something other than a paranoid, will be to get a pic or a print on me. I’ll make sure he doesn’t. Then we’ll see what happens.”
“I don’t like that, Swagger. You’re trying to goad the violence, and we may not be able to stop them in time.”
“No, I’ll stay in touch, and we’ll set up a nice sting op when the time is right and see what we net.”
“No guns.”
“Not unless I know I’m being hunted. Then I’ll hunt back.”
Swagger spent another normal day, dropped by Richard’s bookstore and bought three used books at the friends’ rate, 25 percent discount – Bugliosi, Posner, and the abridged copy of the Warren Commission report; he owned them all but hadn’t brought them – then went back to Dealey, sat, hung out, read yardage with a small Leica Rangefinder, walked this way and that. Then he went back to the Adolphus, had an early meal, and went to bed. He was tailed the whole way.
At 4 a.m. he woke, showered, shaved, packed, and checked out of the hotel. He checked his suitcase at the hotel desk and carried an overnighter with the books and some fresh clothes, toiletries, and his .38 Super, mags, and speed scabbard, then slipped out a side door. He walked about nine blocks through a dark devoid of human activity, dodging the occasional police car whose attention he might merit, and got to Dallas’s West End, a nightclub and entertainment zone a few blocks northwest of Dealey, where cabs were plentiful.
He arrived in twenty minutes at his destination, a randomly selected Econo Lodge on a road that led to the airport, and checked in, paying cash for a week so no one could trace him via credit card. He didn’t think Richard had that capacity, but the big detective agency might. He called Nick’s number and left his new address, then went back to bed.
Nick called at three the next afternoon. “My news is that the boys are going crazy trying to find you.”
“Let ’em sweat.”
“What’s your plan now?”
“I’m going to chill here for a few days and hunker up and reread all this crap. As he said, it’s so goddamn big, and no matter how you enter it, you get lost in the maze. I’m going to try out a more concentrated, less scattershot approach.”
“I thought you had it nailed good by sticking with the rifle stuff.”
“The rifle stuff is great as far as it goes, but I can’t get beyond the timing issue. How’d they do it so fast? If it couldn’t be done that fast, then the whole thing goes away, Lee Harvey’s the bad boy, Robert Aptapton got smacked by a punk on meth, and Bob Lee goes back to his rocker, wiser but poorer. You could go nuts with all this stuff.”
“Many a poor man has, I know, I’m one,” said Nick.
“In a couple of days I’ll pop in unexpectedly on Richard, and we get to the new game of now-he-sees-me- now-he-don’t.”
“Okay. Let me know what I can do.”
That was that. Bob spent the three days poring over the three books, cross-checking, trying to find a pattern, looking for something that might tie everything together in a nice little package. A million others had done so before him, and like them, he failed. Nothing. No holes. Oswald did it, that was all, had to be, nothing else worked. Shot from Dal-Tex? On the wildest frontier of the physically possible but unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, except the generalized conceit that the third bullet came from behind and above, and certain windows at Dal-Tex were within the cone of trajectory that the computer age had imposed upon the reality of the event. No known photo existed that showed the upper floors of the building at around 12:30 that day, which would document whether or not a window had been open.
The one new fact was that someone had killed James Aptapton. If so, then maybe it was over something mundane, not the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Maybe Aptapton had divulged his theory, and that guy had recognized it as something new and special, wished it were his, and decided it was his. So he killed him in Baltimore for it. Murders have happened for lesser reasons by far, for pennies, for toys and gym shoes, for pride and prejudice, for honor and glory, for blow jobs and rim shots. Maybe it was Richard himself, though it was hard to feature someone so rumpled and disheveled as a badass killer. But maybe if “Jack Brophy” came clean with Richard, Richard might have some suggestions about who in the assassination community was capable of such a thing.
It was hard to know what to do next.
On the third day, Swagger could tolerate the inactivity no more and took a cab to an address in the suburbs that he’d found on the Internet. It was a huge sporting goods place called Outdoor Warehouse, and it lived up to its claim of holding nearly everything indoors that could be used outdoors. That included the hunting department, where, among the beautifully crafted new rifles and the black plastic assaulters and the endless variations of 9 mm, .38/.357s, and .45s in the gleaming showcases, he found a wide-ranging aisle of ammunition offerings and, between the 6.5 Creedmore and the 6.5 Swede, some boxes of 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano. It was Czech or something, from an outfit called Prvi Partizan, but in the requisite 162-grain load. It was surprisingly cheap, at around fifteen dollars, and the thirteen-year-old behind the cash register up front displayed no sense of irony at the sight of a man buying a box of six-five Carc in Dallas, Texas.
Back in the room in the Econo Lodge, Bob opened the box, took out the twenty cartridges, and brought one close to his eye. It looked like a small blunt-nosed missile, all gleaming and reflective in the fluorescent light. The bullet was abnormally long, given the length of the case, and spoke of the nineteenth century with its blunt tip, which was the latest thing in the 1890s.
He looked at it from a dozen angles, trying to uncover its secrets. It was a lynchpin of sorts, close enough to the original to stand in for the bullet that LHO had nominally used.
Though it was the magic bullet, today it didn’t look magic, just comically old-fashioned, with that rounded “meplat,” the technical term for bullet point. He recalled the number of wounds it had inflicted, hitting the president high in the back, passing through him, hitting Governor Connally, passing through him, passing through his wrist and smacking his leg, all without doing much damage to itself. From a certain angle that bullet – Warren Commission Exhibit No. 399 – did look as “pristine” as the one three inches from Swagger’s eyes. But Bob recalled that from other angles, it became clear that the base of the bullet was severely mangled, crushed out of round by some impact, with core lead extruded from the interior by the impact. It was far from pristine but at the same time suspiciously intact.
Swagger had a melancholy fund of knowledge on what bullets did to bodies, his own and others’. To him, it was not nearly so mysterious when he considered that the bullet did not strike bone until it left the governor’s body, when it struck his wrist, fracturing it, by which time it had slowed considerably from its initial muzzle velocity of two thousand feet per second and lost most of its power to crumple or break when colliding with hard structures.
Swagger couldn’t get away from the
Another way to look at the bullet was to consider its origin and purpose. Too many fools had written about the event without reference to those two issues. Too many fools thought a bullet was just a heavy piece of lead screwed into a cartridge and sent arbitrarily on its way. In fact, even in 1891 bullets and their design and performance were among the most overengineered items in the human inventory, thought about hard and mathematically; long before men had indoor plumbing or hot running water, they had substantive mathematical treatises on ballistic performance, principles, and laws. Ballistics were always the first thing the state’s mind turned to, not the last.
That bullet, like the one in its brass casing in his hand now, weighed 162 grains and consisted of copper gilding of unusual thickness over a lead core, 1.25 inches in length with a round nose. It was designed after great research and experimentation to perform a certain military job, which the Italian general staff believed would be of importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was nothing arbitrary about it. It wasn’t designed just “to kill” but to kill a particular enemy in a particular environment.
It occurred to Swagger that to understand WC399, he had to understand the military realities of the Italian army in 1891, when the round was adopted as the standard infantry cartridge, during the general European upgrade of that era from single-shot muskets to magazine-fed bolt actions, such as the Mauser K98, the French Lebel, the
