11/22/63 Read online

Ellerton passed around the photographs--stark black-and-white glossies that reminded me of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Bobbi Jill gasped and turned away. Deke grunted softly, as if he'd been struck a blow. Miz Ellie shuffled through them stoically, but her face lost all color except for the two balls of rouge flaming on her cheeks.

  In the first two, Sadie's cheek hung in ragged flaps. That I had seen on Wednesday night and was prepared for. What I wasn't prepared for was the stroke-victim droop of her mouth and the slack wad of the flesh below her left eye. It gave her a clownish look that made me want to thump my head on the table of the small conference room the doctor had appropriated for our meeting. Or maybe--this would be better--to rush down to the morgue where Johnny Clayton lay so I could beat on him some more.

  "When this young woman's parents arrive this evening," Ellerton said, "I will be tactful and hopeful, because parents deserve tact and hope." He frowned. "Although one might have expected them sooner, given the gravity of Mrs. Clayton's condi--"

  "Miss Dunhill," Ellie said with quiet savagery. "She was legally divorced from that monster."

  "Yes, quite, I stand corrected. At any rate, you are her friends, and I believe you deserve less tact and more truth." He looked dispassionately at one of the photographs, and tapped Sadie's torn cheek with a short, clean fingernail. "This can be improved, but never put right. Not with the techniques now at my disposal. Perhaps a year from now, when the tissue has fully healed, I might be able to repair the worst of the dissymmetry."

  Tears began to run down Bobbi Jill's cheeks. She took Mike's hand.

  "The permanent damage to her looks is unfortunate," Ellerton said, "but there are other problems, as well. The facial nerve has been cut. She is going to have problems eating on the left side of her mouth. The droop in the eye you see in these photographs will be with her for the rest of her life, and her tear duct has been partially severed. Yet her sight may not be impaired. We'll hope not."

  He sighed and spread his hands.

  "Given the promise of wonderful stuff like microsurgery and nerve regeneration, we may be able to do more with cases like this in twenty or thirty years. For now, all I can say is I'll do my best to repair all the damage that is repairable."

  Mike spoke up for the first time. His tone was bitter. "Too bad we don't live in 1990, huh?"

  5

  It was a silent, dispirited little group that walked out of the hospital that afternoon. At the edge of the parking lot, Miz Ellie touched my sleeve. "I should have listened to you, George. I am so, so sorry."

  "I'm not sure it would have made any difference," I said, "but if you want to make it up to me, ask Freddy Quinlan to give me a call. He's the real estate guy who helped me when I first came to Jodie. I want to be close to Sadie this summer, and that means I need a place to rent."

  "You can stay with me," Deke said. "I have plenty of room."

  I turned to him. "Are you sure?"

  "You'd be doing me a favor."

  "I'll be happy to pay--"

  He waved it away. "You can kick in for groceries. That'll be fine."

  He and Ellie had come in Deke's Ranch Wagon. I watched them pull out, then trudged to my Chevrolet, which now seemed--probably unfairly--a bad-luck car. Never had I less wanted to go back to West Neely, where I would no doubt hear Lee taking out on Marina his frustrations over missing General Walker.

  "Mr. A.?" It was Mike. Bobbi Jill stood a few paces back with her arms folded tightly beneath her breasts. She looked cold and unhappy.

  "Yes, Mike."

  "Who's going to pay Miss Dunhill's hospital bills? And for all those surgeries he talked about? Does she have insurance?"

  "Some." But nowhere near enough, not for a thing like this. I thought of her parents, but the fact that they still hadn't shown up yet was troubling. They couldn't blame her for what Clayton had done . . . could they? I didn't see how, but I had come from a world where women were, for the most part, treated as equals. 1963 never seemed more like a foreign country to me than it did at that moment.

  "I'll help as much as I can," I said, but how much would that be? My cash reserves were deep enough to get me through another few months, but not enough to pay for half a dozen facial reconstruction procedures. I didn't want to go back to Faith Financial on Greenville Avenue, but I supposed I would if I had to. The Kentucky Derby was coming up in less than a month, and according to the bookie section of Al's notes, the winner was going to be Chateaugay, a longshot. A thousand on the nose would net seven or eight grand, enough to take care of Sadie's hospital stay and--at 1963 rates--at least some of the follow-up surgeries.

