11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  There was one small key on the ring. Stamped on it was FC and 775. It was a safe deposit box key, all right, but what was the bank? First Commercial? That sounded bankish, but it wasn’t right.

  I closed my eyes and looked into darkness. I waited, almost sure what I wanted would come … and it did. I saw a checkbook in a faux alligator cover. I saw myself flipping it open. This was surprisingly easy. Printed on the top check was not only my Land of Ago name but my last official Land of Ago address.

  214 W. Neely St. Apartment 1

  Dallas, TX

  I thought: That’s where my car got stolen from.

  And I thought: Oswald. The assassin’s name is Oswald Rabbit.

  No, of course not. He was a man, not a cartoon character. But it was close.

  “I’m coming for you, Mr. Rabbit,” I said. “Still coming.”

  3

  The phone rang shortly before nine-thirty. Sadie was home safe. “Don’t suppose anything came to you, did it? I’m a pest, I know.”

  “Nothing. And you’re the farthest thing in the world from a pest.” She was also going to be the farthest thing in the world from Oswald Rabbit, if I had anything to do about it. Not to mention his wife, whose name might or might not be Mary, and his little girl, who I felt sure was named April.

  “You were pulling my leg about a Negro being in the White House, weren’t you?”

  I smiled. “Wait awhile. You can see for yourself.”

  4

  11/18/63 (Monday)

  The DAVIN nurses, one old and formidable, the other young and pretty, arrived at 9:00 A.M. sharp. They did their thing. When the older one felt that I had grimaced, twitched, and moaned enough, she handed me a paper envelope with two pills in it. “Pain.”

  “I don’t really think—”

  “Take em,” she said—a woman of few words. “Freebies.”

  I popped them in my mouth, cheeked them, swallowed water, then excused myself to use the bathroom. There I spat them out.

  When I returned to the kitchen, the older nurse said: “Good progress. Don’t overdo.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Catch them?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The assholes who beat you up.”

  “Uh … not yet.”

  “Doing something you shouldn’t have been doing?”

  I gave her my widest smile, the one Christy used to say made me look like a game-show host on crack. “I don’t remember.”

  5

  Dr. Ellerton came for lunch, bringing huge roast beef sandwiches, crispy french fries dripping in grease, and the promised milkshakes. I ate as much as I could manage, which was really quite a lot. My appetite was returning.

  “Mike talked up the idea of doing yet another variety show,” he said. “This time to benefit you. In the end, wiser heads prevailed. A small town can only give so much.” He lit a cigarette, dropped the match into the ashtray on the table, and inhaled with gusto. “Any chance the police will catch the mugs who tuned up on you? What do you hear?”

  “Nothing, but I doubt it. They cleaned out my wallet, stole my car, and split.”

  “What were you doing on that side of Dallas, anyway? It’s not exactly the high-society part of town.”

  Well, apparently I lived there.

  “I don’t remember. Visiting someone, maybe.”

  “Are you getting plenty of rest? Not straining the knee too much?”

  “No.” Although I suspected I’d be straining it plenty before much longer.

  “Still falling asleep suddenly?”

  “That’s quite a bit better.”

  “Terrific. I guess—”

  The phone rang. “That’ll be Sadie,” I said. “She calls on her lunch break.”

  “I have to be shoving off, anyway. It’s great to see you putting on weight, George. Say hello to the pretty lady for me.”

  I did so. She asked me if any pertinent memories were coming back. I knew by her delicate phrasing that she was calling from the school’s main office—and would have to pay Mrs. Coleridge for the long-distance when she was done. Besides keeping the DCHS exchequer, Mrs. Coleridge had long ears.

  I told her no, no new memories, but I was going to take a nap and hope something would be there when I woke up. I added that I loved her (it was nice to say something that was the God’s honest), asked after Deke, wished her a good afternoon, and hung up. But I didn’t take a nap. I took my car keys and my briefcase and drove downtown. I hoped to God I’d have something in that briefcase when I came back.

  6

  I motored slowly and carefully, but my knee was still aching badly when I entered the First Corn Bank and presented my safe deposit box key.

