The patio at the Hotel Bel-Air swarmed with LAPD Bomb Squad technicians.
Two of them collected, bagged and labelled shards of the space heater, which had quickly been identified as the device which housed the bomb.
A pair of detectives took the reserved restaurant manager into a cramped office inside the hotel. The detectives left the door partially open.
The restaurant manager appeared composed. He told the detectives that five people at a corner table fled the scene immediately after the blast. He thought it strange they didn’t try to help others who had been hurt.
Before the bomb went off, the group was acting suspiciously. One had bothered another guest, prompting him to leave. He remembered the man who left wore a satin Harvey’s Lake Tahoe jacket.
He told the detectives there were four women and one man in the group. One of the women, who wore a UCLA cap and large sunglasses, hurried them off the patio right after the blast. He said they seemed to be in a rush to leave.
Two were bleeding. One seemed to limp.
As he spoke, the restaurant manager’s conviction grew. He told the detectives he had previously seen the black haired woman in a long white dress. He thought she may have been a hotel guest. The others he didn’t recognize.
Without being asked, he described the rest of the group, the woman who wore a UCLA baseball cap and large sunglasses, a woman with dusty hiking boots, another woman in a green velvet jacket and a man with curly hair in a blue denim shirt.
The younger of the two detectives asked the restaurant manager what it was about these five people on the patio at the Hotel Bel-Air that made him suspicious. He said what first drew his attention to them was the woman who bothered the guest at the nearby table so much that he left.
Then, as if to reinforce and validate his suspicions, he once again mentioned how quickly they left, and suggested this all may have been planned.
The detectives told the restaurant manager they would drive him down to the station on Butler Avenue to meet with a police sketch artist.
Outside the cramped office in the hotel, the assistant server stood and listened.
He wondered why the restaurant manager told the detectives the space heater had always been on the corner of the patio by the banana palm.