  "I have an idea," Mike said, then glanced over his shoulder. Bobbi Jill gave him an encouraging smile. "That is, me n Bobbi Jill do."

  "Bobbi Jill and I, Mike. You're not a kid anymore, so don't talk like one."

  "Right, right, sorry. If you can come back into the coffee shop for ten minutes or so, we'll lay it on you."

  I went. We drank coffee. I listened to their idea. And agreed. Sometimes when the past harmonizes with itself, the wise man clears his throat and sings along.

  6

  There was a whopper of an argument in the apartment above me that evening. Baby June added her nickel's worth, wailing her head off. I didn't bother to eavesdrop; the yelling would be in Russian, for the most part, anyway. Then, around eight, an unaccustomed silence fell. I assumed they'd gone to bed two hours or so earlier than their usual time, and that was a relief.

  I was thinking about going to bed myself when the de Mohrenschildts' yacht of a Cadillac pulled up at the curb. Jeanne slid out; George popped out with his usual jack-in-the-box elan. He opened the rear door behind the driver's seat and brought out a large stuffed rabbit with improbable purple fur. I gawked at this through the slit in the drapes for a moment before the penny dropped: tomorrow was Easter Sunday.

  They headed for the outside stairs. She walked; George, in the lead, trotted. His pounding footfalls on the ramshackle steps shook the whole building.

  I heard startled voices over my head, muffled but clearly questioning. Footfalls hurried across my ceiling, making the overhead light fixture in the living room rattle. Did the Oswalds think it was the Dallas police coming to make an arrest? Or maybe one of the FBI agents who had been keeping tabs on Lee while he and his family were living on Mercedes Street? I hoped the little bastard's heart was in his throat, choking him.

  There was a flurry of knocks on the door at the top of the stairs, and de Mohrenschildt called jovially: "Open up, Lee! Open up, you heathen!"

  The door opened. I donned my earphones but heard nothing. Then, just as I was deciding to try the mike in the Tupperware bowl, either Lee or Marina turned on the lamp with the bug in it. It was working again, at least for the time being.

  "--for the baby," Jeanne was saying.

  "Oh, thank!" Marina said. "Thank very much, Jeanne, so kind!"

  "Don't just stand there, Comrade, get us something to drink!" de Mohrenschildt said. He sounded like he'd had a few belts already.

  "I only have tea," Lee said. He sounded petulant and half-awake.

  "Tea's fine. I've got something here in my pocket that'll get it up on its feet." I could almost see him wink.

  Marina and Jeanne lapsed into Russian. Lee and de Mohrenschildt--their heavier footfalls unmistakable--started toward the kitchen area, where I knew I'd lose them. The women were standing close to the lamp, and their voices would cover the conversation of the men.

  Then Jeanne, in English: "Oh my goodness, is that a gun?"

  Everything stopped, including--so it felt--my heart.

  Marina laughed. It was a tinkling little cocktail-party laugh, hahaha, artificial as hell. "He lose job, we have no money, and this crazy person buy rifle. I say, 'Put in closet, you crazy eediot, so it don't upset my pregnance.'"

  "I wanted to do some target-shooting, that's all," Lee said. "I was pretty good in the Marines. Never shot Maggie's Drawers a single time."

  Another silen
ce. It seemed to go on forever. Then de Mohrenschildt's big hail-fellow laugh boomed out. "Come on, don't bullshit a bullshitter! How'd you miss him, Lee?"

  "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "General Walker, boy! Someone almost splattered his Negro-hating brains all over his office wall at that house of his on Turtle Creek. You mean you didn't know?"

  "I haven't been reading the papers just lately."

  "Oh?" Jeanne said. "Don't I see the Times Herald over there on that stool?"

  "I mean I don't read the news. Too depressing. Just the funnypages and the want-ads. Big Brother says get a job or the baby starves."

  "So you weren't the one who took that potshot, huh?" de Mohrenschildt asked.

  Teasing him. Baiting him.

  The question was why. Because de Mohrenschildt would never in his wildest dreams have believed a pipsqueak like Ozzie Rabbit was the shooter last Wednesday night . . . or because he knew that Lee was? Maybe because Jeanne had noticed the rifle? I wished with all my heart that the women weren't there. Given a chance to listen to Lee and his peculiar amigo talk man-to-man, my questions might have been answered. As it was, I still could not be sure.