  My banker came out of his office to meet me, and his name clicked home immediately: Richard Link. His eyes widened with concern when I limped to meet him. “What happened to you, Mr. Amberson?”

  “Car accident.” Hoping he’d missed or forgotten the squib in the Morning News’s Police Beat page. I hadn’t seen it myself, but there had been one: Mr. George Amberson of Jodie, beaten and mugged, found unconscious, taken to Parkland Hospital. “I’m mending nicely.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  The safe deposit boxes were in the basement. I negotiated the stairs in a series of hops. We used our keys, and Link carried the box into one of the cubicles for me. He set it on a tiny wedge of desk just big enough to hold it, then pointed to the button on the wall.

  “Just ring for Melvin when you’ve finished. He’ll assist you.”

  I thanked him, and when he was gone, I pulled the curtain across the cubicle’s doorway. We had unlocked the box, but it was still closed. I stared at it, my heart beating hard. John Kennedy’s future was inside.

  I opened it. On top was a bundle of cash and a litter of stuff from the Neely Street apartment, including my First Corn checkbook. Beneath this was a sheaf of manuscript bound by two rubber bands. THE MURDER PLACE was typed on the top sheet. No author’s name, but it was my work. Below it was a blue notebook: the Word of Al. I held it in my hands, filled with a terrible certainty that when I opened it, all the pages would be blank. The Yellow Card Man would have erased them.

  Please, no.

  I flipped it open. On the first page, a photograph looked back at me. Narrow, not-quite-handsome face. Lips curved in a smile I knew well—hadn’t I seen it with my own eyes? It was the kind of smile that says I know what’s going on and you don’t, you poor boob.

  Lee Harvey Oswald. The wretched waif who was going to change the world.

  7

  Memories came rushing in as I sat there in the cubicle, gasping for breath.

  Ivy and Rosette on Mercedes Street. Last name Templeton, like Al’s.

  The jump-rope girls: My old man drives a sub-ma-rine.

  Silent Mike (Holy Mike) at Satellite Electronics.

  George de Mohrenschildt ripping open his shirt like Superman.

  Billy James Hargis and General Edwin A. Walker.

  Marina Oswald, the assassin’s beautiful hostage, standing on my doorstep at 214 West Neely: Please excuse, have you seen my hubka?

  The Texas School Book Depository.

  Sixth floor, southeast window. The one with the best view of Dealey Plaza and Elm Street, where it curved toward the Triple Underpass.

  I began shivering. I clutched my upper arms in my fists with my arms tightly locked over my chest. It made the left one—broken by the felt-wrapped pipe—ache, but I didn’t mind. I was glad. It tied me to the world.

  When the shakes finally passed, I loaded the unfinished book manuscript, the precious blue notebook, and everything else into my briefcase. I reached for the button that would summon Melvin, then dummy-checked the very back of the box. There I found two more items. One was the cheap pawnshop wedding ring I’d purchased to support my cover story at Satellite Electronics. The other was the red baby rattle that had belonged to the Oswalds’ little girl ( June, not April). The rattle went into the
briefcase, the ring into the watch pocket of my slacks. I would throw it away on my drive home. If and when the time came, Sadie would have a much nicer one.

  8

  Knocking on glass. Then a voice: “—all right? Mister, are you all right?”

  I opened my eyes, at first with no idea where I was. I looked to my left and saw a uniformed beat-cop knocking on the driver’s side window of my Chevy. Then it came. Halfway back to Eden Fallows, tired and exalted and terrified all at the same time, that I’m going to sleep feeling had drifted into my head. I’d pulled into a handy parking space immediately. That had been around two o’clock. Now, from the look of the lowering light, it had to be around four.

  I cranked my window down and said, “Sorry, Officer. All at once I started to feel very sleepy, and it seemed safer to pull over.”

  He nodded. “Yup, yup, booze’ll do that. How many did you have before you jumped into your car?”

  “None. I suffered a head injury a few months ago.” I swiveled my neck so he could see the place where the hair hadn’t grown back.

  He was halfway convinced, but still asked me to exhale in his face. That got him the rest of the way.

