11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  The thought had no more than crossed my mind when I saw my target for the first time. Robert and Lee were side by side, talking animatedly. Lee was swinging what was either an oversized attaché case or a small satchel. Robert had a pink suitcase with rounded corners that looked like something out of Barbie’s closet. Vada and Marina came along behind. Vada had taken one of two patchwork cloth bags; Marina had the other slung over her shoulder. She was also carrying June, now four months old, in her arms and laboring to keep up. Robert and Vada’s two kids flanked her, looking at her with open curiosity.

  Vada called to the men and they stopped almost in front of the restaurant. Robert grinned and took Marina’s carry-bag. Lee’s expression was … amused? Knowing? Maybe both. The tiniest suggestion of a smile dimpled the corners of his mouth. His nondescript hair was neatly combed. He was, in fact, the perfect A. J. Squared Away in his pressed white shirt, khakis, and shined shoes. He didn’t look like a man who had just completed a journey halfway around the world; there wasn’t a wrinkle on him and not a trace of beard-shadow on his cheeks. He was just twenty-two years old, and looked younger—like one of the teenagers in my last American Lit class.

  So did Marina, who wouldn’t be old enough to buy a legal drink for another month. She was exhausted, bewildered, and staring at everything. She was also beautiful, with clouds of dark hair and upturned, somehow rueful blue eyes.

  June’s arms and legs were swaddled in cloth diapers. Even her neck was wrapped in something, and although she wasn’t crying, her face was red and sweaty. Lee took the baby. Marina smiled her gratitude, and when her lips parted, I saw that one of her teeth was missing. The others were discolored, one of them almost black. The contrast with her creamy skin and gorgeous eyes was jarring.

  Oswald leaned close to her and said something that wiped the smile off her face. She looked up at him warily. He said something else, poking her shoulder with one finger as he did so. I remembered Al’s story, and wondered if Oswald was saying the same thing to his wife now: pokhoda, cyka—walk, bitch.

  But no. It was the swaddling that had upset him. He tore it away—first from the arms, then the legs—and flung the diapers at Marina, who caught them clumsily. Then she looked around to see if they were being watched.

  Vada came back and touched Lee’s arm. He paid no attention to her, just unwrapped the makeshift cotton scarf from around baby June’s neck and flung that at Marina. It fell to the terminal floor. She bent and picked it up without speaking.

  Robert joined them and gave his brother a friendly punch on the shoulder. The terminal had almost entirely cleared out now—the last of the deplaning passengers had passed the Oswald family—and I heard what he said clearly. “Give her a break, she just got here. She doesn’t even know where here is yet.”

  “Look at this kid,” Lee said, and raised June for inspection. At that, she finally began to cry. “She’s got her wrapped up like a damn Egyptian mummy. Because that’s the way they do it back home. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Staryj baba! Old woman.” He turned back to Marina with the bawling baby in his arms. She looked at him fearfully. “Staryj baba!”

  She tried to smile, the way people do when they know the joke is on them, but not why. I thought fleetingly of Lennie, in Of Mice and Men. Then a grin, cocky and a little sideways, lit Oswald’s face. It made him almost handsome. He kissed his wife gently, first on one cheek, then the other.

  “USA!” he said, and kissed her again. “USA, Rina! Land of the free and home of the turds!”

  Her smile became radiant. He began to speak to her in Russian, handing back the baby as he did so. He put his arm around her waist as she soothed June. She was still smiling as they left my field of vision, and shifted the baby to her shoulder so she could take his hand.

  8

  I went home—if I could call Mercedes Street home—and tried to take a nap. I couldn’t get under, so I lay there with my hands behind my head, listening to the uneasy street noises and speaking with Al Templeton. This was a thing I found myself doing quite often, now that I was on my own. For a dead man, he always had a lot to say.

  “I was stupid to come to Fort Worth,” I told him. “If I try to hook up that bug to the tape recorder, someone’s apt to see me. Oswald himself might see me, and that would change everything. He’s already paranoid, you said so in your notes. He knew the KGB and MVD were watching him in Minsk, and he’s going to be afraid that the FBI and the CIA are watching him here. And the FBI actually will be, at least some of the time.”

