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  Ask Not

  Number XV of Nathan Heller

  Collins, Max Allan

  Tom Doherty Associates (2013)

  * * *

  Tags: Nathan Heller

  Nathan Hellerttt

  Chicago, September 1964. Beatlemania sweeps the nation, the Vietnam War looms, and the Warren Commission prepares to blame a “lone-nut” assassin for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. But as the post-Camelot era begins, a suspicious outbreak of suicides, accidental deaths, and outright murders decimates assassination witnesses. When Nathan Heller and his son are nearly run down on a city street, the private detective wonders if he himself might be a loose end.…

  Soon a faked suicide linked to President Johnson’s corrupt cronies takes Heller to Texas, where celebrity columnist Flo Kilgore implores him to explore that growing list of dead witnesses. With the blessing of Bobby Kennedy—former US attorney general, now running for Senator from New York—Heller and Flo investigate the increasing wave of violence that seems to emanate from the notorious Mac Wallace, rumored to be LBJ’s personal hatchet man.

  Fifty years after JFK’s tragic death, Collins’s rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.

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  For Nate and Abby—

  who will make their own history

  Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed as accurately as the passage of time and contradictory source material will allow, fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones—all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Disclaimer

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  I Owe Them One

  Books by Max Allan Collins

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The promoters of the systemic evil involved in killing President Kennedy counted on our repression and denial of its reality.

  —James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable

  That little Kennedy … he thought he was a god.

  —Allen Dulles

  We’ll take out insurance by setting up some nut to take the fall for the job, just like they do in Sicily.

  —Carlos Marcello

  One out of every four presidents has died in office.

  —Lyndon Baines Johnson

  We’re all mad here.

  —Lewis Carroll

  CHAPTER

  1

  September 1964

  My son’s generation will always remember two key events of their teenage years—where they were when news came of President Kennedy’s assassination, and seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

  I learned of the former in a guest room at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago—in the company of Miss November, fittingly enough. Soon, amid beauties with their mascara running, she and I had hunkered around a portable television with a little gray picture in a big shiny white kitchen. The latter broadcast I somehow missed, but Sam has made it abundantly clear over the years that the February 9 appearance of those four Liverpool lads on The Ed Sullivan Show was right in there with JFK getting it.

  My son once told me that that joyful noise had signaled a rebirth for his generation, the Baby Boomers, granting them permission to smile and have fun and be silly again. But it also signaled the end of barbershops as we knew them and extended the fad called rock ’n’ roll through the rest of the century and beyond.

  Unlike many of my contemporaries—I was a successful businessman in my well-preserved late fifties—I did not have disdain for the Beatles. They were a pretty fair combo, better than most of the little bands that had made the Twist a very big deal on Rush Street, and they seemed to have a sense of humor. Earlier this year, Sam had convinced me to take in their flick A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d liked it. More importantly, Miss November—who you may have calculated was younger than me—loved it.

  The Beatles, through no fault of their own, had created a problem for me with Sam. He lived with his mother and my ex-wife (that’s one person) in Hollywood with her husband, a fitfully successful film producer. Normally Sam spent summers with me in Chicago, but he had begged off of June and July because his combo—yes, the Beatle bug had bit him hard—had a weekly pool party gig at a Bel Air country club that paid “incredible money” ($100).

  “So what about August?” I’d asked him over the phone.

  “August is cool. August is groovy. Everybody’s going on vacation with family, so we can’t take gigs anyway. Dad, are you okay with this?”

  “It’s cool. Maybe not groovy, but cool.” I had maintained a strong relationship with my son by not insisting on having my own way. That’s right. I spoiled his ass. Divorced dads get to do that.

  Have to do that.

  And August had been swell. At a second-run theater in Evanston, we took in From Russia with Love, and before the film began I bragged about having met James Bond’s papa during the war.

  “I doubt Ian Fleming was on Guadalcanal, Dad,” Sam had said skeptically over his popcorn.

  “It was on Nassau,” I said. “He was doing spy stuff.”

  “The stories you tell! How am I supposed to know when you’re bullshitting me?”

  Another way I spoiled Sam was to let him swear around me. His mother hated it. Which I loved.

  I sipped too-sweet Coke. “Someday you’ll appreciate your old man.”

  “Hey, as dads go, you’re one of the cooler ones.”

  Not cool, just one of the cooler ones. I’d settle.

  Sam—actually Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr., but his mother and I decided one Nate around the house was plenty (more than enough, as it turned out)—had caught up with my six feet now. He had my late mother’s Irish good looks, the Jewish half of my heritage nowhere to be seen in either of us, and we looked enough alike to be brothers. If he had a really old brother.

