Ask Not Page 21

  Several employees and patrons of the Sports Drome Rifle Range reported seeing Oswald behaving (in the words of one) in a “loud and obnoxious” manner. In early October, Malcolm Price helped Oswald adjust the scope on an Italian Mauser rifle. On November 17, Garland Slack said Oswald was next to him on the range, and Oswald suddenly began shooting at Slack’s target instead of his own, in a rapid-fire fashion. When Slack objected, Oswald gave him “a dirty look I’ll never forget.”

  On the morning of November 21, a hitchhiker carrying a brown-paper-wrapped package (about four by four and a half, containing “curtain rods”) was picked up by refrigeration repair man Ralph Yates. Conversationally, he asked if Yates had ever been to the Carousel Club, and later wondered aloud if the President on his upcoming visit could be assassinated by a sniper in a high window. The passenger got off at the corner of Elm and Houston. Yates discussed the disturbing incident with a co-worker before the assassination, after which he took his tale to the FBI.

  “It’s possible someone was trying to incriminate Oswald,” I said, “before the fact.”

  “With a double? That’s crazy.”

  “LBJ has a double, if Madeleine Brown is to be believed. Worked for Mussolini and Hitler, didn’t it?”

  “Nate, that’s spy stuff. How would a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald get caught up in something like that?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “It’s a conspiracy involving some high-level people. Anything is possible, I guess.”

  I couldn’t tell her what Bobby Kennedy had confirmed: that Oswald was an asset of both the FBI and CIA, and that the latter agency was eminently capable of such a deception.

  “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, very coherent for a woman who’d downed five martinis, “it explains how Deputy Craig could see Oswald getting picked up in a station wagon when other witnesses put him on a bus and then a taxi.”

  “And maybe,” I said, wishing I could say more, “it explains how an assassin resembling Oswald could be at a window on the sixth floor of the book depository when the real Lee H. was sitting in the lunchroom, sipping a Coke.”

  “Did you have sex with her?”

  “Huh?”

  “That vulgar stripper! Don’t deny it. I can smell her on you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  Guess I should have washed up before joining her back at the club.

  I dropped Flo at the front of the Statler without a word, expecting her to have gone up to her room by the time I got back from the parking lot across the street, but she was waiting just inside.

  “You walked her to her car,” she said. Her big blue eyes were wide in a porcelain face as emotionless as a bisque baby’s. “You were worried about her. Can’t you at least show me to my room?”

  “Sure.”

  We got on the elevator and she stepped away from me, putting some distance between us. We were alone in the car.

  We’d passed a few floors when she said, “Take me to your room … not for sex! I told you there’s a man in my life. I don’t want you and I don’t need you, understand? But … please?”

  Wasn’t this the goddamnedest argument I’d ever had?

  “Sure,” I said.

  She came over and grabbed on to my arm with both of hers and pressed herself close. “I’m afraid. All this talk of … I’m afraid. You were afraid for her, weren’t you? Don’t you think that, that … cleanup crew of yours might want to do me harm?”

  “Could,” I admitted.

  So we went to my room. She sat on the twin bed currently in its couch formation, with cushions propped against the wall. I turned on a table lamp, giving us not much more light than Club 3525.

  “What do you have to drink?” she asked. She was sitting with her legs tucked up under her, heels kicked off, her polka-dot dress hiked, plenty of nice leg showing. But at my age, if she was here for sex, she’d better be prepared to wait a while.

  I sat next to her and plucked the silly bow from her hair and tossed it somewhere. “Water from the faucet is what I have to drink.”

  “Very funny.”

  “There’s a pop machine and ice down the hall. Glad to make the trip.”

  “Call room service. Get some gin and tonic.”

  “I don’t like gin.”

  “I don’t care what you like. Order something for yourself, too. Herald Tribune will pay for it.”

  “You’ve had enough to drink.”

  “That’s your opinion. You work for me.”

  “Not right now. I’m off the clock.”

