The Third Bullet - Страница 4

“No, but I give you it’s got some moments,” Bob said. Somewhere in his rat-pointed tactical brain, he was beginning to play with them. Something had been subtly provoked. Dallas. Abandoned overcoat. Strange smell and stain.

“Okay,” she said. “The Engineer is promoted, and he leaves the firm and goes to that big construction outfit. Again, he is promoted, because he’s very intelligent and hardworking. He’s the type that built America. He becomes a partner. He marries his high school girlfriend, they have three beautiful daughters and move to the suburb where partners live. He joins a country club. He becomes venerable. His daughters marry wonderful men. I’m actually making up the details, but you get the picture. One of the daughters becomes engaged to the son of a rancher, another prosperous fellow. The Rancher and his wife invite the Engineer and the wife out for a get-to-know-you weekend and barbecue. They’re sitting there in the big paneled living room looking out the picture window to the swimming pool and the white horse fences and the green meadows, and the Engineer notices something: dead animals all over the place. Turns out the Rancher is a hunter. He’s been all over the world. Lions and tigers and bears. Ibexes and sables and kudus. They’re all drinking highballs and having a good old time and the Rancher says, ‘Say, Don, care to see the shop?’

“Don nods and off they go. They walk into a big gun place. Guns, heads, safes, benches, targets, photos of men with dead animals, maybe an old Marilyn calendar, tools, all that, the sort of thing my husband had, although I’m guessing this Rancher kept his a lot neater than my husband did. And whammo, the Engineer is hit by an odor. It’s an old, old odor. I don’t know if you know it, but psychologists consider olfactory cues the strongest reminders. A smell can take you back to a time and place and re-create cues to all the other senses. So suddenly, you’re back where you were when you first hit that smell, and of course, Don is back in the engine room of the elevator in that building in Dallas thirty-odd years ago.”

“GI or Hoppe’s 9?” Bob asked.

“Hoppe’s,” she said. “Yes. Barrel solvent. Chemical cleaning fluid especially for guns. Been around since the twenties. That’s what Don smells in his new pal’s shop, and he realizes that’s what he smelled all those years ago in the building that I of course didn’t name.”

“You’re going to tell me it was the Texas Book Depository?”

“If only. No, it’s the building across Houston Street from the Texas Book Depository. It’s called the Dal-Tex Building. It was there in 1963 too. Dal-Tex doesn’t mean Dallas, Texas, but Dallas Textiles, as it was the headquarters of the Dallas wholesale garment industry. Actually, Abraham Zapruder’s office was there, along with a hundred other offices. Nothing particularly special except that it did offer close to the same angle and elevation down Elm Street next to Dealey Plaza that our friend Lee Harvey Oswald used. You can see why it lingers.”

“I can,” said Bob, trying to conjure the structure from a rush of image memories of Dealey Plaza, that triangle of grass at the heart of American darkness. He got nothing, no vision, no sense of place.

“It’s figured in a few of the thousand conspiracy theories. I checked into them; none of them are that interesting or convincing. Someone claims that a photo shows a rifle on a tripod on the fireplace, but it’s just shadows. There were some ‘arrests’ after the building was closed down a few minutes after the shooting, but nothing came of them. Some people claim without evidence that it was one of the nine or is it twelve shooting sites that the CIA, Sears, Roebuck, the Canadian Air Force, and Proctor and Gamble used in their conspiracy. All in all, it’s not much.”

Bob nodded.

“But it lingers,” she continued. “For the Engineer, particularly. He can’t get it out of his mind. You see why, don’t you?”

“The Hoppe’s suggests that someone had need to clean a rifle, which suggests the presence of a rifle. And you can assume the juice was somehow spilled or leaked onto the coat during the cleaning process. But the coat was carefully hidden, as if whoever had spilled the Hoppe’s, with its chemical smell, didn’t want it exposed to the public eye or nose. Lots of folks in Texas would recognize it right away, including most policemen. It was the universal gun cleaner then. All this could have happened on or around November 22, 1963. There’s your lingering. It puts a rifle where there ain’t been one. But it is thin. It’s real thin.”