  Oh, and he had his mother’s brown hair, not my reddish variety. Cut in that Moe Howard bowl haircut the Beatles had bestowed on American males. Once upon a time I’d wished he would let that dumb crew cut grow out. Careful what you wish for.

  “Listen, uh, Dad … I need to talk to you about college. I’m thinking about liberal arts.”

  “Not business?”

  “No. I want to be able to take music courses.”

  Like the Beatles had ever studied music!

  Sam was my only son. My only kid period. I had no desire to reshape him into Nathan Heller, Jr., even if that was his name. But I did have a successful business—the A-1 Detective Agency, here in Chicago and wi
th branches in Los Angeles, New York, and more recently Las Vegas—and I hoped he’d eventually take it over.

  Not as a detective—private eye days were long gone. Hell, they’d even canceled Peter Gunn. But the agency was a very profitable business indeed, and Sam would make a great executive—he was smart and personable and already pretty darn savvy.

  “Music, huh?” I said lightly. “You’ll teach, then. What, marching band? Chorus? What’s the starting salary, thirty-five hundred a year?”

  “Money isn’t everything, Dad.”

  Said the kid with two well-off parents.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t wanna teach. I don’t know what I want to do, maybe keep playing my music…”

  His music. The last time I looked, “his” music was the Beach Boys, Beatles, Chuck Berry, and, what was that instrumental group? The Adventures? Surf music. Jesus God.

  “… or something else, maybe, but not … business.”

  He said the word the way a Republican says Democrat.

  “You know I’ll support you any way you want to go, son. But you might, I’m just saying might, want to—”

  “It’s starting,” Sam said, meaning the movie, or anyway the previews.

  And it was starting. The first major struggle between father and son, at least since back when he wanted to stay up and watch Johnny Carson on school nights.

  So August flew by, and we went to the fights and to ball games and more movies and had plenty of great food with an emphasis on Gino’s pizza. We loafed around my Old Town bachelor pad and watched my color TV with its impressive 21-inch screen. I even arranged for an afternoon tour of Hef’s mansion, just to give Sam a little hint of what being a successful businessman might bring.

  Anyway, it was September now. This was Saturday and Labor Day was Monday. Back in Beverly Hills, school had been in session a couple days already, but I’d arranged for Sam to stick around so I could give him his seventeenth birthday present.

  The Beatles were performing tonight at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. This was the hottest ticket in town, the latest stop on a twenty-four-city, thirty-two-day tour. Tickets were going for $2.50, $3.50, and $4.50. A really great dad, with just the right connections, might be able to score his kid one of those tickets. But I could top that.

  Just like the Beatles could top Elvis Presley, whose first Amphitheater appearance had required two hundred policemen, for security—three hundred fifty cops were being put on for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, plus a couple hundred firemen with half a dozen ambulances standing at the ready. But celebrities like these required personal security as well, for their Midway Airport arrival, their Stock Yard Inn press conference, and the concert itself.

  And that was where the A-1 Detective Agency came in. Alan Edelson, who was handling press arrangements in Chicago, said Brian Epstein himself had requested me. I pretended to be impressed, and later really was, when my son informed me that Epstein was the boy wonder who had discovered and signed the Beatles. Mr. Epstein had apparently read of me across the pond in a News of the World story about Hollywood’s “Private Eye to the Stars.”

  In reality I remained Chicago’s private eye to anybody with a fat wallet, and spent at most maybe three months in California spread out over an average year. But Life and Look magazine articles, focusing on star clients like Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and the late Marilyn Monroe, had made a minor celebrity out of me.

  Normally as president of the A-1, I would have left this job to my staff and whatever add-ons from other agencies we might require. Sure, I’d likely stop around, shake a famous hand to provide the celebrity reassurance (and the A-1 a photograph), then go on my merry way.

  But attending to the Beatles personally gave me an opportunity to maybe be a hero to my son.

  We skipped the madhouse at Midway Airport because I knew the best opportunity for Sam to meet his real heroes was at the Saddle and Sirloin Club, the Stock Yard Inn’s restaurant. The medium-sized Tudor-style hotel itself was at Forty-second and Halsted, adjacent to the amphitheater. Sam and I were already there—half a dozen of my agents were doing the actual security work—when the Beatles arrived in a phalanx of blue uniforms.

  The dining room—a replica of an old English inn with oaken paneling arrayed with hunting prints—was jammed with linen-covered tables at which only invited reporters whose credentials had been checked were allowed. Screaming teenagers outside held back by sawhorses made a kind of muffled jet roar. Blue cigarette smoke drifted lazily in contrast to a general air of tension. Every table had a photographer on his feet with flash camera ready.

