The Third Bullet

Richard said, “He came by a couple of weeks ago. He told me some story about his theory of the case – I hear a lot of those, you know. But his was very gun-centric. It was sort of like yours, I thought, having to do with some Winchester gun firing bullets meant for the Carcano at a much faster speed.”

“Shit,” Swagger said. “Goddammit, that’s my theory. It’s my intellectual property. You’re telling me another guy who–”

“No, no, wait a sec. Here’s the deal. He said he was way behind the curve on what did or did not happen in the event, and he could never catch up. The websites gave him a headache. He’s not a Net guy. He wanted to shortcut the process. Did I know an investigator who was conversant with the facts of the assassination, the state of the art of assassination research and theory, and firearms. Does that sound like somebody we know?”

Swagger didn’t say a thing. His face darkened as if his mood were tanking fast. His eyes narrowed. Finally, he barked, “It took me years to get where I am. I sure don’t want to give it away to some fellow with fancy friends who writes the words nobody reads in picture books. It’s my intellectual property. It’d be like giving away a piece of land with a mineral claim on it.”

“Jack,” said Richard, “I see your point. Don’t let it upset you. I didn’t get the impression he was too organized or anything.”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“Not by name. I told him I had a guy in mind who would fit the bill perfectly. And I’ll get back to him and tell him you’re not–”

“Hold off on that. If he’s published, it means he knows publishers, I mean, real New York publishers, like Simon and Schuster and Knopf and Random House, the big guys whose books get noticed by everybody. I had an idea that if I got it together somehow, I’d take it to them, even if they’d probably steal more than the little guys.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Oh,” said Swagger, going a little over the top on the angry-proprietor thing, “hold off a bit. Let me look into this guy. I’m not a writer, I’m an engineer. Maybe he could help me, I could help him. But goddammit, don’t tell him no more about me!”

Memphis got Agent Neal working again, and the results came back quickly enough. He summed them up for Swagger a few days later, in their weekly coffee-shop meet at a randomly selected Seattle’s Best in the suburbs.

“Okay, once again, we get a clean read,” he said. “Marion Adams, fifty-nine. Born into gun aristocracy. His father was CEO of a now-defunct Connecticut gun valley company that mainly produced .22 target pistols of very high quality. When target shooting got small in the late sixties, the company folded. But Marty, as he is called, knew everybody, he was, er, connected, and he was able to forge a career as a writer and consultant. He’s published nineteen books, many on the big-ticket manufacturers. His connections get him in the doors, he writes whitewashed company histories, he knows everybody, and he produces what many people consider technically beautiful volumes.”

“I’ve seen ’em,” said Bob. “May even own a few.”

“He seems to service the high-end gun trade. You know, the big-dollar guys who go on safaris with gun- bearers and hunt doves in Argentina with Purdey shotguns and pay fifteen grand for a painting called Ducks on a Chesapeake Morn.”

“Got the picture,” said Bob, knowing the kind of huntcult gent who was secretly in love with the traditions of thirties big-game hunting, and yearned to tramp the savannah with Hemingway and Philip Percival at his side, and would have cocktails with the memsahib under the lanterns before dining on linen every night in camp, while the boys did all the work.

“He makes most of his money advising these guys on what and what not to add to their collections. It’s a tricky market, and the main problem is counterfeiting. Turns out that counterfeiting a rare gun is much easier than counterfeiting a thousand-dollar bill or a Rembrandt. Marty works both sides of the trade: he matches collectors to guns, gets a fee from both sides of the deal, and ‘validates’ the authenticity. You don’t want to spend two hundred thousand on a rare early Colt and get it home and hold it to the light and find ‘Made in Italy’ stamped on it.”

“No,” said Swagger, “you don’t. It does seem like a world where a crook could make a ton of loot.”

