Police cars began to arrive in the area of the Tippit slaying while, eight blocks away, Johnny Calvin Brewer was in his shoe store listening to the radio. The president had been shot, and news now came over the radio that a policeman had been shot in Oak Cliff. Brewer heard sirens approach and, looking up, saw a man duck into the lobby of his store and stand with his back to the street. A police car came close, made a U-turn, and drove off. As the wail of the sirens faded, the man, who looked “scared,” “messed up,” and as if “he had been running,” peered over his shoulder, made sure the police car had gone, then turned into the street and walked a short way to the Texas Theatre. Brewer followed him there. He asked Julia Postal, the cashier, whether she had sold a ticket to the man who had just entered the theater. “No, by golly,” she said. Brewer and the usher checked the exits to make sure that none had been used and then, in the darkness, scanned the audience. They did not see the man they were looking for. Mrs. Postal called the police.
Shortly after 1:45, fifteen police officers converged on the Texas Theatre, alerted that the suspect in the Tippit shooting might be there. Someone turned up the houselights. Accompanied by several policemen, Brewer stepped on the stage and pointed to the man who had ducked in without paying. He was sitting by himself in the orchestra, near the back, close to the right center aisle. Patrolman M. N. McDonald walked slowly up the aisle. He stopped abruptly when he came to the man and told him to get on his feet. The suspect rose, raised his hands, and said, “Well, it is all over now.” He struck McDonald and reached for his own revolver. He was grabbed by two or three officers, and in the scuffle McDonald wrenched the revolver away. The man cursed as the officers handcuffed him. “I protest this police brutality,” he said.
As he was being led from the theater, the man stopped, turned, and shouted so that everyone could hear him, “I am not resisting arrest—I am not resisting arrest.” He was driven to police headquarters and arrived in the basement about 2:00 P.M. There were reporters milling around in case a suspect in the president’s murder should be brought in. He was asked if he would like to cover his face as he was taken inside. “Why should I cover my face?” he replied. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”
At 2:15 P.M. Captain Will Fritz of the homicide bureau returned to police headquarters from the City Hall office where he had been checking on Lee Oswald, missing from the book depository. He walked up to two of his officers, handed them an address in Irving, and told them to “pick up a man named Lee Oswald.” One of the officers pointed to the man who had just been arrested at the Texas Theatre. “Captain,” he said, “we can save you a trip. There he sits.”[28]
— 37 —
The Wedding Ring
Marina awoke on the morning of November 22 with a strained, unhappy feeling. Something had been wrong the evening before: Lee’s asking her to move into Dallas with him so insistently, her refusing, his practically kicking her in bed. There had been something nasty between them.
But she was soon distracted. Knowing Marina’s fascination with the president and Mrs. Kennedy, Ruth had left the television on when she went out. Marina did not bother to get dressed. She tended to Rachel, gave cookies and milk to little June, and settled down on the sofa to watch the president. She saw him arrive at Love Field and give a speech. Jackie, dressed in a raspberry-colored suit, looked wonderful. Marina watched a rerun of a breakfast Mr. Kennedy had attended in Fort Worth. Somebody gave him a ten-gallon hat, and he seemed to enjoy it.
Marina was glowing by the time Ruth returned home about noon. She said that it was a pity Ruth had missed the president’s arrival. What a welcome he had had!
Ruth went into the kitchen to fix lunch, and Marina went to her room to get dressed. The television set was on, and suddenly Marina heard a lot of noise. Ruth ran into the bedroom, very pale, and said that someone had shot at the president. The two women dashed to the living room and stared at the set. There was no picture now, only a newsman reporting what had happened. Marina kept asking Ruth to translate. Was it very serious? Was Jackie all right? Ruth listened closely, then said the president had been taken to the hospital. There was not much news of him yet, but he had been hit in the head.
They forgot about lunch. Ruth lit some candles, and she and her little girl prayed. Marina went to her room and cried. She wondered what Ruth would think of her crying for a man who was not even her president. She prayed for the president’s life, and also for Mrs. Kennedy, who might be left alone with two children.
A little later Marina was outside hanging up clothes. Ruth came to join her and told her that the reporters were saying the shots that hit the president had come from the Texas School Book Depository. At that, Marina’s heart “fell to the bottom.”[1]
“Is there really anyone on earth but my lunatic husband crazy enough to have fired that shot?” she asked herself. Unlikely and unexplained occurrences suddenly started to drop into place: Lee’s unannounced visit the night before, his shrugging and saying he knew nothing about the president’s visit. Marina hid the fear that had seized her; she did not want to reveal it to Ruth.
She need not have worried. Ruth was not thinking that way. It had not occurred to her to connect Lee to the crime. She merely thought they knew someone in the building, close to the event, who would give them a first-hand account.[2]
Neither Ruth nor Marina had realized that the place where Lee worked was on the president’s route. Ruth knew that the Book Depository had two warehouses, and she was not certain which of them Lee actually worked in. She had copied Lee’s address, 411 Elm Street, three weeks earlier for James Hosty, but she had forgotten it.
Marina was numb. She left Ruth at the clothesline and went to the house. When she was certain Ruth could not see her, she crept into the garage, to the place where Lee kept his rifle wrapped in paper inside the heavy blanket, a green and brown wool blanket of East German make that he had bought in Russia. Looking for parts to June’s baby bed three weeks earlier, Marina had rolled back a corner of the blanket and spied the rifle’s wooden stock. Now she found the bundle and stared at it. It was lying on the floor, below, and parallel to, a window in the garage. Marina did not touch the blanket, but it looked exactly as it had before. Thank God the rifle was still there, Marina thought, feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her. Yet she wondered if there was really “a second idiot” in Dallas, anyone else crazy enough, besides her husband, even to think of such a deed. And so, in spite of the blanket’s reassuring contours, she was unable to compose herself.
She was sitting on the sofa next to Ruth when the announcement came over television that the president was dead. “What a terrible thing for Mrs. Kennedy,” Marina said, “and for the children to be left without a father.” Ruth was walking around the room crying. Marina was unable to cry. She could not believe the news. She felt as if her blood had “stopped running.” A little later an announcement came that someone had been captured in a movie theater. No name.
An hour, or a little less, after the president’s death was announced, the doorbell rang. Ruth went to answer. She was greatly surprised to find six men standing on her doorstep. They were from the sheriff’s office and the Dallas police, they said, and they showed their credentials. Ruth’s jaw dropped.
“We have Lee Oswald in custody,” one of the policemen said. “He is charged with shooting an officer.”
28
The account of Oswald’s movements from the Tippit shooting to the end of the chapter is taken from the Warren Commission Report, pp. 165–180; and from David Belin’s