11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

“I believe you, Jake. I don’t know if that makes me crazy or not, but I do. And I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Her eyes gleamed in the dark—the one that was almond-shaped and beautiful, the one that drooped but still saw. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, and I don’t want you to hurt anybody unless you absolutely have to. And never by mistake. Never ever. Do you promise?”

“Yes.” That was easy. It was the reason Lee Oswald was still drawing breath.

“Will you be careful?”

“Yes. I’ll be very—”

She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “Because no matter where you came from, there’s no future for me without you. Now let’s go to sleep.”

12

I thought the conversation would resume in the morning. I had no idea what—meaning how much—I would tell her when it did, but in the end I had to tell her nothing, because she didn’t ask. Instead she asked me how much The Sadie Dunhill Charity Show had brought in. When I told her just over three thousand dollars, with the contents of the lobby donation box added to the gate, she threw back her head and let loose a beautiful full-throated laugh. Three grand wouldn’t cover all of her bills, but it was worth a million just to hear her laugh… and to not hear her say something like Why bother at all, when I can just get it taken care of in the future? Because I wasn’t entirely sure she really wanted to go even if she did believe, and because I wasn’t sure I wanted to take her.

I wanted to be with her, yes. For as close to forever as people get. But it might be better in ’63… and all the years God or providence gave us after ’63. We might be better. I could see her lost in 2011, eyeing every low-riding pair of pants and computer screen with awe and unease. I would never beat her or shout at her—no, not Sadie—but she might still become my Marina Prusakova, living in a strange place and exiled from her homeland forever.

13

There was one person in Jodie who might know how I could put Al’s final betting entry to use. That was Freddy Quinlan, the real estate agent. He ran a weekly nickel-in, quarter-to-stay poker game at his house, and I’d attended a few times. During several of these games he bragged about his betting prowess in two fields: pro football and the Texas State Basketball Tournament. He saw me in his office only because, he said, it was too damn hot to play golf.

“What are we talking about here, George? Medium-sized bet or the house and lot?”

“I’m thinking five hundred dollars.”

He whistled, then leaned back in his chair and laced his hands over a tidy little belly. It was only nine in the morning, but the air-conditioner was running full blast. Stacks of real estate brochures fluttered in its chilly exhaust. “That’s serious cabbage. Care to let me in on a good thing?”

Since he was doing me the favor—at least I hoped so—I told him. His eyebrows shot up so high they were in danger of meeting his receding hairline.

“Holy cow! Why don’t you just chuck your money down a sewer?”

“I’ve got a feeling, that’s all.”

“George, listen to your daddy. The Case-Tiger fight isn’t a sporting event, it’s a trial balloon for this new closed-circuit TV thing. There might be a few good fights on the undercard, but the main bout’s a joke. Tiger’ll have instructions to carry the poor old fella for seven or eight, then put him to sleep. Unless…”

He leaned forward. His chair made an unlovely scronk sound from somewhere underneath. “Unless you know something.” He leaned back again and pursed his lips. “But how could you? You live in Jodie, for Chrissake. But if you did, you’d let a pal in on it, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know anything,” I said, lying straight to his face (and happy to do so). “It’s just a feeling, but the last time I had one this strong, I bet on the Pirates to beat the Yankees in the World Series, and I made a bundle.”

“Very nice, but you know the old saying—even a stopped clock gets it right twice a day.”

“Can you help me or not, Freddy?”

He gave me a comforting smile that said the fool and his money would all too soon be parted. “There’s a guy in Dallas who’d be happy to take that kind of action. Name’s Akiva Roth. Operates out of Faith Financial on Greenville Ave. Took over the biz from his father five or six years ago.” He lowered his voice. “Word is, he’s mobbed up.” He lowered his voice still further. “Carlos Marcello.”

That was exactly what I was afraid of, because that had also been the word on Eduardo Gutierrez. I thought again of the Lincoln with the Florida plates parked across from Faith Financial.

“I’m not sure I’d want to be seen going into a place like that. I might want to teach again, and at least two members of the schoolboard are already cheesed off at me.”

“You could try Frank Frati, over in Fort Worth. He runs a pawnshop.” Scronk went the chair as he leaned forward to get a better look at my face. “What’d I say? Or did you inhale a bug?”

