtain, looking out the hotel-room window at the mass of people on the street ten stories below, their murmur like an insistent surf on a reluctant shore. The jacket of his black suit was off, waiting neatly laid out on the bed, and he wore a black tie on a white shirt whose shirtsleeves were rolled up, in a perhaps misguided rich-kid attempt to connect with workingmen.

  “And that’s a bad thing?” I was seated in a comfortable chair nearby, sipping the Coke I’d been provided by a staffer. “They love you, Bob. Yeah yeah yeah.”

  He smiled humorlessly, shaking his head, the familiar tousle of dark-brown hair bouncing. “Don’t kid yourself, Nate. They’re here for him. They’re here for him.”

  He let the curtain take the window, brightness still filtering into a gloomy bedroom with no lights on. He seemed to prefer the shadows.

  In half an hour, the Democratic candidate for senator of New York would be addressing this crowd, supposedly getting them stirred up, but right now that was hard to imagine, as he dropped dejectedly into the chair opposite me, slumping there.

  Days ago I had heard about the funk Bobby was in from Bill Queen, the ex-NYPD cop and current Manhattan branch A-1 agent who was Kennedy’s personal bodyguard. Senatorial candidates didn’t get Secret Service protection, even when the candidate’s brother was an assassinated president.

  Bill was also how I was able to get in to see Bobby without any red tape, a phone call getting me right to Steve Smith, Bobby’s campaign manager (and brother-in-law). And now I was sitting in the bedroom of a suite at the Statler—the venerable and very non-Space Age Statler in Buffalo, New York, that is. Not Dallas, out of which I’d flown yesterday afternoon.

  About fifteen minutes ago, after working my way up from the lobby showing my ID to half a dozen interested parties, I’d entered the suite, where a bustling bunch of aides were in the outer area, some sitting, some pacing, almost all smoking. Included in this group was my man Bill, but also Steve Smith, the only guy in the room with his suit coat on, though his narrow red-and-blue striped tie was loosened.

  Smith was a dark-haired, athletic-looking guy in his thirties, a former hockey goalie with a wry sense of humor and an unflappable nature. Like the others in this mostly male clubhouse (a few “Kennedy Girls,” secretarial types, all young and pretty, were tagging along with clipboards and pencils here and there), he was in shirtsleeves and looked frazzled for a guy normally cool.

  The air was blue from cigarettes, so I said by way of greeting, “This must be that smoke-filled room I’ve heard so much about.”

  “Nate,” Smith said, grinning. “Welcome to the monkey house.”

  He looked a little bit like the young Joseph Cotten, though with a wider face. He offered a hand and I shook it, then he curled a finger for me to join him in as quiet a corner as the campaign hubbub would allow.

  “Maybe you can get Bob out of his funk,” he said. “He likes you.”

  “Doesn’t he like you anymore, Steve?”

  “Right now he doesn’t like anybody much, including himself. This campaign has hardly started and we’re already getting kicked in the ass.”

  My forehead frowned and my mouth smiled. “I can’t believe that. I mean, that guy Keating is well-liked enough, I guess, but he’s basically the smiling uncle you dodge at Christmas.”

  Smith was shaking his head. “Don’t count Keating out. He’s a Republican but he’s a liberal one, and that makes him credible in this state. Good voting record.”

  I nodded toward the street. “There’s a mob scene going on out there. They’re crazy about our blushing boy. Took me half an hour to push my way through.”

  And it had—out on Delaware Avenue at Niagara Square, old and young, men and women, blacks and whites, strained against the police lines.

  “Don’t be fooled,” Smith said. “A good share just want to see a Kennedy in the flesh—that’s no guarantee they’ll vote for him.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a humorless smirk, “but they haven’t heard him talk yet.” He spoke in a barely audible whisper. “Nate, the little fella’s been stinking on ice. He’s flat, and when he isn’t flat, he’s screechy. He’s nervous and he mumbles. Oh, he’s loud enough when he’s snapping at reporters, and you can sure hear that he’s got nothing bad to say about his opponent.”

