“What friend?”
“Janet Adams.”
“Jada! I haven’t gotten anywhere with her.” She sat forward, half turning toward me, with that shark-eyed look great journalists get when they smell a lead. “Can you help me on that front? There are a flock of Ruby strippers I haven’t been able to get to. My God, that would be fantastic...”
“Slow down,” I said, holding up a palm. “I might be able to help. First, fill me in. I want to know what you’ve been up to.”
Her smile was smug but cute. “Keep an eye on the papers next week. That’ll show you what I’ve ‘been up to.’”
“Which is?”
She gave me a pixie look, like she’d gotten away with a cookie or two from that jar on top of the refrigerator. And with those gloves, no fingerprints.
She said, “I’m running a story that showcases Jack Ruby’s Warren Commission testimony.”
I frowned at her. “The Warren Commission report isn’t coming out till the end of the month. And it’s considered Top Secret. And you have an inside source?”
“I do. And you know not to ask.”
“I know not to ask. So what does Ruby say that’s so newsworthy? I’m not somebody who buys that screwball feeling sorry for Jackie Kennedy and just blowing his stack... even if Ruby is a guy known for blowing his stack. It just never included killing people in a police station basement before.”
She sat up straight on the bench, folding her white-gloved hands in her lap, like a little girl at a very proper function. “Last June, Ruby was interviewed in his jail cell by Earl Warren himself, and Gerald Ford, a congressman from Michigan, a crony of the President’s. Ruby has a kind of ostentatious way of speaking, convoluted... like Jerry Lewis trying to sound smart in an interview.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “I know Jack.”
Her eyes flashed sharply, then narrowed shrewdly. “I know you know him, Nate... and we’ll get back to that. But the thing is, Ruby kept dodging questions, and saying his life was in danger, and that he wanted to be taken to Washington, D.C., where it would be safer for him to talk freely.”
“His jail cell here in Dallas is bugged, obviously.”
“Obviously. But the chief justice told him that a D.C. transfer was impossible, because the Commission didn’t have police powers, couldn’t protect him properly.”
“That’s bullshit. Just bring in the FBI!”
“Right,” she said, with a dismissive shrug, then her manner grew intense. “Ruby also kept mentioning LBJ, saying what a wonderful, great man our President was, and that he just knew LBJ could set things straight about him.”
“Hmmm. What do you make of that?”
Her smile was tiny and merciless. “I believe Ruby knows things that he believes he can use to trade his way off Death Row.”
“But not in Dallas.”
“Not in Dallas. Ironic, isn’t it? He was like an unofficial member of the PD here, the best friend a Dallas copper ever had, comping them at the Carousel, fixing them up with his girls. Probably the local mob’s bagman, which explains why he was around the station so often, and had such easy access.”
I was nodding. “He certainly didn’t have any trouble waltzing into that police station the morning they moved Oswald.”
“No.” She made an openhanded gesture. “But now he sits in a Dallas jail cell, where every dirty cop in town can get to him. If he talks, and not just his usual gibberish, he can wind up as dead as Oswald. As dead as Jack Kennedy.”
“What do you want from me, Flo? Besides the bodyguard gig.”
She placed a hand on my shoulder. Her eyes were intense in a different way now. This was a personal gaze, from one friend to another. From one lover to another.
“Nate, you grew up on the West Side of Chicago. Your best friend was Barney Ross, and Barney was, and is, a good friend of Jack Ruby’s. I finagled a very short interview with Ruby at his trial. Nate, Ruby likes me. He’s a fan of What’s My Line?”
“He’d make a great ‘mystery guest.’”
For once she didn’t laugh at a dumb gag of mine. “I want to talk to him again. In depth. Away from his jail cell. But he’s been politely declining through his attorney.”
Melvin Belli, one of the top defense men in the nation.
I shrugged. “I’m not that tight with Jack. We aren’t really friends. I did a job for him, a long time ago, but...”
“But Barney Ross is still a good friend of Ruby’s. If Barney put the word through that Jack should talk to me, and that you will be along as Barney’s surrogate, maybe... just maybe... I can get the interview that will crack this case.”
She had a hell of a reporter’s mind, this kid from Indiana, this game-show celebrity, this gossip columnist.
Shaking her head, she was saying, “I know it sounds unbelievable, Nate, but I am convinced there was a conspiracy behind Jack Kennedy’s murder.”
Should I tell her that she was preaching to the choir? That last year I had helped the Secret Service shut down an attempt on JFK’s life that had been mounted in early November, just twenty days before Dallas? That the players had been the same — the Mob, rogue CIA, exiled Cubans, right-wing crazies?
She was saying, “My source inside the Warren Commission says the results are going to be laughable. They are all too anxious to show that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone, unaffiliated assassin, and Ruby a psychopath who, by the way, has no real connection to the Mafia.”
I shook my head. “I know the government’s been selling the lone-nut theory on Oswald, but how can they deny Ruby’s connection to the Mob? He’s a mobster, for Christ’s sake.”
“The whole thing smells fishy to this girl reporter. Nate, it’s too convenient and simpleminded that some nut kills the President of the United States, then escapes from that little trifling matter to kill a policeman, only to be apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every tenet of police procedure, then to be murdered himself under extraordinary circumstances.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’ve been digging, Nate, and I’ve come up with incredible stuff, starting with the police log that chronicles their minute-by-minute activities. Police Chief Curry was in the first car of the motorcade, and when he heard the shots, his first command was to get a man to the top of the overpass and see what happened there.”
“I’ve never heard this.”
“Of course not. Because the next day, Chief Curry told the press that the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository, and that his first order had been to surround and search that building.”
I frowned in thought. “But in reality his first real concern was the overpass and that grassy slope the President’s car was moving toward when the fatal shots were fired.”
She was nodding, nodding, nodding. “At about eight miles per hour, yes. Here’s something else for you to chew on. The police radio description of Oswald came from an eyewitness, a Howard Brennan, a steam fitter sitting on a concrete wall more than a hundred feet from the sixth-floor corner window that Oswald supposedly shot from.”
Then Flo told me a darkly amusing story about how she and her husband Frank had reenacted the assassination from a window of their swanky five-story town house in Manhattan.
“Frank used a broomstick for a rifle,” she said, “and I went down and outside to East Sixty-eighth Street. I stood approximately where the steam fitter had, hoping none of the neighbors were watching, and let me tell you, Nate, describing a suspect seen from that distance proved impossible.”