  They were so young, these four superstars who took chairs at a microphone-strewn banquet table on a modest platform. With the exception of Ringo Starr, who was maybe five seven, the others were around six feet, slender, smiling, amused. They wore sharp unmatching suits in the mod British style, Paul and Ringo in ties, John with his collar buttoned, George unbuttoned. A row of cops, their caps with badges on, were lined up behind them, as if not sure whether to protect or arrest.

  Sam was in a suit similar to what the Beatles were wearing, but it was a Maxwell Street knockoff I bought him, not a Carnaby Street original; like George, he wore no tie and his collar was open. His shoes were something called Beatle boots that a lesbian might have worn to an S & M party. Not that anyone cared, I was in a dark-gray suit by Raleigh with a black-and-gray diamond-pattern silk tie. And Florsheims, not Beatle boots.

  Before the questioning could begin, I approached the raised table with Sam at my side, and introduced myself to McCartney.

  “You’re the private eye,” he said, pleasant if not overly impressed. He was smoking. They all were. My God, they were young. Not far past twenty. Just four years or so older than Sam.

  I handed him my card. “These are my private numbers, if you need anything or there’s any problem at the hotel.”

  After the concert, they would be staying, briefly, at the O’Hare Sahara awaiting their Detroit flight later tonight.

  “Obliged,” McCartney said.

  I took a shot. “This is my son—Sam. You mind signing something for him?”

  They were all agreeable, signing a cocktail napkin. Sam was frozen, so I mentioned he was in a band himself.

  “Watch what you sign, man,” Lennon said, as he was autographing the napkin. He winked at Sam, who took the flimsy paper square and nodded and said thanks to all of them. They had forgotten him already, but I will always remember that they were nice to my son.

  “Have you fellas given any thought to what you’re going to do when the bubble breaks?”

  “Well,” Lennon said, “we’re gonna have a good time.”

  “We never plan ahead,” Harrison said.

  “How about your retirement, or buying into a big business?”

  “We already are a big business,” Lennon said, “so we don’t have to buy into one.”

  That was a smart-ass reply, which the reporter well deserved, but Lennon’s lilting accent took the edge off. Americans were suckers for a British accent; there was something seductive about it. I’d been with a couple BOAC stewardesses myself.

  “What do you think of Chicago?”

  Gesturing as he spoke, McCartney said, “I’m looking forward to seeing the gangsters with their broad-brimmed hats and wide ties.”

  I’m sure the cute Beatle considered that a gag, but the day before, a restaurant got blown up on Mannheim Road for resisting the protection racket, and two mob factions were currently shooting at each other over control of gambling on the North Side.

  Anyway, the lads were funny and made monkeys out of any number of smug reporters. Sam wore a big grin throughout, holding onto that cocktail napkin with both hands.

  The concert started at 8:30, but the Beatles didn’t come on right away. The vast high-ceilinged chamber was packed with fifteen thousand audience members, most of them teenagers, chiefly girls, often with beehive hairdos. They didn’t scream much during the four openin
g acts—a couple of nondescript combos, an out-of-place R & B singer, and a long-haired blonde who looked like she belonged in the audience—and I started to wonder what all the fuss was.

  I’d been told the audience would scream so loud, you couldn’t hear a damn thing. I was hearing these opening acts much better than I cared to. When the blond girl wrapped up her short set, meaning the headliners were next, the screaming kicked in, the sound like a burning building with flames eating away.

  Finally at 9:20, the Beatles emerged, led onto the stage by Chicago cops, coming down stairs off to one side. Grinning and waving, the three front men strapped on their guitars—Ringo getting behind his drums on a little stage-on-the-stage—and the place went wild. Stark raving mad. Like the Playboy mansion the day JFK was shot, lots of mascara was running. The shrieking was unbelievable. That muffled jet roar wasn’t muffled now—the damn jet was flying around in circles in the place, which was almost possible, since they held indoor drag races in here. There were six hundred thousand square feet of it, after all, currently filled by thousands of girls having a nervous breakdown.

  We had front-row seats and could almost hear the music. Well, Sam seemed to hear it just fine—he was singing along to “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout” and all the rest.

  I officially joined the older generation by covering my ears. Oddly I could hear the music better that way, particularly the bass guitar and drums. The damn thing seemed to go on forever. I thought I might weep. Finally it was over—thirty minutes that had earned these four twenty-year-olds a grand a minute.

  When the Beatles fled the stage, I took advantage of my security status to enlist a cop to lead Sam and me out a side exit while the audience was still on its feet screaming and crying. As for me, my ears were ringing. It was like I had a seashell up to either ear and could hear waves pounding the shore.