“My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thought. She realized that he was sleepless, tense, and she believed that he was so angry at her for refusing to move to Dallas right away that it was no use trying to talk to him. She thinks that he fell asleep about five o’clock in the morning.
Lee usually woke up before the alarm rang and shut it off so as not to disturb the children. On the morning of Friday, November 22, the alarm rang, and he did not wake up.
Marina was awake, and after about ten minutes she said, “Time to get up, Alka.”
“Okay.”
He rose, washed, and got dressed. Then he came over to the bed. “Have you bought those shoes you were going to get?”
“No. I haven’t had time.”
“You must get those shoes, Mama. And Mama, don’t get up. I’ll get breakfast myself.”
Lee kissed the children, who were sleeping. But he did not kiss Marina, as he always did before he left in the morning. He got as far as the bedroom door, then came back and said, “I’ve left some money on the bureau. Take it and buy everything you and Junie and Rachel need. Bye-bye.” Then Lee went out the door.
“Good God,” thought Marina. “What has happened to my husband that he has all of a sudden gotten so kind?” Then she fell back to sleep.
During the days and weeks that followed, Marina realized that there had been several small, out-of-the-way occurrences during Lee’s brief visit. He had played much longer than he usually did with Junie out of doors the day before. Could he have been saying good-bye to the creature whom he loved more than anyone else on earth? It seemed to Marina, looking back, that there had been a farewell quality to his playing, something valedictory almost, in the way he reached out for the falling oak wings. He had never reached for them before. And his being unable to tell her anything about President Kennedy’s visit had been out of character, to say the least.
He had been angry and tense in bed that night, and it was nearly morning before he fell asleep. Marina supposed he was just angry at her for refusing to give in to him. Later on she wondered, what had he been thinking about?
There was the odd circumstance of his telling her not to get up to fix his breakfast. There was no danger that she would—she had never done so before. Why would he tell her not to? Could it be that he did not want to run the tiniest risk of her seeing him enter the garage—and leave it?
Then there was his telling her with unaccustomed gentleness to buy everything she and the children needed. He had never told her such a thing before. When she got up that morning and looked into the bureau, she found the extraordinary sum of $170. It must have been nearly everything Lee had.
And Marina also remembered that twice after his arrival in the afternoon, he had tried to kiss her and she had turned him away. It was only on the third try, when he had his arm around her, that she relented and allowed him an obligatory kiss. He had tried to be tender with her, and she had been obdurate with him.
Finally, she remembered one more thing, the most earthshaking of all. Three times he had begged her to move to Dallas with him “soon.” Three times she had refused. And he had tried to kiss her three times. Everything had happened in threes. That, for Marina, was the key.
— 36 —
November 22, 1963
About 7:15 on the morning of November 22, Linnie Mae Randle was standing by her kitchen sink when, through the window, she saw Lee coming from the Paines’ house carrying a long brown package. She opened her back door a bit to see what he was doing. He walked up to her brother’s car, opened the right rear door, and put the package on the back seat. Mrs. Randle went back to the sink, looked up a moment later, and there, staring in at her through the window, was Lee. Startled, she called to her brother, Wesley Frazier, that Lee was waiting for his ride.[1]
The two men climbed in the car and started off. As they were going out the drive, Frazier glanced in the rear and noticed a long brown package extending halfway across the back seat. He asked Lee what it was, and Lee mumbled something about curtain rods. “Oh, yes,” said Frazier. “You said you were going to get some yesterday.”[2]
The two men drove into Dallas, and Frazier parked the car in a lot two blocks from the depository building. They usually walked from the lot together, but this morning Lee got out of the car first, picked up the package, and walked to the building ahead of Frazier.
At 8:00 A.M. Roy Truly, superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository, and William Shelley, Lee’s supervisor, arrived at the building. Both noticed that Lee was already at work.[3] Charles Douglas Givens, who waited each morning for Lee to finish reading in the domino room before going in to read the papers himself, noticed that Lee did not go to the domino room that day.[4]
Lee went about his job of filling orders, and sometime between 9:30 and 10:00, he and another order filler, James (“Junior”) Jarman, were on the first floor in a room filled with bins. Lee was at the window, Jarman joined him, and Lee asked what the people were gathering on the corner for. Jarman, who had only just found out himself, said that the president was supposed to pass by. Lee asked Jarman if he knew which way the president was coming.
“I told him, yes. He [would] probably come down Main and turn on Houston and then back again on Elm.”
“Oh, I see,” Lee said and went back to filling orders.[5] The turn from Houston into Elm would bring the presidential motorcade directly in front of the southeast corner of the Book Depository Building.
President Kennedy’s plane, Air Force One, landed at Love Field at 11:40 that morning. Vice President Johnson, whose plane had landed a few moments before, was there with Mrs. Johnson to greet President and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor and Mrs. Connally after their brief flight from Fort Worth. There was a welcoming ceremony before the Kennedys boarded the presidential limousine for the drive through Dallas. The limousine was a specially designed Lincoln convertible equipped with a bubble top. But the weather was clear, and the president had asked to have the bubble removed. He sat in the right rear seat with Mrs. Kennedy at his left. Governor and Mrs. Connally rode in jump seats in front of the Kennedys. The presidential party was due at the Trade Mart for lunch at 12:30.
At the book depository, Charles Douglas Givens, Bonnie Ray Williams, and three other men were laying a new plywood floor on the sixth floor of the building. At 11:40 A.M. Williams saw Lee on the east side of the sixth floor but paid no attention to what he was doing.[6] There were Scott-Foresman books on that floor, and he could have been filling orders.[7]
At 11:45 or 11:50 the five men who were laying the floor broke for lunch. They headed for the west, or rear, side of the building, got on the freight elevators, and raced each other to the ground floor. On the way down they saw Lee standing by the fifth-floor gate.[8]
Once he was on the ground floor, Givens realized that he had left his jacket, with his cigarettes in it, on the sixth floor. He rode back up and once again saw Lee. He was on the sixth floor now, not the fifth, and instead of being on the northwest side of the building, where Givens had seen him at the elevator gate, he was walking toward the elevators from the southeast corner, the corner overlooking the route the presidential motorcade was scheduled to take. Lee was carrying his clipboard, but he did not have any books in his hand, and he did not appear to be filling orders.[9] The time was 11:55.
4
Because he did not go in the domino room, Oswald almost certainly did not see the full-page hate group advertisement in the