“Uh-uh. It’s just that I knew a Frati once. Who also ran a pawnshop and took bets.”

“Probably they both came from the same savings-and-loan clan in Romania. Anyway, he might fade five Cs—especially a sucker bet like you’re talking about. But you won’t get the odds you deserve. Of course you wouldn’t get em from Roth, either, but you’d get better than you would from Frank Frati.”

“But with Frank I wouldn’t get the Mob connection. Right?”

“I guess not, but who really knows? Bookies, even the part-time ones, ain’t known for their high-class business associations.”

“Probably I should take your advice and hold onto my money.”

Quinlan looked horrified. “No, no, no, don’t do that. Bet it on the Bears to win the NFC. That way you make a bundle. I practically guarantee it.”

14

On July twenty-second, I told Sadie I had to run some errands in Dallas and said I’d ask Deke to check in on her. She said there was no need, that she’d be fine. She was regaining her old self. Little by slowly, yes, but she was regaining it.

She asked no questions about the nature of my errands.

My initial stop was at First Corn, where I opened my safe deposit box and triple-checked Al’s notes to make sure I really remembered what I thought I had. And yes, Tom Case was going to be the upset winner, knocking out Dick Tiger in the fifth. Al must have found the fight on the internet, because he had been gone from Dallas—and the sensational sixties—long before then.

“Can I help you with anything else today, Mr. Amberson?” my banker asked as he escorted me to the door.

Well, you could say a little prayer that my old buddy Al Templeton didn’t swallow a bunch of internet bullshit.

“Maybe so. Do you know where I could find a costume shop? I’m supposed to be the magician at my nephew’s birthday party.”

Mr. Link’s secretary, after a quick glance through the Yellow Pages, directed me to an address on Young Street. There I was able to buy what I needed. I stored it at the apartment on West Neely—as long as I was paying rent on the place, it ought to be good for something. I left my revolver, too, putting it on a high shelf in the closet. The bug, which I had removed from the upstairs lamp, went into the glove compartment of my car, along with the cunning little Japanese tape recorder. I would dispose of them somewhere in the scrubland on my return to Jodie. They were of no more use to me. The apartment upstairs hadn’t been re-rented, and the house was spookily silent.

Before I left Neely Street, I walked around the fenced-in side yard, where, just three months before, Marina had taken photographs of Lee holding his rifle. There was nothing to see but beaten earth and a few hardy weeds. Then, as I turned to go, I did see something: a flash of red under the outside stairs. It was a baby’s rattle. I took it and put it in the glove compartment of my Chevy along with the bug, but unlike the bug, I held onto it. I don’t know why.

15

My next stop was the sprawling ranch on Simpson Stuart Road where George de Mohrenschildt lived with his wife, Jeanne. As soon as I saw it I rejected it for the meeting I had planned. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure when Jeanne would be in the house and when she’d be away, and this particular conversation had to be strictly Two Guys. For another, it wasn’t quite isolated enough. Paul Quinn College, an all-black school, was close by, and summer classes must have been in. There weren’t droves of kids, but I saw plenty, some walking and some on bikes. Not good for my purposes. It was possible that our discussion might be noisy. It was possible it might not be a discussion—at least in the Merriam-Webster sense—at all.

Something caught my eye. It was on the de Mohrenschildts’ wide front lawn, where sprinklers flung graceful sprays in the air and created rainbows that looked small enough to put in your pocket. 1963 wasn’t an election year, but in early April—right around the time somebody had taken a shot at General Edwin Walker—the representative from the Fifth District had dropped dead of a heart attack. There was going to be a run-off election for his seat on August sixth.

The sign read ELECT JENKINS TO THE 5^TH DISTRICT! ROBERT “ROBBIE” JENKINS, DALLAS’S WHITE KNIGHT!

