The Way You Look Tonight (23 page)

It was an ideal set-up.

The bar’s owner, Tom, was from Arkansas. He’d come down here in the late ’50s when his necessarily secret boyfriend – Little Rock had zero tolerance of men like them
– had told him that he’d heard they could live and breathe a lot easier on the last fragment of the United States before you got to the tropics.

So they’d sold their respective apartments and bought this place together – it was whimsically and incongruously called The Coral Heifer back then – before said boyfriend
had fallen head over heels in love with a visiting lawyer who was passing through the Keys on his 60-foot yacht, and had sailed off to live with him back home in the Bahamas.

Tom had taken this abandonment with good grace and bought out his partner’s share in the business. He now ran one of the best and most profitable taverns in the Key.

Woods had worked out his cover story while he chugged down to Key West in the stolen boat. He told his new boss he was on the run from the authorities in Texas. He said he had been caught in
a classic police sting operation – an undercover cop had come on to him in a Dallas hotel bar and when he’d responded to the man’s clumsy and, with hindsight, pretty obviously
fake advances he’d found himself under arrest and down at city police headquarters being charged, outrageously, with soliciting. It was a brazen set-up.

Luckily he’d made bail and immediately skipped town. He’d heard how things were down in Key West and had driven directly here from Dallas, completing the journey in two straight
days’ driving, sleeping in his car overnight.

Tom had offered him a parking space out back but, thinking on his feet, Woods told him he had no further use for the car and had sold it for cash at a car lot up where Route 1 connected with
the Key. He added that for the time being he was going under a false name, Dennis Clancey, and he’d appreciate it if his new boss didn’t mention he’d just arrived to any police
who might come snooping around, not that he thought they would, but you never knew.

Tom, appalled at the persecution and perfidy from which this pleasant young man had been forced to flee, promised complete discretion.

‘I’ll have a quiet word with the other guys, too, er . . . Dennis. Trust me, no one here’s gonna give you away to those bastards.’

He had smiled gratefully and gone upstairs to his room to unpack.

He hid the gun and what was left of the chloroform under the spare blanket on top of the wardrobe.

He wouldn’t be needing them again for a while.

So he thought.

Jeb’s Lincoln Continental had gone through the little-known security checkpoint at the back of the White House and was now following two dark-suited Secret Service men
who jogged easily in front of the car at a steady 5 mph.

‘Bet those guys wish we weren’t having this Indian Summer,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘They’ll be sweating through their coats by the time we pull up at the
side-door.’

Jeb had visited the White House several times before and he knew the routine. On the drive down from Northampton he’d regaled Dorothy, Stella and Diana with stories about the celebrations
there in the heady days after Kennedy had won the presidency two years earlier.

‘It was all still pretty rumbustious by the time Jack and Bobby asked me down to raise a glass,’ he told them, ‘and that was three days after Jack and Jackie and the kids moved
in. But apparently their first day was wild. Bobby said he slid all the way down the bannisters in the main part of the house and Ethel said she’d have done the same if she’d been
wearing pants.

‘The kids – mostly Bobby and Ethel’s, obviously – ran riot through the rooms and everyone went for a swim in the pool in the basement. Then they had a bowling competition
in the President’s private alley.’

‘Who won?’ Stella had asked him.

‘Are you
kidding
?’ he’d laughed. ‘Ethel’s team. Ethel Kennedy is the most competitive female in America. I swear if she’d been born fifty years later
she’d be the first woman president of the United States. You’ve met her, Stella. Every one of that Ethel’s switches and buttons is permanently set to ON.’

‘Will she be there at dinner tonight?’ Diana asked. ‘I’d love to meet her. I know everyone’s obsessed with Jackie but it’s Ethel I’m fascinated
by.’

‘Sure she will. It’ll be the four of us, plus the President, Jackie, Bobby and Ethel.’ Jeb had turned around to grin at mother and daughter and the car swayed alarmingly on the
turnpike.

‘Jeb!’ shrieked Dorothy. ‘Keep your eyes on the road!’

