CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER  TWO

Wednesday June 5, 1968

ANSWERING THE CALL

            The phone jolted Angie Hawkins into semi-consciousness. She tried to clear the martinis and focus her mind.

            Her first emotion, before pondering who was at the other end of the line, was one she had gone to sleep with – anger. She knew better than to blame Frankie Manzzirie, the Post’s assistant librarian.  Frankie believed he had good reasons for his obsession with the bizarre death of Nick Hays and  the few conspiracy theorists who labored to tie Hays’ death to President Kennedy’s assassination.  Frankie was also obsessed with the detectives who had gotten Hays killed with their gunplay. Neither of the pricks had gone to jail; both had quickly entered guilty pleas and gotten probation. And the Warren Commission had refused to even consider the possibility that Hays’ death might have been linked to JFK. After all, Hays had just returned from Dallas and Jack Ruby’s trial.

Frankie constantly bugged her to fly to Dallas to investigate. She could call it a retrospective and tie it to Bobby Kennedy’s entry into the 1968 presidential primary, he said. Angie had misgivings, but had tried out the idea on Manny Kane, the Post’s managing editor. Fat chance. He had looked at the ceiling and said he’d think about it. That always meant no.

             Angie was frustrated—with Frankie who kept nagging her and with Kane, who never wanted to take a chance. She tried to understand his reluctance. Hays’ murder was history and predated her time at the Post, but what was the harm in revisiting it? Particularly because it was such a good story. Whenever she got like this, Angie forced herself to recognize her great good luck in landing a newsroom job. Most newspaperwomen languished in the features section, writing about society parties, food and social clubs. In fact, she was the only female “hard news” reporter on the Post. 

            Personal connections and a never-say-die attitude had gotten her the job. Married to an L.A. Times photographer, and the daughter of a cop, she had been a bored housewife and mother in her early thirties when she went to work at the first in a series of community weeklies, covering everything from city council and school board meetings to police procedurals, crime and trials. From her husband, she learned how newspapers worked, from her dad she picked up the complicated relationships between various players in city government. No story was too small or unimportant and she covered every beat as if she were covering the White House. Her tenacity got her noticed and here she was, more than a decade later. She sensed—hell, she knew—that some of the editors who initially had lauded her aggressive approach now saw her as a pain in the ass.

            Angie stretched, flexing her feet to work out the leg cramps. Her head started to clear. She had tried to dilute last night’s frustration with alcohol—too much, as it turned out. Her head had been spinning when she lay down the night before. She still felt fuzzy as she tried to find the bedside phone. It was heavy and black; its color serving as a reminder that she should only take serious calls during sleeping hours. These included calls from her ex-husband Simon, the Times photographer. Despite the divorce, they had remained friends and Simon felt free to phone at any hour when he came across a juicy murder or a disaster of some kind.

            She looked at the clock on her nightstand: 1:10 a.m. As if on cue, the phone resumed ringing. It was, in fact, Simon, calling from a phone booth.

             “Bobby Kennedy got himself shot an hour ago,” he said, his voice staccato quick and high with excitement. “Hit in the head. He’s in bad shape at County Hospital. Sound familiar.”

            “Got himself shot?  What are you talking about?”

            “I mean somebody tried to assassinate him.”

            “Do they know who did it?”

            “They have a suspect in custody.  He’s supposed to be Mexican. Maybe Filipino. That’s all we know right now. I’ve got to get off the phone.  Come to County General and wait with the rest of us if you want to be on top of this one. We’re told Kennedy’s aides will give a press conference on the Senator’s condition any time now.

            “Where’d it happen?”

            “The Ambassador Hotel.  Right after his victory speech.  He was walking through the kitchen to where he was supposed to give a short press conference.”

            “Were you with him?”

            “Right behind, but I was blocked from any good pictures. Yaro says he got a shot of Bobby sprawled on the floor.  He’s back at the paper getting it ready. Got to go.”

            “I’m going to the Ambassador. See if I can find anyone there from Long Beach,” Angie said. The Post’s news editors were always looking for local angles in any story, no matter how national or international. If astronauts landed on the moon, they’d be looking for a Long Beach angle.

            “Your call. I hear it’s crazy there,” Simon said.  “The cops are sorting out witnesses and taking them to Rampart Station.”

FINDING WITNESSES

            Angie hung up. She felt a mess, laid back on the pillow and stretched for thirty seconds.

            Her daughter Trish had come home just as she was falling asleep. If Trish heard the phone, she’d ignored it.

            Angie pulled on sweat pants and a sweatshirt, scribbled a short note for Trish (“Off on a story”) and hurried out the door. In the cool silence and inky blackness, she raced up the Harbor freeway from Long Beach. Nearing downtown L.A., she looked at her watch: 2:05. a.m. It had taken her only 35 minutes to get to the city.  Fortunately, the tipsy and traumatized Democrats driving home from the Ambassador were on the other side of the divider. She’d struggled to hold her speed below 90 miles an hour while listening to KFWB. The all-news station was recycling two interviews and sketchy details. One interview was with a waiter, the other with a student volunteer for the Senator. The volunteer told the radio reporter she had heard a young couple leaving the ballroom. She said they were shouting that they had killed Kennedy.

