"Do you have any Goody"s Headache Powder?"
Perry wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled something bad. "I have Bayer Aspirin and Emprin. The Emprin"s a bit stronger."
"Give me that, then. And Dr. Perry?"
He looked up from his bag.
"Sadie and I didn"t do anything wrong. She gave her life for her country . . . and I would have given mine for her. I just didn"t get the chance."
"If so, let me be the first to thank you. On behalf of the whole country."
"The president. Where is he now? Do you know?"
Dr. Perry looked at the cops, eyebrows raised in a question. They looked at each other, then one of them said, "He"s gone on to Austin, to give a dinner speech, just like he was scheduled to do. I don"t know if that makes him crazy-brave or just stupid."
Maybe, I thought, Air Force One was going to crash, killing Kennedy and everyone else on board. Maybe he was going to have a heart attack or a fatal stroke. Maybe some other chickens.h.i.t bravo was going to blow his handsome head off. Did the obdurate past work against the things changed as well as against the change-agent? I didn"t know. Nor much care. I had done my part. What happened to Kennedy from this point on was out of my hands.
"I heard on the radio that Jackie isn"t with him," Perry said quietly. "He sent her on ahead to the vice president"s ranch in Johnson City. He"ll join her there for the weekend as planned. If what you say is true, George-"
"I think that"s enough, doc," one of the cops said. It certainly was for me; to Mal Perry I was George again.
Dr. Perry-who had his share of doctor"s arrogance-ignored him. "If what you say is true, then I see a trip to Washington in your future. And very likely a medal ceremony in the Rose Garden."
After he departed, I was left alone again. Only not really; Sadie was there, too. How we danced, she"d said just before she pa.s.sed from this world. I could close my eyes and see her in line with the other girls, shaking her shoulders and doing the Madison. In this memory she was laughing, her hair was flying, and her face was perfect. 2011 surgical techniques could do a lot to fix what John Clayton had done to that face, but I thought I had an even better technique. If I got a chance to use it, that was.
4.
I was allowed to baste in my own painful juices for two hours before the door of the interview room opened again. Two men came in. The one with the ba.s.set-hound face beneath a white Stetson hat introduced himself as Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police. He had a briefcase-but not my briefcase, so that was all right.
The other guy had heavy jowls, a drinker"s complexion, and short dark hair that gleamed with hair tonic. His eyes were sharp, inquisitive, and a little worried. From the inside pocket of his suit coat he produced an ID folder and flipped it open. "James Hosty, Mr. Amberson. Federal Bureau of Investigation."
You have good reason to look worried, I thought. You were the man in charge of monitoring Lee, weren"t you, Agent Hosty?
Will Fritz said, "Like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Amberson."
"Yes," I said. "And I"d like to get out of here. People who save the President of the United States generally don"t get treated like criminals."
"Now, now," Agent Hosty said. "We sent you a doc, didn"t we? And not just any doc; your doc."
"Ask your questions," I said.
And got ready to dance.
5.
Fritz opened his briefcase and brought out a plastic bag with an evidence tag taped to it. Inside it was my .38. "We found this lying against the barricade of boxes Oswald set up, Mr. Amberson. Was it his, do you think?"
"No, that"s a Police Special. It"s mine. Lee had a .38, but it was a Victory model. If it wasn"t on his body, you"ll probably find it wherever he was staying."
Fritz and Hosty looked at each other in surprise, then back at me.
"So you admit you knew Oswald," Fritz said.
"Yes, although not well. I didn"t know where he was living, or I would have gone there."
"As it happens," Hosty said, "he had a room on Beckley Street. He was registered under the name O. H. Lee. He seems to have had another alias, too. Alek Hidell. He used it to get mail."
"Wife and kiddo not with him?" I asked.
Hosty smiled. It spread his jowls approximately half a mile in either direction. "Who"s asking the questions here, Mr. Amberson?"
"Both of us," I said. "I risked my life to save the president, and my fiancee gave hers, so I think I have a right to ask questions."
Then I waited to see how tough they"d get. If real tough, they actually believed I"d been in on it. Real easy, they didn"t but wanted to be sure. It turned out to be somewhere in the middle.
