11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

She looked at the squat red cube with the peering windows, then turned a dismayed, wide-eyed face to me. I observed—with something like clinical interest—that large white goosebumps had broken out on her neck. “Jake, it’s horrible!”

“I know.”

“But… what’s wrong with it?”

“Everything. Sadie, we have to hurry. We’re nearly out of time.”

12

We crossed Elm on a diagonal, me crutching along at a near run. The biggest portion of the crowd was on Main Street, but more people filled Dealey Plaza and lined Elm in front of the Book Depository. They crowded the curb all the way down to the Triple Underpass. Girls sat on their boyfriends’ shoulders. Children who might soon be screaming in panic happily smeared their faces with ice cream. I saw a man selling Sno-Cones and a woman with a huge bouffant hairdo hawking dollar photos of Jack and Jackie in evening wear.

By the time we reached the shadow of the Depository, I was sweating, my armpit was hollering from the constant pressure of the crutch cradle, and my left knee had been cinched in a fiery belt. I could barely bend it. I looked up and saw Depository employees leaning from some of the windows. I couldn’t see anyone in the one at the southeast corner of the sixth floor, but Lee would be there.

I looked at my watch. Twelve-twenty. We could track the motorcade’s progress by the rising roar on Lower Main Street.

Sadie tried the door, then gave me an anguished glare. “Locked!”

Inside, I saw a black man wearing a poorboy cap tilted at a jaunty angle. He was smoking a cigarette. Al had been a great one for marginalia in his notebook, and near the end—casually jotted, almost doodled—he had written the names of several of Lee’s co-workers. I’d made no effort to study these, because I didn’t see what earthly use I could put them to. Next to one of those names—the one belonging to the guy in the poorboy cap, I had no doubt—Al had written: First one they suspected (probably because black). It had been an unusual name, but I still couldn’t remember it, either because Roth and his goons had beaten it out of my head (along with all sorts of other stuff) or because I hadn’t paid enough attention in the first place.

Or just because the past was obdurate. And did it matter? It just wouldn’t come. The name was nowhere.

Sadie hammered on the door. The black man in the poorboy cap stood watching her impassively. He took a drag on his cigarette and then waved the back of his hand at her: go on, lady, go on.

“Jake, think of something! PLEASE!”

Twelve twenty-one.

An unusual name, yes, but why had it been unusual? I was surprised to find this was something I actually knew.

“Because it was a girl’s,” I said.

Sadie turned to me. Her cheeks were flushed except for the scar, which stood out in a white snarl. “What?”

Suddenly I was hammering on the glass. “Bonnie!” I shouted. “Hey, Bonnie Ray! Let us in! We know Lee! Lee! LEE OSWALD!”

He registered the name and crossed the lobby in a maddeningly slow amble.

“I didn’t know that scrawny l’il sumbitch had any friends,” Bonnie Ray Williams said as he opened the door, then stepped aside as we rushed inside. “He probably in the break room, watchin for the president with the rest of—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m not his friend and he’s not in the break room. He’s on the sixth floor. I think he means to shoot President Kennedy.”

The big man laughed merrily. He dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with a workboot. “That little pissant wouldn’t have the guts to drown a litter o’ kittens in a sack. All he do is sit in the corner and read books.”

“I tell you—”

“I’m goan on up to two. If you want to come with me, you’re welcome, I guess. But don’t be talkin any more nonsense about Leela. That’s what we call him, Leela. Shoot the president! Lor!” He waved his hand and ambled away.

I thought, You belong in Derry, Bonnie Ray. They specialize in not seeing what’s right in front of them.

“Stairs,” I told Sadie.

“The elevator would be—”

The end of any chance we might have left was what it would be.

“It would get stuck between floors. Stairs.”

I took her hand and pulled her toward them. The staircase was a narrow gullet with wooden risers swaybacked from years of traffic. There was a rusty iron railing on the left. At the foot, Sadie turned to me. “Give me the gun.”

“No.”

“You’ll never make it in time. I will. Give me the gun.”

I almost gave it up. It wasn’t that I felt I deserved to keep it; now that the actual watershed moment had come, it didn’t matter who stopped Oswald as long as someone did. But we were only a step away from the roaring machine of the past, and I was damned if I’d risk Sadie taking that last step ahead of me, only to be sucked into its whirling belts and blades.

