“I see,” she said.
“Ma’am – Jean, if I may – you’ve got what the Marine Corps would call intelligence that doesn’t rise to the actionable level. It doesn’t carry enough meaning to be acted on. There are too many other possibilities here for anyone to do anything about it. My best advice is to congratulate yourself for following up on your duty to your husband and then go back to your life. I think your husband would have found that out in time too. Maybe he could do something with his discovery if it were a fiction book, but I don’t see it as having any real meaning in the world, and it sure didn’t have anything to do with his death. Sorry to be so blunt, but you didn’t come all this way and invest all this time for sugarcoating.”
“No, I didn’t, Mr. Swagger. I believe you’ve set me straight.”
“I hope I helped, ma’am. And I’m very sorry about your husband. Maybe by the time you get back, they will have caught the boy.”
“Maybe so.”
“Let me walk you to your car, and we’ll get you out of this godforsaken place.”
“Thank you.”
They both rose as he peeled off a few bills for the waitress and headed out to her Fusion.
“I guess we’ll never know,” she said as she got to her car, “who ran over the mystery man with a bicycle.”
He was only half listening at this time, trying to sneak a look at his watch to see what time it was and how soon he could get back, because he’d promised to help Miko on her low-roping skills and–
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”
“Oh, the back of the coat, it had a smear on it that appeared to represent a tread. The Engineer thought it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. That’s all. A minor point, I forgot to–”
“Do you have a list of the people your husband visited?”
“I have his notebook. It’s hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what is–”
“I have to set some things up. It’ll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer files on the Dallas trip or notepapers, get me that stuff too. I’ll get down there as soon as I’m set up.”
“Do you want to borrow the tommy gun?”
“No, not yet.”
“You’re not joking, are you?”
“No ma’am.”
“Do you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and I–”
“No ma’am,” said Swagger. “This one’s on me.”
CHAPTER 3
A man sat on a park bench at the corner of Houston and Elm, under a spread of aged oak trees, before some kind of odd rectangular white cement ceremonial pool that appeared to be full of Scope. Around him, la vie touristique occurred, a subspecies of human behavior mandating that small knots of oddly dressed people congregated here and there, with cameras inadequate to the scale of the urban space, called Dealey, which they commanded. It was all very strange. Sometimes a particularly brave one would dash onto Elm Street to stand, during a brief traffic interruptus, at one of two X’s that marked the spots on which a man had been shot to death. Meanwhile, homeless men roamed, some to beg, some to sell for five bucks a rag called The Conspiracy Chronicles that promised the latest dish on 11-22-63.
Directly across Elm from the man stood a box of bricks seven stories tall, undistinguished but famous, called the Texas Book Depository. Despite its banality, it had one of the most recognizable facades in the world, especially a corner of the sixth floor where the ambusher had lurked fifty years ago. The sky was bold Texas blue, and a slight wind blew east to west across the territory, which was surrounded by the churn of cars and trucks as they cascaded down Houston and made the tricky turn to the left down Elm for the access to the Stemmons Freeway just beyond the triple underpass. People had things to do, places to go, and for most Dallasites, the tragedy of Dealey Plaza had long since faded. Swagger sat alone, but in his mind, it was 1963, 24/7.
He looked this way and that, up and down, around, down streets, at his shoes, at his fingertips, and he tried to remember. It had been a day like this one, cloudless after a threat of early rain, the sky as blue as a movie star’s eyes. At least that’s what the papers said. He himself had been asleep at the time, half a world away on an island called Okinawa where, as a seventeen-year-old lance corporal, he’d just made the battalion rifle team and would spend the next three weeks cradling a ton of Garand on a flat, dry firing range, trying to put holes in black circles six hundred yards or so off. He didn’t know a goddamn thing about anything and wouldn’t for years.
But at 12:29 p.m., back in Dallas, the president’s motorcade turned right off of Main Street and proceeded one block up Houston, at the northern boundary of the triangular open park that was Dealey Plaza. Now he saw it. Lincoln limo, long black boat of a car. Two up front, driver and agent, two lower, Governor Connally and his wife, then the regal couple, the blessed, the charismatic, John F. Kennedy in his suit and his wife, Jackie, in pink, both waving at the close-by crowds.
The car reached Elm and cranked left. It had to access the Stemmons Freeway, which could only be entered from Elm. It was a 120-degree turn, not a 90-degree turn, so the driver, a Secret Service agent named Greer, had to slow down considerably as he maneuvered the heavy vehicle around the corner. Speeding up, he passed by some trees and continued on a slight downward angle along Elm Street. Immediately to his right was the seven-story building known as the Texas Book Depository, the undistinguished pile of plain brickwork that now loomed over Swagger. He ran his eyes up its edge and halted them at the corner of the sixth floor and saw. . only a window.
On that day, at 12:30 p.m., as the car passed by the trees, a sound that virtually everyone agreed was a gunshot was heard. It appeared to have struck nobody directly, but at least one witness, a man named Tague, reported being stung by what can reasonably be assumed was a fragment, as the bullet broke apart when it hit the curbstone behind the car or a branch in the trees. Bullets do this; it is not strange or remarkable. Within six or so seconds, a second bullet was fired, and most people there assumed it came from the looming depository. That bullet hit the president in the back, near the neck, tumbled through his body, emerged from his throat, nicking his tie, and flew on to hit John Connally horizontally. It penetrated his body entirely too, hit and broke his wrist, and thudded into but did not penetrate his thigh. It was found later that afternoon on a gurney at the hospital. This was the “magic bullet” that many claimed could not have done what this one did.