  “Lemme see your ticket,” he said.

  I showed him my Texas driver’s license.

  “Not thinking of motoring all the way back to Jodie, are you?”

  “No, Officer, just to North Dallas. I’m staying at a rehabilitation center called Eden Fallows.”

  I was sweating. I hoped that if he saw it, he’d just put it down to a man who’d been snoozing in a closed car on a warmish November day. I also hoped—fervently—that he wouldn’t ask to see what was in the briefcase on the bench seat beside me. In 2011, I could refuse such a request, saying that sleeping in my car wasn’t probable cause. Hell, the parking space wasn’t even metered. In 1963, however, a cop might just start rummaging. He wouldn’t find drugs, but he would find loose cash, a manuscript with the word murder in its title, and a notebook full of delusional weirdness about Dallas and JFK. Would I be taken either to the nearest police station for questioning, or back to Parkland for psychiatric evaluation? Did the Waltons take way too long to say goodnight?

  He stood there a moment, big and red-faced, a Norman Rockwell cop who belonged on a Saturday Evening Post cover. Then he handed back my license. “Okay, Mr. Amberson. Go on back to this Fallows place, and I suggest you park your car for the night when you get there. You’re looking peaky, nap or no nap.”

  “That’s exactly what I plan to do.”

  I could see him in my rearview as I drove away, watching. I felt certain I was going to fall asleep again before I got out of his sight. There’d be no warning this time; I’d just veer off the street and onto the sidewalk, maybe mowing down a pedestrian or three before winding up in the show window of a furniture store.

  When I finally parked in front of my little cottage with the ramp leading up to the front door, my head was aching, my eyes were watering, my knee was throbbing … but my memories of Oswald remained firm and clear. I slung my briefcase on the kitchen table and called Sadie.

  “I tried you when I got home from school, but you weren’t there,” she said. “I was worried.”

  “I was next door, playing cribbage with Mr. Kenopensky.” These lies were necessary. I had to remember that. And I had to tell them smoothly, because she knew me.

  “Well, that’s good.” Then, without a pause or a change of inflection: “What’s his name? What’s the man’s name?”

  Lee Oswald. She almost surprised it out of me, after all.

  “I … I still don’t know.”

  “You hesitated. I heard you.”

  I waited for the accusation, gripping the phone hard enough to hurt.

  “This time it almost popped into your head, didn’t it?”

  “There was something,” I agreed cautiously.

  We talked for fifteen minutes while I looked at the briefcase with Al’s notes inside it. She asked me to call her later that evening. I promised I would.

  9

  I decided to wait until after The Huntley-Brinkley Report to open the blue notebook again. I didn’t think I’d find much of practical value at this point. Al’s final notes were sketchy and hurried; he had never expected Mission Oswald to go on so long. Neither had I. Getting to the disaffected little twerp was like traveling on a road littered with fallen branches, and in the end the past might succeed in protecting itself, after all. But I had stopped Dunning. That gave me hope. I had the glimmerings of a plan that might allow me to stop Oswald without going to prison or the electric chair in Huntsville. I had excellent reasons to want to remain free. The best one of all was in Jodie this evening, probably feeding Deke Simmons chicken soup.

  I worked my way methodically through my little invalid-friendly apartment, collecting stuff. Other than my old typewriter, I didn’t want to leave a trace of George Amberson behind when I left. I hoped that wouldn’t be until Wednesday, but if Sadie said that Deke was better and she was planning to come back on Tuesday night, I’d have to speed things up. And where would I hide out until my job was done? A very good question.

  A trumpet-blast announced the network news. Chet Huntley appeared. “After spending the weekend in Florida, where he watched the test-firing of a Polaris missile and visited his ailing father, President Kennedy had a busy Monday, making five speeches in nine hours.”

  A helicopter—Marine One—descended while a waiting crowd cheered. The next shot featured Kennedy approaching the crowd behind a makeshift barrier, brushing at his shaggy hair with one hand and his tie with the other. He strode well ahead of the Secret Service contingent, which jogged to keep up. I watched, fascinated, as he actually slipped through a break in the barrier and plunged into the waiting mass of people, shaking hands left and right. The agents with him looked dismayed as they hurried after.

