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Larry L. Lynch
Larry L. Lynch is a retired newspaper editor and writer living in Paso Robles California. He is an author of several blogs including a "A Federal Offense." It's a work in progress for which he invites suggestions as comments.

SECURITY GUARD'S STORY PART 1

            “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.”
           

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