  "You think I'd be crazy enough to shoot at someone with J. Edgar Hoover looking over my shoulder?" Lee sounded like he was trying to get into the spirit of the thing, Josh Along with George instead of Sing Along with Mitch, but he wasn't doing a very good job.

  "Nobody thinks you shot at anybody, Lee," Jeanne said in a placating voice. "Just promise that when your baby starts to walk, you find a safer place than the closet for that rifle of yours."

  Marina replied to this in Russian, but I'd glimpsed the baby in the side yard from time to time and knew what she was saying--that June was walking already.

  "Junie will enjoy the nice present," Lee said, "but we don't celebrate Easter. We're atheists."

  Maybe he was, but according to Al's notes, Marina--with the help of her admirer, George Bouhe--had had June secretly baptized right around the time of the Missile Crisis.

  "So are we," de Mohrenschildt said. "That's why we celebrate the Easter Bunny!" He had moved closer to the lamp, and his roar of laughter half-deafened me.

  They talked for another ten minutes, mixing English and Russian. Then Jeanne said, "We'll leave you in peace now. I think we turned you out of bed."

  "No, no, we were up," Lee said. "Thanks for dropping by."

  George said, "We'll talk soon, Lee, eh? You can come to the country club. We'll organize the waiters into a collective!"

  "Sure, sure." They were moving toward the door now.

  De Mohrenschildt said something else, but it was too low for me to catch more than a few words. They might have been get it back. Or got your back, although I didn't think that was common slang in the sixties.

  When did you get it back? Was that what he said? As in when did you get the rifle back?

  I replayed the tape half a dozen times, but at super-slow speed, there was just no way to tell. I lay awake long after the Oswalds had gone to sleep; I was still awake at two in the morning, when June cried briefly and was soothed back to dreamland by her mother. I thought of Sadie, sleeping the unrestful sleep of morphine at Parkland Hospital. The room was ugly and the bed was narrow, but I would have been able to sleep there, I was sure of it.

  I thought about de Mohrenschildt, that manic shirt-ripping stage actor. What did you say, George? What did you say there at the end? Was it when did you get it back? Was it cheer up, things aren't so black? Was it don't let this set you back? Or something else entirely?

  At last I slept. And dreamed I was at a carnival with Sadie. We came to a shooting gallery where Lee stood with his rifle socked into the hollow of his shoulder. The guy behind the counter was George de Mohrenschildt. Lee fired three times and didn't hit a single target.

  "Sorry, son," de Mohrenschildt said, "no prizes for guys who shoot Maggie's Drawers."

  Then he turned to me and grinned.

  "Step right up, son, you may have better luck. Somebody's going to kill the president, why not you?"

  I woke with a start in the first weak light of day. Above me, the Oswalds slept on.

  7

  Easter Sunday afternoon found me back in Dealey Plaza, sitting on a park bench, looking at the forbidding brick cube of the School Book Depository, and wondering what to do next.

  In ten days, Lee was going to leave Dallas for New Orleans, the city of his birth. He would get a job greasing machinery at a coffee company and rent the apartment on Magazine Street. After spending two weeks or so with Ruth Paine and her children in Irving, Marina and June would join him. I wouldn't follow. Not with Sadie facing a long period of recovery and an uncertain future.

  Was I going to kill Lee between this Easter Sunday and the twenty-fourth? I probably could. Since losing his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he spent most of his time either in the apartment or handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in downtown Dallas. Once in awhile he went to the public library, where he seemed to have given up Ayn Rand and Karl Marx in favor of Zane Grey westerns.

  Shooting him on the street or at the library on Young Street would be a recipe for instant incarceration, but if I did it in the upstairs apartment, while Marina was in Irving, helping Ruth Paine improve her Russian? I could knock on the door and put a bullet in his head when he opened it. Done deal. No risk of shooting Maggie's Drawers at point-blank range. The problem was the aftermath. I'd have to run. If I didn't, I'd be the first person the police would question. I was the downstairs neighbor, after all.

