Some of the clubs stayed open Friday night. Jack closed the Carousel and Vegas. He was committed to closing for the weekend in honor of the President being shot. He vomited into a polyethylene bag he had somebody manufacture for his twistboards. Then he picked up the phone and called his roommate, George Senator.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"What am I doing? I'm sleeping."
"Schmuckhead. They killed our President."
"Jack, that was yesterday."
"We're going out to take pictures. Where's the Polaroid?"
"At the club."
"You know those Impeach signs? There's one around here someplace. I'm coming to pick you up."
"I want you to know. There's this constant interference of the time that I wake up and the time that you go to bed. Which don't match."
"Get dressed fast," Jack told him.
He found the camera and drove out to his apartment building. It was located over a freeway and looked like a motel that changed its mind. The whole scene was removable. George was sitting on the iron stairway in baggy clothes and slippers. They headed back downtown.
Jack explained the nature of the assignment.
First there was the ad in the Morning News. It said, Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. A series of lies and smears. Not that Jack fully absorbed the points in the ad. It was the nasty tone he noticed most. And of course the black border. And of course the fact that the ad was signed by someone Bernard Weissman. A Jew or someone posing as a Jew to blacken the name of the Jews. Then it just happened that he drove past a billboard with three towering words on it. Impeach Earl Warren. The ad had a post-office box number. So did the billboard. Thinking about it in his mind, as he went over both incidents, Jack believed the number was the same.
"So I am trying to put the two together."
"You think the same person."
"Whereby the same person or group is behind both incidents. And since it is against the President, I am trying to take a crime reporter's frame of mind."
They drove all over the downtown fringe trying to find the Earl Warren billboard and check out the box number. Jack was sure there was conspiracy here. The John Birch Society or the Communist Party were the suspects uppermost. He had his pad and pencil to take down particulars.
That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.
He started vomiting again on the Central Expressway. The way he did it was to open the door, right hand clamped on the steering wheel, and drop his head down to vomit on the road. He could tell where they were going by his view of the white line, which was only inches away. George was screaming at him to stop the car or give up the steering to him. Jack straightened up. He said don't worry, he'd done this as a kid growing up in the toughest streets of Chicago. It was part of how you survived. Then he leaned way over to vomit some more. He vomited half his life out the car door, due to these assaults on his emotions.
They found the billboard on Hall Street. George got out of the car and took three pictures with the flash. To Jack Ruby this was hunting down a major clue and acquiring physical evidence. Now they had to find a copy of the ad so they could compare the box numbers. Jack didn't know where he'd left his newspaper. They drove to the coffee shop at the Southland Hotel just to take a break from these excitements. The place was either just closing or just opening. An old bent Negro working a mop. They sat at the counter and there's a copy of the Morning News lying right there waiting. They looked at each other. Jack ripped through the pages and found the ad. George took out the Polaroids.
The numbers didn't match.
Jack looked around for someone to get some coffee. He didn't even comment on the numbers. He had a twelve-inch stare, a dullish flat-eyed gaze. How a complete nothing, a zero person in a T-shirt, could decide out of nowhere to shoot our President.
They drove past the Carousel to take a look at the sign Jack had put up, one word only, saying closed.
Then they went home. Jack got a few hours' sleep, woke up, took a Preludin with his grapefruit juice and watched a famous New York rabbi on TV.
The man spoke in a gorgeous baritone. He went ahead and eulogized that here was an American who fought in every battle, went to every country, and he had to return to the U.S. to get shot in the back.
This, with the rabbi's beautiful phraseology, caused a roar of sorrow in Jack's head. He turned off the set and picked up the phone.
He called four people to tell them he'd closed his clubs for the weekend.
He called his sister Eileen in Chicago and sobbed.
He called KLIF and asked for the Weird Beard.
"Tell you the truth," Jack said, "I never know what you're talking about on the air but I listen in whenever. Your voice has a little quality of being reassuring in it."
"Personality radio. It's the coming thing, Jack."
"Plus when do I see a beard in Dallas?"
"I'm the only one."
"Russ, you're a good guy so I called with a question I want to ask."
"Sure, Jack."
"Who's this Earl Warren?"
"Earl Warren. Are we talking this is blues or rock 'n' roll? There was an Earlene (Big Sister) Warren sang on the West Coast for a while."
"No, Earl Warren, from the Impeachment signs. The red, white and blue signboards."
"Impeach Earl Warren."
"That's the one."
"He's the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Jack. Of the United States."
"The events have got me bollixed up."
"Who can blame you?"
"It's the worst thing ever in our city."
"One little man comes along and turns everything upside down. And we'll get the blame for him."
"Don't say his name," Jack said. "It has an effect of making me worse in my mind. Like I'm watching a dog playing in the dirt with my liver."
Saturday afternoon. Lee Oswald sat in a small glass enclosure with a phone on a shelf to his right. The door across the room opened. Here she came moving toward him, bandy-legged, dry-eyed, jowly, hair pure white now, long and white and shining. She sat on the other side of the partition. She looked at him carefully, taking him in, absorbing. They picked up the phones.
"Did they hurt you, honey?" she said.
She went on to tell him how she heard the news on the car radio and turned around and went home and called the Star-Telegram and asked them to take her to Dallas in a press car. Then she was interviewed by two FBI men, both named Brown. She told them for the security of the country she wanted it kept perfectly quiet that her son Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States from Russia with money furnished by the State Department. This was news to the Browns and they were pop-eyed.
"They're taping this, Mother."
"I know. We'll be careful what we say. I told them I haven't seen my son in a year. 'But you are the mother, Mrs. Oswald.' I told them I've been doing live-ins as a nurse and they didn't tell me where they'd moved to. 'But you are the mother, you are the mother.' I told them I didn't even know about the new grandchild. I had to endure a year of silence and now there is family news every minute on the radio."
These men, Brown, were looking for suspects in every direction. Magazine people were keeping the family in a room at the Adolphus Hotel. It was kept extremely hush hush. They were whisked from place to place with precautions. All of them. The accused mother, the brother, the Russian wife, the two little babies. Accompanied by approximately eighteen to twenty men who were suspicious of them and of each other. These were FBI, Secret Service and Life magazine. There was a man continually taking pictures. And Marguerite rolled her stockings down and he took that picture too, of the mother rolling her hose after a day that made history.
"Things were done without my consent," she told Lee. "But I'm checking every quote I make to them and if there are mistakes coming out, I'll know it is all stacked up against us, going back to Russia."