According to the papers, Jenkins was that for sure, a right-winger who saw eye-to-eye with Walker and Walker’s spiritual advisor, Billy James Hargis. Robbie Jenkins stood for states’ rights, separate-but-equal schools, and reinstituting the Missile Crisis blockade around Cuba. The same Cuba de Mohrenschildt had called “that beautiful island.” The sign supported a strong feeling that I’d already developed about de Mohrenschildt. He was a dilettante who, at bottom, held no political beliefs at all. He would support whoever amused him or put money in his pocket. Lee Oswald couldn’t do the latter—he was so poor he made churchmice look loaded—but his humorless dedication to socialism combined with his grandiose personal ambitions had provided de Mohrenschildt with plenty of the former.

One deduction seemed obvious: Lee had never trod the lawn or soiled the carpets of this house with his poorboy feet. This was de Mohrenschildt’s other life… or one of them. I had a feeling he might have several, keeping them all in various watertight compartments. But that didn’t answer the central question: was he so bored he would have accompanied Lee on his mission to assassinate the fascist monster Edwin Walker? I didn’t know him well enough to make even an educated guess.

But I would. My heart was set on it.

16

The sign in the window of Frank Frati’s pawnshop read WELCOME TO GUITAR CENTRAL, and there were plenty of them on display: acoustics, electrics, twelve-strings, and one with a double fretboard that reminded me of something I’d seen in a Mtley Cre video. Of course there was all the other detritus of busted lives—rings, brooches, necklaces, radios, small appliances. The woman who confronted me was skinny instead of fat, she wore slacks and a Ship N Shore blouse instead of a purple dress and mocs, but the stone face was the same as that of a woman I’d met in Derry, and I heard the same words coming out of my mouth. Close enough for government work, anyway.

“I’d like to discuss a rather large sports-oriented business proposition with Mr. Frati.”

“Yeah? Is that a bet when it’s at home with its feet up?”

“Are you a cop?”

“Yeah, I’m Chief Curry of the Dallas Police. Can’t you tell from the glasses and the jowls?”

“I don’t see any glasses or jowls, ma’am.”

“That’s because I’m in disguise. What you want to bet on in the middle of the summer, chum? There’s nothing to bet on.”

“Case-Tiger.”

“Which pug?”

“Case.”

She rolled her eyes, then shouted back over her shoulder. “Better get out here, Dad, you got a live one.”

Frank Frati was at least twice Chaz Frati’s age, but the resemblance was still there. They were related, of course they were. If I mentioned I had once laid a bet with a Mr. Frati of Derry, Maine, I had no doubt we could have a pleasant little discussion about what a small world it was.

Instead of doing that, I proceeded directly to negotiations. Could I put five hundred dollars on Tom Case to win his bout against Dick Tiger in Madison Square Garden?

“Yes indeedy,” Frati said. “You could also stick a red-hot branding iron up your rootie-patootie, but why would you want to?”

His daughter yapped brief, bright laughter.

“What kind of odds would I get?”

He looked at the daughter. She put up her hands. Two fingers raised on the left, one finger on the right.

“Two-to-one? That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s a ridiculous life, my friend. Go see an Ionesco play if you don’t believe me. I recommend Victims of Duty.”

Well, at least he didn’t call me cuz, as his Derry cuz had done.

“Work with me a little on this, Mr. Frati.”

He picked up an Epiphone Hummingbird acoustic and began to tune it. He was eerily quick. “Give me something to work with, then, or blow on over to Dallas. There’s a place called—”

“I know the place in Dallas. I prefer Fort Worth. I used to live here.”

“The fact that you moved shows more sense than wanting to bet on Tom Case.”

“What about Case by a knockout somewhere in the first seven rounds? What would that get me?”

e looked at the daughter. This time she raised three fingers on her left hand.

“And Case by a knockout in the first five?”

She deliberated, then raised a fourth finger. I decided not to push it any farther. I wrote my name in his book and showed him my driver’s license, holding my thumb over the Jodie address just as I had when I’d bet on the Pirates at Faith Financial almost three years ago. Then I passed over my cash, which was about a quarter of all my remaining liquidity, and tucked the receipt into my wallet. Two thousand would be enough to pay down some more of Sadie’s expenses and carry me for my remaining time in Texas. Plus, I wanted to gouge this Frati no more than I’d wanted to gouge Chaz Frati, even though he had set Bill Turcotte on me.

“I’ll be back the day after the dance,” I said. “Have my money ready.”

The daughter laughed and lit a cigarette. “Ain’t that what the chorus girl said to the archbishop?”