  She hit my chest with a little fist. “Gin and tonic. Right now!… Please?” She looked like she was going to cry. “I’m scared. You scared me tonight.”

  I didn’t think so. I didn’t think this little dame would scare unless maybe a goddamn bear was chasing her.

  I asked, “What’s this really about?”

  Her chin crinkled. “My guy … my guy hasn’t returned even one of my calls all week.”

  She wasn’t talking about her husband.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “And then you … you haven’t even had the decency of throwing me a pass. And tonight, you take that little slut out to her car, and what did you do? Fuck her in the backseat?”

  She was a girl reporter, all right.

  I said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Janet was just scared, like you are.”

  “I said I could smell her on you! You think I would let you stick it in me after you stuck it in her? Christ knows what diseases she’s carrying. Maybe she’ll get pregnant! Think you’ll live long enough to go to Junior’s graduation?”

  I took her by her spindly arms. “First, there already is a Nathan Heller, Jr. Second, it could be a girl. Third, no it couldn’t, because I used a Trojan. I was in the Boy Scouts, you know.”

  Really I wasn’t, but my words were like a splash of cold water in her face, and then she started to laugh and hugged me.

  “Nathan Heller,” she said, giggling, but it didn’t sound happy exactly. “You are a scamp.”

  “Is that what I am?”

  She pushed me away. “Now get me my gin and tonic.”

  “Okay,” I said, and went over to the phone, but as I was reaching for it, it rang.

  “Heller speaking,” I said.

  “Nate, it’s Clint Peoples,” the receiver said, as if that voice needed any identifying. “I’m goddamn sorry to call you so late like this, but I thought you should know.”

  “Know what, Clint?”

  “The Cheramie girl is dead.”

  I grabbed a nearby chair and sat. “Christ.”

  “An auto-pedestrian accident near Big Sandy.”

  “What’s Big Sandy?”

  “A town in Texas, man, what do you think? Apparently Rose was just lyin’ in the roadway with her suitcases scattered around and a driver came along and tried to swerve and miss her. He didn’t. He struck her, just part of her, but … her skull was crushed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s all I know. I mean, this thing just happened. Came in over the wire. I will make calls tomorrow and have more for you later. Sorry to be the bearer.”

  “Thanks, Clint.”

  We both hung up.

  Then I called down for the gin and tonic.

  * * *

  She stayed with me that night. She was afraid, as well she should be, and she drank herself to sleep. We did not have sex, if your prurient interest must be satisfied. She stayed in her dress, I was down to my underwear, my nine millimeter naked on the nightstand. We talked very little, before she drifted off, although the sense that we had caused that poor woman’s death was there in the room with us, hogging the space.

  Before the gin took her away, I said, “You’ll go home. I’ll go home. You’ll write your story, and maybe win a Pulitzer. But that’s all.”

  “What do you mean … that’s all?”

  “I mean the investigation ends here. You write your story, enjoy your accolades, and you can prime the pump
for other investigators, whether cops or reporters, and let them follow your lead, and them take the heat. We don’t get anybody else killed, understand? Not you. Not me.”

  She toasted her glass with mine. I’d sent down for some Captain Morgan.

  “Okay, big boy,” she said.

  Her tiny, curvy body snuggled next to me in the twin bed, and with her in my arms, I remembered how much fun we’d had together in years gone by, which is what years do.

  An insistent ringing turned out to be the phone again. My eyes somehow came open and I realized sunlight was streaming in. Our respective plane reservations weren’t till the early afternoon, so we hadn’t overslept, at least not dangerously. There was no reason to get up, or hadn’t been till the phone started in.

  She stirred, and I whispered, “Probably Captain Peoples again. Just go back to sleep.”

  She did, and I got the phone. I had a brief conversation, hung up, and came back and shook her gently awake. Her eyes were wide in a face that was pretty despite the smeared makeup and weak chin.

  “That was Barney,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “We got the Ruby interview.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  The Criminal Courts Building, overlooking Dealey Plaza, stood nine granite-trimmed brick-and-steel stories. The 1913-erected structure housed two Dallas county criminal courts, the offices of the sheriff and DA, and the county jail, which was a building within a building. Jailbreaks were impossible, it was said, until one occurred recently and embarrassed Dallas yet again.

