“This was in broad daylight?”
“Yes, and the steam fitter claimed he saw Oswald walking around inside the depository, with no change in height when he came over to fire his shots. Well, it’s been definitely proven that the assassin had to kneel to fire.”
“Interesting.”
“Oh, Nate, and there’s so much more! I’ve got evidence indicating the rifle used wasn’t a Carcano but a Mauser — there was a fucking switch! And do you really think it’s credible that Jack Ruby killed Oswald out of love for Kennedy?”
“All mobsters hate the Kennedys.”
“Right! Or that Ruby, the biggest police buff in Dallas and probably the Mob’s payoff man, never even met Officer J. D. Tippit?”
I shifted on the hard stone of the bench. “Honey, you do understand this is a risky road you’re heading down?”
She snorted a laugh. “Do you really think they’d kill a celebrity?”
“Ask Jack Kennedy.”
The rotating sculpture was making a slight squeak above the gentle lap of the reflecting pool.
“Listen,” she said, softly, “I understand the danger, better than you know. Hell, I have eighteen phones in my town house, and I’m convinced every one is tapped! Or do you think I’m paranoid, like some people do?”
“I don’t. I think this is chancy as hell, and if the kind of people are involved that seem to be involved... you might want to walk away.”
She shook her head. “This story isn’t going to die as long as there’s one real reporter alive.” She sighed. “Nate, I know the perils.”
“Perils? This isn’t a Saturday matinee serial, Flo.”
“You think I don’t know that? Why do you think I was so happy to see you walk back into my life?”
“My charm? My smile?”
That did make her laugh, a musical ripple that went well with the reflecting pool. “Well, of course, darling... but mostly I want a big strong man to be my bodyguard, though I do need you to do a better job than you did for Mayor Cermak.”
“That doesn’t set a very high standard. But have you had death threats? Or damnit — has someone tried—”
“No! No. But there’s a disturbing pattern emerging just the same, as I dig deeper into this morass.”
I frowned again. “What kind of pattern?”
“A pattern of death. Probable murders, and outright ones. Faked suicides.”
I felt the back of my neck prickle, as it had in Captain Peoples’s office.
“Some of the witnesses I wanted to interview, Nate, aren’t available — they are conveniently deceased. Would you like a rundown? Probably just a partial one, because I don’t know of everyone involved, not yet anyway.”
“Please.”
The day after the assassination, Jack Zangretti — an Oklahoma mobster who ran a lavish illegal casino and motel — informed friends, “A man named Jack Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow, and in a few days, a member of the Frank Sinatra family will be kidnapped just to take some attention away from the assassination.” Frank Sinatra Jr., was kidnapped for ransom on December 8, 1963, making national headlines. No such headlines were made when simultaneously Zangretti was found floating in a lake with bullet holes in his chest.
Bill Chesher, thought to have inside information linking Ruby to Oswald, died of a heart attack three months after the assassination.
Hank Killam, a painting contractor who lived at Oswald’s boardinghouse, claimed that he had seen Ruby and Oswald together. His throat was cut when he was tossed through a department-store window, four months after the assassination.
Four men met in Jack Ruby’s apartment after visiting Ruby in jail just a few hours after the killing of Oswald: Bill Hunter, a reporter from California; attorney Tom Howard; Dallas reporter Jim Koethe; and Ruby’s roommate, George Senator. The latter had disappeared, and the other three were dead. Hunter was “accidentally” shot by a police officer. Howard, forty-eight, died of a heart attack.
“Jim Koethe was killed last week,” Flo said, “stepping out of his shower in his apartment here in Dallas. A karate chop to the neck. Place ransacked, but the only thing missing were the notes on the book he was working on — guess what the subject was?”
“Places to see in Dallas?” I asked.
She cocked her head, smug and serious. “What does all this sound like to you, Nate?”
It sounded all too familiar. And the odor was reminiscent, too — the same smell as the convenient deaths in the Billie Sol Estes scandal.
“A cleanup crew,” I said. “Removing witnesses, tying off loose ends.”
“Acquila Clemmons would probably agree with you. From her front porch, she witnessed the killing of Officer Tippit. Saw two men — the gunman was short, kind of heavy, the other tall and thin in khaki trousers and a white shirt. Didn’t want to talk to me, because a Dallas PD officer warned her she might get killed on the way to work.”
“Good advice.”
“I’ve saved the best for last,” she said. “The strange tale of Warren Reynolds.”
The Reynolds story began with Officer J. D. Tippit, shortly after two P.M. on November 22, reportedly cruising for suspects matching Lee Harvey Oswald’s description (as provided by the steam fitter, remember?). Officer Tippit pulled to the curb on Tenth Street, supposedly seeing a suspect matching the description. For some reason, Tippit got out of his squad car and came around to talk to the suspect but was shot and killed instead, falling near the front right fender. Two witnesses saw a man running from the scene. Neither identified Oswald as the runner.
The first such witness, Warren Reynolds — who owned and operated Reynolds Motor Company on Jefferson Boulevard, just west of the murder scene — pursued the man, heading south on Patton Avenue, but lost him a block later.
Two months after the assassination, after news reports identified him as a Tippit witness, Reynolds was questioned by the FBI. He said that Oswald was definitely not the man he saw fleeing, gun in hand, from the Tippit killing.
Two days later, at nine P.M., Reynolds went into the office of his car dealership. The lights were out, the fuse apparently blown. Someone waiting in the darkness shot Reynolds in the head, point-blank.
Miraculously, Reynolds stumbled to the telephone and summoned help, and survived the shooting. A petty local criminal, Darrell Wayne Garner, was arrested, but was freed after a young woman named Betty Mooney gave him an alibi.
“Betty Mooney,” Flo said, “was one of Jack Ruby’s strippers.”
Shortly after, Reynolds’s ten-year-old daughter was nearly abducted. Threats and further intimidation followed.
“Earlier this year,” Flo said, “Reynolds changed his story. He decided the man he saw fleeing was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Domingo Benavides, seeing Tippit’s body in the street, had stopped behind the squad car and rushed up to help, calling in the shooting on the dead officer’s own radio. He found two spent cartridges, 38 autos, which he initialed for Dallas officer J. M. Poe. The casings were apparently replaced with.38 Super cartridges, which would work in a.38 revolver — the.38 autos would not. Domingo’s initials were absent from the Super cartridges, as well.
More problematic was the description of the shooter that Domingo provided, that of a suspect with dark, curly hair and clothing and physical attributes that didn’t match up with Oswald’s.
“Domingo was the closest witness on the scene, by the way,” Flo said.
Domingo began receiving death threats, but it was his look-alike brother, Eddy, who was killed — shot in the head in February ’64.