“Is your name Marjorie, by any chance?” I asked.

She froze with the cigarette in front of her and smoke trickling from between her lips. “How’dja know?” She saw my expression and laughed. “Actually, it’s Wanda, sport. I hope you bet better than you guess names.”

Heading back to my car, I hoped the same thing.

CHAPTER 25

1

I stayed with Sadie on the morning of August fifth until they put her on a gurney and rolled her down to the operating room. There Dr. Ellerton was waiting for her, along with enough other docs to field a basketball team. Her eyes were shiny with preop dope.

“Wish me luck.”

I bent and kissed her. “All the luck in the world.”

It was three hours before she was wheeled back to her room—same room, same picture on the wall, same horrible squatting commode—fast asleep and snoring, the left side of her face covered in a fresh bandage. Rhonda McGinley, the nurse with the fullback shoulders, let me stay with her until she came around a little, which was a big infraction of the rules. Visiting hours are more stringent in the Land of Ago. Unless the head nurse has taken a shine to you, that is.

“How are you?” I asked, taking Sadie’s hand.

“Sore. And sleepy.”

“Go back to sleep then, honey.”

“Maybe next time…” Her words trailed off in a furry hzzzzz sound. Her eyes closed, but she forced them open with an effort. “… will be better. In your place.”

Then she was gone, and I had something to think about.

When I went back to the nurses’ station, Rhonda told me that Dr. Ellerton was waiting for me downstairs in the cafeteria.

“We’ll keep her tonight and probably tomorrow, too,” he said. “The last thing we want is for any sort of infection to develop.” (I thought of this later, of course—one of those things that’s funny, but not very.)

“How did it go?”

“As well as can be expected, but the damage Clayton inflicted was very serious. Pending her recovery, I’m going to schedule her second go-round for November or December.” He lit a cigarette, chuffed out smoke, and said: “This is a helluva surgical team, and we’re going to do everything we can… but there are limits.”

“Yes. I know.” I was pretty sure I knew something else, as well: there were going to be no more surgeries. Here, at least. The next time Sadie went under the knife, it wouldn’t be a knife at all. It would be a laser.

In my place.

2

Small economies always come back and bite you in the ass. I’d had the phone taken out of my Neely Street apartment in order to save eight or ten dollars a month, and now I wanted it. But there was a U-Tote-M four blocks away with a phone booth next to the Coke cooler. I had de Mohrenschildt’s number on a scrap of paper. I dropped a dime and dialed.

“De Mohrenschildt residence, how may I help you?” Not Jeanne’s voice. A maid, probably—where did the de Mohrenschildt bucks come from?

“I’d like to speak to George, please.”

“I’m afraid he’s at the office, sir.”

I grabbed a pen from my breast pocket. “Can you give me that number?”

“Yes, sir. CHapel 5-6323.”

“Thanks.” I wrote it on the back of my hand.

“May I say who called, if you don’t reach him, sir?”

I hung up. That chill was enveloping me again. I welcomed it. If I’d ever needed cold clarity, it was now.

I dropped another dime and this time got a secretary who told me I’d reached the Centrex Corporation. I told her I wanted to speak to Mr. de Mohrenschildt. She, of course, wanted to know why.

“Tell him it’s about Jean-Claude Duvalier and Lee Oswald. Tell him it’s to his advantage.”

“Your name, sir?”

Puddentane wouldn’t do here. “John Lennon.”

“Please hold, Mr. Lennon, I’ll see if he’s available.”

There was no canned music, which on the whole seemed an improvement. I leaned against the wall of the hot booth and stared at the sign reading IF YOU SMOKE, PLEASE TURN ON FAN. I didn’t smoke, but turned the fan on, anyway. It didn’t help much.

There was a click in my ear loud enough to make me wince, and the secretary said, “You’re connected, Mr. D.”

“Hello?” That jovial booming actor’s voice. “Hello? Mr. Lennon?”

“Hello. Is this line secure?”

“What do you…? Of course it is. Just a minute. Let me shut the door.”

There was a pause, then he was back. “What’s this about?”

“Haiti, my friend. And oil leases.”