‘Sorry, honey.’ He steered the Lincoln back on to the line. ‘All I was about to say was . . . well, Stella, the Kennedy boys are genuinely grateful to you. One, you got C.
Farris Bryant off their backs – I hear the talks with Disney are on again – and two, everyone agrees it’s only a matter of time before golden boy down in Key West gets the cuffs
on whatshisname . . . Woodward . . . no, Woods, right? Anyway, that won’t really matter either way to the snowbirds. All they care about is that the bastard’s on the run and the Keys
are safe again for their wives and daughters. Crisis over. Mostly down to you, my dear. Light me a cigarette, would you, Dottie?’

A few moments later Jeb returned to his theme.

‘And Jack’s serious about making you a hired gun for the Feds. He’d never have suggested it without running it past old J. Edgar himself. Hoover may be a son of a bitch but
he’s a son of a bitch who likes results. And trust me, he’ll find a way to take credit for your work down in the Keys. He’ll probably say it was all his idea in the first place
and he had to force it past the President and Attorney General.’ Jeb gave a short laugh. ‘You have no
idea
how much that man hates Jack and Bobby.’

Stella, looking out of her window at the outlying suburbs of Washington that were now beginning to appear, shrugged. ‘I couldn’t care less if this Hoover person wants to claim credit
for anything I might have done. He sounds a repulsive man, from everything I’ve heard about him from Lee. He says he’s a perfect bully, and obsessed with power. Lee told me that most of
the FBI loathe him and politicians are terrified of him because he knows all their secrets.’

Dorothy had turned around, grinning. ‘Jack’s rightly wary of him but Bobby’s not remotely afraid of the guy,’ she said, ‘still less his wife. Last year Ethel took
her kids on the official tour of FBI headquarters and outside of the firing range she said there was a suggestions box, with a big sign above it saying: “Tell us how to make the FBI a better
place.” Ethel took out her red pen –
everyone
knows she always uses a red pen – and wrote: “Get yourselves a new Director.” Good for Ethel!’

‘Hmm . . . up to a point,’ replied her husband. ‘Jack’s right to tread warily. You don’t want to make an enemy of that man, honey.’

‘Oh Jeb, don’t be so stuffy.’

Half an hour later the Lincoln was approaching its destination and the women insisted Jeb pull over so they could refresh their make-up.

‘Are you nervous, Mummy?’ Stella asked, as she passed Diana her powder compact and accepted a lipstick in return. ‘I certainly am, and I’ve met them before, and on my
own, too.’

‘A little, I suppose,’ her mother admitted, powdering her nose. ‘Who wouldn’t be? But from everything you told me about that day on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard,
I think it’ll be fine after the first few minutes. Anyway, Jeb and Dorothy here know them pretty well, don’t you?’

‘Yup, and your mother’s right, Stella,’ Jeb replied, lighting a fresh cigarette and opening his window. ‘I’ve seen folks who looked like they were gonna have
kittens just before meeting the Kennedys, and a few minutes later it’s like they’re talking with the folks back home.’

He turned and gave Diana an unmistakable look of warning. ‘But a word to the wise, Diana. And I’m being serious now, OK? Jack’s a great guy but he’s a player. He
can’t help it. You’re a beautiful woman of around his own age and you’re unattached, not that that makes much difference to Jack.’ He glanced slyly at his wife.
‘Remember when he suggested that you and he—’

Dorothy clamped her palm over her husband’s mouth. ‘Shhh, Jeb. That can keep for another time.’

She turned to Diana. ‘But he’s right, dear. If Jack Kennedy can make a pass at an old stick insect like me—’ she ignored the loud protests that erupted all around her
– ‘he’ll be enraptured when he sets eyes on you. So stay with the pack and don’t accept any offers for a personal presidential tour round the Oval Office.’

Diana tried to suppress a smile as she snapped the compact shut.

‘Don’t worry, everyone,’ she said drily. ‘I can take care of myself, believe it or not. So . . . are we all ready?’

The Lincoln moved smoothly away from the kerb and towards 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lee reluctantly placed the long-distance call on the morning of his tenth day in Key West. He couldn’t think of anything else to do, other than just waiting around like
this.

Former FBI department head Ted Bradley picked up the kitchen extension on the seventh ring. He’d just come inside from his daily early morning swim in the garden pool of his house in
Scottsdale, Arizona. He and his wife had moved there from Washington the year after his early retirement in 1959. Although barely in his sixties, Bradley had fallen prey to the arthritis which had
plagued his own father three decades earlier, and his doctor had recommended he quit Washington – alternately damp or freezing in winter, hot and humid in summer – for the bone-dry heat
in the deserts of America’s south-west.