Fritz used a blunt finger to spin the bag with the gun in it. "I"ll tell you what might have happened, Mr. Amberson. I won"t say it did, but you"d have to convince us otherwise."
"Uh-huh. Have you called Sadie"s folks? They live in Savannah. You should also call Deacon Simmons and Ellen Dockerty, in Jodie. They were like surrogate parents to her." I considered this. "To both of us, really. I was going to ask Deke to be my best man at our wedding."
Fritz took no notice of this. "What might have happened was you and your girl were in on it with Oswald. And maybe at the end you got cold feet."
The ever-popular conspiracy theory. No home should be without one.
"Maybe you realized at the last minute that you were getting ready to shoot the most powerful man in the whole world," Hosty said. "You had a moment of clarity. So you stopped him. If it went like that, you"d get a lot of leniency."
Yes. Leniency to consist of forty, maybe even fifty years in Leavenworth eating mac and cheese instead of death in the Texas electric chair.
"Then why weren"t we there with him, Agent Hosty? Instead of hammering on the door to be let in?"
Hosty shrugged. You tell me.
"And if we were plotting an a.s.sa.s.sination, you must have seen me with him. Because I know you had him under at least partial surveillance." I leaned forward. "Why didn"t you stop him, Hosty? That was your job."
He drew back as if I"d raised a fist to him. His jowls reddened.
For a few moments at least, my grief hardened into a kind of malicious pleasure. "The FBI kept an eye on him because he defected to Russia, redefected to the United States, then tried to defect to Cuba. He was handing out pro-Fidel leaflets on street corners for months before this horror show today."
"How do you know all that?" Hosty barked.
"Because he told me. Then what happens? The president who"s tried everything he can think of to knock Castro off his perch comes to Dallas. Working at the Book Depository, Lee had a ringside seat for the motorcade. You knew it and did nothing."
Fritz was staring at Hosty with something like horror. I"m sure Hosty was regretting the fact that the Dallas cop was even in the room, but what could he do? It was Fritz"s station.
"We did not consider him a threat," Hosty said stiffly.
"Well, that was certainly a mistake. What was in the note he gave you, Hosty? I know Lee went to your office and left you one when he was told you weren"t there, but he wouldn"t tell me what was in it. He just gave that thin little f.u.c.k-you smile of his. We"re talking about the man who killed the woman I loved, so I think I deserve to know. Did he say he was going to do something that would make the world sit up and take notice? I bet he did."
"It was nothing like that!"
"Show me the note, then. Double-dog dare you."
"Any communication from Mr. Oswald is Bureau business."
"I don"t think you can show it. I"ll bet it"s ashes in your office toilet, as per Mr. Hoover"s orders."
If it wasn"t, it would be. It was in Al"s notes.
"If you"re such an innocent," Fritz said, "you"ll tell us how you knew Oswald and why you were carrying a handgun."
"And why the lady had a butcher"s knife with blood on it," Hosty added.
I saw red at that. "The lady had blood everywhere!" I shouted. "On her clothes, on her shoes, in her purse! The son of a b.i.t.c.h shot her in the chest, or didn"t you notice?"
Fritz: "Calm down, Mr. Amberson. No one"s accusing you of anything." The subtext: Yet.
I took a deep breath. "Have you talked to Dr. Perry? You sent him to examine me and take care of my knee, so you must have. Which means you know I was beaten within an inch of my life last August. The man who ordered the beating-and partic.i.p.ated in it-is a bookie named Akiva Roth. I don"t think he meant to hurt me as badly as he did, but probably I smarted off to him and made him mad. I can"t remember. There"s a lot I can"t remember since that day."
"Why didn"t you report this after it happened?"
"Because I was in a coma, Detective Fritz. When I came out of it, I didn"t remember. When I did remember-some of it, at least-I recalled Roth saying he was hooked up with a Tampa bookie I"d done business with, and a New Orleans mobster named Carlos Marcello. That made going to the cops seem risky."
"Are you saying DPD is dirty?" I didn"t know if Fritz"s anger was real or faked, and didn"t much care.
