“Do you want to borrow the tommy gun?”
“No, not yet.”
“You’re not joking, are you?”
“No ma’am.”
“Do you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and I–”
“No ma’am,” said Swagger. “This one’s on me.”
CHAPTER 3
A man sat on a park bench at the corner of Houston and Elm, under a spread of aged oak trees, before some kind of odd rectangular white cement ceremonial pool that appeared to be full of Scope. Around him,
Directly across Elm from the man stood a box of bricks seven stories tall, undistinguished but famous, called the Texas Book Depository. Despite its banality, it had one of the most recognizable facades in the world, especially a corner of the sixth floor where the ambusher had lurked fifty years ago. The sky was bold Texas blue, and a slight wind blew east to west across the territory, which was surrounded by the churn of cars and trucks as they cascaded down Houston and made the tricky turn to the left down Elm for the access to the Stemmons Freeway just beyond the triple underpass. People had things to do, places to go, and for most Dallasites, the tragedy of Dealey Plaza had long since faded. Swagger sat alone, but in his mind, it was 1963, 24/7.
He looked this way and that, up and down, around, down streets, at his shoes, at his fingertips, and he tried to remember. It had been a day like this one, cloudless after a threat of early rain, the sky as blue as a movie star’s eyes. At least that’s what the papers said. He himself had been asleep at the time, half a world away on an island called Okinawa where, as a seventeen-year-old lance corporal, he’d just made the battalion rifle team and would spend the next three weeks cradling a ton of Garand on a flat, dry firing range, trying to put holes in black circles six hundred yards or so off. He didn’t know a goddamn thing about anything and wouldn’t for years.
But at 12:29 p.m., back in Dallas, the president’s motorcade turned right off of Main Street and proceeded one block up Houston, at the northern boundary of the triangular open park that was Dealey Plaza. Now he saw it. Lincoln limo, long black boat of a car. Two up front, driver and agent, two lower, Governor Connally and his wife, then the regal couple, the blessed, the charismatic, John F. Kennedy in his suit and his wife, Jackie, in pink, both waving at the close-by crowds.
The car reached Elm and cranked left. It had to access the Stemmons Freeway, which could only be entered from Elm. It was a 120-degree turn, not a 90-degree turn, so the driver, a Secret Service agent named Greer, had to slow down considerably as he maneuvered the heavy vehicle around the corner. Speeding up, he passed by some trees and continued on a slight downward angle along Elm Street. Immediately to his right was the seven-story building known as the Texas Book Depository, the undistinguished pile of plain brickwork that now loomed over Swagger. He ran his eyes up its edge and halted them at the corner of the sixth floor and saw. . only a window.
On that day, at 12:30 p.m., as the car passed by the trees, a sound that virtually everyone agreed was a gunshot was heard. It appeared to have struck nobody directly, but at least one witness, a man named Tague, reported being stung by what can reasonably be assumed was a fragment, as the bullet broke apart when it hit the curbstone behind the car or a branch in the trees. Bullets do this; it is not strange or remarkable. Within six or so seconds, a second bullet was fired, and most people there assumed it came from the looming depository. That bullet hit the president in the back, near the neck, tumbled through his body, emerged from his throat, nicking his tie, and flew on to hit John Connally horizontally. It penetrated his body entirely too, hit and broke his wrist, and thudded into but did not penetrate his thigh. It was found later that afternoon on a gurney at the hospital. This was the “magic bullet” that many claimed could not have done what this one did.
The third bullet was the head shot, a few seconds later (how many would be legendarily unclear) delivered at a distance of 263 feet from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. It hit the president high in the back of the head on a downward angle. It appears to have disintegrated or detonated, as the few traces of its existence are controversial at best. It blew a large chunk of brain out of the skull, exiting in a burst of vaporized material that jetted or exploded from the right side of the head.
Chaos ensued. The limousine raced off to the hospital, with its cargo of two gravely wounded men and their women. Police moved, perhaps not quickly enough, to cordon off the building from which the shots seemed to have been fired. In time, after a roll was taken, police learned that an employee named Lee Harvey Oswald was missing, though he had been seen there that day and was even confronted by a police officer in the lunchroom right after the shooting.
A description of Oswald was broadcast, and some miles away, in Dallas’s Oak Cliff section, an officer named J. D. Tippit spotted a man who matched that description. Tippit stopped and called him over. He got out of his car and was shot four times by the suspect and died on the spot.
The suspect walked away, but concerned citizens followed him; others noted his odd behavior and knew that suspicions were flying around Dallas about the Kennedy assassin. They noted that he sneaked into a movie theater, and the police were called. Thus was Lee Harvey Oswald arrested.
Meanwhile, at the Book Depository, officers found a “sniper’s nest” of book cartons arranged at the site of the sixth-floor (NE) corner window, three ejected 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano casings, and a hundred feet away, at the site of the sole stairway off the floor, a surplus Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with a cheap and poorly attached Japanese-made scope. The rifle had been cocked and carried a live cartridge in its chamber.
It soon proved that Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle and on the boxes in the sniper’s nest, that he had carried a suspicious bag of “curtain rods” into the depository that morning, that he had ordered, under pseudonyms, both the Carcano rifle and the .38 Special S&W revolver used in the Tippit slaying. Moreover, he was a notorious malcontent with “revolutionary tendencies,” a self-proclaimed Communist, a former defector, a mediocre marine (accounting for his shooting skill), a wife beater, and an all-around creep.
He never stood trial because he was murdered by Jack Ruby on the morning of November 24, 1963, as he was being led to an armored car for transfer to a more secure holding area.
Those seemed to be the facts which, after much haggling, all had come to believe and accept. Swagger believed them and accepted them – that is, until his chat with Jean Marquez.
Her words touched one of his own memories, not a public memory at all but a private, long-buried one. He had been stalked once by a certain team of men in his long and turbulent past, and the smudge she had reported on the back of a coat had a meaning for him that it would have for no other man on earth. Amazing that it had, in some form and after all these years, reached him.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” said someone, and Swagger was pulled from his time travels to see a friend, younger, better dressed, a kind of Dallas up-and-coming executive type in a worsted Hickey Freeman suit, approaching on a beeline to sit next to him.
“We put the dumbest intern on the JFK squad,” the man said as he shook Swagger’s hand and dispensed with the how-are-you bullshit. “He fields the ten or twenty calls we get each day from people who’ve solved the case and now know for sure the Gypsies were involved with the Vatican and Japanese imperial intelligence.”
Nick Memphis was now the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the FBI. In most instances it would have been a plum assignment, but for him it was a last stop on the way out. His career had topped out when a new director took over the Bureau, heard he was intimately involved with the tragic incident at a huge mall in Minnesota, and wanted him far from headquarters. An assistant, some acid-blooded corpse named Mr. Renfro, had handled the delicate task of prying Nick from his deputy directorship and reassigning him to fieldwork in an office that was big and produced more than its share of cases closed but didn’t need radical shaking up or bold new