“It gets thinner. A few more years pass. The Engineer doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s no dummy; he gets how thin it is too, way too thin to take to law enforcement. Then he reads a book. The book is called Shootout on Pennsylvania. It was written by my husband and a friend. It’s the story of an assassination attempt on Harry Truman in 1950 that ended up in a gunfight in the middle of the street in the middle of the day in the middle of downtown Washington, right across from the White House. Two men dead, three wounded. Almost totally forgotten. Anyhow, the Engineer reads the book. He reads in particular about a Secret Service agent named Floyd Barring, who was in command of the watch at Blair House, where the fight happened, and was considered the hero. He shot one of the bad guys in the head and took him down and maybe saved Harry Truman’s life. The Engineer finds from the book that Floyd is still alive and that, thirteen years after being a hero in Washington, he was the agent in charge of the Secret Service advance party for the Dallas trip, and was in Dallas for the assassination and testified before the Warren Commission and all that. The Engineer takes a shine to Floyd, who seems upright, decent, hardworking, committed. Since Floyd is retired yet invested in the assassination, he seems like a candidate to hear the Engineer’s tale. So here’s the first letter: the Engineer writes to Floyd and details everything I have laid out to you.”

“You never read the letter, however.”

“Not even close. I’m telling you more or less what I later heard from Jim when I wasn’t listening hard.”

Swagger nodded, seeing the old agent getting the thick packet from an unknown person in Dallas and slowly considering its contents. “What did this Secret Service guy do?”

“For whatever reason, nothing. In fact, he probably threw it out. Crazy Kennedy bullshit, you know the drill. He was sick of it, as he’d figured in some theories too, and he didn’t like it. He was also in ill health, living in a geriatric apartment in Silver Spring, mourning the death of his wife, and knew he didn’t have much time.”

“I see.”

“Yet it lingered. He couldn’t put it out of his mind. A few years after that, he writes a letter-half a letter-to my husband. He never finishes it. He never sends it. Maybe he thinks better of it. Who knows? Anyway, he dies. And that would seem to be that. No more lingering. The lingering is over. But then: his daughter finds the letter a few years later. So she sends it on to Jim. So years after the coat was found, years after the identity of the smell was discovered, years after it was communicated to a retired Secret Service agent, years after he died, courtesy of his daughter, it was sent to my husband.”

“And he sees the possibilities?”

“More than most. He’s looking for a project. He has a contract that calls for a book a year, he’s just finished one, but there’s no rest for the wicked, and when he gets the half-written letter that Floyd almost sent him concerning the lost letter the Engineer sent to Floyd, he sees something. He spends a few days researching, looking at maps, reading books or at least examining them, and then he has some kind of eureka moment. He claims he’s solved the JFK assassination. I suspect vodka played a part. It turns out he means he has an idea no one else has had. And he has to go to Dallas. And so he goes to Dallas.”

“Was he successful?”

“He talked to a bunch of people, I think he got into Dal-Tex, he came back very excited. He started working like a madman. One day a week later, he goes off to a bar for a drink and ends up with a broken back and pelvis in an alley.”

“You think he was killed because he was looking into a certain idea about JFK’s death?”

“I haven’t said that. I’ve spoken only in facts, and the fact is that now I’m the world’s sole possessor of the story. And it lingers. I can’t get it out of my head, and the connection between it and Jim’s immediate death by possible homicide won’t let me sleep at night. I have to do every last thing to make sure that the story is properly processed. Someone has to deal with it, judge it, assess it, contextualize it, someone who knows this stuff and has worked in this world. I have nominated you for that high honor. So now I ask the question I came all this way for. Is it anything?”

He let out a large breath.

“What does that signify?” she asked. “You think I’m an idiot? The whole thing is nonsense? What a colossal waste of time?”

“No. I can see how it provokes. I ain’t denying that. And I’m not saying I’m a hundred percent Warren Commission lone-gunman guy. I haven’t looked at it hard enough, but I do think, like you, that a lot of the ‘theories’ are stuff people dreamed up to make a buck. I also think that the thing has been looked at so much by so many people for so long that it’s highly unlikely there’s anything left unfound.”

“Fair enough.”