Max Collins - Ask Not

“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) and 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.”