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his hand, then drew it back quickly; he’d remembered my telling him Hughes was not a keen handshaker.
    The man stood for a few agonizing seconds – agonizing for me, in any case. I can see now that we must have looked like three miscast characters in an Oscar Wilde drawing-room comedy; we had all forgotten our lines and a hush had fallen over the theatre. He finally reached deeper into his pocket. His right hand came out with a cellophane bag, which he pushed toward Suskind. ‘Have a prune,’ he said.
    Dick took and examined a prune. ‘That’s an organic prune, isn’t it?’
    ‘Correct,’ Howard said. ‘The other kind are poison.’
    For three or four minutes they discussed the merits of various organic fruits and vegetables and the superiority of natural vitamins over the chemically-processed kind. When the subject was exhausted, Dick said he had to go. The door closed behind him.
    ‘I’m sorry, Howard,’ I said immediately. ‘You told me ten o’clock. We’d just had dinner and we were sitting around playing chess –’
    He waved his hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. Bright guy, very clear-thinking. Doesn’t smoke, I noticed – I had a good look at his fingertips. Good man to have around as a bodyguard. You may need one. Let’s get to work.’
    The final session of interviews occurred on the East Coast of Florida during the months of August and September. I was staying in a motel bungalow on the beach and Howard was staying in a private home some twenty miles to the north. In June he had given me the typed transcripts of the Bahama interviews and I had spent six weeks checking out the details and correcting some names and dates. Howard refused to identify the transcriber-typist, except to refer to him good-humoredly as ‘The Abominable Snowman.’
    ‘I can understand why you call him that.’ I said. ‘He must have typed with all four paws.’ Whoever it was, he could neither type or spell. There were four notations in nearly three hundred pages to the effect that ‘tape broke; sorry; part missing.’ The phrase ‘unclear’ had replaced a dozen names and phrases, and the overlaps that naturally occur when two men are speaking were usually omitted. In general the manuscript was a mess. I said, ‘Howard, it won’t do. You’ve either got to find someone else or you’ve got to let me do it.’
    He eventually decided there was no one else he trusted other than The Abominable Snowman, but he admitted the Snowman was incompetent. So I was awarded the job. It was coolie-labor, brutally boring. By the second week in Florida I was sick of hearing Howard’s voice repeating the same phrases – to catch a muttered monologue or a sharp exclamation the tape had sometimes to be run backwards and forward half a dozen times – and even sicker of hearing my own badgering and apologetic questions. Between transcribing and wrapping up the interviews I was virtually self-imprisoned in thebungalow. Now and then I would step out and swim some laps in the pool under the sulky September sky or drive over to Route 1 to work up a sweat banging golf balls on the driving range, but during those weeks I had no time to learn the first name of a single Floridian other than the maid. Moreover, for the first time I had the precious tapes in my possession, which made Hughes uneasy. ‘If you see a man with a cane hanging around outside the bungalow,’ he said, ‘don’t jump on him. He’s there for your protection. (He meant, of course, for the protection of the tapes.) If there’s anyone else hanging around who doesn’t have a cane, tell your bodyguard to jump him or call the security guard. But get it straight – if he’s carrying a cane, he’s okay.’
    ‘This is Florida, Howard. There are thousands of people who walk with canes.’
    ‘Not men under thirty five years of age.’
    In September we reached what ultimately proved the major decision about the book: the switch in character from authorized biography to