  “Yes, you’ll have to be careful,” Al agreed. “It won’t be easy, but I trust you, buddy. It’s why I called you in the first place.”

  “I don’t even want to get near him. Just seeing him in the airport gave me a class-A case of the willies.”

  “I know you don’t, but you’ll have to. As someone who spent damn near his whole life cooking meals, I can tell you that no omelet was ever made without breaking eggs. And it would be a mistake to overestimate this guy. He’s no super-criminal. Also, he’s going to be distracted, mostly by his batshit mother. How good is he going to be at anything for awhile except shouting at his wife and knocking her around when he gets too pissed off for shouting to be enough?”

  “I think he cares for her, Al. At least a little, and maybe a lot. In spite of the shouting.”

  “Yeah, and it’s guys like him who are most likely to fuck up their women. Look at Frank Dunning. You just take care of your business, buddy.”

  “And what am I going to get if I do manage to hook up that bug? Tape recordings of arguments? Arguments in Russian? That’ll be a big help.”

  “You don’t need to decode the man’s family life. It’s George de Mohrenschildt you need to find out about. You have to make sure de Mohrenschildt isn’t involved in the attempt on General Walker. Once you accomplish that, the window of uncertainty closes. And look on the bright side. If Oswald catches you spying on him, his future actions might change in a good way. He might not try for Kennedy after all.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “No. Actually I don’t.”

  “Neither do I. The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to be changed.”

  He said, “Buddy, now you’re cooking …”

  “With gas,” I heard myself muttering. “Now I’m cooking with gas.”

  I opened my eyes. I had fallen asleep after all. Late light was coming in through the drawn curtains. Somewhere not far away, on Davenport Street in Fort Worth, the Oswald brothers and their wives would be sitting down to dinner—Lee’s first meal back on his old stomping grounds.

  Outside my own little bit of Fort Worth, I could hear a skip-rope chant. It sounded very familiar. I got up, went through my dim living room (furnished with two thriftshop easy chairs but nothing else), and twitched back one of the drapes an inch or so. Those drapes had been my very first installation. I wanted to see; I didn’t want to be seen.

  2703 was still deserted, with the FOR RENT sign double-tacked to the railing of the rickety porch, but the lawn wasn’t deserted. There, two girls were twirling a jump rope while a third stutter-stepped in and out. Of course they weren’t the girls I’d seen on Kossuth Street in Derry—these three, dressed in patched and faded jeans instead of crisp new shorts, looked runty and underfed—but the chant was the same, only now with Texas accents.

  “Charlie Chaplin went to France! Just to watch the ladies dance! Salute to the Cap’un! Salute to the Queen! My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!”

  The skip-rope girl caught her foot and went tumbling into the crabgrass that served as 2703’s front lawn. The other girls piled on top of her and all three of them rolled in the dirt. Then they got to their feet and went pelting away.

  I watched them go, thinking I saw them but they didn’t see me. That’s something. That’s a start. But Al, where’s my finish?

  De Mohrenschildt was the key to the whole deal, the only thing keeping me from killing Oswald as soon as he moved in across the s
treet. George de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist who speculated in oil leases. A man who lived the playboy lifestyle, mostly thanks to his wife’s money. Like Marina, he was a Russian exile, but unlike her, from a noble family—he was, in fact, Baron de Mohrenschildt. The man who was going to become Lee Oswald’s only friend during the few months of life Oswald had left. The man who was going to suggest to Oswald that the world would be much better off without a certain racist right-wing ex-General. If de Mohrenschildt turned out to be part of Oswald’s attempt to kill Edwin Walker, my situation would be vastly complicated; all the nutty conspiracy theories would then be in play. Al, however, believed all the Russian geologist had done (or would do; as I’ve said, living in the past is confusing) was egg on a man who was already obsessed with fame and mentally unstable.