“What’s this about Monsieur Duvalier and that guy Oswald?” There was no worry in his voice, just cheerful curiosity.

“Oh, you know them both much better than that,” I said. “Go ahead and call them Baby Doc and Lee, why don’t you?”

“I’m awfully busy today, Mr. Lennon. If you don’t tell me what this is about, I’m afraid I’ll have to—”

“Baby Doc can approve the oil leases in Haiti you’ve been wanting for the last five years. You know this; he’s his father’s righthand man, he runs the tonton macoute, and he’s next in line for the big chair. He likes you, and we like you—”

De Mohrenschildt began to sound less like an actor and more like a real guy. “When you say we, do you mean—”

“We all like you, de Mohrenschildt, but we’re worried about your association with Oswald.”

“Jesus, I hardly know the guy! I haven’t seen him in six or eight months!”

“You saw him on Easter Sunday. You brought his little girl a stuffed rabbit.”

A very long pause. Then: “All right, I guess I did. I forgot about that.”

“Did you forget about someone taking a shot at Edwin Walker?”

“What has that got to do with me? Or my business?” His puzzled outrage was almost impossible to disbelieve. Key word: almost.

“Come on, now,” I said. “You accused Oswald of doing it.”

“I was joking, goddammit!”

I gave him two beats, then said, “Do you know what company I work for, de Mohrenschildt? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not Standard Oil.”

There was silence on the line while de Mohrenschildt ran through the bullshit I’d spouted so far. Except it wasn’t bullshit, not entirely. I’d known about the stuffed rabbit, and I’d known about the how-did-you-miss crack he’d made after his wife spotted the rifle. The conclusion was pretty clear. My company was The Company, and the only question in de Mohrenschildt’s mind right now—I hoped—was how much more of his no doubt interesting life we’d bugged.

“This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Lennon.”

“I hope for your sake that it is, because it looks to us like you might have primed him to take the shot. Going on and on about what a racist Walker is, and how he’s going to be the next American Hitler.”

“That’s totally untrue!”

I ignored this. “But it’s not our chief worry. Our chief worry is that you may have accompanied Mr. Oswald on his errand last April tenth.”

“Ach, mein Gott! That’s insane!”

“If you can prove that—and if you promise to stay away from the unstable Mr. Oswald in the future—”

“He’s in New Orleans, for God’s sake!”

“Shut up,” I said. “We know where he is and what he’s doing. Handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. If he doesn’t stop soon, he’ll wind up in jail.” Indeed he would, and in less than a week. His uncle Dutz—the one associated with Carlos Marcello—would go his bail. “He’ll be back in Dallas soon enough, but you won’t see him. Your little game is over.”

“I tell you I never—”

“Those leases can still be yours, but not unless you can prove you weren’t with Oswald on April tenth. Can you do that?”

“I… let me think.” There was a long pause. “Yes. Yes, I think I can.”

“Then let’s meet.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Nine o’clock. I have people to answer to, and they’d be very unhappy with me if I gave you time to build an alibi.”

“Come to the house. I’ll send Jeanne out to a movie with her girlfriends.”

“I have another place in mind. And you won’t need directions to find it.” I told him what I had in mind.

“Why there?” He sounded honestly puzzled.

“Just come. And if you don’t want the Duvaliers pre and fils very angry at you, my friend, come alone.”

I hung up.

3

I was back at the hospital at six on the dot, and visited with Sadie for half an hour. Her head was clear again, and she claimed her pain wasn’t too bad. At six-thirty I kissed her good cheek and told her I had to go.

“Your business?” she asked. “Your real business?”

“Yes.”

“No one gets hurt unless it’s absolutely necessary. Right?”

I nodded. “And never by mistake.”

“Be careful.”

“Like walking on eggs.”

She tried to smile. It turned into a wince as the freshly flayed left side of her face pulled against itself. Her eyes looked over my shoulder. I turned to see Deke and Ellie in the doorway. They had dressed in their best, Deke in a summer-weight suit, string tie, and town cowboy hat, Ellie in a pink silk dress.

“We can wait, if you want us to,” Ellie said.

“No, come on in. I was just leaving. But don’t stay long, she’s tired.”

