V.T. led the way to a freshly painted bare room down the hall, in the center of which he had a projector set up on a metal typing table. There were two straight chairs on either side of it. The blinds were closed, and when V.T. shut the door and clicked off the lights, the room became quite dark.
'What are we watching?' asked Karp, sitting in one of the chairs.
'You're a trained investigator-see if you recognize it.'
V.T. flicked the projector switch and sat down. The white wall opposite lit up. The usual leader numbers counted down and there was a message informing the viewer that this film was copyrighted by Life magazine and a brief look at the seal of the National Archives. Then bright sunlight, a road, a crowd, a motorcade coming down a street, led by motorcycle cops, preceding an open limousine in which two men and two women are waving and smiling.
Karp realized that he had never actually seen the film shot by Abraham Zapruder on assassination day, although he had seen the grainy color stills made from it. It was different, more chilling, in motion. He asked, 'This is the original?'
'No, that's in a vault at Time-Life. This is the archival copy. Let me slow it down for you.'
V.T. turned a lever and the scene slowed to a nightmare crawl. The Kennedy limo passed behind a large sign and emerged, the president grimaced and snapped both his hands up to his throat, elbows high, then John Connally puffed his cheeks out in pain and slumped to the side, then Kennedy's head exploded in a pink cloud. Jackie scrambled out onto the rear deck of the car, a big Secret Service man leaped up on the rear deck and thrust her back into her seat, the car accelerated and moved away until it vanished under a freeway overpass. The screen went white again and the most famous snuff film ever made was over.
'Like to see it again?' asked V.T.
'Yeah. Can you stop it on a particular frame?'
'No, not with this projector. I want to get us a Moviola for that and for some other film material I have. There are eight-by-ten prints of each frame, of course, but they're not as… compelling as seeing the real thing. I'm also going to go back to the city and take a look at the original. What I hear is that it's got detail you can't see on the archival copies.'
'That's interesting. I mean why take any trouble to make a good copy? It's just the most important piece of film in history. If Zapruder hadn't shot that film, we'd both be back in the city, eating bagels and putting asses in jail. There wouldn't be an investigation. There wouldn't be any single-bullet theory because you wouldn't need one, because without the film to time the bullet impacts and show their order in detail, all you got is a dead guy, a wounded guy, and a rifle in a high building. Let's see it again.'
V.T. rewound it and they watched the Zapruder film again at normal speed. It took twenty-two seconds. They were silent for the few seconds it took to rewind.
'Again?' asked V.T.
'Not right now,' said Karp. He rose, stretched, and turned on the lights. 'We have a photo tech yet?'
'Uh-huh. I convinced Jim Phelps to join the cause. You don't recognize the name? He's the guy who liberated the Zapruder film and he's done some interesting enhancements. He impressed me. A certain passionate sincerity that ought to balance my own blithe amateurism.'
'I'll need to meet him.'
'I'll set it up. Also, I have that list for the autopsy panel you wanted.'
'Murray's heading it, right?' Newbury bobbed his head in assent, but with a sour expression on his face.
'What's the matter, you have something against Murray Selig?' Karp asked.
'No, not as such. The credentials are fine. You can't beat chief medical examiner in New York City. On the other hand, you and he have been pretty tight over the years. His objectivity may be called into question. It might have been better to give it to someone with whom we have no prior connection.'
'Come on, Murray's the best in the business. You think he's going to shave the findings to make me happy?'
V.T. shrugged. 'You're the boss. Okay, next: I'm going to set up an index for the materials we're gathering. I'll base it on the index Sylvia Meagher made in sixty-four, of course. We'd really be even further up shit's creek without that. And I'll make a separate list of the stuff we should have that's missing, not that I have very high hopes of finding it.' He rose and sighed and ran his hand through his fine pale hair.
It struck Karp that V.T. had been putting in hours as long as his own and even after a few weeks his face was beginning to show the strain.
'Fulton's coming on Monday?' V.T. asked.
'Yeah. He called yesterday. He's got his little mafia of retired cops ready to start as contract investigators. Speaking of which, first thing Monday we should have a meeting. I'll get Selig to come down, and you should get your photo guy in. I'll try to figure out which of the people wandering around here knows what the hell they're doing.'
V.T. nodded unenthusiastically and went to the door. Karp said, 'I'd like to see that fist of missing stuff as soon as possible. I'm going over to see the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maybe they'll know about some of it.'
'Tomorrow morning all right?'
'Sure. Like what kind of stuff, by the way?'
V.T. shot him a glum look. 'Like Kennedy's brain, for starters. And it's probably not in the Dirksen Building.'
Karp read for the rest of the day until his eyes burned. He reached the end of a chapter and threw the heavy book on a pile. He'd gone through three yellow pads making notes on the Warren Report, cross-checking his reading with the critical works also spread out across his desk: Meagher's Accessories after the Fact, Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, Lane's Rush to Judgment, Epstein's Inquest. He reviewed his notes and distributed more little yellow slips among the critical books. As always, he finished these sessions with an incipient headache and a queasy sensation in his belly.
Having entered this work without any prejudgment of the Warren Report, he had never concerned himself particularly with its critics. He had read the Times and watched Uncle Walter on CBS like millions of Americans, and the idea that a lone nut had shot the president was perfectly reasonable to him. He also had a deep-seated reluctance to accept the idea of conspiracy on the part of government agencies, even though he had in his career exposed several such conspiracies.
That was the point, in fact. If he had exposed conspiracies, and he was a law-enforcement official, it was difficult to believe that other law-enforcement officials could not have done likewise. Since none had, in the last decade, it had seemed to him probable that no conspiracy existed. He also had a professional's reluctance to accept the conclusions of amateurs. In his long experience at the DA's office in New York, and in contradiction to the great mass of popular culture pertaining to the subject, no amateur, no Miss Marple, no Poirot, no Sam Spade, no Lew Archer, had ever contributed in the slightest to the solution of a homicide. Private investigators were a joke among the pros he worked with.
After three weeks of study, however, these beliefs had been seriously eroded, and he had conceived a ferocious resentment against the people associated with the Warren Commission. His reading had shown him what any experienced homicide prosecutor would have gathered. The commission report was not an investigation that might have substituted for a trial of the dead Oswald, but merely a prosecutor's brief, and not a very good one at that. As Crane had suggested at their first meeting, Karp would have laughed out of his office a junior ADA who had waltzed in with something of this quality as prep work for the trial of a street mutt accused of popping a whore.
He had seen a similar botch any number of times in training ADAs: love at first sight. The cops provide a likely suspect; the kid gathers evidence that aids in convicting that suspect, and shows up at Karp's pretrial meeting with a fat file and a big grin, which grin Karp demolishes by pointing out all the things the defense is going to bring up that the kid didn't think about, or didn't think were important. The autopsy. Did you see the films? Are the wounds consistent with the weapon we say he used? What about that weapon? Chain of evidence? Do you have it, an unbroken written record of everyone who touched it from the time it was found in possession of the defendant to the present instant? You 'think' so? Not good enough. What about the witnesses? You got 'most of them'? Why not all of them? They didn't see anything or they didn't see what you thought they should have seen? Better apply for a continuance, kid. You're not ready for court.