  Al had written in his notes: If Oswald was on his own on the night of April 10th, 1963, chances that there was another gunman involved in the Kennedy assassination seven months later drop to almost zero.

  Below this, in capital letters, he had added his final verdict: GOOD ENOUGH TO TAKE THE SON OF A BITCH OUT.

  9

  Seeing the little girls who hadn’t seen me made me think of that old Jimmy Stewart suspenser, Rear Window. A person could see a lot without ever leaving his own living room. Especially if he had the right tools.

  The next day, I went to a sporting goods store and bought a pair of Bausch & Lomb binoculars, reminding myself to be wary of sunflashes on the lenses. Since 2703 was on the east side of Mercedes Street, I thought I’d be safe enough in that regard anytime after noon. I poked the glasses through the gap in my drapes, and when I adjusted the focus knob, the crappy living room–kitchen across the way became so bright and detailed that I might’ve been standing in it.

  The Leaning Lamp of Pisa was still on the old bureau where the kitchen utensils were stored, waiting for someone to turn it on and activate the bug. But it would do me no good unless it was hooked up to the cunning little Japanese reel-to-reel, which could record up to twelve hours on its slowest speed. I had tried it out, actually speaking into the spare bugged lamp (which made me feel like a character in a Woody Allen comedy), and while the playback was draggy, the words were understandable. All of which meant I was good to go.

  If I dared to.

  10

  July Fourth on Mercedes Street was busy. Men with the day off watered lawns that were beyond saving—other than a few afternoon and evening thunderstorms, the weather had been hot and dry—then plopped down in lawn chairs, listening to baseball games on the radio and drinking beer. Subteen posses threw firecrackers at stray dogs and the few roving chickens. One of the latter was struck by a cherry bomb and exploded in a mass of blood and feathers. The child who tossed it was dragged screaming into one of the houses farther down the street by a mother wearing nothing but a slip and a Farmall baseball cap. I guessed by her unsteady gait that she had downed a few brewskis herself. The closest thing to fireworks came just after ten o’clock, when someone, possibly the same kid who slashed my convertible’s tires, torched an old Studebaker that had been sitting abandoned in the parking lot of the Montgomery Ward warehouse for the last week or so. Fort Worth FD came to put it out, and everyone turned out to watch.

  Hail Columbia.

  The next morning I walked down to inspect the burned-out hulk, which sat sadly on the puddled remains of its tires. I spotted a telephone booth near one of the warehouse loading bays, and on impulse called Ellie Dockerty, getting the operator to find the number and connect me. I did it partly because I was lonely and homesick, mostly because I wanted news of Sadie.

  Ellie answered on the second ring, and she seemed delighted to hear my voice. Standing there in an already roasting phone booth, with Mercedes Street sleeping off the Glorious Fourth behind me and the smell of charred car in my nostrils, that made me smile.

  “Sadie’s fine. I’ve had two postcards and a letter. She’s working at Harrah’s as a waitress.” She lowered her voice. “I believe as a cocktail waitress, but the schoolboard will never hear that from me.”

  I visualized Sadie’s long legs in a short cocktail waitress’s skirt. I visualized businessmen trying to see the tops of her stockings or into the valley of her décolletage as she bent to put drinks on a table.

  “She asked after you,” Ellie said, and that made me smile again. “I didn’t want to tell her that you’d sailed off the edge of the earth as far as anyone in Jodie knew, so I said you were busy with your book and doing fine.”

  I hadn’t added a word to The Murder Place in a month or more, and on the two occasions when I’d picked up the manuscript and tried to read it, it all seemed to be written in third-century Punic. “I’m glad that she’s doing well.”

  “Her residency requirement will be fulfilled by the end of the month, but she’s decided to stay out there until the end of summer vacation. She says the tips are very good.”

  “Did you ask her for a picture of her soon-to-be ex-husband?”

  “Just before she left. She said she has none. She believes her parents have several, but she refused to write them about it. Said they’d never given up on the marriage, and it would give them false hope. She also said she believed you were overreacting. Wildly overreacting was the phrase she used.”

