diner in a dying wide-spot in the road called Cascade, Idaho, and invested close to two months in earning an audience with him.”
“The lingering part is very interesting. So far, you’ve got me hooked.”
“We start with a young man, a recent graduate of an engineering school in Dallas, Texas. The time is unknown, but I’m guessing mid-seventies. He’s smart, ambitious, hardworking, decent. He wants to join a construction firm and engineer giant buildings. The first job he gets is entry-level, for an elevator contractor.”
“Elevators?”
“Right. Not exactly the glamour trade. But elevators, which we all take for granted, are heavily engineered. That is, they are overde-signed, overmaintained, overregulated, and no one involved with them takes them for granted. His firm installs them and maintains them on contract so they can pass their yearly examinations and don’t drop ten people fifty stories.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“It’s hard, crummy work. The shafts and ‘engine’ rooms, as they call the motor and pulley devices that make them run, are dark, poorly ventilated, and not air-conditioned. Even more so back then. The space is cramped, and it involves a lot of twisting and bending to get access. The work is intensive and highly pressurized, because the building managers hate it when they have to shut down the elevators and the tenants hate it and everybody hates it. Are you getting a picture?”
“I am.”
“This young man and his crew are in the engine room on the roof of a particular building, and they’ve set up lights, and they’re measuring cable wear, gear wear, electrical motor wear, lubricating, trying to work fast so they can get the box, as they call it, back in service. It’s hot, crowded, and except for the light beams, dark. Not pleasant, not happy, and suddenly-kaboom.”
“Kaboom?”
“One of the workers, maybe resting, maybe backing away to make room for someone else, maybe doing whatever you do in an elevator engine room, bumps into something on the wall, and there’s a loud crash and the sound of stuff falling to the ground, a big cloud of acrid dust, everybody’s coughing and wheezing. All the flashlights go onto it, and they discover that he’s bumped into a shelf on the wall, and for whatever reason – the screws rusted or came out, the brick or stucco or whatever gave way, the metal itself sheared – when he jostled it, it collapsed, dumping its pile of whatever was stored there to the ground. That’s the action scene, by the way. The shelf falling, that’s as exciting as it gets.”
“My heart’s beating so fast, I can hardly stand it.”
“Here’s the really boring part. They figure out what’s wrong with the shelf, and somehow get it remounted, and start restacking the stuff on it. The stuff is carpet remnants. That is, the lobby of the building has a big carpet, and they ended up with remnants that they had to keep around for patching or whatever, so they had a shelf in the engine room and someone decided that would be a good out-of-the-way place to store the remnants.”
“Sounds pretty top-secret to me.”
“And someone says, ‘Hey, look at this.’ Be cool if it was a rifle, huh? Or a box of ammo, a telescopic sight, a spy radio, something really James Bond?”
“That would be very interesting.”
“Sorry. It’s just a coat. I told you it was a boring story.”
“It ain’t without interest. Please go on.”
“It turns out to be a man’s overcoat, XL, tan gabardine, fairly high-quality, in extremely good condition. Maybe almost new. It had been methodically folded and slid into the pile of carpet remnants in the engine room sometime in the past. Again, no dates, no specifics, nothing.”
“I’ve got it,” said Swagger.
“They unfold it and immediately make a discovery. It stinks. Unfolding it puts out some kind of chemical stench, very unpleasant. Flashlights go onto it. It seems that the left breast wears a rather gaudy petro or chemical stain, and even now, who knows how many years later, the odor of that stain is powerful. It hasn’t gone away. Instead of finding a free coat, they’ve found a fixer-upper, which would involve dry cleaning, which might or might not get the stain and the smell out, and no one is interested, and so it goes into the trash. It is thrown out. It disappears. It is gone forever. End of story. Not much of a story, is it?”
“No, but I give you it’s got some moments,” Bob said. Somewhere in his rat-pointed tactical brain, he was beginning to play with them. Something had been subtly provoked. Dallas. Abandoned overcoat. Strange smell and stain.
