“Do they?”
“Sure! Like how can there be a lone gunman when the Parkland docs say one of the bullets entered the throat? Or how can a guy using a shitty twelve-buck mail-order bolt-action rifle squeeze off three expert shots in under six seconds?”
“You’ve seen the same tasteless articles I have,” Bobby said, with a derisive tone and a sneer to go with it. “These so-called assassination buffs, they’re creeps and kooks, even if they have asked some of the right questions.”
“Well, here’s one they missed — if Oswald was a pro-Castro pinko, why would he shoot a president who was trying to improve relations with Cuba? Of course, you and I know that Oswald was a CIA asset. So maybe his motive was the Bay of Pigs fiasco.”
Irritation was showing in his face again. “Nate, stop it.”
“This isn’t going away, Bob.”
“I know it isn’t. And when I’m in the White House, it’s going to be exposed.”
He meant it would be exposed when he had the power to manipulate the facts to whitewash himself and his brother in Operation Mongoose. And as the guy who had set up the first meeting between the players in that sad game, I was just fine with that.
“Then,” I said, sitting back comfortably, “I need to tell you what I’ve been doing in Dallas the last week or so.”
And he sat forward. Not slumping now.
I gave it all to him, including the Billie Sol Estes cleanup effort, though I wasn’t convinced it had anything to do with the dead witnesses in Dallas, similar though the approach might be.
“I don’t know,” he said, and shuddered. “Flo Kilgore? A gossipmonger? A silly game-show celebrity? That’s not my idea of a credible investigation.”
That rated a laugh. “You aren’t conducting a credible investigation, Bob. You are, in your own words, mounting a very timid, sub-rosa one. Why not let Flo be your stalking horse? She’s going to do it anyway.”
“And if you accept her job offer,” he said, thinking it through, “then you’ll know what she’s found, and you can control the situation.”
“To some degree,” I said, nodding. “And I can report back to you. Plus keep my eye on preserving the Kennedy legacy. But I didn’t want to take her money without you giving the okay.”
His expression remained thoughtful. “I appreciate that. But it’s not like I could stop you, Nate.”
“If you said walk away, Bob, I’d walk away.”
His smile was barely there, but it meant a lot. “Thank you, Nate.”
“And I may walk away, anyway.”
“Oh?”
I told him how this had begun, with what appeared to be an attempt on my life disguised as a hit-and-run accident. And I told him how, afterward, I’d approached both my CIA handler and my primary Mob contact, and had been assured they were not responsible.
“Thing is,” I said, “I promised them I’d stay out of any inquiry into the assassination, or anyway implied as much. I presented myself as a loose end not worth tying off.”
“But now you find yourself in Texas,” Bobby said, “in the midst of what looks like a concerted effort to, uh, tie off various loose ends.”
“Yes. A cleanup crew. Getting rid of pesky witnesses and annoying snoops. And you may have noticed that I fall into both categories.”
He was frowning in thought, his fingertips tented. “Who do you suspect in this?”
“Not CIA. As my handler said, if the CIA wanted me dead, I’d be dead by now. The Billie Sol aspect, if it ties in, might indicate Texas oil. But Ruby, and whether anybody can connect him to Oswald, pre-assassination, seems to be the focus.”
“Which means mob.”
I nodded. “Which means mob.”
He cocked his head. “And this began with a Cuban trying to run you down.”
“Yup.”
“And you’re someone else who saw Ruby and Oswald together.”
“Right.” I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe everybody’s trying to kill me.”
“Nate,” Bob said, some spark back in his blue eyes, “considering how long you’ve been around? Everybody’s got a reason.”
“Glad I finally cheered you up,” I said.
The sound from the window seemed to be intensifying. “You didn’t really know Jack well, did you, Nate?”
“No.”
“Half the days he spent on earth he was in intense physical pain — scarlet fever, terrible back pain, and just about every conceivable other ailment in between.”
Including VD, I thought.
“We used to joke that a mosquito took a hell of a risk biting him.” He was smiling with the memory. “On a trip around the world about ten, twelve years ago, he, uh, got so sick I thought we’d lose him. His Senate campaign? He spent it on crutches.”
“No kidding. Did he bitch?”
“Not once. I never heard him say anything resembling God had dealt him a bum hand. If you were close to him, you knew when he was having trouble, because his face got a little whiter, the lines around his eyes a little deeper... maybe his, uh, words a little sharper. Those who didn’t know him so well didn’t pick up on anything.”
“If you want to honor his memory, Bob, then do me a favor and let my guy Bill Queen tighten up your security.”
But he wasn’t hearing me. He was saying, “When that Jap destroyer sank his PT boat, Jack swam and swam, rescuing six of his crew, leading them to this small island, towing his badly burned engineer all the way. Then he went for help — he swam for two or three hours in the black cold of that water and that night, and then tread water and finally just drifted till dawn, his mind a hallucinating jumble, his only clear thought that he was going to die and then when he didn’t, it changed him. He told me so many times, ‘You’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth.’”
That had been the nobility of Jack Kennedy, all right. Also his weakness — it had put him in bed with Marilyn Monroe and Judith Exner and so many other willing women.
But who was I to talk?
We spent another five minutes with family chitchat, shook hands, and then I left him there, with his brother and the waiting throng.
Chapter 10
This was the same kind of warm sunny fall day that had greeted John F. Kennedy last year when he and his wife Jacqueline and their entourage emerged from Air Force One at Love Field late on the morning of November 22. That had been a Friday. This was a Monday, just after two P.M. Traffic was medium, the tourists minimal, the citizens of Dallas at work or otherwise occupied. Meanwhile, a New Yorker named Flo Kilgore was giving a Chicagoan named Nathan Heller a tour of the most famous crime scene of the twentieth century.
On the edge of downtown Dallas, west of Houston Street, was the landscaped triangular city park called Dealey Plaza; there Elm, Main, and Commerce Streets converged at a triple underpass, Elm turning into Stemmons Freeway, while at the south, east, and north, like battlement walls, tall buildings loomed over this grassy oasis in a modern city. Where Main Street entered the Plaza, and at the outer edges of Commerce and Elm, decorative colonnades with fountains and basins stood on either side, dispassionate observers from another age. The grassy slope within the Plaza that had been above and to the President’s right was bounded by a seven-story turn-of-the-century rust-brick building — the Texas School Book Depository — on the corner of Elm and Houston. A sidewalk to the south, a parking lot to the north and east, and a railroad bridge over the triple bypass completed the crime-scene picture.
The President’s motorcade eased down Main, turning right at the Criminal Courts Building, going one block west past the Dallas County Records Building, just south of the Dal-Tex Building, finally turning left on Elm, heading toward the underpass on the way to Trade Mart, where Jack Kennedy’s next event awaited. Of course another event had intervened.