The Mexican said into the dashboard, "Hello hello hello." Later there was an ambulance and many police cars with red lights and sirens, cars on the sidewalks and lawns and men taking pictures of the stains in the street. Helen stood in front of a frame house halfway down the block, where she'd somehow ended up, trying to tell a detective what she'd seen. She said she waitressed at the Eat Well downtown and was on her way to the bus stop to go to work. Three or four shots, real rapid fire.
Back at the scene there were two small white canvas shoes on the hood of Patrolman Tippit's car. The men from Homicide stood around wondering. They discussed what these objects could possibly mean.
Wayne Elko sat in the last row of the Texas Theater, center section, watching a black-and-white movie called Cry of Battle with Van Heflin and a bunch of people he'd never seen before. It was about an hour into the movie and Van Heflin has just shot Atong, a Filipino bandit. This is taking place a little after Pearl Harbor and Wayne was pretty sure the Japanese were getting ready to pull a night raid on the Filipino guerrillas and their American friends. Under his jacket he carried a target pistol with the barrel tooled down to a nub and an eight-inch length of baffled tubing attached to it. There were seven other men scattered in the theater. The shot will sound like someone coughing.
There's a female guerrilla in skintight jeans. Wayne was thinking how Hollywood invents these women just for afternoons like this, exposed and white, men at loose ends hiding in the dark. That's when Leon appeared at the head of the aisle. He stood there a moment to accustom his eyes. His hair was messed up and his shirt was outside his pants and he looked scared and he looked wild. He took a seat three rows from the back. He was two rows in front of Wayne and four seats to the left.
Be cool, Wayne. Do not rush into this.
Wayne watched the silver faces show fear and desire. He was waiting for the noise on-screen to increase, for the Japs to swarm over the guerrilla camp with machine guns and grenades. He planned to ease out of the row, step in behind Leon, whisper a small adios, then mash the grooved trigger, already walking backwards to the lobby.
But he would wait for the noise and cries.
He would let the tension build.
Because that's the way they do it in the movies.
It didn't get that far. Four or five minutes after Leon came in, an exit door opened near the stage, showing silhouetted figures. Then men appeared at the rear and there were voices in the lobby. Someone turned up the house lights and Wayne saw police sort of combing the aisles. Two cops on the stage, thumbing their gun butts and peering out.
The picture died away with a swoony sound.
They searched two men in the rows up front. They came up the aisles. Some more of them pushed through another exit. Sirens repeating in the street. A cop jumped down off the stage. Another drew his gun. Cool head, Wayne. There was a pie-face cop who approached Oswald. Leon got to his feet and said something. When the cop moved into the row, Leon took a swing at him. He hit him hard in the face. The hat spun around on the cop's head. He punched Leon, who twisted away, grinning and hurt, then showed a pistol in his hand.
They fell all over him. Cops grunting, banging their knees on the seats. The first cop and Leon were in the seats struggling for the gun. Officers cursing. Wayne heard a click and thought the hammer snapped on someone's hand. They were on Leon from the row behind him, grabbing his neck and hair. He almost ripped the nameplate off one man's shirt. It was general grappling that went on and on, awkward and intense.
They worked the gun out of his hand and were trying to get the cuffs on. The rows were bursting with police. They gave him a little roughing up.
When they had him in handcuffs they moved him into the aisle. There were cops still banging their knees on the edges of seats, picking up their caps and flashlights. They took him out to the lobby, quick-time, pressing around him.
Wayne heard Leon's voice going out the door, "Police, police brutality."
There was a moment when the patrons didn't know what to do. Then the ones who were standing returned to their seats. Somebody called, up front, "Lights." Another guy tilted his head sideways and up, saying, "Lights, lights." They all waited in their seats, hearing the sirens go into the distance. They tried clapping hands. Then Wayne spoke up, "Lights, lights." And in fifteen seconds the house lights went down and the picture shot onto the screen.
The men settled down contentedly. Wayne felt the mood close around them, the satisfied air of resumption. It wasn't just this picture to see to the end. There was a second feature coming up, called War Is Hell.
The prisoner stood inside the jail elevator, which was sealed to ordinary traffic. Four detectives edged in tight, rangy men in dark suits and ties, high-crowned Western hats, their faces closed to interpretation.
The media crowds collected and rocked in the corridors. They were waiting for the prisoner to come down to the interrogation room here on the third floor of the Police and Courts Building. TV cameras sat on dollies and there were cables slung over windowsills, trailing through the offices of deputy chiefs. Nobody checked credentials. Reporters took over the phones and pushed into toilets after police officials. Total unknowns walked the halls, defendants from other parts of the building, witnesses to other crimes, tourists, muttering men, drunks in torn shirts. It was a roughhouse, a con-foundment. Every rumor flew. Disk jockeys arrived to fill in, blinking, flinching, wary. A reporter wrote notes on a pad he balanced on the back of the chief of police.
They set up a chant. "Let us see him, bring him down. Let us see him, bring him down."
Hours going by. Blank faces arrayed against corridor walls. Men crouched near the elevators waiting. They sensed the incompleteness out there, gaps, spaces, vacant seats, lobbies emptied out, disconnections, dark cities, stopped lives. People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together. Ringing phones, near-brawls, smoke in their eyes, a deathliness, a hanging woe. Is Connally alive? Is Johnson safe? Has SAC gone to full alert? They began to feel isolated inside this old municipal lump of Texas gray granite. They were hearing their own reports on the radios and portable TVs. But what did they really know? The news was somewhere else, at Parkland Hospital or on Air Force One, in the mind of the prisoner on the fifth floor.
Someone said he's coming. A kind of clustered stirring, like riled bees. Then formal jostling across the floor, a grab for position. When he appeared in the elevator door, a slight man in handcuffs, with a puffed eye and stubble, they went a little crazy. Stooped photographers moving backwards, hand mikes shooting out of the crowd, everybody shouting, reaching toward him. A howl, a passion washing through the corridor. Newsreel cameras floated over the heads of the men escorting him. They had to throw some elbows, working him toward the door of the interrogation room. One eye puffed, a cut over the other, his shirt hanging loose. He resembled a guy who comes out of a doorway to bum a smoke. But a protective defiance, an unyielding in his face. The flash units fired. TV floodlights cooked the nearest heads. The reporters stared and wailed. It was hard to breathe in the ruck around the prisoner. They looked at him. They all cried out.
"Why did you kill the President?"
"Why did you kill the President?"
He said he was being denied the right to take a shower. Denied his basic hygienic rights. The escorts worked him to the office door.
Questioned, arraigned, displayed in lineups. He felt the heat of the corridor mobs every time he got off the elevator, the actual roil of moist air. Assassin, assassin.