“Okay,” she said. “The Engineer is promoted, and he leaves the firm and goes to that big construction outfit. Again, he is promoted, because he’s very intelligent and hardworking. He’s the type that built America. He becomes a partner. He marries his high school girlfriend, they have three beautiful daughters and move to the suburb where partners live. He joins a country club. He becomes venerable. His daughters marry wonderful men. I’m actually making up the details, but you get the picture. One of the daughters becomes engaged to the son of a rancher, another prosperous fellow. The Rancher and his wife invite the Engineer and the wife out for a get-to-know-you weekend and barbecue. They’re sitting there in the big paneled living room looking out the picture window to the swimming pool and the white horse fences and the green meadows, and the Engineer notices something: dead animals all over the place. Turns out the Rancher is a hunter. He’s been all over the world. Lions and tigers and bears. Ibexes and sables and kudus. They’re all drinking highballs and having a good old time and the Rancher says, ‘Say, Don, care to see the shop?’
“Don nods and off they go. They walk into a big gun place. Guns, heads, safes, benches, targets, photos of men with dead animals, maybe an old Marilyn calendar, tools, all that, the sort of thing my husband had, although I’m guessing this Rancher kept his a lot neater than my husband did. And whammo, the Engineer is hit by an odor. It’s an old, old odor. I don’t know if you know it, but psychologists consider olfactory cues the strongest reminders. A smell can take you back to a time and place and re-create cues to all the other senses. So suddenly, you’re back where you were when you first hit that smell, and of course, Don is back in the engine room of the elevator in that building in Dallas thirty-odd years ago.”
“GI or Hoppe’s 9?” Bob asked.
“Hoppe’s,” she said. “Yes. Barrel solvent. Chemical cleaning fluid especially for guns. Been around since the twenties. That’s what Don smells in his new pal’s shop, and he realizes that’s what he smelled all those years ago in the building that I of course didn’t name.”
“You’re going to tell me it was the Texas Book Depository?”
“If only. No, it’s the building across Houston Street from the Texas Book Depository. It’s called the Dal-Tex Building. It was there in 1963 too. Dal-Tex doesn’t mean Dallas, Texas, but Dallas Textiles, as it was the headquarters of the Dallas wholesale garment industry. Actually, Abraham Zapruder’s office was there, along with a hundred other offices. Nothing particularly special except that it did offer close to the same angle and elevation down Elm Street next to Dealey Plaza that our friend Lee Harvey Oswald used. You can see why it lingers.”
“I can,” said Bob, trying to conjure the structure from a rush of image memories of Dealey Plaza, that triangle of grass at the heart of American darkness. He got nothing, no vision, no sense of place.
“It’s figured in a few of the thousand conspiracy theories. I checked into them; none of them are that interesting or convincing. Someone claims that a photo shows a rifle on a tripod on the fireplace, but it’s just shadows. There were some ‘arrests’ after the building was closed down a few minutes after the shooting, but nothing came of them. Some people claim without evidence that it was one of the nine or is it twelve shooting sites that the CIA, Sears, Roebuck, the Canadian Air Force, and Proctor and Gamble used in their conspiracy. All in all, it’s not much.”
Bob nodded.
“But it lingers,” she continued. “For the Engineer, particularly. He can’t get it out of his mind. You see why, don’t you?”
“The Hoppe’s suggests that someone had need to clean a rifle, which suggests the presence of a rifle. And you can assume the juice was somehow spilled or leaked onto the coat during the cleaning process. But the coat was carefully hidden, as if whoever had spilled the Hoppe’s, with its chemical smell, didn’t want it exposed to the public eye or nose. Lots of folks in Texas would recognize it right away, including most policemen. It was the universal gun cleaner then. All this could have happened on or around November 22, 1963. There’s your lingering. It puts a rifle where there ain’t been one. But it is thin. It’s real thin.”
