Max Collins - Ask Not

Rosselli hadn’t noticed me yet. Like him, I usually didn’t have any trouble getting into Chasen’s, but my partner Fred Rubinski of the A-1 LA branch had made a call just in case. This was after Fred called around to the mobster’s half dozen favorite restaurants to see which one he was taking his latest starlet to on Saturday night.

My son, my ex-wife, and I rarely dined together as a family, if that’s what we were, but I had insisted. Both were intrigued that I’d flown out to their corner of the USA at such short notice, particularly since Sam had just spent a month in mine.

We were ensconced in our own lushly padded leather booth, just like such regulars as Alfred Hitchcock and Gregory Peck, neither of whom were here tonight, though we didn’t rate a name plaque like they did. A few celebrities could be spotted — Sinatra’s pal Don Rickles at the bar, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in separate booths with their individual wives, neither party acknowledging the other. Otherwise, star-gazers seemed out of luck, though you could bet this crowd included talent scouts, publicity agents, and studio execs, and you never knew who would enter next under the famous canopy out front.

The Hollywood A-list restaurant, at the corner of Doheny Drive and Beverly Boulevard, had a slightly cluttered, men’s-club feel — a model TWA plane courtesy of onetime regular Howard Hughes flew over the bar, and autographed celebrity photos rode the knotty-pine walls. Waiters in tuxes played chummy with the patrons, famous or not, and would grill the famous “Hobo” steak table-side — three salt-encrusted slices of New York strip on buttered toast. Drinks were notably strong and the atmosphere borderline raucous. This was, after all, where midgets had once jumped out of a big cake for Jimmy Stewart’s birthday.

The noise level was a plus for my purposes.

“All right,” my ex-wife said. “I’ll bite. What’s the occasion?”

My ex-wife in her mid-forties looked fantastic. She was small, almost petite, and had dark-brown hair and violet eyes. She’d retained her figure over the years, and she’d once been a model for calendar artists, so it was a nice figure. As Margaret Hogan, she had been in a few movies, and even in a town where women over forty were considered ancient, she could still turn heads.

Sam was between us in the curve of the booth. He was in the Maxwell Street knockoff Beatle suit, while his mother wore a white wool suit threaded with black and a black silk cowl-necked blouse, not a knockoff. Givenchy, probably, knowing her expensive tastes. I was in a green worsted by Cricketeer, pretty hot stuff in Chicago, nothing special out here.

“Peggy,” I said, “why don’t we order first? Anything you like.”

“Please don’t call me that. You know it irritates me.”

I insisted on calling her Peggy because that was the name I’d known her by. Out here everybody called her Maggie, including her husband, who was out of town on a shoot, not that I’d have invited him.

“Order,” I instructed her. “Pretend you’re trying to get an extra child support check out of me, which on this menu won’t be hard.”

She gave me a dirty look — she didn’t like me saying things like that in front of Sam, who was oblivious to them. Right now he was sneaking a look at Jerry Lewis.

We ordered. My ex and I both got the Maude’s salad and Hitchcock sole — she hated that we still liked the same foods — and Sam ordered the famous chili. How famous? Not so long ago, that other violet-eyed beauty, Liz Taylor, had servings sent to the set of Cleopatra. In Rome.

“I’m going to ask you to excuse me,” I said, sliding out of the booth. “I’ll be back before the food gets here.”

“Nathan,” Peggy snapped. “What is going on?”

“If I told you,” I said cheerfully, “it would spoil your meal.”

“Goddamnit, Nathan!”

But I was already halfway to Rosselli’s booth, which was when he recognized me. A moment of surprise — what, that I was still breathing? — was replaced by a big smile. It seemed genuine, but this was Hollywood, remember.

“Nate Heller!” he said, extending his hands with palms up, as if to prove neither held a weapon. He turned to his date. “Sweetie, this is Nate Heller, an old Chicago pal of mine.”

The little blonde smiled weakly and nodded. He did not introduce her by name. If, in years to come, she ever graduated from starlet to movie star, I didn’t recognize her.

“Hope I’m not intruding, Johnny,” I said. “I’m here with my family.”

I gestured over to the booth, where Peggy was frowning a little and Sam was rubbernecking. Dean Martin’s direction, this time.

“Aren’t you divorced?” he asked, rather delicately for a hood. “If I’m not speaking out of school.”

“Yes, that’s my ex-wife, but we’re still friendly. You know, just because you divorce a woman, it doesn’t mean she isn’t still the mother of your kid.”

Rosselli nodded several times at this sage observation, while the blonde was frowning, trying to work it out.

I leaned in, resting a hand on the linen cloth of the booth’s table. “Could I impose on you, John, for just a few minutes? Just a few words?”

His eyebrows went up. “Certainly, Nate. Be a pleasure to catch up.”

“I’m not really here just to socialize, John.”

Now the eyebrows came down, frowning just a little, in thought, nothing sinister, really. “Is it business? Is it personal?”

“Both.” I smiled at the blonde. “Miss, would you mind powdering your nose for five minutes?”

She was thinking about that when Johnny nudged her, saying, “Go on, sweetie. Boy talk.”

So the blonde slid out, swayed off, and I slipped into the booth. They hadn’t been served anything but rolls yet, plus Rosselli was working on a glass of what was almost certainly Smirnoff on the rocks. I never knew him to drink anything else.

There was also what I would bet a hundred bucks was a Shirley Temple that the blonde had been drinking. What the hell — Chasen’s was where they invented it.

“Nate, I admit you have my attention. And I’m a little concerned. What is it, man?”

Without any preamble at all, I told him what had happened after that Beatles concert, including that the hit-and-run driver had been one of the two Cubans I’d picked up for the Secret Service when that first assassination attempt on JFK had been squelched.

“What do you make of that?” Rosselli asked cagily.

“When somebody swings out of one lane to run me down in the other, I figure he has a grudge. Or anyway a goal.”

“One would think,” Rosselli allowed.

I leaned toward him and he leaned toward me.

I said softly, “The Warren Commission will be hanging the JFK hit on that Oswald character, any day now. Somebody doesn’t want me to spoil things. Somebody thinks I might talk.”

“About what, Nate?”

“About Operation Mongoose, John. About Cubans and spooks and Outfit guys thinking the Kennedy boys ought to be taken down a big goddamn peg. About the attempted Chicago hit three weeks before Dallas that the Secret Service has kept mum about.”

He backed away a little, frowning again, and now something sinister had found its way in. “Are these really things that should be discussed in a public place?”

“I might get killed in a private place, John.”

The frown melted into a sad smile, the blue eyes in the tan face hooded. “Nate, Nate, what you are you saying? You know you’re a friend.”

He meant not just to him, but to the Outfit, and the other crime families around the country with which they were aligned.

“I’m a friend to your friends,” I said, my voice even, “and the CIA considers me an asset. My guess, though, is that the Cubans feel otherwise.”