  “Doesn’t he want to win?”

  The campaign manager shrugged in exasperation. “I don’t know at this point, Nate. I really don’t know. Maybe you can reason with him. I just know he’s blowing it.”

  “So why bust your ass for the guy, Steve?”

  “Because Jean wants me to,” he said, referring to his wife, who was also Bobby’s sister, of course. “Anyway, it’s like I always say—ask not what the Kennedys can do for you, ask what you can do for the Kennedys.… You can go on in, if you can get past your own man. Bobby knows you’re stopping by.”

  Bill Queen was indeed sitting in a chair near the bedroom door, a bald mustached paunchy guy in his fifties in a brown suit and brown-and-yellow tie who was Central Casting’s idea of a cop, and Central Casting was right. He was reading Playboy magazine, or anyway looking at the busty blonde in the centerfold.

  “Nice work if you can get it,” I said.

  Unashamed, he refolded the Playmate and got to his feet. “I have a boss who can appreciate the finer things.”

  I pointed to the magazine in his hand. “Those girls in there are young enough to be your daughter.”

  “I don’t have a daughter, Nate.” He nodded toward the door and did Groucho with his eyebrows. “He’s in a mood. Hell, he’s always in a mood. You shoulda warned me about the guy.”

  “What mood would you be in, doing rallies on streets with high windows all around, if you were him?”

  “Oh, that doesn’t faze Mr. Kennedy. Hell, he sits up on the backseat of a convertible like a beauty queen, waving and giving the crowd that sad-puppy smile. Sometimes he stands on the roof of a parked car to see ’em better. It’s like he’s askin’ for it.”

  That sounded like Bobby. “So are Hoover’s boys cooperating?”

  The ex-cop nodded. “I call them every morning, like you arranged, and they give me the latest death threats. Steady stream of ’em, Nate. Or do you think Hoover’s just trying to look vigilant for his old boss?”

  “I don’t think J. Edgar gives two shits about what his ‘old boss’ thinks.”

  Bill jerked a thumb at the closed door nearby. �
�Well, you tell your friend, in future, to listen to me about security measures, would ya? Then maybe I’d have better things to do with my time on this assignment than pound my pud in the john to Miss October.”

  Bobby heard me come in and met me at the door, shaking my hand and giving me his shy, almost bucktoothed smile, which with his rather high-pitched voice suggested an Ivy League Bugs Bunny. “It’s been too long, Nate. Too long. Can I, uh, get you something to drink?”

  I asked for a Coke and he yelled out to a Kennedy Girl to get us both one. She swiftly returned with a warm smile and two chilled bottles. Then she was gone and we were shut inside the hotel bedroom, which was smoke-free—Bobby was not a smoker, actually was adamantly against it, though he clearly didn’t forbid his staff. He wasn’t much of a drinker, either, as the sodas indicated, though he was by no means a teetotaler.

  We exchanged a few pleasantries as I tried to get used to how skinny he looked. I hadn’t seen him since late October ’63, though I’d talked to him on the phone a few times, post-assassination, and he’d seemed himself. But in the flesh, he appeared to have shrunk, all but swimming in the white shirt and black trousers. Almost a year later, and he was still wearing black. His face seemed sunken, gaunt.

  “Tell me, Nate, do you really have something to talk over with me, or, uh, did Steve Smith just want you to come and give me a pep talk—get me off my duff and into this thing?”

  “I really do have something to talk about. And I don’t think it’s going to boost your spirits any. Just don’t jump out that window, when you hear. Anyway, some college girls down there would just catch you and drag you off to have their way with you.”

  That made him smile, although his eyes lacked their usual spark. “Doesn’t, uh, sound half-bad.”

  I gestured toward the muffled roar. “If you’re not up for this race, why the hell did you get in it?”

  Everything had happened so recently—he hadn’t even announced his candidacy until August 22, and only resigned as attorney general at the beginning of the month.

  His face tried to remember how to summon a big smile. “Remember what Steve McQueen said in The Magnificent Seven, Nate?”