  Saturday morning, at ten o’clock, with Flo in the passenger seat, I pulled the rental Galaxie into the shallow basement of the Courts Building, eerily similar to the city jail basement where Ruby had shot Oswald. We got out and headed toward the elevator. We looked spiffy—I was in a gray Botany 500 (not tailored for a shoulder-holstered weapon, which was tucked in the car trunk) and Flo in a pink suit with leopard top and white heels and her usual white gloves. I felt we projected the class with which Ruby was so obsessed.

  Joe Tonahill was waiting at the elevator, the only attorney from the murder trial who remained on the current Ruby team. The Stetson-wearing Tonahill (I was bareheaded today) was an aptly named mountain of a man, six four and three hundred pounds easy, with a narrow skull, out-of-control John L. Lewis eyebrows, and a shelf of a second chin that seemed to engulf the almost boyish face.

  Tonahill smiled and nodded to Flo, saying, “Always a pleasure, Miss Kilgore. You’re the only reporter Jack will talk to.”

  “Well, I’m honored,” she said with a funny smile that added, I guess.

  The small head on the huge body swiveled my way. “You’d be Nathan Heller,” he said affably, and we shook hands. “I read about you in the Enquirer.”

  “That puts the ‘any PR is good PR’ notion to the test,” I said, as we exchanged smiles. “What’s the drill?”

  He gestured toward the elevator. “Jack, as you might expect, is kept separate from the general population. He doesn’t even have a cell of his own.”

  “That doesn’t sound like he’s being kept separate.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t phrase that as felicitously as I might. He’s camped out in a corridor on the mezzanine level between the sixth and seventh floors. By the chief jailor’s office. There is a little holding cell he can sleep in.”

  Tonahill reached suddenly inside his tan suit coat and for a moment I flashed on Lee Harvey getting surprised. But all he withdrew was a folded sheet of paper.

  “I’m accompanying you up, but Jack has made it clear I’m not welcome to sit in on the interview. How would you feel about signing a document that has you working for me as an investigator, Mr. Heller? Providing you with the rights of confidentiality that Miss Kilgore enjoys as a member of the Fourth Estate?”

  I looked at it. Simple and straightforward, it required my signature and for Tonahill to pay me “the sum of $1 and other good and valuable consideration.” He handed me a pen and I leaned the page against the closed elevator door and signed it.

  Handing the contract back to him, with one of my cards, I said, “I’ll want a photostat of that for my files.”

  “Certainly,” he said, and his smile was as tiny as he wasn’t. He pressed the elevator button with a forefinger that made it disappear.

  “You’re forgetting something,” I said.

  His tufted eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

  “Where’s my dollar?”

  He grinned and got out his wallet and I was slipping the buck in my pocket when the elevator doors dinged open. We got on board and Tonahill pressed 6-M.

  Soon we were stepping into a vestibule and facing an office with E.L. HOLMAN, CHIEF JAILOR in black-edged gold on a light-brown door. We did not enter the office. Instead, a deputy at a barred gate at right recognized Tonahill, nodded, and allowed us into a narrow hallway. The deputy stayed at his post while Flo and I followed Tonahill, moving down the straight path to another gate and another deputy. Three more deputies were on the other side, the quartet of deputies the literal guards at Ruby’s gate. Two of them sat at a little metal table in the white-walled windowless end-of-the-corridor space, which opened up into what might have served as a reception area, with another office door at left and a steel door at right. They were playing cards with their charge.

  “Gin!” Jack Ruby said, and, hearing the metal grind and whine of the gate opening, threw his cards in and got to his feet with a smile. “Miss Kilgore. Nate Heller! What a pleasure to have such high-class company.”

  Ruby came over quickly, his thinning hair slicked back George Raft–style, his face freshly shaved. He looked a little like Uncle Fester, minus the lightbulb in his mouth, the black pajamas traded in for trim white short-sleeve jail coveralls, though his loafers and socks were Addams Family black.