It seemed to have made a difference, as Bradley’s wife had told him only the evening before. ‘You’re moving more easily than you were even two years before you retired,
Ted,’ she said over supper. ‘At the very least it’s not getting any worse.’

He grunted. His wife’s optimism notwithstanding, it was nevertheless an undeniably gnarled and swollen hand that now reached for the receiver.

‘Bradley.’

‘Ted, it’s Lee. How the heck are you?’

His old boss gave a dry chuckle. ‘I’m just fine, Lee. Been waitin’ for you to call. Still not got the cuffs on him, huh?’

‘Nope. He’s close by, Ted, I can feel it. I just can’t seem to cut a break down here. Thought if I spoke with you, you might see something I’m missing.’

The older man nodded. ‘Sure. Just let me have some coffee and eat those flapjacks I can see Helen starting to mix up, and then we’ll talk. Call me back in an hour – say,
eight-thirty?’

‘That I will surely do. Thanks, Ted. Say hi to Helen for me.’

Bradley had been Lee’s chief mentor and cheerleader at the FBI. Early on he’d spotted the young man’s instinctive feel for how a case might be cracked, when
the Mayor of Cincinnati’s young son was abducted and a series of ransom notes received.

Local Feds suspected the kidnapping was the work of the city’s mafia. The mayor had declared war on them in his election campaign the year before and the ransom messages, as well as
demanding a huge sum in cash, appeared to contain coded warnings to the frantic father to back off in his crusade against organised crime.

But Lee was doubtful. The ransom notes somehow smelled wrong to him with their odd mix of the pecuniary and the political. He struck off on his own, delving into the mayor’s chequered
marital history. Seven years earlier he’d divorced his drunken, faithless first wife after her third affair; the missing child was the issue of his second, happier marriage.

Lee followed a hunch and tracked the first wife to a run-down apartment on the city’s east side. He had her movements watched and within twenty-four hours she had unwittingly led
detectives to an even seedier apartment nearby where her current boyfriend, a small-time hood, was holding the missing boy. The ransom notes’ hints of mafia involvement had been a ruse to
throw investigators off the scent.

Bradley had gone out on a limb to support his protégé’s intuition so the successful outcome to such a high-profile case reflected well on both men. They formed a deepening
friendship based on mutual trust and respect. Even when they were working on cases in different parts of the country, it wasn’t unusual for one to call the other for advice.

Lee had been downcast two years earlier when his mentor told him he was planning on retiring early. ‘Who’ll I call for advice now?’ he grumbled over farewell drinks in a
Washington bar.

‘Me, of course,’ the older man answered, surprised. ‘For Chrisakes, Lee, I’m not handing my brain in along with my badge.’

When he called Bradley back, Lee spoke more or less uninterrupted for almost ten minutes before pausing for breath, closing his long monologue with: ‘So that’s
about the size of it, Ted. There’s a chance, of course, that he’s slipped away, but like I said I don’t believe that for one second. I’m looking down Duval from my office
window now and every bone in my body is telling me he’s out there, maybe not two hundred yards from where I’m standing right this moment.’

‘Yeah . . . reminds me of the Clevedon case, remember that one?’ his old boss replied thoughtfully. ‘Clevedon spent more’n a month pumping gas on a forecourt not one
hundred yards from my headquarters. I felt just like you do now. You know, that not only was the murdering bastard lyin’ low, he was within smelling distance of me too. Damnedest feeling I
ever had.

‘Your man Woods has gone to ground all right, that’s obvious,’ he continued, ‘and let’s assume that the old Foster instinct is playing you true and he’s right
there in Key West. So we need to kinda wander over the course here a little; establish some fundamentals. To be honest with you, Lee, I’ve been doing some thinking about the case anyway,
based on what I’ve read in the papers and seen on Most Wanted. Like I said, I’ve been expecting your call. Just hold the line a second now – I’m gonna get my briar. Helps
the old mental juices flow.’

After a moment Lee heard the rattling of drawers followed by the unmistakable strike and flare of a match. Then Bradley was back, coughing and clearing his throat. ‘You still there,
Lee?’ he asked between hacks. ‘Sorry about this racket. First pipe of the day. Always does this to me. Hang on . . .’