  That sounded like my Sadie. Only she wasn’t mine anymore. Now she was just hey waitress, bring us another round … and bend a little lower this time. Every man has a jealous-bone, and mine was twanging hard on the morning of July fifth.

  “George? I have no doubt she still cares for you, and it might not be too late to clear this mess up.”

  I thought of Lee Oswald, who wouldn’t make his attempt on General Edwin Walker’s life for another nine months. “It’s too early,” I said.

  “I beg pardon?”

  “Nothing. It’s good to talk to you, Miz Ellie, but pretty soon the operator’s going to come on the line asking for more money, and I’m all out of quarters.”

  “I don’t suppose you could get down this way for a burger and a shake, could you? At the diner? If so, I’ll invite Deke Simmons to join us. He asks about you almost every day.”

  The thought of going back to Jodie and seeing my friends from the high school was probably the only thing that could have cheered me up that morning. “Absolutely. Would this evening be too soon? Say five o’clock?”

  “It’s perfect. We country mice eat early.”

  “Fine. I’ll be there. My treat.”

  “I’ll match you for it.”

  11

  Al Stevens had hired a girl I knew from Business English, and I was touched by the way she lit up when she saw who was sitting with Ellie and Deke. “Mr. Amberson! Wow, it’s great to see you! How’re you doing?”

  “Fine, Dorrie,” I said.

  “Well, order big. You’ve lost weight.”

  “It’s true,” Ellie said. “You need a good taking-care-of.”

  Deke’s Mexican tan was gone, which told me he was spending most of his retirement indoors, and whatever weight I’d lost, he’d found. He shook my hand with a hard grip and told me how good it was to see me. There was no artifice in the man. Or in Ellie Dockerty, for that matter. Leaving this place for Mercedes Street, where they celebrated the Fourth by blowing up chickens, began to seem increasingly mad to me, no matter what I knew about the future. I certainly hoped Kennedy was worth it.

  We ate hamburgers, french fries sizzling with grease, and apple pie à la mode. We talked about who was doing what, and had a laugh over Danny Laverty, who was finally writing his long-bruited book. Ellie said that according to Danny’s wife, the first chapter was titled “I Enter the Fray.”

  Toward the end of the meal, as Deke stuffed his pipe with Prince Albert, Ellie lifted a tote she had stored under the table and produced a large book, which she passed above the greasy remains of our meal. “Page eighty-nine. And push back from that unsightly puddle of ketchup, if you please. This is strictly on loan, and I want to send it back in th
e same condition I received it.”

  It was a yearbook called Tiger Tails, and had come from a school a lot more fancy-schmancy than DCHS. Tiger Tails was bound in leather instead of cloth, the pages were thick and glossy, and the ad section at the back was easily a hundred pages thick. The institution it memorialized—exalted might be a better word—was Longacre Day School in Savannah. I thumbed through the uniformly vanilla senior section and thought there might be a black face or two there by the year 1990. Maybe.

  “Holy joe,” I said. “Sadie must have taken a pretty good whack in the wallet when she came to Jodie from here.”

  “I believe she was very anxious to get away,” Deke said quietly. “And I’m sure she had her reasons.”

  I turned to page eighty-nine. It was headed LONGACRE SCIENCE DEPARTMENT. There was a corny group shot of four teachers in white lab coats holding bubbling beakers—paging Dr. Jekyll—and below it were four studio shots. John Clayton didn’t look a bit like Lee Oswald, but he had the same sort of pleasantly forgettable face, and his lips were dimpled at the corners by the same suggestion of a smile. Was that the ghost of amusement or barely hidden contempt? Hell, maybe it was just the best the obsessive-compulsive bastard could do when the photographer told him to say cheese. The only distinguishing features were hollows at the temples, which almost matched the dimples at the corners of his mouth. The photo wasn’t color, but his eyes were light enough to make me pretty sure they were either blue or gray.

  I turned the book toward my friends. “See these indents on the sides of his head? Is that just a natural formation, like a hooked nose or a chin-dimple?”