“That’s why someone of Marty’s integrity is valued. Now, there have been rumors. It’s so psychological. Guy buys a big-dollar piece on Marty’s recommendation, but his buddy says, ‘Hmm, looks fake to me,’ and the guy who was proud and confident is now full of doubts, and he says something and it gets repeated. But nothing substantial that we could find. Like Richard, he seems on the up-and-up, and there’s no record of contacts with exotic operators, no hint of criminal malfeasance.”

“Got it,” said Bob.

“Are you going to meet with the guy?”

“Absolutely.”

“I think it’s the right decision. I can find no suggestion that anyone here in Dallas is on to you. Those two exvice PIs are out to pasture, there’s no underworld interest, and our random intercepts never turn up surveillors; everything is looking like Hugh or whoever he is has either lost interest or hasn’t picked you up yet.”

Swagger nodded, albeit a bit grimly. “That’s what every man I ever killed thought one second before the bullet arrived.”

- - - -

I am fully aware that as I write, I am being hunted. I await word from the various agents I have afield, confident that my disguises, my barriers, my fortifications, my confusions are impenetrable. I am sublimely confident. Hmm, then why am I drinking so much Vod?

Anyhow, let us return to the far more interesting past and my courtship of the fool called Lee Harvey Oswald. After our dinner meet, I let him stew a day or so. Let him think it through, get himself ginned up, not force too much on him at once. I spent the next day in West Dallas, trying two more Mexican restaurants, truly enjoying each one. I read the Times at lunch, thoroughly, as was my custom, noting yet another White House conference on the Republic of South Vietnam, which was disappointing everyone in its military’s lack of improvement in the wake of the coup that killed Diem a few weeks earlier. I don’t know what they expected, and it began to make me mad again, not merely that my report had been twisted to nonproductive ends but that another parade seemed to be forming, and I fancied I could hear the drums drum-drum-drumming and the bugles blow- blow-blowing. I had spent six months there, from October ’62 through March ’63, and I saw little in the place worth dying or killing for. The Southerners weren’t a warlike people, and without a great deal of aid, they’d never stand up to a Soviet-fortified and Soviet-advised North Vietnamese army. I was long gone by the time of the coup, which seemed to me a clear doubling-down on an unwinnable bet. But I heard reports and could imagine the look of fiery anger on Captain Nhung’s face after he’d shot the Diem brothers in the head, in the back of the armored personnel carrier, on the way to general staff headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. I saw the picture that circulated in Langley: President Diem, a pleasant enough fellow in my dealings with him, with his head blown in at close range.

Anyway, I tried to put my anger aside and pursue my true goal in Dallas, to look around at a cocktail lounge called the Patio a few miles north of downtown, in another dreary suburban neighborhood. The place had little appeal to me, but it was said to be a favorite of General Walker’s, where he loved to sit on the outdoor platform and drink margaritas, whatever they were, with his staff. He was slated to give a speech at SMU November 25, and having spent some time with the Dallas Times Herald, I knew it was likely that he and his “boys” (a few years later, though I was out of the country at the time, he earned the quotation marks around “boys”) would head there for the hooch. It didn’t take much time for me to figure where to put Alek so that he couldn’t miss, although he would, and where to put whomever was shooting backup so he wouldn’t miss. Yes, I had a pretty good idea who that would be, but that lay in the future at least a week.

I made notes to myself, considered angles, heights, and so forth, tracked getaway routes, and although the planning of sniper assassinations wasn’t one of my strong points, I satisfied myself that late on a Monday evening, with vehicular and pedestrian traffic low, Alek could easily cut through the alleyway across the street, hide his rifle, then cut through backyards to a pickup spot. Meanwhile, if needed, our real shooter would have undisturbed escape by vehicle; all that would take place in the four minutes that in those days was the norm for Dallas Police Department response, again according to the Times Herald. I felt we could probably do it in two with practice, maybe even one. Within a day or so, everything would be back to normal in cowtown, and a certain nasty piece of work would trouble nobody, least of all the United States of America, again.