I smiled, then leaned forward and kissed her. “Race you,” I said, and started up the stairs. Over my shoulder I called, “If I fall asleep, he’s all yours!”

13

“You folks crazy,” I heard Bonnie Ray Williams say in a mildly remonstrative tone of voice. Then there was the light thud of footsteps as Sadie followed me. I crutched on the right—no longer leaning on it but almost vaulting on it—and hauled at the railing on the left. The gun in my sport coat pocket swung and thudded against my hip. My knee was bellowing. I let it yell.

When I hit the second-floor landing, I snuck a look at my watch. It was twelve twenty-five. No; twenty-six. I could hear the roar of the crowd still approaching, a wave about to break. The motorcade had passed the intersections of Main and Ervay, Main and Akard, Main and Field. In two minutes—three at most—it would reach Houston Street, turn right, and roll past the old Dallas courthouse at fifteen miles an hour. From that point on, the President of the United States would be an available target. In the 4x scope attached to the Mannlicher-Carcano, the Kennedys and Connallys would look as big as actors on the screen at the Lisbon Drive-In. But Lee would wait a little longer. He was no suicide-drone; he wanted to get away. If he fired too soon, the security detail in the car at the head of the motorcade would see the gunflash and return fire. He would wait until that car—and the presidential limo—made the dogleg left onto Elm. Not just a sniper; a fucking backshooter.

I still had three minutes.

Or maybe just two and a half.

I attacked the stairs between the second and third floor, ignoring the pain in my knee, forcing myself upward like a marathoner near the end of a long race. Which, of course, I was.

From below us, I could hear Bonnie Ray yelling something that had crazy man and say Leela goan shoot in it.

Until I was halfway up the flight to the third floor, I could feel Sadie beating on my back like a rider urging a horse to go faster, but then she fell back a little. I heard her gasping for air and thought, too many cigarettes, darlin. My knee didn’t hurt anymore; the pain had been temporarily buried in a surge of adrenaline. I kept my left leg as straight as I could, letting the crutch do the work.

Around the bend. Up to the fourth floor. Now I was gasping, too, and the stairs looked steeper. Like a mountain. The cradle-rest at the top of the beggar’s crutch was slimy with sweat. My head pounded; my ears rang with the sound of the cheering crowd below. The eye of my imagination opened wide and I could see the approaching motorcade: the security car, then the presidential limo with the Harley-Davidson DPD motorcycles flanking it, the cops on them wearing white chin-strapped helmets and sunglasses.

Around another corner. The crutch skidding, then steadying. Up again. The crutch thudding. Now I could smell sweet sawdust from the sixth-floor renovations: workmen replacing the old plank boards with new ones. Not on Lee’s side, though. Lee had the southeast side to himself.

I reached the fifth-floor landing and made the last turn, my mouth open to scoop in air, my shirt a drenched rag against my heaving chest. Stinging sweat ran into my eyes and I blinked it away.

Three book cartons stamped ROADS TO EVERYWHERE and 4th AND 5th GRADE READERS blocked the stairs to the sixth floor. I stood on my right leg and slammed the foot of the crutch into one of them, sending it spinning. Behind me I could hear Sadie, now between the fourth and fifth floors. So I had been right to keep the gun, it seemed, although who really knew? Judging from my own experience, knowing you are the one with the primary responsibility to change the future makes you run faster.

I squeezed through the gap I created. To do so I had to put my full weight on my left leg for a second. It gave a howl of pain. I groaned and grabbed at the railing to keep from spilling forward onto the stairs. Looked at my watch. It said twelve twenty-eight, but what if it was slow? The crowd was roaring.

“Jake… for God’s sake hurry…” Sadie, still on the stairs to the fifth-floor landing.

I started up the last flight, and the sound of the crowd began to drain away into a great silence. By the time I reached the top, there was nothing but the rasp of my breath and the burning hammerstrokes of my overtaxed heart.

14

The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was a shadowy square dotted with islands of stacked book cartons. The overhead lights were burning where the floor was being replaced. They were off on the side where Lee Harvey Oswald planned to make history in one hundred seconds or less. Seven windows overlooked Elm Street, the five in the middle large and semicircular, the ones on the ends square. The sixth floor was gloomy around the stairhead but filled with hazy light in the area overlooking Elm Street. Thanks to the floating sawdust from the floor project, the sunbeams slanting in through the windows looked thick enough to cut. The beam falling through the window at the southeast corner, however, had been blocked off by a stacked barricade of book cartons. The sniper’s nest was all the way across the floor from me, on a diagonal that ran from northwest to southeast.