I kissed Sadie twice—dry lips and moist forehead. Then I drove back to West Neely Street, where I spread out the items I’d bought at the costume and novelty shop. I worked slowly and carefully in front of the bathroom mirror, referring often to the directions and wishing Sadie were here to help me.

I wasn’t worried that de Mohrenschildt would take a look at me and say haven’t I seen you before; what I wanted to make sure of was that he wouldn’t recognize “John Lennon” later on. Depending on how believable he was, I might have to come back on him. If so, I’d want to take him by surprise.

I glued on the mustache first. It was a bushy one, making me look like an outlaw in a John Ford western. Next came the makeup, which I used on my face and hands to give myself a rancher’s tan. There were horn-rimmed specs with plain glass lenses. I had briefly considered dying my hair, but that would have created a parallel with John Clayton that I couldn’t have faced. Instead I yanked on a San Antonio Bullets baseball cap. When I was finished, I hardly recognized myself in the mirror.

“Nobody gets hurt unless it absolutely has to happen,” I told the stranger in the mirror. “And never by mistake. Have we got that straight?”

The stranger nodded, but the eyes behind the fake glasses were cool.

The last thing I did before leaving was to take my revolver from the closet shelf and shove it in my pocket.

4

I got to the deserted parking lot at the end of Mercedes Street twenty minutes early, but de Mohrenschildt was already there, his gaudy Cadillac butted up against the brick backside of the Montgomery Ward warehouse. That meant he was anxious. Excellent.

I looked around, almost expecting to see the jump-rope girls, but of course they were in for the night—possibly sleeping and dreaming of Charlie Chaplin touring France, just to watch the ladies dance.

I parked near de Mohrenschildt’s yacht, rolled down my window, stuck out my left hand, and curled the index finger in a beckoning gesture. For a moment de Mohrenschildt sat where he was, as if unsure. Then he got out. The bigtime strut wasn’t in evidence. He looked frightened and furtive. That was also excellent. In one hand he held a file folder. From the flat look of it, there wasn’t much inside. I hoped it wasn’t just a prop. If it was, we were going to dance, and it wouldn’t be the Lindy Hop.

He opened the door, leaned in, and said, “Look, you’re not going to shoot me or anything, are you?”

“Nope,” I said, hoping I sounded bored. “If I was from the FBI you might have to worry about that, but I’m not and you know I’m not. You’ve done business with us before.” I hoped to God Al’s notes were right about that.

“Is this car bugged? Are you?”

“If you’re careful about what you say, you won’t have anything to worry about, will you? Now get in.”

He got in and shut the door. “About those leases—”

“You can discuss those another time, with other people. Oil isn’t my specialty. My specialty is dealing with people who behave indiscreetly, and your relationship with Oswald has been very indiscreet.”

“I was curious, that’s all. Here’s a man who manages to defect to Russia, then re-defect to the United States. He’s a semi-educated hillbilly, but he’s surprisingly crafty. Also…” He cleared his throat. “I have a friend who wants to fuck his wife.”

“We know about that,” I said, thinking of Bouhe—just another George in a seemingly endless parade of them. How happy I would be to escape the echo chamber of the past. “My sole interest is making sure you had nothing to do with that botched Walker hit.”

“Look at this. I took it from my wife’s scrapbook.”

He opened the folder, removed the single page of newprint it contained, and passed it over. I turned on the Chevy’s domelight, hoping my tan wouldn’t look like the makeup it was. On the other hand, who cared? It would strike de Mohrenschildt as just one more bit of cloak-and-dagger spookery.

The sheet was from the April 12 Morning News. I knew the feature; AROUND TOWN was probably read a lot more closely by most Dallas-ites than the world and national news. There were lots of names in boldface type and lots of pix showing men and women in evening dress. De Mohrenschildt had used red ink to circle a squib halfway down. In the accompanying photo, George and Jeanne were unmistakable. He was in a tux and flashing a grin that seemed to show as many teeth as there are keys on a piano. Jeanne was displaying an amazing amount of cleavage, which the third person at the table appeared to be inspecting closely. All three held up champagne glasses.

“This is Friday’s paper,” I said. “The Walker shooting was on Wednesday.”

“These Around Town items are always two days old. Because they’re about nightlife, dig? Besides… don’t just look at the picture, read it, man. It’s right there in black and white!”