"I"m saying I watch The Untouchables and I know the Mob doesn"t like rats. I bought a gun for personal protection-as is my right under the Second Amendment-and I carried it." I pointed at the evidence bag. "That gun."
Hosty: "Where"d you buy it?"
"I don"t remember."
Fritz: "Your amnesia is pretty convenient, isn"t it? Like something on The Secret Storm or As the World Turns."
"Talk to Perry," I repeated. "And take another look at my knee. I reinjured it racing up six flights of stairs to save the president"s life. Which I will tell the press. I"ll also tell them my reward for doing my duty as an American citizen was an interrogation in a hot little room without even a gla.s.s of water."
"Do you want water?" Fritz asked, and I understood that this could be all right, if I didn"t misstep. The president had escaped a.s.sa.s.sination by the skin of his teeth. These two men-not to mention Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry-would be under enormous pressure to provide a hero. Since Sadie was dead, I was what they had.
"No," I said, "but a Co"-Cola would be very nice."
6.
As I waited for my c.o.ke, I thought of Sadie saying We"re leaving a trail a mile wide. It was true. But maybe I could make that work for me. If, that was, a certain tow truck driver from a certain Fort Worth Esso station had done as the note under the Chevrolet"s windshield wiper had asked.
Fritz lit a cigarette and shoved the pack across to me. I shook my head and he took it back. "Tell us how you knew him," he said.
I said I"d met Lee on Mercedes Street, and we"d struck up an acquaintance. I listened to his rantings about the evils of fascist-imperialist America and the wonderful socialist state that would emerge in Cuba. Cuba was the ideal, he said. Russia had been taken over by worthless bureaucrats, which was why he"d left. In Cuba there was Uncle Fidel. Lee didn"t come right out and say that Uncle Fidel walked on the water, but he implied it.
"I thought he was nuts, but I liked his family." That much was true. I did like his family, and I did think he was nuts.
"How did a professional educator such as yourself come to be living on the s.h.i.ta.s.s side of Fort Worth in the first place?" Fritz asked.
"I was trying to write a novel. I found out I couldn"t do it while I was teaching school. Mercedes Street was a dump, but it was cheap. I thought the book would take at least a year, and that meant I had to stretch my savings. When I got depressed about the neighborhood, I tried to pretend I was living in a garret on the Left Bank."
Fritz: "Did your savings include money you won from bookies?"
Me: "I"m going to take the Fifth on that one."
At this, Will Fritz actually laughed.
Hosty: "So you met Oswald and became friendly with him."
"Relatively friendly. You don"t become close buddies with crazy people. At least I don"t."
"Go on."
Lee and his family moved out; I stayed. Then one day, out of the blue, I got a call from him saying he and Marina were living on Elsbeth Street in Dallas. He said it was a better neighborhood and the rents were cheap and plentiful. I told Fritz and Hosty that I was tired of Mercedes Street by then, so I came on over to Dallas, had lunch with Lee at the Woolworth"s counter, then took a walk around the neighborhood. I rented the ground-floor apartment at 214 West Neely Street, and when the upstairs apartment went vacant, I told Lee. Kind of returning the favor.
"His wife didn"t like the place on Elsbeth," I said. "The West Neely Street building was just around the corner, and much nicer. So they moved in."
I had no idea how closely they would check this story, how well the chronology would hold up, or what Marina might tell them, but those things weren"t important to me. I only needed time. A story that was even halfway plausible might give it to me, especially since Agent Hosty had good reason to treat me with kid gloves. If I told what I knew about his relationship with Oswald, he might spend the rest of his career freezing his a.s.s off in Fargo.
"Then something happened that put my ears up. Last April, this was. Right around Easter. I was sitting at the kitchen table, working on my book, when this fancy car-a Cadillac, I think-pulled up, and two people got out. A man and a woman. Well-dressed. They had a stuffed toy for Junie. She"s-"
Fritz: "We know who June Oswald is."
"They went up the stairs, and I heard the guy-he had kind of a German accent and a big booming voice-I heard him say, "Lee, how did you miss?""