Behind the barricade, in the sunlight, a man with a gun stood at the window. He was stooped, peering out. The window was open. A light breeze was ruffling his hair and the collar of his shirt. He began to raise the rifle.

I broke into a shambling run, slaloming around the stacked cartons, digging in my coat pocket for the .38.

“Lee!” I shouted. “Stop, you son of a bitch!”

He turned his head and looked at me, eyes wide, mouth hung open. For a moment he was just Lee—the guy who had laughed and played with Junie in the bath, the one who sometimes hugged his wife and kissed her upturned face—and then his thin and somehow prissy mouth wrinkled into a snarl that showed his upper teeth. When that happened, he changed into something monstrous. I doubt you believe that, but I swear it’s true. He stopped being a man and became the daemonic ghost that would haunt America from this day on, perverting its power and spoiling its every good intent.

If I let it.

The noise of the crowd rushed in again, thousands of people applauding and cheering and yelling their brains out. I heard them and Lee did, too. He knew what it meant: now or never. He whirled back to the window and socked the rifle’s butt-plate against his shoulder.

I had the pistol, the same one I’d used to kill Frank Dunning. Not just like it; in that moment it was the same gun. I thought so then and I think so now. The hammer tried to catch in the pocket-lining but I dragged the .38 out, hearing cloth rip as I did so.

I fired. My shot went high and only exploded splinters from the top of the window frame, but it was enough to save John Kennedy’s life. Oswald jerked at the sound of the report, and the 160-grain slug from the Mannlicher-Carcano went high, shattering a window in the county courthouse.

There were screams and bewildered shouts from below us. Lee turned toward me again, his face a mask of rage, hate, and disappointment. He raised his rifle again, and this time it wouldn’t be the President of the United States he’d be aiming at. He worked the bolt—clack-clack—and I fired at him again. Although I was three-quarters of the way across the room, less than twenty-five feet away, I missed again. I saw the side of his shirt twitch, but that was all.

My crutch struck a stack of boxes. I tottered to the left, flailing with my gun-hand for balance, but there was no chance of that. For just a moment I thought of how, on the day I’d met her, Sadie had literally fallen into my arms. I knew what was going to happen. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil’s music. This time I was the one who stumbled, and that was the crucial difference.

I could no longer hear her on the stairs… but I could still hear her rapid footfalls.

“Sadie, down!” I shouted, but it was lost in the bark of Oswald’s rifle.

I heard the bullet pass above me. I heard her cry out.

Then there was more gunfire, this time from outside. The presidential limo had taken off, driving toward the Triple Underpass at breakneck speed, the two couples inside ducking and holding onto each other. But the security car had pulled up on the far side of Elm Street near Dealey Plaza. The cops on the motorcycles had stopped in the middle of the street, and at least four dozen people were acting as spotters, pointing up at the sixth-floor window, where a skinny man in a blue shirt was clearly visible.

I heard a patter of thumps, a sound like hailstones striking mud. Those were the bullets that missed the window and hit the bricks above or on either side. Many didn’t miss. I saw Lee’s shirt billow out as if a wind had started to blow inside it—a red one that tore holes in the fabric: one above the right nipple, one at the sternum, a third where his navel would be. A fourth tore his neck open. He danced like a doll in the hazy, sawdusty light, and that terrible snarl never left his face. He wasn’t a man at the end, I tell you; he was something else. Whatever gets into us when we listen to our worst angels.

A bullet spanged one of the overhead lights, shattered the bulb, and set it to swaying. Then a bullet tore off the top of the would-be assassin’s head, just as one of Lee’s had torn off the top of Kennedy’s in the world I’d come from. He collapsed onto his barricade of boxes, sending them tumbling to the floor.

Shouts from below. Someone yelling “Man down, I saw him go down!”

Running, ascending footfalls. I sent the .38 spinning toward Lee’s body. I had just enough presence of mind to know that I would be badly beaten, perhaps even killed by the men coming up the stairs if they found me with a gun in my hand. I started to get up, but my knee would no longer hold me. That was probably just as well. I might not have been visible from Elm Street, but if I was, they’d open fire on me. So I crawled to where Sadie lay, supporting my weight on my hands and dragging my left leg behind me like an anchor.