  He took Flo by the hand, in a gentlemanly way, as if about to ask her for the first dance. “This is such a rare, wonderful opportunity.”

  He didn’t say whether that applied to him or her.

  Then Ruby offered me a sweaty hand to shake, and I did, as he said to Flo, “You may not know this, but Nate and me go back to the West Side. We grew up together.”

  That was an exaggeration, of course, but not exactly a lie.

  “How’s Barney?” he asked, walking us over to the metal table, which the pair of deputies had vacated. They had left the cards behind. Tonahill was still standing near the gate, where all four deputies had now gathered, like flies around offal.

  “Barney’s doing fine,” I said. “I’m grateful he arranged this.”

  Ruby waved that off. “Anything for Barney. He raised a hell of a lot of dough for my defense.”

  “He’s going to do the same for your appeal, he says.”

  “What a stand-up guy. What a stand-up guy. Listen.” He leaned in and whispered to me. He smelled of Old Spice. His eyes were like black buttons sewn onto his face, only buttons blinked more. “I can’t let that lawyer sit in. I don’t know if I trust him.”

  “You haven’t fired him.”

  “Not yet. But this meet is strictly for you and Miss Kilgore. This is a one-of-a-kind interview, Nate. You are about to sit down with history. You want some water? I don’t think I can talk them into coffee or anything, unless you’re still here at lunch.”

  “No water, thanks,” I said, and Flo said the same.

  Tonahill hunkered in conference with one of the deputies, the oldest of the quartet. Then he came over and towered over us and said, “They’ve arranged for you to use room 7-M upstairs. It’ll be more comfortable.”

  There was something accusatory in Ruby’s pasty face as he said, “That’s where Justice Warren interviewed me.” He said this looking at Tonahill, then he turned to me and repeated it.

  I said quietly, “I’m ahead of you, Jack. What do you see as our options?”

  Ruby had already thought that over. “There’s a visiting room on this floor, but I don’t trust it any more than 7-M. That holding cel
l over there…”

  He nodded toward a cubbyhole with its barred door swung open.

  “… is where I sleep and do my personal business.”

  He meant piss and shit.

  He was shaking his bullet head. “Not appropriate for Miss Kilgore. Crowded and not what I would term pleasant—though I don’t see how they would bug it.”

  I nodded. The only bugs in there would be cockroaches. But Jack was right, it wouldn’t do.

  Then I turned to Tonahill, who stood anxiously nearby like a guy waiting for an estimate from a shady auto mechanic. “Joe, see if you can get those deputies to stand down the hall a ways, on the other side of that gate. We’re going to have our little talk with Jack right here.”

  Tonahill thought about that for maybe two seconds, nodded, said, “Okey dokey,” and went over and ran it past the deputies. One went off to check with the chief jailor, but we went ahead and set up shop. I moved the little metal table flush against the far wall, and arranged Flo’s chair so that her back would be to the deputies and Tonahill. I sat across from Ruby, who gathered the cards and set them to one side.

  Tonahill got the okay, and he and the deputies positioned themselves on the other side of the gate, close enough to keep us in sight, far away enough to provide the privacy we needed.

  Flo got the portable tape gizmo out and asked Ruby for permission to record him.

  “Please,” he said, nodding, so worked up he blinked once or twice. “Be my guest.”

  Then he folded his hands before him as if about to say grace and waited for the interview to begin.

  Flo had a little notebook she was checking in, to make sure she hit every subject on her mind, and Ruby blurted, “Not everything pertaining to what’s happened has come to the surface, you know.”

  “Is that right?” she said, flipping through pages, still getting ready.

  “The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives, unless you can get the story out. I trust you, Miss Kilgore. And Nate and me, like I say, we go way back—like me, he’s had dealings with certain kinds of underworld types without ever selling his soul to them.”

  With a serious smile, I asked, “You never had to make that bargain, Jack? Isn’t that what brought you here?”