As for Oswald, or whoever was back there in the building, whichever one it was, his situation was completely different. His shot, in wing-shooting terminology, was an outgoer. It’s pretty easy. The target presents very little angle. The limo wasn’t exactly at zero degrees angle to him, but as it moved down Elm Street and as he oriented himself in the window to track it, it was under five degrees. From his point of view, even through that poor-quality scope, it was trending right to left slowly, possibly even undetectably to him. Its main quality was that it was diminishing in size as it traveled farther in distance. Neither of these conditions required that he shoot on the deflection, demanding that skillful computation of lead. He could hold point-blank on the target, concentrate on his squeeze, and get his shot off. If the rifle was accurate and the sight aimed dead zero, then the shot was technically no harder than a benchrest shot at a rifle range. The difference in distances – 75 feet versus 263 feet – was hardly meaningful. To Bob’s sniper’s brain, the shot from behind and above was far easier than a shot from 90 degrees at a vehicle accelerating at an unknown rate.
Swagger thought: Hmm, that’s kind of interesting. The shot had to come from behind.
CHAPTER 5
Shower, dress, coffee, paper. The same khaki suit, still baggy. The same red tie. He noticed neither tie nor suit and headed out. Dal-Tex was eight blocks or so away, the same walk as last night’s jaunt to Dealey, and he thought it would do his hip some good to walk it.
He made them easily enough. Two of them. One on foot, one trailing in a car, which looked to be an ’09 Chevy. The car hopscotched, and the man on foot would change duties with the driver. One guy was black, in a black suit with no necktie, a porkpie hat, and shades. The other was dour and plump, in plaid sport coat and slacks, no tie, no hat, no glasses, sun or otherwise. They were not amateurs.
Bob walked down Main, swallowed by the glass-and-steel canyons that had not been there fifty years ago. As last night, he followed Kennedy’s route, pungently aware that the style of modern air-conditioning climate control largely banished the open window from large building construction. No open windows in the sheets of tinted glass that rose forty stories.
It was all different for Kennedy. The buildings then were squatter, stouter things, constructed mostly in the twenties and thirties, lots of ornamentation and showy work, arches and cupolas and the other flourishes that cheap skilled labor could routinely produce in brick or stone. And windows. The close-in canyons of Main must have pushed JFK past fifty thousand open windows, and a shooter could have lurked in any of them. It was outside the limits then. Kennedy himself joked about it and drew smiles because it was such a fantastic possibility. He was just about out of windows too; beyond the depository, it was wide-open space all the way to the Trade Mart and the speech he never gave. The fifty-thousand-and-first window had a gunman behind it. End of story.
As had Kennedy, Swagger reached Main’s jog at Dealey, and instead of turning left to follow Main, he turned right down Houston. A block brought him to the corner where he’d met Nick, where Houston crossed Elm and the two brick piles stood side by side, the Book Depository and Dal-Tex, almost twins: square girder and mortar palaces.
He looked hard at Dal-Tex. A biggish office building, seven stories tall, redbrick, flat roof, fairly elaborate with arches built into the brick, recessing the windows, thick stone slabs edging the roof, big windows that opened from the bottom up. He could see where new oranger brick had replaced a couple of chunks at the joinery of the Elm-Main corner, to sustain a new brand for the unit. That corner also sported the building’s sole retail unit, the Sixth-Floor Museum souvenir shop and coffee gallery, though it was unclear if it was officially connected with the museum in TBD across the street, or if they had claimed the name as a marketing ploy. He noted that a fire escape, which in 1963 ran the height of the building on Houston Street, was gone.
Swagger’s vision drifted leftward, across the gulf of Houston Street, and settled again on LHO’s sniper’s nest, at the sixth-floor corner window. From where Swagger stood at the corner of the two streets, the window seemed immense. It couldn’t have been seventy-five feet away, and the downward angle wouldn’t affect the trajectory because the range was so close. You point at the white shirt through that junky scope and pull the trigger and cannot miss; no bad trigger pull could jerk the gun far enough to make a difference, no wind deflection could push the bullet from its destiny, nothing could interfere with its flight into flesh.
He stood on the corner, again imagining the slow pivot of the big car as the driver wheeled it through the 120 degrees of the turn. It would have been all but stationary except for the slow pivot. And up there, behind Window 50,001, was the gunman.
Again: why didn’t he shoot then? Wide-open target, straight angle into the high chest, Connally too far forward to interfere, Jackie to the right and out of the way, the shot so easy. A Boy Scout could have made it.
What was going on with LHO up there in his nest?
Another mystery, unknowable, unsolvable, that had died with Jack Ruby’s .38 Special into Lee Harvey.
Swagger waited for the light to change, crossed the street, turned right and then left up the four steps, and entered Dal-Tex.
The first thing he felt was the openness. Looking up, he saw space, as an atrium scooped from the guts of the building exposed several floors of balconies and the wood trusses of the roof. Moving ahead to the security kiosk, he was greeted by a man in his forties, well dressed and pleasant.
“Mr. Arons? My name is Jack Brophy. I think my friend Richard Monk called you on my behalf.”
They shook hands and Arons said, “Yes, he did, Dr. Brophy–”
“Jack, please.”
“Jack, then. He did, and I like Richard, so I’ll be happy to take you through and try to answer any of your questions.”
Swagger peppered the man with inquiries. The first concerned the atrium, which, no, wasn’t there in ’63. It was the creation of a nineties refurb. The whole building, Swagger saw, had the kind of urban-hip tone of so many gentrified older units, and the new designer had stressed raw brick where possible, lots of plain white structural wood, simplicity and unforced elegance everywhere. The ceilings had been cleverly peeled of stucco, exposing the stout girders that were the frame of the building nested in the still-sound wood beams that also sustained the building’s pressures.
“I’m guessing these three elevators were here before?” he asked as they rode up.
“Since the beginning,” said Arons. “They’ve been rehabbed, of course” – the elevator was sleek stainless and teak, with mirrors for the vain – “but the shaft was always here, central rear.”
“Got it. Were there ever any elevator operators? Particularly in 1963?”
“Not then, not ever.”
“What about security?”
“Never. Not until recently, that is.”
Swagger felt that the building was smaller on the inside than on the outside, even with the opened atriums and ceilings. Also, it was squarer; somehow you sensed the perfection of its symmetries inside, whereas from outside, it seemed longer one way, more rectangular.
They started on the seventh floor, and Arons took him to an unrented office suite that fronted on Houston Street, looking south to the Book Depository. Its roof could be seen twenty-five feet away, but more evident was the angle down Elm, exposing totally the street up to and beyond the X that marked the brain shot.