“I don’t care.”
“You will when you play that tape.”
They had a long row of booths to themselves. If it went bad, he could kill him and duck out the back door.
“You crossed the line, Pete. You knew the line was there, and you crossed it.”
Pete shrugged. “We didn’t hurt Jack, and Bobby’s too smart to bring in the law. We can walk out of here and get back to business.”
“And trust each other?”
“I don’t see why not Jack’s the only thing that ever got between us.”
“Do you honestly think it’s that simple?”
“I think you can make it that way.”
Boyd unlatched the suitcase. Pete laid the machine on the table and hit Play.
His tape splice rolled. Pete turned the volume up to cover the jukebox.
Jack Kennedy said, “Kemper Boyd’s probably the closest thing, but he makes me a tad uncomfortable.”
Barb Jahelka said, “Who’s Kemper Boyd?”
Jack: “He’s a Justice Department lawyer.”
Jack: “His one great regret is that he’s not a Kennedy.”
Jack: “He just went to Yale Law School, latched onto me, and–”
Boyd was shaking. Boyd was ungroomed working on unhinged.
Jack: “He threw over the woman he was engaged to to curry favor with me.”
Jack: “He’s living out some unsavory fantasy–”
Boyd hit the tape rig barefisted. The spools bent and cracked and shattered.
Pete let him beat his hands bloody.
84
(Meridian, 5/13/62)
The plane fishtailed in and skidded to a halt Kemper braced himself against the seat in front of him.
His head throbbed. His hands throbbed. He hadn’t slept in thirty-odd hours.
The co-pilot cut the engines and cranked the passenger door open. Sunshine and steamy air blasted in.
Kemper deplaned and walked to his car. His finger wraps seeped blood.
Pete talked him out of reprisals. Pete said Ward Littell built the shakedown from the ground up.
He drove to the motel. The road blurred behind thirty-odd hours of liquor and Dexedrine.
The lot was full. He double-parked beside Flash Elorde’s Chevy.
The sun hit twice as hot as it should. Claire kept saying, “Dad, please.”
He walked to his room. The door jerked open just as he touched it
A man pulled him inside. A man kicked his legs out. A man threw him prone and cuffed him facedown on the floor.
A man said, “We found narcotics here.”
A man said, “And illegal weapons.”
A man said, “Lenny Sands killed himself in New York City last night He rented a cheap hotel room, slashed his wrists and wrote ‘I am a homosexual’ in blood on the wall above the bed. The sink and toilet were filled with burned-up tape fragments obviously taken off a bug installed in the Kennedy family’s suite at the Carlyle Hotel.”
Kemper thrashed. A man stepped on his face and held him still.
A man said, “Sands was spotted burglarizing the suite earlier in the day. The NYPD located a listening-post setup a few doors down. It was print-wiped and cleaned out, and obviously rented under a phony name, but the people running it left a large quantity of blank tape behind.”
A man said, “You ran the shakedown.”
A man said, “We’ve got your Cubans and that French guy Guéry. They won’t talk, but they’re going down on weapons charges anyway.”
A man said, “Enough.”
The Man: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
A man pulled him into a chair. A man uncuffed him and recuffed him to the post at the foot of the bed. The room was packed with Bobby’s pet Feds–six or seven men in cheap summer suits.
The men walked out and shut the door behind them. Bobby sat on the edge of the bed.
“Goddamn you, Kemper. Goddamn you for what you tried to do to my brother.”
Kemper coughed. His vision shimmied. He saw two beds and two Bobbys.
“I didn’t do anything. I tried to break up the operation.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that your outburst at Laura’s apartment was anything but an admission of your guilt.”
Kemper flinched. The cuffs gouged his wrists and drew blood.
“Believe what you like, you chaste little piece of dogshit. And tell your brother that nobody ever loved him more and got back less.”