“So you’re a Dal-Tex guy. I could put you in touch with a couple of other big Dal-Texers.”
“Well. .” said Bob. “Yes, but I am cautious–”
“I get it. You’ve got a theory, it’s your intellectual property, you don’t want it getting out. All of us are like that, halfway between hungering to share and fearing being ripped off. I’ll go easy, no problem.”
“You know everybody and everything?”
“I am the Kennedy assassination,” Richard said, laughing. “I live and breathe this stuff, Jack. And I have the unfortunate problem of a photographic memory. If I read something, it’s there forever. Or at least so far. Maybe it’ll reach a point where one more fact makes my head explode.”
Swagger laughed. Richard Monk was engaging, if weird, and didn’t have that suspicious, feral quality that so many in the “assassination community” seemed to have.
“Offhand, what’s the state of the art on Dal-Tex?”
“Well, for a time the people who owned it were generous in letting researchers tour it if they made an appointment. Their policy has changed lately, I suspect because of the fiftieth, and the attention is ginning up, and they’re trying to rent out a lot of office space. I know the building manager; I might be able to get you in.”
“That would be great,” said Bob.
“To be honest, you shouldn’t expect much. The whole thing has been gutted and rehabbed twice over since ’63. Now it’s modern, you know, kind of ‘lofty,’ very chic urban Greenwich Village vibe happening. They even built an atrium into the lobby that goes up all the way through the center of the building so it looks like the Bradbury Building in L.A. Very old-movie cool, but completely disconnected from 1963.”
“The windows are still where they were?”
“Absolutely,” Richard said, “and of course you’ll confirm that certain windows line up almost perfectly with the angle and the trajectory of the head shot allegedly taken by LHO that day.”
“Good. See, I get into it through the guns. I’m a shooter. I actually did a lot more hunting than whoring and drinking and feeling sorry for myself, and I’ve seen a lot of animals and even some men die when hit by a high-powered bullet, or even, believe it or not, a low-powered six-point-five. My work has been on guns and ballistics, and now the problem is to make it fit the possibilities of the day.”
“Got it. See, I think it’s good that you don’t come into it with the preset conviction that ‘The CIA Did It’ or ‘Dallas Right-Wing Oil Bastards Did It,’ because that skews your thinking.”
“Exactly.”
“You know what, Jack? I’m way behind in my shipping. I more or less survive by mail order. Man, without the Internet, I’d be trying to get by on a major’s pension from Big Green.”
“Army?”
“Intel. Twenty years, mostly Germany. Anyhow, I’m thinking maybe we ought to meet for dinner and talk there. Is that something you’d be up for?”
“Only if it’s on me.”
“Great. Better than I hoped for. Where you staying? I can at least come to you.”
“The Adolphus.”
“Oh, then the French Room,” Richard said airily, and Swagger knew it was a joke, for the French Room was the swanky hotel’s glamorously decadent restaurant.
“Seriously, go down one block to Main, go up Main, there’s a great Mex place called Sol Irlandes.”
“Got it,” said Swagger.
“See you at eight. It’s an easy walk.”
“Okay,” said Richard, after a long grateful swallow of Tecate, “I didn’t bring the file, because I am the file. But when you come back, I can pull all the pictures and references for you, or I can attach it to an e-mail and ship it to you, whichever.”
“Great,” said Swagger.
“Meanwhile, I’ll call Dave Arons, who manages the building for its owners, Galaxy Capital Limited. Dave’s okay, he gets it; I’ll tell him you’re an old friend, very trustworthy. He just doesn’t want loonies parading through there in tinfoil hats.”
“I left mine in Boise.”
Around them, the dark restaurant hummed with commerce. It seemed to be a popular place, maybe because the salsa was so good. Swagger sipped his Diet Coke.
“By the way, they’re playing down the connect to the assassination, even if they’ve got an assassination museum souvenir shop right there on their corner, at Houston and Elm.”
“I noticed it,” said Bob. “I didn’t go in.”
“They now call it 501 Elm, not Dal-Tex.”
“Makes sense.”
“Good marketing move, I think. Okay, right now Dal-Tex is featured in at least thirty-eight of the two hundred sixty-five formally recognized conspiracy theories. It’s got the angles, and as you’ll find, access and egress on that day was more or less easy. It wasn’t closed down till twelve-thirty-nine or so, so a team could have gotten out pretty easy. But you probably know neither Bugliosi nor Posner, the two great Warren Commission acolytes who’ve studied all the theories, give it much time of day. They don’t even bother to rebut it. When you think about it, maybe that’s sensible. I mean, man, it would have taken some balls. Go into a public building, crack an office, pop the president, and walk out whistling ‘Dixie’ ten seconds before the cops arrive. Balls and luck. Over two hundred people worked in that building.”
“Weren’t most of them at Dealey, like Mr. Zapruder?”
“There’s always some guy hanging around.”
“Maybe they were disguised.”
“Possible, I suppose. But disguised as what? A giant charm bracelet? No way strangers can disguise themselves as friends.”
“‘Giant charm bracelet’?”
“Sorry, Woody Allen line. Not funny if you don’t love Woody.”
“I must have missed it,” Swagger said. “Anyhow, on the disguise thing, maybe it was long-term. The group rented an office before, and after the shooting stayed there for six months, when the lease was up. No, wait, dammit, the route wasn’t known till the twentieth.”
“That would free you up to the big deep-conspiracy thing, where some sinister force buried in government uses its tentacles to manipulate things into place far in advance.”
“I’m an engineer. I have a distrust of big plans, because I’ve made my money troubleshooting when big plans go wrong, and believe me, they go wrong all the time. It’s better to have a plan than not have a plan, but at the same time, no plan survives contact with reality.”
“You sound military, Jack. I was in for twenty, I saw it happen all the time.”
“I was in the marines for a–”
“The limp, Vietnam?” interrupted Richard.
“Nah. Ecuador. A piece of drill bit going a thousand feet a second. That was my real education. The engineering teaches you that a plan is a set of assumptions or diagrams that are wrong or impossible. Everything affects everything, everything changes, and you end up in a place you never thought you’d be.”
“I agree.”
“Still, dammit, the angle of any of six windows to that X on Elm Street gives us exactly the brain shot that killed the president. It’s attractive to a conspiracy theorist.”
“It is. You say your thing is ballistics?”
“Yeah. I think I’ve figured out some things as to how there could have been another gun, but no forensic evidence of it.”