Monday, April 8, was Lee’s first day out of work. He deceived Marina by rising early as usual, putting on a T-shirt, and leaving the apartment as if he were going to work. Again he was out all day, and only one of his activities is known. He visited the Texas Employment Commission and told the sympathetic ladies there that he was out of a job. This time they did not come up with any leads. Once again he may also have been watching Walker’s house. If so, he surely noticed increased activities there. Walker came back, he himself recalls, “in the late afternoon or break of evening” that day.[18]
Lee had his supper at six. Then he went out again, and Marina, who had no idea that he had quit typing school, assumed that he had gone to Crozier Tech. She noticed that he returned earlier than usual after typing class, but it did not occur to her to ask why.
It was several days before she learned where he had been. After supper he bought a newspaper and boarded a bus, not the bus he took to Crozier Tech but one of several buses that would carry him close to the spot where he had buried his rifle. He was on his way to shoot General Walker.
On the bus, Lee was to claim later to Marina, he glanced at the church announcements in the paper. They were more numerous and more prominent than usual because it was Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. Reading the paper, he noticed that the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church at 4027 Turtle Creek Boulevard just behind General Walker’s house, was having a service Wednesday night that would get out at about nine o’clock. “Good,” Lee thought. “There’ll be people and cars around there on Wednesday and I’ll have a better chance of getting away.” He climbed off the bus, came home, and postponed his attack.[19]
The next day, Tuesday, April 9, Lee no longer pretended to go to work. He told Marina that it was a holiday and he was going to collect his paycheck. For the third time since his final Saturday at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he was gone the whole day. He came home at six and after supper walked down the street as he often did to buy a newspaper and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. When he returned, he sat out on the balcony, where, after two months of being irritable—not, Marina says, on an ascending curve of irritability but merely irritable all the time, with an occasional outcropping of good humor—he unexpectedly turned tender toward her. “Come sit with me,” he coaxed her onto the balcony. He asked in the friendliest way whether she had heard from her girlfriends in Russia? Had she seen anything special in Soviet Belorussia or Krokodil? He drank a sip or two of his Dr. Pepper, then handed the bottle to her and grandly urged her to drink it all.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, Marina thought Lee looked pensive and rather sad. With tears in his eyes, he confessed at last that he had lost his job. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I tried. I liked that work so much. But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?”
Marina ached with sympathy. She had no idea how to comfort him, and when he went out for the day, she supposed he was looking for work. He was dressed in his good gray suit and a clean white shirt.[20]
As nearly as Marina can recall, Lee did not come home for supper that night. She waited until seven, an hour past their usual suppertime, then absent-mindedly cooked something for herself. Between eight and nine she was busy putting June to bed. Then she began to grow uneasy. Lee had taught her not to pry, not even to ask herself what he might be up to. He had accustomed her to his absences at hours when most workingmen and, above all, most family men, are at home with their wives. But Marina knew her husband well. For months he had been tense, preoccupied, ready, like his rifle, to “go off.” Nor, despite efforts to censor her curiosity, could she suppress an awareness that his comings and goings had been out of the ordinary. Now it turned out that he had been fired. Marina sensed, too clearly for her own peace of mind, that this element on top of the rest made up a recipe for danger, although what kind of danger she could not have said.
While she was waiting for Lee, she thought back to the last time he had been so late. It was their last week on Elsbeth Street, late in February.[21] Frantic with worry, she had gone to the Tobiases next door and asked if she might use the phone. With Mrs. Tobias doing the dialing, she called George de Mohrenschildt, told him Lee had not come home, and asked him to find out what he could. George called the printing plant, then called back to report that Lee had left hours before. When he came home that night, Lee was angry at what Marina had done. He said his boss disapproved when the men got phone calls at work. He told her never to do it again.
Now Marina’s resources were more meager still. She no longer had a neighbor with a phone, and Lee no longer had a job where, in a pinch, she could try to reach him. There was nothing she could do but wait. She paced anxiously from room to room, doing her best not to think. On an impulse, about ten o’clock, she opened the door to her husband’s study. There on the desk she saw a key with a sheet of paper lying under it. At the sight of the key, Marina felt a thud inside: Lee was never coming back.
She picked up the paper and read the note he had left her in Russian.[22]
1. Here is the key to the post office box which is located in the main post office downtown on Ervay Street, the street where there is a drugstore where you always used to stand. The post office is four blocks from the drugstore on the same street. There you will find our mailbox. I paid for the mailbox last month so you needn’t worry about it.
2. Send information about what has happened to me to the Embassy [the Soviet Embassy in Washington] and also send newspaper clippings (if there’s anything about me in the papers). I think the Embassy will come quickly to your aid once they know everything.
3. I paid our rent on the second so don’t worry about it.
4. I have also paid for the water and gas.
5. There may be some money from work. They will send it to our post office box. Go to the bank and they will cash it.
6. You can either throw out my clothing or give it away. Do not keep it. As for my personal papers (both military papers and papers from the factory), I prefer that you keep them.
7. Certain of my papers are in the small blue suitcase.
8. My address book is on the table in my study if you need it.
9. We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you.
10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month, and you and Junie can live for two months on $10 a week.
11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town (the very beginning of town after the bridge).
Marina’s eyes took in what Lee had written, but her brain did not. She had no idea what his message was supposed to convey. Only two words meant anything to her. They were “prisoner” and “jail.” She saw them and started shaking all over.
At 11:30 Lee walked in, white, covered with sweat, his eyes glittering.
19
It is possible, and even likely, that Oswald made up the story about the church announcement. E. Owen Hansen, counselor of the church, confirmed that his church had services every Wednesday from 7:30 to 9:00 P.M. and was generally empty fifteen or twenty minutes later (Exhibit No. 1953, Vol. 23, p. 763). Oswald, who had been stalking the neighborhood, may have known this already. Moreover, no announcement of the sort Oswald described has been found in either of the major Dallas dailies for that week.
21
Oswald could have been looking for their new apartment that night, and he could have been watching General Walker, who left Dallas on February 28.