the TV. Well, I tell you, he done a good job, but he made one mistake. He killed Bob’s dog. Well, around these parts, we consider our dogs family. And that makes it
This quaint bit of Arkansas lore made the evening news, but nobody paid it much attention because nobody wanted to get into the bitter old man’s delusions.
Other witnesses were located to discuss the phenomenon that had become Bob Lee Swagger. His father’s legendary heroism was hauled out of the files, and his father’s death on U.S. 67 the night of July 23, 1955, as a sergeant in the Arkansas State Police and one of Arkansas’s seven Medal of Honor winners from the Second World War. A number of old Arkansas salts who knew both men made television news appearances.
“Hard to b’lieve a son of Earl Swagger’s could end up like this,” they said to a man. “He was one of the bravest, fairest, most decent men to ever walk the face o’ the earth. We-all thought Bob was a true-blue type too, but you can’t never tell how a boy’s gonna turn out.”
A few ex-Marine snipers who’d served with Bob were located; only one would go on television and say “interesting” things – and only with the proviso that his face not be shown. He was now an automobile salesman.
“Bob was just a great shot but he had the coldness,” the man said, “the coldness of heart that makes a killer. Of all of us, and there were over fifty men rotated in and out of that platoon over the three years it was operational, he was certainly the best. But as far as I know, we all went back to civilian lives convinced we’d served our country as well as we could. And most of us readjusted.”
The man went on to detail his own psychic difficulties with living with his own evil, his own fascination with violence. He’d been in and out of programs, he said, had a long history of alcoholism and only just lately had gotten his life together again. Later, when it was determined he was a fraud, the story ran only on
On the third day, the ballistics report was issued by the FBI. It began with the bad news that the bullet – which had mushroomed considerably as it plowed through bone and brain, then veered free and struck something hard, perhaps a nail in the podium – was unreadable as to its rifling marks. However, preliminary results of tests on the bullet’s metallic structure via a neutron activation analysis revealed that it matched perfectly with traces of copper residue found inside the Hart stainless steel barrel on Bob’s Remington action. Two partial fingerprints were lifted from inside the weapon’s barrel channel; from Marine Corps records, they were quickly verified as Bob’s. The empty shell found on the floor had indeed been fired in the chamber of the Remington; all its marks corresponded exactly to the markings of the chamber. The shell itself probably came from an order of brass -.308 Winchester Match Nickel Plated, Lot No. 32B 0424, manufactured by the Federal Cartridge Company, Anoka, Minnesota – which Bob had purchased, mail order, from Bob Pease Accuracy in New Braunfels, Texas. The matching shells, some loaded, some yet untouched, were found in his workshop.
And last, there was the letter. Poignant, desperate, awkward and naive, it swiftly became the most famous letter in American culture: Bob telling the president he wants the Congressional Medal of Honor because he’s earned it. It was the letter that got him on the Secret Service’s Charlie list, and had not an idiotic FBI agent blown the assignment, it was the letter that might have saved a man’s life. But there it was, the crucial issue of motive.
In all this, there was not one public doubt raised about the guilt of Gunnery Sergeant (Ret.) Bob Lee Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, in the matter of death by gunshot in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 1. That was finally uttered, for the first time, on the fourth day, when a reporter from WKNU-TV finally tracked down Mrs. Susan Swagger Preece, of Highland Junction, North Carolina, who had once been married to Bob Lee Swagger and was now the wife of a hardware store owner.
She was a bitter little woman, her face almost completely concealed under a headscarf and sunglasses. The reporter caught her rushing from her husband’s Cadillac toward his lawyer’s office.
No, she had no idea where Bob was, and doubted very much, if he was alive, if he’d try to make contact with her. That was all over, she said, and life was too short to be involved with Bob Swagger more than one time.
But she had a last thought.
“I’ll say this, though,” she said, turning for just a second, “if Bob Lee Swagger took it in his mind to fire a bullet at the president of the United States, then the president of the United States would be a dead man, and not no Salvadoran archbishop. You’re telling me Bob Swagger aimed at a man and missed and killed another man? Bob Lee Swagger never missed nothing he aimed at his whole life and that’s the Pure-D truth.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Millions of people saw it within minutes. But Nick Memphis did not see it for three days, and then only by accident.
He was at hub center of the Swagger manhunt in FBI headquarters, going through leads, keeping his head down in the seething atmosphere of the place now so totally locked into finding the sniper that it seemed unable to pay attention to some smaller details…such as himself. But he knew Mother Bureau would get around to it. He knew the inevitable could not be avoided, and that he was riding in a bubble of illusion. The ax would fall. On him. Soon.
But for now he’d lost himself in the minutiae of the reports, and the sightings that now extended over seven states. Bob was everywhere. Bob was in Alaska. Bob was in California. Bob was really Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother. Bob had held up a gas station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Bob was a dance instructor in New Haven, Connecticut. He had what appeared to be an amusing sighting in Everett Springs, Georgia, where an ex-Marine, who said he knew Bob in the war, swore he’d run into him on a back trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Nick was trying to figure out how the hell Bob could have gotten from New Orleans with two nine-millimeters pumped into him to Everett Springs, Georgia, in the damn Blue Ridges.
But from the investigators, not much at all had surfaced. The car had simply vanished. No snitch had any word at all, and the pressure was on but good. Helicopters cruised the highways and a hundred agents had been flown in to handle the pursuit, on which considerable professional pride rested. But a thousand roadblocks and a hundred thousand photos had yielded nothing at all.
Suddenly, Hap Fencl was leaning in.
“Hey, Nick, we finally got the CBS version, you wanna look?”
“Ahhh – ” Nick paused. Something weird in him ticked off. No, he didn’t really want to see it, even if, by chance, the CBS cameraman had been best situated to record impact and collapse and poststrike scramble, and even if the pricks at CBS had been snooty about playing ball with the poor old Feebs, who were only in charge of tracking down the motherfucker on the trigger, and even though NBC and CBS and the three New Orleans affiliates who’d had tape on the ultimate moment had shipped it right over, that is,
Bob the Nailer might have been a lot of terrible things but he was a great shot. He never missed, that’s what Nick thought, along with Bob’s wife and two or three others.
“Come on, pal, you might as well see what all the shouting’s about. The shouting’s gonna be in your ear sooner or later, old buddy.”
Hap said this with a malicious grin, not quite meaning to be cruel but rather to be bluff and hearty and masculine and to undercut the tension, because everybody knew Nick was a gone goose. So Nick could hardly turn down the invite.
He walked into a dark room a few minutes later, to a batch of catcalls and hoots – everybody had been working so hard, three eighteen-hour days in a row that Nick-baiting was a treat for them all.
“Hey, hero, where you been hiding?”
“Nicky, whyn’t ya shoot the motherfuck when you had the chance, I haven’t been able to touch my wife in three days and I am getting very very horny, old boy.”