I checked, but I knew he was telling the truth as soon as I saw the other man’s name in the newspaper’s hotcha-hotcha boldface type. The harmonic echo was as loud as a guitar amp set on reverb.

Local oil rajah George de Mohrenschildt and wife Jeanne lifted a glass (or maybe it was a dozen!) at the Carousel Club on Wednesday night, celebrating the scrump-tiddly-uptious lady’s birthday. How old? The lovebirds weren’t telling, but to us she doesn’t look a day over twenty-three (skidoo!). They were hosted by the Carousel’s jovial panjandrum Jack Ruby, who sent over a bottle o’ bubbly and then joined them for a toast. Happy birthday, Jeanne, and long may you wave!

“The champagne was rotgut and I had a hangover until three the next afternoon, but it was worth it if you’re satisfied.”

I was. I was also fascinated. “How well do you know this guy Ruby?”

De Mohrenschildt sniffed—all his baronial snobbery expressed in a single quick inhale through flared nostrils. “Not well, and don’t want to. He’s a crazy little Jew who buys the police free drinks so they’ll look the other way when he uses his fists. Which he likes to do. One day his temper will get him in trouble. Jeanne likes the strippers. They get her hot.” He shrugged, as if to say who could understand women. “Now are you—” He looked down, saw the gun in my fist, and stopped talking. His eyes widened. His tongue came out and licked his lips. It made a peculiar wet slupping sound as he drew it back into his mouth.

“Am I satisfied? Was that what you were going to ask?” I prodded him with the gun barrel and took considerable pleasure in his gasp. Killing changes a man, I tell you, it coarsens him, but in my defense, if there was ever a man who deserved a salutary scare, it was this one. Marguerite was partially responsible for what her youngest son had become, and there was plenty of responsibility for Lee himself—all those half-formed dreams of glory—but de Mohrenschildt had played a part. And was it some complicated plot hatched deep in the bowels of the CIA? No. Slumming simply amused him. So did the rage and disappointment baking up from the plugged oven of Lee’s disturbed personality.

“Please,” de Mohrenschildt whispered.

“I’m satisfied. But listen to me, you windbag: you’re never going to meet with Lee Oswald again. You’re never going to talk to him on the phone. You’re never going to mention a word of this conversation to his wife, to his mother, to George Bouhe, to any of the other migrs. Do you understand that?”

“Yes. Absolutely. I was growing bored with him, anyway.”

“Not half as bored as I am with you. If I find out you’ve talked to Lee, I’ll kill you. Capisce?”

“Yes. And the leases…?”

“Someone will be in touch. Now get the fuck out of my car.”

He did so, posthaste. When he was behind the wheel of the Caddy, I reached out again with my left hand. Instead of beckoning, this time I used my index finger to point at Mercedes Street. He went.

I sat where I was a little while longer, looking at the clipping, which he in his haste had forgotten to take with him. The de Mohrenschildts and Jack Ruby, glasses raised. Was it a signpost pointing toward a conspiracy, after all? The tin-hat crew who believed in things like shooters popping up from sewers and Oswald doppelgngers probably would have thought so, but I knew better. It was just another harmonic. This was the Land of Ago, where everything echoed.

I felt I had closed Al Templeton’s window of uncertainty to the merest draft. Oswald was going to return to Dallas on the third of October. According to Al’s notes, he would get hired as a common laborer at the Texas School Book Depository in the middle of October. Except that wasn’t going to happen, because sometime between the third and the sixteenth, I was going to end his miserable, dangerous life.

5

I was allowed to spring Sadie from the hospital on the morning of August seventh. She was quiet on the ride back to Jodie. I could tell she was still in considerable pain, but she rested a companionable hand on my thigh for most of the drive. When we turned off Highway 77 at the big Denholm Lions billboard, she said: “I’m going back to school in September.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. If I could stand up in front of the whole town at the Grange, I guess I can manage it in front of a bunch of kids in the school library. Besides, I have a feeling we’re going to need the money. Unless you have some source of income I don’t know about, you’ve got to be almost broke. Thanks to me.”

“I should have some money coming in at the end of the month.”

“The fight?”