  I could claim I wasn't there when it happened, and they might buy that for awhile, but how long would it be before they discovered that the George Amberson of West Neely Street was the same George Amberson who just happened to be at a scene of violence on Bee Tree Lane in Jodie not long before? That would merit checking, and checking would soon reveal that George Amberson's teaching certificate came from a degree-mill in Oklahoma and George Amberson's references were phony. At that point I'd very likely be arrested. The police would obtain a court order to open my safe deposit box if they found out I had one, and they probably would. Mr. Richard Link, my banker, would see my name and/or picture in the paper and come forward. What would the police make of my memoir? That I had a motive for shooting Oswald, no matter how crazy.

  No, I'd have to run for the rabbit-hole, ditching the Chevy somewhere in Oklahoma or Arkansas, then taking a bus or train. And if I made it back to 2011, I could never use the rabbit-hole again without causing a reset. That would mean leaving Sadie behind forever, disfigured and alone. Of course he ran out on me, she would think. He talked a good game about smallpox scars being as pretty as dimples, but once he heard Ellerton's prognosis--ugly now, ugly forever--he headed for the hills.

  She might not even blame me. That was the most rotten possibility of all.

  But no. No. I could think of a worse one. Suppose I got back to 2011 and discovered that Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22 after all? I still wasn't positive Oswald was on his own. Who was I to say that ten thousand conspiracy theorists were wrong, especially based on the few scraps of information all my haunting and stalking had gleaned?

  Maybe I'd check Wikipedia and discover the shooter had been on the grassy knoll, after all. Or on the roof of the combined jail and county courthouse on Houston Street, armed with a sharpshooter's rifle instead of a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano. Or hiding in a sewer on Elm Street and watching for Kennedy's approach with a periscope, as some of the wilder conspiracy buffs claimed.

  De Mohrenschildt was a CIA asset of some kind. Even Al Templeton, who was almost positive that Oswald had acted alone, acknowledged that much. Al was convinced he was just a little asset, passing on bits of South and Central American tittle-tattle to keep his various oil speculations afloat. But what if he was more? The CIA had loathed Kennedy ever since he refused to send in American troops to back the beleagured partisans at the Bay of Pigs. His graceful handling of the Missi
le Crisis had deepened that loathing; the spooks had wanted to use it as a pretext to end the cold war once and for all, because they were positive the ballyhooed "missile gap" was a fiction. You could read much of this in the daily papers, sometimes between the lines of the news stories, sometimes stated baldly in the op-ed essays.

  Suppose certain rogue elements in the CIA had talked George de Mohrenschildt into a much more dangerous mission? Not killing the president himself, but recruiting several less-than-balanced individuals who would be willing to do the job? Would de Mohrenschildt say yes to such an offer? I thought he might. He and Jeanne lived big, but I had no real idea how they supported the Cadillac, the country club, and their sprawl of a house on Simpson Stuart Road. Serving as the cutout, a dead-short between a targeted U.S. president and an agency that theoretically existed to do his bidding . . . that would be dangerous work, but if the potential gain were big enough, a man living above his means might be tempted. And it wouldn't even have to be a cash payoff, that was the beauty of it. Just those wonderful oil leases in Venezuela, Haiti, and the DR. Also, such work might appeal to a grandiose strutter like de Mohrenschildt. He liked action, and he didn't care for Kennedy.

  Thanks to John Clayton, I couldn't even eliminate de Mohrenschildt from the Walker attempt. It was Oswald's rifle, yes, but suppose Lee had found himself unable to fire it when the time came? I thought it would be just like the little weasel to choke at the critical moment. I could see de Mohrenschildt snatching the Carcano out of Lee's trembling hands and snarling, Give it to me, I'll do it myself.

  Would de Mohrenschildt have felt capable of making the shot from behind the garbage can Lee meant to use as a sniper's bench? One line in Al's notes made me think the answer was yes: Won skeet-shooting championship at country club in 1961.

  If I killed Oswald and Kennedy died anyway, it would all be for nothing. And then what? Rinse and repeat? Kill Frank Dunning again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? Drive to Dallas again?

  Meet Sadie again?

  She would be unmarked, and that was good. I would know what her crazy ex-husband looked like, dye-job and all, and this time I could stop him before he got close. Also good. But just thinking about going through all of it again exhausted me. Nor did I think I could kill Lee in cold blood, at least not based on the circumstantial evidence I had. With Frank Dunning, I'd known for sure. I had seen.