The front of her blouse was soaked with blood, but I could see the hole. It was dead-center in her chest, just above the slope of her breasts. More blood poured from her mouth. She was choking on it. I got my arms under her and lifted her. Her eyes never left mine. They were brilliant in the hazy gloom.

“Jake,” she rasped.

“No, honey, don’t talk.”

She took no notice, though—when had she ever? “Jake, the president!”

“Safe.” I hadn’t actually seen him all in one piece as the limo tore away, but I had seen Lee jerk as he fired his only shot at the street, and that was enough for me. And I would have told Sadie he was safe no matter what.

Her eyes closed, then opened again. The footfalls were very close now, turning from the fifth-floor landing and starting up the final flight. Far below, the crowd was bellowing its excitement and confusion.

“Jake.”

“What, honey?”

She smiled. “How we danced!”

When Bonnie Ray and the others arrived, I was sitting on the floor and holding her. They stampeded past me. How many I don’t know. Four, maybe. Or eight. Or a dozen. I didn’t bother to look at them. I held her, rocking her head against my chest, letting her blood soak into my shirt. Dead. My Sadie. She had fallen into the machine, after all.

I have never been a crying man, but almost any man who’s lost the woman he loves would, don’t you think? Yes. But I didn’t.

Because I knew what had to be done.

PART 6
The Green Card Man

CHAPTER 29

1

I wasn’t exactly arrested, but I was taken into custody and driven to the Dallas police station in a squad car. On the last block of the ride, people—some of them reporters, most of them ordinary citizens—pounded on the windows and peered inside. In a clinical, distant way, I wondered if I would perhaps be dragged from the car and lynched for attempting to murder the president. I didn’t care. What concerned me most was my bloodstained shirt. I wanted it off; I also wanted to wear it forever. It was Sadie’s blood.

Neither of the cops in the front seat asked me any questions. I suppose someone had told them not to. If they had asked any, I wouldn’t have replied. I was thinking. I could do that because the coldness was creeping over me again. I put it on like a suit of armor. I could fix this. I would fix this. But first I had some talking to do.

2

They put me in a room that was as white as ice. There was a table and three hard chairs. I sat in one of them. Outside, telephones rang and a Teletype chattered. People went back and forth talking in loud voices, sometimes shouting, sometimes laughing. The laughter had a hysterical sound. It was how men laugh when they know they’ve had a narrow escape. Dodged a bullet, so to speak. Perhaps Edwin Walker had laughed like that on the night of April tenth, as he talked to reporters and brushed broken glass from his hair.

The same two cops who brought me from the Book Depository searched me and took my things. I asked if I could have my last two packets of Goody’s. The two cops conferred, then tore them open and poured them out on the table, which was engraved with initials and scarred with cigarette burns. One of them wetted a finger, tasted the powder, and nodded. “Do you want water?”

“No.” I scooped up the powder and poured it into my mouth. It was bitter. That was fine with me.

One of the cops left. The other asked for my bloody shirt, which I reluctantly took off and handed over. Then I pointed at him. “I know it’s evidence, but you treat it with respect. The blood on it came from the woman I loved. That might not mean much to you, but it’s also from the woman who helped to stop the murder of President Kennedy, and that should.”

“We only want it for blood-typing.”

“Fine. But it goes on my receipt of personal belongings. I’ll want it back.”

“Sure.”

The cop who’d left came back with a plain white undershirt. It looked like the one Oswald had been wearing—or would have been wearing—in the mugshot taken shortly after his arrest at the Texas Theatre.

3

I arrived in the little white interview room at twenty past one. About an hour later (I can’t say with exactitude because there was no clock and my new Timex had been taken with the rest of my personal effects), the same two uniforms brought me some company. An old acquaintance, in fact: Dr. Malcolm Perry, toting a large black country doctor’s medical bag. I regarded him with mild astonishment. He was here at the police station visiting me because he didn’t have to be at Parkland Hospital, picking bits of bullet and shards of bone out of John Kennedy’s brain. The river of history was already moving into its new course.

“Hello, Dr. Perry.”

He nodded. “Mr. Amberson.” The last time he’d seen me, he’d called me George. If I’d had any doubts about being under suspicion, that would have confirmed them. But I didn’t. I’d been there, and I’d known what was about to happen. Bonnie Ray Williams would already have told them as much.