  “This was the scene in Tampa,” Huntley continued, “where Kennedy pressed the flesh for almost ten minutes. He worries the men whose job it is to keep him safe, but you can see that the crowd loves it. And so does he, David—for all his alleged aloofness, he enjoys the demands of politics.”

  Kennedy was moving toward his limo now, still shaking hands and accepting the occasional lady-hug. The car was a top-down convertible, exactly like the one he’d ride in from Love Field to his appointment with Oswald’s bullet. Maybe it was the same one. For a moment the blurry black-and-white film caught a familiar face in the crowd. I sat on my sofa and watched as the President of the United States shook the hand of my former Tampa bookie.

  I had no way of knowing if Roth was correct about “the syph” or just repeating a rumor, but Eduardo Gutierrez had lost a lot of weight, his hair was thinning, and his eyes looked confused, as if he wasn’t sure where he was or even who he was. Like Kennedy’s Secret Service contingent, the men flanking him wore bulky suit coats in spite of the Florida heat. It was only a glimpse, and then the footage switched to Kennedy pulling away in the open car that left him so vulnerable, still waving and flashing his grin.

  Back to Huntley, his craggy face now wearing a bemused smile. “The day did have its funny side, David. As the president was entering the International Inn ballroom, where the Tampa Chamber of Commerce was waiting to hear him speak … well, listen for yourself.”

  Back to the footage. As Kennedy entered, waving to the standing audience, an elderly gentleman in an Alpine hat and lederhosen struck up “Hail to the Chief ” on an accordion bigger than he was. The president did a double take, then lifted both hands in an amiable holy shit gesture. For the first time I saw him as I had come to see Oswald—as an actual man. In the double take and the gesture that followed it, I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.

  David Brinkley was also smiling. “If Kennedy’s reelected, perhaps that gentleman will be invited to play at the Inaugural Ball. Probably ‘The Beer Barrel Polka’ rather than ‘Hail to the Chief.’ Meanwhile, in Geneva
…”

  I turned off the TV, returned to the sofa, and opened Al’s book. As I flipped to the back, I kept seeing that double take. And the grin. A sense of humor; a sense of the absurd. The man in the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository had neither. Oswald had proved it time and again, and such a man had no business changing history.

  10

  I was dismayed to find that five of the last six pages in Al’s notebook dealt with Lee’s movements in New Orleans and his fruitless efforts to get to Cuba via Mexico. Only the last page focused on the lead-up to the assassination, and those final notes were perfunctory. Al had no doubt had that part of the story by heart, and probably figured that if I hadn’t gotten Oswald by the third week of November, it was going to be too late.

  10/3/63: O back in Texas. He and Marina “sort of” separated. She at Ruth Paine’s house, O shows up mostly on weekends. Ruth gets O a job at Book Dep thru a neighbor (Buell Frazier). Ruth calls O “a fine young man.”

  O living in Dallas during the workweek. Rooming house.

  10/17/63: O starts work at Dep. Shifting books, unloading trucks, etc.

  10/18/63: O turns 24. Ruth and Marina give him a surprise party. O thanks them. Cries.

  10/20/63: 2nd daughter born: Audrey Rachel. Ruth takes Marina to hosp (Parkland) while O works. Rifle stored in Paine garage, wrapped in blanket.

  O repeatedly visited by FBI agent James Hosty. Stokes his paranoia.

  11/21/63: O comes to Paine house. Begs Marina to reunite. M refuses. Last straw for O.

  11/22/63: O leaves all his money on dresser for Marina. Also wedding ring. Goes from Irving to Book Dep with Buell Frazier. Has package wrapped in brown paper. Buell asks about it. “Curtain rods for my new apartment,” O tells him. Mann-Carc rifle probably disassembled. Buell parks in public lot 2 blocks from Book Dep. 3-min walk.

  11:50 AM: O constructs sniper’s nest on SE corner of 6th floor, using cartons to shield him from workers on other side, who are laying down plywood for new floor. Lunch. No one there but him. Everyone watching for Pres.