            Angie exited at the Olympic Boulevard off ramp in downtown LA. She calculated she could make good time heading west on the wide street.  But the intersection lights were turning red like it was 5 p.m. rush hour and they were set to slow traffic. It had to be some office-bound engineer’s idea of traffic control, designed to put the brakes on drivers like her who could lose their licenses with another ticket or two.  She blasted through two short yellows figuring the LAPD would be too busy to stop her. 

            Through the windshield she saw that a foggy haze was starting to form halos around the streetlights. She took a right off Olympic onto Western. A police blockade stopped her at 8^th Street.  She scanned the faces of the four cops waiting at the intersection to turn traffic around. She saw no one that she recognized. She flipped a U and worked her way around for an approach from the northeast when a police department bus full of passengers ground its engine through an intersection just ahead. It was headed east on 6^th.  Following at a distance, she watched the bus pull up in front of LAPD’s Rampart station on West Temple and disgorge a load of unhappy civilians. She ditched plans for the Ambassador; any significant witness would be at the police station.

            Many of the men climbed out of the crowded bus with suit coats flung over their shoulders.  Some of the women were in stocking feet, carrying high heels. Angie looked around for patrol cars, saw a chance and again grabbed a U, scanning the curb at the intersection with Rampart Boulevard for a safe parking place. She settled on a spot under a street light and near a closed but lit-up gas station.  She couldn’t do better in this dodgy part of the city. She checked the locked doors on her red ’67 Camaro – it looked almost black under the street light – and hurried by foot along Rampart, then up West Temple to the station house. She hoped to find a talkative witness she could offer a ride back to the Ambassador.

            As she reached the steps leading into Rampart station, a beefy young man in a security guard uniform emerged, waving his arms. A young Latina was at his side, matching his long strides. The woman appeared to be listening intently to the guard’s monologue. Angie turned her back and moved sideways to get of their way. She circled, gambling that they were paying no attention to her, and joined the pair as if she too were just exiting the station house.

            “I was caught in the crowd following the Senator. I didn’t see much,” she volunteered.  “What about you guys?”

            “I was clearing his way through the crowd,” the security guard boasted. He showed her his company’s name, Modern Security, writ large across the back of his jacket.

            “Did you see the shooter,” Angie asked.

            “Only for a minute. I had to help with crowd control right away,” the guard said.  “Rosey Grier and another guy I didn’t recognize, another big colored guy, jumped on the suspect, wrestled him to the ground.”

            “That’s no way to talk,” the young woman said and stomped off, her Kennedy lapel pin flashing in the glow of a streetlight.

SECURITY GUARD'S STORY

            “Sorry,” the guard turned to call after her.  “I’m no lover of the coloreds, causing all the riots.  Kennedy should have been more careful who he hired.  He might have lived to be president.”

            “You think he’ll die?” Angie asked, grabbing the guard on the elbow with a grip she thought would get his attention.

            “Looked like it, him lying there on the floor, one eye closed and the other catawampus.”

            “Tell me what you saw,” Angie said.  “I really missed the whole thing, stuck back in the crowd.”

            Angie offered the man a ride back to the Ambassador to pick up his car. He might be a good witness. He was in his twenties, big, maybe 235 pounds.  Under the street lights she had decided he had a boxer’s beefy jaw and a face getting puffy from too much booze. Nose was a little crooked. It wasn’t clear exactly what he’d seen or his exact role in the shooting’s aftermath. He gave her some details of the scene in the pantry he could not have easily picked up from others at Rampart Station.  Going on what she’d heard on the radio driving up, Angie told him she’d been in the ballroom crowd and driven to Rampart to look for a friend who maybe was somehow scooped up and taken to the station with the actual eyewitnesses. The security guard just nodded, climbed into her car and resumed his story. He clearly wanted her to know he’d been part of the action.

            He is a wanna-be-cop, Angie thought.

            “You still box?” Angie asked. 

            “How’d you know?”

            “You look like a boxer I might have seen fight,” she lied.

            He grinned and went on. He obviously had no interest in what she thought, or in her, for that matter. And why should he? She was in her mid-forties. She wore no make-up and her shoulder-length brown hair hadn’t been brushed or styled in nearly twenty-four hours. She still had good skin, well, pretty good; her face was angular, but her nose was somewhat narrow. She was fairly slender, but she surely didn’t look like a model, or anyone special—at least in her own mind. It was her prodigious energy, and her smarts, that drew people to her. And this young guy didn’t care about either of those things. In fact, he seemed to care only about puffing up his own importance, as he continued describing the scene at the Ambassador: the Senator being loaded aboard an ambulance and the LAPD rounding up people who claimed to be in the pantry at the time of the shooting.

            Nearing the hotel, the police security seemed to have evaporated, except for the occasional patrol car. The security guard said he had parked on Western near Wilshire.

 Almost there, she began pressing him. “You said Kennedy got ahead of you on his way into the pantry.”

            

(To be continued with posts several times a week)