“I understand you’ve reinjured that knee.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Let’s have a look.”

He tried to pull up my left pants leg and couldn’t. The joint was too swollen. When he produced a pair of scissors, both cops stepped forward and drew their guns, keeping them pointed at the floor with their fingers outside the trigger guards. Dr. Perry looked at them with mild astonishment, then cut the leg of my pants up the seam. He looked, he touched, he produced a hypodermic needle and drew off fluid. I gritted my teeth and waited for it to be over. Then he rummaged in his bag, came out with an elastic bandage, and wrapped the knee tightly. That provided some relief.

“I can give you something for the pain, if these officers don’t object.”

They didn’t, but I did. The most crucial hour of my life—and Sadie’s—was dead ahead. I didn’t want dope clouding my brain when it rolled around.

“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 chickenshit 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 passed 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 basset-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 fiance 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 assassination, 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 horor. 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 fuck-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 bitch 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 participated 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 glass 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 assassination 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 Coke, 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 shitass 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 ass 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?’”

Hosty leaned forward, eyes as wide as they could get in that fleshy face. “What?”

“You heard me. So I checked the paper, and guess what? Someone took a shot at some retired general four or five days before. Big right-winger. Just the kind of guy Lee hated.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I knew he had a pistol—he showed it to me one day—but the paper said the guy who shot at Walker used a rifle. Besides, most of my attention was taken up by my girlfriend by then. You asked why she had a knife in her purse. The answer is simple—she was scared. She was also attacked, only not by Mr. Roth. It was her ex-husband. He disfigured her pretty badly.”

“We saw the scar,” Hosty said, “and we’re sorry for your loss, Amberson.”

“Thank you.” You don’t look sorry enough, I thought. “The knife she was carrying was the same one her ex—John Clayton was his name—used on her. She carried it everywhere.” I thought of her saying, Just in case. I thought of her saying, This is an in-case if there ever was one.

I put my hands over my face for a minute. They waited. I dropped them into my lap and went on in a toneless Joe Friday voice. Just the facts, ma’am.

“I kept the place on West Neely, but I spent most of the summer in Jodie, taking care of Sadie. I’d pretty much given up on the book idea, was thinking about reapplying at Denholm Consolidated. Then I ran into Akiva Roth and his goons. Wound up in the hospital myself. When they let me out, I went to a rehab center called Eden Fallows.”

“I know it,” Fritz said. “Kind of an assisted living thing.”

“Yes, and Sadie was my chief assistant. I took care of her after her husband cut her; she took care of me after Roth and his associates beat me up. Things go around that way. They make… I don’t know… a kind of harmony.”

“Things happen for a reason,” Hosty said solemnly, and for a moment I felt like launching myself over the table and pummeling his flushed and fleshy face. Not because he was wrong, though. In my humble opinion, things do happen for a reason, but do we like the reason? Rarely.

“Near the end of October, Dr. Perry okayed me to drive short distances.” This was a blatant lie, but they might not check it with Perry for awhile… and if they made an investment in me as an authentic American Hero, they might not check at all. “I went into Dallas on Tuesday of this week to visit the apartment house on West Neely. Mostly on a whim. I wanted to see if looking at it would bring back some more of my memories.”

I had indeed gone to West Neely, but to get the gun under the porch.

“Afterward, I decided to get my lunch at Woolworth’s, just like in the old days. And who should I see at the counter but Lee, having a tuna on rye. I sat down and asked him how it was going, and that was when he told me the FBI was harassing him and his wife. He said, ‘I’m going to teach those bastards not to fuck with me, George. If you’re watching TV on Friday afternoon, maybe you’ll see something.’”

“Holy cow,” Fritz said. “Did you connect that with the president’s visit?”

“Not at first. I never followed Kennedy’s movements all that closely; I’m a Republican.” Two lies for the price of one. “Besides, Lee went right on to his favorite subject.”

Hosty: “Cuba.”

“Right. Cuba and viva Fidel. He didn’t even ask why I was limping. He was totally wrapped up in his own stuff, you know? But that was Lee. I bought him a custard pudding—boy, that’s good at Woolworth’s, and only a quarter—and asked him where he was working. He told me the Book Depository on Elm Street. Said it with a big smile, as if unloading trucks and shifting boxes around was the world’s biggest deal.”